• Omada Health filed its S-1 to go public at the beginning of May.
• Now, the chronic care startup is launching new AI agent tools for nutrition.
• Omada is cashing in on a surging "food as medicine" market amid the Ozempic-fueled weight loss boom.

Omada Health just filed its S-1 to go public. Now, the diabetes care startup is bolstering its business with new tech for AI-powered nutrition.

The startup is releasing an AI agent to provide nutrition education and guide patients through goal-setting sessions about their food habits, Business Insider has learned exclusively.

The agent, called OmadaSpark, is part of a new suite of "nutritional intelligence" tools that Omada hopes will help its patients make more thoughtful and informed choices about their nutrition and drive behavior change.

Omada is tapping into a booming nutrition care market. "Food as medicine" pushes are picking up steam, especially as US Department of Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. touts his agenda to "Make America Healthy Again", while more and more patients take GLP-1 drugs such as Ozempic for weight loss.

That's leading investors to back nutrition startups like Nourish and Fay Nutrition with big funding rounds — and bringing fresh business to late-stage virtual care businesses seizing on the moment like Omada.

The release comes less than two weeks after Omada filed to go public. The startup is one of two digital health companies to have publicly announced IPO plans this year, alongside physical therapy startup Hinge Health, which launched its road show last week.

Omada Health has been caring for patients with chronic conditions, with a focus on diabetes, since 2011. It's making most of its new AI nutrition tools available to all of its patients across conditions from diabetes to hypertension to obesity. That includes a "food hub" in Omada's app where patients can ask the AI agent nutrition-related questions and track their meals, with new capabilities to track patients' water intake and log meals based on food barcodes or photos of the food uploaded to the app.

OmadaSpark is Omada's first patient-facing AI tech. Dr. Justin Wu, Omada Health's vice president of clinical innovation and quality, said the startup now feels ready to allow patients to interact with AI directly after significant improvements in the underlying models. He said Omada has fine-tuned its nutrition AI with the startup's own clinical input, as well as guidelines from the United States Department of Agriculture and other organizations.

Anti-diet tech in the age of Ozempic

Omada Health CEO Sean Duffy told BI in October that metabolic health is the company's most popular entry point for new customers, which Wu said remains true today.

While Omada doesn't prescribe GLP-1s like Ozempic or Wegovy, many of its members take the drugs, and employers and insurers often contract with Omada seeking wraparound care for those patients, Duffy said in October.

Despite the recent Ozempic-fueled weight loss craze, Omada says its new nutrition tools are distinctly anti-diet.

Omada's meal-tracking feature aims to provide feedback encouraging nutrient-dense foods rather than focusing on caloric intake. Its app further tailors nutrition recommendations based on a range of factors, including users' demographics, chronic conditions, dietary preferences, and whether they're taking a GLP-1.

"At Omada, we've always had a nutrition philosophy that's moved away from a restrictive mindset to one of abundance," Wu said. "We don't want to make people feel bad about their choices — we really want to give them freedom in how they approach their nutrition. Now with AI, we're able to uplevel those tools."

Omada's approach arrives at a complicated moment for the weight loss market. Longtime player WW International, formerly WeightWatchers, filed for bankruptcy earlier this month after struggling with its strategic pivot away from calorie counting and toward wellness. Weight-loss startup Noom, on the other hand, has faced criticism over the years for marketing itself as an anti-diet app while promoting dieting mainstays like significant calorie deficits.

Omada is treading especially carefully knowing its patients may have histories of disordered eating. Wu said Omada's new AI agent's goal-setting tools will only be available at first to patients who have indicated emotional eating as a concern, to ensure the tool can support those patients' needs. The information from those sessions will also be fed to the members' care teams, Wu said, to help coaches carry the conversation forward at a deeper level.

Omada's IPO prospects

While the public markets dipped in April due to President Donald Trump's tariff proposals, key policy rollbacks have cooled market volatility and prompted plenty of companies, including Omada Health, to barrel ahead with their IPO ambitions.

While Omada's financial profile isn't quite as strong as Hinge Health's, the chronic care startup has been making progress toward profitability and high margins.

Omada banked nearly $170 million in revenue last year, up 38% from its 2023 revenue, with a 60% gross margin.

Its losses have been narrowing, but the company is not profitable yet, recording a $47 million net loss in 2024. Bankers and investors have generally pushed digital health startups to reach profitability before trying to go public, after the sector's last IPO cycle produced several company collapses.

Omada last raised $192 million in a Series E funding round led by Fidelity Management in 2022 that boosted its valuation to over $1 billion.

The startup plans to list on the Nasdaq under the ticker "OMDA".

• The markets have relaxed after Trump's tariffs scare, and companies are racing to go public again.
• Startups like Chime and Hinge Health resumed their IPO plans this week after previous delays.
• Bankers are telling IPO hopefuls to capitalize on the market's stability — knowing it may not last.

IPOs are back — just a month after a sudden market slump forced tech companies to put their public market debuts on hold.

This time, bankers are telling companies to rush out while they still can.

"If you're trying to get public, now is the time to 'go go go' before something else happens," a healthcare banker told Business Insider. The banker requested anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak to the press.

When President Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on imports from other countries on April 2, the markets panicked. The chaos forced companies from the payments lender Klarna to the physical therapy startup Hinge Health to put their long-awaited IPO plans on hold.

But in the past month, a number of changes, including Trump's rollbacks of the most severe tariffs and assurances he would not fire Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, all but erased that market drop. The S&P 500 is now up about 1% since the beginning of the year, a nearly 19% increase from its April lows.

With IPOs on the table again, companies are hustling to complete those deals while the market stability holds.

EToro, the Israeli trading platform, made its public debut on Wednesday via a SPAC merger and saw its shares pop on the Nasdaq, opening 34% above the IPO price and valuing the company at nearly $5.2 billion by Friday. Hinge Health resumed its own IPO plans by kicking off its road show Tuesday, aiming for a valuation of up to $2.6 billion. Digital banking app Chime and diabetes care startup Omada Health also filed to go public in May.

The markets have bounced back quickly after Trump rolled back most tariffs in part because investor appetites didn't go away, said Tom Johnson, global cohead of capital markets at Barclays. (Barclays is an underwriter on Hinge Health and Omada Health's planned IPOs.) Companies are being encouraged to seize on that improvement, he said.

"Knowing that we're perhaps going to be living in a world with a bit more volatility, you've got to be thinking about going when you can," Johnson said.

Releasing pent-up IPO demand

Bankers are looking at a number of signals that suggest companies could see successful IPOs right now.

Most importantly, the volatility index has cooled, signaling calmer markets. VIX, a measure of market volatility often called the stock market's fear gauge, denotes high volatility at values of 30 or more, while values of 20 or below signal more stability. The VIX index hit painful highs of 52 on April 8. As of Friday, the index has dropped to 17.

That reduced volatility, combined with better market performance, has allowed public investors to stop playing defense with their existing portfolios and consider new buys.

With steadier supply chains for most industries and fewer market shocks, companies and investors are also finding it easier to agree on fair pricing, a key ingredient for a successful IPO.

"Boards are now talking about the IPO option as being attractive and something that they want to proactively seek," said Jimmy Williams, a senior banker at Jefferies who worked on the eToro deal. "The backlog of private companies waiting to go public right now is one of the longest we've ever seen because we've had such a historic drought the last three years."

No guarantee of sunny skies ahead

Despite recent market improvements, Barclays' head of Americas equity capital markets, Robert Stowe, said it's reasonable to expect higher political volatility for the foreseeable future.

"The conversations are harder than they've been historically. It's harder to predict even the next day, let alone the two weeks you need for a typical IPO roadshow," he said.

Not all of the companies previously rumored to be on the precipice of IPOs have come back to market yet. As of May 15, online payments company Klarna and ticket marketplace StubHub, which both reportedly delayed their IPO plans in April due to the stock sell-off, haven't publicly reupped those efforts.

Neither has Medline, a surgical equipment company backed by private equity firms Blackstone and Carlyle, which said in December it had confidentially filed its S-1. Medline had been planning a spring 2025 IPO until Liberation Day tariffs forced an indefinite delay, per the Financial Times.

It's not clear yet which of these companies, if any, will resume their IPO efforts in the current market. Medline, for one, still stands to be significantly affected by the tariffs, since the company manufactures much of its supplies in China. Most imports from China now face a 30% tariff, at least for the next 90 days, while the US and China attempt to negotiate a long-term trade deal.

Spokespeople for Klarna and StubHub said the companies don't have any information to share on their IPO plans. Medline didn't respond to requests for comment for this story.

Private investors may not be able to take advantage of the market upswing by cashing out at a company's IPO, either. Insiders are frequently subject to lock-up periods, wherein investors have to wait from 90 and 180 days after the IPO to sell their shares, sometimes even longer. Given how much the market has fluctuated this year, investors can't be sure that shares will continue ticking up for the next six months.

Still, it may be worth it to get an exit on the books while the market fundamentals are favorable, particularly for mature companies like Omada Health founded more than a decade ago, and offer an opportunity for investors to get the returns they've been waiting for.

"There is more impetus to get the first deal done and get the company listed, give the stock a chance to trade, and then the owners can be more nimble with the balance that they're holding," Stowe said.

For other companies, especially those that could be more vulnerable to policy changes, bankers are advising a "wait and see" approach, watching how this next set of IPOs performs and continuing to evaluate emerging political risks, said Phil Capen, a managing director of equity capital markets at Deutsche Bank.

"The market is getting better, but there's still a lot of uncertainty out there. If you don't need to go, and you can be patient, I think there are a number of companies that are just waiting to find the right window," he said.

• Tech's heaviest hitters are racing to build new AI tech for healthcare.
• They're landing partnerships with health systems and Big Pharma and selling consumer health AI tech.
• Here's how tech powerhouses from Microsoft to Alphabet to Nvidia are investing in healthcare AI.

Artificial intelligence is gaining ground in healthcare, and tech's biggest players are racing to stake their claims.

Many tech giants have been building healthcare businesses long before the AI boom. Amazon, for example, invested heavily in the industry when it acquired primary care provider One Medical for $3.9 billion in 2022.

Now, those tech powerhouses are sharpening their healthcare strategies with AI at the center. Chipmaker Nvidia has rapidly expanded its healthcare ambitions in the past two years, aiming to tackle everything from surgical robotics to drug discovery.

Their healthcare ambitions reflect a broader shift: as AI advances, Big Tech sees fresh opportunities for transformation — and revenue — in the complex industry.

From AI-powered wearables to robotic surgery, here's how tech's most powerful companies are investing in healthcare AI.

Microsoft: Doubling down on its healthcare cloud

Microsoft first entered healthcare nearly two decades ago. Now, it's integrating AI into its cloud solutions to automate hospital operations.

Microsoft bought the ambient intelligence company Nuance in 2022 for nearly $20 billion. Nuance dominates the market for AI-powered medical scribing, though it now faces tough competition from startups like $2.75 billion Abridge. Its latest release is Dragon Copilot, a solution Microsoft announced in March that integrates the company's voice dictation tech with Nuance's ambient listening, in a move the company said would help doctors save even more time documenting patient visits.

In an October 2024 KLAS report, most healthcare organizations said they considered Nuance when purchasing a clinical documentation solution, in part due to prior contracts with Microsoft and the company's extensive healthcare software suite. The tech giant is integrating AI into those other healthcare cloud offerings to organize and analyze medical records and automate tasks like patient scheduling and paperwork.

Microsoft also partners with Nvidia to combine Nvidia's AI tech with Microsoft's cloud solutions to power advanced healthcare and biopharma research and better medical imaging.

Apple: Banking on AI-powered consumer health tracking

Apple's AI efforts have been understated compared to its peers, as have its healthcare investments.

Much of Apple's healthcare attention to date has focused on its Apple Watch, which includes several AI-powered health features for consumers, from AI-powered fall detection and irregular heartbeat tracking to sleep analysis.

After Apple released its augmented reality headset Apple Vision Pro last year, the company said multiple healthcare organizations were using the new tech for various applications, including reviewing patient surgical plans or training clinicians to use new medical devices.

Apple's next big health AI push could be on the horizon. Bloomberg News reported at the end of March that Apple was developing an AI-powered health coach to provide personalized lifestyle recommendations based on its consumers' health data, as tracked through devices like the Apple Watch and iPhone.

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Nvidia: Bringing "physical AI" to the hospital

Chip giant Nvidia is digging into a wide range of healthcare specialties, from radiology to drug discovery, primarily by partnering with other healthcare companies.

Nvidia VP of healthcare Kimberly Powell told Business Insider in April that medical imaging was one of Nvidia's entry points into healthcare. The company has notched a number of medical imaging partnerships powered by its AI platforms, most recently with GE Healthcare in March. GE Healthcare plans to use Nvidia's tech to simulate autonomous medical imaging, including autonomous X-rays and ultrasounds, to test their application in physical medical devices.

It's a similar collaboration to Nvidia's existing deal with IT solutions provider Mark III to work with healthcare systems to create simulations of their hospital environments for AI development. "Physical AI," or AI that can analyze and interact with the physical world, is a key part of Nvidia's vision for healthcare. 

"This physical AI thing is coming where your whole hospital is going to turn into an AI," Powell told BI in November. "You're going to have eyes operating on your behalf, robots doing what is otherwise automatable work, and smart digital devices. So we're super excited about that, and we're doing a lot of investments."

Nvidia is also an investor in several healthcare startups, most notably clinical documentation startup Abridge, which raised $250 million in February from investors including Nvidia's venture arm NVentures at a $2.75 billion valuation, and Hippocratic AI, which raised $141 million in Series B funding from NVentures and other firms at a $1.64 billion valuation.

It's also partnered with many of its portfolio companies, such as Moon Surgical, a robotics company that uses Nvidia's medical device AI platform Holoscan for its surgical assistant robot.

Amazon: Adding more tech to consumer care

Amazon is bringing AI to doctors, patients, and pharma companies across its healthcare businesses.

In March, Amazon announced it was testing a new chatbot feature called Health AI, which the company says can give users advice and suggest products for common medical needs. The health AI assistant can direct users to Amazon's online pharmacy or to talk to a doctor at its primary care chain, One Medical, for further care. An Amazon spokesperson told BI that the chatbot is in beta, and the retailer is collecting feedback from customers and working on new features for its AI assistant.

The retail giant also offers its own medical transcription tool, called HealthScribe, which analyzes doctor-patient conversations to create clinical notes for providers. It's one of several AI capabilities that One Medical's clinicians use, in addition to features that assist with patient messaging and care coordination.

Amazon provides a number of generative AI tools through Amazon Web Services for life sciences companies, too. Genentech and AstraZeneca, for example, have used AWS's AI tools for drug discovery research and clinical trial tasks.

Amazon has also suffered more false starts in healthcare than its peers. The retailer shut down its telehealth service Amazon Care in 2022, three years after its launch, and discontinued its wearable fitness tracker Amazon Halo in 2023. Last year, One Medical came under fire after media reports and a malpractice lawsuit raised concerns about the primary care chain's patient safety practices. An Amazon spokesperson said that the company is prohibited by law from discussing patient records, but that One Medical has extensive quality and safe measures in place for patient care.

