Casey Caruso on Topology Ventures: $75M fund backed by Marc Andreessen, betting on neurotech and technical founders

stream. Tell us who you are. My name is Casey Caruso. I'm the managing partner of a fund called Topology. Fantastic. Psyched to be here. Uh, what reaction to demo day? Electric. Electric. Electric. Uh, more electric than last Demo Day. Particularly electric. What is what about it is electric?

I just think the founder quality is so high and I think it's just an incredible thing that YC does for the valley and it's very unique. I mean there's a lot of things that are like this and still the essence of YC has been I think retained. Yeah. Totally. Totally. Uh were you at the last demo of day? I was.

To me like the it seems like the bar is like consistently higher across this batch. I I don't know if you feel the same.

I feel like the the founder maybe it's the founder the same but the the quality of the company and the traction the industry has kind of figured out like how to tell the story that's not just like AI only and it's actually like putting going back to the basics of like what's the problem we're solving and so when I talk to a lot of the founders they come in and they lead yeah there's AI being said but it's almost in the background and they're more focused on the market or the problem or the product so I've been I feel like all the stories have been a lot more tractable than just like AI infrastructure stuff agree I also think the founders are getting younger younger I honestly feel high school dropouts.

Yeah, there's like 14y olds out there and they're like, "We just launched 30 seconds ago and we have 10K in MR. " And I'm like, "Oh my god. " Like, yeah, they're skipping the Minecraft and the like sneaker flipping. They're just going straight into enterprise SAS. It's absolutely beautiful.

Uh, where where have you been most uh excited to invest broadly just out outside of YC over the past uh year?

Yeah, I mean so the fund is a 75 million fund one and we're backed by people like Mark Andre, founder of OpenAI and we really focus on technical founders that are commercially minded building cool and that's really important.

We only back cool and so we will look everywhere but that's like the motto or that's the oneliner. We spend a lot of time in neuroch. We spend a lot of time in maybe less popular AI categories. Yeah. Yeah. Uh any reaction?

Uh since you said Neuroch, there was a company that had went pretty viral yesterday with doing like te telepathy. What what what's going on there? How proprietary do you think that is? Is that is that something that we're going to see more of as like a form factor? Yeah, absolutely. So, actually, if you go to topology.

vc/neruro-map, you can see a really sick visualization market of all this. I love it. It's but it's more than a market map. Okay. Um but I love market maps. We're we're pro market map here, by the way. And if they're crowdsourced, even better, right? Yeah, of course.

Um, but that specific technology is called silent speech. Okay. And it's becoming more popular. Very cool. Uh, it's actually Do you have to actually move your mouth in order for That's right. So, it's using muscle movement instead of brain signals. And there's some that are trying to do silent speech with brain.

Um, but like Ultra Ego is going with the muscle approach. Uh, and to actually get it with like the EKG, you don't or is is it EK, not EKG, what whatever EMG maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, you need you need like 60 sensors or something like that. So, it's not necessarily Yeah.

Right now, the biggest thing in neuro is to become what's called multimodal, kind of like what happened with AI. So, people are using things like ultrasound with EEG, which is one of the most popular non-invasive technologies with, you know, MAC or um with muscle movement and combining them all together.

The other cool neuroch company though that we're investing in is Sam Olman's new company called Merge. And that one's going to become really popular, too. But I thought they killed that demo on Twitter. Yeah. Yeah. Great demo. It was a great demo. Yeah. Um, lightning round. Lightning round. We got to get out of here.

So, um, we do need to get out of here. Favorite entrepreneur alive or dead. Oh, I can't do that. All my children I love equally. All my portfolio you read a biography of who's like, you know, from a hundred years ago.

You don't have anyone that you You're like, "No, my favorite my favorite entrepreneurs are only the only the the companies I invest in. " Yeah. No, not not favorite entrepreneur that you've necessarily. No, you then you go Einstein. Einstein. That's good. No one said Einstein yet.

Uh, and how did you make your first money, first dollar either on the internet or in business? Yeah. I I started coding when I was really young as an anon cuz my mom wanted to keep my uh like gender kind of under wraps.

So I, you know, didn't get any like creepy messages and I used to, yeah, do website development as a great one. I love that. Great stuff. Fantastic. Awesome. Great having you on so much for coming on the stream. Nice to meet you. Have a great rest of your day. Good to meet you. Cheers. We'll talk to you soon.

Anyway, thank you for watching our show. Show. Thank you tomorrow live from New York City. Live from New York City. Maybe live from New York Stock Exchange. You never know. It might very well happen. We could very well be there. Thank you to our incredible sponsors for making TBPN