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Articles by AJ
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A Positive-Sum On-Chain Venture Ecosystem
A Positive-Sum On-Chain Venture Ecosystem
While investing in startups has grown significantly more accessible in recent years with the popularity of AngelList…
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Venture Capital w/ 1000x SoftwareDec 31, 2024
Venture Capital w/ 1000x Software
We're at the precipice of a transformation of the valuation framework we've been using for venture-backed software for…
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Activity
6K followers
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AJ S. shared thisHealthcare clinics spend hours on referrals, intake, documentation, and follow-up before they are even able to actually practice medicine. Insight Health AI, Inc. is automating all of the admin headaches that get in the way of what matters most - serving their patients. With over 3 million conversations across multiple specialties, they're proving the model works where it matters most. Congrats on the $11M Series A!AJ S. shared thisToday is a big day for Insight Health. We are officially announcing $11M in Series A funding led by Standard Capital, with participation from Pear VC, Kindred Ventures, Eudemian Ventures, ElevenLabs, and 43. Healthcare's administrative crisis is enormous. Over $1 trillion in annual overhead, 50%+ staff turnover at many practices, and 80% of physicians reporting that administrative burden contributes to burnout, which negatively impacts patient care. We built Insight Health's voice-first clinical agents so healthcare organizations can operate at the level their patients deserve, and we are seeing first hand that the healthcare organizations that embrace the power of AI to alleviate these challenges will be the ones that thrive and better serve their patients. Insight Health has completed more than 3 million autonomous clinical conversations with patients, and our customers like The Oregon Clinic, Pacific Sports & Spine, Coastal Health, and Santiam Hospital are collectively saving over $50 million in annual administrative costs. I truly believe that 2026 is the year patient-facing AI will take off, and we are proud to be part of that evolution of healthcare. I’m deeply grateful to our investors like Dalton Caldwell, Kanyi Maqubela, Soso Sazesh, Kathleen Estreich, Andrew Parambath MD MBA, Raoul Felix Maier, Abbas Haider Ali, AJ S., Invariantes Fund, Andrea Funsten, Steve Jang, RTP Global, Bo Berluti, Angie Lal, Calvin French-Owen, Chuck Hwang, Peter Reinhardt, Christian Monberg, Neej Gore, Eleanor Dorfman, Kevin Niparko, Tido Carriero, Diede van Lamoen, James Ho, Christie Kong, Rishi Shah, Tejas Manohar, David Russo, DO, MPH, Trey Rigert, my co-founders Eric Stecker, Saran S., Pankaj Gore, MD, and the amazing team we’ve built, and the healthcare organizations building this future alongside us. Read more about our news today in Fortune (link in comments) #AIinHealthcare #DigitalHealth #Fundraise Insight Health AI, Inc.
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AJ S. reposted thisAJ S. reposted thisThere's a hidden tax on every knowledge worker in the world, and nobody talks about it: The design tax. You're a strategist, a sales lead, a marketer. You were hired for what you know. But every meeting, every pitch, every proposal expects you to show up with something that looks like a designer made it. I lived this. Before Gamma, I spent time in consulting and investment banking. I spent more hours formatting slides than the analysis that went into them. When my cofounders and I started Gamma, we asked: what if you never had to be a designer in the first place? Five years and nearly 100 million users later, we've refunded billions of hours of the design tax. Today, we're eliminating it for good with our biggest launch ever. Gamma Imagine — a powerful, AI-native visual creation tool directly in Gamma. Posters, logos, infographics, visuals from a single prompt. On brand, every time. AI-Native Templates. Templates were supposed to save you from design work. Instead you spent the time filling them in. So we completely rebuilt the template experience. Modify a whole deck with a single prompt, with your brand and style intact every time. Gamma Connectors. You're already thinking in ChatGPT and Claude. Now Gamma sits inside the most popular work apps in the world. No more context-switching. You were hired for your ideas, not to resize text boxes. Let Gamma pay the design tax.
