Defy.

Defy Partners is an early stage venture fund exclusively focused on emerging high-potential opportunities where we devote our time and network to help you get ahead. Why we started a new firm? We started Defy so we could focus exclusively on investing in early-stage opportunities. We are driven by a passion for working closely with entrepreneurs, especially through the transformative time after seed funding. We invest in people and in their conviction and talent for creating real change. Why “Defy”? Being an entrepreneur means questioning everything. It means pushing back on all the smart, well-meaning people who tell you you’re wrong. Entrepreneurs that build something magical out of nothing embody what it means to defy.

Hayley Korman

Associate

Madison McIlwain

Partner, Seed

Bob Rosin

Partner

Brian Rothenberg

Partner

Kamil Saeid

Partner, Creation Lead

Neil Sequeira

Founder and Partner

Purvi Shah

Co-Founder, Partner and CFO

Phebe Tran

Co-Founder and Chief of Staff

Trae Vassallo

Advisor

Past deals in Pakistan

Prive

Seed Round in 2021
Prive is the world's first marketplace infrastructure platform for eCommerce brands. We are building for the new generation, enabling brands you know and love to compete and win at scale. Starting with the tools and systems that allow brands to manage and optimize their end-to-end pricing and incentives levers, we are changing the status quo of guess-work and tribal knowledge- hardly what 2021 should look like. Prive enables brands to compete against the Amazons of the world.

MEDgle

Series B in 2021
Lumiata is transforming the healthcare enterprise through the application of AI. Bringing predictive power within reach of data science teams and business users, we’re driving predictability and precision at scale — empowering providers and payers to reduce risk and manage costs and move out of reliance on flat data into a future of insights. Lumiata machine learning tools and pre-trained models comprise a scalable platform purpose-built for healthcare. Lumiata products are built from more than 120 million patient records, in-depth clinical knowledge, and its proprietary clinical IP. Lumiata enables healthcare organizations to explore use cases such as underwriting and care management. Lumiata is proud to be backed by Khosla Ventures, Blue Venture Fund, Defy.vc, and AllegisNL Capital. Team Lumiata is distributed across Silicon Valley, Dallas, and Guadalajara, Mexico.

Nautilus Biotechnology

Series B in 2020
Born from the founders’ recognition that their diverse but complementary skills and experiences would enable them to successfully address challenges that others had not, the company set about solving a vexing problem: how to bring true proteomics to the world in a way that accelerates therapeutic development, dramatically improves medical diagnostics, and makes personalized and predictive medicine a reality. The extraordinary team at Nautilus represents a wide spectrum of disciplines and expertise, including protein chemists, chip designers, molecular biologists, data scientists, material scientists, biophysicists, optical engineers, microfluidics engineers, bioinformaticists, software engineers, and more. Nautilus is positioned to revolutionize proteomics, transform the way drugs are developed, and significantly improve the way human health is managed.

Elevate Security

Series A in 2019
Elevate Security, Inc. develops a web-based human risk management platform that focuses on shifting human behavior and responses to security threats in order to prevent breaches. The company's platform leverages a variety of data sources to continuously track security behaviors, engages the employee with an interactive learning experience when high risk behavior occurs, helps the individual understand the cost of the wrong behavior and its impact on their organization, and uses the same data sources to track and measure change in behavior over time. The company was founded in 2017 and is based in Berkeley, California with an additional office in Quebec, Canada.

Thrilling

Series A in 2021
Thrilling Inc. operates an e-commerce platform for vintage and second hand stores. Its online retail portfolio comprises clothing, such as dresses, skirts, sweaters, tops, tees, outerwear, blazers, pants, and swimwear; and shoes, bags, and accessories. The company was incorporated in 2018 and is based in Burbank, California.

Shujinko

Series A in 2019
Shujinko Inc. develops compliance and information technology audit software solutions. It offers automated evidence collection engine for cloud compliance, security compliance at cloud, and automate audit preparation. The company was founded in 2018 and is based in Seattle, Washington.

SoundCommerce

Funding Round in 2021
SoundCommerce equips consumer brands with advanced technology, enabling world-class shopper experiences that drive profitable growth. Our platform and services are driven by data science, a digital-native approach, and operating discipline grounded in unit economics — your most critical KPIs.

MIXhalo Corp.

