monday.com launches $200 million AI venture arm for startups

monday.com is moving beyond software subscriptions and into startup investing, creating a $200 million venture arm to back artificial intelligence companies that could shape how work gets done inside its own platform. The new fund, monday Ventures, starts with $50 million and can grow only with board approval, a sign the company is treating AI as both a product strategy and a hedge against disruption.

The fund will write individual checks of $1 million to $5 million and invest at every stage, with a focus on startups building “the next layers of innovation in the world of work.” Globes said the arm is meant to accelerate technology companies in Israel, especially those building tools that help enterprises, teams and workers make decisions and create business value. Three investments have already been made, with a fourth expected.

The clearest signal of where monday.com wants to go comes from the first disclosed bets. One is Blocks.diy, founded by former monday.com employees Tal Haramati and Michal Lupu, which builds digital workers to improve work processes. Another is Guidde, an AI company that turns work processes into video training manuals, where monday Ventures joined a $50 million Series B. The third is NanoCo, which raised $12 million and makes NanoClaw, a personal AI assistant. monday.com had already led a $10 million seed round for Blocks in September 2025, its first-ever investment, making the new fund look less like a pivot than a formal expansion of a pattern already underway.

Aviel Ichai, who leads monday Ventures, said the firm has already started investing and is just at the beginning. That matters because monday.com’s own platform strategy has shifted sharply this spring. On May 6, 2026, the company said it was rebuilding itself from a work management platform into an AI Work Platform centered on people and AI agents working together. It has since introduced native AI agents, onboarding infrastructure for those agents and a consumption-based pricing model.

The investment push also lands against a complicated backdrop. monday.com reported first-quarter 2026 revenue of $351.3 million, up 24% year over year, along with record GAAP and non-GAAP operating income and continued growth in larger customers. The company now says it serves more than 250,000 customers worldwide. But investors have also worried that AI could eat into monday.com’s business, and Globes reported the stock had fallen 82.6% from its 2021 peak before recovering somewhat. Backing startups now gives monday.com a way to influence the ecosystem around work software, not just the product it sells.

That ecosystem already includes one-click connectors to Anthropic’s Claude, Microsoft 365 Copilot and OpenAI’s ChatGPT. For engineers, product managers and sales teams inside monday.com, the message is hard to miss: the company is betting that the future of work software will be built around agents, connectors and workflow infrastructure, and it wants to own more of that stack than a single app can hold.