By Nancy Dahlberg
As hundreds of Florida Funders investors gathered for their annual Venture Summit this week, the mood was in the room was cautious optimism. Florida Funders Managing Partner Tom Wallace and General Partner Saxon Baum said some of their portfolio companies had phenomenal years in 2024 and as a firm they expect a better year ahead for exits, with a couple of their companies already rapidly approaching the runway. It also doesn’t hurt that it is also the most investor-friendly market in decades amid an AI revolution.
Florida Funders’ portfolio contains 108 companies, with 68% of them based in Florida, one of the fastest-growing regions for tech. The firm has $268 million assets under management, up from $200 million a year ago, said Baum, at the event at The Motor Enclave in Tampa. Florida Funders has also had eight exits, including a very recent one for Simplebet founded by Miami’s Joey Levy.
Speaking of local impact, Miami-based Flex is now Florida Funders’ largest position in its Fund 2. “They had a great 2024 where they acquired an a16z-backed company and they raised an additional $10 million,” Baum said. “We have several Fund 2 companies that when they exit, they have the potential to return the entire fund.” Those could include companies with familiar names to South Florida, including Flex, HealthSnap and Betr, as well as Tampa-based Rewst.
Florida Funders, one of the state’s most active venture firms, is now raising Fund 3, which it plans to cap at $75 million to $100 million. The firm has already invested in seven companies through its Fund 3.
“The largest difference between Fund 2 and Fund 3 strategy is that we know our strategy works. We’re going to have fewer companies in Fund 3 with more to invest in those companies. We want to take larger, more concentrated positions,” Baum said. “We believe it is a great time to invest in venture capital.”
Combined with the Summit were founder talks. Suneera Madhani is back in founder mode with Worth AI after her unicorn exit of Stax. This time she is aiming to solve a fintech gap she was very familiar with: the non-existence of business credit worth.
“We exited a business north of $1.3 billion and I couldn’t get a line of credit to our business. We’re very mission centric as to why we’re building again: to create an ecosystem where it doesn’t matter who is the business owner or what business history they have or not, the business should be assessed and backed on the business’s credit worth,” she said.
Worth has partnered with all the major financial data set providers, she said, and the timing is on their side with generative AI.
Madhani’s tips for founders?
On building a team: “You want to go fast, you need people to go fast, you have to have A players, where rise and grind comes natural. We have a culture of winning, and I think it’s finding teammates that have successful track records, and we also believe in diversity of thought. When you build a culture of winning and accountability, you don’t need to micromanage.”
On building a product: “Create raving fans” everywhere you go, but be authentic, not transactional, she said. Madhani values an early mentor’s advice: Focus on collecting genuine relationships.
As a longtime Orlando resident, Madhani added, “we want to be part of this Florida story.”
Miami-founders and Thiel Fellows Zaid Rahman of Flex and Joey Levy of Betr offered their perspectives at the summit.
“The pain point I realized as a founder is that running your business is really really hard and the thing that usually sucks is finance,” Rahman said. That’s why Flex is an end-to-end financial operating system for business owners. As for growth, he said just two years ago Flex’s total transaction volume was $10 million, and “we recently crossed a billion so in two years – 100X.”
But what about a financial operating system for personal lives? Now Flex is very soon launching a consumer-product. “We have been working for about a year now on launching a full consumer product, which would be the first best-in-class fintech platform plus financial services product in one, he said. Stay tuned.
Levy’s Betr is a direct-to-consumer sports gaming and media business. He previously founded Simplebet, which sold to DraftKings a couple of months ago in one of the bigger B2B transactions in industry history, he said. Betr’s flagship product is Betr Picks, “one of the largest fantasy picking apps in the United States,” said Levy.
January 2025 was one of Betr’s best month in its history: Betr grew net revenue by 50% year over year but also reduced its marketing expenses by 75%, Levy said, helped by Betr’s media strategy incubating its own media company. Now Levy’s ready to raise more funding to “take this traction and success and really scale it to the next level.”
Closing the daylong event was the keynote speaker, David Cohen, co-founder and CEO of Techstars, a firm that has invested in 5,000 companies, including 21 current unicorns and 120 “soonicorns,” using its accelerator model of investing.
“Unicorns are being born everywhere. Our believe is that you have to be part of those communities to capture those opportunities as an investor,” Cohen said, adding that the startup communities around them are the “secret weapons” of these unicorns and soonicorns.
With 25,000 applications for 500 spots in their accelerators, how do they choose? “Six things in order that we’re looking for – team, team, team, market, progress, idea. And we put idea last just to point out how little we care about it,” he said.
Looking ahead, what is Cohen most excited about? The intersection of AI and quantum computing. “When you put those things together … computing is going to look completely different in that world – not just faster, but making everything we do today obsolete.”
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