Las Olas Venture Capital

We're proud to share that Corey Apirian, Founder & CEO of Davinci Micro Fulfillment, has been named a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2026 New Jersey Award. Corey founded Davinci after recognizing that traditional fulfillment infrastructure was struggling to keep pace with the demands of modern commerce. As consumer expectations around delivery speed, cost, and convenience continue to rise, brands increasingly need inventory positioned closer to end customers without sacrificing operational efficiency. Davinci is building a distributed fulfillment network designed to help brands optimize inventory placement, reduce shipping costs, and improve delivery times across channels including Amazon, Shopify, TikTok Shop, Walmart, and Target. By rethinking how fulfillment infrastructure is deployed, the company is helping brands compete more effectively in an increasingly complex commerce landscape. This recognition reflects Corey's leadership, vision, and the hard work of the entire Davinci team as they continue to build the next generation of fulfillment infrastructure. Congratulations to Corey and the Davinci team on this well-deserved honor. We are proud to support their journey and look forward to what comes next. Announcement Link: https://lnkd.in/ej4jB4TN

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Python or Plato? For the last thirty years, you’d have been rewarded for choosing the former. And rightly so. The specialist was answering the question the economy was actually asking. But the question likely changed in 2022. The word “liberal” in liberal arts was never originally about politics. It referred to the education thought necessary for a free person: the habits of judgment needed to deliberate about ends, govern oneself, and help govern others. The technical arts built the modern world. The liberal arts asked what was worth building. For a long stretch, the market rewarded the first kind far more heavily, so we trained people accordingly—a rational response to a real signal. History suggests that mass unemployment induced by AI is improbable. Technologies tend to move work rather than end it. But a new emphasis on human judgment is undeniable. As the machine grows fluent in the defined, specifiable task, the scarce thing becomes the part that no AI model supplies: judgment under real uncertainty. Technical skill still matters enormously. But breadth, synthesis, and judgment increasingly shape the uniquely human contribution. The ideal founder, investor, or institutional leader of the next twenty years may look surprisingly Renaissance-like. May, not will. The same tools can make us more fluent and less formed, more capable of producing the appearance of judgment while the capacity that enables it atrophies. Formation has always required friction, and friction is the first thing convenience removes. The reward for choosing Python was real. The next thirty years may simply ask us to add what no specialty could teach. #ArtificialIntelligence #AI #LiberalArts #HumanJudgment #Leadership #Founders #VentureCapital #Education #CriticalThinking #Agency #Innovation #FutureOfWork #Entrepreneurship #DecisionMaking #Technology

I keep reading that the founders of breakout companies succeeded because they could “see the future.” There is some truth in this. Exceptional founders often do perceive signals, shifts, and possibilities earlier than others. They may develop unusually strong intuition about technology, markets, or human behavior. But the popular retelling goes too far. It turns successful founders into prophets. No human can literally see the future. And that framing is quietly discouraging because it suggests that extraordinary outcomes belong only to the clairvoyant. The founders who appear to have “seen the future” usually only seem that way in retrospect. What they actually possessed was something more practical and more attainable: the ability to operate under uncertainty. They could act without full information. Experiment without guarantees. Absorb failure without paralysis. Update their thinking rapidly. Then repeat the process again and again. This is not magic. It is capacity. And capacity is formed. Forged through challenge, friction, repeated contact with ambiguity, and the willingness to keep moving before certainty arrives.  Which is good news for the rest of us who cannot see the future either. #Entrepreneurship #Startups #Leadership #VentureCapital #Resilience #FounderMindset #KnightianUncertainty

We’re thrilled to announce our latest investment in CLEATUS AI! Founders Yigit Guney, Mithat C., and Erik Sherman built CLEATUS after seeing firsthand how fragmented, compliance-heavy, and inaccessible government procurement workflows had become for small and midsize businesses. Their experience led them to build an AI-native platform designed to help SMBs find, bid on, and win government contracts more efficiently. Government contracting is one of the largest procurement markets in the world, yet the underlying workflows remain highly fragmented and manual. CLEATUS is modernizing this process through AI-powered workflow automation across opportunity discovery, compliance review, proposal drafting, and solicitation analysis while delivering immediate ROI to procurement teams operating in complex markets. The platform also helps level the playing field for SMBs competing against larger incumbents with dedicated procurement teams. The company has already helped more than 500 contractors compete for government opportunities, demonstrating strong demand for workflow automation in one of the most underserved categories in enterprise software. Las Olas Venture Capital co-led CLEATUS’s $4M Seed round. The capital will support continued product development, expanded procurement source coverage across federal, state, local, and defense markets, and further investment in AI agent capabilities across capture, compliance, and proposal workflows. As part of the investment, our General Partner, Dean Hatton, will join the Board of Directors. We’re proud to support the CLEATUS team as they build the AI-native operating system for government procurement. The future of procurement is becoming AI-native. Read the full press release here: https://lnkd.in/dnBSkXDt

