Primary Venture Partners raises $625M Fund V, betting on seed as mega platforms overextend downmarket

you want to multiream, go to reream.com. And I'm also going to tell you about Graphite Code review for the Age of AI. Graphite helps teams on GitHub ship higher quality software [music] faster. And without further ado, our next guest is in the Reream waiting room. We have Brad from Primary. He's the co-founder in general. Brad, good to see you. How are you doing?

Great, guys. How are you doing?

We're doing fantastic. Not as great as you. We didn't raise uh hundreds of millions. We're not announcing hundreds of millions of dollars in the news. What happened?

I don't know guys, but you what is this like about 12 months in and you're becoming the place that people like me have to come and make these announcements. So, like you're doing something right.

Thank you. Thank you.

We're having fun.

Uh but it's great great to meet great to meet you. Um, and uh, super excited to get

Give us the news. How much is the fund?

So, we raised uh, $625 million for our uh, big gong.

Awesome.

First gong of my life. I I appreciate it. First gong in primaries history.

That's great.

May there be many more.

Yes.

But, uh, 625 for our fifth family of funds. that's both a a pure seed fund and a what we call our select fund that doubles down on uh some of the biggest and most successful uh of our portfolio companies. Um that's to you know we are our model is is institutional seed at scale. We think the world is rapidly as you guys know and you guys have talked to the leaders of these firms the kind of mega platforms are getting bigger and bigger. They're sucking a lot of oxygen out of the room. They're getting more and more aggressive in the seed market. And our point of view, my co-founder Ben Son and I have have thought from the beginning 10 years ago that seed [clears throat] was a subasset class that deserve to be treated as such. That there's a very different value proposition, a very different set of needs and opportunities to be the best partner to founders at the earliest stages. It it looks a lot different than supporting founders who have $10 million businesses. you're trying to take to 100. And so we've toled everything we do to be the best partner uh in an institutionalized professional with a lot of support resources behind it way from in those you know most fragile moments where the magic really starts to happen. give us uh give us the the update on seed today in in 2020 2021 there was you know every platform fund was descending down and being like hey we've got plenty of money why don't we compete here uh the narrative at that time that you were probably talking founders through was like hey there's some real signaling risk and you're not going to get necessarily the attention and there's all these imp implications uh and then I feel like a lot of funds backed off a little bit, but at the same time they created accelerators and things like that. And where where are we at today? What is what does the market look like?

Yeah, I don't I haven't seen a ton of backing off yet. Certainly, every time we're in an exciting

competitive seed deal, which is all of them now, we assume that one of the big, you know, at least one of the big multi-stage platforms is is around the hoop as well. Um, and I get why. I mean, I've been in this business for a couple of dozen years now. I've seen

three full cycles of of of the kind of big firms coming down market and that's that's what everybody does. It gets competitive at your at your stage and you try to frontr run all your competitors and move early and that moves down and down and down market. Um, and so we're seeing it again. I think in each one of those cycles I've seen before, founders ultimately figure it out. Um, you know, when you have leaders of some of these platforms openly saying, "We're sort of indexing categories and we want to seed multiple competitors and then we'll back up the truck for the winner." That's a really rational decision for them. It's not a great value proposition for for seed founders and um we we want to be that. We are that.

Amazing.

Sorry,

go for Oh. Uh, I'm just uh I'm wondering [clears throat] more about uh what being ready for a seed round looks like in 2026. It feels like some things are so fast with prototypes, vibe coding, like you can have something that looks so polished. At the same time, like building relationship with co-founders takes years, decades sometimes. like what what what do young founders, new founders actually need to be thinking about before they go out to raise?

I think the fact that to your point, the fact that you can vibe code something awfully impressive in a weekend, the fact that you can get customers excited about something literally in a week or two. Now, um, obviously that plays to the advantage of everybody, but it doesn't substitute for the fact that if you're going to be selling into a market, you know, there's a reason that the guys, you know, the three or four real breakout companies in the legal tech world all have

lawyers as their amongst their founders. There's like critical customer context and product awareness that only comes from living within these industries. And you can't you can't fake that in a weekend.

You can't fake

how well you've gotten to know your co-founder. We certainly spend as much time as we can really getting to understand the the human dynamics of this stuff because the lesson I relearn every single year in this business is that there's nothing more important than the kind of character and grit and makeup of those founding teams. Like that's that's what ultimately drives the game.

Yeah. How

what's a category that you'd like to be more invested in? Maybe you've done some uh one or two deals, but you want to do more or there's kind of you see a green field opportunity and you're looking for the right company to back there.

