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Articles by Nick
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20 Summer Reads On Tech & Infrastructure
20 Summer Reads On Tech & Infrastructure
Out of my three small forearm tattoos, the one I get asked most often about reads in typewriter font: “Readers…
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The Serial Killer of Startups: Bad StrategyJul 8, 2024
The Serial Killer of Startups: Bad Strategy
The most closely held advice inside the startup network state is to always be building. Derivative mantras include:…
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Activity
5K followers
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Nick Durham shared thisSUPER excited to announce we co-led the pre-seed for Western Chemicals. They turn wastewater into the world's cheapest fuels. And they are going to do it at planetary scale. Shadow's LP base includes a deep bench of A/E and GC firms, and well before I met Jared West, wastewater treatment specifically had moved into the foreground of those conversations. Every firm I talked to is betting that wastewater is its next big vertical after data centers. Our investment is a bet that Western solves a unique treatment problem for wastewater plants, dramatically cuts the cost of powering the plant, AND is strongly incentivized to do all of it because of the massive upside of producing biofuel at net-negative cost. How will they do it? You can read our thesis below.
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Nick Durham shared thisIt's been fun watching my partner KP Reddy get back in the founder game. His new startup is Zero RFI, an AI-native Owner's Representative firm backed by General Catalyst. Most owners and AEC firms can't imagine a world of zero RFIs. It's an impossible mission. Which makes for a perfect company name. Zero requests for information reflect a state in which project direction is so complete, coordinated, and unambiguous that no additional clarification is required. For Shadow Ventures, Zero makes the technology bets we've already made more deployable and harder to displace. We've always had great access with AEC firms. Now, through Zero, we have a direct line to some of the world's largest owners and developers. The OG is back at it. I can confirm that his energy is higher than ever. Some people just need to build...Nick Durham shared thisKP Reddy is a legend in construction tech, spending more than two decades as a founder, operator, and investor in the industry. Today, we're proud to announce the launch of Zero RFI, our latest AI-enabled roll-up, acquiring the best businesses in one of the last major industries to have its AI moment. Every RFI (Request for Information) on a construction project is a sign something slipped. We're on that journey with KP aiming to get that number to zero. More in comments from Paul Kwan, Marc Bhargava, Adrian Stehnkuhl and Sarah Ascherman.
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Nick Durham shared thisI wasn't at all embarrassed when a week after I published my cute, several thousand word essay on beauty and real estate, Alexis Ohanian Sr. dropped the sexiest highlight reel ever for Monumental Labs.
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Nick Durham shared thisLast year, we invested in Monumental Labs. They use AI and robotics to reduce the cost of stone fabrication by 90%, automating a process that hasn't fundamentally changed in centuries. They've done building facade work for Carnegie Hall and The Frick, and this year they'll venture into building construction with the opening of a 40,000 sq ft factory in Brooklyn. Before investing, I had to answer a question that's been nagging me for years: when and why did we stop building with beauty? Picture a working-class tenement in NYC from 1910, which has more depth and presence than most luxury towers going up today. It wasn't expensive by the standards of its time. So what happened? A simple distillation: Steel frames replaced load-bearing stone. Widespread real estate financialization created shortened horizons for developers. Structure and surface became separate line items and beauty was eventually cut. Modernism gave developers cover. Ornament was "waste," austerity was "honesty." Yet, stone, an objectively beautiful and structurally sound material, should be cheap. It's abundant and durable. The cost bottleneck was always fabrication and logistics, which remains labor-intensive and dependent on a shrinking pool of a skilled trade. I wrote all of my thoughts down about beauty in real estate in an essay for Thesis Driven. Many thanks to Micah Springut and James Kaminsky for their edits! https://lnkd.in/eT_N4vtk Building with stone is a tooling problem. And tooling problems get solved.
