AI & ML · Remote
Riverbed
Data pipelines for retrieval-heavy applications.
- Stage
- Series A
- Founded
- Founded 2022
- First invested
- We invested 2022
- Team
- 38 people
- Board
- Board seat
- Total raised
- $18M
- Current stage
- Series A
- Team
- 38
- Founded
- 2022
What they build
The product, in plain terms
Riverbed builds data pipelines for retrieval-heavy applications. The company started in Remote in 2022. We backed it at pre-seed and have worked with the team through Series A.
- 01
A model layer trained on the customer's own history of decisions, not a general base model with a prompt wrapped around it.
- 02
An evaluation harness that runs before anything ships, so the team can prove a change made the output better rather than different.
- 03
Human review built into the product from the start, because the first buyers will not accept an unsupervised system.
Where it stands
Numbers the team watches
Reported by the company at its most recent board meeting. We publish what founders are comfortable publishing and nothing more.
- Tasks handled monthly
- 2K
- Accepted without review
- 97%
- Median time saved
- 4 days
Why we invested
The note from the first meeting
“We met Riverbed in 2022, back when the demo was easy and the last ten percent of accuracy was where every competitor was dying. They were building the boring half of the product first, which almost nobody does, and it made the rest of the roadmap credible.”
- Signed its first design partner before the program ended.
- Shipped the enterprise tier without hiring a single sales engineer.
- Turned down an acquisition offer in year two and was right to.
Founders
Who is building it
Both founders were in the room the day we wrote the check, and both still run the company.
Jonas Sorensen
Co-founder and CEO
Sold into this market for eight years before deciding the product was the problem.
Farhan Mansour
Co-founder and CTO
Ran platform engineering at a company ten times this size.
Timeline
How it has gone
The version we would give another investor, including the years where nothing looked like progress.
- 2022
Founded
Jonas Sorensen and Farhan Mansour start Riverbed in Remote around a single wedge: data pipelines for retrieval-heavy applications.
- 2022
We invested
We wrote the pre-seed check and took a board seat. Priya Nair has worked with the team ever since.
- 2023
Paid customers
Contracts replaced pilots, and the company stopped selling a roadmap and started selling a product.
- 2024
Series A round
Raised at $110M, led by an investor we introduced during diligence. We took our full pro rata.
- 2026
Where it stands
38 people, selling in more markets than it started in, still run by the two people who wrote the first version.
Alongside us
Co-investors
We share rounds with people we would want on our own cap table.
- Amplify Partners
- Foundation Capital
- Emergence
- Bessemer
Working here
Open roles
Riverbed is hiring in these areas. Mention us and the note gets to the founders directly.
- Applied research
- Forward deployed engineering
- Enterprise sales
Building something next to Riverbed?
We are usually early to a category and happy to be early again. Send us the short version.