Kristen Craft

You can feel it, something’s shifting in hard tech. From materials to manufacturing to energy, we’re seeing founders take on harder problems, and raising from investors who finally understand what it takes to build in these sectors. When Harpoon Ventures started Black Flag, our goal was simple: help critical-tech founders close the distance between great ideas and the right capital. Over the past few months, we asked hundreds of founders which investors they trust and recommend most. Their answers became something worth sharing: a public list of the most active deep-tech funds today. It’s meant to save founders time, connect them to the right partners, and make this ecosystem a little easier to navigate. 🏴‍☠️ Introducing The Black Flag Investor List → https://lnkd.in/dYsCnpnd

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Startups building for national security can’t afford to waste time fighting through bureaucracy just to test, iterate, and deploy. That’s why I’m fired up to share a new resource for Black Flag teams: thanks to our partnership with Second Front, participating companies now get free access to the 2F Workshop dev environment — the fastest on-ramp to fielding software on DoD networks through Game Warden. This isn’t a sandbox. It’s a launchpad. If you're building in defense, intelligence, or dual-use tech — apply to Black Flag and plug straight into the real-world infrastructure that matters. 🏴‍☠️

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Excited to partner with Clarify in their $22.5M funding led by USVP and Gradient, alongside Madrona, Recall Capital, and others. Sales teams spend most of their time updating CRMs instead of selling. Patrick Thompson, Austin Hay, and Ondrej Hrebicek built an autonomous CRM that handles all the manual work automatically. I use it all day every day. More on the future of the sales tech stack and autonomous CRM here: https://lnkd.in/gcG-YgcE

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The latest Studio Stack newsletter dropped on Friday — and in it, I unpack why community is the most underutilized competitive advantage in most organizations but ESPECIALLY in the Venture Studio sphere. 💡 87% of leaders say community is critical to their company’s mission 📈 79% report it’s directly impacting business results Yet most studios still treat it like a side project. In the article, I break down what actually works in 2025: → Build where people already “play” → Force connection (because they won’t do it themselves) → Curate, don’t just collect 'If you’re serious about standing out in a sea of 1,000+ studios, this one’s for you. 📰 Read the full issue — packed with new frameworks, launches, jobs, and insights from Studio builders and thought leaders across the world. 👉 https://lnkd.in/eZ2AtsDy

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Just read a sharp articulation of a truth by Mark Buffington: Too many founders learn the hard way that the very traits that create a venture rarely scale it. Yet, here’s the nuance I’d add… We’ve over-romanticized youthful founders as if raw ambition and irrational optimism are sufficient to build enduring enterprises. They’re not. They’re ignition—not propulsion. Seasoned founders bring something far more consequential: earned self-awareness. They know who they are. More importantly, they know who they are not. And that clarity becomes a strategic advantage. Because the transformation from founder to high-performance CEO isn’t about abandoning your entrepreneurial DNA—it’s about augmenting it with judgment, restraint, and intentionality. Older, wiser founders don’t cling to control. They architect capability. They don’t hire for loyalty. They recruit for complementary excellence. They don’t confuse charisma with leadership. They build systems, culture, and teams that scale beyond them. Your ability to grow is directly proportional to the quality of the people you choose to surround yourself with—and to your willingness to let them lead. That’s the real inflection point. Not when the founder gets better… But when they get comfortable being outmatched in key areas of their own business. Because world-class CEOs aren’t the smartest person in the room. They’re the ones who intentionally build rooms where they’re not. Read Mark's article below. https://lnkd.in/ekzTHmMX

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Had some fun talking the future of AI, Robotics, and VR in Construction with Michael Canzoneri and Garrett Smith on the Radial Ventures podcast!

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New blog out for Pave Health Ventures! If you’re a startup tackling health-related challenges, take a closer look at the intersection of two massive, fast-growing industries: Consumer Health & Wellness and Traditional Healthcare. You might be pleasantly surprised. The opportunity is bigger (and closer) than you think. Read the full blog + subscribe to our Substack for more insights at the intersection of wellness and healthcare: https://lnkd.in/gJ2T6WBK

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A nice moment for our team: pWin.ai was included in the Washington Business Journal’s “Startups to Watch in 2026.” https://lnkd.in/eNPEQbrd What we’re building is simple to say and hard to do: help government contractors systematically reuse proven, contract-winning knowledge to generate full proposal drafts — often hundreds of pages — in hours, not weeks, in a single, consistent voice grounded in Shipley best practices. We never want to pretend that “software wins proposals.” Customers win because of their solutions, relationships, and teams. We’re simply trying to give them time back — while raising the quality bar at the same time. Grateful for the recognition — and even more grateful for the people doing the real proposal work every day. #apmp

