Keyan K.

🌆 Looking for funding in the Big Apple? We've compiled a comprehensive list of 220 New York VC firms! Find everything from portfolio links to social media handles. Start your journey here:https://lnkd.in/d89M9Kjz #startup #startups #venturecapital #funding #vc #B2B

1

Ilya Sutskever has raised $1 billion from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital for his 3-month-old startup Safe Superintelligence (SSI). The valuation lands at $5 billion according to sources. SSI, which currently has 10 employees, plans to use the funds to acquire computing power and hire top talent. It will focus on building a small highly trusted team of researchers and engineers split between Palo Alto, California and Tel Aviv, Israel. According to SSI, they've raised the money to help develop safe artificial intelligence systems that far surpass human capabilities. $1B raise at a $5B valuation. For a company that is a couple of months old and doesn't seem to have a product or even a single line of code in production. Wild. In this case, everyone knows it takes hundreds of millions to train models. So investors are essentially rolling the dice on an extremely well-regarded team. And if it takes about a billion just to get off the ground, the valuation would need to be at least in the couple billion range to make it worth it for employees to work there. US dream 🦅 #artificialintelligence #startups #venturecapital

2

Startup decks vs Business plans. It's accepted that a startup needs a deck. Dax Dasilva of Lightspeed Commerce made an important point on 20VC. Writing a business plan - including financial projections - is an important step. It requires discipline. It provides a rigorous framework for thinking deeply about the problem you're trying to solve. Harry Stebbings countered that he doesn't even want to see a deck since it's all dreams. We spent a lot of time and energy on our business plan with the expectation that we would show it to no one ever. The business plan was part of our roadmap for the company. We researched customers - including having 50+ conversations. We wanted to understand them: their background, their interests, their presence on social media. We also wanted to understand how they were evaluated by leadership and how integrated they were with the business of the company they were protecting. We researched pricing both with potential customers and other products in our industry to find out if OpEx or CapEx was a better fit. How did they buy today? How would they like to buy? We did market research to understand the verticals and map the right entry point - we were wrong but that doesn't reduce the value of the research. We looked at competitors in depth to understand what they were seeing that we weren't. Dax is right. This is an invaluable document that should be updated every year - the company is changing, the market is changing, there's more feedback about price and ICP. It's not for sharing with the outside world. It's a map for driving forward. Decks won't get you investment - VCs invest in people. We make decks but we know they don't tell our story. The deck is a calling card. Dax and Harry are both right. https://lnkd.in/e25M82xY

15

1 Comment

🔮 What's the future of developer platforms? ☠ Or the death knell for open core companies? Get the answers (and more) from Ethan Kurzweil; longtime partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and soon-to-be founder of a new, early stage venture firm. In his time at Bessemer Ethan invested in Launchdarkly, Twilio, PagerDuty, Intercom, Twitch, SendGrid, HashiCorp and npm. He's seen it all, you won't want to miss his takes on what's next and what isn't going to work. I'm sharing our closing lightning round questions here, but the full interview (which is much juicer) can be found at calyx.substack.com. ⚡Lightning round questions!⚡ *What's the developer platform that you respect most?* 🔶 Zapier. It's the ultimate democratizer of development for 4,000 different esoteric use cases and some not so esoteric use cases. And they built it in a way to allow anyone to use it. *Who is a developer GTM leader you respect?* 👨 Adam FitzGerald at HashiCorp. Disclaimer - he’s a Bessemer operating advisor. He is the best thinker to help companies structure developer evangelism programs at scale. *Unpopular opinion re: dev tools?*  💼 That a lot of dev tools shouldn't be businesses. Many should be free or part of a larger developer platform offering. The difference between tool and platform can make a big difference as to whether you have a sustainable business. *How do you feel like you’re able to uniquely work with developer-first companies?* ⚾ I’ll keep it to one for the lightning round: I’ve gotten lots of experience with false signals. If you’re a founder working on a startup sometimes you’ll respond to a false signal and it’s hard to go back and unwind those choices—we have lots of experience with developer platforms and can help founders avoid those pitfalls. Disclaimer: Ethan would never use emojis like this. He actually...doesn't use emojis!? I've just added them in an attempt to improve readability on LinkedIn... enjoy!

