• Opinion

Level’s Albert Azout hosted on the Superclusters Podcast

jake, May 19, 2025

  • Research & Engineering
  • Opinion

Criticality Investing

albert, May 15, 2025

Many of the most lucrative investment opportunities often lie hidden in plain sight, masked by mounting market tensions that few recognize. Financial markets, like other complex systems (earthquakes, neurons in the brain, etc), self-organize towards criticality—a metastable state between order and chaos, where tension is suppressed in the system’s underlying structure. Suppressed tensions build and are […]
  • Announcement
  • Science & Technology

Level Featured by the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics (SIAM)

dev, April 17, 2025

We’re delighted to announce a new SIAM News article that gives a gentle overview of dynamic networks and their broad applications. The Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics is the world’s largest scientific society for applied math and supports inquiry in a wide range of research areas. Read the article here:https://www.siam.org/publications/siam-news/articles/inspired-by-nature-dynamic-graphs-and-their-applications
  • Opinion

Punctuation and Delayed Selective Pressure

albert, April 16, 2025

Capital markets (VC included) are complex adaptive systems (CAS). As such, they exhibit various unique phenomena that make investing incredibly difficult and unpredictable. Some of the most important of these are: (a) emergent behavior (properties that cannot be predicted by analyzing individual participants), (b) adaptation and self-organization (market participants evolve their strategies based on feedback; participants organize […]
  • Research & Engineering

Brewing Better Builds with Workbrew

dev, March 31, 2025

At Level, we write, test, and ship code every day. To manage software packages on our development and production computers, we use the extremely popular Homebrew. (If you’re not familiar, brew is a package manager for unix-based computers that lets you install all sorts of software.) However, until now, we had neither security nor observability […]
  • Data Study
  • Announcement

Thesis: Christian Hennings at TU Darmstadt

dev, March 24, 2025

Congrats to Christian Hennings at TU Darmstadt for submitting his Master’s thesis! At Level, we are committed facilitating academic research. As part of this commitment, we advised Christian’s thesis and provided the core data that underlies his work. At a high-level, Christian analyzed the outcomes of quantitative and data-driven approaches to venture capital investing. He […]
  • Data Study

PitchBook is Right: Networks Matter

dev, March 20, 2025

At Level, we believe that network theory captures the underlying dynamics of the venture capital ecosystem. It should be no surprise, then, that we’re delighted to see a core private market data provider (and one that is an integral component to our own research) highlight the importance of network effects. PitchBook, in their latest post […]
  • Research & Engineering

Using Unstructured Data for Investment Alpha

liam, March 11, 2025

Each organization sits on a goldmine of information that often goes to waste. The fundamental problem is that their valuable knowledge is scattered across thousands of unstructured documents, buried in emails, presentations, and internal wikis. At Level, we faced this exact challenge. And because one of our core advantages is the knowledge we capture from […]
  • Opinion

Smart Alpha vs Beta in VC

albert, March 10, 2025

Adaptive Markets Theory, a theory laid out by Andrew Lo that claims a market is neither efficient nor irrational, argues that is essential to understand market participants’ evolving ecology and strategy in order to comprehend the state of the market. This is because specific investment strategies are not fixed but co-evolve based on which are […]
  • Opinion

On Inefficient Markets

albert, February 7, 2025

In our last post we wrote about data center build-out and the potential oversupply of compute capacity. In this update, we want to dig into the relationship between price and fundamental value in today’s markets. Efficient market hypothesizers assume that price is tied to fundamental value and all information about a particular asset is implied and factored […]
  • Opinion

AI Data Center Build-Out

albert, January 19, 2025

I once read: “if it is not a law of nature, it is a shared belief”. In investing, shared beliefs often take the form of narratives which (a) abstract away complexities in their underlying assumptions (i.e. are overly coherent), (b) project out the future in a linear or in a first-order approximation, and/or (c) overestimate […]
  • Announcement

Talk: Level featured at Joint Mathematics Meetings 2025

dev, January 15, 2025

To make the best investment decisions, we leverage a variety of data science and quantitative finance tools. Sometimes, that approach means we end up doing in-house fundamental research. We recently published a paper on vertex clustering and we’re delighted to announce that we were featured at the Joint Mathematics Meetings—the world’s largest math conference—to give […]
  • Research & Engineering

Managing configuration across systems and environments

dev, January 1, 2025

We have about 500k source lines of code that implement all of our research engineering. We execute code in a variety of contexts, whether ephemeral lambdas, beefy EC2 instances with GPUs, or our laptops when developing code. Although we have somewhat traditional change control management for our code, we also have a central system that […]
  • Research & Engineering

Fast container builds

dev, December 1, 2024

Most of our code at Level is in python. We have a fairly modern stack that includes excellent tools like ruff and pre-commit. However, our most vexing task is dependency management and so one of our most important tools is python poetry. As a part of rolling out poetry for dependency management, we also put […]
  • Opinion

