earlystage.xyz

Jeff Barg / Justin Bleuel

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Jeff Barg

Head of AI at Clay

                                                                    
                                                                    
                                                                    
                                                                    
                                                                    
                                                                    
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Justin Bleuel

Product staff at OpenAI

We invest in founders building at the edge of AI infrastructure and AI applications. The most interesting companies are rarely only one or the other: they turn new technical capability into workflows people use every day, then use that proximity to customers to make the system smarter.

Our bias is toward products with a real wedge, clear taste, and infrastructure hiding inside the application. We like the messy middle where model behavior, data quality, reliability, distribution, and workflow design all matter at once.

Thesis

+-------------------+     +-------------------+     +-------------------+
| AI infrastructure | --> |    capability     | --> |  AI applications |
+-------------------+     +-------------------+     +-------------------+
          ^                                                   |
          |                                                   v
          +------------- feedback loops / data ----------------+

AI infrastructure: models, data, evals, tools
capability: what becomes newly possible
AI applications: workflow, judgment, distribution
feedback loops: usage data compounds the system

We built Avenue because operational teams were drowning in signals but still missing the moments that mattered. The product watched changes across growth workflows, turned them into useful alerts, and helped teams act while the context was still fresh. Avenue later became part of Clay, where that same idea now shows up as AI-native systems for growth teams.

That experience shaped how we look at companies now. We care about founders who can hold the product and infrastructure problems in their heads at the same time, because AI-native markets reward teams that can make hard systems feel obvious.

We write $10-$100k checks at pre-seed and seed.