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AJ S. reposted thisAJ S. reposted thisVery proud to announce our multi-year partnership with PayPal. The world is changing. Billing is becoming the system of record that drives revenue strategy, and it's moving upstream. It's not an afterthought you implement after payments anymore. Pricing models have become increasingly complex. Not just because of usage-based. Think hybrids, multi-product catalogs, different GTM motions coexisting in the same company: self-serve, enterprise sales, channel partnerships. With AI being embedded in every product, this complexity isn't going anywhere. When the company synonymous with global payments picks you to power their billing infrastructure, it says a lot about where the market is going, and about the product we've built at Lago. This wouldn't have been possible without our relentless commitment in open-source, composability and developer experience, and of course the team's incredible work, especially Jérémy Brian Raffi.
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AJ S. reposted thisAJ S. reposted this“Harvard should start teaching plumbing instead of computer science.” That’s what an investor tweeted after an obscenely high quote for a water heater. So I reached out and said “we’re a couple Harvard guys starting a plumbing company.” He invested. As a homeowner, you look up the cost of hardware, which seems reasonable. And then you’re absolutely floored when you get the real price including installation. You feel like you’re getting fleeced (and you often are). The price of installing a water heater is so high because: 1) there’s a trade shortage, 2) there’s a lot of red tape to jump through even for basic plumbing work, and 3) there’s too much information asymmetry when it comes time to get plumbing work done. You’re smart, but how much time do you have to think about plumbing? At Reservoir we’re going after all three issues. 1) We’re engaging trade schools to build a tech enabled workforce that builds excitement with a new generation (yes, plumbing is cool!). 2) We’re standardizing the home review, install and permit process and digitizing as much as we can to cut time, friction and costs. 3) We’re publishing transparent pricing because we’re not afraid to. We know we're competitive in Boston. Our goal is to be the most reliable, comfortable and affordable way of enjoying hot water. We’re just getting started. Thanks for just “getting it”, AJ S..
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AJ S. reposted thisAJ S. reposted thisToday we're publicly releasing the details behind onepot CORE — an enumerated chemical space of 3.4 billion synthesizable molecules, backed by our automated synthesis platform and AI chemist, Phil. The problem we're solving: The "make" step remains the biggest bottleneck in drug discovery. Existing on-demand synthesis options take 4-5 weeks on average. That's too slow for modern discovery timelines. What we built: onepot CORE combines: → 3.4B compounds across 7 validated reaction classes → ML-based feasibility assessment trained on real experimental data → Fully automated synthesis from route selection through purification → US-based operations — no customs delays The result: Synthesis in as fast as 5 business days. Our partners can now run 5 iterations of compound selection in the time a single cycle used to take. In the paper, we walk through our space construction strategy, share real performance data on timelines and purity, and validate compound quality through NMR confirmation and biological assays. We believe democratizing small molecule synthesis will accelerate discoveries across pharmaceuticals, materials, and beyond. This is just the beginning — more reactions and multistep chemistry coming soon. Links to the blog and the paper are in the comments below.
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AJ S. reposted thisAJ S. reposted thisGowatch (YC W25) is the AI monitoring platform for businesses. Keep track of competitors, customers, investments, and more. Modern businesses lack a full picture of their market, and we provide them with clarity. Gowatch makes it easy to set up AI agents that search and monitor the web for anything important to your business and alert you when it happens. Users are already: 1. Tracking competitors' product launches and changelog updates 2. Monitoring job changes for customers in their CRM 3. Finding acquisition targets in the middle market The founders studied economics and computer science at Harvard and UW-Madison and worked in private equity, GTM at Datasite and Box, and built surveillance systems for the US Government. Congrats on the launch, Charlie Maki, Corey Anderson, and Cameron Hake! https://lnkd.in/gGgY8Age
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AJ S. reposted thisAJ S. reposted thisYour clients and prospects are already talking to AI. Why aren’t they talking to yours? 🤔 That changes today with MyClone - Your knowledge. Your clients. Your AI. Let me tell the quiet part out loud: for consultants, advisors, and coaches, you are the product. Your expertise drives impact, but your time, energy, and availability are limited. Imagine a version of you that: ⚡ Educates prospects while you’re offline ⚡ Generates revenue while you sleep ⚡ Engages with qualified leads while you’re busy Over the past 4 months, we’ve worked with 450+ consultants and coaches, living in their daily chaos. We captured it all in a 2-minute film about Jo, a sales consultant you’ll instantly recognize. Who is ready to use AI to scale themselves? 👇 Comment “clone” below for 1 month of Pro free.
