A $10 Million Wager on the Power of the Small

A new $10 million venture fund, Shiva, is betting that the future of software belongs to tiny, agile teams. Founded by entrepreneur Sahil Bloom and Ben’s Bites newsletter creator Ben Tossell, the fund will back startups with as few as one to ten employees, arguing that modern AI tools have fundamentally changed the math of company building.

The fund’s premise is that AI coding assistants and generative platforms have slashed the cost and time required to develop software. Where a project once demanded fifty engineers, a handful of skilled founders might now manage it. Shiva plans to write checks from $100,000 to $500,000 for these capital-efficient operations, focusing on businesses that use existing AI infrastructure to build products quickly, not on foundational AI research.

This model promises extraordinary margins if successful. A two-person team generating millions in revenue, without the overhead of large staff or offices, represents a potent ideal. It also aligns with a venture capital climate that, after recent corrections, increasingly prizes efficiency.

Yet significant questions remain. While tools accelerate building, scaling a company involves customer support, compliance, and strategic decisions that still rely heavily on human effort. Furthermore, if AI makes creation easy, it may also simplify replication, making a startup’s long-term defensibility harder to secure.

The fund’s timeline is ambitious, aiming to prove its thesis by 2026. Whether Shiva’s portfolio can translate the clear productivity gains of AI into durable, scalable businesses is the real experiment. Its launch signals a serious institutional interest in redefining what a fundable startup looks like in this new era.