Alphabet: Powering better health research with foundation models and search tools

Alphabet has created several healthcare AI tools that build upon Google's core search capabilities, with a focus on healthcare-specific foundation models.

Google launched MedLM, a set of healthcare foundation models, in 2023 to enable tech to summarize patient-doctor conversations, conduct clinical research, and automate insurance claims processing. In October, it announced Vertex AI Search for Healthcare, a specialized search engine that gives clinicians answers to their medical questions about a patient's health records or medical documents. It's also built a research AI system designed to assist with patient diagnosis, which can analyze data such as medical images and simulate patient-provider interactions.

On the consumer front, Google has released a number of tools with health applications, such as Google Lens, which allows people to take a picture of their own skin and search for visually similar skin conditions. It's also working on personal health AI models that can interpret sleep and fitness data to offer personalized wellness suggestions.

Isomorphic Labs, Alphabet's AI research arm spun out of Google DeepMind, has partnered with pharma giants like Novartis and Eli Lilly on more efficient drug development, building on DeepMind's AlphaFold protein structures.

Dr. Karen DeSalvo has led Google's health initiatives since 2019. At the beginning of May, she announced her retirement as chief health officer; Google Health chief clinical officer Dr. Michael Howell will replace her when she steps down in August.

Oracle: Leveling up health records with AI

Oracle's long-awaited plans to revolutionize electronic medical records with AI will come to fruition this year, according to the tech company.

In October, Oracle unveiled its "next-generation" electronic health record system, which the company said would incorporate several of Oracle's cloud and AI capabilities, including clinical AI agents, search capabilities, and patient data analytics. Its goal is to seamlessly integrate AI into providers' workflows and automate healthcare administrative tasks. The AI-powered EHR is slated for release to early adopters this year, the company said.

Oracle made its biggest investment toward this goal in 2022, when it bought EHR company Cerner for $28.3 billion and rebranded it as Oracle Health. Its efforts to transform Cerner have hit a number of snags, however. BI reported in May 2024 that flaws in Cerner's EHR rollout at the Department of Veterans Affairs led to thousands of medical orders vanishing, resulting in delayed or missed treatments for many veterans, and leaving Oracle scrambling to fix Cerner's tech after the acquisition.

Oracle is also financially backing Stargate, a joint venture with OpenAI, SoftBank, and investment firm MGX, to invest up to $500 billion in US-based AI infrastructure. Oracle cofounder and executive chairman Larry Ellison said in January that the team is working on tools for advancing disease detection, including cancer detection, with AI.

Salesforce: Selling ready-made health AI agents

Salesforce is jumping onto the AI agent trend with a range of pre-built AI assistants for healthcare organizations.

In February, the cloud-based software company announced Agentforce for Health, a library of AI agents that healthcare companies can use to automate patient tasks like appointment booking, provider tasks like summarizing a patient's medical history, and life sciences tasks like clinical trial matching. Salesforce also landed a partnership with electronic health record company Athenahealth to integrate Agentforce for Health capabilities into Athenahealth's EHR.

The agentic AI release builds on Salesforce's previous healthcare assistant tool, Einstein Copilot, which launched in March 2024 to allow providers to query patient data as consolidated in Salesforce's Health Cloud.

Salesforce is also powering new AI platforms created on its Health Cloud, such as Blue Shield of California's AI-powered prior authorization tech, which the two companies said would enter testing in early 2025.

Palantir: Partnering with health systems on AI transformation

Palantir is primarily known for its billions of dollars in defense tech contracts with the US government. But it's also spent the past four years building out a healthcare business, working with top healthcare systems to improve their operations with AI.

Palantir works with health systems including Cleveland Clinic, Tampa General, and Nebraska Medicine to automate key hospital functions, including revenue cycle management, staffing and scheduling, and patient flow, co-heads of healthcare Jeremy David and Drew Goldstein told BI in April.

Palantir said in May it would work with the Joint Commission, a nonprofit that evaluates healthcare organizations for accreditation, to streamline the Joint Commission's data collection process and help hospitals manage their quality standards using Palantir's AI and analytics.

Palantir is also partnering with R1 RCM, the AI-powered revenue cycle management company acquired by TowerBrook and CD&R in an $8.9 billion take-private deal in August. Beyond its partnerships, Palantir aims to equip more healthcare startups with its AI tools through its software platform HealthStart.

• Deshpande has spent the past decade looking for the next big consumer trends.
• She's one of the world's top seed investors, backing companies like Carrot Fertility and Wildtype.
• Read "The Seed 40: The best women early-stage investors of 2025."

Sara Deshpande first met Rene Caissie, the CEO of Medeloop, in 2022 at Startup Garage, the Stanford business school class she helps teach. He pitched her a fledgling startup idea.

He and his classmates shared a few business ideas with Deshpande: consumer genetic services, health data tracking, and health management for conditions like diabetes. But Deshpande wasn't convinced. She told Caissie and his team members that they needed to think of their potential consumers first to identify more unique and novel problems.

So Caissie reworked his concept and came back to her 18 months later with something better.

That second version became Medeloop, an AI-powered medical research startup that now counts Deshpande's venture firm, Maven Ventures, as an investor. It has since raised $23 million from General Catalyst, Maven, and other firms.

Deshpande's criticism was emblematic of her approach as an early-stage investor. She isn't the kind of VC who politely nods and writes a check or supports her founders' ideas without question.

"With my founders, I'm really known for tough love," she says. "I never say anything I wouldn't say directly to them, and they know everything I'm saying comes from a place of wanting them to succeed."

Deshpande has been investing at Maven Ventures since 2014, when she joined as a general partner. Founded in 2013 by Jim Scheinman, Maven set out to become a go-to seed-stage firm for consumer startups, with bets including the $22 billion videoconferencing company Zoom and the $9 billion AI search startup Perplexity.

At Maven, Deshpande invests in consumer applications across digital health, climate, and AI. She's backed companies including the fertility benefits startup Carrot Fertility and the sustainable seafood company Wildtype.

Above all, she looks for founders who share her vision of chasing emerging consumer trends and are relentless in their pursuit.

"We like to back people who'll tear through a brick wall to bring their vision to life," she said.

From healthcare strategy to startup advisory

Deshpande began her career at Deloitte in healthcare strategy during the passage of the Affordable Care Act in 2010.

"It was a moment when all our clients were trying to figure out what the next wave of consumer healthcare would look like," she says.

That experience sparked a lasting interest in how consumers interact with big, complex systems — and what it takes to simplify those systems through tech. While still at Deloitte, she began volunteering at the Idea Village, a New Orleans-based startup accelerator.

The day she paid off the loans she took out to attend Stanford's business school, she called the Idea Village's CEO and asked if she could come aboard full time.

"That's where I got this knack for helping founders identify and achieve bold visions, against all the odds," she said of the Idea Village.

By the time one of Maven's limited partners introduced Deshpande to Scheinman, she had years of experience coaching founders but had never raised outside capital. Scheinman had a few seed investments under his belt, including in Zoom, and needed a partner to help make his vision of identifying and supporting forward-thinking consumer founders a reality.

"Within 24 hours of that first meeting, I wrote Jim an email like, 'Here's my job description,'" Deshpande said.

Deshpande has been at Maven ever since, helping to grow the firm's portfolio and reputation. She's been a board observer or advisor to companies such as Hello Heart, Carrot Fertility, Daybreak Health, and Medeloop.

Finding bold founders in a shaky market

Now more than a decade in, Deshpande still sees long-term potential in sectors like consumer health, concierge medicine, and personalized care.

Deshpande said consumer health technologies remain a resilient sector despite market challenges. An analysis by the digital health advisory company Galen Growth found that consumer health tech investments grew by 9% between 2023 and 2024.

But Deshpande isn't blind to the moment. She acknowledged that recent recession fears and market volatility may shape consumer and founder behavior.

"It's a really turbulent time to be a founder," she said. "We'd all been hoping for a rosier economic picture. That now seems way less certain."

Still, Deshpande said that great companies are often created during periods of economic uncertainty.

She's keeping her eye on founders willing to push forward, including through layoffs or dramatic market shifts. "Sometimes that's the kick somebody needs," she said.

• A court just ordered healthcare startup Commure to stop selling its hospital panic buttons.
• Commure has been embroiled in a legal battle with the makers of the tech for more than a year.
• The $6 billion startup now won't be able to market its Strongline Pro product or get new customers, according to a recent injunction.

$6 billion healthcare startup Commure has been ordered to stop making one of its most historically successful products in a legal face-off with the tech's creators.

Commure, the startup cofounded by General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja and incubated by the VC firm, has been embroiled in legal turmoil for over a year with the makers of its former workplace safety tech, Strongline.

Canopy Works created the technology behind Strongline, a wearable panic button for hospital staff that was once Commure's best-selling product. Canopy severed its ties with Commure in 2023, after which Commure released an "upgrade" to Strongline called Strongline Pro.

Canopy alleged in a lawsuit against Commure in the Northern District of California that Commure's Strongline Pro was a derivative of Canopy's Strongline, which violated the companies' contract. Now, a federal district court has sided with Canopy and ordered Commure to stop selling Strongline Pro.

The court's preliminary injunction, filed on April 25 in the Northern District of California and made public Friday afternoon, prohibits Commure from distributing or marketing Strongline Pro to new customers, at least while the underlying breach of contract case proceeds.

It's a big win for Canopy, which says it's lost business as hospital customers "upgrade" from Canopy's Strongline to Commure's Strongline Pro. Strongline's business was Commure's sole growing revenue source at the time of its $6 billion merger with fellow General Catalyst portfolio company Athelas, as Business Insider reported in September. It's unclear how much revenue Strongline Pro now contributes to Commure or how much that revenue could be affected by the court order.

"This injunction validates the years of dedicated R&D and significant investment Canopy has poured into its unique healthcare safety platform," A Canopy spokesperson said in a statement to BI. "This ruling provides certainty for our customers, confirming they are partnered with the creator of this technology and can trust the integrity and performance of the Canopy system safeguarding their employees."

Commure has asked the court to delay the injunction's enforcement. In a statement to BI, Commure SVP and General Manager Dan Warner said he expects the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals to overturn the injunction, adding that "the law and facts are firmly on Commure's side," and that Commure developed Strongline Pro entirely in-house.

For its part, Commure has expanded well beyond its workplace safety product in the past year. The startup has signaled its intentions to dig deeper into healthcare AI following its acquisition of revenue cycle management company Athelas, buying ambient scribing company Augmedix in July 2024 for $139 million in cash, and scooping up another General Catalyst portfolio company, AI-powered care coordination platform Memora Health, in December.

General Catalyst is also closing a deal to buy Akron, Ohio-based health system Summa Health. The firm has said it plans to integrate healthcare technology into the hospitals' operations, an endeavor that would likely include Commure's tech.

Commure's battle with Canopy

Commure and Canopy created their first agreement to make Commure a reseller of Canopy's technology in 2019.

In 2022, Commure bought the rights to white-label and sell Strongline's wearable panic buttons for hospital staff. Canopy Works, then known as SMP Labs, remained a separate company and retained ownership of the intellectual property.

Tensions quickly escalated after the acquisition. In late 2022, Commure sued Canopy when the company tried to terminate its partnership with Commure. Canopy had cited delayed payments as a reason for breaking away from the startup.

That lawsuit was dismissed and later settled, but the damage was done. By December 2023, Canopy spun out for good as a new company to sell its safety technology directly to health systems.

Commure moved quickly to rebuild its workplace safety business, launching Strongline Pro just days after Canopy's debut. Commure positioned Strongline Pro as a successor to the original Strongline product, although filings with federal regulators showed substantial similarities between the two devices, per BI's September reporting.

Commure holds that "Strongline Pro was developed independently by Commure without using any information from Canopy," per the Friday injunction.

After Canopy's exodus, Commure filed a lawsuit against Canopy in April 2024, alleging that Commure had contributed to the development of Strongline's original concept and that Canopy had violated its contractual obligations to provide its tech to Commure through the end of the year. Commure also raised concerns about alleged security vulnerabilities in Canopy's technology.

As ordered in the injunction, existing Strongline Pro customers can continue to use Strongline Pro, but Commure cannot upgrade those systems or contract with new Strongline Pro customers.

In his statement to BI, Commure's Warner also referenced a prior civil decision in which he said a judge ruled that a Canopy employee, who previously worked at Commure, had misappropriated Commure's confidential information for Canopy's benefit. Warner said the ruling "confirms that Commure, not Canopy, is the party harmed in this dispute." BI could not independently review the filing as it has not been made public.

A Canopy spokesperson said in response that the arbitration was a separate issue with one of Commure's former employees that is "completely unrelated to the ongoing litigation with Canopy."

Early-stage investors take some of the biggest — and boldest — swings in venture capital.

Our Seed 40 list, in its fifth year, spotlights the women who have done exactly that: find breakout talent early, and work alongside these founders to shape the future of tech. This year's honorees have placed bets across some of 2025's hottest verticals, from AI to health tech.

Perhaps it's no surprise that these investors are drawn to founders with similar characteristics. Mathilde Collin, one of the new members on this year's Seed 40 and Seed 100, told Business Insider she seeks out "a delicate balance between humility, self-awareness, and self-confidence." "Enough self-confidence to inspire people to be on the journey with them, enough humility to get people to help them, enough self-awareness to work on themselves," she added.

This list is compiled using data analysis supplied by Termina, a software platform spun out of Tribe Capital. Read the full methodology behind the list.

1. Laura Rippy

Managing partner and board member, Alumni Ventures

Notable investments: Daydream, Rent App, Barnwell Bio, Atomic Supply, TRM Labs, Believer.gg,

City: Boston

Rippy says that when the world is chaotic, startups are the most nimble, which is why she's excited for this year.

"The pattern of 2025 so far is highly talented teams tackling big opportunities," she told BI.

Based in Boston, Rippy has built a large network of school-related founders and investors. She runs two school-centric funds, Green D at Dartmouth College and Yard Ventures at Harvard, and she's also the managing partner of Alumni Ventures, one of the most active VC firms in the world. Alumni brings VC investing to individual investors' portfolios and manages more than 650,000 members.

Prior to joining Alumni Ventures in 2017, Rippy spent 14 years at the private family office Ripplecreek Partners.

2. Shruti Gandhi

Founder and general partner, Array Ventures

Notable investments: Capsule, Eventual Computing, Mozart Data, Placer.ai, Rad AI, Runway.team

City: San Francisco

Gandhi's track record shows she gets results for limited partners. In under a decade, the solo capitalist has returned her first $7 million fund at a fivefold multiple, with more companies still waiting to exit. A stream of acquisitions has sped along those distributions, including Simility, a fraud-detection company which sold to PayPal in 2018, just two years after Gandhi invested.

As a one-time startup founder, Gandhi decided to raise a fund in 2016 because she saw a need for more investors who rolled up their sleeves at the seed stage. Her fund, Array Ventures, helps technical founders close early sales and develop their go-to-market sales strategy.

