Leore Avidar

I’m thrilled to officially announce our $3M seed investment in Propel People, a company we built inside the 1848 Ventures studio to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing the #construction industry today: the skilled #labor shortage. For small and medium-sized contractors, hiring isn't just a challenge. It's the number one threat to their growth, profitability, and safety. With 94% of contractors struggling to find qualified workers, it’s clear that traditional hiring methods aren't built for the trades. That’s why we built Propel People. It’s a mobile-first, AI-powered hiring platform designed for how construction actually works: in the field. By leveraging smart candidate ranking, instant #SMS-based screening, and a fully #bilingual interface, Propel helps contractors build great crews faster and more efficiently. I’m also thrilled to formally announce that industry veteran Dexter Bachelder is at the helm as CEO. Having worked with Dexter and the team over the last few months, we've already seen the impact of his leadership. His 25 years of experience scaling construction tech companies will be instrumental as Propel People enters this initial stage of growth. This investment reinforces our core thesis at 1848 Ventures: building AI-native companies that solve fundamental pain points for the #SMBs that form the backbone of our economy. A huge congratulations to Dexter and the entire Propel People team on this milestone. We are incredibly proud to partner with you to support the people who build our world. Read the full announcement below. #constructiontech #venturecapital #seedfunding #ai #skilledtrades #smb

144

14 Comments

🚨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

18

1 Comment

30+ VCs Backing Marketplace Startups Below is a cross-stage, cross-sector mix of firms that back marketplace and platform companies early and support them as they grow. Consumer and platform investors Upfront Ventures 1752vc (Formerly Pegasus) BAM Ventures Forerunner Brand Foundry Ventures Maveron BoxGroup Greycroft Alumni Ventures Marketplace natives and network effects specialists FJ Labs NFX Great Oaks Venture Capital RiverPark Ventures Left Lane Capital First Round Capital Lerer Hippeau Precursor Ventures Seed partners building two-sided platforms early Founder Collective NextView Ventures Uncork Capital Slow Ventures Bling Capital Gaingels Initialized Capital Felicis Multi-stage firms backing marketplace winners at scale Accel Bessemer Venture Partners Lightspeed General Catalyst New Enterprise Associates (NEA) Kleiner Perkins Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) Founders Fund

77

16 Comments

HealthVC x Lusha: Unlocking Smarter Fundraising and Sales Workflows We’re thrilled to announce our newest partnership: HealthVC has teamed up with Lusha to bring next-gen data and prospecting tools to founders, fund managers, and operators across our community. Lusha recently launched a powerful suite of AI-powered features that redefine how go-to-market teams research, prospect, and convert. Now those capabilities are coming to HealthVC Pro subscribers. ✨ With this partnership, you’ll be able to: Surface real-time, accurate, and compliant B2B contact data Use AI Prospecting Chat to instantly uncover new investor or customer leads Tap into CRM-triggered recommendations to stay one step ahead Turn insight into action with Sales Streaming, Lusha’s smarter, connected selling framework. But Lusha’s superpower isn’t just the AI; it’s that the AI sits on top of best-in-class data. That means every signal, every recommendation, and every lead is not just fast, it’s trustworthy. At HealthVC, we’re building more than a newsletter; we’re building the operating system for venture, and this partnership helps our members move faster, pitch smarter, and close better. Available now to all HealthVC subscribers, link in comments.

18

8 Comments

At Vibe Capital, we believe the venture landscape is bifurcating. The reason is simple: reality is full of drunk cats. "Drunk Cats" are the emergent, second-order effects that arise from simple rules. They can tank a product, entire system, or an entire country. The ability to see -and master - these drunk cats reveals the true split in startups today. It is no longer between software and hardware, but between "impressionistic" founders who map the world as it is, and "mechanistic" founders who can reverse-engineer reality from first principles. My latest Dave's Quick Hits newsletter provides the playbook for identifying and funding these mechanistic architects. It is about a fundamental shift from describing effects to mastering cause. I break down the three core stages of the Mechanistic Playbook: 1. See the System: Identifying the hidden rules and emergent flaws in any complex system, from software to biology. 2. Debug the System: Using technology to patch the legacy "bugs" of a previous industrial paradigm. 3. Architect a New System: Building with true primitives, like DNA, to program matter itself. The next trillion-dollar companies won't be built by operators chasing surface-level trends. They'll be built by system-thinkers who can see, debug, and architect reality’s source code. You can read the full analysis and the investment theses here: https://lnkd.in/dkhkBUwh #VentureCapital #DeepTech #FrontierTech #Investing #Strategy #Biotechnology #Nanotechnology #vibecap #vibecapital #drunkcats

