Florida Funders

Florida Funders Florida Funders is a hybrid between a venture capital fund and an investor network

Florida Funders is a hybrid between a venture capital fund and an investor network that discovers, funds, and builds early-stage technology companies.

06/03/2026

The next page of Rachael Ferm's Founder Playbook gets into one of the most overlooked parts of a pitch: teaching investors how your market works.

Most investors have seen a thousand market size slides, but what they really want to know is the details like who owns demand, who controls distribution, and where margins concentrate.

Here's how to map your market structure to show the bottlenecks, decision points, demand aggregators, and distribution dynamics, so your business becomes more legible to investors and less like a traditional pitch.

Send this post to another founder and be sure to follow along for more expert tips straight from Rachael's desk.

Introducing our latest Fund 3 investment, Opus Health.$150B in HSA and FSA funds go underutilized every year because the...
06/01/2026

Introducing our latest Fund 3 investment, Opus Health.

$150B in HSA and FSA funds go underutilized every year because the checkout workflow at most healthcare practices doesn't support it. Opus Health sits at the point of care, automatically identifying and applying eligible benefits at checkout, so patients can access the funds they've already paid into while providers capture revenue that was previously slipping through the cracks.

Founder Carolina Paduano came to this problem through two lenses: years as an investor at a healthcare and fintech-focused fund, and a personal experience navigating a broken system during a family health crisis. She saw the gap firsthand and built the infrastructure layer no one else had.

Providers using Opus have seen a 120%+ increase in HSA/FSA utilization, 70% increase in revenue per patient, and 66% reduction in patient financing.

Carolina is deeply credentialed, mission-driven, and building in a space she knows from the inside out. We couldn't be more thrilled to back her. Welcome to the FLF family. https://hubs.la/Q04jbQHD0

a16z's NYC Tech Week is June 1-7 and the lineup is stacked with featured speakers including the CEO of IBM and co-founde...
05/27/2026

a16z's NYC Tech Week is June 1-7 and the lineup is stacked with featured speakers including the CEO of IBM and co-founders of HubSpot, Whoop, and Twitter. Rachael Ferm will be there representing FLF, so if you're one of the founders, funds, or companies joining the fun and want to find a time to connect, reach out. Let's find a time to meet. https://hubs.la/Q04hYPvP0

We're grateful to have PEO Analysis as a sponsor for the Florida Funders Venture Summit, and if you're a founder navigat...
05/26/2026

We're grateful to have PEO Analysis as a sponsor for the Florida Funders Venture Summit, and if you're a founder navigating HR challenges while scaling your organization, they provide valuable solutions.

As the largest PEO consulting firm, PEO Analysis helps companies outsource their HR operations while providing access to better medical benefits at significantly reduced costs. Through their comprehensive PEO partnerships, companies gain enterprise-level capabilities that improve talent acquisition and retention without the overhead of building these functions internally.

For more information about leveraging PEO partnerships for sustainable growth, contact PEO Analysis. https://hubs.la/Q04fjxWR0

05/25/2026

Sales teams spend an enormous amount of time on the content that closes deals, pushing out sales cycles and creating more opportunity for issues along the way. FLF portfolio founder Ben Hills built Iris to solve that as the first AI-native platform for last-mile sales content. Iris gives sales teams everything they need to win deals faster without the manual grind behind it.

FLF has been an investor since the beginning, working alongside the Iris team on strategy, positioning, and product roadmaps and using our own experience as founders to do more than just write a check.

Two hundred customers in, Ben's playing a long game. His goal is to be the number one AI-native sales tool across the U.S. By his count, there are still about 4 million customers to reach. He's ready for the road ahead.

If you're at the beginning of your founder's journey, take Ben's advice. Pick up a copy of The Hard Thing About Hard Things by Ben Horowitz and stay strong in your conviction in what you're building despite the noise.

Thanks to Carta for sponsoring the 2026 FLF Venture Summit, and thanks to Peter Walker, Head of Insights, for taking the...
05/21/2026

Thanks to Carta for sponsoring the 2026 FLF Venture Summit, and thanks to Peter Walker, Head of Insights, for taking the stage and sharing a market data update for attendees.

Carta manages cap tables, equity programs, and valuations for thousands of private companies. As you raise rounds, issue equity to employees, and navigate complex ownership structures, Carta provides the infrastructure that keeps everything organized and compliant. The platform gives founders and investors real-time visibility into ownership, valuations, and equity management.

Great conversation was had around startups and the future of innovation yesterday. Our very own Saxon Baum spoke at Tamp...
05/21/2026

Great conversation was had around startups and the future of innovation yesterday. Our very own Saxon Baum spoke at Tampa Bay Tech's Powered Up alongside Becca Brown with spArk Labs and Tim Holcomb CEO of Embarc Collective. If you attended, let us know what your favorite part was.

Accessible context is what allows expertise to scale. The companies owning that context layer are becoming the operating...
05/20/2026

Accessible context is what allows expertise to scale. The companies owning that context layer are becoming the operating memory of their industries.

That's the central thesis from Rachael Ferm, our Director of Investments, after attending the a16z SR006 cohort this spring. The thread connecting the cohort wasn't a specific sector but a structural position: the information layer precedes the judgment layer, and whoever owns it accumulates the context judgment requires.

A few other threads she pulled: organizations are starting to see human judgment differently as AI embeds into daily work. Provenance is becoming more valuable as synthetic output gets cheaper. And in physical industries (construction, logistics, field services) the companies compressing data assembly today are building the moat.

Read Rachael’s full insights. https://hubs.ly/Q04hh0560

05/18/2026

ShyftOff started with Trevor Clark self-funding a thesis he'd developed over years running large-scale contact center operations. The idea worked, but what he needed was capital to survive long enough to prove it at scale.

Florida Funders came in as the first investor, leading the seed round that changed the trajectory. Since then, ShyftOff has grown 100% annually, automating 98% of its clients' contact center overhead and saving them 30-50% in the process. As for where Shyftoff is going, Trevor sees the company becoming the key orchestration layer for the future of contact centers, blending AI and humans to work together on their own.

We're big believers in knowledge sharing, so we asked Trevor to give some advice to founders currently in the investor pitching stage. Speaking from his experience and ShyftOff's firsthand success, Trevor encourages founders to put numbers on the board and let them do the talking. That's what confirmed things for FLF to come on board, and it's mission-critical when searching for long-term support for your venture.

We’re excited to share that Brox AI, a new FLF Fund 3 deal, recently announced a strategic funding round following a yea...
05/15/2026

We’re excited to share that Brox AI, a new FLF Fund 3 deal, recently announced a strategic funding round following a year of 10x revenue growth. The enterprise platform has created 60k proprietary digital twins, 1:1 behavior replicas of real people, to stimulate human decision-making with accuracy at a scale that can keep up with the AI era.

Each digital twin is constructed from hours of deep interviews and up to 300 pages of personal data data, allowing enterprise companies to run unlimited research scenarios in hours instead of a typical 12-week cycle. Google, JP Morgan Chase, Amazon, and Pfizer are already on the client roster.

Pair that with founder Hamish Brocklebank’s extensive background in building and scaling AI-driven product initiatives and analytics infrastructure, and we’re beyond confident in this company’s vision and ex*****on.

https://hubs.la/Q04gFSkf0

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