Series B in 2021
MIXhalo Corp. develops an audio technology platform that enables users to access sound at a live event through the smartphones. It offers Mixhalo, a platform that enables live event organizers to give audiences what they came for, by delivering audio directly to attendees’ own phones and headphones. The company provides its solutions for concerts, political speeches, music events, sports, conferences, interpretations, and public events. MIXhalo Corp. was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Novi

Series B in 2022
Novi is a technology platform that uses AI to ingest proprietary chemical information from chemical manufacturers or suppliers and create chemical profiles at the trade material level. It enables brands and formulators on the platform to access data for any trade material of interest to assess an ingredient currently in use, find safer alternatives, or discover new ingredients that meet their standards. Retailers verify that brands only use ingredients that meet their standards. The company is dedicated to solving the large hurdle of scalable data management by acting as the third-party to translate relevant proprietary information between suppliers and brands.

Genemod Corporation

Seed Round in 2023
Genemod is a unified platform for life scientists to collaborate and streamline day-to-day operations in the research lab. The company's proprietary technology brings together both scientific and management tools onto a single, shared platform for the multitude of tools required by scientists. They host scientific tools on a user-friendly admin dashboard and utilize data processing algorithms to streamline workflow alongside project management. It is intuitive, scalable, user-centered, modern, and secure. It was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, USA.

Fable

Seed Round in 2021
Fable Group, Inc. owns and operates a platform, which delivers a social experience with stories in the service of mental wellness. The company was incorporated in 2019 and is based in Palo Alto, California.

Bazaar Technologies

Series B in 2022
Bazaar is empowering small and medium sized retailers who form the backbone of Pakistan’s retail economy. Bazaar’s mobile app gives these small business owners access to a large assortment of goods from multiple local and international brands as well as unbranded products on a single platform - which can be ordered at any day of the week with free next day delivery to storefronts. Our mission is to build a truly incredible and scalable tech company in and for Pakistan.

prima

Seed Round in 2021
Prima is a best-in-class, purpose-driven holistic wellness brand elevating hemp-based CBD and functionally innovative botanicals. Its core mission is to rise up against the modern day stress epidemic through education and products made with the highest standards of purity, potency and transparency. Prima is built on the essential principle that balance is a critical part of health and happiness — and that we all deserve better. Prima is a privately held Public Benefit Corporation (PBC) based in Santa Monica, CA.

Honorlock Inc.

Series B in 2021
Honorlock provides remote proctoring services for online assessments using webcams and screen-capturing technology. The company combines traditional methods of proctoring such as webcam, lockdown browser, and ID verification with its new patented search and destroy technology to create a world-class proctoring solution. With a focus on user experience, Honorlock requires no software to download, on-demand testing, and 24/7 support. Honorlock is headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida.

Perfect Venue

Seed Round in 2022
Find the perfect venue for your next event.

Shujinko

Seed Round in 2018
Shujinko Inc. develops compliance and information technology audit software solutions. It offers automated evidence collection engine for cloud compliance, security compliance at cloud, and automate audit preparation. The company was founded in 2018 and is based in Seattle, Washington.
Airspace Technologies makes shipping faster, safer, and more transparent than ever before through people, service, and technology. Their vision is to create the most trusted delivery network the world has ever seen. Airspace integrates technology, people, and services through an industry-first automated software platform that gives their customers a true end-to-end time-critical shipping solution with full visibility. Founded in 2014, the company is headquartered in Carlsbad, California, United States.

Agentology

Series A in 2018
Agentology Inc. develops a web and mobile referral network for real estate agents. Its product includes ReferralEngine, an agent-to-agent referral network which refers leads and receives referrals. The company enables real estate agents to engage and convert their leads. The company's platform synchronizes lead sources and CRMs, contact leads via SMS, phone, or email, and send lead's information. The company was formerly known as MyAgentFinder and changed its name to Agentology Inc. in November, 2015. Agentology Inc. was founded in 2012 and is based in San Diego, California.

Searchable AI Corp, Inc.

Seed Round in 2020
Searchable AI Corp, Inc. develops a personalized semantic search engine software. It offers Searchable.ai, a software that enables enterprises to search for documents and information across emails, chats, cloud content, and traditional files. The company’s search engine uses its Neural Indexing technology to enable work documents to become deeply searchable. The company was incorporated in 2019 and is based in San Francisco, California.

The Dipp

Seed Round in 2020
The Dipp offers subscription to entertainment news. The company is headquartered in Brooklyn, New York.

Fable

Series A in 2021
Fable Group, Inc. owns and operates a platform, which delivers a social experience with stories in the service of mental wellness. The company was incorporated in 2019 and is based in Palo Alto, California.

Fable

Venture Round in 2021
Fable Group, Inc. owns and operates a platform, which delivers a social experience with stories in the service of mental wellness. The company was incorporated in 2019 and is based in Palo Alto, California.

