A startup can find product-market fit and still break on the way to becoming a company.
The first customers may come through founder obsession, personal networks and a willingness to sit inside every deal. The next hundred customers require something less romantic: hiring, segmentation, forecasting, revenue operations and a sales process that still works when the founder is no longer in every room.
Permanent Capital Ventures has raised $200 million for PCV Fund II to invest at exactly that handoff. The new vehicle brings the firm’s total capital raised since its launch in early 2024 to more than $350 million.
The thesis, however, is older than the firm itself.
More than a decade ago, Jason Duboe approached Mike Gamson with an idea for a venture firm built around a problem both would later experience firsthand: technically strong companies can reach product-market fit and still struggle when growth starts demanding a repeatable go-to-market engine.
Gamson spent 11 years at LinkedIn, eventually leading its global sales organization as revenue grew from roughly $10 million to $5 billion. Duboe spent seven years as an institutional investor before joining project44 as Chief Growth Officer, where the company grew from around $1 million to $130 million in ARR.
That history now sits at the center of Permanent’s investment philosophy.
The firm argues that AI is widening the distance between how quickly a company can ship a product and how quickly it can build a repeatable commercial engine.
As Permanent puts it:
“In an AI-native era, the gap between ship speed and sales speed is wider than it’s ever been before.”
That sentence explains why the firm is not trying to be first into every company.
Permanent targets applied AI businesses that have already found early demand and are entering the stage where founder-led selling has to become an organization. Its work focuses on questions such as which customers deserve priority, how sales teams should be structured, when revenue operations becomes necessary and which hires can turn early momentum into something repeatable.
The firm deliberately keeps its investment pace low. Each team member makes only one to two investments per year, giving Permanent more room to work directly with founders instead of treating operating support as a broad portfolio service.
Its portfolio reflects that bias. Permanent has backed companies across AI tax, autonomous CRM, compensation intelligence, enterprise supply-chain software, mortgage AI, insurance operating software and dental revenue-cycle management. The common thread is not simply AI. These are markets where technically strong products still have to fight through complicated enterprise buying decisions before they become durable businesses.
Permanent has also built infrastructure around that operating thesis. Vector, its invitation-only gathering for senior revenue-operations leaders, is structured without booths or sales pitches and instead focuses on the mechanics of scaling revenue organizations.
That makes the $200 million fund more interesting than another AI-focused venture vehicle.
AI may make it easier than ever to build the product.
Permanent Capital Ventures is betting that the companies that matter will still be separated by something far less automated: turning early demand into an organization that can sell, hire and scale without the founder carrying the entire machine.