general-catalyst
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The Venture Firm That Bought a Hospital
General Catalyst spent 25 years turning startups into giants. Then it did something no venture firm had done before - it bought a hospital.
Wilson Spearman
Wilson Spearman is the co-founder and CEO of CreativeMode (YC S24), an AI-powered, no-code platform that lets anyone build Minecraft mods without writing code. An MIT computer science graduate who worked on AI cloud infrastructure at Crusoe and procurement tools at Settle, he now leads a small San Francisco team that has helped players create hundreds of thousands of mods - by the company's account, more Minecraft mods in nine months than in the game's previous seventeen years combined. When he is not shipping software, he is an aspiring ski mountaineer chasing alpine glacier routes.
Yuzu Health
Yuzu Health is a New York-based healthtech company that rebuilds the administrative backbone of health insurance into a single, white-labeled system of record. Operating as a vertically integrated third-party administrator (TPA), Yuzu runs the behind-the-scenes engine for claims processing, payments, and member administration, letting insurers, brokers, and self-funded employers launch highly configurable plan designs - direct provider contracts, cash-pay options, and dynamic copays - without the heavy services burden of legacy administrators. Founded in 2022, the company works with customers across all 50 states and has processed more than $1 billion in claims payment volume.
IM8 (David Beckham & Danny Yeung's health drink startup)
IM8 is a premium longevity supplement brand co-founded by soccer icon David Beckham and serial entrepreneur Danny Yeung, operating as a consumer-health subsidiary of Nasdaq-listed Prenetics. In July 2026, IM8 secured $1 billion in growth financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund (CVF), a non-dilutive facility that funds up to 70% of customer-acquisition spend in exchange for a capped share of cohort revenue rather than equity. Launched in December 2024, IM8 became the fastest-growing premium supplement brand on record, hitting roughly $100 million in annualized revenue within eleven months, and the capital is meant to pour fuel on marketing while ownership stays undiluted.
Chariot Defense
Chariot Defense is a South San Francisco defense-technology company building hybrid-electric power systems for the battlefield. Its Amphora platform delivers quiet, high-density, software-controlled power to distributed military hardware - drones, sensors, radios, electronic-warfare and directed-energy systems - so that energy never becomes the limiting factor in a fight. Founded in 2024 by former Anduril and Archer engineer Adam Warmoth, the company raised a $34M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in February 2026, bringing total funding to roughly $41-42M, and has fielded its systems with the U.S. Army and the Defense Innovation Unit.
Matthias Hofmann
Matthias Hofmann is the co-founder and CEO of Eyebot, a Boston-based company building self-serve vision-test kiosks that deliver a 90-second refractive exam and pair users with a tele-optometrist. He holds a PhD in electrical engineering from Virginia Tech, did postdoctoral optics work at Harvard Medical School, and was an early engineer at MIT spinout EyeNetra before starting Eyebot in 2021 with Jack Moldave. In August 2025 Eyebot raised a $20M Series A led by General Catalyst.
Max Kauderer
Max Kauderer is the co-founder and CEO of Yuzu Health, a New York-based third-party administrator building an operating system for health insurance. After stints at LinkedIn, Capital One, and Bain & Company, he started Yuzu in 2022 with Russell Pekala and Ryan Lee to let small businesses spin up flexible, transparent health plans in days rather than months. Yuzu raised a $35M Series A in April 2026 led by General Catalyst and Chemistry, bringing total funding to about $40M.
Sahir Jaggi
Sahir Jaggi is the founder and CEO of Forus, an AI-powered network (formerly known as Tandem) that automates the paperwork sitting between a doctor's prescription and a patient actually getting the drug. Forus emerged from stealth in May 2026 with $160M in funding at a $1B valuation from Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, and Accel. Before Forus, Jaggi spent six years as a product leader at Oscar Health after studying biomedical engineering and computer science at Columbia.
