# Ben Orthlieb

> Ben Orthlieb is a seed investor at Blue Moon (San Francisco) backing Software and SaaS. See 28 investments, check sizes, portfolio. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: Angel Investor
- Fund: [Blue Moon](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/2-12-angels)
- Location: San Francisco, United States
- Total investments: 28
- Last investment: Jul 2022
- Lead investor: 0%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/benorthlieb/

Ben Orthlieb is a seed investor at Blue Moon in San Francisco focused on Software and SaaS. Ben Orthlieb - Head of Corporate Development @ LinkedIn

## Round sizes

| Stage | Round size |
| --- | --- |
| Seed | $900k–$6.3M |
| Pre-Seed | $100k–$6.8M |

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Software | 12 | 43% |
| SaaS | 7 | 25% |
| Artificial Intelligence | 6 | 21% |
| Financial Services | 5 | 18% |
| FinTech | 4 | 14% |

67 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Seed | 19 | 68% |
| Pre-Seed | 4 | 14% |
| Angel | 2 | 7% |
| Convertible Note | 2 | 7% |
| Series A | 1 | 4% |

### Country

| Country | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| United States | 24 | 86% |
| Canada | 1 | 4% |

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Syrup Tech | Syrup Tech is a machine-learning decision-support engine for inventory in commerce. The company uses advanced demand forecasting and stochastic optimizations. Syrup Tech's software empowers brands and retailers to significantly increase full-priced inventory sell-through by (1) preventing stock-outs and end-of-season markdowns, (2) decreaseunnecessary excess inventory and reduce overproduction, and (3) reduce the time spent on manual tasks for stretched merchandising and planning teams. | $6.3M | Seed | Jul 13, 2022 |  |
| MindsDB | MindsDB utilizes machine learning so its users can ask predictive questions of their data and receive accurate answers from it. Adam Carrigan and Jorge Torres founded the open source company with a mission to democratize machine learning.MindsDB was a graduate of YCombinator's recent Winter 2020 batch and was recently recognized by Forbes asone of America's most promising AI companies. | $6.8M | Seed | Nov 01, 2021 |  |
| MindsDB | MindsDB utilizes machine learning so its users can ask predictive questions of their data and receive accurate answers from it. Adam Carrigan and Jorge Torres founded the open source company with a mission to democratize machine learning.MindsDB was a graduate of YCombinator's recent Winter 2020 batch and was recently recognized by Forbes asone of America's most promising AI companies. | $6.8M | Pre-Seed | Nov 01, 2021 |  |
| Alectio | The Alectio platform is the first full-stack, end-to-end, ML-driven self-serve DataPrepOps platform® enabling ML teams to prepare, curate, annotate, manage, version and visualize their training data in a few clicks, in near-real-time and quasi-automated manner.Alectio's proprietary technology is based on the fundamental belief that ML modelscan be trained with the same (sometimes better) performance with just a fraction of the data (which means lower labeling, storage and compute costs, and eventually the possibility of training on the edge). Data Scientists wrap their regular model and raw data with the Alectio's SDK and the Alectio curation engine guides the training process strategically so that the model gets trained on the most informative data; they'll never have to spend a minute on data preparation again!We're neither a labeling company nor an MLOps company: we're building a new category providing the entire workflow to prepare data during training which allows ML experts to build models and datasets simultaneously, reducing time to market, and a new training paradigm that will lead orgs to actual AI profitability.Alectio uncovers the smart data inside your big data, unlocking model performance and saving machine learning experts both time and money. | $2.6M | Seed | Feb 04, 2021 |  |
| Akorda | AI Powered Contract Lifecycle Management Software for the Enterprise | $4M | Seed | Dec 21, 2020 |  |
| Akorda | AI Powered Contract Lifecycle Management Software for the Enterprise | $4M | Convertible Note | Dec 21, 2020 |  |
| Acquire App | Developer of an e-commerce platform designed to power and improve checkout experiences. Facing operational challenges late in 2022, the CEO took the company on an exit path and a transaction was recorded later in 2023. | $1.7M | Pre-Seed | Sep 30, 2020 |  |
| Warmly | Warmly is the first autonomous revenue orchestration platform purpose built for SMB sized revenue teams. The platform orchestrates metadata from sales enablement tools, B2B intent, and enrichment tools to identify, track, and connect with website visitors who are ready to convert. By automatically aggregating data and integrating insights fromvarious platforms, Warmly orchestrates the most effective next step to drive qualified conversations for the sales team. | $2.1M | Seed | Aug 13, 2020 |  |
| swivl.ai | swivl is an all-in-one platform that allows Product teams to build and optimize Artificial Intelligence in a no-code environment. Think Duolingo + SquareSpace for AI. swivlStudio provides a toolset for companies to simplify the process of AI training. Our interface allows companies to train their current workforce to provide value in anincreasingly AI-first world through step by step guided data labeling exercises. The employees can then manage the feedback loop to train, test, and tune custom machine learning models that personalize their customers’ experiences via natural language processing, personalized search results, image classification, and generalized data categorization. By combining the best of human and machine intelligence, companies can now increase speed to launch and improve accuracy over time. |  | Seed | Jul 13, 2020 |  |
| AccessBell | AccessBell Expand your Zoom experience with features including real-time collaboration, personal notes, and agendas that sync with tools you already know and love. Take personal & collaborative notes and assign action items during the meeting. Organize your meetings with an agenda to indicate the progress of the meeting. Integrate seamlesslywith Slack, Drive, Email, and other productivity tools. Track user engagement and better understand your meeting participation. | $1.2M | Seed | May 25, 2020 |  |

