BTV is a fintech-only pre-seed and seed firm that leads rounds, founded by two fintech operators (Jake Gibson of NerdWallet and two-time founder Sheel Mohnot). Its core belief, dating to its Fund I deck, is that 'everything is fintech': finance is ~20% of global GDP and still under-digitized, so financial services increasingly get embedded inside vertical software that becomes the operating system a business runs on. With Fund III ($140M, 2025) BTV is leaning into the intersection of fintech and AI, backing companies that own the 'last mile' of a workflow with real-world accountability rather than thin AI features. They invest in great teams above TAM, prizing 'taste and systems' and speed of iteration.
A real, painful problem inside a large, under-digitized slice of financial services — ideally a manual, document-heavy, high-regulation workflow where AI plus embedded fintech can take out cost. BTV starts from the conviction that finance (~20% of global GDP) is one of the least-digitized large industries.
“finance is still one of the largest industries yet to be fully digitized. About 20% of global GDP is financial services, and much of it remains inefficient, analog, and ripe for reinvention.” — Announcing BTV III
“Data-rich, high-regulation, document-heavy manual workflows” — Team BTV
“At Better Tomorrow Ventures, we believe that incumbents, some close to 35 years in age, are due for disruption.” — Nihar Bobba
“QuickBooks does $8B in revenue and is still growing ~20% a year, despite an NPS of just 15.” — Sheel Mohnot
A solution that embeds financial services inside the software where the customer already works, or that owns the 'last mile' of an AI workflow — i.e. it becomes essential infrastructure, not a thin, easily-copied feature. They want the product that becomes the operating system a business runs on.
“Long-term defensibility still comes from embedding deeply into workflows, accumulating context, and owning the last mile. The companies that win won't just be useful, they'll be essential.” — Building at the Intersection of AI and Financial Services
“There are lots of ways to deliver value that don't create enterprise value.” — Mitchell Troyanovsky (Basis, quoted by BTV)
“They won't sell “accounting software” as a standalone product. It will feel like an invisible feature baked into the tools an SMB already relies on, and it will use AI to do the accounting” — Sheel Mohnot
“AI can supercharge software with the ability to take actions that can generate outcomes. But ultimately, for tangible commercial impact, these outcomes need to affect line items on the income statements of businesses operating in the real world.” — Nihar Bobba
Markets anchored to financial services (~20% of global GDP, trillions in market cap) or to labor/services TAM that dwarfs the software TAM — but BTV warns that headline TAM surplus is not the same as addressable opportunity. They back teams that can discover great TAM, not just claim it.
“About 20% of global GDP is financial services, and much of it remains inefficient, analog, and ripe for reinvention.” — Announcing BTV III
“a great team discovers great TAM” — Nihar Bobba
“But equating TAM surplus to addressable opportunity is one of the most common mistakes in the space.” — JC Bahr-de Stefano
“Trillions in aggregate market cap in financial services” — Team BTV
At pre-seed/seed BTV cares less about revenue than about velocity and depth: how fast you ship/learn, and how deep you've gone with the right early customers. For embedded fintech they want evidence of platform adoption converting into end-customer usage; references and trust earned early matter more than premature scale.
“it's better to go deep with the right partners than to scale too fast.” — Building at the Intersection of AI and Financial Services
“The greatest single metric that I've found to determine which startups will fail and which will become household names is the speed at which they ship.” — Jake Gibson
“The key question isn't whether the platform wants your product. It's whether their customers will use it.” — Sheel Mohnot
“Layer has seen up to 40% of merchants convert in the first few months!” — Sheel Mohnot
BTV weights team above all else. In an AI era where iteration is nearly free and software superficially stops differentiating, they hunt for 'taste and systems' — strong opinions/tradeoffs (taste) and deliberate mechanisms that make those opinions survive reality (systems). They look for early fingerprints: a costly tradeoff, a hire passed on, a feature killed.