13

EliseAI just closed a massive $250M Series E led by Andreessen Horowitz, bringing their total funding to new heights as they automate healthcare and housing operations. The Numbers: Doubled headcount from 150 to 300+ employees since August 2024 Surpassed $100M ARR milestone Serving 75% of NMHC's Top 50 housing operators Powering 10% of the US apartment market Healthcare and housing represent ~40% of average American household spending, yet both industries remain notoriously inefficient. EliseAI is attacking the $600B+ in annual healthcare administrative costs and addressing housing's rising costs, labor shortages, and high workforce turnover. AI's biggest impact may come from automating routine but critical operations rather than flashy consumer applications. EliseAI's focus on unglamorous but essential workflows (call centers, scheduling, maintenance requests) could deliver more value than many AI companies chasing consumer attention. The timing is strategic. As both healthcare costs and housing affordability reach crisis levels, solutions that genuinely reduce operational overhead while improving user experience have clear product market fit.

11

Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

71

3 Comments

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.

12

1 Comment

🚀 This month at LvlUp Ventures we’re investing in 100+ companies. Not over the next year. Not “by Q4.” This month. Why? Because the next iconic companies aren’t waiting for perfect timing. They’re being built right now — in dorm rooms, tiny apartments, co-working spaces, late at night after full-time jobs. And capital shouldn’t be the bottleneck to ambition. Because momentum loves speed. Because the best founders aren’t waiting for perfect market conditions. Because early belief changes trajectories. So instead of sitting on the sidelines debating spreadsheets for weeks, we’re choosing momentum. 👇 Drop your one-liner in the comments and I’ll DM you. #Startups #VentureCapital #VC #AngelInvesting #Founders #Entrepreneurship #StartupFunding #Investing #Innovation #BuildInPublic #SeedStage #EarlyStage #TechStartups #Fundraising #LevelUp

260

367 Comments

Midi Health just raised a $100M Series D and became the first menopause unicorn. This marks Actions Capital (fka K50 Ventures)'s ninth unicorn on the platform AND first investment for the Actions Growth Co-investment platform! We first met Joanna Strober in 2021 when we invested in the pre-seed, thanks to an intro from portfolio founder, Sarah Adler, PsyD (thanks Sarah!!). To me, the problem was staggering: 45 million women in the U.S. seeking care for menopause symptoms and not getting treatment, only 500 certified menopause providers in the entire country, 97% of midlife women without an OB/GYN, and an entire healthcare system that essentially told women to “tough it out”. Joanna had lived this problem herself, spending over a year searching for care, driving an hour to see a specialist, paying out of pocket, etc., and asked the question that would become Midi: Why isn't expert care for women at midlife easily accessible and covered by insurance? What started as a virtual care clinic has become the platform redefining how midlife women access healthcare in this country: • 25,000+ women receiving care every week. • Insurance-covered expert care in all 50 states. • Fortune 100 employers offering Midi as a health benefit. • Partnerships with major health systems and benefits providers nationwide. • Care that has expanded well beyond menopause into the full spectrum of midlife women's health. This $100M Series D round at $1B valuation was led by Goodwater Capital with Serena Ventures, Foresite Capital, and earlier investors including GV, Emerson Collective, SemperVirens, McKesson Ventures, AVP, and Felicis participating. Congrats to Joanna Strober, Sharon Meers, Jill Herzig, Kathleen Jordan, MD, Mindy Goldman, and the entire Midi Health team. You're no longer proving a concept. You're scaling a healthcare organization that women rely on every day. Let’s cook!