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AJ S. reposted thisAJ S. reposted thisSuper excited to launch FactIQ today! Digging through government data sites is a nightmare. So we built FactIQ to fix it. It’s an AI search engine for the economic data. Ask a question → get instant, objective charts & reports based on official data. We built FactIQ for researchers, journalists, and public policy professionals - people that _really_ care about getting the right information to make decisions that matter. We are starting with US data, and will add China, India, and the EU in the coming weeks. Try it out (it's free!): factiq[dot]com
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AJ S. reposted thisAJ S. reposted thisThe TAM for AI isn’t “software.” It’s all of human labour. The real gold rush in AI today is RL environments + human-data infra where models actually learn to work, not chatbots and app layer "token streams" in your feed. The stakes are very high. Most white-collar automation isn’t a “capability” problem. It’s a verifiability problem. RL is the rocket fuel of this platform shift, and it’s powering companies like Mercor, Surge, Applied Compute, Fleet, Theta & co. We've been obsessed with this space. Sean Cai from Costanoa Ventures and I just published ~5k words (http:// bit.ly/4oJ4zOh) on our definitive view on RL environments + bonus reading on RLaaS in the appendix. Inside: a ton of founder quotes, a map of the RL env/human-data/RLaaS landscape, how teams actually go to market, and the checklist we now use to spot winners (and avoid RL theater). Huge thanks to Jerry Wu (Halluminate), Parth Patel (HUD), Rob Farlow (Plato), and other unnamed founders for sparring with us on this. More on twitter: https://lnkd.in/gqTvRNzm
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AJ S. liked thisAJ S. liked thisHi! Want to build your first app with AI? We’re hosting a free live session where we’ll show you how to find an app idea, build it with AI, and scale it to $1K MRR and more. I will host the stream with George Lampropoulos. The app he built on Rork made $131,863 in just 6 months with ~$1,100 in total spend. We'll walk through whole process of creating an app from scratch: • how to find an app idea • how to design and build it with AI • how to nail onboarding so people pay • how to scale to $1K MRR If you've been wanting to launch something but never knew where to start, this is the moment. 📅 April 7 (Tuesday), 1 pm PST 🌎 100% free and fully online Link to join the stream: https://luma.com/p66dm4s3 See you! Know someone who might find this useful? Share it with them or hit repost - I'd really appreciate it ❤️
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AJ S. liked thisAJ S. liked thisOur New York team showed up in Times Square to see Doppel’s campaign live on the Nasdaq tower! Huge thanks to Nasdaq for featuring us. Watching it in real life was a special moment, and a reminder of the work we’re doing to pioneer AI-native social engineering defense.
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AJ S. liked thisAJ S. liked thisDC is no bellwether. Most of us see Capitol Hill through a screen, but the parts of government that are real – the water department, the permitting office, and the public hearing – that’s where government is felt and where trust is built. And when a resident’s call goes unanswered, that trust erodes. Not just in a department, but in the system itself. So we built something that makes sure those calls get answered. Now tens of thousands a month. Strong local governments are the backbone of our nation, and this is how we’ve chosen to serve the national interest.
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AJ S. liked thisProud to be part of the Massachusetts AI Coalition, which recently announced its Founder Starter Pack connecting founders to resources, networks & more in Boston 💡 🎊AJ S. liked thisToday, the Founder Starter Pack application offered by the Beacon Taskforce is officially live. Here are the specifics on what Beacon founders get in the Founder Starter Pack: 1. Free GPU credits from providers. 2. 6-months of free co-working space surrounded be fellow founders. We will have player options to extend if you crush. 3. Access & intros to founders and operators who've actually scaled billion dollar companies through IPOs and acquisitions. 4. Discounts on technology. 5. Exclusive events with fellow founders, builders, investors, and leaders shaping the AI ecosystem And that's just the starting line. Beacon has tiered benefits — the more you build, the more the ecosystem unlocks for you. We're looking for the most ambitious AI founders in the country who want to build in Massachusetts, and we plan to give them access to fast, flexible capital, free GPUs, free buildings to work out of, and more. College dropout with a demo? PhD spinning out of a lab? Repeat founder going again? First-time builder taking the leap? Researcher who's done publishing and ready to start shipping? We want ALL OF YOU. You can be from here or you can be from anywhere: San Fran, NYC, Austin, Miami, LA, the Middle East, Europe, Asia, Africa, South America, Australia, Antarctica. If you are willing to be in Boston for 6+ months and build, you are able to apply for benefits, and we will have our entire community of the Massachusetts AI Coalition support you. This ecosystem is showing up for founders in a way it never has before. No equity ask. No catch. No strings. Just real support from experienced founders, operators and companies who have been through IPOs, been through billion dollar acquisitions, and founded and scaled companies. Massachusetts has world-class talent, elite research institutions, and deep capital. It's time to bring all of that together. Short application. Link in the comments. Let's go.
