Eric Zhu started building Aviato, an analytics platform for private market data, in a high school bathroom in Carmel, Indiana, a very typical place for an entrepreneur. Now, the 17-year-old startup is emerging from obscurity after securing $2.3 million in venture funding.
Aviato tracks funding rounds and headcounts, as do competitors like Crunchbase and PitchBook, as well as other metrics and data points like company credit card revenue data, employee vesting schedules, and where top engineers currently work. If this sounds a bit like what SignalFire built for its internal database, that’s intentional. Zhu said Aviato’s goal was to build a platform similar to what SignalFire built internally. In fact, he said his startup worked closely with the company’s founder, Walter Kortschak, to build the product.
Zhu told TechCrunch that his early interest in venture capital and startups came about when he was in the right place at the right time during a boring pandemic, joining a Discord group chat that included people like Sam Altman at age 13 in 2020.
This interest led him to start a company called Esocial, a digital platform for schools, in 2021, which was acquired 10 months later. Shortly after, he joined Bachmanity Capital, which supports early-stage companies with strong government application potential. While building the fund, he got the idea for Aviato. He realized that data startups like PitchBook and Crunchbase were good for tracking data, but they lacked the analytics layer that he thought was needed to make these platforms truly useful.
“Aviato started with the idea that private market data has historically been very unstructured,” Zhu said. “That’s why funds are spending tens of millions of dollars to build internal databases.”
To create Aviato, a nod to HBO’s “Silicon Valley” TV show, Zhou met in a high school bathroom. He set up a green screen, a ring light, and a partition as an excuse to skip class. Zhou was expelled from school for doing so, but before that, he had secured clients like NEA, Republic Capital, and 8VC.
Aviato’s $2.3 million seed funding came from 8VC, Soma Capital, SoftBank, and others. Eric Bahn, co-founder and general partner of Hustle Fund, personally invested in the startup a few years ago. Bahn told TechCrunch that he met with Zhu after the teenager sent him one of the best cold emails he’s ever received. Bahn described the Zoom call as bizarre.
“He had braces on,” Bahn recalled of Zhu, who was 14 at the time. “He definitely looked pretty young, but he was strangely mature. What was really weird was that he was in the bathroom, obviously a freshman in high school, and I was like, ‘Where the hell are you?’ I literally said that. He said, ‘I just faked diarrhea, so I think I’ll have 30 minutes to talk to you.’”
Bahn said he invested $3,000 at the time and joked that he probably flushed it down the toilet, metaphorically and literally. But now, three years later, as Zhu has matured and the product has matured, he feels differently.
“I started playing with the product myself. It's pretty elegantly made,” Bahn said. “He's already proven one thing to me: the quality of the people he hires. His executive team are very serious builders.”
Last fall, the startup brought in David Razavi, former CTO of LowerMyBills and former head of product at LendingTree, as co-founder and COO. Harrison Kessel rounds out the founding team and takes over as CTO. Kessel was the third employee at Sequoia-backed Zeet, where he built the data infrastructure for the developer-focused data application platform.
Zhu has now moved to San Francisco and is working on completing his high school degree online. He said his parents are still a little confused about what he’s doing, and his mother might still want him to be a doctor, but Zhu doesn’t seem too worried about it.
“We built a product, and a lot of people love it,” Zhu said. “Our customer base is venture funds, private equity, etc. I would generally sell to anyone who works with private equity. We could replace PitchBook.”