100

4 Comments

Founders – if you missed Carta’s latest market report, check out our new post with the TL;DR and what it means for startups in the Southeast. A few interesting data points: • SAFEs still dominate Seed rounds – but excessive stacking can complicate future raises and dilute founders more than expected. • Founder ownership drops quickly – nationally, median ownership slips from 56% post-seed to 23% by Series B, but Southeastern founders often retain closer to 65% post-seed thanks to lower operating costs. • AI premium is real – startups with AI capabilities are commanding higher valuations but also facing steeper dilution. • Team composition matters – solo founders make up 35% of new companies but only 17% secure venture funding. Equal equity splits between co-founders are increasingly the norm. • Option pools & vesting – 10–15% option pools at Seed/Series A are standard, but Southeastern startups may need slightly larger pools to attract talent; some later-stage firms are moving to 5–6 year vesting schedules to retain key people. Link to full post → https://lnkd.in/eE4qGzSf #startups #venturecapital #carta

7

1 Comment

Seed VC isn’t just in a downturn—it’s facing extinction unless it evolves fast. Great read from Rob Go & David Beisel at NextView Ventures... - YC and mega-funds now dominate the early-stage landscape, squeezing out traditional seed investors - Power law thinking has gone mainstream—everyone’s chasing trillion-dollar outliers - AI isn’t helping seed VCs—it’s raising the stakes, crowding the field, and disrupting VC itself - The middle of the market has collapsed, and excess profits are gone - Hope isn’t a strategy—seed needs a new model, now Link here... https://lnkd.in/ek2MZGhm And if you like this topic, I wrote a piece on venture bifurcating into inception funds and mega funds here: https://lnkd.in/eJz5DmX6 #ai #venturecapital #vc

31

8 Comments

This week Tulip Interfaces became Acequia Capital's 23rd unicorn company. When we made the first investment into Tulip in 2015, it was clear to Hank and I that we were early. It was going to take some time, but that massive legacy industries had no idea the amount of innovation and value was out there, waiting to be won by companies that could master software and machine intelligence. These observations and others led us to develop two investment theses we’ve been executing on since; what we termed “New Industrials.” Fast forward 10 years and the idea that a broader industrial reinvention is underway is now almost a given across the capital markets and leading companies. A movement has sprung up around us. It’s much more in vogue to back physical technology startups now, but most investors misunderstand what great ones look like, and how numerous the barriers to adoption are. We’re fortunate to benefit from a decade of lessons and insights from watching up close as incredible founding teams have built immensely valuable organizations, these include Stoke Space, Radiant, Formlabs, Atomic Industries, Applied Atomics, Harbinger, Dirac, Inc., Rainmaker Technology Corporation, AnySignal, EthonAI, Flow Engineering, Milvus Advanced, Rivelin Robotics, Adaptyv, KMB Telematics Inc., Tactian, Nimble Precision, sensmore, Hyperdrives, Ethos Space Resources, Antaris, TransAstra, Rightbot Technologies, Provectus Algae, Arctoris, Flexe, Coronal Technologies, Exapto, Visolis, Vorticity Inc., XENOPS AI, and many others. My takeaway from 10 years of investing in industrial reinvention is that we are still at the beginning. We have a long way to go and the next 10 years will move a lot faster than the last. Thanks to our founders for the continued trust and partnership.

153

13 Comments

The best founders don’t just build products; they reframe the problem. Ryan Alshak has done exactly that with Laurel - turning time from a background task into a source of insight, alignment, and leverage. IVP is leading Laurel's Series C to help build the system of record for how work actually happens. Read more from Allie Garfinkle: https://lnkd.in/gweNiwsc

63

Check out the latest funding news from across the Techstars portfolio. → Zipline (Techstars 2011), a drone delivery and logistics startup, raises more than $600M in new funding, boosting its valuation to $7.6B, as it expands commercial deployments. → Language learning startup Preply (Techstars 2015) raises $150M and becomes the 23rd known unicorn from Techstars accelerators. → Hydrosat (Techstars 2019) raises $60M in Series B funding → Tive (Techstars 2017) receives a $20M investment, valuing the shipment-tracking systems developer at slightly more than $500M. → Parambil (Techstars 2023) raises an additional $6M in seed funding ($8M to date). → Seasats (Techstars 2021) receives $24M in Department of War APFIT funding to accelerate the fielding of its autonomous surface vessels. → Hawaiian Airlines’ newly announced $600M Kahuʻewai Hawai‘i Investment Plan features a strategic investment in Ampaire (Techstars 2018) to support hybrid-electric aviation in the islands. → Fintalo (Techstars 2025) secures $500K+ in oversubscribed Pre-Seed funding. → PraxisPro (Techstars 2024) closes an oversubscribed $6M seed round. → Samara Aerospace (Techstars 2024) closes $10M seed round to help bring more stability to sats in orbit. → MyARC (Techstars 2022), a platform that enables fitness creators to train their communities at scale, secures £1.5M investment. Massive congratulations to these incredible portfolio companies!   🔗  Read more at https://lnkd.in/dxtCTvrg 