3. Anne Dwane

Cofounder and partner, Village Global

Notable investments: Commontools, P-1 AI, AirGarage, Cherry, Pave, Grow Therapy

City: San Francisco

For a career investor like Dwane, AI has represented a generational shift, which is creating an exciting time to evaluate startups and founders for new investment opportunities.

"The last year has been like no other," she told BI. "AI's impact is just beginning to show up in legacy industries, where the gap between what's possible and what exists remains wide."

Dwane added that the industry is also experiencing a revolution when it comes to software development, which she said will allow more people to build companies.

Across Village Global's three funds, Dwane's deals have a cumulative holding value of more than $16 billion. Before Village Global, Dwane cofounded the veteran-focused news site Military.com and later served as the CEO of Zinch, a university-recruitment startup acquired by the edtech company Chegg in 2011.

4. Meltem Demirors

General partner, Crucible Capital

Notable investments: Double Zero, CentralAxis, Ostium

City: New York

Demirors has had a busy year launching her new firm, Crucible Capital, which invests in energy, compute, and crypto startups. Crucible ended 2024 with $36 million in committed capital from a $50 million target fund and is now oversubscribed, Demirors told BI. The firm also recently made its third investing hire.

For Demirors, Crucible Capital is the natural extension of her long career as an investor outside the traditional venture capital space. Rather than spinning out of a VC fund, she built investment firms and asset managers in crypto while she was angel investing. Prior to launching Crucible, Demirors was the chief strategy officer at the digital-asset investment company CoinShares.

At Crucible, her LPs are mostly builders, operators, and investors, rather than institutional investors or funds of funds.

"I feel like Crucible is a bit of an anomaly and it can be challenging considering how clubby venture can be sometimes," she said.

5. Mathilde Collin

Cofounder and executive chairperson, Front

Notable Investments: Retool, Mercury, Vanta, Copilot, Meter, Browser Use

City: San Francisco

Colllin cofounded Front, a customer service platform startup, in 2013 after working as a project manager at another startup. She served as Front's CEO until October and is now its executive chairperson. Collin also angel invests in a variety of companies, which include the fintech banking startup Mercury and the tool-building platform Retool.

In founders, Collin looks for "a delicate balance between humility, self awareness and self confidence," she told BI. "Enough self confidence to inspire people to be on the journey with them, enough humility to get people to help them, enough self awareness to work on themselves."

6. Ann DeWitt

General partner, Engine Ventures

Notable investments: Cellino, Bexorg, Matrisome Bio, Terragia, Anthology, Kano Therapeutics, Source Bio

City: Boston

DeWitt has spent her career helping companies build new transformative biotechnologies. She began in VC at the Massachusetts life sciences firm Flagship Pioneering, then moved to Sanofi, where she guided the pharma giant's investments.

She joined The Engine, an MIT spinout, in 2018, two years after its launch. First as The Engine's chief operating officer, then as a general partner, she supported the startup incubator and accelerator's work with "tough tech" companies, offering an array of resources from lab space to capital for startups building in areas like climate and human health.

In 2023, DeWitt stayed on the investing side of the business when The Engine split its startup support operations from its venture arm. She highlighted Engine Ventures' investment in Cellino, which announced in February plans to open a stem cell manufacturing facility on-site at Massachusetts General Hospital in partnership with the top health system Mass General Brigham's Gene and Cell Therapy Institute.

7. Caterina Fake

Founder, Yes VC

Notable investments: Career Karma, Outschool, Public Goods, Jow, Running Tide

City: San Francisco

Fake is a serial entrepreneur, cofounding the photo-sharing service Flickr, which was acquired by Yahoo in 2005. She makes investments through Yes VC, her firm that invests in climate, AI, health and longevity, energy, and defense companies. She's backed Etsy, Cloudera, Oura, and Adept.

She was also named to the VC firm Trac's list of "SuperForecasters," or people the firm considers "extraordinary" pre-seed and seed VCs. Fake has said that this ability to spot future unicorn companies, "plus strong networks and access, is an absolute requirement for angels and VCs."

8. Trish Costello

Founder and CEO, Portfolia

Notable investments: YourChoice, Bone Health Technologies, Canela Media, Eden GeoPower, Prime Roots, Lighthouse Pharma

City: San Mateo, California

Costello founded the venture fund Portfolia in 2014. The fund taps women investors to lead venture capital deals in areas such as women's health, sustainability, active aging and longevity, and startups led by founders of color. Before that, Costello was part of the entrepreneurial ecosystem for more than two decades with her work as the cofounder of the Kauffman Fellows program, an education and leadership program for venture capitalists.

Costello told BI that while many venture firms slowed their investing pace last year because of market conditions, Portfolia closed 27 investments, adding to its more than 100 investments in the past five years. "Over the past year, we determined that the smartest trend was to stay consistent and disciplined and keep putting our money to work," she said.

9. Julia Hartz

Cofounder and CEO, Eventbrite

Notable investments: Doppler, Mmhmm, Nooks, Oliver Space, Socket

City: San Francisco

Hartz is the animating spirit behind Eventbrite's mission to create a closer world through live experiences. She's also an ardent supporter of early-stage companies.

Her angel investing portfolio includes Socket, a startup focused on helping companies secure open-source software, and Nooks, which is developing a fully autonomous sales assistant.

Before Eventbrite, Hartz helped develop television shows for MTV Networks and FX Networks.

10. Kirsten Green

Founder and managing partner, Forerunner

Notable investments: Chime, Faire, Hims & Hers, Daydream, Balance

City: San Francisco

For a seasoned consumer investor like Green, a visionary founder is only part of the equation — when she's evaluating a potential startup investment, she's also looking for which business models are going to make for knockout consumer experiences.

"The strongest businesses don't just have a great product or compelling branding — they are structurally designed to scale in a way that enhances the customer journey, accelerates inevitable behavior shifts, and creates self-reinforcing business advantages over time," Green told BI.

Green founded Forerunner in 2012 and has spent more than a decade investing in early-stage consumer companies such as the fintech Chime, the vision juggernaut Warby Parker, and the healthtech company Hims & Hers.

11. Varsha Rao

CEO, Zeal AI

Notable investments: Athelas, Grow Therapy, Sanas AI, New Lantern, Observo AI, Candid Health

City: San Francisco

Rao's Zeal AI, an AI-powered restaurant scheduling platform that launched in November, is her latest venture in a storied career at consumer-focused companies. She first founded and co-led the e-commerce beauty site Eve.com, which Idealab acquired in early 2000 for $110 million. She's held leadership roles at Airbnb, Gap's Old Navy, and LivingSocial, which was acquired by its rival Groupon. Before Zeal, she was the CEO of the reproductive health platform Nurx, which merged with the telehealth company Thirty Madison in 2022.

She's also an executive partner at the healthcare-focused VC firm Flare Capital Partners, primarily advising new and existing investments. She's using her experiences as a founder and an investor to keep Zeal AI lean and focused on driving meaningful consumer growth, even amid market volatility. "Now is a really awesome time to build if you can manage your burn because there is going to be less competition," she said.

12. Aileen Lee

Founder and managing partner, Cowboy Ventures

Notable investments: Branch, Dollar Shave Club, Drata, Ironclad, Guild, Mutiny Software

City: Palo Alto, California

It's been over a decade since Lee coined the term "unicorn," the once-rare feat for startups worth over $1 billion. She left Kleiner Perkins in 2012 to start her own firm, Cowboy Ventures, to invest in pre-seed to later-stage startups. Since then, a few of Lee's notable exits include Dollar Shave Club, which sold to Unilever for $1 billion in 2019, and Trendyol, which Alibaba acquired for almost $750 million in 2018.

Lee told BI that she loves meeting founders who are "learning animals" and have a keen desire to build relationships, absorb information, and grow quickly.

"We don't require product market fit or even a fully built product to want to invest in a team. We look for a unique insight into an underestimated category, and also pedigree, or a vision, for a way better solution to an existing huge problem," she said.

13. Ling Wong

Founder, CEO, and general partner, Highbury Group

Notable Investments: Anacor Pharmaceuticals, Visterra, Slack, Guardant Health, Singular Genomics, ScienceIO

City: Seattle

Wong founded Highbury Group in 2013. She invests in science-driven startups, though she has backed some major SaaS players, such as Slack, as well.

Her technical background helps her assess some of the most technical startups. Wong got her masters and a doctorate in applied sciences, bioengineering, entrepreneurship, and global health from Harvard University and bachelor's degrees in chemical engineering and biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

14. Sara Deshpande

General partner, Maven Ventures

Notable investments: Hello Heart, Daybreak Health, Medeloop, Wildtype, Carrot Fertility, Gondola AI

City: San Francisco

Deshpande has been building Maven Ventures alongside its CEO, Jim Scheinman, since 2014. At Maven, she makes seed investments in companies capitalizing on emerging consumer trends, from areas like fertility care (Carrot Fertility) to sustainable seafood (Wildtype). She said she's known for her "tough love" approach with founders. "I try to be the most honest voice they can have about the risks and opportunities related to the company they're pursuing," she said.

Deshpande is also a board observer at Daybreak Health and Medeloop. Beyond her day job at Maven, she helps teach a course at Stanford Graduate School of Business called Startup Garage, where students devise and stress-test new business ideas. In fact, she invested in Medeloop after its founder got the idea for the AI-powered medical research platform based on Deshpande's advice during the course.

15. Gale Wilkinson

Managing partner, Vitalize Venture Capital

Notable investments: Elevate K-12, Groundfloor, Placer.ai, Upwage, Upwards, Statusphere

City: Chicago and Nashville, Tennessee

Wilkinson invests in companies working to change how we work. That focus paid off big time during the pandemic as companies moved dramatically toward digital channels. To date, she's invested in over 100 companies and deployed more than $70 million in capital.

One of Wilkinson's portfolio crown jewels is Placer.ai, a startup that turns location data into market research for companies. Last year it crossed $100 million in annualized revenue.

16. Elizabeth Weil

Founder and managing partner, Scribble Ventures

Notable Investments: Whatnot, Stoke Space, Omni, Certn, Lemi, Streamline AI

City: San Francisco

A former Twitter exec and partner at Andreessen Horowitz, Weil cofounded Scribble Ventures in 2020. But she's been investing for well over a decade, making over 100 angel investments across all stages, including in Slack, SpaceX, Figma, Coinbase, Superplastic, Gusto, Tipalti, Envoy, Daily, and Carta. At Scribble, Weil invests in pre-seed and seed rounds and will write initial checks of up to $1.5 million.

The rocket developer Stoke Space, one of Scribble's early investments, is preparing its initial launch plans at Cape Canaveral in Florida after being awarded the launchpad space by the US Space Force. The startup also just announced a $260 million Series C round in January, with the launch site to be ready by the end of the year. "We dig in with our founders on product, hiring, and go-to-market because these are the two most precarious — and pivotal — elements of early-stage success," Weil said.

17. Juliana Garaizar

Venture partner, Porfolia and ClimaTech Global Ventures

Notable Investments: Cemvita Factory, Syzygy Plasmonics, Canela Media, Kauel, Suma Capital, Portfolia

City: Houston

Garaizar invests with ClimaTech Global Ventures, a firm that invests in early-stage, cross-border startups using AI in the climate tech space. She's also a partner at Portfolia, a firm based in San Mateo, California. Previously, Garaizar was the chief development and investment officer at Greentown Labs, a climatetech startup incubator. One of her investments, Cemvita Factory, is a biotechnology startup that converts carbon dioxide into compounds to make products like oil.

When asked about the future of her portfolio, Garaizar was enthusiastic about its opportunities for overseas expansion: "I am very excited about the international expansion of my portfolio companies such as Cemvita Factory in Brazil, Canela Media in Latin America and Spain, and Kauel in Europe," Garaizar told BI.

18. Rudina Seseri

Founder and managing partner, Glasswing Ventures

Notable investments: Basetwo, Reprise, Ship Angel, Telmai, Verusen

City: Boston

Seseri and her firm, Glasswing Ventures, know how to cut through the hype and find companies designed with artificial intelligence at its core, not as an afterthought. She leads the firm's investments in startups harnessing this tech to drive measurable value and enterprise growth.

She also sits on boards including Basetwo, a low-code platform for manufacturing engineers, and Reprise, an Iconiq Growth-backed startup that helps companies create software demos.

Seseri spent her early career at Credit Suisse and Microsoft, where she was a senior manager in corporate development and led several successful acquisitions.

19. Enke Bashllari

Founder and managing director, Arkitekt Ventures

Notable investments: Mural Health, CertifyOS, Paradromics, Nanite, Cofertility, Handspring Health

City: New York

Bashllari launched Arkitekt Ventures in 2017 to back early-stage startups advancing human health. A neuroscientist by training, she's invested in dozens of startups across healthcare and biotech, from the egg donation startup Cofertility to the gene delivery company Nanite to the brain implant maker Paradromics. She's an advisor for Harvard Business School's dual MBA and Master of Science life sciences program, having received multiple degrees herself — an MBA from Harvard and a Ph.D. from Columbia University.

She said evaluating founder-market fit is particularly critical in life sciences investments. "These legacy industries have deeply entrenched structures and complexities — it's crucial for founders to truly understand the nuances of the space, the market dynamics, and stakeholder incentives to successfully build and scale their company," she said.

20. Lan Xuezhao

Founder and managing partner, Basis Set

Notable investments: Quince, Sakana, Workstream, Ergeon, Rasa

City: San Francisco

Xuezhao studied the human mind for her doctorate in psychology at the University of Michigan. Little did she know that studying psychology would be useful for investing in AI, which is programmed to mimic how a human brain works.

Xuezhao is something of a sage when it comes to AI investing. When she started her firm, Basis Set Ventures, in 2017, few other venture capitalists focused on the field. She's among the early investors in startups including Quince, Sakana and Workstream. Before getting into venture capital, Xuezhao built out the corporate development strategy team at Dropbox, using her years of experience at McKinsey helping tech companies with their growth strategies.

21. Ann Miura-Ko

Cofounding partner, Floodgate

Notable investments: SmarterDx, Roo, Hebbia, Nooks, Thinkful, Studio, Emotive

City: Menlo Park, California

Miura-Ko, who has a Ph.D. from Stanford and is a lecturer there, has been dubbed "one of the most powerful women in startups." As the cofounding partner of the seed-stage VC firm Floodgate, Miura-Ko and the firm made early bets on Lyft, Twitter, Twitch, and Okta. Her passion for technology started when she was a child, inspired by her father's work as a rocket scientist at NASA, and continued during her studies at Yale, where she took part in robotics competitions around the world.

Her recent early investments are gaining traction. In the past year, the AI document search startup Hebbia has raised $130 million in a funding round led by A16z. As for what Miura-Ko is interested in investing in, she told BI: "We're excited about founders that are willing to look beyond immediate efficiency gains and instead envision entirely new ways of working, collaborating, and creating value through AI."