Uh a couple of things we've been we've been very light on activity over the last several years in blockchain and crypto because we haven't felt like the kind of application layer of those markets was ready. that is starting to feel much more interesting to us. My partner Emily who leads all of our financial services work is getting more and more oriented there. My partner Sam Tulle who leads our healthcare practice uh is thinking a lot and we brought on a venture partner recently to help us explore what's happening at the intersection of AI and biology and there's a set of life sciences companies that are going to be transforming treatment and therapeutics in the next decade that look a lot more like computer science companies than they do biotech companies in a traditional way. and and we're getting uh much more actively involved there as well.

How have you been processing the SAS apocalypse? Is it is it a suicide mission if you're a startup founder to pitch a seatbased model in 2026?

A seatbased model.

Seat based model. I'm selling SAS and I'm doing enterprise. Save yourself trouble. Stick the gun [laughter] to your head. Just

just end. Yes. but a usage base, a value base. Like I think we're in a really interesting period of of transforming the way software is priced. And I think there's a lot of people with

good ideas and best guesses. Anybody tells you right now, they know what the answer is,

is wrong. Like we're going to have to see how that plays out over the next several years. And it's that kind of, you know, our the premium we put on creativity, nimleness, like being a learning machine and the founders we back

is higher than ever right now because we know it like it's just radically changing.

Yeah.

Week to week to week.

Yeah. Do you think that uh do you like the idea that AI unlocks like new areas for software to eat the world more fully? I mean, the legal boom has been interesting. There's been a there's been a few legal tech companies, but I never thought of legal tech as like a multi-unicorn category. And now it feels like there's many players, lots of revenue, like it's an entirely new era for that category. And I feel like there's probably five more of those subcategories that are less explored. I think there's a lot of markets where historically it's been hard to sell software, but when you do what the illegal tech guys are doing and start to sell software that's bundled effectively with work,

that's a super compelling uh super compelling set of opportunities. We have a company called Light Table that's in the kind of architecture and engineering and design space that you know you traditionally an architect completes a set of drawings for a building you send it off

to a third party quality control operation and they like do the checking of like hold on you can't have a you know elevator right there next to that

I beam whatever the problem is and so it's been a traditionally very manual process

like

suddenly bam that is AI automated. What took you three months gets done in 30 minutes.

Um, and that's been historically a really hard

category to sell into.

But now when you're selling not just tools to do the work, but the work completed itself, that's really transformational and we think that plays that is what's going on in legal and that plays across many many many sectors.

IPO sorry uh you

go for it. uh IPO market in relation to seed market if uh open AI and SpaceX get out there's a whole bunch of liquidity that could funnel into early stage startups even early employees getting liquidity becoming angels at the same time you know you have like the most formidable in the companies in the world now trying to like eat every opportunity how are you processing this idea of like these mega IPOs and how they might change your business or the businesses the companies that you work with

there there's no question guys, they're they're going to be helpful. I mean, this

LP base, you know, we have

terrific LPs. They just trusted us with a big pile of new capital.

We feel very fortunate, but they're all starved for liquidity. The asset class has not done a great job of returning more dollars than it's raised year after year. Um, and so I think [clears throat] this will this will unlock a bunch. It's been a tough, we had a quite streamlined process at our raise, but it's been a tough process for a lot of people and I think it will be good to have more capital flowing into frankly something other than just the the mega platforms. I think an interesting thing in the IPO dynamic though is you know yes, OpenAI, Anthropic, SpaceX, those are incredibly sexy like I need to own that stock kind of names. The pipeline of IPO ready companies is also full of a lot of traditional seatbased SAS companies that are in a a bit of a weird limbo right now. So it's unclear to me whether or not those three getting out unlock some like title wave of additional activity.

Yeah.

Last question. How are you advising early stage founders? Let's say you back at you know three co-founders in New York. when are they making the call to stay and scale a team in New York versus uh set up on the West Coast or or wherever?

Uh you know, we do equal amounts of work on the West Coast as as [snorts] New York. Now, despite our original New York heritage, by and large, if we're meeting teams who are in New York, they're in New York for a reason and a good reason. And so I can't remember ever having said like gosh you really need to go west to build this business. We definitely see companies on the west coast that are um that should be there as well. But I think as we you know what we're in right now is a is a phase of the AI revolution that's been much more foundational and infrastructured driven. And that's a phase that the bay always does well. you know, when the when the PhDs are driving the companies, Stanford and Berkeley are going to be, you know, out punching NYU and Colombia.

When kind of go to market activity and being connected to customers and starting to really scale around accounts and all of that, like that's when the fact that New York is home to media and consumer packaged goods and financial services and everything else starts to shine. So, it's it's been important for us to be playing both coasts because different coasts excel in different environments.

Yeah, makes a ton of sense.

Awesome. Well, great to meet you. Thanks for coming on. Congrats to the whole team.

Congratulations.

Thank you.

Thanks guys. Congrats again to you guys on all your success. It's been fun to watch.

Appreciate that. We'll talk to you soon. Have a good rest of your day.

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