2025 was a defining year for Curious and our companies.

Since our very first day, we’ve been advocating for an alternate approach to operating software companies that differs dramatically from the growth at all costs mindset that’s prevalent in VC-backed companies. In 2025, we put that approach into practice.

Curious today consists of five different companies — Convox, Buildfire, Polymer, Avenue and Uservoice. As a group, we’ve crossed $10M in ARR while remaining profitable and growing. In almost every case, this was a meaningful departure from how these businesses were being operated prior, with a particular emphasis towards sustainability and longevity. This is hard work, but it’s work that we love to do alongside our CEO partners.

In 2025, we also expanded our wonderful team. As a group, we’re now over 100 people strong, with team members across the world. Within that group, I’ve seen dozens do career-defining work. Our culture has been built on radical autonomy and relentless curiosity, allowing our people to flourish and become truly great at what they do. It’s the thing that inspires me every day to do what we do.

As we reflect on the past two years, from our very first announcement in the WSJ in 2023 to our most recent coverage in TechCrunch, we’ve been remarkably consistent in our mission to provide wonderful exits for founders.

In most exits, the acquiring company looks to either rip and replace the team completely or shut the business down. Our approach is different: we focus on continuation and acceleration of the business as it is. This is challenging work, but we believe it’s critical to ensuring a successful transition. We talk a lot about preserving the legacy of the founders while doubling down on the business, team, and go to market — as we’ve gotten more reps here, this has gone from challenge to core competency.

All Eyes on AI

AI is the elephant in the room and rightfully so. Internally, we’ve been working hard to become AI native.

In practice, this has meant that each company now leans fully on agentic coding across engineering organizations. This has allowed our pace of development to meaningfully ramp, allowing us to stay more competitive against larger, more heavily-funded competitors.

We’ve also recently begun to implement more automation across sales and success efforts, helping score customer accounts by health, qualify leads more efficiently, route and automate outreach, and more, but this area still feels underdeveloped. Engineering efficiency has been where most of the positive impact has been seen in 2025. In 2026, we expect that efficiency to permeate more to customer-facing functions.

Now, to the risk. We’d be ignorant to ignore the risk to SaaS businesses. At this point, it’s unclear how that risk takes shape, aside from point solutions that AI can handle more elegantly than legacy software products, allowing prospective users to build hyper-specific software in a way that legacy tools cannot. Similar to my commentary last year, the pace of innovation and disruption coming from AI is unlike anything I’ve seen in my 20 years in the technology industry.

With every acquisition we make, we analyze the AI disruption potential, but that’s increasingly opaque and difficult to gauge given the pace of change. Each of our companies has built AI functionality natively into their product at this point, and that’s proven to be a net positive for the businesses given upsell potential and retention benefits. But the risk remains and we continue to monitor it closely.

In the meantime, we as a group will continue our push to become AI native, as we believe the best defense is a good offense.

Vintages Gone Sour

With all eyes on AI, there’s a particular emphasis on what Curious was built to do. AI is the shiny new thing, which means that most VC dollars are going toward the AI-first companies.

What does that mean for the VC fund vintages of the early 2020s? Those companies have been largely abandoned by their funders, with the exception of the top 10% of companies. Venture power law has accelerated in today's technology ecosystem.

Because of that, startup shutdowns have increased through the entirety of 2024 and into 2025, as the bar for growth continues to rise due to extreme outliers in the age of AI. For those that fall outside of the exceptional few, the upstream capital just isn’t there. We've spoken with hundreds of founders who feel that they have been abandoned given this dynamic, in spite of building what many would consider to be great businesses.

This is a trend we saw firsthand through our investments in over 20 early-stage startups, and is the core reason we exist. Where others see boring and slow growth, we see remarkable businesses and teams. There needs to be a buyer who can move quickly with an operational understanding of startups, one that pays cash without unnecessary earnouts, and cares deeply about the team, customers, product, and legacy that has been built. That’s explicitly what Curious does.

Our intention is to be the preferred exit path for those businesses, now and in the future.

Finally, A Thank You

‍As always, I want to end with a heartfelt thank you to our small but mighty team. This is not easy work. The first ones to get on the bus deserve the most praise and that’s certainly true of the team we have.

They took a chance on us and poured their passion into our mission. I can’t thank them enough. I also can’t thank you enough, our shareholders, for your support from day one. It’s uncommon to have partners that have a true long-term orientation that allows us to work in the best interest of founders and their companies. We feel very fortunate.