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AJ S. liked thisAJ S. liked thisGreat article on our recent AI research report from HOTEL MANAGEMENT Magazine ! We surveyed hoteliers across the globe to see how they’re thinking about AI — and the results point to a major shift for the industry. Worth a read for those following where hotel tech is headed: https://lnkd.in/eSw6Y3NeReport: Hotel AI adoption surges with 82% expanding use in 2026Report: Hotel AI adoption surges with 82% expanding use in 2026
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AJ S. liked thisAJ S. liked this2 years since our YC Demo Day. Feels surreal writing this. Back then, we were just a 2 member team with an idea. A lot of conviction, very little clarity. We had plans. We had a roadmap. We thought we knew what we were building. Reality had other plans. Post YC, we unlearned a lot. Dropped ideas we were convinced about. Spoke to customers. Changed direction. Took bets. Some worked. Many didn’t. But we kept moving. What followed was tremendous growth. - From 0 to 10,000+ customers. - From $0 to $200M+ annual processing. - Team grew 7x. - Volume scaled 100x+. More than numbers, we went from guessing to understanding. From building in isolation to building with customers. The biggest learning? Building a company is less about being right and more about being willing to change. Again and again. You start with an idea. You build. You get it wrong. You listen. You rebuild. That cycle never really stops. Grateful for the team that stayed through the uncertain days. Grateful for customers who trusted us when we were still early. 2 years in. Still feels like Day 1. A lot more to build.
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AJ S. liked thisAJ S. liked thisExciting news at Unit21: Tyler Allen is the new CEO of Unit21. I am transitioning to Founder & Chairman. When we started Unit21, the thesis was simple: Giving tools to operators would fundamentally rewrite the rules of financial crime. Most people thought AML and fraud was a checkbox, not a product category. The industry was stuck in the dark ages of legacy tools. Years later, Unit21 is the infrastructure for the world's leading institutions. We monitor > 1.5B txns a month, power AML and fraud for customers in 90+ countries, and file 5% of all SARs in the US. Tyler was our first hire seven years ago. He has the rare technical DNA and ambition-without-permission required to lead at this scale. Most recently, he architected our pivot to an AI-first strategy, a move that has already seen our AI review 1M+ alerts with 98% accuracy. He doesn’t just understand the game. He actually knows how to change the rules. As Chairman, I'll be focused on our most important strategic partnerships and the next frontier of AI Risk Infrastructure. Building Unit21 has been the defining work of my career so far. I'm excited for the next chapter of Unit21 with us rewriting how the industry thinks about this space with AI. Onward. PS: A callback to our first company trip 6.5 years ago at Zion National Park (Tyler is on the far right). We’ve come a long way from the desert. The best is yet to come.
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AJ S. liked thisWHOOP just filed a lawsuit against us. A $10B company with 800+ employees is scared of us, a 20-person team making health tracking accessible to all. Rather than focusing on product and innovation, Whoop has decided to use its newly raised capital on lawfare. In this video, I share our side of the story, explain why their claims are baseless, and why we believe fighting back is the right thing to do.AJ S. liked thisWhoop filed a lawsuit against us, and this is our response. Over the last 2 years, we've worked tirelessly to make health tracking accessible to all. In this video, we share our side of the story, explain why their claims are baseless, and why we believe fighting back is the right thing to do. We've been preparing and are confident in our defense. This isn't the end for Bevel. We have a major update coming soon, and we're just getting started.
