Aaref Hilaly

BCV helps technical founders build businesses around their ideas. We invest early (seed / Series A), and commit -- working closely with founders on recruiting, early customers, messaging, launch and scale. Our team brings deep domain expertise in AI, cloud infrastructure, fin-tech, and more, and taps the unique network and portfolio of Bain Capital.

Krea is a leading AI platform for image generation and refinement. Its magic is in rapidly incorporating the latest models and making them available to creatives, without imposing an aesthetic -- instead, it amplifies the user's unique creative identity. Krea's 750K weekly active users create over 3M images a day.

Decagon is building an agentic platform for customer communication, starting with customer support. The company has grown rapidly, winning market-leading customers like Figma, Notion and Rippling. Its pace of execution is ferocious.

Contextual is a platform for bringing large language models (LLMs) into the enterprise, by addressing issues such as hallucination and attribution. The technology is inspired by the founders' seminal work on retrieval augmented generation (RAG) at Facebook AI Research.

EvenUp is using genAI to build an operating system for personal injury attorneys. The company's Claims Intelligence Platform creates demand letters, medical chronologies, and other core units of work.

Clari's revenue operations platform has become the way many sales leaders run their business. It complements Salesforce to provide actionable forecasts, pipeline management and activity intelligence.

General Partner focused on Seed / Early. Over seven years, I invested in, and served on the boards of, a dozen companies. Two went public (Guardant Health, MobileIron), one is a unicorn (Clari), three were acquired for ~$1 billion each (Lightstep (ServiceNow), Skyhigh (McAfee), ThousandEyes (Cisco)), and a couple were total disasters. Privileged to learn venture investing from some of the best in the business.

Joined Symantec through its acquisition of Clearwell and served for a year on the leadership team.

Led company from the early stages of product development to over $100m in ARR within 6 years, growing 80% YoY. Raised a total of $33m from Sequoia (seed & Series A) and Redpoint (Series B). Burned a cumulative $25m to reach profitability. Clearwell was the leading e-discovery software (legal-tech) company for enterprises and government agencies. Symantec acquired Clearwell in 2011 for $410 million.

My first startup! CenterRun pioneered data center automation. We raised Series A from Sequoia, grew to 30 people and $5 million in revenue, and then sold the company (too early) to Sun Microsystems for $66 million.