17-year-old Eric Zhu's startup was built in a high school bathroom — now it's raised $2.3M and is emerging from stealth

Eric Zhu started building Aviato, an analytical platform for private market data, in a very atypical place for an entrepreneur: the bathroom in his Carmel, Indiana, high school. Now the 17-year-old’s startup is emerging from stealth with $2.3 million in venture funding.

Aviato tracks funding rounds and headcount, similar to competitors like Crunchbase and PitchBook, as well as data points like company credit card revenue data, employee vesting schedules, and where top engineers are currently working, in addition to other metrics. If that sounds a little like what SignalFire built for its internal database, that’s intentional. Zhu said Aviato’s goal is to build a platform that resembles what SignalFire has built internally; in fact, he said that his startup has worked closely with the firm’s founder, Walter Kortschak, to build out its product.

Zhu told TechCrunch that he credits his early interest in venture capital and startups from being in the right place at the right time during the boring days of the pandemic, learning about the space from Discord group chats he joined in 2020, when he was 13, that included people like Sam Altman.

This interest led him to launch a company called Esocial, a digital platform for schools, in 2021; it was acquired 10 months later. Shortly after, he joined Bachmanity Capital, which backs early-stage companies that have strong government application potential. Building the fund is when he got the idea for Aviato. He realized that while data startups like PitchBook and Crunchbase were good at tracking data, they were lacking that analytical layer that he thought was missing to make these platforms really useful.

“Aviato came from the idea that private market data has been historically super unstructured,” Zhu said. “That’s why funds are spending tens of millions of dollars to make their internal databases.”

To build Aviato, a nod to HBO’s “Silicon Valley” TV show, Zhu took meetings from his high school bathroom. He’d set up in the stall with a green screen, a ring light and an excuse to be out of class. Zhu ended up getting kicked out of school for doing so, but not before he was able to land customers like NEA, Republic Capital and 8VC.

Aviato’s $2.3 million seed funding came from 8VC, Soma Capital and SoftBank, among others. Eric Bahn, a co-founder and general partner at Hustle Fund, made a personal investment in the startup a few years ago. Bahn told TechCrunch that he took a meeting with Zhu after the teenager sent him one of the better cold emails Bahn had ever received. Bahn described that Zoom call as bizarre.

“He had his braces on,” Bahn recalled about Zhu, who was 14 years old at the time. “He clearly looked quite young, but he was oddly mature. The really strange part is he was clearly in the bathroom stall as a high school freshman, and I was like, ‘Where the f*** are you right now?’ I literally said that. He said, ‘I pretended that I had diarrhea, so I think I have like 30 minutes to chat with you.’”

Bahn said he made a $3,000 investment at the time and joked that he probably was flushing it down the figurative, and literal, toilet. But now, three years later, he feels differently as Zhu has matured and the product has come to fruition.

“I started to play with the product myself; it’s pretty elegantly made,” Bahn said. “He’s already proven to me one thing: the quality of people he’s hired. His more executive team, they are very serious builders.”

Last fall, the startup brought on David Razavi, the former CTO of LowerMyBills and former product lead at LendingTree, as a co-founder and COO. Harrison Kessel rounds out the founding team and serves as CTO. Kessel was the third employee at Sequoia-backed Zeet, where he built out the developer-focused data application platform’s data infrastructure.

Zhu has now moved to San Francisco and is working to finish his high school degree online. He said that his parents are still a little confused about what he is doing, and his mom may still want him to be a doctor, but Zhu doesn’t seem too concerned about that.

“We’ve built a product, and a lot of people like it,” Zhu said. “Our customer base is venture funds, private equity funds and more. I want to sell to every single person that works with private markets in general. We will be able to replace PitchBook.”