Portfolio Spotlight: Bluefish

We’re excited to announce that our portfolio company ‌Bluefish has raised a $20M Series A led by NEA and Salesforce Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding to $24 million within its first year of launch.

We’ve backed the Bluefish team from the very beginning, investing in the company at pre-seed and, before that, supporting CEO Alex Sherman and COO Jing Feng as a seed investor in their previous company, PromoteIQ (acquired by Microsoft).

As AI becomes the first stop for product discovery and purchasing decisions, enterprise brands face a new challenge: understanding and influencing how they appear in AI-generated responses. Bluefish is rebuilding the enterprise marketing stack for this new reality. Its platform analyzes millions of AI prompt responses across ChatGPT, Google AI, Meta AI, Amazon Rufus, and more, giving marketers real-time visibility into how their brands are represented. With this data, Bluefish enables teams to optimize content strategies, improve discoverability, and measure performance against custom KPIs. Unlike one-size-fits-all tools, the platform was built from the ground up for the Fortune 500, allowing each brand to tailor insights and actions to its unique business needs.

The results speak for themselves: Bluefish has grown revenue 10x over the past six months and now counts a host of Fortune 500 leaders among its customers. More than 80% of its client base comes from the Fortune 500, spanning industries from financial services and consumer packaged goods to travel, auto, and beauty. Bluefish’s newest release, Custom AI Audiences, allows marketers to define audience-specific profiles and insights, creating differentiated strategies that further expand competitive advantage.

The company’s founding team brings a deep track record of building marketing platforms for global brands. CEO Alex Sherman co-founded PromoteIQ, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2019. CTO Andrei Dunca co-founded LiveRail, acquired by Facebook in 2014. COO Jing Feng held senior leadership roles at Microsoft, PromoteIQ, and LiveRail. Together, they bring decades of experience and a clear vision for how enterprise marketing must adapt to the AI era.

At Laconia, we back seed-stage B2B software companies bringing structure to complex workflows, and Bluefish fits squarely within that thesis. By giving enterprise marketers the transparency, control, and tools they need to thrive as consumer behavior shifts to AI, Bluefish is building the future of marketing. We’re proud to support Alex and his team as they continue their journey and define what enterprise AI marketing looks like for the decade ahead.

For more information on the investment, read here.

Founder Spotlight: Shauna Sweeney (tendercare)

Meet Shauna Sweeney, Founder & CEO of tendercare.

After spending eight years as a full-time caregiver for her grandmother, Shauna emerged with a deep understanding of just how emotionally and logistically overwhelming caregiving can be, especially when you're doing it alone.

She founded tendercare to change that.

With over 50 million Americans acting as informal caregivers, tendercare is tackling a massive, underserved market. The platform is more than just a task app, it's an AI-powered care coordination tool that brings structure to fragmented, high-emotion workflows.

We invested in Shauna and tendercare because she lived the caregiving chaos firsthand and built a mission-critical solution to solve it. She brings the clarity, grit, and founder-market fit we look for, and the early traction spoke for itself.

Watch Sweeney’s Rock, a short documentary that shares Shauna’s story, her bond with her dad, and the mission driving tendercare forward.

Trends vs. Waves in Tech: Why It Matters for Founders and Investors

One of the hardest things in early-stage investing is learning to tell the difference between a trend and a wave.

Trends are exciting. They move fast, get headlines, and spark FOMO. But they often fade just as quickly as they arrived.

Waves, on the other hand, are slower to build—but they change industries. They create durable value. And if you catch the right one early, it can take you far.

The analogy I always come back to: Trends are like ripples on the surface—quick to appear, quick to fade. Waves run deeper. They take time to build, but when they do, they carry force. If you’re positioned right, they can take you somewhere truly meaningful.

We’ve all seen it:

Waves:

• Cloud infrastructure in the early 2010s

• The shift to mobile post-iPhone

• Vertical SaaS gaining traction in legacy industries

• Enterprise AI actually getting integrated into operations and workflows

Trends:

• Clubhouse

• The Web3 tokenization of everything moment

• Groupon-style daily deal clones

• “AI” slapped on slide 3 of a deck with no real use case

At Laconia, we’ve learned to pause and ask a few key questions:

• Is this a feature or a company?

• Is this solving a real pain point, or just riding a headline?

• Who’s the actual customer, and are they pulling for this—or is the founder pushing it?

Waves usually don’t come with buzzy packaging. They show up quietly—in behavior shifts, infrastructure development, regulatory tailwinds, or workflow changes. But once they start moving, they open up space to build something meaningful.