48

4 Comments

🚀 AlleyCorp Closes $250M Fund to Fuel Tech Innovation in NYC and Beyond🗽 🌟 Founded by NYC internet entrepreneur Kevin Ryan, AlleyCorp incubates and invests in transformative companies across diverse verticals including Diversified Technology, Healthcare, Robotics, and Impact. 💡💰 🤝 The fund, backed by a select group of LPs, supports AlleyCorp's mission to originate ideas, hire teams, provide initial funding, and maintain integral leadership throughout the company’s lifecycle. 🌱🔍 💼 With about 20–30 new investments and 5–8 incubations per year, AlleyCorp has a track record of nurturing early-stage tech pioneers. 📈🌐 🦄 Notable investments include MongoDB (NASDAQ: MDB), Business Insider, Gilt Groupe, Zola, and Nomad Health, shaping the landscape of tech innovation in NYC. 🌆🌟 🔬 AlleyCorp also announces the incubation of Radical AI, pioneering AI-driven materials design, and Conduce Health, revolutionizing access to personalized healthcare specialists. 💻🏥 ✅ Looking to raise capital for your #fund and increase the international pool of your LP #investors?   🤝 Need warm #LP introductions?   📝 Selling #secondaries to increase liquidity?   🧐 Looking for co-investments?   ▶ G+QUANT's link for inquiries and fund decks: https://lnkd.in/gjC_EuTE #VentureCapital #TechInnovation #NYCTech #StartupInvestment #Incubation #AlleyCorp #ImpactInvesting #HealthTech #AI #Robotics #DiversifiedTechnology #InvestmentStrategy

1

Check out our curated list of #New York funded startups, featuring key insights like HQ locations, founded years, and investor info. https://lnkd.in/dbw7pUqq #startup #startups #venturecapital #funding #vc #investmentbanking

2

It was another action packed quarter at MGMT Boston. Here are the standout startups we highlighted in Q3 2024.. Sequentially: Sense, mabl, Customers.ai, Wicket, Form Health, EnFi, Inc, Crunchtime, OfferFit Native AI: EnFi, OfferFit ClimateTech: Sense Vertical & Horizontal SaaS (+AI): mabl, Customers.ai, Wicket, Crunchtime HealthTech: Form Health Seed Stage: EnFi Growth Stage (A-C): Customers.ai, Wicket, Form Health, OfferFit Late Stage (>C): Sense, mabl, Crunchtime Sense - a growth stage software company bringing better intelligence to the edge of our electrical grid mabl - growth stage software company building a unified platform to streamline testing across web, mobile, API, accessibility, and performance to bring innovation to QA testing because all software should be shipped quickly with enterprise level quality Customers.ai - a provider of website visitor identification and remarketing solutions that turn anonymous prospects into customers, using smart identification capabilities Wicket - changing the stadium experience through advanced facial recognition software technology so fans can get to their seats faster, enjoy themselves, and stadiums get to improve their operational rigor too Form Health - a virtual obesity medicine clinic that provides science-based obesity care to help patients achieve their weight loss and health goals EnFi - building an agentic, native AI software platform for financial institutions to give complex credit lenders the power of 10,000 analysts Crunchtime - a late stage vertical software company at $100M+ ARR that serves multi-unit restaurant brands, helping them deliver industry leading operational excellence in every location OfferFit - building an AI Decisioning platform that enables lifecycle marketers to automate personalization at scale, taking the tedium & pain out of A/B testing More to come in Q4!