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Daniel Dart
Rock Yard Ventures • 10K followers
🚨NEW EPISODE: Recorded live at FUTURE TITANS 2026 - Jeff Perry of Carta sat down with the iconic Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry. Seth has been in venture for 25 years, built Foundry from scratch as an emerging manager himself, and has backed about 50 emerging manager funds through his fund of funds. He has genuinely seen every side of this table. They went deep on building Foundry, why VCs are in the influence business, not the decision business, and why the concentration problem in venture is not only bad for LPs, but also for the innovation ecosystem overall. And why Seth's new book, Capital Evolution, is so important for the future of America. 🎧 Links to listen... Apple: https://lnkd.in/ehQUQ2EM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eU4FExpg
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Casey Berman
Camber Creek • 4K followers
Camber Creek led the $3.7 million Seed round for TwinKnowledge, which is tackling an important problem in the built environment. Construction projects get delayed and rework is required because of discrepancies across construction documents, submittals, requests for information, design, and other plans. TwinKnowledge’s AI Agents absorb structured and unstructured project data, surfacing and preventing conflicts before the work begins. We’re excited about our partnership with CEO Ivan Panushev and his team. #construction #AEC #AI #technology https://ow.ly/mBYX50VtaVG
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Salesfully.com
2K followers
Startups don’t need VC to grow. Revenue-based financing doubled from $1.8B in 2021 to over $3.8B in 2024 and average deals are ~$350k with a 6% cap. Funding mix in 2025: VC 52%, crowdfunding 14%, RBF 11%, angels 10%, partnerships 7%, grants 6%. 1,500 companies raised $700M via crowdfunding in 2023. Explore smarter funding options: https://lnkd.in/ebTeA_MX #StartupFunding #AlternativeFinance
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Kate McAndrew
Baukunst • 26K followers
What do creative technologists build? At Baukunst, we’ve spent the last few years answering that question in real time. We are a collective of builders — operators, designers, engineers, and investors — committed to advancing the art of building at the frontiers of technology and design. We lead pre-seed rounds with conviction, often as the first institutional capital a founder takes, and we invest deeply in the messy, magical early days of company creation. This deck is the portfolio behind that philosophy, or rather that portfolio that has grown up out of it. We have chosen to champion these companies, and they chosen to co-create with us. These are companies built by creative technologists, founders who think in systems, design for real people, and push beyond the familiar.
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Matt Rappaport
Future Frontier Capital • 8K followers
Don't Build a Better Wheat Farm" - Why Defensibility Stakes Are Higher in Deep Tech Just published a new piece on my "Ignore the Confusion" blog, building on thoughtful insights from Eric Ver Ploeg at Tunitas Ventures about startup defensibility. Eric's core thesis: Too many startups pitch like wheat farmers - "huge TAM, slow incumbents, growing market, domain expertise" - but fail to think through long-term defensibility until it's too late. From a deep tech perspective, the stakes are even higher: ** Unlike software, deep tech founders must commit to defensibility strategies from day one - their funding depends on it ** Patent vs. trade secret decisions are often difficult to reverse and shape your entire competitive strategy ** Even "picks and shovels" providers (the tools that make industries more efficient) become commodities without proper moats The key insight that resonates: Defensibility can't be retrofitted. Whether you're building software or deep tech, your moat must be architected into the business model from the start. Thanks to Eric Ver Ploeg for sharing these insights on startup strategy and letting me build on his framework from a deep tech lens. Read the full post: https://lnkd.in/dEj_iF-Q #DeepTech #StartupStrategy #Defensibility #VentureCapital #Innovation
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Arnaud van der Wyck
Concrete VC • 2K followers
https://lnkd.in/d6M6zQVR Exciting News: Concrete Ventures is proud to announce our investment in AUAR! We're thrilled to back AUAR, a pioneering construction robotics startup transforming homebuilding with timber and automation. AUAR's innovative deployable robotic "Micro-Factory" can produce timber-frame homes on-site, drastically reducing construction costs by up to 40% and labor requirements by an impressive 96%. AUAR recently secured £5.1 million in funding, bringing their total raised to £7.7 million. With a current valuation of £26.1 million, their ambitious plans include supporting over 200 builders and producing 100,000 carbon-negative homes by 2030, projecting over £200 million in revenue. They also aim to expand across Europe and launch a mid-rise timber housing system in 2026. We believe AUAR's technology will play a crucial role in building a more sustainable and efficient future for construction. Read more about this groundbreaking development here: AUAR Secures Over £5 Million #PropTech #ConTech #Innovation #VentureCapital #SustainableBuilding #Robotics #Construction #Investment #AUAR #ConcreteVentures