22. Jenny Lefourt

General partner, Freestyle

Notable investments: Discord, BetterUp, Crexi, Artera, Narvar

City: San Francisco

Lefcourt is a two-time founder (WeddingChannel.com and Bella Pictures) and a partner at Freestyle, an early-stage venture firm that's sector agnostic and leads seed rounds with funding between $2 million and $4 million.

As one of the few women to ascend to the highest ranks of venture capital, she cofounded All Raise, a nonprofit dedicated to increasing diversity in tech.

In the past year, she invested in Payman, which enables AI agents to move money safely, and Keebler Health, which specializes in AI-driven solutions for healthcare providers.

"Given how quickly AI is evolving, I look for founders who are constantly learning and can react fast to harness AI for maximum impact," Lefcourt told BI.

23. Yun-Fang Juan

General partner, Brighter Capital

Notable investments: Creatify, Little Otter, Expo, Chowdeck, Reddit

City: Cupertino, California

Juan was one of the first 150 employees at Facebook, where she co-created Facebook Ads. She then worked at several startups, including Khan Academy, before she took the ultimate entrepreneurial plunge and founded Fundastic, which looked to provide small businesses with information on funding options.

Juan previously told BI that even though Nav bought her company in 2015, the windfall wasn't massive, and she considered it a failure. But she said she gained valuable perspective from the experience that had helped her guide other startup founders as an investor.

Juan said she really admired what the AI startup Perplexity was doing and wished she were an investor. "I am basically looking for founders who are like the Perplexity team, and I will just give them the money and have them figure things out," she said.

24. April Underwood

Managing director and cofounder, Adverb Ventures

Notable investments: Particle, Untold, Shotsy

Location: San Francisco

Underwood is the embodiment of a builder VC, having held product, partnership, and engineering roles at Slack, Twitter, Google, and Intel. While at Twitter, Underwood started investing in startups through #Angels and personally backed companies like Color, Cue Health, and Carta. She also sits on the boards of Zillow Group and Eventbrite.

In 2023, Underwood teamed up with her fellow Twitter alum Jessica Verrilli to form Adverb Ventures, a $75 million fund focused on early-stage investments. One of Adverb's recent investments, Shotsy, a GLP-1 companion app, breezed past $1 million in subscription revenue in under nine months on the market, Underwood said. As for what she looks for in a founder, Underwood said: "Founders who roll up their sleeves and just start building before waiting for permission get me excited."

25. Leah Solivan

General partner, Fuel Capital

Notable investments: Pacaso, Upwards, Collaborative Robotics, MiSalud

City: San Francisco

Solivan founded TaskRabbit in 2008 and was CEO of the online marketplace for freelance laborers for nearly eight years before it was acquired by Ikea in 2017. That year, she joined Fuel Capital, where she has helped fund Pacaso, a vacation coownership company, and Upwards, formerly known as Weecare, one of the largest childcare networks in the US.

"I look for founders who are obsessed with solving a specific problem because he or she has a personal connection to it," Solivan told BI. "We call it founder-market fit."

26. Emily Kirsch

Founder and CEO, Powerhouse

Notable Investments: Amperon, Pearl Street Technologies, Terabase, Presto, ThinkLabs, Tyba

City: Oakland, California

Kirsch has been interested in climate policy for nearly two decades. She began her career working for the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights, where she worked with local California businesses on the state's Energy and Climate Action Plan. In 2018, she founded Powerhouse Ventures, which works with global corporations such as Google and The Rockefeller Foundation to back climate-focused, seed-stage startups working on decarbonization efforts.

In 2019, she was elected a Young Global Leader by the World Economic Forum and began serving on the advisory board for the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, which supports the development of clean tech innovation and programming in New York.

When assessing founders, Kirsch opts for those with strong technical prowess and a differentiated approach to a major bottleneck. Her biggest win so far in 2025 has been the energy SaaS company Enverus' acquisition of the automation interconnection solutions company Pearl Street Technologies, Kirsh told BI. "Their CEO David embodies exactly the kind of founder we love to back — understated, brilliant, and deeply technical."

27. Noramay Cadena

Managing partner, Supply Change Capital

Notable Investments: FoodReady, Cargologik, Hyfé, Michroma, Canela Media, Terrantic

City: Los Angeles

Cadena is an engineer turned investor. She studied engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and began her career at Boeing, eventually leading a team that coordinated support for 400 mechanics on one of the first 787 airplanes. At Supply Change Capital, Cadena invests in environment, health, and diversity-focused startups, according to its website.

"This is a critical time to invest in technology across the food supply chain as a driver for health, consumer preference and efficiency," Cadena told BI. "Food safety, nutrition, and cost of goods are top of mind for all stakeholders and Supply Change Capital invests in infrastructure technologies to improve the flow of data and goods."

28. Alice Zhang

Cofounder and CEO, Verge Genomics

Notable investments: Osmind, Asher Bio, Arpeggio, Encellin, Multiply Labs

City: San Francisco

Zhang has spent the past decade building the biotech startup Verge Genomics to use AI for better, faster drug discovery. Since then, Verge has raised $180 million from top firms including BlackRock, Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, and Y Combinator. The startup also notched a deal with the pharma giant Eli Lilly in 2021 to develop drugs for the neurodegenerative disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, or ALS.

As an angel investor, she's backed the immunotherapy-focused biotech startup Asher Bio, which raised a $55 million Series C in April 2024, and the biopharma robotics startup Multiply Labs, which notched an $85 million contract with the Sam Altman-backed Retro Biosciences in May 2024.

29. Lu Zhang

Founder and managing partner, Fusion Fund

Notable Investments: Otter.ai, Proscia, Subtle Medical, You.com, Vectara, Lepton AI

City: Palo Alto, California

Zhang's Fusion Fund, which invests in healthcare and enterprise AI startups, celebrated its 10th anniversary this year and closed a $190 million fund, roughly $40 million oversubscribed, bringing its total assets under management to more than $500 million. "It's a key milestone that reflects our decadelong commitment to backing technical founders building transformational companies," Zhang told BI.

Zhang sold her healthcare startup, Acetone, which made medical devices for testing type 2 diabetes, and founded Fusion Fund by the age of 25. In 10 years, Fusion Fund has invested in at least five unicorns, such as the food tech startup GrubMarket and the DNA analysis company Element Biosciences, as well as cutting-edge AI startups including You.com and Otter.ai.

30. Linda Xie

Cofounder, Scalar Capital

Notable investments: Farcaster, dYdX, StarkWare, Zora, Sardine, Pulley

Xie invests in crypto companies alongside working her day job as the developer ecosystem lead at Farcaster. One of Xie's early bets, Sardine, recently raised $50 million in Series B funding. Xie highlighted her in-depth experience in the crypto industry as helping her as an investor.

"I've been working in crypto full time for 11 years, so have seen a lot and found that I'm often able to help founders most as a sounding board, share what else I'm seeing out there, and help make connections to others in the ecosystem," Xie said.

31. Jana Messerschmidt

Founding partner, #ANGELS

Notable investments: Vanta, Anchorage, Roam, Lovevery, Daydream, Ashby

City: San Francisco

Before becoming a venture capitalist, Messerschmidt worked in tech at companies including Netflix and Twitter, now X, where she spent six years as its vice president of global business development and platform. A few years after leaving Twitter, she joined Lightspeed Venture Partners as a partner.

In 2015, she cofounded #ANGELS, a venture capital firm founded by former female tech execs that works to close the gender gap among investors and founders.

32. Julie McDermott

Startup investor and advisor

Notable investments: Hazel AI, Queen of Raw, Kernal Biologics, Orda, TomoCredit, Conekta

City: New York

After a decadelong career on Wall Street as a bond trader, McDermott decided to turn her attention to the tech startup world. She's since become known as an advocate for female founders and an active angel investor. She was an early backer of Maven, a women's digital-healthcare company last valued at $1.7 billion in 2023. (McDermott sold her stake in 2020.)

McDermott has focused on other investments in sustainability, biotech, and fintech, such as the startups Conekta and Eggschain. Later this year, she plans to turn more attention to ocean tech startups, which she sees as a "huge opportunity."

"I often look for companies that are moving the needle in an impactful way for society," she told BI.

33. Caroline Casson

Seed investor

Notable investments: AllVoices, Elevate K-12, Lunch, Placer.ai, WorkMade, Zingtree

City: Madison, Wisconsin

Casson bets on founders with big ideas about how the workforce can work better. Her portfolio includes WorkMade, a fintech helping freelancers keep track of their earnings and pay taxes, and Elevate K-12, an edtech company working to address the nationwide teacher shortage.

Casson cut her teeth as an investor at GE Ventures, where she helped incubate and operate a startup in the drone space. Then she went to IrishAngels, an angel network of Notre Dame-affiliated investors, before settling in at the seed-stage venture fund, Vitalize Venture Capital.

She recently left Vitalize after over six years to pursue a new, unannounced opportunity.

34. Serena Williams

Managing partner, Serena Ventures

Notable investments: Chatdesk, Daily Harvest, Esusu, MasterClass, Rebel

City: Jupiter, Florida

When Williams took a step back from tennis in 2022, she jumped into investing with both feet. The tennis champ raised a massive $111 million fund, a testament to her relationships and competitive edge. Williams invests in consumer brands and software companies that positively impact "the everyday lives of everyday people," she said during an event late last year.

Her firm stands apart from traditional investors because it focuses on underestimated founders. According to a spokesperson, around half of the portfolio companies were founded by women.

35. Cyan Banister

Cofounder and partner, Long Journey Ventures

Notable investments: AtoB, Roadster, Forge, IRL, ClassPass

City: San Francisco

Banister has been seed investing for more than a decade and has backed SpaceX, Uber Technologies, and DeepMind. She was previously a partner at Founders Fund and worked at AngelList. She recently raised a $181 million fund with Arielle Zuckerberg for their firm, Long Journey.

Banister told Bloomberg that Long Journey aims to "look for those magically weird people and to find them before it becomes consensus." "There's always a pocket of dreamers and weirdos. You just have to know where to look," Banister said.

36. Maria Salamanca

Partner, Ulu Ventures

Notable investments: Parfait, Career Karma, Maximus, Pine Park Health, KaiPod

City: San Francisco

Before joining Ulu Ventures in 2022, Salamanca was a partner at Unshackled Ventures, where she focused on seed investing in teams with immigrant founders. From 2015 to 2022, Salamanca helped make more than 75 seed investments at Unshackled. She was also an early team member at FWD.us, an immigration lobbying group founded by Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, and other tech leaders.

When asked what she looks for in a startup before she invests, Salamanca said she assesses how they will use time, not money. "I look for speed of execution, relentless prioritization, and the ability to define the toughest problems that must be solved to de-risk and unlock the next phase of the company," Salamanca told BI.

37. Holly Liu

Cofounder and managing partner, PKO Investments

Notable investments: Crypto Art House, Jadu, Lootex, NZXT, Playhouse, Quidd

City: San Francisco

Liu founded the mobile game company Kabam in 2006, and she grew the startup for more than a decade until it was acquired for $1 billion in 2017 by South Korea's NetMarble Games.

Since 2021, Liu has been running PKO Investments, the VC fund she cofounded that focuses on early-stage startups at the intersection of tech and entertainment in sectors including the metaverse, Web3, crypto, the creator economy, gaming, and social media. So far her fund has raised more than $27 million from over 370 investors, and written checks to 33 startups, including Roboto Games, Lovo, and Pixels.

38. Karin Klein

Founding partner, Bloomberg Beta

Notable investments: Anagram, Atolio, Bluefish, Campus, MelodyArc, Shield AI

City: New York

Klein is the founding partner of Bloomberg Beta, the venture arm of Bloomberg. Before helping to launch the firm, she led several initiatives at Bloomberg.

She previously worked at SoftBank, leading the division that reviewed new investments; MC Group, a communications agency; and the education company Knowledge Universe.

Bloomberg Beta has been at the forefront of AI, investing in the space long before it was in vogue. She continues to be excited about this area. "As a firm that has been investing in the future of work since 2013 and AI since 2014, it's rewarding to see new opportunities continue to emerge that make work better," Klein told BI.

She highlighted startups such as Bluefish, which helps brands navigate the new world of LLMs, Folio, which enables employers to hire job-ready students, and Synaptic, which uses AI agents to optimize Salesforce integrations.

39. Nisha Dua

Cofounder and managing partner, BBG Ventures

Notable investments: Spring Health, SuperCircle, Starface, Millie, HopSkipDrive, Nara Organics

City: New York

Dua tried on many hats throughout her career before settling on venture capital. She spent six years as an M&A lawyer at the Australian law firm Blake Dawson before moving to Bain & Co. as a management consultant, and then to the internet provider AOL, where she managed its pop culture website Cambio.

At AOL, Dua created Built by Girls, a software platform that connected young women with tech professionals. Then, backed by AOL, she cofounded BBG Ventures, using that acronym to invest in companies with one or more female founders.

BBG Ventures spun out of AOL in late 2018. The firm now invests at the pre-seed and seed stages in often overlooked founders tackling areas like healthcare, education, and financial security. Spring Health, which Dua first backed in 2018, raised a $100 million Series E round at a $3.3 billion valuation in July.

40. Hayley Barna

Partner, First Round

Notable investments: Mirror, Caper, Alma, Studs, Arbor, Brellium

Location: New York

After a stint in management consulting at Bain, Barna cofounded the subscription company Birchbox in 2010. She moved over to the investing side in 2016 to join First Round Capital to lead its New York office, where she has focused on commerce, supply chain, climate, and healthcare.

"Right now, I'm most excited about a wave of seed-stage companies (still in stealth) applying AI to transform healthcare operations and patient experience," Barna told BI. "These founders are tackling real-world pain points with potential for outsized impact on cost and quality of care."

Interactive development by Annie Fu and Randy Yeip.

Behind every great company, there was a prescient early investor who planted the seed that helped it grow into a redwood.

For Facebook, that investor was Peter Thiel. For DoorDash and Opendoor, it was Keith Rabois.

Seed-stage investors arguably have the hardest job in venture capital. They often write a check after hearing just the smallest kernel of an idea, long before there is even a product. But with the greatest risk comes the biggest reward, and some small checks have turned into life-changing fortunes.

"At the earliest stages, it's truly all about the founder," said Gokul Rajaram, who made his debut on the Seed 100 this year. "Great founders can take mediocre ideas and mediocre markets and either pivot or change the market, and do the right thing to change the company trajectory."

The job has also become harder, with seed funding in the first quarter of this year dropping to its lowest level in years, according to Crunchbase, and more money going into megarounds for AI companies.

Not all seed investors are alike. Some prefer defense tech while others like to bet on consumer tech. Some look for specific founding teams while others only invest in repeat founders.

Now in its fifth year, the Seed 100 list celebrates these figures — the sage dealmakers who provide the essential first push to startups that go on to become some of the greatest successes in the tech world. This list is compiled using data analysis supplied by Termina, a software platform spun out of Tribe Capital. Read the full methodology behind the list.

