Niko Bonatsos

Obsessed with technical founders building products for themselves

📍 United States🔄 Updated September 2026💼 15 investments📅 14 years investing🗓 Last invested Sep 2025
VC🌍 United StatesInvested this year
15
Total investments
10
Early stage
1
Mid stage
0
Late stage
14y
Years active

Portfolio

15 investments · sorted by recency
All investments
Early stage
Mid stage
Late stage
Seed Investor
Sep 2025
Researchers trained the world’s most powerful foundation models on words. But human intelligence far exceeds the origin of language; it emerged over millennia of interaction, exploration, and the ceaseless negotiation of intent, action, and consequences in unbounded environments. Truly intelligent machines must acquire the capacity to perceive, anticipate, and improvise within the unfolding dynamics of reality. We embrace games as the ultimate expression of ingenuity and problem solving.
Seed Investor
Sep 2024
The ultimate on-screen personal assistant: be 10x faster at your job
Seed Investor
Oct 2023
We find the best experts in every professional domain and put their knowledge to work training frontier models. Through APEX, we measure whether those models can actually perform economically valuable work. Were also bringing that expertise to enterprises: deploying custom AI agents, staffing teams with vetted domain experts, and helping organizations encode their own knowledge into AI systems.
Seed Investor
Apr 2023
Were a team of engineers, researchers, and farmers on a mission to revolutionize one of Earths most important industries – agriculture. At Orchard, were securing America’s food supply by building the AI farmer that automates our nation’s farms. Our mission is to help farmers produce more food for the world, more profitably and sustainably than ever before. Farmers across the U.S. use our industry-leading hardware-enabled software to look at their data, make critical decisions, and command farming operations. Our technology is used today across some of the largest farms in the nation.
Seed Investor
Mar 2023
Pylon is the modern alternative to Zendesk, optimized for B2B. We bring together everything a post-sales team needs including a ticketing system, B2B omnichannel integrations (Slack Connect, Microsoft Teams), modern chat widget, AI knowledge base, AI agents, account intelligence, customer marketing, and more.
Board Member
Mar 2023
Empowering passionate providers to start and grow their own in-network ABA practice.
Pre-Seed and Seed Investor
Mar 2023
Bandana was built for modern recruiting. Our worker-centric product and extensive social channels (20M+ monthly reach) have made us the fast-growing and most trusted job board in the US. Modern hiring = reaching workers where they are. Traditional job boards no longer work. Modern hiring requires getting in front of qualified job seekers where they: social media. Bandana’s unique and extensive social channels are the most trusted source of good jobs for 20M+ job seekers monthly. Worker-centric = real trust with top talent. Workers trust Bandana because of our intuitive human-first job search experience. We are the fastest growing job platform because top quality applicants LOVE using and sharing us. Quality, not just many. Bandana’s recruiting assistant helps you filter quickly for the most qualified applicants for your roles. Rather than going through hundreds of applications, focus on the most promising ones.
Series A Investor
Apr 2022
Premier consumer entertainment and commerce
Seed Investor
Aug 2020
One of the fastest growing game startups in the world.
Board Member
Jun 2019
Talent is everywhere. Opportunity is not. Remotes mission is to create opportunity everywhere, empowering employers to find and hire the best talent, and enabling individuals to build financial and personal freedom. Remote is the all-in-one HR and payroll platform to find, hire, manage, and pay your entire team everywhere. Whether onboarding your first cross-border hire or scaling across continents, Remote delivers enterprise-grade compliance, intuitive design, and dedicated local expertise. With one platform for every contract, payslip, and regulation, Remote helps you grow without borders through our comprehensive set of core solutions including, HRIS, payroll, international employment, contractor management, and more. Whether you’re just starting your global journey, or looking to optimize your existing operations, sign up or book a demo - and see how Remote makes global HR simple.
Board Member
Oct 2018
Sleepers mission is to connect people over sports. Were building a digital playground for sports fans and their friends to hang out together. We believe what truly makes sports so special in our lives is its ability to strengthen bonds between the people we care about. Some of our fondest memories include super bowl parties with friends, streaming the world cup with co-workers, and enjoying Christmas NBA games with family. Our products enable you and your friends to enjoy sports together in a fun and social way, creating bonds that can span a lifetime. ****Sleeper has been made aware of a recruiting scam falsely using the Sleeper brand name and that of of our HR Manager, Amanda Lopez, in an effort to exploit job seekers. Scammers are exploiting the Sleeper logo and utilizing fraudulent email addresses to deceive individuals into believing they are applying for or being offered positions at Sleeper. These scams can be highly convincing, with fraudsters often requesting personal information or offering fake job opportunities in exchange for sensitive personal and financial details. Please note, Sleeper will never ask applicants for money or extend a job offer without conducting a verbal or video interview via Google Meet. If you are interested in applying for a job at Sleeper, please visit our website at Sleeper.com or https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/sleeper. If you suspect youve encountered a recruiting scam, please report it to the FTC at this link: https://consumer.ftc.gov/articles/job-scams ****
