Eric Chu started building Aviat, a platform for analyzing private market data, in a pretty typical place for an entrepreneur: a high school bathroom in Carmel, Indiana. Now the 17-year-old's startup is coming out of stealth with $2.3 million in venture funding.
Aviato tracks funding rounds and employee numbers, just like competitors like Crunchbase and PitchBook, but also tracks data points like companies' credit card revenue data, employee vesting schedules, where their top engineers currently work, and other metrics. If it sounds a bit like what SignalFire built for its internal database, that's intentional. Zhu said Aviato's goal is to build a platform similar to what SignalFire built in-house. In fact, he said the startup has worked closely with the company's founder, Walter Kortschak, to build the product.
Chu told TechCrunch that his interest in venture capital and startups developed because he was in the right place at the right time during the tedious days of the pandemic, learning about the field in a Discord group chat that included people like Sam Altman, who joined in 2020 at age 13.
This interest led him to start a company called Esocial, a digital platform for schools, in 2021, which was acquired 10 months later. Soon after, he joined Bachmanity Capital, which backs early-stage companies with promising government applications. It was while starting this fund that he came up with the idea for Aviato. He noticed that data startups like PitchBook and Crunchbase were good at tracking data, but lacked the analytics layer that seemed to be missing to make these platforms truly useful.
“Aviat was born out of the idea that private markets data has historically been extremely unstructured,” Chew says, “which is why funds are spending tens of millions of dollars building in-house databases.”
To create Aviato, which pays homage to the HBO TV show “Silicon Valley,” Zhu met in a high school bathroom. He set up a bathroom stall with a green screen and a ring light, and an excuse to skip class. Zhu ended up getting kicked out of school for it, but not before landing clients like NEA, Republic Capital, and 8VC.
Aviat's $2.3 million in seed funding came from 8VC, Soma Capital, SoftBank and others. Hustle Fund co-founder and general partner Eric Byrne personally invested in the startup a few years ago. Byrne told TechCrunch that he met with Chu after Chu sent him one of the best cold emails he'd ever received. Byrne described the Zoom call as strange.
“He had braces on,” Byrne recalled of Chu, who was 14 at the time. “He obviously looked quite young, but oddly mature. What was really weird was that he was clearly a freshman in high school and he was in a bathroom stall, and I was like, ‘Where are you?’ And I was like, literally, ‘I’m just pretending to have diarrhea, so I think I’ll have a chat with you for about 30 minutes.’”
Byrne said he invested $3,000 at the time and joked that he would have flushed the money down the toilet, both figuratively and literally, but now, three years later, with Chew growing and the product coming to fruition, Byrne says he's changed his mind.
“I've started to try the products myself and they are so elegantly made,” Byrne said. “He's already proven one thing to me: the quality of the people he's hired. His management team are very serious makers.”
Last fall, the startup brought on David Razavi, former CTO of LowerMyBills and former product lead at LendingTree, as co-founder and COO. Harrison Kessel joined the founding team and serves as CTO. Kessel is the third employee at Sequoia-backed Zeet, where he built the data infrastructure for the company's data applications platform for developers.
Chu has now moved to San Francisco and is studying to get his high school degree online, and while his parents still seem a little perplexed by what their son is doing — his mother may still want him to be a doctor — Chu doesn't seem too worried about that.
“We've built a product, and a lot of people like it,” Chu said. “Our customer base is venture funds, private equity funds, etc. I would like to sell to anyone in the private markets in general. We could replace PitchBook.”