The hottest place for startups to strike a deal? The F1 paddock

Over cold drinks in the Florida heat, this TechCrunch reporter watched from the paddock as founders and investors — the rich and the richer — mingled in search of deals. Conversations barely paused, except for the occasional glance at the track where drivers, sealed inside multi-million-dollar machines, chased the chequered flag.

F1 weekend is a three-day affair, with the race as the finale. In between are kickoffs, soirées, cocktail parties, dinners, and nightclub takeovers — spaces where business and pleasure blur. Events like this, where wealth concentrates, have historically been places where business deals are struck. But the popularity of the F1 paddock has grown in recent years, especially among the startup and venture crowd.

“It’s a hot place for everyone with access trying to strike a deal,” one founder said, recalling being brought to the paddock by a venture firm two years ago.

This year, Chandler Malone, a founder, said he didn’t even attend the race; he only went to some of the side events. So many venture firms were hosting them and much more than usual, he said.

“You name the fund, it was someone there hosting clients,” Marell Evans, an investor, also told TechCrunch. “Lots of folks missed Milken for F1 Miami.”  

F1 teams, once sponsored by major oil, tobacco, banks, and alcohol companies, have embraced the new railroad giants. The F1 team liveries this season — plastered with AI, cloud computing, and enterprise company logos — is a literal sign pointing to where the money is.

The past five years reflects the shift. In that time, Oracle became the title sponsor of Red Bull Racing team, the Mercedes-AMG PETRONAS F1 team struck a multi-year partnership with Microsoft, CoreWeave became Aston Martin Aramco’s official AI cloud partner, Anthropic began working with Williams Racing, Palantir and IBM partnered with Ferrari, AWS began providing data analytics to F1, and the audio app ElevenLabs and fintech Revolut have teamed up with Audi.

Some VC and PE firms also own stakes in F1 teams, including Dorilton Capital’s 2020 acquisition of Williams Racing and the 200 million euro investment into Alpine by backers Otro Capital, RedBird Capital Partners, and Maximum Effort Investments.

Hannan Happi, founder of the climate startup Exowatt, credits the 2020 Netflix F1 show “Drive to Survive” as a catalyst for increasing audience interest. But the tech industry showing up in force is more recent, Happi said, “really the last three or four years.” He cited all the big tech companies that have moved into the sport, including crypto and AI brands. “Where the sponsors go, the executives will follow,” he said.

A concentration of enterprise buyers

It’s no wonder, then, that TechCrunch ran into Lightspeed Ventures CMO Josh Machiz, who explained that founders and execs from many startups in its portfolio were also roaming the paddock. The goal for them, he said, was to strike some enterprise deals with other startups and tech giants.

Though TechCrunch ran into Machiz in the IBM Paddock, he said the firm actually has a formal program in place with the entity that owns Formula 1 for the three races in U.S. cities, Austin, Las Vegas, and Miami. As part of that program, he worked with Aston Martin Aramco and other F1 teams to help introduce Lightspeed founders to these entities and their enterprise clients. In the paddock, CIOs and CISOs stand next to CEOs, and rooms are small enough for people to actually chat with each other, Machiz said. Aston Martin, like all the F1 teams, is actively looking for ways to leverage the latest tech, as well as meet the founders behind it.

Technology has always been central to F1, helping drive advancements in consumer tech and car safety. Looking ahead is how teams stay ahead and these days, if a startup like Anthropic gets big enough, the team can nab a future sponsor, too.

Machiz calls Lightspeed the first firm to formalize this kind of partnership and said the Miami race brought in 10 portfolio companies. And it produced results, he said. One of the firm’s blockchain companies struck a handshake deal dover the weekend, and one of its AI infrastructure startups closed two more. Two came from Aston introductions, while the third came by chance, he said.

“The Aston Martin tech team also opened doors to our founders and talked about what they need from builders,” Machiz continued.

Machiz, who used to work at Redpoint, joined Lightspeed just a few months ago. One of the first things he wanted to do was to challenge the idea of the “traditional founder retreat,” where startups and their investors spend time in a remote location, talking, catching up, and, well, sometimes being bored out of their minds.

“The consistent ask from founders was always the same, ‘help me meet more buyers,’” Machiz said, recalling when he used to help plan founder retreats. “Another weekend in Sonoma was never going to do that, and the reviews were always that while [it was] nice to spend time together and to meet tech luminaries or VIP speakers, they’d have rather been building or meeting customers.”

Instead of another retreat, he took the Lightspeed Venture portfolio to F1. It is, after all, he said, “one of the densest concentrations of enterprise buyers anywhere.”

“The opportunity was obvious,” Machiz continued. “We wanted to build a structure around it, not just show up.”

Farooq Malik, founder of the Lightspeed company Rain, said he managed to close a deal, connect with another prospective client, and meet another founder whose product he’s interested in using as part of Rain’s ERP (enterprise resource planning). “This model was a lot more interactive with more organic interactions,” Malik said.

It’s not just startup founders, either. Evans, the investor, said backers are tired of going to dinner and attending conferences. “They want to see real-world experiences, and why not do it at the fastest-growing company in the world right now, F1?,” he mused.

Evans said top money makers like seeing how their business world intertwines with the tech these car teams are using.

“We’ve seen different brands showcase how they’re using AI for the drivers and some of the technology they’re using inside the cars,” he said.

‘Everyone there has capital’

Investor Immpana Srri said she went to Miami this year to look for deals and noted that over the past five years it has become a place for tech people to meet up.

“Sponsors followed, investors followed, and founders followed. Now it’s just where people are,” Srri said.

The race is actually quite fast, she said, and it’s the pre-race and post-race events that matter most over the three-day weekend. Srri flew in by herself, ran into some friends, then got an invite to the McLaren paddock and other brand activations — a micro-conference, she called it — where she met other operators, allocators, and founders.

“It’s all priced as a filter,” she said of how expensive tickets can be. “By the time you’re inside, the room has done the sorting for you. Everyone there has capital, the deal flow, or the kind of track record that justifies dropping six figures on a weekend.”  

Like Machiz, she also noted how tiny the spaces are — a pressure cooker of people quietly trying to one-up each other in conversations.

“Deals get showcased; names get dropped. Stuff gets teased. Over the weekend, I heard pitches across defense, CPG, and more,” she said.

Happi, the founder of Exowatt, said F1 champion-turned-investor Nico Rosberg stopped by the startup’s headquarters over the Miami Grand Prix weekend to see what the team was building.

Happi said F1 represents something tech also identifies with: “engineering excellence, rapid iteration, a willingness to spend big to win.”

The aesthetic of the whole sport, he continued, matches the startup world. It’s international by nature, he added, and the fact that the event usually lasts a few days gives people time to close a deal, should they wish.

“F1 is a luxury sport by nature, and that brings a certain type of person,” Happi said, adding that he’s heard of deals getting closed “in the helicopter to the hotel to the track.”

“And it doesn’t hurt that Miami and Las Vegas, suddenly two of the marquee races, are in really fun, entertainment-led cities,” he continued.

Miami kicked off the Lightspeed Aston Martin program, and Machiz hopes to continue throughout the season, at least at the U.S. races, the last of which is in Las Vegas in November. Then, he wants to expand his program internationally and is planning to bring a small group of their European founders to England’s Silverstone later this year.

“In AI, distribution is speed,” he said. “The firms that win are the ones that can get founders in front of buyers and into deals faster than anyone else.”

Update: The article was updated to include that Lightspeed has a formal program in place with Formula 1 for the three races in the United States.