AfterHour
AfterHour is a San Francisco social trading app that lets retail investors link their real brokerage accounts and post their actual positions - in full dollar amounts - to a public feed under a pseudonym. The twist is verification: you can talk your book, but the app proves you're holding what you claim. Founded by Kevin Xu, the WallStreetBets folk hero known as 'Sir Jack A Lot' who turned roughly $35,000 into millions during the meme-stock era, AfterHour combines verified portfolios, live stock chat rooms, and real-time trade signals into one community. It raised a $4.5M seed round led by Founders Fund and General Catalyst in June 2024.
Aurelius Systems
Aurelius Systems is a San Francisco defense-technology startup building Archimedes, an autonomous, high-powered laser turret that detects, tracks and neutralizes drones in seconds for roughly the cost of electricity. Founded in 2024 by photonics veterans Michael LaFramboise and John Marmaduke, the company fuses commercial off-the-shelf hardware, advanced optics and AI-guided targeting into a compact, low-cost counter-UAS platform aimed at protecting soldiers and critical infrastructure from cheap, swarming aerial threats.
Haize Labs
Haize Labs is a New York-based AI safety and reliability startup that automates the red-teaming, stress-testing, and evaluation of large language models. Founded in 2024 by a trio of Harvard-trained researchers, the company builds algorithms that hunt for the inputs that make AI models misbehave - jailbreaks, failure modes, and edge cases - so they can be fixed before real users find them. Its 'haizing suite' and multi-turn attack engine Cascade are used by frontier model labs including OpenAI and Anthropic, alongside enterprises like Deloitte and MongoDB.
Percepta
Percepta is a New York-based AI transformation company, wholly owned and incubated by venture firm General Catalyst, that embeds teams of researchers, engineers, and product managers directly inside large enterprises to move them past AI pilots and into AI-native operations. Founded in 2025 by CEO Hirsh Jain (a former Palantir SVP) and General Catalyst's Hemant Taneja, the company pairs applied engineering with a frontier research lab to rebuild core workflows in healthcare, financial services, manufacturing, and government - working closely with founding partners Anthropic and AWS.
Danish Qureshi
Danish Qureshi is the founder and CEO of Zarminali Pediatrics, a nationwide pediatric multispecialty group he started in 2024 to fix the fragmented way American children get care. Before Zarminali, he co-founded LifeStance Health, scaling it into the country's largest outpatient mental health provider with thousands of clinicians across dozens of states before it went public. A former Bain consultant and private equity operator who cut his teeth in wound care, Qureshi has raised roughly $150M for Zarminali and grown it to nearly 30 clinics across eight states in under two years.
Leonard Tang
Leonard Tang is the co-founder and CEO of Haize Labs, a New York AI safety startup that stress-tests frontier language models by automatically jailbreaking them before they reach the public. A Harvard math and computer science graduate who turned down a Stanford PhD, Tang built Haize into a venture that frontier labs like OpenAI and Anthropic pay to break their models on purpose. By 2024 the company had raised a $12.5M seed led by General Catalyst at a $100M valuation, roughly eight months after founding, and Tang landed on Forbes' 2025 30 Under 30 list for AI.
Hirsh Jain
Hirsh Jain is the co-founder and CEO of Percepta, a General Catalyst Transformation Company that embeds AI engineers, researchers, and product managers directly inside large enterprises to move them past pilots and into AI-native operations. He spent seven years at Palantir Technologies as a senior vice president leading its healthcare and civilian-government business, and previously worked at Google, Jane Street, and the U.S. Department of Defense. A Harvard computer-science and mathematics graduate and published machine-learning author, he launched Percepta in 2025 with General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja and a founding team drawn from Palantir, MIT, Meta FAIR, Google, and Citadel. Shortly after launch, Palantir sued him and other former employees, putting the New York startup at the center of one of the year's most-watched AI talent fights.
