Sameer Dholakia

I’m thrilled to announce defy.vc’s investment in Birches Health as part of their $20M combined Seed and Series A funding round, alongside incredible partners like AlleyCorp, General Catalyst, Will Ventures, and others. As someone deeply passionate about backing companies that tackle important problems for our society, I couldn’t be more excited about what Birches is building—a national virtual clinic dedicated to treating gambling addiction and related behavioral disorders like gaming, sex, porn, and internet addictions. What excites me most is Birches’ innovative health assurance model: proactive, accessible, and affordable care that’s evidence-based and delivered right at home. With the explosion of legal sports betting—think nearly $1.5 billion wagered on this year’s Super Bowl alone—we’re staring down a looming public health emergency. Traditional options like hotlines or generic therapy fall short for this high-acuity issue, but Birches changes that by offering specialized therapy from trained clinicians, multimodal treatment, and peer support, all covered by major insurers like United Healthcare, Cigna, Aetna, and Blue Cross Blue Shield. It’s available in all 50 states, breaking down geographical and financial barriers that have left so many without help. The impact is already profound: 96% of patients report an improved quality of life, and 94% give Birches a 5/5 rating. By partnering with state governments, payors, and policymakers, Birches is pushing gambling addiction into the spotlight of behavioral health conversations, where it’s been neglected for too long—often leading to shame, worsened outcomes, and higher suicidality risks. This funding will supercharge their growth: expanding the provider network, boosting clinical excellence, scaling infrastructure, and deepening insurance and state partnerships to meet surging demand. Very excited to partner with Elliott Rapaport and the entire Birches team! See more about our POV in the blog post linked in the comments. #GamblingAddiction #BehavioralHealth #HealthTech #VentureCapital #Innovation

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Today we Lightspeed are excited to announce the industry-first formal partnership with 𝐒𝐤𝐲 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐮𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐋𝐚𝐛 to support the next generation of entrepreneurs & technical leaders at University of California, Berkeley. Many of the most consequential AI-native startups of our generation were founded by students, postdocs, faculty, and alums of UC Berkeley, including OpenAI, Databricks, Perplexity, Skild AI, ReflectionAI, Physical Intelligence, and more. Sky Computing Lab has followed in the footsteps of predecessors Berkeley RISE Lab & AMPLab to push technical research & commercialization across both AI/ML infrastructure and applications. Generational startups often begin within the walls of academic institutions like UC Berkeley, but the research funding landscape (in particular tied to NSF) is shifting, and the impact is already visible: fewer grants, slower timelines, and heightened urgency to commercialize. On behalf of Lightspeed, James Alcorn & I are honored to partner with Ion Stoica, Joseph Gonzalez, Dawn Song, and the Sky leadership team with a commitment of capital, network, and startup resources to ensure Berkeley's next wave of entrepreneurs has the platform and partners to build industry-defining companies. UC Berkeley College of Engineering UC Berkeley College of Computing, Data Science, and Society UC Berkeley Electrical Engineering & Computer Sciences (EECS) #UCBSkyComputing #BerkeleySky #UCBerkeley https://lnkd.in/etDTiBzC

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Today, X, The Moonshot Factory quietly unveiled A-Life, a project that brings biomanufacturing into the AI era. It may sound niche, but it’s one of the most transformative projects I’ve ever worked on (and that includes Calico Life Sciences, Google’s effort to understand aging and lifespan). Here’s why: We now have a clear way to use living cells, like yeast and bacteria, to produce materials we currently make from petroleum and waste-heavy processes. Look around you: the textiles in your clothes, the packaging of your snacks, the medicines and supplements you take. All of these could be made cheaper, cleaner, and with less waste through biomanufacturing. What’s new is that the team built a set of AI tools specifically for biology that makes this possible at scale. For years, making biomanufacturing cost-competitive has been described as a $30 trillion holy grail for the industry. A-Life is the first time we’ve seen a viable path forward. 🔗 Introducing A-Life: https://lnkd.in/ggrYuUCS For me, collaborating on this was a full-circle ikigai moment, bringing together Google, wonderful teammates, molecular biology, and company-building all at once. Always say yes to those rare moments! Huge thanks to Relly, Jodi, Odd, and the whole team for making this such a fun version of ‘work.’ In my University of Oxford lab days, just trying to keep fibroblast cells alive, I would have been stoked to see this future taking shape. Photo: Making biochemistry thrilling since 2005 :).

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We at Upfront Ventures are proud to work with BrightAI as they raise $51M in a Series A to bring AI into America’s critical infrastructure. Story in comments. Much of the world’s essential services, like power grids, water pipelines and HVAC systems, still rely on manual checks and reactive maintenance, which leaves field teams in the dark until something breaks. BrightAI will use this new capital to scale their observability and automation platform and invest in a new HQ in the heart of Silicon Valley. Here’s to a more resilient future. Let’s go!

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The AI Breakfast keeps going from strength to strength with a full house of AI founders this morning at Barclays Innovation Hub powered by Eagle Labs to hear from an expert panel of VC partners on "How AI is impacting VC". Big thank you to Shamillah Bankiya from Dawn Capital, Hussein Kanji from Hoxton Ventures and our own Katie Lockwood from Twin Path Ventures for sharing your insights and experiences. My three big takeaways were that AI enabled services ( if margins are high) are now VC backable, that startups using AI to generate "De Novo" in areas as diverse as Drug Discovery or Material Science are changing investing in deep tech and how at least one VC will give Data Science led startup teams experiments to perform to prove that their AI models are novel and perform in their DD process. Next month theme for the AI Breakfast is on Autonomous Vehicles with a super hot panel- https://luma.com/fo3d9y4y -Don't miss out

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Chatting with ZEDEDA CEO, Said Ouissal, and he has an elegant way of explaining the evolution of industrial Edge. Zededa provides OS for orchestrating Edge AI. 2010s were about IoT/Edge Connectivity. 2020s were about Edge computing/processing. 2030s will be all about Edge AI.

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AI isn't just powering software. BrightAI just raised $51 million to automate inspection and other hardware-based AI capabilities. As Alexa von Tobel, co-founder of Inspired Capital put it: “So many people are so focused on the future of digital AI, but we’re excited about this new layer of AI: the physical world AI.” We are in the early innings of a series of AI-fueled innovations! https://lnkd.in/enhmafvH

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