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The gap between SBIR and venture funding is the narrowest it's been in 44 years. Reauthorization created a new award tier up to $30M. 0% equity. Requires a prior Phase II award + a 1:1 match (private capital or non-SBIR government funding) + a federal customer signaling intent. Closer to a co-investment round than a grant. Founders winning these in 2028-2029 are entering the Phase I pipeline right now. I sat through the AFWERX webinar last week (my first one) and was honestly surprised by how much airtime the new authority got. AFWERX is DoD-side, but the rule applies cross-agency: HHS, DOE, NSF, NASA, & DoD all qualify. Most folks analyzing it are focused on Phase II winners. The more useful question for early-stage founders: what does this mean if you're at Phase I, or thinking about SBIR for the first time? Here's a representative stack at NSF: Phase I ($305K) → Phase II (~$1.25M) → Strategic Breakthrough Award (up to $30M with matched capital). SBIR does evaluate both technical merit and commercial potential, but the new authority pushes harder on outside-capital validation and customer intent than any prior SBIR vehicle. The math compounds for early-stage founders. At seed, $305K saves ~2-6 points of cap table depending on round size. Stack Phase II at Series A and a Strategic Breakthrough at Series B, and the cumulative savings can run into double-digit points by exit. My take: set up Phase I now, alongside (or before) your next venture round, so you have the $30M option later.

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Live view of dreamers moving from skepticism to building GPT's To say today was rewarding is an understatement. The Alpha Cohort with FM's partnership with The Nexus at Trilith Studios has it's first outputs: 12 entrepreneurs built 12 custom GPT's that deliver value for their business. We estimated that each of us combined for over 40 hours of productivity savings per week across the group. From skeptics to builders, that is the promise of #AI Lets go!

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The next decade of commerce will be built below the surface. Across the ecosystem, one pattern keeps repeating: The real breakthroughs aren’t happening in storefronts, apps, or checkouts; they’re happening in the infrastructure nobody sees. As Dawn Capital put it in their recent Future of ecommece study: Growth continues, but the playbook is changing. Efficiency, forecasting, and data control are taking center stage. AI is everywhere, yet it still struggles to solve the most challenging problems: demand planning, analytics, and real-time decision-making. And then there’s the next frontier: agentic commerce, where AI won’t just recommend, but transact. Early days, but every major retailer and brand is paying attention. Search is being rewritten by generative models that understand context and intent better than any algorithm before them. At Founderment, that’s music to our ears. It’s precisely where our Fund I retail-tech companies operate: Cernel, Relewise, Sentispec, and Hakio. Four teams quietly redefining the plumbing that makes modern commerce work, from discovery to delivery. Cernel sits at the epicenter of the data shift, helping merchants safely expose their product catalogs to AI engines without losing control over data or revenue. Relewise personalizes at scale, turning raw behavioural data into loyalty through real-time, privacy-first recommendations. Sentispec brings computer vision to the warehouse floor, unlocking efficiency where margins are won or lost. Hakio transforms forecasting from gut instinct to predictive precision. And as we continue cheering on our four retail-tech companies, our search is on for the next set of founders, those with the vision, grit, and technical depth to build the infrastructure beneath the future of commerce. If you’re building in this space, reach out. We’re always keen to connect and learn.

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Most founders have no idea their state government wants to write them a check. When Jess Lynch I started building FoundersEdge - a pre-seed fund built by founders, for founders - we thought we had a pretty good handle on the funding landscape. I'm based in Massachusetts, she's in Connecticut. We knew about MassVentures. We knew about Connecticut Innovations. We knew our backyards be we had no idea of the extent of funding available to founders. As we dug into the ecosystem, we kept stumbling onto state-level programs we'd never heard of - direct investment funds, co-investment vehicles, fund-of-funds programs, accelerator grants — spread across nearly every state in the country. Some writing checks as small as $50K. Others going up to $5M. Many specifically targeting pre-seed and seed stage companies in technology. Almost nobody talks about these. They don't show up in the usual "how to fundraise" threads. VCs rarely mention them. And founders are leaving real money on the table. So we did what any slightly obsessive operators would do: we built a spreadsheet. Thanks for the assist Claude! We compiled every state-level venture and startup funding program we could find. It's not perfect, and we're still adding to it, but it's already one of the most comprehensive lists we've seen. We're making this list available because we believe the best thing founders can do for each other is share access. That's the whole thesis behind our fund, and it starts with something as simple as making sure people know what's out there. Drop a comment or DM and I'll share the full list. And if you know a founder raising capital or an emerging fund manager who could benefit from this, tag them below.

