Blake Billiet

Blake Billiet is an early-stage investor and operator who spent the core of his career at Hyperplane Venture Capital, a Boston-based seed fund founded in 2014 (by Vivjan Myrto and Brendan Kohler) that backs founders building companies on machine intelligence, sensor technology, and cloud computing. Billiet joined Hyperplane as a co-op in 2017, came on full-time as an Analyst in 2018, and was promoted to Principal in 2021, where he sourced and led deals across computer vision, enterprise software, PropTech, and Web3/blockchain.

Before Hyperplane, he built an unusually deep VC apprenticeship for someone early in their career: he was a Venture Partner at Contrary Capital (2017–2018), and held roles or internships connected to Hercules Capital, Harvard Management Company, the New England Venture Capital Association, and served as a coach at IDEA, Northeastern University's venture accelerator. He earned a B.S. in Business Administration (Finance & Entrepreneurship), with a minor in Computer Science, from Northeastern University (2013–2018), and completed summer coursework at the London School of Economics.

Around 2022 Billiet began shifting from pure investing toward operating: he joined Hyperplane portfolio company Elucidata (an AI data infrastructure company for life sciences) to work on growth, partnerships, pricing, and revenue operations. In June 2024 he co-founded Afino, a San Francisco–based finance startup that provides outsourced bookkeeping, corporate tax, R&D tax credits, and fractional-CFO services to startups and small companies (using QuickBooks and fast ~5-day month-end closes). Several of his former portfolio companies — including Elucidata and FoxyAI — appear as Afino clients, reflecting the network he built as an investor. As a result, Billiet today operates primarily as a founder/operator who also angel-invests, rather than as a full-time institutional VC.

• Stage: Seed and early Series A; comfortable being an early institutional check.
• Check size: $250K–$3.0M at Hyperplane, with a ~$1.5M sweet spot; angel-scale checks personally.
• Core thesis (Hyperplane): Back exceptional, often technical founders applying machine intelligence, sensor tech, and cloud to hard enterprise and industrial problems — "applied AI" rather than pure research.
• Sector emphasis: Computer vision, enterprise/vertical SaaS, PropTech, robotics/industrial, data infrastructure and services, and Web3/blockchain; more recent interest in marketing tech and data services.
• What makes him say yes: Strong technical teams solving concrete, defensible problems in AI/ML, ideally where deep tech meets a clear enterprise buyer — consistent with the deals he led (Modulate, Greeneye, FoxyAI, Elucidata).
• Operator lens: Having worked inside portfolio companies (Elucidata) and now running his own company (Afino), he evaluates go-to-market, pricing, and revenue operations, not just technology.