Basis Set Ventures

STATUS: DEAD (rapport kill). Met Wilson (Will) Kyi on 2026-05-06 (Zoom) — Sazzad did not enjoy the conversation and killed the path the same day. Not a thesis pass; a person/firm-fit kill. See Fundraise Relationship.

Firm Profile

AI/automation-native early-stage VC. HQ San Francisco (also Menlo Park / “Silicon Valley”); founded 2017 by Dr. Lan Xuezhao. One of the earliest funds to specialize in AI.

• Thesis. AI to “help people perform more productively,” across four themes: scaling infrastructure, intelligent collaboration, automated workflows, autonomous machines. Strongly aligned on paper with init.inc’s automation thesis.
• Fund size / vintage. **$250MFundIVclosedJan2026\ast \ast (announced2026-01-26;WSJ:\ast "BasisSetVenturesBetonAIBeforeOtherFirms.NowItHasRaiseda$250 Million Fourth Fund”*). ~$850M AUM as of 2026 ^[single-source: Wikipedia]. LPs publicly named: Foundry and Melinda French Gates’ Pivotal Ventures.
• Stage / check. Pre-seed / seed / Series A — leads and co-leads. ~9 deals in trailing 12 months (deal activity +50% YoY). Runs an AI Fellowship program (e.g., 2026 Agentic Memory Track with Mem0).
• Founder. Lan Xuezhao (also “Lan Xuezhao” / “Xuezhao Lan”) — Founder & Managing Partner; ex-Corporate Development @ Dropbox, ex-McKinsey; X @xuezhao.

Partners

(Only the CRM POC is roster-relevant; rest plain text.)

• Wilson (Will) Kyi — Partner, init.inc’s POC. wilson@basisset.ventures · linkedin.com/in/wilsonkyi. The meeting with Will is the reason this is dead. ✅ confirmed on Basis Set team roster.
• Lan Xuezhao — Founder & Managing Partner. Chang Xu — Partner. John Mannes — Partner. (plain text; not in roster.)

Recent pre-seed/seed activity (Pass-1 sketch — ≤5 deals; exhaustive 18–24mo pull is Pass 2)

Full source-tagged data → /Users/sazzad14/seed-market-scan/firms/basis-set-ventures.csv.

• Mem0 — led/backed early (“before YC”); participated in the $24M Series A (Oct 2025) alongside Peak XV, GitHub Fund, YC, Kindred. AI memory layer for agents. ✅
• AI Fellowship program is a recurring early-pipeline channel (e.g., Mem0 Agentic Memory Track 2026).

Best data channels for this firm

• basisset.com/insights + /team — the firm self-publishes fund and program announcements (Fund IV post is authoritative).
• Lan Xuezhao’s LinkedIn + X (@xuezhao) — primary deal-celebration channel.
• TechCrunch / WSJ for round-level confirmation (Mem0, Fund IV).
• ⚠️ Watch the seed-vs-Series-A boundary — Basis Set “backs from earliest days” then follows on, so a single company shows up across rounds; tag stage on the primary source.

Fundraise Relationship (init.inc)

• Status: DEAD (rapport). Thesis fit was strong (automated-workflows theme ≈ init.inc) — but the single Will Kyi meeting did not click, and Sazzad killed it immediately. The kill was partner-specific (Will), not a firm-wide thesis/conflict judgment; the other partners are Lan Xuezhao and Chang Xu.
• Re-touch trigger (noted): a strong warm intro to Lan Xuezhao (founder) specifically, given the thesis alignment.
• Conversation log (newest first, from CRM):
  • 2026-05-06, 10:00 AM (Zoom) — Met Will. Sazzad did not enjoy the conversation. Killed by Sazzad same day (5/6).
  • 2026-04-27 — Niam intro’d.
• Mutual connections / warm path: intro’d via Niam.
• Personal & rapport notes: the kill was conversational chemistry with Will, not a thesis or process objection. Firm itself is a clean, thesis-aligned AI seed fund.
• Live stage: tracked in the CRM (Google Sheet) — Lost (killed by founder, 5/6).

Cross-check vs existing wiki

• No cap-table conflict found. Basis Set does not appear in cap-table-patterns-across-startup-competitors (no exposure to init.inc’s 8 ITSM/back-office competitors). Dead = rapport, not conflict. ✅
• Niam (connector) page references Basis Set — creating this page resolves that link. ✅

Related

Niam · cap-table-patterns-across-startup-competitors

Pass 2 deal pattern (2026-05-25)

Seed/Series A lead-rate: ACTIVE — “automated workflows” thesis is firing live. Pass 2 net-new: Synthetic $10Mseed(May2026,Khosla-led,BasisSetparticipated)\ast \ast —fullyautonomousAIbookkeepingforstartupsbyex-Benchfounders,adirectservices-as-software/labor-displacementexample;\ast \ast Parasail$10M seed (2025, Basis Set-backed) — AI Supercloud/GPU-aggregation, AI infra theme; **Daydream $15MSeriesA(Apr2026,WndrCo-led,BasisSetparticipated)\ast \ast —AI-nativeSEOagencythatBasisSe{t}^{\prime }sOWNblogframesasthecanonical"service-as-software"exemplar("AIcanreplaceentireservicecategoriesbydoingthework,notjustenablingit").ConfirmedPass-1Mem0row(combined$24M seed+A). Typical Basis Set check is $2-3Mseed/$10-32M Series A across AI infra + automated workflows + agent memory. ⚠️ Pass-1 correction logged: Parasail’s $32M Series A (Apr 2026) was co-led by Touring + Kindred — NOT Basis Set; aggregator data (F4) misattributed the A-lead. Basis Set was the seed-stage backer. Thesis-adjacency to init.inc re-confirmed: the Daydream “service-as-software” framing on basisset.com is verbatim init.inc-language; the Synthetic bookkeeping bet is an exact labor-displacement analog. This sharpens the Pass-1 verdict that the Will-Kyi rapport-kill was a notable loss — the firm is actively writing the wedge. Best data channel: basisset.com/insights is unusually content-rich (Parasail and Daydream both have first-party Basis Set posts naming the thesis); WSJ + TechCrunch for round-level confirmation; Lan Xuezhao’s X/LinkedIn for celebration-channel signal; PRNewswire/LinkedIn “Day in AI Funding” digests catch the recent participations. Cap-table-clean re-confirmed: zero init.inc-competitor exposure across Pass-2 rows (Khosla appears as a co-investor on Synthetic but on a non-competitor company, so no conflict propagates). Re-touch trigger from Pass 1 stands: if a strong warm intro to Lan Xuezhao surfaces, the thesis-fit case is now even stronger than it was — but the rapport kill still places this at low priority.