164

7 Comments

If you look at the early-stage fundraising funnel, conversion rates are tightening, but the companies that do raise are doing so at higher valuations and with larger checks. The market seems to be betting on fewer winners, but those winners will be bigger. I’m not convinced. I do believe the very biggest winners will be larger than ever as AI expands the reach of technology, largely by replacing labor. But I don’t believe there will be fewer winners overall. Most B2B solutions are moving toward verticalized, specialized use cases that deliver superior value compared to generalized horizontal platforms. That shift should create more winners. While these vertical players may not reach the scale of the horizontal mega-winners, they can still generate the kind of multibillion-dollar outcomes that venture is built to fund.

57

9 Comments

With RL techniques like GRPO, it’s become easy to fine-tune small models to outperform foundation models on vertical tasks. We’re open sourcing Osmosis-Apply-1.7B: a small model that merges code (similar to Cursor’s instant apply) better than foundation models. Links in comments! Using foundation models for high specificity, low complexity tasks like code merging can be overkill - instead, it’s better to use a specialized model instead for higher performance and latency. We fine-tuned the model on 100K real-world code commits where the model needs to merge a code edit snippet into an original code snippet. On the test dataset (subset of CommitPackFT), foundation model performance ranged between 0.77-0.93 reward score. In comparison, Osmosis-Apply-1.7B achieved a 0.98 reward score - while also being 3X-5X more affordable than the next cheaper model AND ~10X faster! Why this matters: the best AI agents use multiple models to ensure task specialization and reliability at scale - on top of cost and latency benefits as well. Links to the model and full write-up (with reward function, hyperparameters, etc.) are in the comments - reach out if you’re interested in using reinforcement learning!

240

18 Comments

𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗘𝗾𝘂𝗶𝘁𝘆 𝘃𝘀. 𝗩𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗖𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 - 𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁’𝘀 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗥𝗲𝗮𝗹 𝗗𝗶𝗳𝗳𝗲𝗿𝗲𝗻𝗰𝗲? At DFX, we see founders and investors mix these up all the time. They’re both private capital. But they operate very differently. Here’s the breakdown: 1️⃣ 𝗦𝘁𝗮𝗴𝗲 𝗣𝗿𝗶𝘃𝗮𝘁𝗲 𝗘𝗾𝘂𝗶𝘁𝘆 (𝗣𝗘) • Buys mature, established companies • Often post-revenue, profitable, or cash-flow positive 𝗩𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗖𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 (𝗩𝗖) • Invests in early-stage startups • Pre-seed to Series B (sometimes later) 2️⃣ 𝗖𝗼𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗻𝘆 𝗧𝘆𝗽𝗲 𝗣𝗘 • Acquires companies across industries • Focused on operational improvement + financial optimization 𝗩𝗖 • Often concentrated in tech, biotech, fintech, climate, AI • Focused on innovation and high-growth models 3️⃣ 𝗢𝘄𝗻𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗣𝗘 • Frequently acquires majority control • Often 100% ownership in leveraged buyouts (LBOs) 𝗩𝗖 • Takes minority stakes • Typically below 50% 4️⃣ 𝗜𝗻𝘃𝗲𝘀𝘁𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗦𝗶𝘇𝗲 𝗣𝗘 • Large investments • Often $100M to multi-billion-dollar transactions 𝗩𝗖 • Smaller checks • Can range from $250K to <$10M at early stages 5️⃣ 𝗖𝗮𝗽𝗶𝘁𝗮𝗹 𝗦𝘁𝗿𝘂𝗰𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲 𝗣𝗘 • Uses a mix of equity + debt • Financial engineering plays a major role 𝗩𝗖 • Primarily equity (sometimes convertible notes or SAFEs) Neither is “better.” They serve different moments in a company’s lifecycle. PE optimizes and scales proven businesses. VC fuels innovation and growth before stability exists. Understanding the difference changes how you position your company, and who you pitch. So tell us… are you building for PE or VC? Graphic from WallStreetMojo. #PrivateEquity #VentureCapital #PrivateCapital #Founders #Investors

79

17 Comments