Michael LaFramboise
Michael LaFramboise is the CEO and co-founder of Aurelius Systems, a San Francisco defense startup building autonomous, AI-guided laser turrets that detect and destroy drones at the speed of light for roughly pennies per shot. A Case Western engineer, Navy veteran, and ex-Coherent and Amazon Devices operator, he dropped out of a Columbia PhD in nano optical systems to build Archimedes, a low-cost directed-energy weapon. Aurelius raised a $10 million seed co-led by General Catalyst and Draper Associates in September 2025 and opened a U.S. manufacturing line for high-power fiber lasers in 2026, aiming to become America's domestic one-stop laser shop.
Zayd Ali
Zayd Ali is the founder and CEO of Valley, a New York based AI SDR that runs LinkedIn-first outbound for B2B teams by learning a company's product, cloning its best reps' voice, and booking sales meetings. He sold his first appointment-setting company for seven figures while still in high school, briefly studied at Columbia, joined Antler in 2022, and after starting and shelving a founder-VC network called Fish, pivoted into Valley. He took 136 investor meetings before closing a seed round that grew to roughly $3M from backers including Antler, Jason Calacanis, and General Catalyst's Fellows program.
Shanel Fields
Shanel Fields is the founder and CEO of MD Ally, a public safety telehealth company that plugs virtual care directly into the 911 system so non-emergency callers get routed to the right help instead of an ambulance. A Cornell graduate and Wharton MBA, she spent her first year doing ride-alongs with dispatchers and first responders before building the platform solo. The daughter of a volunteer EMT, she has raised more than $23M, taken MD Ally through Techstars, joined the Techstars board of directors, and been featured by The New York Times and Good Morning America.
Fabric
Fabric is a New York-based care enablement company building an AI-powered operating layer that sits on top of hospital and health system technology to automate clinical and administrative work. Its platform spans a Digital Front Door, virtual and in-person care suites, patient engagement, and a 50-state clinical network, all stitched together by a hybrid AI that combines conversational models with clinical logic. Founded by Aniq Rahman, the former Moat president, Fabric grew fast through product plus four acquisitions in 18 months and now reaches more than 75 health systems and roughly 100 million covered lives.
Aniq Rahman
Aniq Rahman is the founder and CEO of Fabric, a New York healthcare technology company building an AI-driven care enablement platform that helps health systems triage, navigate and treat patients faster. Before Fabric, he was president of ad-analytics firm Moat through its roughly $850 million sale to Oracle, was on the early team at Behance, and ran Instinctiv before its acquisition by SoundCloud. He launched Fabric in 2021 after watching his father move through the hospital system following a heart attack, and has since stitched together five acquisitions, raised tens of millions from General Catalyst, Thrive Capital, GV and Salesforce Ventures, and earned spots on Forbes 30 Under 30 and Modern Healthcare's 40 Under 40.
Chris Altchek
Chris Altchek is the founder and CEO of Cadence, a New York health-tech company that runs remote patient monitoring and virtual care for chronic conditions on behalf of large U.S. health systems. He built the company after selling his first venture, the millennial media brand Mic, which he co-founded at 23 with high-school friend Jake Horowitz. A Harvard social studies graduate and former Goldman Sachs analyst who also worked in the Bloomberg administration and the White House, Altchek pivoted from media to medicine through an entrepreneur-in-residence stint at Thrive Capital. Cadence reached a reported $1 billion valuation in 2021 after a $100 million Series B led by Coatue, and now monitors tens of thousands of patients across more than 20 states.
Jake Brooks
Jake Brooks is the co-founder and co-CEO of Triumph, a San Francisco company that gives mobile game developers a drop-in SDK to add real-money, skill-based tournaments to their games. He dropped out of Stanford during the pandemic to build it, and in 2023 the company launched with $14.1M in seed and Series A funding led by General Catalyst. Triumph handles the hard parts - payments, KYC, anti-fraud, matchmaking and state-by-state compliance - so developers can monetize beyond ads. Brooks pitches real-money competition as a third pillar of game revenue alongside advertising and in-app purchases.