Board Member
Feb 2017
Medely is the largest labor Marketplace for short and long term healthcare jobs. An economic empowerment engine, Medely helps healthcare professionals instantly access high paying healthcare jobs with the freedom and flexibility to work when and where they want. Healthcare facilities benefit by instantly accessing highly qualified healthcare professionals. Medely also provides healthcare facilities with the tools needed to manage their contingent workforce, time tracking, billing and credentials management. Named by Forbes as one of America’s best startup employers, Medely is revolutionizing healthcare through innovation and opportunity. So become a Medely teammate and be a part of this change. You’ll work hand in hand with the most diverse and mission driven team in healthcare. Check out our careers page for our latest openings and join us in changing the way healthcare works.
Seed Investor
Sep 2016
Cover is a technology company that designs, manufactures, and installs homes. Our mission is to make living in a thoughtfully designed and well-built home a reality for everyone. Using proprietary design software and a precision manufactured building system, Cover delivers exceptional design, functionality, and energy performance, in a fraction of the time of traditional custom construction. For more information, visit www.buildcover.com
early stageConstruction
Board Member
Oct 2013
Hive is the leading provider of cloud-based AI solutions to understand, search, and generate content, and is trusted by hundreds of the worlds largest and most innovative organizations. The company empowers developers with a portfolio of best-in-class, pre-trained AI models, serving billions of customer API requests every month. Hive also offers turnkey software powered by proprietary AI models and datasets, unlocking breakthrough applications for critical business needs with deep learning and generative AI. Collectively, Hives technology is transforming approaches to platform integrity / content moderation (including AI-generated content detection), brand protection, sponsorship measurement, context-based ad targeting, and more. Hive has raised over $120M from leading investors, including General Catalyst, 8VC, Tomales Bay Capital, and Glynn Capital. In April 2021, Hive announced a $50M Series D at a $2B valuation. The San Francisco-based company has 200+ full-time employees globally, in addition to a distributed workforce of more than 5 million global contributors that supports data labeling operations. For more information, visit thehive.ai or follow on LinkedIn.
Seed Investor
May 2012
Discord is used by over 200 million people every month for many different reasons, but there’s one thing that nearly everyone does on our platform: play video games. Over 90% of our users play games, spending a combined 1.5 billion hours playing thousands of unique titles on Discord each month. Discord plays a uniquely important role in the future of gaming. We are focused on making it easier and more fun for people to talk and hang out before, during, and after playing games. We believe games give us a way to have fun with our favorite people, whether listening to music together or grinding in competitive matches for diamond rank. Join us in our mission! Take a look at https://discordapp.com/jobs for openings.
Experience · 17 entries
All (17)
Investments (15)
Founder (1)
Board (5)
2026
Founder & Managing Director
Jan 2026
First Money, Seed, and Series A Venture Capital.
2025
Seed Investor
Sep 2025
Researchers trained the world’s most powerful foundation models on words. But human intelligence far exceeds the origin of language; it emerged over millennia of interaction, exploration, and the ceaseless negotiation of intent, action, and consequences in unbounded environments. Truly intelligent machines must acquire the capacity to perceive, anticipate, and improvise within the unfolding dynamics of reality. We embrace games as the ultimate expression of ingenuity and problem solving.
2024
Seed Investor
Sep 2024
The ultimate on-screen personal assistant: be 10x faster at your job
2023
Seed Investor
Oct 2023
We find the best experts in every professional domain and put their knowledge to work training frontier models. Through APEX, we measure whether those models can actually perform economically valuable work. Were also bringing that expertise to enterprises: deploying custom AI agents, staffing teams with vetted domain experts, and helping organizations encode their own knowledge into AI systems.
Seed Investor
Apr 2023
Were a team of engineers, researchers, and farmers on a mission to revolutionize one of Earths most important industries – agriculture. At Orchard, were securing America’s food supply by building the AI farmer that automates our nation’s farms. Our mission is to help farmers produce more food for the world, more profitably and sustainably than ever before. Farmers across the U.S. use our industry-leading hardware-enabled software to look at their data, make critical decisions, and command farming operations. Our technology is used today across some of the largest farms in the nation.
Show all 17 entries ↓
Investment activity
2012–2025 · 15 investments
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