Founders: ask yourself—is what you’re building going to matter in five years, or just five minutes?

Chasing trends might get you early attention, but building on a wave gives you staying power. The companies that grow, compound, and reshape industries? They're built on waves.

Jeffrey Silverman

Reframing the Board Meeting: It’s Not a Performance Review

Too many founders walk into board meetings with anxiety levels through the roof, bracing for a grilling. And too many investors treat it like a quarterly performance review. That’s not what a board meeting is supposed to be—especially at the early stage.

Let’s reset the narrative.

A board meeting should be a working session, not a courtroom. Founders should see it as an opportunity to get guidance from people who have seen more cycles, more challenges, and more patterns than they have. If you’ve brought on thoughtful investors and advisors, use them. That’s the whole point.

Here’s how we think about it:

The Deck is the Setup, Not the Show. Send the board deck 72 hours in advance. That gives your board time to digest the numbers, think through the product roadmap, sales pipeline, hiring plans—whatever is relevant to the current phase of the business. The goal is to get everyone on the same page before the meeting starts.

Use the first third of the meeting to quickly walk through the highlights of the deck—financial health, sales traction, product progress, customer wins, and open hires. Don’t get bogged down in details. This part is about clarity and context.

The Real Value is in the Last Two-Thirds. The magic happens in the back half of the meeting. That’s where the founder gets to say: Here’s what I’m struggling with. Here’s where I want feedback. Here’s where I need help.

This is your time to tap into the experience and networks of your board. The best board members don’t use this time to criticize—they use it to help solve problems.

Some of the best board meetings I’ve seen are where the founder walks out with:

• A new sales comp plan idea

• A warm intro to a key customer

• A reframing of their go-to-market strategy

• A different way to think about pricing

• Or sometimes, just the confidence that they’re on the right track

Culture Comes from the Top - If you’re an investor reading this: you don’t win any points by beating up a founder. Your job is to challenge them with empathy and support them with intent. That’s how trust gets built—and trust is the foundation of any great board.

Founders: don’t dread your board meetings. Set the tone. Come in curious. Ask questions. Use your board.

This is your team, these are your partners. Treat and respect each of them like it.

Jeffrey Silverman

Don’t Feed a Newborn a Porterhouse ...and other thoughts on raising the right amount of capital at Seed

Lately, we’ve seen large funds coming down-market, playing in the seed stage. And while the attention might feel validating, the impact often isn’t.

These funds are used to writing $5M–$10M checks without blinking. But when they apply that same muscle at seed, it’s like handing a porterhouse steak to a newborn. Technically it’s food—but the baby doesn’t have teeth, can’t chew it, and definitely can’t digest it. That kind of “nourishment” can actually do more harm than good.

Seed is about learning. Testing. Tinkering. Finding product-market fit. Not scaling like you’ve already nailed it. A big check too early can kill the scrappiness, warp decision-making, and set expectations that aren’t aligned with where the company actually is.

And lately, it’s not just large funds anymore—it’s MEGA funds. (The kind that need a luggage cart just to move their capital stack from one term sheet to the next.)

At Laconia, one of the first things we dig into during due diligence—even at pre-seed—is the financial model. Not because we expect a crystal ball, but because it tells us how a founder thinks.

How they prioritize. Where they’re focused. Whether they understand their own levers. It gives us a lens into capital efficiency, customer acquisition strategy, burn, and—most importantly—what the real capital needs are.

That number should drive the raise. Not what a mega fund wants to deploy.

We’ve seen too many founders raise more than they need simply because someone offered. And while it feels great in the moment, it often leads to bloated burn, rushed hiring, distracted execution, and pressure to grow before the foundation is solid.

A great financial model isn’t about perfect projections—it’s about knowing what it’ll take to hit meaningful milestones. And using that to figure out how much you really need to raise.

And sometimes, those founder conversations get real. We’ll push back when a raise feels oversized and ask: what are you really trying to accomplish with this capital? Are you building a foundation or booking a growth plan the business isn’t ready to deliver on?

We’ve passed on deals where the cap table was already bloated and the expectations baked in from the last round made the next one nearly impossible to price. More money isn't always more runway. Sometimes it just means you burn through the wrong stage faster.

Founders: don’t let someone else’s fund size dictate your future. Raise what you need to prove what you can. That’s how real businesses get built.

Because at the end of the day—babies don’t need steak. They need the right nourishment to grow into something strong.

Jeffrey Silverman