Tagged: seed-stage
30 results
Ability Biotherapeutics
Ability Biotherapeutics (also known as Ability Biologics) is a Montreal-based biotech founded in 2023 that engineers highly selective, immune-cell-modulating antibody therapeutics for cancer and autoimmune disease. Its AbiLeap discovery engine pairs continuously learning AI with one of the largest antibody-antigen interaction databases ever assembled to generate fully human, IgG-based multispecific antibodies that sense their environment and act only where intended - so-called logic-gated therapeutics. Backed by US$18M in seed capital led by Amplitude Ventures, the company is advancing a pipeline of immuno-oncology and autoimmune candidates toward preclinical readiness.
AngeLink
AngeLink is a women-led social crowdfunding platform based in Naples, Florida, that bills itself as the first fintech fundraising site powered by women. It pairs a zero-platform-fee model with an AI tool called AI-Wizard that helps people write more compelling fundraiser stories, plus fraud review and mobile-first design. Positioned as a GoFundMe alternative, it targets the reality that most crowdfunding donors and organizers are women, and aims to raise money for medical bills, emergencies, small businesses, and community causes.
Fortitude Biomedicines
Fortitude Biomedicines is a Waltham, Massachusetts biotech that launched in early 2026 with $13M in seed financing to develop next-generation antibody-based therapies for autoimmune diseases and cancer. Its proprietary GLUE-DAC platform bolts molecular glue degraders onto antibody-drug conjugates, aiming to use catalytic targeted protein degradation to widen the therapeutic window of ADCs and overcome the resistance that has dogged the field. Its lead program, FORT-202, is a first-in-class T-cell targeting bispecific antibody for axial spondyloarthritis expected to reach the clinic in the first half of 2027.
Parcha
Parcha is a San Francisco AI company building enterprise-grade AI agents that automate compliance and operations work for banks and fintechs. Founded in 2023 by former Brex leaders AJ Asver and Miguel Rios-Berrios, its Agent Hub platform lets compliance teams create, test, and deploy agents in minutes to run KYC/KYB reviews, enhanced due diligence, AML screening, and document verification - work that traditionally requires large operations teams. Backed by $5M in seed funding led by Kindred Ventures and Initialized Capital, Parcha counts fintechs like Bridge, Airwallex, Flutterwave, and Pipe among its users.
Hapi
Hapi is a Peruvian-founded, YC-backed fintech that lets people across Latin America invest in U.S. stocks, ETFs and cryptocurrencies from their phones - with zero commissions, no minimums and an account you can open in about five minutes. Built to knock down the high fees and paperwork that historically kept Latin Americans out of the U.S. markets, Hapi has grown from 10,000 users in 2022 to a reported 500,000-plus clients across roughly 20 countries.
Idilio TV
Idilio TV is a Latin American microdrama streaming app that produces original vertical series with episodes roughly 90 seconds to 3 minutes long, blending the melodrama of telenovelas with the format of TikTok. Founded by Gabriela Tafur and Esteban Ramirez and legally operating as Latido TV SAS, the company uses an AI-assisted production pipeline to make short-form drama faster and cheaper than traditional studios. Available free on iOS and Android, it passed 1.3 million-plus downloads across 50-plus countries within months of launch and raised a $5.5M seed round led by a16z Speedrun with backing from Jeffrey Katzenberg's WndrCo, Goodwater Capital, Precursor Ventures and Nubank founder David Velez.
Jacobi Robotics
Jacobi Robotics is a UC Berkeley spinout building AI-powered motion planning software that lets industrial robot arms be programmed and deployed in under a day instead of a month. Its platform generates collision-free trajectories in under a millisecond, and its flagship product, the Jacobi OmniPalletizer, handles real-time mixed-case palletizing without pre-sequencing. Founded in 2022 and launched publicly in 2024 with a $5M seed round, the company partners with robotics providers like Formic and ABB to bring faster, cheaper automation to manufacturers and warehouses.
