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Thursday, December 19, 2024

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Teen’s Startup Raises $2.3M, Born in School Bathroom

 

Eric Zhu started building Aviato, an analytical platform for private market data, in a very atypical place for an entrepreneur: the bathroom in his Carmel, Indiana, high school. The 17-year-old’s startup is now emerging from stealth with $2.3 million in venture funding.

Startup Overview of Aviato

Aviato tracks funding rounds and headcount, similar to competitors like Crunchbase and PitchBook, as well as data points like company credit card revenue data, employee vesting schedules, and where top engineers are currently working, in addition to other metrics. If that sounds a little like what SignalFire built for its internal database, that’s intentional. Zhu said Aviato’s goal is to make a platform that resembles what SignalFire has built internally; he said that his startup has worked closely with the firm’s founder, Walter Kortschak, to develop its product.

Early Interest in Venture Capital

Zhu told TechCrunch that he credits his early interest in venture capital and startups to being in the right place at the right time during the dull days of the pandemic. He learned about the space from the Discord group chats he joined in 2020 when he was 13, including people like Sam Altman.

Previous Ventures

This interest led him to launch a company called Esocial, a digital platform for schools, in 2021; it was acquired ten months later. He joined Bachmanity Capital shortly after, which backs early-stage companies with solid government application potential. Building the fund is when he got the idea for Aviato. He realized that while data startups like PitchBook and Crunchbase were good at tracking data, they lacked the analytical layer he thought was missing to make these platforms useful.

Concept of Aviato

“Aviato came from the idea that private market data has been historically super unstructured,” Zhu said. “That’s why funds spend tens of millions to make their internal databases.”

Startup Building Aviato

Zhu took meetings from his high school bathroom to build Aviato, a nod to HBO’s “Silicon Valley” TV show. He’d set up in the stall with a green screen, a ring light, and an excuse to be out of class. Zhu ended up getting kicked out of school for doing so, but not before he could land customers like NEA, Republic Capital, and 8VC.

Seed Funding

Aviato’s $2.3 million seed funding came from 8VC, Soma Capital, and SoftBank, among others. Eric Bahn, a co-founder and general partner at Hustle Fund, made a personal investment in the startup a few years ago. Bahn told TechCrunch that he met with Zhu after the teenager sent him one of the best cold emails he had ever received. Bahn described that Zoom call as bizarre.

Meeting with Eric Bahn

“He had his braces on,” Bahn recalled about Zhu, who was 14 years old. “He looked quite young, but he was oddly mature. The strange part is he was clearly in the bathroom stall as a high school freshman, and I was like, ‘Where the f*** are you right now?’ I said that. He said, ‘I pretended that I had diarrhea, so I think I have like 30 minutes to chat with you.’”

Investment Perspective

Bahn said he made a $3,000 investment then and joked that he was probably flushing it down the figurative and literal toilet. But now, three years later, he feels differently as Zhu has matured and the product has come to fruition.

Startup Product Quality

“I started to play with the product myself; it’s pretty elegantly made,” Bahn said. “He’s already proven to me one thing: the quality of people he’s hired. His more executive team is very serious builders.”

Key Team Members

Last fall, the startup brought on David Razavi, the former CTO of LowerMyBills and former product lead at LendingTree, as a co-founder and COO. Harrison Kessel rounds out the founding team and serves as CTO. Kessel was the third employee at Sequoia-backed Zeet, where he built out the developer-focused data application platform’s data infrastructure.

Current Status and Future Plans

Zhu has now moved to San Francisco and is working to finish his high school degree online. He said his parents are still slightly confused about what he is doing, and his mom may still want him to be a doctor, but Zhu doesn’t seem too concerned about that.

Startup Vision for Aviato

“We’ve built a product, and many people like it,” Zhu said. “Our customer base is venture funds, private equity funds, and more. I want to sell to everyone who works with private markets in general. We will be able to replace PitchBook.”

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