# Scott Banister

> Scott Banister is a seed investor at IRL (San Francisco) backing Software and Mobile. See 156 investments, check sizes, portfolio. Updated Aug 2026.

- Type: Angel Investor
- Fund: [IRL](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/irl-app)
- Location: San Francisco, United States
- Total investments: 156
- Last investment: Mar 2026
- Lead investor: 6%
- Last updated: Aug 2026
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/banister
- X (Twitter): http://twitter.com/nist
- Website: https://x.com/nist
- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/scottbanister

Scott Banister is a seed investor at IRL in San Francisco focused on Software and Mobile. Scott is an American entrepreneur and angel investor. He is best known as a co-founder of IronPort and an early advisor and board member at PayPal.Scott Banister started his career as a pioneer in the email business. He was Founder and VP of Technology at ListBot, the largest ASP for business email list hosting. ListBot was acquired byMicrosoft. After ListBot, Scott spent his time working with other start-ups as a board member and investor. These start-ups include eVoice, creator of the first email-enabled home voicemail service, which was acquired by AOL in 2001. He served as VP of Ideas at idealab!, where he contributed numerous innovations, including the unique bid-for-placement search engine model that powers Overture. In December 2000, with Scott Weiss, Banister co-founded IronPort, an email appliance provider that was acquired in 2007 by Cisco for US$830 million.Scott Banister is co-founder and Chairman of Other private equity investments include Zappos.com, LiveOps, Facebook, Hi5.com, Tagged.com, iLike, and Causes.com.Banister attended University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, from which he dropped out in 1996 to move to Silicon Valley. He currently lives in Half Moon Bay, California with his wife Cyan.

## Round sizes

| Stage | Round size |
| --- | --- |
| Seed | $660k–$5.8M |
| Angel | $500k–$1.3M |
| Series A | $1.4M–$45M |

## Investment focus

### Industry

| Industry | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Software | 35 | 22% |
| Mobile | 17 | 11% |
| Internet | 17 | 11% |
| Information Technology | 17 | 11% |
| Artificial Intelligence | 16 | 10% |

211 industries tracked in total.

### Stage

| Stage | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Seed | 77 | 49% |
| Series A | 37 | 24% |
| Angel | 9 | 6% |
| Series B | 8 | 5% |
| Series C | 5 | 3% |

11 stages tracked in total.

### Country

| Country | Investments | Share |
| --- | --- | --- |
| United States | 122 | 78% |
| United Kingdom | 2 | 1% |
| India | 1 | 1% |
| Canada | 1 | 1% |
| Israel | 1 | 1% |

7 countries tracked in total.