Oligo Space
Oligo Space is a Hawthorne, California startup building an AI-first stack for designing and manufacturing payload-centered spacecraft. Its software engine, Zenith, turns raw mission requirements into flight-ready ESPA-class spacecraft using generative design, constraint solving and physics-based optimization - compressing work that once took teams of specialists months into a process that runs in minutes and manufactures in under eight months. Founded in 2024 by MIT AeroAstro graduate and former NASA JPL engineer Jacob Rodriguez, the company plans to fly its first spacecraft, Chimera-1, aboard SpaceX's Transporter-15 mission in 2026.
ProductNow
ProductNow is a Palo Alto AI-native platform that closes the gap between AI-generated prototypes and engineering-ready specifications. Founded in 2025 by two-decade product veteran Tript Singh Lamba, it snapshots prototypes from tools like Claude, Lovable, and Figma, collects ranked customer feedback within hours, and hands engineering a single source of truth of validated context, decisions, and requirements. The company raised a $6M seed round led by Sierra Ventures in July 2025.
Jing Zhu
Jing Zhu is the Founder and CEO of Duet (Dashboard Story, Inc.), a B2B SaaS platform built for non-emergency medical transportation (NEMT) providers across the United States. A Cornell PhD-turned-Berkeley MBA, she spent a decade in corporate healthcare before founding Duet — first as a neighborhood carpooling app, then pivoting to a full-stack dispatching and billing platform that helps wheelchair, stretcher, and ambulatory transport operators run leaner and get paid faster. Based in San Francisco, Zhu leads a 12-person team and has raised $120K in seed funding.
Jon Carter
Jon Carter is the CEO and Founder of Prado, an Austin-based technology platform that connects physicians, nutrition providers, and food businesses to make food function as medicine — unlocking $170 billion in pre-tax HSA/FSA dollars for medically tailored meals. Before Prado, Carter built a career spanning digital product leadership at Union Bank and Live Nation (where he ran eCommerce for 600+ artist brands including Jay-Z and Madonna), and CEO of Snap Kitchen. His father died from type 2 diabetes, and that loss transformed into a professional mission: eliminate the friction preventing food from operating as healthcare.
Katrin Kaurov
Katrin Kaurov is the Estonian co-founder and CEO of Frich, a New York based social finance app that lets Gen Z anonymously compare how their peers spend, save and invest. A former international model who worked across 20+ countries before age 18, she went on to Harvard's entrepreneurship program and built Frich with co-founder Aleksandra Medina out of a shared NYC apartment.
Anyware Robotics
Anyware Robotics is a Fremont, California startup building deployable physical AI for industrial work. Its first product, Pixmo, is a mobile robot that drives into a shipping container or trailer and unloads boxes - up to about 1,000 cases per hour - using a force-sensing collaborative arm and an AI stack the company calls AnywareOS. Founded in 2023 by former UC Berkeley researchers and FANUC engineers, the company aims to take over the back-breaking jobs that warehouses can no longer reliably staff.
Nestment
Nestment is a San Francisco-based proptech startup that helps first-time and co-buying homebuyers navigate the path to ownership. It pairs 1:1 human coaches with AI-powered affordability, analysis, and matchmaking tools, and connects buyers to a vetted network of real estate agents and lenders - including a notable model for buying homes with friends and family.
Octave
Octave is a San Francisco-based AI company building a generative go-to-market platform - an 'agentic GTM brain' that codifies a company's ICP, positioning and messaging, then feeds that context to sales agents, workflows and tools like Clay, Salesforce and HubSpot. Founded in 2022 by Zach Vidibor and Julian Tempelsman, it has raised $8.4M total and reports 2,500+ GTM teams on the platform.
Clipbook
Clipbook is an AI-native platform for communications and corporate affairs teams. It monitors over one million media and policy sources - press, broadcast, podcasts, social, regulatory filings - and uses agentic AI to surface what actually matters, in real time. Founded in 2023 by ex-BCG consultant Adam Joseph, Clipbook bootstrapped to seven figures in ARR before raising a $3.3M seed round co-led by Mark Cuban, Commonweal Ventures, and Carpenter Capital in late 2025.
