Graham Stanton

📈 Curious about the startup scene in Massachusetts? Explore our detailed funding list featuring startup names, HQ locations, and investor info. Perfect for investors and entrepreneurs alike! Check it out: https://lnkd.in/dAp3xj-Q #startup #startups #venturecapital #funding #vc #managementconsulting

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And my second investment at defy is in 🐶 zeroETL puppies 🐶... I mean PuppyGraph, which is all the beauty of a graph database, none of the data migration or continuous upkeep of a graph database. Sounds like magic? So are puppies 🐶 . Puppygraph is NOT a graph or a database. It is graph analytics engine that answers graph questions on your existing data warehouses, whether that is a Databricks datalake, Google BigQuery or postgres. Compared to SQL, it's faster, handles way more complexity, scales and has almost no upkeep. How did I get to conviction? 1. Tailwinds - 🌊 Lakehouses 🌊 have helped enterprises put all their data in one place, enabling Puppygraph to unlock insights previously unavailable. - 📚 LLMs! 📚AI and RAG cannot easily traverse fragmented data. Puppygraph's Graph RAG unlocks insights with their Knowledge Graph and spoonfeeds to the LLMs. 2. 👯 Team 👯 We have graph experts from Google, LinkedIn, Databricks, Tigergraph, and Instacart who are uniquely able to build this solution. 3. 💸 Customers 💸 . My alma mater Coinbase is a proud user. The feedback from my former colleagues was off the charts! A blockchain is very much a graph database and Puppygraph tracks down fraudulent transactions that go through mixers and helps identify patterns. Huge congrats to Weimo Liu Danfeng Xu Lei Huang Zhenni Wu Gary Hagmueller, defy.vc is proud to be an investor!!

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Orb (#uncorrelated) raised $25M to continue building their pricing and billing platform that lets companies automate a range of different billing modes e.g., usage-based, subscriptions, or a mix, marry analytics and billing, collect and meter product usage data, invoice customers, generate revenue reports, draw on product usage insights to find revenue opportunities, model out alternative pricing plans (thus enabling experimentation), orchestrate changes in real time, schedule future price changes for certain customer cohorts or contract renewals, directly embed draft invoices into product billing portals, surface past-due invoices, and recover failed payments automatically. "Orb gives companies a single source of truth that can connect every unit of product usage to revenue. We’ve found a particularly strong fit in AI, cloud infrastructure, fintech, and dev tools, and have seen most of our growth come from those verticals.” Orb’s revenue grew 5x in the past year, and the customer base tripled to include brands such as Vercel, Replit, Pinecone, and Perplexity. https://lnkd.in/gYh4y2tg

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🚀 Venture debt covenants might sound like a small part of the deal, but they carry huge implications for your startup’s future. 📈 You need to be strategic in your negotiations to avoid any pitfalls down the road. It’s all about setting yourself up for success, not stress. Dive into more details in the original Kruze Consulting post. The link is in the 1st comment. 👇

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Insightful breakdown from my great Partner Omri Amirav-Drory on the simple factors that really separate the top 1% of investors from the rest, and how more operators should become investors! https://lnkd.in/gEiZdT2h

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POV on AI from Max Levchin in our latest Smart Humans episode

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Today, GTMfund’s is excited to announce to launch of Operator, its first incubated company. Max Altschuler (founder of GTMfund) teamed up with co-founder Adam M. (design engineer and 0-1 builder) and co-founder Mark Kosoglow (Outreach employee #1 and former SVP of Global Sales) to create Operator.ai alongside an insanely talented team Pleasant Middelhof, Jeremy Jonas, Carl Gunderson. We've entered a period called “The Great Ignore”. Spam and irrelevant, poorly-automated outbound campaigns are running rampant.   Operator gives you an easy-to-use Growth Engineer that allows you to build and enrich lists with accurate data, and run experiments and queries using AI to generate highly targeted outreach.    Check out their website to get updates, early access, and see how they are taking the world back to 2 touches meant to attract buyers into conversations that convert, instead of 20 touches meant to make sure you hit your activity number: https://www.operator.ai/

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AI will make news and content even more a commidity.. human beings, unique positions as well as human connections will become the key to the #futureofmedia

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Ep. 007 of The Feedback Loop is here! It's the first half of startup pitches from New York Tech Week, and from an almost-all-AI batch of companies. Joining me on this episode: returning fan-favorite, Jenny Fielding of Everywhere Ventures! For those not familiar, every week, a guest venture investor joins me to give granular and unfiltered feedback to founders on their storytelling and their concept. It's all about helping founders construct a better narrative for their move-forward -- because across fundraising, sales, recruiting, and company-building, it's the core narrative and pitch that can often hold startups back. And Jenny currently holds the tenure jacket as my guest co-host, with this being her 4th time on stage delivering quick insights and context you just can't find anywhere else. Massive shout-out to the founders featured: Matt Shenker building MatterMore, Karl White building Wroom, Trista V. building Nunchi, and Jeremy Da building Acrylic! Relevant links below.