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Nick Durham shared thisMany people in tech with large exposure to AI tools are experiencing extreme levels of anxiety. Consider that the AEC/RE industries have interesting AI protection qualities. Lots of regulation, heavily relationship-driven, general conservatism toward technology due to safety and risk concerns, and integration with physical-world assets. The diffusion of AI will be slower. The same attributes that made the built world a less attractive recruiting ground for many years, make it a compelling safe haven for tech talent as knowledge work is swallowed. If you are an engineer or marketer working in tech today, would you rather join a B2B SaaS startup building a modern crm or a hardware company solving durable problems for society that can't fulfill on its backlog because of a skilled labor shortage? The resolution of this choice gets clearer with each new model release.
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Nick Durham shared thisAt 16, he built earthworks surveying software At 21, an electric autonomous wheel loader At 23, a tele-operated electric skid steer At 25, the world's first 32-ton fully electric dozer. Next Wednesday at HackSummit in NYC, I'll be sitting down with Lumina Co-Founder ahmed shubber to tell his story.
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Nick Durham reposted thisNick Durham reposted this"Who actively chose not to go outside on certain days this summer due to the heat?" was a question I asked about 1000 audience members over the course of New York Climate Week - and nearly every person raised their hand. The world needs practical, scalable innovations to keep people safe and productive as extreme heat increasingly threatens how we live and work - especially for field workers in construction, logistics, and operational sectors (which I saw in direct P&L losses and safety issues when I ran Citi Bike, too). That’s why we at Streetlife Ventures are proud investors in Eztia Materials’s seed round, in partnership with Shadow Ventures, Granite Asia, and Scrum Ventures. Many of you know that I’ve gone deep on a range of extreme heat areas over the last few months, and here are just a few of the reasons why we invested: 👯 Led by impressive founders, deep in this problem space: Tiffany Yeh, MD (Massachusetts Institute of Technology materials scientist, University of Pennsylvania physician) and Jack Wilson (former US Army Special Forces, NYU Stern Full-time MBA, wildland firefighter) are a rockstar team who have experienced extreme heat directly, and have the technical and operational experience to solve for it. ⚡ Critical business and individual pain point: Workers (and anyone) in temperatures above 90°F lose 50% of work productivity (estimated to cost businesses $200B in the U.S. alone, today). And health and safety risks (heat stroke, loss of life, etc.) increase dramatically at these temperatures as well. 💵 Nearly immediate payback: Eztia is priced for businesses to see a payback in less than three days, with a useful life of more than six months. 🧊 Effective and efficient: Eztia's wearable gel technology cools skin by up to 10°C for 8 hours with no batteries or refrigeration needed, making it not only one of the most effective human cooling solutions on the market, but one of the most sustainable, too. 🏙️ Especially important for people in cities: Due to Urban Heat Island (UHI) effects, cities have air temperatures up to 10°F (5.6°C) warmer than the surrounding natural land cover Read more about their exciting work here: https://lnkd.in/g27mcDQP And shout out to co-investors with Sonam Velani and me here: Shadow Ventures (Matthew Ohlman, Nick Durham), Granite Asia, Scrum Ventures (Tak Miyata, Michael Yan, Akira Hagiwara, Anand Engineer). And special shout out to Nick Durham for creating the nice image shown here :)