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Astasia Myers
Felicis • 6K followers
GPUs have gotten faster, and models have gotten larger. But storage is still stuck in the past. Modern AI workloads need instant access to huge datasets. Instead, teams waste time on slow retrieval, idle GPUs, and costly pipelines. Archil is changing this. It delivers object-storage scalability at block-storage speeds. The platform allows for seamless, high-performance access to massive datasets. By eliminating cold starts and accelerating throughput 30X, Archil enables teams to fully utilize their infrastructure and move faster on training, analytics, and AI deployment. Archil’s founder Hunter Leath brings rare technical depth and operating experience from building Amazon EFS and optimizing Netflix’s cloud performance. This is a team building the foundational layer that AI workloads desperately need. I’m thrilled to lead Archil’s seed at Felicis with Nancy Wang and support their mission to reinvent cloud storage for the AI era. https://lnkd.in/gWueXhzz
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Nic Poulos
Euclid • 10K followers
It goes by a lot of names: MSO, synthetic rollup, business-in-a-box. But earning a right to sharing in customers' upside is unique vertical strategy. Shopify, Honor, Compass, DoorDash, TaskRabbit, OpenDoor, Grow Therapy. What does it take to win that level of customer trust early? Sometimes, it means doing things that don't scale. Services can play a big role. We asked Dan Friedman, founder of another champion of the model: Moxie Get Dan's take in this clip from our latest episode.
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Tim Schumacher
World Fund • 27K followers
The energy transition is not only about generating clean electricity. It is also about building the infrastructure that can deliver it efficiently at scale⚡ As electrification accelerates across AI, mobility and industry, the demand placed on power systems is increasing dramatically. This creates opportunities for new technologies that rethink how electricity is converted and distributed. That is why I am very happy to welcome Hyperscale Power to the World Fund portfolio. Huge credit to Daria Saharova, Dr.-Ing. Mark Windeknecht and Robin Neff for leading this investment and supporting the company from the very beginning. The team at Hyperscale Power is developing solid state transformers that are dramatically smaller and more efficient than traditional systems, enabling new possibilities for data centres, EV charging and renewable energy infrastructure. Congratulations to Daniel Rothmund and Sami Pettersson on the €5M seed round, and welcome to the World Fund family. We are excited to work together with our friends at Vsquared Ventures as the company grows. Press coverage in TechCrunch. https://lnkd.in/deXmPnv6
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Jordan Steiner, CFA
Developer Capital • 3K followers
"Build the event you wish existed" That's what we at Monadical did last week at #NYTW. We wanted an AI Engineers discussion for Engineers. There's always a lot of events out there for VCs to network, or for startups to learn about G2M, but very little on lessons learned from actual engineers in the field. So that's the event we hosted. Big thank yous to our awesome panel, Roy Pereira, Ben Cohen and Corey J. Gallon. Here's the key takeaways and the AI tools we're using. 🚀 All three panelists independently called AI Agents the most transformative LLM application they’ve used. They specifically called out Claude 3.5 Sonnet for its accuracy and reliability. 🪨 We dug into how LLMs are “jagged”, not general. They can be shockingly good at some tasks and completely fail at others. Everyone agreed: good evaluations are critical (and hard.) 🧪 Corey noted how public benchmarks and reality are two different things. Most public evals are saturated or gamed. ♊ Ben emphasized that AI projects are actually two projects: building the tool and building the evaluation process. 🧱 We explored how falling dev costs may impact startup defensibility and labor demand. Roy shared that founders are already shifting strategies in response. ⚒️ In a world of daily AI launches, the panel discussed how they decide what’s worth attention, and what’s just noise. They called out tools like Goose, Aider, Claude Code, and Monadical’s own Cubbi, which helps run agentic workflows safely in dev environments. (links in the comments). CTA: What would you want to hear in an AI Applied Engineering talk you attended?