1. Kevin Mahaffey

Founder, SNR Ventures

Notable investments: Sourcegraph, Benchling, Coco Robotics, Mesh, XOPS, Sublime Security

City: San Francisco

Mahaffey has experience as both a founder and investor. He started the mobile-security company Lookout when he was 22 years old. After an initial spate of rejections from venture capital firms, Lookout would close investments from venture capitalists like Chris Sacca and Vinod Khosla at a $1.7 billion valuation.

As a seed investor, Mahaffey has helped mint nearly a dozen unicorns like Lattice and People.ai. "Nothing gets me more excited than spending time with founders creating businesses that seem audacious today — but will be obvious in retrospect," Mahaffey told BI. "I firmly believe that different + difficult = defensible."

2. Gaurav Jain

Cofounder and managing partner, Afore Capital

Notable investments: Cruise Automation, Firebase

City: San Francisco

Jain is all about getting into startups as early as possible. In fact, his firm, Afore Capital, has the thesis that no investment is "too early," and they'd like to get involved well before other VCs. Jain has been running the $500 million venture fund Afore since 2016, and the firm raised a $185 million fourth fund in February 2025 to continue investing in pre-seed startups.

In addition to Afore, Jain has made more than two dozen seed investments through Founder Collective, a seed-stage VC fund where he was a principal from 2012 to 2016. Those bets include Airtable, Firebase, which was acquired by Google, and Cruise Automation, which was acquired by General Motors for more than $1 billion.

3. Naval Ravikant

Entrepreneur

Notable investments: AtoB, Hebbia, Korbit, Pipe, Clearbit

City: Palo Alto, California

Ravikant has etched his mark on Silicon Valley for more than two decades. He's perhaps best known for cofounding AngelList in 2010, the fundraising platform that helps investors connect and write checks to early-stage startups. Before that, he colaunched the consumer product review site Epinions, which later merged with another site to become the consumer price comparison website Shopping.com.

In 2007, Ravikant founded the early-stage venture firm The Hit Forge. He also made early bets on companies such as Twitter, now X, and Uber. He's gone on to found several other companies and funds and has been a prolific angel investor in startups, including Substack, Perplexity, and Pipe.

4. Walter Kortschak

Title: Partner, Firestreak Ventures

Notable investments: Palantir, Stripe, Robinhood, Databricks, Perplexity, Anthropic

City: Aspen, Colorado and London

Kortschak's 39 years in venture capital have been full of successful bets on companies like E-Tek Dynamics, Finisar, and McAfee. He spent more than three decades at Summit Partners, where he focused on growth-stage investing. As a private investor, he was an early investor in Trade Desk, Palantir, Stripe, and Robinhood.

"Our north star is assessing a founder's ambition to take a disruptive big idea and imagine the potential to build a generational company," Kortschak told BI.

He helped launch SignalFire in 2013 and started Firestreak in 2022 to invest his personal capital and write pre-seed and seed-stage checks between $50,000 and $150,000 to startups focusing on infrastructure; AI and machine learning; data; and open-source, cybersecurity, and developer tools. He has invested in buzzy AI and data startups like Anthropic, Cohere, Databricks, Hugging Face, MotherDuck, and Perplexity.

5. Bradley Horowitz

General partner, Wisdom Ventures

Notable investments: OpenAI, Anthropic, Slack, Miro, Ramp, Scale AI

City: Palo Alto, California

As vice president of product at Google for 15 years, Horowitz led teams that developed some of the company's most important offerings, such as Gmail, Google Docs, and Google News.

He left Google in 2023 to invest full time through Wisdom Ventures and as an angel investor.

Horowitz has backed more than 150 startups and already boasts four decacorns, startups valued at more than $10 billion. Those include Scale AI, Miro, Applied Intuition, and Ramp. Through Wisdom Ventures, he is also one of the few investors in two of the biggest LLM's, OpenAI and Anthropic.

Last year, he joined the board of Circle, a global fintech company that facilitates payments. He also saw his early investment in Coda, a productivity startup, pay off when it was acquired by Grammarly.

6. Darian Shirazi

Managing partner, Gradient Ventures

Notable investments: Gigs, Legora, Krea, Numeral, Range, Writer

City: San Francisco

Shiraz, leaping 12 spots up the ranking this year, was recently elevated to managing partner at Gradient Ventures, Google's artificial intelligence-focused venture fund.

Shirazi seeks out companies that harness machine learning to disrupt and reshape traditional industries, such as Legora for the legal industry and Numeral for fintechs and banks.

Shirazi famously became the first intern for Facebook when he was 19. Then he built a marketing tech startup, Radius, before selling it to the fintech startup Kabbage in 2019. Since then, he's mobilized his own social network to invest in breakthrough companies.

7. Jeremy Yap

Angel investor

Notable investments: Maven Clinic, Stepful, Corti, Oura, Mojo, Meeno

City: San Francisco and London

Yap has been a full-time angel investor for over a decade, since leaving his day job in derivatives trading at Merrill Lynch in 2012. He's invested in more than 100 startups and sits on the advisory boards of the travel management company TravelBank and the fund of funds Cendana Capital.

He splits his time between San Francisco and Europe. He's backed startups such as the women's healthcare company Maven Clinic, which raised $125 million in Series F funding at a $1.7 billion valuation in October, and the smart ring maker Oura, which raised a $200 million Series D round at a $5.2 billion valuation in December.

8. Sam Altman

Title: Cofounder and CEO, OpenAI

Notable investments: Asana, Cerebras, Reddit, Stripe, Uber

City: San Francisco

Before he was the J. Robert Oppenheimer of our age, Altman was a red-letter startup investor.

Since Altman left his post at Y Combinator in 2019, he's plunged his personal wealth and outside capital into companies working on nuclear energy (Oklo and Helion), supersonic passenger planes (Boom Supersonic), and therapies to delay aging (Retro Biosciences).

While OpenAI made Altman famous, his investments have made him a billionaire. As an investor in Reddit, Altman and his related funds saw a cash windfall from its initial public offering last year.

9. Garry Tan

President and CEO, Y Combinator

Notable investments: Coinbase, Cruise, Flexport, Instacart, Rippling, Truepill

City: San Francisco

Tan plays father to thousands of startups a year as the president of Y Combinator, but it was his previous investments at Initialized Capital that made him a top-ranked seed investor. He funded Coinbase in 2012. He invested $300,000 and ended up with shares worth over $2.4 billion.

Since taking over Y Combinator in 2022, Tan has ushered in a new, harder-charging era at the accelerator. It moved its headquarters to San Francisco, doubled the number of startup cohorts it supports a year, and steered the latest cohort to become the most profitable in the firm's history.

10. Lachy Groom

Cofounder, Physical Intelligence

Notable investments: Notion, Figma, Anduril, Deel, Humane

City: San Francisco

Groom was an early Stripe employee and led Stripe Issuing, the team in charge of virtual and physical cards. He left the fintech in 2018 and last year cofounded Physical Intelligence, an AI startup with the goal of bringing general-purpose AI into the physical world via spatially intelligent robots. The startup raised $400 million last fall from Jeff Bezos, Thrive Capital, and OpenAI.

Groom is also an angel investor, having raised around $100 million in 2020 for his second fund, LFG II. His investments include Notion and Figma.

11. Keith Rabois

Managing director, Khosla Ventures

Notable investments: YouTube, Airbnb, Lyft, Palantir, DoorDash, Ramp

Location: Miami

Rabois made a fortune investing his own money in iconic companies like YouTube, Airbnb, and Palantir. He returned to Khosla Ventures last year after four years at Founders Fund. During his first stint at Khosla, Rabois led the firm's early investments in DoorDash, Affirm, and Stripe.

A vocal proponent of Miami's tech scene, Rabois also cofounded and still serves as CEO of OpenStore, a Khosla-backed e-commerce company.

12. Daniel Gross

Cofounder, Safe Superintelligence Inc.

Notable investments: Instacart, Coinbase, GitHub, Figma, Notion, Deel, Rippling

City: San Francisco

Gross has invested in multiple startups, often with his fellow Seed 100 honoree Nat Friedman, with whom he started the billion-dollar AI fund C2 Investment, where the two acquired more than 2,000 Nvidia chips to distribute alongside venture funds. He's backed big companies such as Instacart, Notion, and Figma, as well as Gusto and Character.ai.

Gross is also a serial entrepreneur and currently working on Safe Superintelligence, a startup he cofounded with Ilya Sutskever and Daniel Levy that's so far raised $1 billion from NFDG, a16z, Sequoia, and other investors. He previously cofounded Cue, a search engine that was acquired by Apple in 2013.

Gross is a former Y Combinator partner who started the accelerator's AI program.

13. Arjun Sethi

Chairman, Tribe Capital; co-CEO, Kraken

Notable investments: Apollo, Applied Intuition, Block, Carta, Snapchat

City: Menlo Park, California

Instead of relying on gut feelings alone, Sethi takes a data-driven approach to seed investing. His firm, Tribe Capital, uses artificial intelligence and data analysis to predict which early-stage companies are most likely to become unicorns.

This approach has led to breakout investments such as Applied Intuition, the autonomous vehicle software company that was last valued at $6 billion, and Rippling, the workforce management software company that's raised nearly $1 billion in equity financing to date.

Sethi added a new role last year as co-chief executive of the cryptocurrency platform Kraken.

14. Gokul Rajaram

Founding partner, Marathon Management Partners

Notable investments: Deel, BetterUp, Figma, Printify, Boon, Atlas

Location: San Francisco Bay Area

Rajaram was an early employee at Alphabet and Meta and most recently, an executive at DoorDash. He now uses his wallet and expertise to help startups scale. After years of angel investing, he plans to write checks through a new firm, Marathon Management Partners.

"I look for relentless and obsessed founders who are ambitious and aggressive, who have unique insights into their space, understand what takes to win in their space better than anyone on the planet, and who want to build a generational company," Rajaram told BI.

Rajaram also sits on the boards of Coinbase, Pinterest, and Trade Desk.

15. Dalton Caldwell

Managing partner, Y Combinator

Notable investments: Brex, PostHog, Rappi, Retool, Whatnot, Zip

City: San Francisco

During his time at Y Combinator, Caldwell has put his stamp on more than 35 unicorn startups, including DoorDash, Flexport, Brex, and Deel. A former founder himself, Caldwell joined the storied startup accelerator as a full-time partner in 2014. Since then, he's racked up more than 6,500 office hours with founders over the course of 25 batches.

Caldwell is also one of the accelerator's gatekeepers, overseeing the admissions process. He's said that two things he looks for in an application are technical prowess and a clear explanation of why the founder is the right person to start the business of their choosing.

16. Alexis Ohanian

General partner and founder, Seven Seven Six

Notable investments: Angel City Football Club, Feastables, Flock Safety, Riverside, Ro

City: Jupiter, Florida

Before he married a tennis superstar and became Mr. Serena Williams, Ohanian was known as the "mayor of the internet." He cofounded Reddit and scaled it to become one of the most popular websites worldwide. Since he sold the company, he's plunged his personal wealth and venture funds into companies building in the blockchain, software, and healthcare industries.

In 2020, Ohanian left the firm he cofounded, Initialized Capital, to launch yet another venture fund. Between Ohanian and his Seven Seven Six founding partner, Katelin Holloway, the fund has backed a number of startups led by women and people of color, including the group coaching platform The Grand and maternal telehealth solution Poppy Seed Health.

17. Ben Ling

Founder and general partner, Bling Capital

Notable investments: GitHub, Rippling, Airtable, Spellbook, Noetica

City: Miami

Ling was a general partner at Khosla Ventures before launching Bling Capital, a VC firm focused on seed and Series A investments. Ling has also served in senior operating roles at Google, YouTube, and Facebook and was an active angel investor, nabbing early stakes in Airtable, Lyft, Square, Palantir, and Quora.

In 2024, one of Bling's early investments, Printify, grew 100 times the firm's entry valuation and merged with Printful to become one of the largest print-on-demand platforms globally. As for what Ling looks for in an entrepreneur, he said he seeks a founder with "the right level of obstinance, an earned secret about a space, and an innate drive to learn it all."

18. Jon Soberg

CEO and managing partner, MS&AD Ventures

Notable investments: Yotpo, Mercury, Flex, Rubrik, ValidMind, Plus Platform

City: Palo Alto, California

This is Soberg's fifth straight year on the Seed 100, a position he's maintained due in part to the seven IPOs and 19 unicorns in his portfolio. His many bets include the marketing platform Yotpo, the business banking fintech Mercury, and Rubrik, the cloud cybersecurity company that went public last year.

Soberg has been leading MS&AD Ventures since 2018. His firm focuses on early-stage startups and invests across insuretech, AI, Internet of Things, big data, and cybersecurity.

For Soberg, success means finding companies that can weather tough conditions — not just shine when the market is great.

"Building in tougher markets makes people focus extra diligently, and we see really responsible growth, great unit economics, and people tackling very tough problems," he told BI.

19. Julian Counihan

Title: General partner, Schematic Ventures

Notable Investments: Altana, Harbinger, Plus One Robotics, P-1 AI, Infinitform, Chassy

City: San Francisco

Counihan is a general partner at Schematic Ventures, an early-stage firm that invests in supply chain, manufacturing, and enterprise software startups. Before Schematic, Counihan worked at Red Sea Ventures, where he invested in industrial hardware and supply chain companies, and in tech investment banking at Citi. He started his career as a software engineer at Fortna, a logistics company.

"The first wave of industrial startups brought world-class engineering talent into supply chain and manufacturing," Counihan told BI. "Engineers from those companies are now launching startups building from first principles and creating entirely new systems for how the physical world operates. There is more energy, talent and capital working on industrial technology than ever before."

20. Micah Rosenbloom

Managing partner, Founder Collective

Notable investments: Hawthorne, Kasa, Lovevery, Socure, Talos, Verkada,

City: New York

Rosenbloom and his firm, Founder Collective, are the picture of founder-friendly investors. The seed-stage shop forsakes pro rata rights, helping to avoid "signaling risk" in the market, and eggs on founders to raise as little money as possible, even if it hurts the markups on their deals.

Rosenbloom, a three-time founder himself, invests across sectors and has backed everything from security systems to pet DNA tests. He co-leads Founder Collective's New York office.

21. Ed Sim

Founder and general partner, Boldstart Ventures

Notable investments: BigID, Common Paper, Kustomer, Protect AI, Snyk, Tessl

City: Miami

Sim thrives in one of the riskiest corners of the market: He invests in startups before they even incorporate. The self-described "inception investor" prefers to roll up his sleeves and work with founders to shape their ideas, close their first hires, and rally the all-important early adopters.

While Sim's portfolio has produced monster exits such as Kustomer's $1 billion sale to Meta, his biggest successes may be ahead. In 2016, Sim wrote one of the first checks into Snyk, the developer-security unicorn startup that's eyeing a potential initial public offering, TechCrunch reported. He also backed Snyk founder Guy Podjarny's latest company, the white-hot coding platform Tessl.

22. Scott Belsky

Partner, A24

Notable investments: Airtable, Clay, KoBold, Meter, Pinterest, Ramp, Uber

City: New York

A longtime Adobe executive and creative virtuoso, Belsky left the design software company earlier this year for the role of a lifetime: He joined A24 as a partner, leading tech and innovation projects at the independent studio. In a social media post announcing the move, Belsky pledged to "continue supporting founders as an investor/product advisor" and board member.