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Nick Durham shared thisShadow Ventures co-led a $4M seed round for Eztia Materials with Streetlife Ventures. Eztia is an advanced materials startup that turns work uniforms into cooling systems. Their first product is HydraVolt, a tuned hydrogel that lowers skin temperature about 10°C for up to 8 hours, then recharges with water. Here's our thesis: 1/ Heat is not an abstact problem On real sites, heat presents obvious fatality risks, steals hours, triggers stoppages, and just generally sucks to operate in. In construction, output often drops about 50% once temps pass 91°F. Most crews have water, rest, and shade, but nothing that cools people while the work continues. 2/ Materials breakthrough Eztia’s product, HydraVolt, is a materials invention. It’s a tuned hydrogel that sits close to the skin, moves heat by evaporation, and stays dry to the touch. In the lab and field, it delivers ~10°C skin cooling for 6–8 hours, then recharges in water in minutes. No batteries. No pumps. No freezers. If you've ever used an ice pack to stay cool, just think about what it means to have 8 hours of constant cooling with no breaks....insane. 3/ Logistics was the constraint, now solved Most competing ideas add logistics you do not have: charge cycles, ice, bulk, or special storage. HydraVolt removes logistics you do not want. A cooling shirt that recharges from a 5-gallon bucket is the difference between a product that gets used and one that doesn't. Simple logistics is why this can scale across construction, utilities, ports, and defense. 4/ 1.5 day payback Above ~90°F, crews routinely lose ~50% of output. A HydraVolt kit (≈ $115 per worker) that gives back even 2 hours of productive work on a hot day at $40/hour pays back in ~1.5 days. After that, the rest of the season is margin. Incident avoidance and fewer heat-related stoppages are upside, we’re not even counting. It’s a no brainer purchase. HydraVolt does the hard thing: remove heat at useful flux for a full shift and do it inside existing uniforms. That puts Eztia in the only quadrant that matters on a job site: effective and deployable. Release here: https://lnkd.in/eBbC9W5Y Ready to get to work with Tiffany Yeh, MD, Jack W., Streetlife Ventures, Granite Asia, and Scrum Ventures to help the team build the default cooling layer for frontline workers.
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Nick Durham shared thisThe unfortunate part about having founders like Chaitanya N K in your portfolio is that your investors, HENSEL PHELPS and Performance Contracting, Inc. (PCI), who quickly became early customers, now expect every founder to have his contagious spirit and breakneck product velocity. Which is impossible. Excited to work with Ironspring Ventures and Zacua Ventures on Track3D's next phase of growth.Nick Durham shared this🎉 Exciting News: Track3D Secures $10M in Series A 🎉 We are so thrilled to share that Track3D has just closed Series A funding, led by Ironspring Ventures and co-led by Zacua Ventures, with continued support from Shadow Ventures and Monta Vista Capital. This funding will fuel our mission to advance our Reality Intelligence platform, bringing the next generation of AI-powered capabilities to construction monitoring. In just over a year, Track3D has become the go-to platform for some of the most respected contractors and owners in the U.S., powering hundreds of projects. That momentum is what made this raise possible, and it’s what drives us to keep redefining how construction projects are monitored and delivered. 🤗 Huge thanks to our customers, investors, and the Track3D team for being a part of this journey. This milestone is one we’re proud of, and it marks the beginning of an even bigger journey ahead. Read the full announcement here: https://lnkd.in/dxQ9JA6y #Track3D #Track3DSeriesA #ConTech #Realityintelligence #ConstructionAI
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Nick Durham liked thisNick Durham liked thisWOW. Berkshire Hathaway to buy Taylor Morrison—a giant homebuilder ranked No. 452 on the Fortune 500—for $8.5B This is BIG I’ll send out an article/analysis tonight about it. If you want the article, make sure you’re subscribed to the ResiClub newsletter (free list) 🏡📊👇 https://lnkd.in/gc6XNqfW #homebuilding #housingmarket #homebuilders
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Nick Durham liked thisNick Durham liked thisAnnouncing the Western Chemicals $4M Pre-Seed Fundraise! We are now building the WORLD’S FIRST vertically integrated duckweed-to-ethanol plant capable of producing 10,000+ gallons of fuel-grade ethanol annually. Wastewater-to-fuel at planetary scale starts NOW!