“When posed with the Team A or Team B choice, the axes that are becoming increasingly more important are ‘Taste and Systems’, and the best teams must spike on both!” — Team or TAM is the Wrong Question
“Taste and systems don't pitch, they reveal themselves over time, under stress, in decisions made that are not immediately legible.” — Nihar Bobba
“When anyone can build anything, how and why teams choose to build "the thing" matters more than ever.” — Nihar Bobba
“In an AI-first world, taste, agency, and judgment are just as important as raw technical skill.” — Team BTV (JC Bahr-de Stefano)
BTV likes models where fintech (payments, lending, banking, payroll) becomes a revenue stream layered onto vertical software, expanding LTV — and where pricing aligns to value delivered, not seats or tokens. They are wary of per-seat SaaS pricing when AI replaces seats, and skeptical of 'services become software' margin assumptions.
“Software platforms add new revenue streams and expand customer lifetime value through payments, lending, and banking.” — BTV AGM: Checking In on Embedded Fintech
“You can't give a CEO a per-token bill. We price based on a proxy for the work being done, like number of end clients.” — Mitchell Troyanovsky (Basis, quoted by BTV)
“The clients aren't just paying for output. They're paying for credentials, brand equity, institutional trust, and someone to own the outcome - and the liability that comes with it.” — JC Bahr-de Stefano
“This model works because it creates value across the stack.” — Sheel Mohnot
Real defensibility, not a feature. Against incumbents, BTV wants native distribution plus a 10x product; against AI lookalikes and foundation-model creep, it wants companies that own a 'long last mile' — liability, regulatory and real-world coordination — plus context rails and 'taste and systems' that copycats can't replicate.
“the Vertical AI companies that can compete are those that own what I call the last mile of AI, delivering intelligence for a specific outcome in a specific context with specific accountability” — Will Vertical AI Survive?
“Native distribution: show up inside the software SMBs already open 10x a day.” — Sheel Mohnot
“AI is not a feature that gets bolted onto a product and therefore the argument in favor of existent distribution does not typically hold true.” — Nihar Bobba
“as time in market for a product increases, the moats derived from mature and growing context rails are hard to outcompete.” — Nihar Bobba
A timing story driven by the collision of AI and fintech: vertical ERPs proliferating as the new system of record, manual financial workflows ripe for automation, and AI making it possible to attack markets (like SMB accounting) that were previously uncontestable. BTV believes we're at the start of an AI 'gold rush' in financial services.
“AI is reshaping technology faster than any of us could have imagined and financial services may be the most exciting industry for its application.” — Announcing BTV III
“It's the future we anticipated six years ago. And we are still just getting started!” — Sheel Mohnot
“When the ERP is the front door, embedded fintech becomes the default path to the customer.” — Sheel Mohnot
“as foundation models verticalize faster, the window to make that move is compressing.” — Nihar Bobba
BTV favors capital efficiency over big raises. Coming from a bootstrapping ethos (Jake built NerdWallet to 200 employees before raising), they want founders who raise 'just enough' to run sharp experiments and stay hyper-focused, treating every dollar as runway to ship and learn rather than to 'play business.'
“This is why we started The Mint pre-seed program at Better Tomorrow Ventures (BTV), to help founders raise just enough money to get started and hyper-focus on what matters, with all the resources they need to run those early experiments.” — The Lost Art (of bootstrapping)
“runway should be thought of as how many experiments you can ship, and burn should be thought of as the cost of how much learning you can do” — Jake Gibson
“Everything you do has to have an impact.” — Jake Gibson
“Fintech is not a narrow business model. It is a tool to improve business models across every vertical. Some of the biggest software companies in the world are also fintech companies. Toast and Shopify are not exceptions. They are the blueprint.”
“The greatest single metric that I've found to determine which startups will fail and which will become household names is the speed at which they ship.”
“When posed with the Team A or Team B choice, the axes that are becoming increasingly more important are ‘Taste and Systems’, and the best teams must spike on both!”
“AI is making services businesses better services businesses. The margins improve. The leverage per person increases. But they don't magically become software companies.”