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🏛 PredictAP, Inc. is an AI-powered invoice capture platform to codify tribal knowledge and modernize software tooling in a traditionally “offline” real estate industry 🏛 It's W5 / Q4 / 2024 & this week in our MGMT Boston startup series we’ve got PredictAP, a team building the product they wished they had reconciling invoices, tax IDs, and payment flows to help real estate managers better allocate resources and capture efficiencies. Founder & CEO David Stifter worked for Colony Capital for almost 20 years and is an accountant by background (having studied locally at BU). He became an in house real estate technology leader and led a major ERP integration to Yardi, the industry standard real estate accounting software. His career was advancing. The migration went smoothly. Then Chrissa, who was a key player in Colony Capital’s AP process, retired (with her institutional knowledge). Colony ($43B in assets) moved a lot of money around and had an internal system that helped them reconcile payments, approvals, and invoicing through a complex ownership structure. Accounting rules vary depending on whether a property in their portfolio was a multi-family asset or an industrial asset. AP isn’t glamorous, but you can imagine the complexity as it relates to cash flows, invoicing, tracking, etc. So when Chrissa retired, poof! A lot of context went missing. David & his team built an internal “invoice coding system” tool and, a couple years later, David bought out the rights to the internal tool with his partner Russell Franks to build a proper technical infrastructure and see if this tool could help real estate managers more broadly. A year later the product was ready, and PredictAP hit the market running in 2021 to solve a very specific pain point: properly coding multi-line real estate invoices. So real estate teams can spend more time in the facility and less time manually updating spreadsheets and reconciling data. Today they have 80+ customers and can show clear 4-5x ROI on the time savings, let alone the resiliency they are building. The platform processes nearly 3M invoices annually, demonstrating its scalability. In November of 2023 they closed their $8M Series A and are on track to grow from six figures to mid seven figures of ARR in 2024. They expect to close the year at over 100% revenue growth and have seen existing customer revenue growth grow by 25%. With a team of ~20 employees, PredictAP is positioned at the intersection of real estate, accounting, and AI technology as a crucial player in the real estate accounting technology stack. Operators to Know (Locally): -Greg Achenbach, VP of Product -Kristina D., Software Engineer -Ethan Neidhart, Software Engineer -Ali Noel, Director of GTM Enablement -Tony Scalese, VP of Customer Success -Emma D Whitman, MPH, Product Manager If you're interested in learning more, the full post is linked in the comments And sign up for the newsletter to see who we bring you in the weeks ahead!

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Apply now to get a coveted spot for the Venture Lane B2B Pitch Night Event! 🚀 🥇 On November 19th, Venture Lane | Startup Hub is hosting our exclusive Pitch Night 👉 - a rare opportunity for Boston's B2B tech founders to tune their pitch and get in front of awesome mentors, investors, and industry leaders. ⏰ Apply by November 1st to secure your spot! 📲 Find the application link in the comments below. #B2BTech #Startups #Fundraising #BostonStartups #PitchNight #VentureLaneStudio

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Perfecting your product and GTM strategy are surely important. But Box CEO and co-founder Aaron Levie argues there's one factor that outweighs all others in startup success: recognizing and capitalizing on tech and macro tailwinds. Fighting against them? You're setting yourself up for failure. Our full conversation here: https://lnkd.in/gEAPFR-A

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At Forum we look at thousands of deals each year across our Accelerator and Pre-Seed funds but only end up investing in a little over 1% of those startups.  As an early stage VC, I am in the business of saying no to nearly every startup I meet, and while there is nuanced rationale for many of the startups I pass on, a vast majority of businesses that don’t meet the qualification to get funded typically fall into one of two buckets. ▪ First time founders have a tendency to go out to market too early to raise pre-seed capital ▪   I’m sure most founders have heard some iteration of this from VCs that ultimately pass on their business.  In some cases it's a blanket excuse covering up for other pass reasons- perhaps a VC doesn’t believe in a team or isn’t bullish on the market opportunity - but in many cases founders simply haven't proven enough to the market to warrant an investment. I meet many teams with an articulate vision for the product that they want to build, but they either haven't performed enough customer discovery to prove demand for their initial wedge product, or need to raise pre-seed capital to build out an MVP.  In those cases, pre-seed investors are unwilling to underwrite those risks.  To be default fundable, teams need to be able to keep costs low, perform extensive customer discovery, and ship some version of an early product - pilots and early paid customers are key. A huge piece of this is having founding engineering talent on the team. ▪Not every startup is a venture opportunity ▪ By definition, a venture backed business is solving a problem within a market opportunity so massive and so desperately needed, that its growth rate is off the charts.   It spreads like a weed, absorbing almost unlimited amounts of capital to fulfill demand within its customer base.   Each year there are maybe 20 companies launched that ultimately have venture scale outcomes. The bar to reach this rarified air is unfathomably high and the reality is the vast majority of founders simply aren’t building for opportunities that have the potential to be one of these generational companies. Many startup founders view VC as the only viable option for capitalizing their business, but not every great business is a venture business, and most successful founders never take VC dollars.  In order to reach an IPO/acquisition large enough to generate venture returns, a startup needs a credible path to $100s of millions in revenue. This is the standard by which early stage opportunities are evaluated. The flip side to this, and I share this feedback often with founders I meet that are building interesting business in non venture markets, if you are able to scale to $10- $20M in revenue that can be a massively successful outcome for a founder.  There are investors who focus on these type outcomes, namely lower middle market PE shops, and the typical path to those deals is a bootstrapped business or a friends/family capital raise.