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Nick Durham liked thisProud to announce allO's $14M Series A. Since becoming an investor, I've been on the lookout for the tools I would have wanted during my time as CFO of Momofuku: most restaurant software is bad. Yet few entrepreneurs have the blend of industry know-how, technology expertise, and ruthless practicality that one needs to thrive in such a demanding operational environment. Cancan Liu, Teodor Rupi, Benedikt von Lewinski are different. They have it all. They are building the POS of the future, a restaurant operating system that pulls together disparate data sources and makes work seamless. Today, they're announcing their first AI reservationist that means no more missed calls or delivery orders--with many more on the way. They're off to a fast start within Germany and soon, beyond. They'll be welcoming many new team members over the next few months -- come join them! cc: Keen Venture Partners Briehan Burke Paul Bonnet Alexandre Dewez 20VC LifeX Ventures Aperture Capital Wecken & Cie. - Care4 AG Nils OttNick Durham liked thisWe're thrilled to announce allO's $14M Series A, led by Zigg Capital 🚀 We're excited to welcome LifeX Ventures, Aperture Capital, Wecken & Cie. - Care4 AG, and angels Fabian Siegel, Mark Ransford, and Ludwig A. Fuchs - alongside the continued support of 20VC and Keen Venture Partners. This marks a major milestone in our mission to build the first AI-native operating system for restaurants. With this investment, we're accelerating our expansion across Europe and pushing forward a vision we deeply believe in: the restaurant industry deserves technology that does more than process transactions. The industry still runs on fragmented software, disconnected workflows, and constant operational chaos. Restaurant owners don't want more software to learn. They want the work done. So that's exactly what we're building — AI-powered digital employees on top of a fully integrated restaurant OS. Today, we're launching our Reservation & Ordering Voice Agent: the first of ten+ digital employees coming to allO over the next 18 months. 1,000+ restaurant locations across Germany. 6x location growth. 3.5x revenue year on year. Deep gratitude to our customers, partners, and most of all - our incredible team. Building in hospitality is not easy, but the opportunity to transform this industry has never been bigger. 🧡 The restaurant industry is entering a new era. We're here to build it. And we're hiring! Check out https://lnkd.in/dsgYExcm if you want to be part of building the future with allO. 🔥
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Nick Durham liked thisNick Durham liked thisSomething important happened at ICSC this year. 😱 ✍ 📙 I wrote and published a book, the real 107 pages book. The book is called The Store Development AI Playbook, A Field Guide. I gave away 25 early copies of a book to CDOs and VPs from Burlington Stores, Inc., Dollar General, 7-Eleven, McDonald's, Family Dollar, Valvoline Inc., CVS Health, The TJX Companies, Inc. and others. The people quietly carrying the weight of opening and managing thousands of retail stores in this country. I wrote it with Schaefer Jones, MBA from JD Sports Fashion Store Development team, It's the real story behind opening 100+ new stores. It's the first field guide ever written about applying AI inside retail store lifecycle management. Not because we wanted to claim a first. Because when we started this work a year ago, we realized no one else was doing it. So we decided to wrote down what we learned within this year of AI implementation. We wrote it because no one had written it yet, and the industry needed it Not to sell or disrupt anything. Retail real estate doesn't need to be disrupted. Technology alone doesn't transform industries. The operators do. The leaders willing to experiment. The teams willing to learn. It's not AI entering retail. It's retail adopting AI. And I believe in the power of community, where everyone cares about each other. This is not a consulting report about AI impact. These are our real actions - week-to-week calls, day-by-day usage, and hundreds of iterations. That's the value, and we wanted to share it with a community of others who care. The first reactions I'm receiving tell me people actually recognize themselves in this book. They recognized the late-night calls. The Sundays in Excel. The landlord coordination. The punch walks. The delays no one outside the industry sees. The quiet pressure behind every portfolio number. Leaders with 20+ years in this industry that started as PMs and now leading whole portfolio were truly grateful for their copy and I'm glad it's now in their hands. This is kind of an open-source project of sharing knowledge with industry is more valuable than keeping it a secret. It's a win-win for everyone if after reading this book you can avoid mistakes and develop your own view on how new tech can impact existing processes. The book is 30 minutes to read. A year of real work behind it. Strategies, workflows, prompts, results and a few honest stories about what we got wrong. #getyourcopy If you'd want your copy, drop a comment below. The next version is better when more people contribute.