Thatch
Thatch is a San Francisco health benefits platform that lets employers give workers a tax-free monthly healthcare budget instead of a one-size-fits-all group plan. Employees shop a marketplace for their own medical, dental and vision coverage, then spend any leftover budget on care through a Thatch debit card. Built around ICHRA - a 2020-era IRS rule - the company aims to unbundle health insurance from a single employer plan and hand the choice back to individuals. Since launching in 2023 it has served more than 1,000 businesses and raised about $84.5 million across seed, Series A and Series B rounds.
Nan Wang
Nan Wang is the co-founder and CEO of Sleeper, the fantasy sports platform built like a group chat that grew to millions of daily users almost entirely by word of mouth. He left a private equity career in Hong Kong to build a sports product that is social at its core, turning a 20-year fantasy league among childhood friends into a company backed by a16z, General Catalyst, and athletes like Kevin Durant and Klay Thompson. Under Wang, Sleeper expanded from fantasy football into the NBA and fantasy esports, drawing an unusually large share of women and casual fans to a category long dominated by ESPN and Yahoo.
Triumph
Triumph (Triumph Labs) is a San Francisco company that turns ordinary mobile games into real-money skill tournaments. Its plug-and-play SDK lets developers add cash competitions with a single line of code, while Triumph handles the hard parts behind the scenes: payments, KYC identity checks, state-by-state legal compliance, geolocation, matchmaking, anti-cheat, and payouts. Founded in 2021 by Stanford dropouts Jake Brooks and Jared Geller, the company raised $14.1M (a $10.2M Series A led by General Catalyst plus a $3.9M seed) and also runs its own consumer apps - Triumph Arcade for skill games and Rips for card collectibles.
WonderHowTo Network
WonderHowTo Network is a Santa Monica-based digital media company that helps curious people learn how to do almost anything. Founded in 2006 by former TV executive Stephen Chao and technologist Michael Goedecke, it began as a search engine and directory for instructional how-to videos and grew into a network of specialized brands - Gadget Hacks, Null Byte, Next Reality, Food Hacks Daily and more - covering smartphones, white-hat hacking, augmented reality and everyday DIY. At its peak the network reached roughly 12 million monthly unique visitors.
Priyanka Agarwal
Priyanka Agarwal is a physician-turned-founder building HealthEx, an AI-powered patient consent and data-rights platform she started in 2022. A practicing UCSF telehealth physician with an MD from Harvard Medical School and an MBA from Harvard Business School, she is rebuilding how patients grant, revoke, and direct access to their own medical records. HealthEx raised $14M led by General Catalyst, connected to national networks through TEFCA, and partnered with MD Anderson, Epic, CLEAR, and athenahealth to make patient-controlled data the default rather than the exception.
Nitesh Banta
Nitesh Banta is the co-founder and CEO of B12, a New York-based AI website builder and online presence platform for professional service firms. A Harvard graduate who spent five years investing at General Catalyst and co-founded the student fund Rough Draft Ventures, he teamed up with his middle-school classmate Adam Marcus in 2015 to bet on a shift from do-it-yourself software to do-it-for-you software where AI and human experts work side by side. B12 has raised more than $40M and helped over 150,000 firms get online.
Parth Shah
Parth Shah is the co-founder and CEO of Polimorphic, the New York-based company building AI-powered constituent relationship management software for local governments. An MIT-trained electrical engineer and former NVIDIA deep learning engineer, Shah started out trying to build an 'ESPN for politics' and ended up rewiring how town halls answer phones, process permits, and serve residents in 75+ languages. In July 2025 Polimorphic raised an $18.6M Series A led by General Catalyst, bringing total funding to roughly $28M.
Patrick Gilligan
Patrick Gilligan is the founder and CEO of SOMETHINGS, a New York based near-peer mentorship platform that connects youth ages 13 to 26 with trained mentors in their twenties through real-time virtual support. The service is free to teens and paid for by states, Medicaid managed care plans and school systems. In February 2026 the company raised a $19.2M Series A led by Catalio Capital with returning backers General Catalyst and Tusk Ventures, bringing total funding to roughly $28.6M. SOMETHINGS has supported more than 11,000 teens and is built on Gilligan's conviction that a young person in crisis needs a person, not a chatbot.