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Neal Ghosh
9point8 Collective • 3K followers
Trying something new this week - a studio industry roundup with my take on what matters. The studio model is no longer an experiment being run in a handful of places. It is infrastructure being built across geographies, sectors, and institutional types. 5️⃣ stories from the past seven days: 1️⃣ OSS Ventures hit a EUR 40M first close on a EUR 75M follow-on fund -- capital raised specifically to back the 30 companies their studio created since 2019. The "build then fund" lifecycle is maturing. B'More Venture Studio with a similar thesis: studio operations first, then dedicated capital to scale what's working. 2️⃣ Delta40 raised $20M from 54 investors across 13 countries to launch Africa's first integrated venture studio and fund. The LP base is almost entirely DFIs and foundations. Impact capital is discovering the studio model as a deployment vehicle, something I seeing across geographies (conversations with Michael Bob Starr and Damias McDonald this week alone) 3️⃣ Start Holdings launched Start.vc out of NYC and Barcelona after a $200M EV infrastructure exit. Another operator-turned-studio-founder. This is the pattern we see quite often in our work at 9point8 -- experienced operators like Jason Goldsmith who've built and exited deciding the studio model is how they want to build next. 4️⃣ UBC HATCH admitted 10 new deep-tech spinouts for Winter 2026 -- mostly climate tech. University venture builders are quietly becoming one of the fastest-growing segments. Follow Evan Allen and Jaimie Testai to keep track of its rapid evolution. 5️⃣ The INVEST Act is advancing through the Senate. If passed, it expands qualifying VC fund size from $10M to $50M and loosens general solicitation rules for accelerator and university events. For studio-funds -- and for folks in the The Venture Studio Forum community tracking policy -- this could be the most significant capital formation legislation since the JOBS Act. If this roundup format is useful, I'll keep it going. What other noteworthy news hit your desk this week, and what stood out to you?
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Ryan Sommerville
Antler • 11K followers
Thrilled to share the launch of Criticality, a $65M fund built to back founders solving hard, high-leverage problems at the intersection of technical complexity and real-world urgency. Criticality builds on the foundation we’ve laid at Antler - applying our conviction-driven approach to companies at Seed & Series A. The fund is sector-flexible but applies a deep tech lens to each opportunity, targeting non-obvious, high-leverage problems from the earliest stages of company formation. Grateful to the New Mexico State Investment Council for their support in anchoring Criticality. More to come soon from Cash Allred & I.
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PYMNTS
116K followers
Plaid's CEO just said the next five years will look completely different than the last five, but somehow that's not even this week's biggest plot twist. This week, we're breaking down the moves that matter: 💡 Plaid CEO Zach Perret tells Karen Webster the company is evolving from data connectivity to becoming "the analytics platform for financial services" while betting big on agentic AI. https://hubs.ly/Q03v4JdD0 📉 Main Street businesses are struggling hard, growing at just two-thirds the rate of larger companies as restaurants and retail get hammered by cautious consumer spending. https://hubs.ly/Q03v4H_C0 🛡️ Block's Brian Boates reveals how Cash App prevented $2 billion in P2P fraud since 2020 using machine learning models that warn users about only 1.5% of payments. https://hubs.ly/Q03v4GPm0 ⚖️ A federal judge rules Anthropic can train AI with books without permission under fair use, dealing a major blow to authors seeking copyright protections. https://hubs.ly/Q03v4G-d0 🏦 Mastercard opens its account-to-account instant payments sandbox to UK banks, letting them test new services without breaking critical infrastructure. https://hubs.ly/Q03v4H1Q0 💰 Fiserv launches its own stablecoin FIUSD on Solana, joining the rush of traditional finance companies entering the digital asset space. https://hubs.ly/Q03v4G-f0 Big question of the week: If AI companies can legally train on copyrighted content, what does that mean for every creative industry's future? Thanks for tuning in, we'll see you next week.
