Why we invested in Flare

AI can generate convincing statements faster than anyone can evaluate them. LLMs are becoming our primary information interface - whether when interacting with the web or acquiring knowledge about the world. But they're trained on unreliable data and hallucinate facts at scale, and an AI trained on yesterday's information cannot validate today's claims. The infrastructure for discernment hasn't scaled with the infrastructure for content - and that gap is growing fast.

Flare has one mission: fix the inaccuracy problem. They're building the infrastructure for knowledge validation - making the internet and LLMs more accurate and trustworthy.

That’s why we’re excited to share that byFounders co-invested with 20VC and a group of incredible angels from Stack Overflow, GitHub, Reddit, Meta, HubSpot, Kahoot, and Encord in Flare’s €3.6M pre-seed round. 

A mission-driven team solving one of the biggest challenges of our time

We were the first investor that Nicolai spoke to in May 2025, right after having decided to leave our portfolio company Corti to build something of his own. Very quickly thereafter, the two founders Nicolai Frost and Victor Birk became an integral part of the byFounders community since they decided to join us in our co-working space The Shack at the earliest stages of building Flare.

Knowing the people they had worked with, it was hard to find someone more highly referenced in the Copenhagen ecosystem. From the very beginning it became clear to us that we were dealing with two extremely smart individuals with a deep passion for solving one of the biggest challenges of our time.

“What stood out to us about Nicolai was his determination and extremely opinionated nature - there isn’t a topic he does not have an informed opinion about, and other than that he simply seems to not need sleep like regular people. With Victor, it’s rare to find an engineer that combines his level of technical depth with such an extreme level of EQ.”
— Sara Rywe, Partner at byFounders

At Corti, Nicolai led machine learning efforts, and Victor quickly rose the ranks within the infrastructure team - and here they saw first-hand the necessity of having accurate, verified data. Solving the problem of accuracy was critical for Corti - when working with healthcare, the margin of error is extremely low. This also formed the realization that the problem cannot be solved without humans in the loop.

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Trust infrastructure as AI outpaces human verification

Flare is developing the infrastructure for knowledge validation - a structured and transparent system where anyone reading online can see which statements are supported and not. By decentralizing how knowledge is built and validated, Flare strengthens information quality and the understanding of it.

Think of it as the trust layer of the internet - a platform where a community of verified contributors evaluate claims, and where users are motivated to contribute by gaining reputation for their contributions, much like Stack Overflow and Reddit before them.

This data not only helps users navigate accurate information, but also creates training data and real-time validations for AI systems. AI companies desperately need verified, permissioned data sources, and platforms need validation infrastructure they can actually trust. Flare provides both - combining automated claim detection across the web with human validation, creating a feedback loop where machine precision meets human judgment.

"We've spent years building systems that had to be both large and trustworthy. What's broken right now isn't that people are naïve. It's that the infrastructure for discernment hasn't scaled with the infrastructure for content. That's what we're building." 
— Nicolai Frost Kolborg Jacobsen, Co-founder & CEO

Launching the first website today 

Today also marks Flare's first day out of stealth and a new website where they are opening up for early signups. Starting with food and nutrition - a space where conflicting claims are rampant and people are actively seeking understanding in what they read - Flare is rolling out a product that gives them exactly that, while building more trust in the information they encounter online.

It's the first step toward a much larger vision, and we can't wait to see the community take shape.

Join the waitlist at flare.co.

We're proud to partner with Nicolai, Victor and the Flare team on this journey. Welcome to the byFounders family!

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