Cube
Cube is an AI-powered marketing automation platform headquartered in Palo Alto, California, that deploys autonomous AI agents to manage paid ads, SEO, social media, email marketing, and online reputation management from a single dashboard. Founded by IIT and Stanford alumni, the company trains its AI on historical ad-spend data to deliver real-time campaign optimization across Google, Meta, TikTok, Amazon, and more - promising businesses a full marketing team's output without the headcount.
Joaquin Olmedo
Joaquin Olmedo is the co-founder and CEO of Filadd (YC S21), a Córdoba-born edtech platform helping students across Latin America get into — and through — university. What began in 2016 as an online prep course for Argentine university entrance exams has grown into a four-country operation serving over 25,000 students annually, with 90% year-over-year growth and recognition as one of Holon IQ's 100 Leading LatAm EdTechs. An industrial engineer by training, Olmedo applied to Y Combinator on a Mexican investor's offhand suggestion and was accepted — with metrics that caught the partners' attention immediately.
Kathleen Forte
Kathleen Forte is an Investor Relations Partner at Sequoia Capital, one of the world's most storied venture capital firms. With over two decades of experience across investor relations, business development, and fundraising, she has held senior roles at Lightspeed Venture Partners, SVB Financial Group, ADM Capital, and Clearwater Capital Partners. Known for her deep expertise in LP relationships and fund management, Forte joined Sequoia in July 2022, bringing a rare blend of financial acumen and relationship-driven dealmaking to one of Silicon Valley's most prestigious platforms.
Neiman Mathew
Neiman Mathew is a Partner at Greylock, one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capital firms, where he focuses on early-stage founders building the next generation AI stack. He skipped college to pursue technology, spending years at Hex Labs applying AI to materials discovery and at Schmidt Futures funding ambitious AI-for-science research before joining Amplify Partners and then Greylock. Known for engaging founders before they even have a business idea, Mathew brings a rare combination of deep scientific intuition and investor pattern-recognition to the earliest and most uncertain bets in AI.
Ernest Addison
Ernest Addison is a Senior Associate at Boldstart Ventures, one of the premier enterprise-focused seed-stage VC firms, where he backs founders at the earliest inflection point. With a career that spans Goldman Sachs, Deutsche Bank, Bank of America's Global Industrials investment banking desk, and private equity at Audax Group, Ernest brings a rare mix of Wall Street rigor and startup-native intuition to enterprise infrastructure, security, developer tools, and SaaS. Originally from Washington, D.C. and a UVA McIntire alum, he joined Boldstart in 2021 and has since become a fixture in the firm's mission to be the first check into ambitious technical founders.
Herman Yang
Herman Yang is the CEO and co-founder of Upscale AI, an AI-native platform that lets e-commerce brands create, run, and optimize performance TV ads on streaming channels. A Stanford CS grad with an MBA from Harvard Business School, Yang spent over a decade reshaping mobile advertising at AdMob (acquired by Google) and MoPub (acquired by Twitter, then AppLovin), before stints at Facet Data, Chatgrid, and Moloco. In May 2025, he emerged from stealth with $5.5M in seed funding - backed by Nvidia Ventures, M12, Eniac, and others - to democratize what was once a $100K-minimum medium: streaming TV ads, rebuilt from scratch for performance marketers.
Monica Woo
Monica Woo is a Partner at 2048 Ventures, a $67M seed-stage VC fund in New York, where she backs early-stage companies in AI, cybersecurity, edtech, and e-commerce. A Wharton MBA with a career spanning four continents, she has held CMO and president-level roles at 1-800-Flowers.com, Bacardi, Diageo, Nutrisystem, Sears, FreshDirect, and Mozido - generating over $5 billion in incremental revenue across her career. As founder of WooWorks, she channels that operator experience into advising and investing in the next wave of emerging tech companies.