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Eran Sandhaus
J-Impact Fund • 17K followers
We are thrilled to celebrate Powerline’s $7M Seed round and our partnership with this exceptional team. Led by Matineh Eybpoosh and Julian Lamy, Powerline is solving the most critical bottleneck of the energy transition: the "Intelligence Gap." As global energy demand surges, the grid requires capacity that is both faster to deploy and hyper-efficient to operate. Powerline is proving that the answer lies in software-driven intelligence. Their AI platform — the Battery Co-Pilot™ — radically improves the unit economics of energy storage, converting batteries from passive backup into high-yield financial assets. They are already delivering measurable results across the energy lifecycle: Existing Installations: Retrofitting "brownfield" battery portfolios with an intelligence layer that captures missed revenue and manages market volatility. New Deployments: Providing the digital testbeds needed to scale global fleets with institutional precision, significantly shortening the path to ROI. Legacy Displacement: Delivering a cost-effective alternative to polluting "peaker-plants," which can cost up to $200/MWh more than an optimized Powerline fleet. While solar-plus-storage is now consistently 20-30% cheaper than new-build gas, the real victory is in how that hardware is managed. At J-Impact Fund, we focus on the massive value creation that occurs when technology turns energy scarcity into abundance. By shifting the grid from a model of expensive, finite fuel to one of persistent, harvested power, we unlock superior financial upside. For us, deep decarbonization is the inevitable byproduct of this superior economic model. Congratulations to Matineh, Julian, and the entire team—we are proud to be on this journey with you. #EnergyStorage #AIOptimization #VentureCapital #AssetManagement #SeriesSeed #FinancialAlpha
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Jos White
3K followers
Today Isembard announced a $50m Series A fundraise led by Union Square Ventures, less than a year after Notion Capital led their Seed round. 💥This is a company right at the intersection of AI & supply chain sovereignty & they’re exceeding even our most optimistic expectations. By the end of the year they will have 25 factories across the UK, US, Germany, France & Ukraine. 💥Isembard is rapidly scaling its network of AI-first factories for precision manufacturing at the same time as market demand is accelerating. Macro forces (reshoring, rising defence spend, concentration risk in Asia, and the growth of neo-primes) are structurally increasing demand for fast, local, flexible manufacturing that the current industry is unable to deliver on. 💥The innovation is in the way the company builds and franchises factories as a product with tightly integrated units of machines, software, robotics, & process intelligence that turn design files into certified components with speed & reliability. 💥Their AI software platform, MasonOS, connects all sites into a single operating system, replacing fragmented shops with standardised, high-performance industrial nodes & enabling real-time quoting, predictable delivery, & low defect rates. By owning the full production stack, Isembard delivers premium manufacturing performance with the scalability & flexibility of a software platform. 💥We are at the top of the AI hype cycle and there are understandable concerns about the ROI on the vast sums of money being invested into this new super-cycle. But, the ROI for Isembard is both clear and compelling. They will deliver components 10x faster and at 50% of the cost of current suppliers. They will also build a de-centralised, global network of factories to meet the growing demand for national or regional sovereignty. 💥This is a company with a clear vision to disrupt a massive, fragmented $1.8tn component manufacturing market. Today marks another huge stride towards that vision. And they are only just getting started. We’re thrilled to be on this journey with Alexander Fitzgerald & the team & we’re also excited to welcome Rebecca Kaden & USV into the investor base. Notion Capital Union Square Ventures Alexander Fitzgerald Rebecca Kaden Maximilian Eichler Stephen Millard Britt Mulder
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JT Benton
9point8 Collective • 8K followers
The #fundraising function is always-on for #VentureStudio founders. And many emerging studio leaders report it being much harder than they expected. In my experience, the problem isn't with the studio model, but rather the way it's being explained. The mechanics of running venture studios are different - and I'd argue more complex - than a typical startup or a VC fund. For many studio GP's, the instinct is to explain that complexity upfront. We sometimes call this the "Studio Monologue." Instead of leading with complexity, we help our studio partners win with clarity. Our framework turns scattered narratives into crisp, investor-ready theses. We cover this - and a lot more - in our latest paper - "The GP Dilemma: Escaping the Venture Studio Trap." I've linked it to this post - for free. Want to learn more? DM me and we'll find a time to connect!
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Benjamin Gordon
Cambridge Capital LLC • 32K followers
AI isn't just powering software. BrightAI just raised $51 million to automate inspection and other hardware-based AI capabilities. As Alexa von Tobel, co-founder of Inspired Capital put it: “So many people are so focused on the future of digital AI, but we’re excited about this new layer of AI: the physical world AI.” We are in the early innings of a series of AI-fueled innovations! https://lnkd.in/enhmafvH
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Nick Solaro
Drive Capital • 2K followers
Destiny awaits for those bold enough to answer the call. Path sits at the nexus of 4 mega trends: AI, Data Centers, Energy, Automation. It turns out you can’t be long any of them without also being long welding. Path is the AI that builds the machines that make the world go.
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