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📊 AmTech Daily: Deals Defining America's Future — Feb 25, 2026 Each morning, Commonweal Ventures compiles the day's top #AmTech deals and news at the intersection of government and technology. Here's today's. Comment "Subscribe" to get the full briefing, news included, in your inbox. Education 🔹 Subject (Beverly Hills, CA), which offers an AI-powered digital curriculum platform for middle and high school students, raised $28 million in funding led by Vistara Growth, joined by NextEquity Partners, Green Street Impact Partners, Outcomes Collective Growth Capital, and other existing investors. Health 🔹 Handl Health (Los Angeles, CA), which provides an analytics platform to help health plans and benefits consultants design employer health benefits that lower costs and improve care quality, raised $14.2 million in Series A funding led by Arthur Ventures, joined by Syndra Capital Partners, a strategic investor, Mucker Capital, Riverfront Ventures, Digital Health Venture Partners, and Boutique Venture Partners. Aerospace 🔹 Sophia Space (Pasadena, CA), building orbital data centers composed of ultra-thin, solar-powered computer panels called TILES that sit on or next to satellites, raised $10 million in seed funding led by Alpha Funds, KDDI Corporation Green Partners Fund, and Unlock Venture Partners. Finance 🔹 Comeryx Insurance (Denver, CO), which runs an AI-driven online insurance platform that automatically prices and issues specialty liability coverage for small trade contractors that traditional carriers won't easily underwrite, raised $7.5 million in seed funding led by Altai Ventures, joined by American Family Ventures, Intact Ventures, Boulder Ventures, Arch Capital Group, and Echelon. AI Chips 🔹 Cerebras (Sunnyvale, CA), which designs wafer-scale AI chips and computer systems that let large organizations train and run advanced AI models faster and more efficiently, has confidentially filed to go public in the U.S. after previously raising more than $2.5 billion in private funding across eight rounds. Energy 🔹 Terrasmart's eBOS division (Grand Rapids, MI), which makes prefabricated electrical wiring and combiner-box systems that connect utility-scale solar panels to inverters and the grid, was acquired by GameChange Energy Technologies for $70 million to extend its end-to-end solar infrastructure offering. What is #AmTech? It's our term for the companies tackling America's biggest challenges in sectors like energy, defense, healthcare, and infrastructure. In these markets, the path to building category-winning companies runs through government, and the founders who understand that are building the most consequential technology businesses of our generation.
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Faisal Butt
Pi Labs • 38K followers
I've spent over a decade backing founders shaping the built world and there's never been a more exciting time to be doing it with the arrival of AI-native proptech. VerbaFlo.AI is one of those companies, and we’re excited to lead the round alongside Haatch, Navigate Ventures and Old College Capital. Verbaflo is replacing the fragmented chaos of tenant communication with a single AI layer that runs leasing, operations and resident engagement 24/7. Eleven months in and the numbers already speak for themselves, with Verbaflo powering communication across 230,000+ units globally. The best proptech companies of the last decade made real estate more efficient, the next wave will make it autonomous. This is the future our new fund, Pi Labs Fund IV, is excited to back, vertical AI that becomes core to how the built world operates, not just another tool in the tech stack. Onwards Sayantan Biswas Abhishek Garg Dan Smith VP Singh If you're an investor who wants to understand where vertical AI is creating real value across real assets and construction, reach out to LP@pilabs.vc 📩 🔗 Read more on why we invested here Tech.eu: https://lnkd.in/dDeN-fVT
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Ralph Dickerson III
Specialties: Corporate… • 2K followers
Capital Isn’t the Strategy—Clarity Is In a market awash with capital, the real scarcity is clarity. At R² Partners, we’re often brought in after the pitch deck has been built, the capital allocated, and the path defined—yet something still feels misaligned. Because strategy without clarity is just expensive motion. We ask harder questions. Not “What are you building?” but “Why should it exist? Why now? Why you?” Capital doesn’t create coherence. Thoughtful design does. #StrategicClarity #CapitalDiscipline #FounderAdvice #R2Partners
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Craig Foos
Dyad • 4K followers
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Tuukka Jarvenpaa