One of the bright spots in his portfolio is the fintech Ramp. Founded in 2019, the corporate card and software provider boasts hundreds of millions in annualized revenue and a $13 billion valuation.

23. Ryan Hoover

Founder and general partner, Weekend Fund

Notable investments: Atlys, Deel, Extropic, Justpoint, Luminai, Pipe, Truemed

City: Miami, New York, and San Francisco

Hoover built the launchpad for startups with Product Hunt, a website for sharing and discovering the latest mobile apps and tech creations. Now, as an investor, he's transformed his network of thousands of founders into a sourcing engine for finding and investing in the next big thing.

His portfolio includes Deel, the human resources software provider that closed $30 million in new funding earlier this year, and the embedded finance platform Pipe.

24. Avichal Garg

Managing partner, Electric Capital

Notable investments: Aven, Bitwise, Figma, Kraken, Notion, Pulley

City: Palo Alto, California

The spectacular collapse of crypto exchanges like FTX and Binance has cast a long shadow over the broader crypto market. But Garg and the fund he founded, Electric Capital, are continuing to bet big on decentralized and blockchain-based technologies.

In addition to his work with Electric, Garg has been a successful angel investor for over a decade, having been an early backer of Cruise, Deel, and Figma. He also worked at both Facebook and Google and founded multiple startups of his own before getting into investing.

25. Laura Rippy

Managing partner and board member, Alumni Ventures

Notable investments: Daydream, Rent App, Barnwell Bio, Atomic Supply, TRM Labs, Believer.gg,

City: Boston

Rippy says that when the world is chaotic, startups are the most nimble, which is why she's excited for this year.

"The pattern of 2025 so far is highly talented teams tackling big opportunities," she told BI.

Based in Boston, Rippy has built a large network of school-related founders and investors. She runs two school-centric funds, Green D at Dartmouth College and Yard Ventures at Harvard, and she's also the managing partner of Alumni Ventures, one of the most active VC firms in the world. Alumni brings VC investing to individual investors' portfolios and manages more than 650,000 members.

Prior to joining Alumni Ventures in 2017, Rippy spent 14 years at the private family office Ripplecreek Partners.

26. William Hockey

CEO, Column

Notable investments: Deel, Metronome, Tropic, TryNow, Middesk

City: San Francisco

Hockey worked briefly in consulting at Bain before cofounding Plaid, a fintech infrastructure company, with Zach Perret in 2012. He spent eight years at Plaid as the president and chief technology officer before leaving in 2019.

In 2022, he announced what he'd been building since leaving Plaid: a federally chartered banking startup called Column that allows developers to build financial products faster. Hockey is the cofounder and CEO of Column. He's also a prolific fintech investor who's backed companies such as Moov and the payroll startup Deel, according to PitchBook data.

27. Alex Iskold

Founder and partner, 2048 Ventures

Notable investments: GlossGenius, Aerodome, Gorgias, Mantl, Healthie, Nomic Bio

City: New York

Iskold immigrated to the US from Ukraine when he was 19 and has built a long and successful career as a founder, software engineer, and investor in over 150 startups. He's also a prolific blogger on his site Startup Hacks. Earlier this year, one of 2048 Ventures' early bets, the fintech Mantl, was acquired by Alkemi for $400 million. "AI was and is an arms race. Instead of horizontal plays, we focus on the vertical value capture, full solves, and strong data moats," Iskold told BI. "On the macro level, capital is scarce both for startups and emerging managers. We view this as a very positive net dynamic for the space as there is less noise in general and more value creation."

28. Nat Friedman

Former CEO, GitHub

Notable investments: Figma, Stripe, Deel, Magic, Perplexity, The Bot Company

City: San Francisco

A multi-time founder, Friedman's second software startup was acquired by Microsoft in 2016, paving the way for him to become GitHub's CEO in 2018, when the tech giant bought the coding company for $7.5 billion. Friedman stayed in the top spot at GitHub for three years and stepped down in 2021.

Over the past few years, Friedman has become well known as an investor backing startups like Figma, Stripe, and Perplexity, and often cowrites checks with Daniel Gross. The two acquired more than 2,000 Nvidia chips and distributed them along with venture funding through one of their funds, the billion-dollar AI fund C2 Investment.

29. Ali Partovi

Founder and CEO, Neo

Notable investments: Anysphere, Kalshi, Vanta, Cobot, Bluesky, Chai Discovery

City: San Francisco

Partovi sold his previous company to Microsoft for $265 million and was an early investor and advisor to dozens of startups, including Zappos and Airbnb. He now runs Neo, a startup incubator, venture fund, and professional network. Neo identifies promising individuals, often while they're still in school, and provides them with mentorship, education, job placement, and, in some cases, investment.

One of Neo's graduates, the AI coding startup and Cursor developer Anysphere, recently raised over $100 million at a $2.5 billion valuation. The startup also became one of the fastest companies ever to reach $100 million in annualized revenue, Partovi, who was its first investor, said. "At Neo, we're obsessed with investing in people. Our Neo Scholars program identifies future tech leaders when they're still in college, long before they start a company."

30. Max Mullen

Title: Cofounder, Instacart

Notable investments: Census, Alt, Caper, Verifiable, Pelago

City: San Francisco

Mullen cofounded the delivery giant Instacart, which went public in 2023. He's also been a prolific seed investor, backing over 100 startups, including Lattice, Checkr, Omni, Mercury, and Pelago. He's also backed a number of startups founded by Instacart alums, such as Anomalo, Ascend, Cabal, Highstock, and Monocle. Among Mullen's advice to founders: "Every minute counts."

31. Salil Deshpande

General partner, Uncorrelated Ventures

Notable investments: Redis, Fingerprint, Astranis, Dynatrace, MuleSoft, Stashfin

City: Palo Alto, California

Deshpande has generally preferred to focus on technical founders who are building companies in infrastructure software. As it has become clear that AI can write software code, he has focused more on hardware and space investments, which he sees are more defensible.

Two of his biggest wins have been Redis, a data platform he says crossed $300 million in annual recurring revenue, and LucidLink, a cloud storage tool he says he invested in before it had any product and has now crossed $40 million in ARR.

Prior to founding Uncorrelated Ventures, Deshpande worked at Bain Capital Ventures for seven years and Bay Partners for seven years before that.

32. Shruti Gandhi

Title: Founder and general partner, Array Ventures

Notable investments: Capsule, Eventual Computing, Mozart Data, Placer.ai, Rad AI, Runway.team

City: San Francisco

Gandhi's track record shows she gets results for limited partners. In under a decade, the solo capitalist has returned her first $7 million fund at a fivefold multiple, with more companies still waiting to exit. A stream of acquisitions has sped along those distributions, including Simility, a fraud-detection company which sold to PayPal in 2018, just two years after Gandhi invested.

As a one-time startup founder, Gandhi decided to raise a fund in 2016 because she saw a need for more investors who rolled up their sleeves at the seed stage. Her fund, Array Ventures, helps technical founders close early sales and develop their go-to-market sales strategy.

33. Ramy Adeeb

Founder and general partner, 1984 Ventures

Notable investments: PostHog, Postscript, BuildOps, Collaborative Robotics, Fay Nutrition, Cline

City: New York

Adeeb was hooked on the startup world after joining the speech recognition tech startup TellMe Networks in 2000 as the company's head of enterprise engineering. Seven years later, TellMe sold to Microsoft, and Adeeb spent two years as a principal at Khosla Ventures before starting his own company. He sold that venture, the web curation tool Snip.it, to Yahoo in 2013.

Adeeb founded 1984 Ventures in 2017 to invest in early-stage tech startups. This year, he's particularly excited about his investment in Cline, which he said was stealing away customers from highly funded AI coding editors like Anysphere's Cursor and Windsurf for its competing product, built by a single engineer. Cline hadn't publicly announced its funding as of April.

Another of Adeeb's investments, the commercial contracting software BuildOps, raised a $127 million Series C round in March at a valuation of $1 billion.

34. Elad Gil

Angel investor

Notable investments: Anduril, Braintrust, Harvey, Notion, Perplexity

City: San Francisco

When it comes to evaluating seed-stage startups, Gil says that the potential for product-market fit is the most important thing he's looking for when deciding whether to write a check.

This strategy has proved fruitful, with Gil making early bets on AI legaltech darling Harvey, the workplace productivity suite Notion, the AI search engine Perplexity, and the defense tech company Anduril, along with several other buzzy startups that have since become heavy hitters.

A longtime angel investor, Gil has also written checks for Airbnb, Coinbase, Figma, Deel, and a slew of other startups. He was previously an executive at Twitter, now known as X, and worked in product management at Google.

35. Kunal Bahl

Cofounder, Titan Capital

Notable investments: Ola, Urban Company, Mamaearth, OfBusiness, Unicommerce, Credgenics

City: New Delhi

Bahl cofounded one of India's hottest startups, Snapdeal, which was once valued at $6.5 billion. Snapdeal's parent company, the SoftBank-backed Unicommerce, went public in 2024 and was the first software-as-a-service company to go public in India. When the company went public, it was the second-most-subscribed IPO of the year.

"Outside of the usual help a portfolio company would expect from any seasoned investor, one area we are very focused on is ensuring discipline around maintaining a thoughtful, well-structured monthly MIS that is discussed within the startup's leadership and with our team at Titan Capital," Bahl said, referring to a management information system report. "This ensures everyone — internal and external stakeholders — is always on the same page with respect to the direction the business is headed."

36. Marlon Nichols

Cofounder and managing general partner, MaC Venture Capital

Notable investments: Thrive Market, Pipe, Finesse, Purestream, Seed Health, Truebill

City: Los Angeles

Nichols started his career as an operator at a seed-stage startup, helped scale it, and then transitioned to consulting. But while that career was fulfilling, he felt that something was missing. He wanted to collaborate with executives and decision-makers and be close to the latest technology. For Nichols, the answer was venture capital. He started in VC at Intel Capital and then cofounded Cross Culture Ventures. That firm then merged with another to form MaC Venture Capital in 2021, which raised $110 million for its first fund and followed that up with a second $203 million fund.

In 2024, Mac closed on another $150 million fund, its third in four years. Nichols said this "reflects our impact as a seed-stage firm, the strength of our thesis and the founders we back" and "cements MaC as one of the largest seed-stage firms in Los Angeles and North America."

Nicholas said the new fund had allowed the firm to continue to expand in areas such as energy, sustainability, defense, and hard tech, sectors the firm believes "are at an inflection point and poised for outsized impact and returns."

37. Marc Benioff

Chairman and CEO, Salesforce

Notable Investments: Wiz, You.com, Artera AI, Warp, LearnLux, Zebra Medical Vision

City: San Francisco

Benioff caught the startup bug as a summer intern at Apple in the summer of 1984, writing assembly code for the Macintosh 68000 Development System. Fast-forward a few decades, and he's running Salesforce, a 75,000-person Fortune 500 giant.

Seed stage investing isn't his day job, but Benioff says he's drawn to founders because he relates to them. He estimates that over the past 20 years, he's backed more than 200 seed-stage startups. Founders in his portfolio don't just get cash — they also get access to his playbook for scaling and his deep network of executives and operators.

The key signal he looks for in a founder? Shared vision. "Do I have a complementary vision to how they see their own company?" Benioff told BI. "Many of these people are visionaries. They're seeing things that don't exist. Am I also able to see what they're seeing?"

Beyond his personal investing, Benioff also oversees TIME Ventures and Salesforce Ventures. One of its biggest wins: a roughly $600 million return from Wiz's $32 billion acquisition, Benioff told BI. Salesforce Ventures first invested in the cybersecurity startup's Series B in June 2021.

38. Scott Dorsey

Managing partner, High Alpha

Notable investments: Narvar, Zylo, Logik.ai, Lessonly, Superside

City: Indianapolis

Dorsey has been at the helm of the Indianapolis-based venture studio High Alpha since 2015, which he cofounded with his fellow Salesforce alums Eric Tobias and Mike Fitzgerald and the serial entrepreneur Kristian Andersen. Before getting into venture, Dorsey cofounded the marketing SaaS company ExactTarget and led the company as its CEO through an IPO, public market debut, and subsequent sale to Salesforce for $2.5 billion in 2013. Dorsey said that experience as a founder and longtime CEO had served him well as he guides the next generation of entrepreneurs.

"With my ExactTarget journey from startup founder to public company CEO, I pride myself on being a great partner and sounding board to our founders," he told BI. "I enjoy contributing to important strategic decisions as well as supporting founders with the everyday challenges they encounter."

39. Alex McIsaac

Founder and general partner, Northside Ventures

Notable investments: Ledn, AutoLeap, Draft, Float Financial, Clutch

City: Toronto

Before launching Northside Ventures, a pre-seed and seed stage firm based in Toronto, McIsaac cofounded an energy storage-focused cleantech startup in 2012 that Blackstone Energy bought in 2018. He transitioned to VC and landed at BDC Capital, the largest venture firm in Canada, where he worked on its seed and women in tech funds. He also led the Canadian investment practice as a partner at Global Founders Capital, a European venture firm.

40. Rohit Bansal

Cofounder, Titan Capital

Notable investments: Ola, Urban Company, Mamaearth, OfBusiness, Unicommerce, Credgenics, Giva, Shadowfax

City: New Delhi

Bansal, along with his fellow Seed 100 honoree Kunal Bahl, cofounded one of India's hottest startups, Snapdeal, which was once valued at $6.5 billion. The SoftBank-backed Unicommerce, also cofounded by Bansal and Snapdeal's parent company, went public in 2024 and was the first SaaS company to go public in India.

"India is on a rising tide — we will be the third-largest economy very soon — and all boats are being lifted in this significant and positive evolution the country is going through," Bansal said. "We are witnessing tremendous innovation in AI applications being built in India, not only for the Indian market but also for global customers. We anticipate this trend to accelerate in 2025."

41. Anshu Sharma

Cofounder and CEO, Skyflow

Notable investments: AirMDR, Ema, Ikigai Labs, Zus Health, Zinc Labs, Fold Health

City: Mountain View, California

Sharma has been writing checks to early-stage startups for over a decade, but his investing motto has remained the same: Always be closest to the smartest people you know.

This rule scored him an investment in Nutanix, as he knew the cloud-computing startup's CEO from his years at Oracle. Nutanix went public in 2016, valued at over $5 billion.

In the past year, he wrote checks to AirMDR, an AI for security company, as well as Ema, an agentic AI startup building universal AI employees. Two of his early investments, Razorpay and Tekion, are seen as likely IPO candidates.

As a three-time founder, Sharma relates personally to the entrepreneurs he works with. Barracuda Networks bought his company Clearedin in January 2022.