Big news: CLEATUS just raised $4M in seed funding. 🚀 Co-led by Las Olas Venture Capital and Revo Capital, with participation from Motley Fool Ventures. The U.S. government awards $2.7T in contracts every year. The barrier isn’t the work. It’s everything surrounding it: compliance, fragmented portals, dense regulatory text, proposal workflows, and institutional complexity. That’s what we’re changing. CLEATUS is building agentic AI for the full find-bid-win workflow, helping small businesses compete on the quality of their work instead of their ability to navigate bureaucracy. Already, 500+ contractors are using CLEATUS to find opportunities, manage pursuits, and win contracts. And we're just getting started. Full announcement: https://lnkd.in/dnBSkXDt

Honored to share that EY has named me a finalist for Entrepreneur Of The Year in the New Jersey region. When I founded Davinci Micro Fulfillment, the premise was straightforward: inventory positioned closer to consumers unlocks speed, lower costs, and real profitability. Centralized warehouse models were buckling under the weight of rising customer expectations. Brands needed a new infrastructure layer — and we built it. But strategy on paper is easy. Execution is where it gets hard. Launching a distributed fulfillment network meant committing personal capital, walking away from career security, and entering a capital-intensive space full of entrenched competitors. We had to secure facilities, build carrier partnerships, implement scalable technology, and prove our unit economics — all at the same time. Every obstacle — carrier volatility, labor shortages, supply chain disruptions, shifting platform dynamics — sharpened us. We didn't retreat from complexity. We leaned into it. Today, Davinci Micro Fulfillment supports brands selling across Amazon, Shopify, TikTok, Walmart, Target, and beyond through a unified, scalable network. What started as an idea is becoming a national fulfillment infrastructure built for the next generation of commerce. This recognition belongs to everyone who helped build it: To my team — you are the company. To our partners and customers — your belief in what we're building is the fuel. To my family — thank you for standing with me through every season of this. Building something truly new requires people willing to be uncomfortable, stay curious, and commit fully. I'm proud to work alongside people like that every day. Thank you to EY for this recognition and to Ari Apirian for the nomination. Looking forward to celebrating with outstanding entrepreneurs at the awards ceremony in June. 🦾

🌴 Join us next Tuesday, May 5th for our South Florida Tech Breakfast 🌴 We’re excited to bring together tech founders and active investors who are shaping the future of technology and AI in South Florida and beyond. Looking forward to a morning of thoughtful conversations and connections. 📅 Tuesday, May 5th ⏰ 8:00–10:00 AM EST Co-hosted by: 🔹 Las Olas Venture Capital 🔹 Ocean Azul Partners Ryan Pruitt 🔹 General Provision Work Club This breakfast is designed for: ✅ B2B tech founders with $1M+ in revenue or capital raised ✅ Investors with 5+ high-growth tech investments in the past 24 months Enjoy great coffee and breakfast alongside meaningful conversations with founders and investors building the South Florida tech ecosystem 🔗 Request to join here: https://luma.com/ktwosf3v We look forward to seeing you there. Feel free to share this with anyone who you think would benefit from joining. #VentureCapital #StartupEvent #SouthFloridaTech #AIStartups #FoundersBreakfast

A well-managed, mature company is an execution machine. Your early-stage startup is a learning machine. Funding one like the other is how good companies die. The scarcest resource in an early-stage company isn’t cash. It’s time under uncertainty. Money spent shortening that uncertainty can be the highest-return capital of all. This means that some spending that appears inefficient on a spreadsheet is actually deeply rational in practice. This type of spending buys you signal, not scale—such as a senior hire six months early or a pricing experiment that costs more than it earns. Capital efficiency matters. Eliminate waste. But some companies save their way out of discovery. Efficiency and learning are both real disciplines. They’re just not the same discipline. The best early-stage investors know which one they’re funding. #VentureCapital #Startups #LeanStartups #Leadership #CorporateFinance #Entrepreneurship

A well-managed, mature company is an execution machine. Your early-stage startup is a learning machine. Funding one like the other is how good companies die. The scarcest resource in an early-stage company isn’t cash. It’s time under uncertainty. Money spent shortening that uncertainty can be the highest-return capital of all. This means that some spending that appears inefficient on a spreadsheet is actually deeply rational in practice. This type of spending—a senior hire six months early or a pricing experiment that costs more than it earns—buys you signal, not scale. Capital efficiency matters. Eliminate waste. But some companies save their way out of discovery. Efficiency and learning are both real disciplines. They’re just not the same discipline. The best early-stage investors know which one they’re funding. #VentureCapital #Startups #LeanStartups #Leadership #CorporateFinance #Entrepreneurship