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Founders make dozens of decisions every week. Make sure you're one of the founders who go back to check how those decisions played out. It's easy to remember the wins and explain away the misses. If you don't actively work against that, you end up with a growing confidence in your own judgment that's never actually been tested. I was in a session with a founding team that had been running for years. Experienced, sharp, deep domain knowledge. When I asked how they make product and prioritization decisions, the answer was honest: "From experience. But we don't always revisit those critically." Their experience had created assumptions that felt like facts. Hardwired beliefs about customers, pricing, and priorities that hadn't been questioned since they were first formed. In another company, a founder had a real "lightbulb" moment when she realized they'd been tracking customer data for billing and sales, but never for learning. The data to evaluate their own assumptions was sitting right there. They just hadn't thought to look at it that way. This isn't really about "data vs. gut." Most founders use both, in some mix, all the time. The deeper question is whether you have any feedback loop on your own decision-making. When you made a bet on a customer segment six months ago, do you remember what you assumed? Did it turn out to be true? If not, what did that teach you? The founders who build the best companies hold themselves accountable for their own calls. They go back, check what happened, and adjust their compass. That's how intuition actually develops. Not through experience alone, but through experience that's been honestly examined. Every correction makes the next decision a little sharper. Don't let your ego or the pace of the business stop you from developing the one asset that compounds over time: your judgement.
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Tim Regnier
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Venkat Chary
WillowTree Ventures • 5K followers
Our WillowTree Ventures dinner brought together an incredible group of fintech and AI operators. What struck me most was the consistency across perspectives: AI is finally unlocking tangible value in workflows, personalization is becoming real, and some of the biggest opportunities sit in the corners most people overlook. Founders building for financial services and enterprise AI deserve more conversations like these. Grateful to everyone who made time, and if you’re tackling one of these “non-sexy but massive” markets, let’s talk. Here are some key takeaways - AI is still about efficiency. The most serious near-term initiatives focus on automation, workflow augmentation, and operational leverage across teams. - Tech orgs continue to control the AI agenda. Budgets and decision-making largely sit with product and engineering, who are driving both exploration and implementation. - Personalization at scale is becoming real. There was broad agreement that AI can finally enable true 1:1 experiences in products and services, not just improved segmentation. - The most interesting opportunities are in “boring” corners. Non-traditional and overlooked segments are wide open for AI. “Non-sexy is sexy” may define the next wave of category creators. - Crypto is still early in the enterprise. Despite broader excitement, real day-to-day adoption remains nascent and uneven.
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Dave Goldblatt
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Hendrik Jordaan
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Few stories in American business are as remarkable as that of Fernando De Leon. He grew up in Matamoros, Mexico, crossed the border daily to attend school in Brownsville, Texas, and at 12 represented South Texas in the National Spelling Bee. He went on to Harvard University, then Goldman Sachs — and walked away at 25 to bet on himself. He launched Leon Capital Group in 2006, just before the financial crisis, and went "all in 200 times in a row" — buying what others were fleeing and building from the ground up. Today, Leon Capital is a Dallas-based family holding company with a portfolio exceeding $10 billion across real estate, healthcare, and financial services. What makes Fernando's model so compelling isn't just the scale — it's the structure. Permanent capital. Proprietary deal flow. Operating discipline that institutional PE simply can't replicate. He's redefining what a family office can be. This conversation with The Distribution by Juniper Square is worth your time. #FamilyOffice C. Travis Pittman
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Michael Shufeldt, MBA
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Access changes everything. Lowering the Jetstream Venture Fund minimum to $5,000 creates a new entry point for people who want exposure to high-growth companies. Excited to see where this goes. Full details in the press release below.