Natalie Ledbetter
Natalie Ledbetter is a 3x startup People Ops executive, TEDx speaker, and former Operating Partner & Head of People at Boldstart Ventures who scaled Stash from 27 to 350 employees in 2.5 years. A self-described 'third culture kid' who grew up attending school in Jakarta, Indonesia alongside students from 90 countries, she now runs Ledbetter Global Advisory, offering embedded fractional people operations leadership to Series A-B companies. She has partnered with 100+ founders across the startup ecosystem, blending strategic executive thinking with hands-on execution to build high-performance, psychologically safe teams.
Rachel Soper Sanders
Rachel Soper Sanders is a Venture Partner at 2048 Ventures and the CEO and co-founder of Rootine, a precision nutrition company that personalizes cellular health through DNA analysis and biometric data. A Harvard Business School MBA and former healthcare investment banker at Raymond James who worked on $5B+ in M&A deals, she pivoted from Wall Street to wellness after personally battling burnout and fatigue. She co-founded Rootine in 2018 with Dr. Daniel Wallerstorfer, raised a $3M seed round and a $10M Series A, launched the Apex Optimizers NFT project bridging web3 and health optimization, and hosts the Smart Health with Rachel Sanders podcast. She brings over a decade of health-tech experience across investment banking, product strategy, and company building to her venture investing role.
Michael Dearing
Michael Dearing is the founder and sole General Partner of Harrison Metal, a seed-stage venture capital firm based in Woodside, California. A former SVP at eBay who oversaw nearly $20 billion in gross merchandise sales, Dearing is one of Silicon Valley's most respected — and deliberately low-profile — early-stage investors. He taught entrepreneurial finance and management at Stanford for nearly a decade, coined the concept of 'cognitive distortions of founders,' and has backed companies including AdMob (acq. Google $750M), Acompli (acq. Microsoft $200M), MasterClass, PagerDuty, and Signal Sciences. He operates Harrison Metal with the philosophy that great general management is the scarcest resource in startup ecosystems.
Mar Hershenson
Mar Hershenson is a Spanish-American venture capitalist, electrical engineer, and serial entrepreneur who co-founded Pear VC (originally Pejman Mar Ventures) in 2013 with no prior VC experience - learning the trade from Amazon-purchased books. A Stanford PhD who holds 14 patents and founded three startups (two acquired), she has grown Pear VC to over $800M AUM with a portfolio that includes DoorDash, Guardant Health, Gusto, and Dropbox. A perennial Forbes Midas List honoree (#29 in 2021), she also teaches Stanford's Lean Launchpad course, champions women in VC through All Raise and her Female Founder Circles initiative, and is known for her conviction that great founders are made, not born.
Anna Pinol
Anna Piñol Mediano is a Partner at NFX, a $450M seed-stage venture capital firm, where she leads investments in AI, marketplaces, fintech, and consumer companies across the U.S., Europe, and Latin America. A founder-turned-investor, she co-founded Jupiter (YC S19) after her Stanford MBA and was recruited to NFX - the very firm that had backed her startup. Promoted to Partner in May 2024, she is widely recognized as one of Silicon Valley's leading voices on AI agents and the emerging AI workforce, having authored influential essays and spoken at Stanford's Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series.
George Zachary
George Zachary is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures) and one of Silicon Valley's most storied venture capitalists, known for seed-stage bets on Twitter, Yammer, and PillPack. A Greek-American MIT graduate who once helped build the Nintendo 64 at Silicon Graphics, he pivoted from consumer internet to bioengineering after a near-miss cancer scare in 2015 - writing more diligence on his first biotech deal than in the prior decade combined. He deploys capital guided by a single question: does this founder need - not just want - to build something big?
Miriam Rivera
Miriam Rivera is the Co-Founder, CEO, and Managing Director of Ulu Ventures, one of the largest Latina-led venture capital firms in the United States with ~$400M AUM. A first-generation college student born to Puerto Rican migrant farmworkers, she earned four degrees from Stanford, joined Google as its second attorney and helped scale the company from $85M to $10B in revenue, then co-founded Ulu Ventures in 2008 with husband Clint Korver. Ulu's data-driven, bias-reducing investment model has backed 10 unicorns including Palantir and Guild Education, with a portfolio where 80% of founders are women, immigrants, or from minority groups.