MIXhalo Corp.

Series A in 2019
MIXhalo Corp. develops an audio technology platform that enables users to access sound at a live event through the smartphones. It offers Mixhalo, a platform that enables live event organizers to give audiences what they came for, by delivering audio directly to attendees’ own phones and headphones. The company provides its solutions for concerts, political speeches, music events, sports, conferences, interpretations, and public events. MIXhalo Corp. was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

PullRequest

Series A in 2018
PullRequest is passionate about code quality. From static analysis to an on-demand network of code review experts, we help development teams ship code faster, with improved quality and lower costs. Based in Austin, Texas and the San Francisco Bay Area, PullRequest was founded in May 2017 and went through the YCombinator (S17) accelerator program.

Apploi

Series B in 2021
Apploi provides hiring software designed specifically (though not exclusively) for the hourly, contingent and part-time workforce. We're transforming the way in which companies find and screen talent, which traditionally has been very inefficient (think long lines in stores / recruiting events / stacks of resumes) and unsuccessful in fully engaging those looking for jobs in these industries.

Nifty Games Inc.

Seed Round in 2018
Nifty Games brings free to play multiplayer sports gaming to mobile devices. Nifty Games are focused on delivering classic sports gaming style competition to the industry's highest growth segment, with relatively short game sessions that take mere minutes to complete.

Fable

Seed Round in 2021
Fable Group, Inc. owns and operates a platform, which delivers a social experience with stories in the service of mental wellness. The company was incorporated in 2019 and is based in Palo Alto, California.

TruePlan.io

Series A in 2021
TruePlan Inc. develops a collaborative headcount management platform to provide end-to-end control of financial visibility. The company’s platform reduces time spent on manual tasks, creates instant alignment in hiring across teams, and centralizes all aspects of headcount management through a single platform. The company was incorporated in 2020 and is based in San Francisco, California.

Pawlicy Advisor Inc.

Series B in 2022
Pawlicy Advisor Inc. provides pet insurance comparison services. The company allow users to compare and buy breed-specific insurance plans. Pawlicy Advisor Inc. was founded in 2018 and is based in New York, New York.

WhyLabs, Inc

Series A in 2021
WhyLabs is the AI observability company. Its mission to build the interface between humans and AI applications.

Nifty Games Inc.

Series B in 2021
Nifty Games brings free to play multiplayer sports gaming to mobile devices. Nifty Games are focused on delivering classic sports gaming style competition to the industry's highest growth segment, with relatively short game sessions that take mere minutes to complete.

Aalto

Series A in 2021
Aalto is the private real estate market, an entirely new way to sell your home — designed to offer privacy, flexibility, and peace of mind. Life is stressful enough, selling your home shouldn't be.
Airspace Technologies makes shipping faster, safer, and more transparent than ever before through people, service, and technology. Their vision is to create the most trusted delivery network the world has ever seen. Airspace integrates technology, people, and services through an industry-first automated software platform that gives their customers a true end-to-end time-critical shipping solution with full visibility. Founded in 2014, the company is headquartered in Carlsbad, California, United States.

Arevo Labs

Venture Round in 2021
AREVO, based in Silicon Valley, California, develops technology to enable direct digital additive manufacturing of ultra-strong, lightweight composite parts for end use applications in high volume. With the company's unique combination of breakthrough materials, powerful design/build software, and free motion robotics for the first “true 3D” construction, AREVO is moving beyond prototypes by enabling the design and fabrication of large, mass-produced parts and structures, quickly leading 3D printing into mainstream manufacturing. AREVO provides designers and manufacturers with unprecedented freedom to unlock the unparalleled strength and weight of composite materials for a wide range of consumer and industrial products, and has seen early success manufacturing CFRTP composite parts for OEM customers. With an initial focus on Aerospace, Defense, Consumer Electronics, Transportation, and Consumer Goods, Arevo is poised to optimize additive manufacturing services to OEM’s worldwide.

SoundCommerce

Seed Round in 2019
SoundCommerce equips consumer brands with advanced technology, enabling world-class shopper experiences that drive profitable growth. Our platform and services are driven by data science, a digital-native approach, and operating discipline grounded in unit economics — your most critical KPIs.

Novi

Series A in 2021
Novi is a technology platform that uses AI to ingest proprietary chemical information from chemical manufacturers or suppliers and create chemical profiles at the trade material level. It enables brands and formulators on the platform to access data for any trade material of interest to assess an ingredient currently in use, find safer alternatives, or discover new ingredients that meet their standards. Retailers verify that brands only use ingredients that meet their standards. The company is dedicated to solving the large hurdle of scalable data management by acting as the third-party to translate relevant proprietary information between suppliers and brands.

