Inside the Second Annual Artemis Hunters Summit

May 27, 2026

By The Artemis Fund
The Artemis Fund believes technology can create prosperity for all. With offices in New York, Texas, Massachusetts, and Nevada, Artemis leads seed rounds for companies creating resilient families, individuals, and businesses across the US.
Earlier this month, we hosted the second annual Artemis Hunters Summit at The Holdsworth Center on Lake Austin.
Over three days, we brought together Artemis portfolio founders, exceptional Texas-based founders, co-investors, and operators for quality time together IRL. The stunning retreat-style campus nestled in the Texas Hill Country provided a nature-soaked respite from the daily grind.
The Artemis Hunters Summit exists because the founders doing the hardest, most important work deserve a space built around them. Artemis founders are a rare group, at different stages and in different markets, but are connected by a shared conviction: the problems worth solving are the ones most people walk past. The ancient Greeks had a goddess for this: Artemis, the huntress. Relentless in pursuit, and never hunting alone. That's who we are together.

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We kicked off with a Welcome Reception featuring a blues folk band, a roaming magician whose tricks genuinely wowed the room (as pictured below), and a Tex-Mex fajita bar. It was a good crowd and a great night. Post-reception, our founders, speakers, and team headed to a speak easy style after hours hosted by our amazing partners at Justworks.

What We Learned
We opened each morning with a yoga class. Several people managed headstands for the first time, which felt fitting. The whole point of practice is that eventually you stop thinking about the skill and just do it. That's as true on a yoga mat as it is in building a company. We carried that into sessions.
Rethinking GTM with Dana Warren & Vivian Chang
Go-to-Market was a question we kept hearing from founders heading into this year. Not which channel to pick, but how to think about the whole motion. We built this session around that, bringing in two people with serious GTM credentials to work through it with the room.
Know your customer before you commit to a motion. A tight feedback loop with early buyers matters more than picking the right channel. When you do go to market, make it easy to say yes. Wedge product, price below the procurement threshold, and get in the door. The first contract doesn't have to be the hero contract.
Building a Team That Scales with Emily Bartels & LaToya Allison
The decisions that define whether a company scales or stalls tend to look different for every founder, depending on where they are, what they're building, and who was there at the start. We built this session to work through those decisions, hosted by two operators who have navigated them from different vantage points.
The team that gets you to $1M is rarely the team that gets you to $10M. Assess honestly and early, act when you know the answer, and don't let the discomfort of a hard conversation cost you more than the conversation itself.

Building Technical Advantage That Lasts with Tasneem Minadakis & Zain Gulamali
Every founder is building with AI right now, and most are asking the same questions: where does real defensibility come from, and how do you build something that lasts when the tools are changing this fast? We designed this session around those questions, pairing two people who have built and invested at the intersection of technical infrastructure, data, and AI-first product.
The answer isn't about which model you pick or how fast you ship. It comes from how deeply embedded you become in your customer's workflow, especially in regulated, high-liability, or historically underserved verticals. Data alone is no longer a moat. Data plus workflow plus continuous user feedback is.
Founding, Scaling, & Disrupting in Regulated Industries with Justin Mares & Jeff Glueck
Led by two seasoned, repeat founders who have built in some of the most complex corners of healthcare, this conversation was less about surviving regulation and more about using it. The founders reshaping industries aren't reacting to where the system is.
They're building toward where it's going, and making a clear, credible argument that the future they see is the one regulators actually intended. Find where your mission and the intent of the regulation overlap, and make that case early and often.

Exit & Efficient Scaling with Mellie Price, Shanaz Hemmati, and Tara Zahiri
When it comes to exits, most founders have a number in their head, and usually it’s because someone told them what it should be. What they often don't have is a clear view of the math behind it, what LP expectations actually look like, or what it takes to build toward an exit on their own terms. We built this session to close that gap, with a panel of three operators and investors who have been on both sides of it.
The founders who scale well challenge every hire against real constraints, not optimistic projections. And the ones who exit well start building strategic relationships years before they need them, maintain leverage before the LOI, and never take their eye off the business during diligence.

Tactical AI in Practice, a group discussion
We designed this session differently, because the best thinking on AI right now isn't coming from just one expert on a stage. It's distributed across founders who are actually building with it every day. Getting that many of them in the same room doesn't happen often, so we made space for them to learn from each other.
Founders compared notes in real time on what's actually working with AI across their businesses. A few themes surfaced repeatedly: brand voice consistency is critical across AI tools, and needs to be revisited frequently. The zero-to-one product moment has gotten dramatically faster. And getting non-technical teammates to genuinely adopt AI requires more than encouragement. It requires sitting with them, identifying a specific pain point, building something that solves it, and following up.
After a day of hard work, we took a boat cruise on Lake Austin. And yes, of course we had BBQ for dinner. We had to cut the cruise short as a storm rolled in, but we kept the party going in one of the hotel’s “teacher” lounges.

Looking Ahead
The best thing that happened at Summit wasn't in any single session. It was founders realizing they weren't as alone as they thought, that the people sitting next to them were carrying the same questions, the same doubts, and the same drive. Year two brought in roughly 80% of our portfolio, with many returning founders bringing their co-founders along. In our post-event survey, 100% said they would recommend the Summit to a fellow founder. We'll take that.
Deep thanks to our Gold Sponsors: Hunton Andrews Kurth, Justworks, Spoke, and Microsoft for Startups, and our Silver Sponsors: Morrison Foerster, Texas Capital Bank, Sentant, Withum, and Hire Tomorrow, who made this event possible.

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