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We gathered dozens of operators from the MGMT Boston Operators Club and local founders alongside the 186 Ventures team this October to discuss the evolution of our dear software markets, the status of some predictions for 2024 (all looking good!), and what’s on deck for next year. General Partner Giuseppe Stuto led us through the following predictions for 2025 to share with you all.. ↕ We will see more vertical AI applications manifest themselves within the Enterprise in a similar ways that SaaS moved from horizontal to vertical use cases 🔔 We will see services business models more common and software budget purchasing models less common - SaaS may even be given away for cheap/free as a “way in” ⚖ Capital efficiency, on a relative basis, will almost be required to create enduring & compounding defensible enterprise value. Details like procurement cycle lengths and creativity with non-dilutive financing, like leveraging revenue based financing tools for example, will all matter 💡 Specific to AI, premiums will be placed on applications that can actually get “reasoning” right. All purpose LLMs still have a ways to go and there are multiple approaches with the “jury still out” on how to get context and reasoning right. Infrastructure solutions that use general purpose or customizable knowledge graphs to help application developers get to 100% (enterprise acceptable accuracy) will emerge OR savvy application developers will fill the gaps themselves. We will likely see both, depending upon the specific case! Thank you Giuseppe, Julian, and Sophie for a great discussion and evening!

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This San Franciscan has landed in the Big Apple for #NYTechWeek! Here’s why it was important to me to be out here this week and I view NYC as a sister city. ((scroll down for 2 events The Council is hosting today!)) 🏭🏥 Reminder: The Council Fund invests at Pre-seed in Software’s Third Act, the transformation of the essential economy. Our investments span healthcare and industrial sectors like manufacturing, logistics, construction. 🐂 I’m eternally bullish on NY & SF and hate how many pit the two cities against each other. The reality is that a lot of capital and talent flow back and forth between the cities. They need each other to thrive! 🗽🌁 Cities like NY & SF attract young and mid-career talent because of their population density, transient nature, beauty, and reputations as cities where someone new on the scene can make a name for themselves. For the areas we invest in, I’m *specifically* excited about NY because of: 🏗️ Closer proximity to industrial hubs which are scattered across the Midwest / Rust Belt 🏛️ Closer proximity to DC where a lot of regulation around VC, startups, healthcare, onshoring initiatives, and industrial sectors takes place 💰 Many of the large financial institutions that are backing hard tech focused funds and major healthcare initiatives are also headquartered here in NYC 🎯 We’ve got several startups here who are hitting it out of the park, like Dirac and Siena. This has further validated my belief in this ecosystem to support young companies! Today we are kicking off with 2 events on Day 1 of #NYTechWeek 👉 AI Demo Day: The Council, Next Wave NYC, Lynx Collective, Flybridge will host 8 founders and 200+ investors and founders for a pitch competition this evening! Luma: https://lnkd.in/gbdYiJMw 🔜 Can still join the waitlist! Small & Big VCs in Hard Tech: The Council joined General Catalyst, Lux Capital, Iron Prairie Ventures, AlleyCorp, House Of Ventures, Steel Atlas for 2 back to back panels on industrial innovation & collaboration across the capital stack Luma: https://lnkd.in/gj6D4-Au ⏰ Event has passed

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what of the man who inspired it all? Alexei Navalny, a beacon of courage and unwavering dedication to truth. His fight, and the tireless work of the Anti-Corruption Foundation, serve as a constant reminder that we are not alone. They are the embodiment of hope, a testament to the power of resilience in the face of oppression. Their fight is our fight. Let us stand together, united in our pursuit of a Russia where justice and transparency prevail. Let us honor their struggle by demanding a better future, a future where every citizen has the power to hold those in power accountable. Let us never stop believing in the power of our collective voice, for it is through our combined strength that we will achieve the Russia we deserve. https://lnkd.in/e5i8Mtzw

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Not many topics create as much buzz in 2024 as AI. Hot takes abound. I enjoyed my grounded conversation with Bryan Chappell, CEO of Scout, who is helping companies all over the US incorporate AI into their workflows (Quipli is one of them). While the topic can get heady quickly, I appreciated his thoughts on how rental companies can benefit today in the quickly evolving AI landscape. "One use case today, is that you can turn customer support from a cost center to a profit center. You still keep a 'human in the loop', but AI allows you to give much higher levels of customer support, to a much larger level of customers. This is totally different than we were five years ago with simple AI chat bots. Five years ago we were riding bikes. Now we are driving a Ferrari. With technology today, AI can draft hyper personalized messages using the structured data you have, that ultimately speeds up the response time to customers while simultaneously delivering better service." Listen to the full episode, and all 30+ episodes on Spotify, Apple Music, and Youtube of The Rental Roundtable at https://lnkd.in/ewCCfsAf.

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