10 of 28 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Off the Grid Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/off-the-grid-ventures) — VC Fund, 7 deals together
- [500 Global](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/500-startups) — VC Fund, 3 deals together
- [Y Combinator](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/y-combinator) — VC Fund, 3 deals together
- [Alumni Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/alumni-ventures-group) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [Alven](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/alven-capital) — VC Fund, 2 deals together
- [Angel Invest](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/angel-invest-ventures) — VC Fund, 2 deals together

## About Blue Moon

VC Fund · San Francisco, United States

Blue Moon' goal is to be the highest value-add to Founders per dollar invested. We invest pre-seed / seed companies in the Enterprise space. We also make extensive use of AI and automations across all our operations: sourcing and vetting (agent Agatha), deal assessment (agent Da Vinci), Founder support (agent Sherpa), portfolio companiestracking (agent Kojak), automated operations (agent Slash).

2 contacts available at Blue Moon.

| Name | Title | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Ben Orthlieb | Co-Founder and General Parnter | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/ben-orthlieb |
| Olivier Legrand | Limited Partner | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/olivier-legrand-2 |

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## FAQ

### What does Ben Orthlieb invest in?

Ben Orthlieb invests primarily in Software, SaaS and Artificial Intelligence startups, most often at Seed and Pre-Seed stage. Most of the 28 investments tracked by Shizune back companies in United States. The Investment Focus section breaks down every industry, stage and country in the portfolio.

### What is Ben Orthlieb's check size?

Ben Orthlieb typically joins rounds of $900k–$6.3M at Seed and $100k–$6.8M at Pre-Seed. These ranges are 10th–90th percentile round sizes calculated from confirmed public funding rounds, so they are a realistic guide to the rounds Ben Orthlieb participates in.

### When did Ben Orthlieb last invest?

The most recent investment recorded for Ben Orthlieb closed in Jul 2022. Shizune tracks 28 investments in total for this profile, including round sizes, stages and portfolio companies, all sourced from confirmed public funding rounds and refreshed monthly.

### Is Shizune's investor data accurate?

Yes — every stat on this profile is calculated from confirmed public funding rounds monitored across hundreds of sources since 2020. This profile was last refreshed in Aug 2026 and is updated monthly. Spotted something off? Use the “Suggest an edit” link near the top of the page.

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