Bazaar Technologies

Series A in 2021
Bazaar is empowering small and medium sized retailers who form the backbone of Pakistan’s retail economy. Bazaar’s mobile app gives these small business owners access to a large assortment of goods from multiple local and international brands as well as unbranded products on a single platform - which can be ordered at any day of the week with free next day delivery to storefronts. Our mission is to build a truly incredible and scalable tech company in and for Pakistan.

Boom Fantasy

Seed Round in 2018
Boom Sports is a technology company whose mission is to entertain and connect sports fans through games. After building the most popular real-money pick 'em daily fantasy product (2-time EGR app of the year), we're designing and operating world-class, free-to-play, games for media, league, and pro sports team partners. Our flagship product is NBC Sports Predictor, which offers fans in all 50 states the chance to win real money based on their (free) predictions. The product has been a huge success -- hundreds of thousands of active users, a 4.8 app store rating on 2K+ reviews -- and has provided a model for others that want to maximize the value of their audience in advance of legalized sports betting. If you want to build (legal) sports gaming products for the next generation of fans, come join us! We're hiring!

OwlFactor

Pre Seed Round in 2019
Are you getting unbiased news from your news sources? Get the most credible stories on trending news topics every morning with The Factual newsletter. The Factual automatically scores 20,000 articles daily for credibility based on diversity of sources, opinionated tone of writing, topical expertise of the author, and site reputation. The result is a wider array of sources than Google news and a less biased offering than Apple News.

Securly

Series B in 2018
Securly is the first web filter that has been designed from the ground up for schools. It is completely cloud based, takes five minutes to set up per district and costs a fraction of the enterprise solutions that schools are forced to pay for today. We solve the problem of "over blocking" in schools by allowing educators to safely use 21st century instructional tools such as Google, YouTube and Wikipedia in the classroom.

GajiGesa

Seed Round in 2021
GajiGesa is a financial wellness platform helping Indonesians achieve financial dignity and security from their work. GajiGesa's mission is to improve the financial literacy of Indonesian employees. GajiGesa believes that every employee has the right to access and financial education. With GajiGesa, employees can have full control of their finances in hand.

Apploi

Series B in 2020
Apploi provides hiring software designed specifically (though not exclusively) for the hourly, contingent and part-time workforce. We're transforming the way in which companies find and screen talent, which traditionally has been very inefficient (think long lines in stores / recruiting events / stacks of resumes) and unsuccessful in fully engaging those looking for jobs in these industries.

Pawlicy Advisor Inc.

Series A in 2021
Pawlicy Advisor Inc. provides pet insurance comparison services. The company allow users to compare and buy breed-specific insurance plans. Pawlicy Advisor Inc. was founded in 2018 and is based in New York, New York.
Airspace Technologies makes shipping faster, safer, and more transparent than ever before through people, service, and technology. Their vision is to create the most trusted delivery network the world has ever seen. Airspace integrates technology, people, and services through an industry-first automated software platform that gives their customers a true end-to-end time-critical shipping solution with full visibility. Founded in 2014, the company is headquartered in Carlsbad, California, United States.

Honorlock Inc.

Series A in 2020
Honorlock provides remote proctoring services for online assessments using webcams and screen-capturing technology. The company combines traditional methods of proctoring such as webcam, lockdown browser, and ID verification with its new patented search and destroy technology to create a world-class proctoring solution. With a focus on user experience, Honorlock requires no software to download, on-demand testing, and 24/7 support. Honorlock is headquartered in Boca Raton, Florida.

Visor

Series A in 2018
Visor Inc., an online tax filing and advisory solution, specializes in advising urban professionals. It prepares annual returns and provides year-round tax advice. The company was founded in 2016 and is based in San Francisco, California with locations in Miami, Florida; Marietta, Georgia; New York, New York; Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; Phoenix, Arizona; Seattle, Washington; Washington, DC; Atlanta, Georgia; Boston, Massachusetts; Chicago, Illinois; Dallas and Houston, Texas; Denver, Colorado; and Los Angeles, California.