42. Joe Montana

Title: Managing partner, Liquid 2 Ventures

Notable Investments: GitLab, Rippling, Applied Intuition, Anduril, Mercury, Reducto

City: San Francisco

After a Hall of Fame career as quarterback of the San Francisco 49ers, Montana cofounded HRJ Capital, a fund of funds, in 1999. After a few years of angel investing and learning from the "super angel" Ron Conway, Montana launched Liquid 2 Ventures, which invests in industries as varied as B2B SaaS and defense tech, in 2015. The firm recently closed on a new $100 million fund, the San Francisco Business Times reported.

Montana says that, like football, venture capital is a long game: "At Liquid 2 Ventures, we're committed to being lifetime investors," he told BI. "We look for potential in founders, and aim to be a partner to them throughout their lifetime, not just for one lifecycle. Many of the most successful companies in our portfolio are from founders who are on their second or third company."

43. Dylan Field

CEO, Figma

Notable investments: Warp, Pattern Biosciences, Retro, Conception Bio, The Browser Company

City: Penngrove, California

Field has carved out time to make angel investments across different verticals, including the DNA startup Pattern Biosciences and The Browser Company, a consumer startup building the internet browser, Arc.

He's vetting startups and writing checks in addition to running Figma, the late-stage collaborative design startup he cofounded in 2012 with Evan Wallace. The company has raised more than $300 million from VCs and was in talks to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion in 2022 before the deal fell apart. In April, the company confidentially filed draft paperwork for an IPO.

44. Justin Mateen

Title: Founding partner, Jam Fund

Notable investments: Deel, Hadrian, Kalshi, Radiant Nuclear, Rain AI, Varda

City: Los Angeles

Mateen is best known as the cofounder of Tinder, the OG dating app. Now, he swipes right on startups as a savvy early investor in companies like Lyft, which went public in 2019 at a $24 billion valuation, and Brex, which had a $12.3 billion valuation in January 2022.

Mateen told BI he looks for founders with "serious domain expertise who have something to prove to themselves, the world, or someone they care deeply about" and companies that are disrupting large markets and have a clear path to positive-unit economics at scale.

45. Ali Tamaseb

General partner, DCVC

Notable investments: StarkWare, ElectronX, Odyssey, Earth AI, Chai Discovery

City: Palo Alto, California

Before landing at DCVC, Tamaseb cofounded and was the CEO of Blocks Wearables, a deep-tech hardware startup that developed wearables for industrial use. He also runs the networking community Super Founders Club, which includes founders with prior meaningful exits and IPOs. Tamaseb told BI that in the past year, he'd been able to grow the community "2x." It allows Tamaseb to get access and find the best and most promising founders.

"My style of investing is 100% founder-first and founder-centric," he said. "I use data, and an institutional way of creating networks to find, fund, and partner with the best founders of our generation at pre-seed, seed, A, and beyond."

46. Sheel Mohnot

Cofounder and general partner, Better Tomorrow Ventures

Notable investments: Mercury, Kin, Unit, Relay, Coast, Basis

City: San Francisco

Mohnot has been featured on the Seed 100 every year since its inception four years ago. In 2020, he cofounded Better Tomorrow Ventures, a fintech venture firm. Before that, he was an angel investor in companies such as Flexport and Ironclad. He's been investing in fintech since 2015 and cofounded the food company Thistle before starting his venture capital career.

Mohnot is excited about the prospects for fintech this year. "We had 10 markups over the course of a month earlier this year — fintech is back!" he said.

His firm specializes in helping startups with sales, recruiting, business development, community building, and raising money for the next round of funding, he said, adding that it had introduced founders to their next-round investors more than 90% of the time.

47. Nick Candito

Cofounder and managing director, ACOF

Notable investments: Carta, TrueMed, Metafy, Augment Markets, Atomic Insights, BRM

Cities: Austin and San Francisco

Candito started his career as an operator in the Boston startup scene before heading west to join the sales data startup RelateIQ, which Salesforce bought for $390 million in 2014. He then founded and served as the CEO of the cloud-based enterprise startup Progressly, which Box acquired in 2018.

Candito spent some time at Box and other startups before moving on to investing in startups, including the data importing company Flatfile. He also launched the firm Netshire Technology, and in 2020, he cofounded Angel Collective Opportunity Fund, of which he's the managing director. ACOF helps emerging managers back startups through a pooled investment fund.

Candito said he was very excited about his investments over the past year in several AI infrastructure startups, including Gable, Distributional, Letta (formerly MemGPT), TensorWave, and Fiddler AI.

48. Eric Tarczynski

Title: Founder and managing partner, Contrary

Notable investments: Ramp, Zepto, Moment, Doss, Hermeus, Anduril

City: San Francisco

Tarczynski founded Contrary in 2017 to identify exceptional entrepreneurs early, sometimes before they've even begun their next venture. The firm, which invests in early-stage tech companies, is backed by the founders of tech powerhouses such as Tesla, Reddit, Facebook, and Airbnb. Contrary's portfolio includes tech unicorns such as the defense tech startup Anduril, the Indian grocery delivery company Zepto, and the fintech platform Ramp.

Tarczynski began his own entrepreneurial journey in 2012 with Checkit, a restaurant mobile payments startup that folded after two years of competing against Toast — which Tarczynski describes as an invaluable learning opportunity. He was also an early employee at the social platform Kamcord, whose team was acqui-hired by Lyft in 2017.

49. Jackson Moses

Title: Founder and managing partner, Silent Ventures

Notable investments: Saronic, CHAOS, Armada, Gallatin AI, Firestorm, UNION

City: Dallas

Moses is a prolific defense tech investor, with some of the buzziest startups, such as the autonomous maritime company Saronic Technologies and the defense detection startup CHAOS, in his portfolio. He started his venture fund, which invests in aerospace, defense, and national security companies, in late 2022.

Previously, Moses angel invested across multiple verticals and cut his teeth starting companies of his own: He founded MainStreet, a corporate tax software company, and Spectrum Labs, a content moderation startup.

50. Roger Chen

Title: Partner, Silverton Partners

Notable investments: Apprentice, Billie, Docjuris, Grocery TV, Rx Redefined, Valid8 Financial

City: Austin

Chen moved to Austin six years ago to become a partner at the early-stage investment firm Silverton Partners. He told BI that he tends to "gravitate toward category creators" when evaluating a startup before investing.

That's evidenced by his portfolio of local software and consumer businesses that have become the envy of Silicon Hills, with stakes in Apprentice, Fama, and Grocery TV (formerly Clerk). Chen also received a sizable exit with Edgewell's purchase of the razor maker Billie for $310 million in 2021.

Chen said that in the past year, his portfolio company Rx Redefined had "performed consistently ahead of plan and capped off the year with a Series B." And he's very excited about another of his portfolio companies, the legaltech AI startup DocJuris, which he said "has been able to out-innovate and win deals against peers with significantly more funding."

51. Martin Tobias

Managing partner, Incisive Ventures

Notable investments: Jeeves, OpenSea, Enable, Yassir, Portside, LMNT

City: Seattle

Tobias is a serial entrepreneur and investor who's been in the game for nearly 30 years. After stints at Accenture and Microsoft, Tobias ventured out on his own to launch two companies, and he led several others during the early 2000s. He says that over the years, he's invested in more than 250 companies as an angel investor, and he's a limited partner in at least a dozen venture funds.

Tobias started Incisive Ventures, a pre-seed fund based in Seattle, in 2020, and he was an early investor in the fintech startup Jeeves, the NFT platform OpenSea, and the electrolyte drink mix company LMNT. He's particularly excited about the recent wave of AI advancement and all of the startups capitalizing on the technology. "I am most excited about the companies that are seizing this AI moment to deliver whole new categories of B2B applications versus AI paste-ons," he said.

52. Bill Trenchard

Partner, First Round Capital

Notable investments: Uber, Looker, Verkada, EvolutionIQ, Flexport, Dyna Robotics

Cities: San Francisco and Seattle

Trenchard was an entrepreneur for more than two decades, starting five companies and backing many more as an angel investor. In 2012, he joined First Round Capital, the seed-stage firm founded by Josh Kopelman and Howard Morgan.

In the past year, several of Trenchard's portfolio companies have seen continued success. The insurtech startup EvolutionIQ, one of Trenchard's portfolio companies that he backed in 2019, was bought for $730 million. The security tech startup Verkada raised a $200 million round, valuing it at $4.5 billion.

Trenchard said that in his years as an investor, he'd looked for "founders who are willing to go to extraordinary lengths to make customers successful." He recalled that eight years ago, Verkada CEO Filip Kaliszan got up on a ladder at midnight to install cameras at the Equinox in Beverly Hills. Kaliszan "recently revisited the site and found those original cameras still in use — with the customer just as happy," he said. "That level of founder commitment and obsession with making customers successful, no matter what it takes, is a powerful indicator.

53. Itamar Novick

Founder and general partner, Recursive Ventures

Notable investments: Deel, Placer AI, May Mobility, Akash Network, Tomato AI, Anjuna Security

City: Berkeley, California

Novick makes seed investments through Recursive Ventures, the firm he launched in 2014 as a solo capitalist. He announced its third fund in February, with $30 million to back pre-seed startups primarily based in the US and Israel and focused on industry disruption with data and AI.

He started Recursive while still working at Life360, where he was a member of the location-sharing app's founding team. He stayed at Life360 in various roles until its 2024 IPO, for which he served as its acting chief financial officer and general counsel. Before that, he was on the founding team of the customer identity management startup Gigya, which the German company SAP acquired for $350 million in 2017.

Novick has invested in more than 100 startups since 2010. He's particularly excited about his 2024 investment in Perspective AI, which lets founders simulate conversations with their customers — a tool he said he would've loved to have used when he was an operator.

54. Raymond Tonsing

Title: Founder and managing partner, Caffeinated Capital

Notable investments: Saronic, Varda, Airtable, Affirm, Opendoor, Clipboard Health

City: San Francisco

After working in real estate investing, Tonsing switched to tech in 2009 when he founded Caffeinated Capital, an early-stage venture capital firm in San Francisco. He's backed companies like the online payments startup WePay, which JPMorgan acquired, and the app development startup Parse, which Meta bought in 2013.

Tonsing also saw success with the fintech company Affirm, which went public in 2021 at a valuation of over $10 billion, and Airtable, which was valued at $11 billion in 2021.

He was an early investor in Varda Space, which aims to develop pharmaceutical components in space, and serves on its board.

55. Andreas Klinger

Title: Solo general partner, Prototype Capital

Notable investments: Remote, Luma AI, Circle, Zed, PierSight Space, Sensmore

City: Berlin

Klinger was a founding member and chief technology officer of the product launch website Product Hunt before it was acquired by AngelList in 2017. He worked at AngelList and its subsidiary CoinList while also investing in pre-seed and seed-stage companies such as Hopin, Clubhouse, and Remote. In 2024, he launched the solo fund Prototype Capital.

Klinger says that in the past year, he's been one of the core people behind a movement to establish a Pan-European legal entity that hopes to fix most of the hurdles to early-stage funding in Europe. The proposal has gotten the backing of the Stripe cofounder Patrick Collison and the Y Combinator cofounder Paul Graham.

56. Lucas Vaz

Title: Founder and general partner, Ravelin Capital

Notable Investments: Apex Space, Base Power, Covenant, Hadrian, The Lumber Manufactory, Shinkei Systems

City: San Francisco

Vaz founded his venture firm, Ravelin Capital, which backs early-stage startups building "critical software," with bets largely in the industrial, defense, and manufacturing sectors. Vaz was motivated to found Ravelin after noticing "the decay of our infrastructure, the collapse of our institutions, and the changing geopolitical tides," he wrote in a note on the firm's website. Previously, Vaz worked as an investor at Village Global, an early-stage venture firm.

"From manufacturing and defense to other sectors such as industrials, energy, fishing, and lumber, we're witnessing an unprecedented wave of world-class talent pouring into sectors that have long been overlooked," Vaz told BI. "These entrepreneurs aren't chasing trends — they're committing their lives to rebuilding the systems that matter most."

57. Jeff Fluhr

Venture partner, Craft Ventures

Notable investments: Warby Parker, Twilio, Houzz, CrewAI, Arch, Pickle

City: San Francisco

Fluhr dropped out of the Stanford Graduate School of Business to cofound StubHub in 2000 and served as the company's CEO until its sale to eBay in 2007. He then launched the social video platform Spreecast, which shut down in 2016, and joined Craft Ventures a few years later. In March, Fluhr announced in a LinkedIn post that he was transitioning to a new chapter as a venture partner at the firm after seven years as a general partner.

As an investor, Fluhr has backed companies including Warby Parker and Houzz, and other unicorns, including Course Hero, MDLive, and Trulia. Out of his investments in the past year, Fluhr is particularly excited about the AI agent startup CrewAI, which he said was "the leading open source framework for AI agent orchestration, an area that is already having a huge impact on Fortune 500 companies and will only grow in importance over the next five years."

58. Kevin Durant

Title: Cofounder, Thirty Five Ventures

Notable investments: Goalsetter, StarStock, Hugging Face, Helm.ai, Lively

City: New York

Durant is best known as a star in the NBA, winning back-to-back championships with the Golden State Warriors in 2017 and 2018. But few realize that Durant is also a prolific investor through Thirty Five Ventures, the firm he cofounded with his business partner, Rich Kleiman, in 2016.

His investments include the AI coding startup Hugging Face to the wellness company Thrive Global.

59. Zach Weinberg

Title: General partner, Operator Partners; cofounder and CEO, Curie.Bio

Notable investments: Whatnot, Nourish, Ro, Spring Health, QA Wolf

City: New York

Weinberg helps seed-stage founders discover drugs with his biotech-focused accelerator and investment firm, Curie.Bio. It's backed by the industry heavyweights GV, Andreessen Horowitz, and Arch Venture Partners. It raised $340 million in January to back up to 20 more biotech companies this year.

He's a successful two-time startup founder, having sold his adtech startup, Invite Media, to Google for $81 million in 2010. His second company, the oncology tech startup Flatiron Health, sold to Roche for $2 billion in 2018.

Weinberg also deploys capital through the early-stage venture firm he cofounded, Operator Partners, and maintains a personal portfolio as an angel investor.

60. Steve Loughlin

Title: Partner, Accel

Notable investments: Monte Carlo Data, Airkit.ai, Poggio Labs, Centaur Labs, Productiv, Stairwell

City: Palo Alto, California

Loughlin was originally a founder, developing the sales technology startup RelateIQ, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2014 for $390 million. He joined Accel in 2016, where he helps lead the firm's seed practice. One of Loughlin's early bets, the data startup Monte Carlo Data raised $60 million in Series C funding in 2024 and saw 100% year-over-year revenue growth.

"In looking at new investments for a seed, it's all about the founders," Loughlin told BI. "Startups are never a straight line, so understanding why they are starting and learning about their history of execution is critical in partnering."

61. Hadley Harris

Founding general partner, Eniac Ventures

Notable investments: Attentive, 1upHealth, Anchor, Hinge, Level AI, Attention

City: New York

Prior to cofounding New York-based Eniac Ventures in 2010, Harris cut his teeth at two VC-backed startups, including an AI voice assistant that would later become Siri.

He's now using that experience to lead Eniac's AI investing efforts, both at the application and tooling layer. Eniac leads early-stage rounds for software, AI, and IT companies.