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Ryan Sommerville
Criticality • 11K followers
Thrilled to share the launch of Criticality, a $65M fund built to back founders solving hard, high-leverage problems at the intersection of technical complexity and real-world urgency. Criticality builds on the foundation we’ve laid at Antler - applying our conviction-driven approach to companies at Seed & Series A. The fund is sector-flexible but applies a deep tech lens to each opportunity, targeting non-obvious, high-leverage problems from the earliest stages of company formation. Grateful to the New Mexico State Investment Council for their support in anchoring Criticality. More to come soon from Cash Allred & I.
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Chris Kelly
Stackpoint Ventures • 11K followers
AI is as transformative as it is overwhelming. When we searched for a comprehensive resource to empower and guide Real Estate CEOs and Leaders in navigating this pivotal moment, we came up empty-handed—so we decided to create one ourselves. “Real Estate AI: A CEO’s Guide to What Matters” is an unbiased, in-depth, and actionable handbook designed for: - Leaders at any stage of the AI adoption journey, from skeptics and beginners to seasoned experts - Owners, operators, developers, and investors - Across sectors, including #singlefamily, #multifamily, #commercial, #industrial, #hospitality, and #construction Our hope is that this guide equips you with the confidence and knowledge to lead your organization through the #AI transformation and embrace the future with clarity and purpose.
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Matthew Chang, PE
Chang Robotics • 4K followers
Check back if you missed it! The world is changing around us and it makes sense to own a piece of it. Remember we have two entry points into deep tech: 1) go direct into the CR Fund 2) write a small check into AIM Company *Must be accredited. Sorry, government rules, not mine.
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Scott Brady
Stanford Graduate School of… • 7K followers
We’re excited to announce our investment in LightTable a team on a mission to bring AI-powered quality control to developers and general contractors. Before a project breaks ground, developers spend billions manually reviewing drawings and specs - a slow, fragmented process that drives $500B in annual waste. LightTable’s AI catches design issues 5x more effectively and 15x faster than human reviewers, creating the first true system of record for pre-construction. Looking forward to seeing Paul Zeckser, Dan Becker, Ben Waters, and team build toward a fully AI-assisted design future. Read more about why we invested here: https://lnkd.in/d8rFuhdm
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Shay Grinfeld
Greenfield Partners • 6K followers
Greenfield Partners is proud to be deepening our partnership with Capitolis as they announce today a $56M strategic round. If you’ve spent time in market infrastructure, you know how rare it is to see deep market insight paired with real product velocity. The team at Capitolis has both, and the result is infrastructure that makes capital markets safer and more efficient. We’re increasing our investment alongside Barclays, BNP Paribas, J.P. Morgan, fellow investors Canapi Ventures, 9Yards Capital, and existing investors Citi, Morgan Stanley, State Street, and UBS to fuel the next stages of Capitolis’ Capital Marketplace and Portfolio Optimization solutions. https://lnkd.in/exK8nQYx Kudos to Gil Mandelzis and the entire Capitolis team!
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Rob Freele
TELUS Global Ventures (TGV) • 4K followers
The future of corporate venture capital isn’t about optionality or one-off M&A wins. It’s about designing modular, industry-specific platforms that flex and scale with market needs. In this article, I share a playbook for how CVCs can move from cheque-writers to ecosystem architects, building future-ready platforms one module at a time. Let’s stop acquiring the future and start assembling it. https://lnkd.in/gWSjg9fT
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Lucas J. Pols
1752vc (Formerly Pegasus) • 14K followers
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
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Ignasi Heras
CRB Health Tech SGEIC • 9K followers
🚀 Excited to announce our investment in Waiv, formerly Owkin Dx as part of their €35M funding round. A truly outstanding team, led by Meriem Sefta and Lionel Guillou, redefining diagnostics by building the most comelling platform at the intersection of AI and precision medicine.
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Daniel Dart
Rock Yard Ventures • 10K followers
🚨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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