Early-Stage Innovators Recognized in Pre-Seed to Succeed's 2025 Liftoff Record Book

Pre-Seed to Succeed, an investment program for early-stage startups, today announced the launch of the Liftoff Record Book, a new initiative celebrating pre-seed and seed founders whose work shaped innovation in 2025.

At a time when mega-rounds account for nearly 60% of all venture funding and early-stage companies receive only about 10%, the project aims to spotlight the founders driving breakthroughs at the earliest stage, which often remains underlooked.

Inspired by the "Guinness Book of Records", Pre-seed to Succeed analysed more than 1,000 startups across their online presence and evaluated them in 10 categories ranging from fundraising milestones to generational breakthroughs and community impact. The winners were selected based on publicly verified achievements, traction, and industry influence.

The Solo Rocket Raised

Pre-Seed Winner:
Leon Ming, Founder of YouWare, an all-in-one AI coding platform that closed a landmark $50M pre-seed round, valuing the company at $200M and marking one of the largest solo-founder pre-seed raises to date.

Seed Winner:
Andre Cronje, Founder of Flying Tulip. A DeFi pioneer, Andre secured $200M in seed funding for Flying Tulip, representing one of the largest seed rounds for a solo founder in 2025.

Rising Generation Award

Bindwell - Founders Tyler Rose & Navvye Anand
A project, founded by Tyler Rose (18) and Navvye Anand (19), Bindwell is reimagining pesticide development using AI. Backed by Y Combinator and leading investors, the company raised a $6M seed round, exemplifying a new generation of scientifically driven youth entrepreneurship.

Lifetime Builders

AheadComputing
Founded by a highly experienced founding team with an average age above 50, who successfully raised $21.5M in seed funding to develop open-specification core IP for next-generation microprocessors.

Led by Debbie Marr, Jonathan Pearce, Dr. Srikanth Srinivasan, and Mark Dechene, the team proves that decades of experience power breakthrough innovation.

Product Hunt Launch of the Year

Screen Studio 3.0
Product Hunt's community propelled Screen Studio 3.0, a screen recorder producing high-impact videos automatically, to the top of the charts. With 1,644 upvotes and achieving #1 Product of the Day, #2 Product of the Week, and #3 Product of the Month in February, Screen Studio 3.0 became one of the year's most celebrated product launches among early adopters.

Leap to Success

Octonomy
An AI company building agentic systems for enterprise service workflows, completed a standout fundraising leap in 2025. The company raised €5 million pre-seed in February followed by a $20 million seed round in November, led by Macquarie Capital Venture Capital. With $25 million total raised in 2025, Octonomy's founding team: Sushel Bijganath, Oliver Trabert, Thorsten Grote, Markus Hanslik, and Thomas Bollig, - set a benchmark for rapid early-stage scale.

The Most Community-Driven Founder

Browser Use
Magnus Müller and Gregor Žunič, who built Browser Use - one of the most active developer communities in AI tooling, with 73,000 GitHub stars, 23,400 Discord members, and 15,000+ participating developers worldwide.
The project's momentum culminated in a $17M seed round, reinforcing the power of open-source, community-led innovation.

The Girl Power Capital Breakthrough

Mira Murati, Founder of Thinking Machines Lab
A former CTO of OpenAI, Mira secured a record-setting $2 billion seed round for her new AI research lab, Thinking Machines. Led by a16z, the raise stands as one of the largest early-stage funding events of the decade and highlights Murati's role as one of the most influential women in deep-tech AI.

The Major Fortune 500 Startup Launchpad

Citi
An analysis of LinkedIn founder histories across the 2025 pre-seed and seed cohorts shows that commercial banks were the leading source of new startup founders. Among Fortune 500 companies, Citi ranked first as the most common previous employer of early-stage founders who successfully raised funding this year.

Among technology companies, IBM emerged as the top former employer for aspiring startup founders.

LinkedIn Trailblazer of the Year

Marius Meiners, Co-Founder & CEO of Peec AI
Peec AI experienced a rapid financing trajectory in 2025, raising €1.8 million pre-seed, followed by a €5.2 million seed round led by 20VC within four weeks, and closing a $21 million Series A in November. Co-founder Marius Meiners has built an energetic LinkedIn presence with 14,095 followers and an average engagement of ~748 interactions per post, equating to 53 engagements per 1,000 followers, one of the highest ratios among early-stage founders this year.

The Impact Catalyst Award

Bindwell
Bindwell's AI-driven pesticide innovation directly advances multiple UN Sustainable Development Goals, including:

- Zero Hunger (SDG 2),
- Responsible Consumption and Production (SDG 12),
- Life on Land (SDG 15)
- Climate Action (SDG 13).

Pre-Seed to Succeed
2075 Sutter St, San Francisco, CA 94115
ana@p2s.vc

Pre-Seed to Succeed is an investment for young and ambitious companies helping raise their first funding round. The program is backed by 4 venture funds: AltaIR Capital, Yellow Rocks, Smart Partnership Capital and I2BF Global Ventures. P2S is designed for startups in the early stages with MVP and first traction and focuses on the following industries: B2B / SaaS, FinTech, AI, Future of Work, Productivity Tools, Digital Health, HR Tech.

This release was published on openPR.