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Two weeks ago on Swimming with Allocators, we sat down with David Clark, CIO at VenCap, to talk about what decades of venture data can teach allocators. One takeaway that stood out: discounts don’t matter as much as people think in venture secondaries. Because venture is such a power-law asset class, outcomes are driven by exposure to a few massive winners. Whether a stake is bought at a small discount, or even a premium, often matters far less than the quality of the underlying company and its upside. Great conversation on venture returns, manager selection, and the nuances of how allocators should think about secondary investments. 👇 Link in the comments.

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Orange Health Labs has always been committed to six-hour reporting. Not "as fast as possible" but specifically six hours, no exceptions. This one constraint made them build everything differently. They couldn't use standard labs designed for average daily volume - they had to build for peak hourly capacity. They couldn't have doctors at each location, so they built remote pathology, where one doctor reviews slides from multiple cities. They couldn't rely on traditional logistics - so they created dedicated networks covering four times the area of competitors. Now incumbents can't copy it without scrapping their existing infrastructure. They have hundreds of labs built the old way, doctors hired locally, and established logistics. Retrofitting would cost more than starting from scratch, and starting from scratch means abandoning their existing business. I like how Orange Health's edge is that matching their model means incumbents must treat their current infrastructure as sunk cost. This is the kind of advantage that compounds.

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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.

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Being worked on here at Trellus (YC W22) 1. We are bringing on more design partners for our dialer SDK to allow any major platform to begin competing with Nooks/Orum and stand-up their own whitelabeled power/parallel dialers - reach out if you're interested in working with us on it 2. New upgrades for speed are going live in the next two weeks for faster patch times + iOS/android navigation - our team is heads down working on these capabitilies #sdrs #bdrs #ai #coldcalls #sales #salesenablement

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🚨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

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What is a "buyer-builder"? It's the founder archetype we back at Daring Ventures. Buyer-builders have lived experience and domain expertise on the industries they are building in. They've felt the friction and know which problems to address and who to build for. They don't need to do customer discovery because they've experienced it first-hand. Outsiders spend years and millions figuring out what buyer-builders already know. We started The Builders Series to profile the ones doing it right. This edition: Ara Mahdessian and Vahe Kuzoyan of ServiceTitan. Ara and Vahe did not need to be told that contractors were underserved. They grew up watching it. Their fathers, competent skilled operators, losing hours every week to paper invoices, missed calls, and work that software should have absorbed years earlier. Full piece on Forward This 👇

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In honor of #InternationalWomensDay, I wanted to take a moment to shout out just a few the awesome women investors and ecosystem builders in the Boston community. @David Chang of Via AI, Inc. has outdone me with a most thorough list of founders and funders - p.s. this is one way we keep the trusted human in AI. Here are just of few of these amazing women who have pioneered in venture in Boston or are currently investing. I am in awe of you, inspired by you and in many cases indebted to you for your support: Women running their own funds or Managing Funds: @Nicole Stata, Boston Seed Fund Katie Rae, The Engine Jennifer Lum, Biospring Partners Rudina Seseri & Kleida Martiro, Glasswing Millie Liu, First Star Maia Heymann & Nilanjana Bhowmik, Converge Melissa Withers, RevUp Lily Lyman, UnderscoreVC Maureen Stancik Boyce, PhD, Good Growth Rana el Kaliouby, Ph.D. & Gabi Zijderveld, Blue Tulip Sarah Hodges, Pillar VC Awesome investors: Beth Porter, C10 Stacy Swider, MassVentures Holly Maloney, General Catalyst Brigid O'Brien, Planetary Health, RA Capital Jennifer Davis, Techstars Kerty Levy, Techstars Samara Gordon, Hyperplane Incredible Angels, Public Board Directors, Company & Ecosystem Builders: Jean Hammond, Anita Brearton & Sheryl Schultz, Shereen Shermak, Stefania Mallett, Jules Pieri, Emily Green, Sarah Fay, Sarah Biller, Sara Fraim, Jodi Goldstein, Jody Rose, Jodi Gernon, Jodi Collier, Jodi-Tatiana Charles, and so many more! We have come a long way, baby. Sisters are doing it with community.

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