October 2024 LP Update

albert, November 14, 2024

It is important to assess the potential impacts of AI on software and software-based business models. The “SaaS is dead” narrative circulating in market implies that, with the rapidly decreasing cost of (complex) software creation due to LLM code generators, traditional SaaS businesses will face competitive pricing pressure from new/homegrown solutions and thus suffer compressed […]
  • Research & Engineering

Running GPU workflows with Prefect and AWS

dev, October 22, 2024

At Level, we continually train our deep learning models. In addition to training every week with new data, we also experiment with new architectures, deploy hyperparameter sweeps, and recompute Jackknife+ folds. To do all this, we need GPUs and they need to go brrr. Our orchestration tool of choice to support our ETL processes is […]
  • Announcement

Paper: Vertex clustering in diverse dynamic networks

dev, October 21, 2024

Here at Level, we endeavor to use cutting edge data science to solve our business problems. We also believe in contributing back to the scientific community where we can: we actively conduct and publish fundamental research, attend conferences like the JMM, and maintain active collaborations within academia and beyond. In that spirit, we’re delighted to […]
  • Research & Engineering

Building consensus through RFCs

dev, October 1, 2024

Everyone at Level does a little bit of everything. We have a research, data engineering, and our investment team collaborating on initiatives, where the only consistency is the sheer variety. One practice that we’ve settled on is the use of Request for Comments (RFCs) to build consensus on technical initiatives across the firm. RFCs come […]
  • Data Study

On Simulating Returns for Pre-Seed/Seed Funds

albert, September 19, 2024

In our regular conversations, we often explain the structural implications of fund strategy in venture. LP capital flows into VC fluctuate with market cycles, which are subject to interest rates, risk appetite, and other LP allocation dependencies (e.g., denominator effect). Since, historically, prices/fees in PE/VC are inelastic due to structural norms (the standard 2/20 model), […]
  • Research & Engineering

Jackknife+ and Model Confidence

dev, September 1, 2024

Here at Level, we build a variety of statistical models. These models are predicting something that is inherently random. For example, if we are predicting the projected returns of a particular fund, our model may give us an estimate that, in expectation, the fund will have 5x returns over three years — a stellar result! […]
  • Data Study

Founder Experience Drives Investment Alpha

liam, August 8, 2024

Investors have long thought about how to judge a founder’s previous work history. At Level, we’ve put together a new metric that our entity-resolved and time-series-resolved data set shows to indicate future success. Specifically, we aimed to quantify “earned experience.” Although still a work in progress, our first attempt was to take the maximum valuation […]
  • Data Study

Dynamic Networks and Machine Learning

dev, February 16, 2024

Here at Level, we love graph-based data: whether studying the interaction between key players in the venture ecosystem or analyzing technical contributions on Github, we have a variety of data that fundamentally captures entities and the myriad relationships between them. For those uninitiated to the world of graphs (also called networks), we need but two […]
  • Announcement
  • Opinion

Level Featured in Signature Block

jake, February 13, 2024

The Data Revolution in Venture Capital Data-driven algorithmic decisions now make up 75%+ of public market trades — an AUM of $1+ TRILLION. But that wasn’t always the case. Hedge funds drove this revolution back in the 90s, leveraging the parallel explosion of available datasets and computing power. Now, 30 years later, the data-driven revolution is making its […]
  • Data Study

On Valuations and Hyped Seed

liam, September 12, 2023

The recent flow of AI seed funding announcements, almost all at high valuations, sparked my curiosity: can investing in these deals deliver high fund returns for seed investors or are they tailored to a different strategy altogether?
  • Announcement

Level Featured in Techcrunch

jake, July 10, 2023

In 2023, funds of funds (FoFs) are on track to raise the smallest amount of money in more than a decade. At the same time, muted venture deal activity has many firms ditching their follow-on funds.
  • Announcement
  • Data Study

Level Featured in the 2023 Data-driven VC Landscape

jake, May 15, 2023

Level Ventures was featured on the recently released 2023 Data-driven VC Landscape and ranked the #1 firm in venture capital by percentage of employees that are engineers.
  • Opinion

Level’s Albert Azout hosted on the Sutton Capital Podcast

jake, May 1, 2023

Listen to the interview here.
  • Data Study

The Correlation Between Public Market Drawdowns and Venture Dispersion

liam, March 21, 2023

Is there a correlation between public market drawdowns and venture capital dispersion?
  • Science & Technology

Predicting Mass Spectrum from Molecular Graphs

albert, March 20, 2023

Level recently invested in Enveda Biosciences' Series B. We are excited about the company’s potential, and the use of advanced computational methods to find therapeutic solutions to human disease.
  • Opinion

Level’s Jake Kupperman hosted on the Confluence Podcast

albert, March 16, 2023

Listen to the interview here.
  • Data Study

Outperformance in Early-Stage Specialist Firms: A Data-driven Analysis

liam, February 6, 2023

Does sector specialization impact the performance of emerging managers?
  • Data Study
  • Opinion

The Time Has Come to Modernize the Venture Capital Fund of Funds

jake, September 5, 2021

The VC fund of funds is an effective investment strategy, but an onset of new technologies offers a fresh opportunity in the space.