56

3 Comments

💰 Funding Alert 💰 Placer.ai 💲 Amount Raised: $75M 🚀 Series: Series D 💡 Founded: 2018 👥 Founders: Noam Ben-Zvi, Zohar Bar-Yehuda, Oded Fossfeld, Ofir Lemel 🔍 Problem: Businesses face challenges in making informed decisions due to fragmented and insufficient location-based data. ✅ Solution: A comprehensive AI-powered platform that integrates anonymized location data from various sources, providing deep market insights and analytics across multiple industries. 🤝 Investors: GEM Realty Capital, WndrCo, Fifth Wall, Array Ventures, and over 50 other firms and individuals. Subscribe to our newsletter launching soon in the comments! 👇 #venturecapital #realestate #fintech #AI #proptech #automation

190

4 Comments

The above is all true, and I'd like to add a really important point. In the Bay Area, I observed that startups collaborate, partner, meet, etc - all in the spirit of the best possible user experience as an end in itself. The startups work together more. It's easy to get a meeting, you can basically show up to someone's office, just walk in, and you're welcomed. Founders work on "cool" experiences or tech first, and worry about financials second. In NYC I found the reverse to be true. It's harder to get a meeting with a founder. When you get one, it's like going to the dentist; the EA schedules a meeting with you 6 weeks in advance, upon arriving you sit in lobby and you wait until you are called. The meeting is transactional, a "novel" user experience or excitement around a technical breakthrough is rarely a main topic. It's much more transactional. This isn't a criticism in any way, it's just an observation that I believe explains why there are less household tech names coming out of NYC. Because if you look at the household tech names in the world - they always put the user first.

31

9 Comments

Bold prediction for 2025: Investors will pay founders to access their venture data. Founders own their data and grant access to investors for a fee. This shift promotes transparency, trust, and efficiency in fundraising, while giving startups a new revenue stream.

14

3 Comments

🗽 Founders N' Funders is coming to New York City on July 10th ..... and we have one last spot open for a VC investor to present at our inaugural NYC VC Reverse Pitch Event. So, please share with me who your favorite VCs are in NYC! These are such fun events for everyone, where we turn the tables and have the investors pitch to the founders. This particular event is for Seed and Series A tech startup founders and will provide founders a unique opportunity to see first-hand that not all investors are the same. Investors can have different qualifications they look for in terms of industry, investment amounts, company stages, business models, geography, etc. If you are a tech founder and interested in attending, simply comment with the "🗽 " emoji below and we'll send you a link where you can apply to attend. Capacity is limited and filling up fast, so register asap. Special thanks to Dylan Scott at Techstars for helping organize this event and also to our awesome sponsor partners for making this event possible! 🙌 Carta (Will Buckstaff) Capchase (Ian Garrett) Kintsugi (Ryan Connell / David Lorenzo Lopez) CAVU Securities, LLC (Chris McMillan) Optimist Legal (Omeed Tabiei, Esq.) Forecastr See you in NYC on July 10th!!! #FoundersNFunders #startups #founders

34

3 Comments

The pocket guide of essential YC advice for startups • Launch now • Build something people want • Do things that don't scale • All startups are badly broken at some point • Find the 90 / 10 solution • Find 10-100 customers who love your product • Write code - talk to users • "It's not your money" • Growth is the result of a great product not the precursor • Don't scale your team/product until you have built something people want • Valuation is not equal to success or even probability of success • Avoid long negotiated deals with big customers if you can • Avoid big company corporate development queries - they will only waste time • Avoid conferences unless they are the best way to get customers • Pre-product market fit - do things that don't scale: remain small/nimble • Startups can only solve one problem well at any given time • Founder relationships matter more than you think • Sometimes you need to fire your customers (they might be killing you) • Ignore your competitors, you will more likely die of suicide than murder • Most companies don't die because they run out of money • Be nice! Or at least don't be a jerk • Get sleep and exercise - take care of yourself via Ben Lang

6

1 Comment

20 meetings w/ investors and startups in 3 days around SF/Bay Area. Here's what’s happening in hiring right now: 1) Elite engineers demand elite offers. Early-stage startups are winning top talent by paying up (sometimes as high as $250k-$300k + equity). 2) Startups are prioritizing candidates with brand names, interest in startups, history of solving complex problems, ambition, higher ego (not too high). 3) The best candidates have clarity on career direction. Some good questions I heard founders ask, “Where are you going?” and “How can we help you get there?” 4) Despite early funding surges in Q1/Q2, investors are becoming more selective - especially in AI.  This creates an opportunity for startups to hire from struggling shops with top talent. Invest now before the market shifts again.