## Investments

| Company | Description | Amount | Stage | Date | Website |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| DealFlowAgent | Foundy is an end-to-end marketplace for full and secondary M&A for tech startups. JP Lewin's first-hand experience building and exiting his last tech marketplace startup provided him insight into the unnecessary inefficiencies, complexities and costs of running an M&A process. Now, using his mission-driven passion for modernising thisprocess alongside an injection of £1.25m in initial funding led by marketplace focussed VC, Fuel Ventures, JP and his team are completely modernising the M&A industry for tech startups. Foundy.com offers startups the opportunity to seamlessly connect with relevant buyers and M&A advisors as well as access the latest knowledge, tips and tools at minimal cost, hassle and time. Educational podcasts, blogs and tutorials as well as an M&A advisory directory and a valuation calculator amongst other resources are examples of ways in which Foundy strives to help founders and respective buyers to complete rewarding deals time and cost-effectively. We are extremely excited to be launching a range of products in 2022/3. We welcome you to sign up as a seller or buyer or join our newsletter via foundy.com. Feel free to reach out if you are a prospective investor or journalist interested in working with Foundy. Stay tuned. | $750K | Seed | Mar 06, 2026 |  |
| Artemis | Powered by AI, Mona Lee is the fastest, most efficient way for homeowners to go solar. Through a direct-to-consumer approach, Mona Lee’s AI-powered self-serve platform transforms the solar buying experience by eliminating non-stop solicitation calls, lengthy design and evaluation processes, and back-and-forth price negotiations that can take up toweeks. With Mona Lee, customers go from quote to scheduling their installation in minutes. Feel free to visit our website to read customer testimonials and Mona Lee solar reviews.Mona Lee was founded by a group of serial entrepreneurs with decades of experience in clean energy. The company is headquartered in Boston, MA and is proud to serve homeowners nationwide. | $6M | Venture - Series Unknown | Mar 04, 2026 |  |
| Barndoor AI | Barndoor AI offers a centralized governance layer to manage granular access, policy enforcement, and visibility across agentic AI workforce. | $13.6M | Seed | May 19, 2025 |  |
| Together AI | Together AI provides a cloud platform for developing, training, fine-tuning, and deploying generative artificial intelligence models using open-source technologies. Its services include serverless and dedicated model inference, GPU compute infrastructure, managed storage, code sandboxes, and model customization tools that support AI applicationdevelopment and production workloads. The platform also offers APIs and deployment options that enable developers and organizations to build, run, and manage language, image, audio, vision, and code models without maintaining underlying infrastructure. | $305M | Series B | Feb 20, 2025 |  |
| Valid | Validated helps you discover what customers want by simulating that your product ideas exist with hundreds of AI generated ads and observing conversion. | $5.5M | Seed | Feb 18, 2025 |  |
| Justpoint | Justpoint is the artificial intelligence-powered platform connecting people with the right litigation attorney and tools. Using predictive analytics rather than billboards, Justpoint brings transparency, simplicity, and credibility to the process of finding litigators in the personal injury space. For attorneys, Justpoint takes on back-office taskswhile creating efficiencies in the discovery process so they can quickly understand a claim's merit and obtain the best results. With over 1000 law firms, more than 300,000 historical claims, and operations in 33 states, Justpoint’s team of attorneys, engineers, and doctors are dedicated to increasing access to justice. For more information visit https://justpoint.com. | $45M | Series A | Feb 12, 2025 |  |
| Arcee.ai | Arcee is building context adapted SLM's (Small Language Models) through our SLM Adaptation system, all in your own cloud. This system all includes a domain pretraining layer, an alignment layer and a RAG layer—all in one system.Arcee's SLM Adaptation system allows you to get models into prod fast and runs in your own environment. Thisprovides you full control over model, data and intellectual property, thus removing data privacy and security concerns, and removing any licensing uncertainty. | $24M | Series A | Jul 18, 2024 |  |
| Superpower | The world's most comprehensive and convenient platform to manage your health, for life. | $4M | Pre-Seed | Apr 10, 2024 |  |
| Together AI | Together AI provides a cloud platform for developing, training, fine-tuning, and deploying generative artificial intelligence models using open-source technologies. Its services include serverless and dedicated model inference, GPU compute infrastructure, managed storage, code sandboxes, and model customization tools that support AI applicationdevelopment and production workloads. The platform also offers APIs and deployment options that enable developers and organizations to build, run, and manage language, image, audio, vision, and code models without maintaining underlying infrastructure. | $106M | Series A | Mar 13, 2024 |  |
| HeyMarvin | HeyMarvin connects every single person in an organization with unfiltered feedback so they can make smarter, customer-centric decisions. HeyMarvin is an AI-native customer feedback repository that brings together primary research and passive feedback channels collected through sales interactions, support tickets, and more. With advanced AI agents,HeyMarvin empowers product and research teams to capture and interpret customer insights at warp speed. Through a user-friendly AI interface, insights become instantly accessible organization-wide, enabling faster decisions and keeping every team aligned with customer needs. For more information, please visit heymarvin.com. | $6.5M | Seed | Mar 01, 2024 |  |

10 of 156 investments shown.

## Co-investors
- [Long Journey Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/long-journey-ventures) — VC Fund, 18 deals together
- [SV Angel](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/sv-angel) — VC Fund, 15 deals together
- [First Round Capital](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/first-round-capital) — VC Fund, 13 deals together
- [500 Global](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/500-startups) — VC Fund, 7 deals together
- [Founders Fund](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/founders-fund) — VC Fund, 7 deals together
- [Khosla Ventures](https://shizune.co/investors/profile/khosla-ventures) — VC Fund, 7 deals together

## About IRL

VC Fund · San Francisco, United States

IRL is the place for Social Messaging! Follow your friends, join groups you relate to, and chat! IRL super-charges your social life! IRL is one of the top Social Apps, and it’s accessible through all your devices.Friends - Follow all your friends on IRL! Chat with them and see the events they are interested in. Use it to discover what you mighthave missed and plan something to do!Groups - Create groups around your interests and discover people that have the same interests as you. Make new friends, or get closer with someone you know already. Groups can be public or private, you decide who joins.Events - Events you create and join get added to your IRL Calendar so you can manage your busy days. Create events and invite your groups, make it easy to plan for clubs and activities! Birthday parties on IRL are always more fun.Chat - Chat on groups and events, create polls, and send gifs! Chat with your clubs, friends, school groups, or family. Have a chat with 2, or be a part of a worldwide chat! Chat more together.Find out why Apple named us "Our Favorite" in Social and upgrade your life today ;)The company was founded in 2017 and is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

5 contacts available at IRL.

| Name | Title | Profile |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Scott Banister | Founder | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/scott-banister |
| Abraham Shafi | Founder and CEO | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/abraham-shafi |
| Henry Khachatryan | Co-Founder | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/henry-khachatryan |
| John Fitch | Leadership | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/john-fitch |
| Josh Elman | Special Projects | https://shizune.co/investors/profile/josh-elman |

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## FAQ

### What does Scott Banister invest in?

Scott Banister invests primarily in Software, Mobile and Internet startups, most often at Seed and Series A stage. Most of the 156 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 Scott Banister's check size?

Scott Banister typically joins rounds of $660k–$5.8M at Seed, $500k–$1.3M at Angel and $1.4M–$45M at Series A. These ranges are 10th–90th percentile round sizes calculated from confirmed public funding rounds, so they are a realistic guide to the rounds Scott Banister participates in.

### When did Scott Banister last invest?

The most recent investment recorded for Scott Banister closed in Mar 2026. Shizune tracks 156 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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