Skubana

Series A in 2019
Skubana is a distributed order management platform powering fulfillment, inventory, and business intelligence for brands looking to achieve multi-channel profitability. Skubana synchronizes data from sales channels, warehouses, 3PLs, POS systems and more so merchants can stay focused on providing the best customer experience.
Airspace Technologies makes shipping faster, safer, and more transparent than ever before through people, service, and technology. Their vision is to create the most trusted delivery network the world has ever seen. Airspace integrates technology, people, and services through an industry-first automated software platform that gives their customers a true end-to-end time-critical shipping solution with full visibility. Founded in 2014, the company is headquartered in Carlsbad, California, United States.

PullRequest

Seed Round in 2017
PullRequest is passionate about code quality. From static analysis to an on-demand network of code review experts, we help development teams ship code faster, with improved quality and lower costs. Based in Austin, Texas and the San Francisco Bay Area, PullRequest was founded in May 2017 and went through the YCombinator (S17) accelerator program.

Searchable AI Corp, Inc.

Seed Round in 2019
Searchable AI Corp, Inc. develops a personalized semantic search engine software. It offers Searchable.ai, a software that enables enterprises to search for documents and information across emails, chats, cloud content, and traditional files. The company’s search engine uses its Neural Indexing technology to enable work documents to become deeply searchable. The company was incorporated in 2019 and is based in San Francisco, California.

Elevate Security

Series A in 2020
Elevate Security, Inc. develops a web-based human risk management platform that focuses on shifting human behavior and responses to security threats in order to prevent breaches. The company's platform leverages a variety of data sources to continuously track security behaviors, engages the employee with an interactive learning experience when high risk behavior occurs, helps the individual understand the cost of the wrong behavior and its impact on their organization, and uses the same data sources to track and measure change in behavior over time. The company was founded in 2017 and is based in Berkeley, California with an additional office in Quebec, Canada.

Pawlicy Advisor Inc.

Seed Round in 2020
Pawlicy Advisor Inc. provides pet insurance comparison services. The company allow users to compare and buy breed-specific insurance plans. Pawlicy Advisor Inc. was founded in 2018 and is based in New York, New York.

Owl Cameras Inc.

Series A in 2018
Owl Cameras Inc. develops and manufactures security camera for cars. The company's product enables car owners to capture different actions including car crashes, stops, break-in the vehicle, and any other thing in and around the vehicle. It offers software capabilities as well as the hardware for its product. The company provides constant connectivity, 24-hour video storage, and video alerts to user's phone features. The company was founded in 2016 and is headquartered in Palo Alto, California.

Beamable

Venture Round in 2021
Disruptor Beam brings together worldwide fan communities with games created surrounding iconic properties. It creates highly authentic, socially-driven games based around worlds that have spawned communities of millions of passionate, dedicated fans. The company was founded in 2010 and headquartered in Framingham, Massachusetts.

WhyLabs, Inc

Seed Round in 2020
WhyLabs is the AI observability company. Its mission to build the interface between humans and AI applications.

Novi

Seed Round in 2020
Novi is a technology platform that uses AI to ingest proprietary chemical information from chemical manufacturers or suppliers and create chemical profiles at the trade material level. It enables brands and formulators on the platform to access data for any trade material of interest to assess an ingredient currently in use, find safer alternatives, or discover new ingredients that meet their standards. Retailers verify that brands only use ingredients that meet their standards. The company is dedicated to solving the large hurdle of scalable data management by acting as the third-party to translate relevant proprietary information between suppliers and brands.

Arevo Labs

Series B in 2020
AREVO, based in Silicon Valley, California, develops technology to enable direct digital additive manufacturing of ultra-strong, lightweight composite parts for end use applications in high volume. With the company's unique combination of breakthrough materials, powerful design/build software, and free motion robotics for the first “true 3D” construction, AREVO is moving beyond prototypes by enabling the design and fabrication of large, mass-produced parts and structures, quickly leading 3D printing into mainstream manufacturing. AREVO provides designers and manufacturers with unprecedented freedom to unlock the unparalleled strength and weight of composite materials for a wide range of consumer and industrial products, and has seen early success manufacturing CFRTP composite parts for OEM customers. With an initial focus on Aerospace, Defense, Consumer Electronics, Transportation, and Consumer Goods, Arevo is poised to optimize additive manufacturing services to OEM’s worldwide.

Genemod Corporation

Seed Round in 2020
Genemod is a unified platform for life scientists to collaborate and streamline day-to-day operations in the research lab. The company's proprietary technology brings together both scientific and management tools onto a single, shared platform for the multitude of tools required by scientists. They host scientific tools on a user-friendly admin dashboard and utilize data processing algorithms to streamline workflow alongside project management. It is intuitive, scalable, user-centered, modern, and secure. It was founded in 2018 and is headquartered in Seattle, Washington, USA.