30

2 Comments

The state of venture capital is wild right now. We are witnessing a surge of innovation across the spectrum: - Funds merging - VC doing PE - PE doing VC - Secondary funds - Buyout funds - Spin-out funds - Debt funds - Continuation funds - Infrastructure funds - GP turnover - Hard Tech surging - Family Office uptick

60

8 Comments

I really enjoyed breaking in our new studio to sit down with Temporal Technologies Co-Founders Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev for the latest episode of Founded & Funded. Temporal was founded in 2019 based on an open-source microservices orchestration engine project but is the result of a more than decade-long partnership between the two co-founders that spanned their time working on different iterations of the same thing at AWS, Microsoft, and Uber. In this episode, Samar, Maxim, and I dive into the challenges of building an open-source ecosystem while also working on a commercial offering and scaling a successful company, how to navigate and adjust a product roadmap in an ever-changing world of AI and large language models, and how to successfully build an early startup team, navigate through a CEO transition, and bring on a startups first independent board member. It's a very compelling conversation and a must-listen for every builder out there. Watch the full episode on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/gymf9sES Find other platforms and the transcript on our website: https://lnkd.in/ggRtnKtM Be sure to subscribe to our channel for more deep dives into cutting-edge technologies and the minds behind them. Don't forget to like, comment, and share this conversation if you found it valuable!

73

3 Comments

Somewhere between a dollar slice spot and a rooftop view... 🍕🏢 Here are a few #NYC startups hiring #SoftwareEngineers that are on the verge of something big! 👀 - - - 𝟏. 𝐆𝐞𝐧𝐀𝐈 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐩 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐏𝐫𝐨𝐝𝐮𝐜𝐭 𝐓𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐭𝐮𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐝𝐬 🚀 - With a product that is already clicking for customers, they're looking for folks of all levels to work at intersection of Product Engineering, GenAI/LLMs and Infrastructure to execute their ambitious product roadmap. 𝟐. 𝐀𝐈-𝐩𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐞𝐝 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐜𝐨𝐧𝐭𝐫𝐢𝐛𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐭𝐨 𝐒𝐨𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐆𝐨𝐨𝐝 😁 - Looking to build and own core projects 0-1 that leverage AI to make a real-world impact? Fresh off their Seed raise, they're looking for 2 engineers! 𝟑. 𝐅𝐢𝐧𝐓𝐞𝐜𝐡 𝐒𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐮𝐩 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐱, 𝐥𝐚𝐫𝐠𝐞 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐞 𝐭𝐞𝐜𝐡𝐧𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐥 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐞𝐧𝐠𝐞𝐬 📈 - An NYC FinTech making headlines multiple times recently are looking for multiple Backend and Infra focused engineers interested in high ownership & deep technical challenges. 𝟒. 𝐄𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐩𝐫𝐢𝐬𝐞 𝐀𝐈 𝐈𝐧𝐧𝐨𝐯𝐚𝐭𝐨𝐫 🤖 - After their recent round, they're looking for engineers experienced with things like Distributed Systems, ML, and Data to help the continue pushing the boundaries on what can be achieved with AI. Do any of these roles sound interesting to you or look like they could be a fit for someone you know? Shoot me a message here or email at [email protected] - - - #NYCTech #Startup #Hiring #SoftwareEngineer

18

4 Comments

TensorFuse (YC W24) is now one of the most popular deals for running serverless GPUs on YC! We're the trusted infra partner for many fast growing YC companies. Here’s what we do for our early users: 1) A private Slack channel for any MLOps related support. 2) Help with tasks ranging from downloading models from Huggingface or open-source repo, to writing inference code and deploying it on autoscaling infra. 3) Help with containerising your models (if you haven’t done it already) 4) Expedited approval of GPU quota limits (we have a dedicated support channel with cloud providers) If you want to deploy custom ML models on auto-scaling infra and don’t want the hassle to manage it, get started with our docs: https://lnkd.in/gS7KAMHN

75