"I feel incredibly fortunate to have spent over 15 years building and investing in AI-first companies, including building the first voice-based virtual assistant, which became Siri after being acquired," Harris told BI. "This deep-rooted passion has given me valuable experience and insight, helping me partner with founders of AI-first companies today."

62. Jason Warner

Cofounder and CEO, Poolside

Notable investments: Moderne, Render, The Browser Company, StarTree, Tinybird

City: San Francisco

Warner is the cofounder and CEO of buzzy AI startup Poolside, which just raised $500 million at a $3 billion valuation. Prior to founding Poolside, Warner was an investor at Redpoint Ventures, where he backed AI and infrastructure companies. Warner was also the CTO of GitHub, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2018 for over $7 billion.

63. Eric Wu

Cofounder and advisor, Opendoor

Notable investments: Ramp, Airtable, Mercury, Harvey, Faire

City: San Francisco

At the end of 2023, Wu stepped down as president of Opendoor, the property technology company he cofounded in 2014. The move opened the door for him to do more angel investing.

"While a common criterion, I place significant emphasis on the slope and market fit of the founding team," Wu told BI.

He has a passion for real-estate tech firms, such as Kindred Concepts, which was founded by two former Opendoor employees, and the Brazilian homebuying marketplace Loft. Wu also oversees a syndicate alongside David King to write bigger checks.

64. Olaf Carlson-Wee

CEO, Polychain Capital

Notable investments: Polymarket, Anoma, Yellow Card, Merico, Vesper Energy

City: San Francisco

A self-proclaimed early lover of crypto who wrote his 2012 college thesis on bitcoin, Carlson-Wee became Coinbase's first employee after he famously cold-emailed the company's founders, he recalled in a 2016 interview with Y Combinator. That was the year he left Coinbase and launched Polychain Capital, an investment firm focused on backing crypto and blockchain-based technologies.

Since then, Carlson-Wee has served as the investment firm's CEO, which has racked up nearly 300 investments, according to PitchBook. Those include checks to the crypto-based prediction market Polymarket and the African cryptocurrency exchange Yellow Card.

65. Dan Teran

Cofounder and managing partner, Gutter Capital

Notable investments: Forerunner, Bikky, Opus, Rowan

City: New York

Teran is a founder turned investor and started backing startups in 2021 after selling his company, the office management software Managed by Q, to WeWork in 2019 for $220 million. His portfolio has since grown to more than 100 startups, and several of his bets have blossomed into companies worth $1 billion.

"Whether it's raising money, hiring executives, finding product-market fit, making an acquisition, or selling the company — most challenges our founders encounter I've done myself," Teran said. "We built our strategy around being the founder's first choice, and our highly concentrated investment strategy allows me to spend real time with our founders to recruit teams, close sales, navigate to product-market fit, and build companies of consequence."

66. Neeraj Berry

Title: Founder and managing partner, Tet Ventures

Notable investments: Maven, Chef Robotics, Kingdom Supercultures, Wildwonder, Phytoform, Season Health

City: Oakland, California

A serial entrepreneur, Berry cofounded food delivery startup Sprig. He also founded 12Society, a subscription commerce business backed by a host of celebrities and investors like Mark Cuban. Berry founded Tet Ventures to make seed investments in food tech startups. One of Berry's early investments, Chef Robotics, a startup that brings AI-powered robotics to food services, just raised $20.6 million in a Series A funding round.

"Money is flowing again, but we believe long-term success to be predicated on taking ambitious swings with fewer resources," Berry told BI. "We've seen the rise and fall of the overcapitalized startup many times, and we're betting on teams that are increasingly audacious, nimble, and resourceful."

67. Peter Thiel

Title: Partner, Founders Fund

Notable investments: Airbnb, Anduril, Facebook, Flexport, Stripe

City: Los Angeles

Thiel keeps a low public profile despite being one of the most influential people in Silicon Valley and now in Washington, DC.

He is part of the early lore at some of Silicon Valley's most iconic companies. He cofounded PayPal and Palantir and was an early investor in Facebook and LinkedIn. His more recent bets include the defense tech company Anduril, which is seeing extremely high demand from secondary investors, and Ramp, which doubled its valuation to $13 billion earlier this year.

Thiel has also launched several venture firms: Founders Fund, whose portfolio includes Faire and Rippling; Valar Ventures, an internationally focused firm that was an early backer of the accounting software company Xero; and Mithril Capital Management, which invested in the blockchain-focused fintech company Paxos.

This year, Thiel has seen his influence rise as an ally of the Trump administration. He is considered by many the "godfather of DOGE."

68. Max Levchin

CEO, Affirm; general partner, SciFi VC

Notable investments: Yelp, Crunchyroll, Stripe, Gusto, Brex

City: San Francisco

Levchin cofounded the company that would become PayPal with Peter Thiel and cemented his lore in the tech world as a member of the now-famous "PayPal Mafia." Since his PayPal days, he's gone on to launch several companies, including the startup studio HVF. From HVF, Levchin spun out the fintech company Affirm, which he cofounded with Nathan Gettings, Jeffrey Kaditz, and Alex Rampell. He's been the company's CEO since 2014, heralding it through its IPO in early 2021.

Levchin is also an active investor and cofounded SciFi VC with his wife, Nellie Levchin, whom he credits with finding the firm's investments and many of his angel investments. Levchin was also an early backer of companies including Yelp, Crunchyroll, and Stripe.

69. Guillermo Rauch

CEO, Vercel

Notable Investments: Perplexity, ElevenLabs, Resend, Spline, Braintrust

City: San Francisco

Rauch is the CEO of Vercel, a cloud infrastructure startup that last raised a $250 million Series E at a $3.25 billion valuation in 2024. Before Vercel, Rauch founded Cloudup, a startup acquired by the parent company of WordPress in 2013. He has angel invested in some of Silicon Valley's buzziest startups, such as Perplexity and ElevenLabs.

Rauch's own stance on rethinking products like Vercel to account for the rapid pace of AI advancements informs his investment thesis: "It's very easy to rest on the laurels of what you've built," he told BI. "It's hard to try and disrupt yourself while revenue is growing, customers seem happy, and your peers are impressed, yet I think this is what the greatest companies are all about."

70. Jack Altman

General partner, Alt Capital

Notable investments: Antares, Fillout, Legora, Owner, Rogo

City: San Francisco

A year and a half ago, Altman stepped back as the chief executive of Lattice, the human resources software company he founded and scaled to unicorn status, to return to his first love: the earliest stages of company-building. He locked down $150 million for his inaugural fund and launched an accelerator for business software startups, harnessing artificial intelligence.

Altman's bets include Legora, the legal tech startup that's shaking up the industry, and Rogo, the Thrive Capital-backed startup working to build Wall Street's first truly autonomous analyst.

71. Nat Turner

General partner, Operator Partners; CEO, Collectors

Notable investments: Plaid, Suki, Oura, Zipline, David Energy

City: New York

Turner has been angel investing since 2010, the same year he sold his first startup, the adtech company Invite Media, to Google for $81 million. After two years at Google, he cofounded Flatiron Health, the cancer care startup acquired by Roche for $1.9 billion in 2018.

In 2020, he formalized his investment approach by launching the venture firm Operator Partners alongside three friends, including his Invite Media cofounder Zach Weinberg. He became the CEO of Collectors, an online collectibles marketplace and authentication platform, after leading an investor group in taking the company private in 2021. He joined GameStop's board of directors in November, a month after Collectors notched a partnership with the gaming retailer.

72. Robert Leshner

General partner, Robot Ventures; CEO, Superstate

Notable investments: Nansen, Celestia, Axelar, LayerZero, Alluvial, Succinct

City: New York

Leshner is known as one of the forefathers of decentralized finance, having cofounded Compound Labs in 2017, which developed one of the first DeFi applications. He went on to cofound and is the CEO of Superstate, an asset management firm that's building blockchain tokenized investment products.

Leshner is also a cofounder and general partner of Robot Ventures, a pre-seed and seed stage firm focused on crypto and fintech startups. Since its founding in 2019, Robot Ventures has backed more than 200 companies, and it raised $75 million for its fourth fund last year. Leshner shared his advice for startup founders now building: "Robots/AI are going to perform all jobs, from finance to media. Build accordingly."

73. Jordan Nof

Managing director, Tusk Venture Partners

Notable investments: Ro, Alma, Dub, Sunday, Kodex, Lumion

City: New York

Nof started Tusk Venture Partners in 2015 to back early-stage tech companies in highly regulated markets. He's bet on startups like the direct-to-consumer health startup Ro, which was last valued at $7 billion in 2022, and the mental health startup Alma, which raised $130 million in Series D funding in 2022.

Before launching Tusk Venture Partners, Nof was a director at Blackstone Innovations, the private equity giant Blackstone's early-stage investing arm. In its 10-year history, Tusk Venture Partners has invested in companies such as the crypto exchange Coinbase, the insurtech company Lemonade, and the sports betting platform FanDuel.

74. Ron Pragides

Limited Partner, GTMfund

Notable Investments: Allstacks, Cacheflow, Cake Equity, Jet HR, Momentum.io, Seeds Investor

City: San Francisco

Pragides is one of more than 350 limited partners at GTMfund, an early-stage venture firm that invests in B2B SaaS companies, according to the company's LinkedIn. He also angel invests and has cashed out on some hot investments, such as Cacheflow, a billing product startup that was acquired by HubSpot in 2024.

The most important qualities Pragides looks for in a startup before investing are founder-market fit, a B2B angle, prioritizing automation and efficiency, and "niches that I am personally interested in," he told BI.

75. Terrence Rohan

Managing director, Otherwise Fund

Notable investments: Figma, Notion, Robinhood, Vanta, Hugging Face, Granola

City: San Francisco

Rohan began his venture capital career with seven years at Index Ventures, during which he built an angel fund for founders to make seed investments. He spun Otherwise Fund out of Index in 2017 with the same premise — to help founders invest in seed- to growth-stage startups. Rohan also invests from the fund, with a focus on seed-stage bets.

In the past year, nearly one-quarter of Rohan's seed investments have seen valuation markups or raised Series A rounds, one of the highest ratios he's seen in his 15 years of seed investing, he told BI. When choosing his investments, he said he focuses especially on the founders' unique insights, as well as the "why now" question: What makes the timing right for that specific company to succeed?

"These essential variables don't easily change and define company trajectory," he said. "Everything else important — product, pricing, distribution, business model, competition — is more malleable and therefore secondary."

76. Anne Dwane

Cofounder and partner, Village Global

Notable investments: Commontools, P-1 AI, AirGarage, Cherry, Pave, Grow Therapy

City: San Francisco

For a career investor like Dwane, AI has represented a generational shift, which is creating an exciting time to evaluate startups and founders for new investment opportunities.

"The last year has been like no other," she told BI. "AI's impact is just beginning to show up in legacy industries, where the gap between what's possible and what exists remains wide."

Dwane added that the industry is also experiencing a revolution when it comes to software development, which she said will allow more people to build companies.

Across Village Global's three funds, Dwane's deals have a cumulative holding value of more than $16 billion. Before Village Global, Dwane cofounded the veteran-focused news site Military.com and later served as the CEO of Zinch, a university-recruitment startup acquired by the edtech company Chegg in 2011.

77. Jim Andelman

Cofounder and managing director, Bonfire Ventures

Notable investments: Writer, Mntn, TaxJar, Boulevard, Wildfire Systems, Alvys

City: Los Angeles

Andelman kicked off his investing career 25 years ago, backing growth-stage software companies at Broadview Capital Partners. A few years later, he founded Rincon Venture Partners, which he calls one of the original "micro VC" firms — seed investing before seed investing as an industry exploded.

His latest venture firm, Bonfire Ventures, backs hot early-stage startups building business-to-business software. The firm raised its fourth and largest fund in February, a $245 million fund that pushed Bonfire's total assets under management over $1 billion. Several of its portfolio companies have also had banner years, including the generative-AI startup Writer, which raised $200 million in Series C funding at a $1.9 billion valuation in November, and the adtech startup Mntn, which filed to go public in March.

78. Immad Akhund

Founder and CEO, Mercury

Notable Investments: Rappi, Airtable, Rippling, Etched, Decagon, Albedo Space

City: San Francisco

Akhund is the founder and CEO of the banking startup Mercury, which recently raised a $300 million Series C at a $3.5 billion valuation led by Sequoia. Before Mercury, Akhund cofounded Heyzap, a startup that made mobile game developer tools, which was acquired by Fyber for $45 million in 2016.

Akhund angel invests in "things that will seem inevitable 10 years from now and can be $10 billion companies," he told BI. To him, these are Silicon Valley heavyweights such as Etched, which makes computing hardware, and Decagon, an AI-powered customer support software startup.

79. Emmett Shear

Title: Cofounder, Justin.tv

Notable investments: Torch, Cruise, ForeVR Games, Fathom, Substack

City: San Francisco

A serial entrepreneur, Shear is best known for cofounding the livestreaming startup Justin.tv with Kan. In 2011, Shear spun the gaming livestreaming business Twitch off from Justin.tv. In 2014, Amazon bought Twitch for $970 million, and Shear remained as its CEO. In 2023, he was the interim CEO of OpenAI for a short time after Sam Altman was ousted. Shear made early bets on companies like Substack and Cruise.

80. Ashu Garg

General partner, Foundation Capital

Notable investments: Databricks, Anyscale, Cohesity, Arize, Turing, Eightfold

City: Palo Alto, California

For Garg, whose firm, Foundation Capital, was founded more than 30 years ago and placed its first AI bet more than a decade ago, there are three important things to look for when it comes to evaluating an early-stage, pre-revenue startup: the founder, the market, and technical insight.

"I look for evidence of 'exceptional' — exceptional intellect, exceptional grit, and exceptionally high willingness to prioritize the startup over almost everything else in their life," he told BI. "What's the unique insight that makes this startup different from the 100-plus other players going after the same market?"

Over the years, keeping these questions in mind has served Garg well as he's made bets in startups like Databricks, which has mulled an IPO, Cohesity, and Turing.

Prior to joining Foundation Capital in 2008, Garg worked at McKinsey and Microsoft.

81. Andrew Miklas

Title: Founder, Functional Capital; cofounder, PagerDuty

Notable investments: Gem, Retool, Clerk, Courier

City: San Francisco

Miklas cofounded the digital operations management company PagerDuty with Alex Solomon and Baskar Puvanathasan in 2009. He served as the company's chief technology officer until 2016 and then transitioned to venture capital, becoming a venture partner at S28 Capital. He also founded the early-stage firm Functional Capital, which focuses on B2B startups. Miklas has been a visiting group partner at Y Combinator since last year. PagerDuty was part of the accelerator's summer cohort in 2010 and became its second company to go public after a 2019 IPO.

82. Lee Fixel

Title: Founder, Addition

Notable investments: Hugging Face, Lyra Health, Satispay

City: New York

Fixel spent more than a decade at Tiger Global Management and played a pivotal role in investing in companies such as Flipkart, Spotify, and Peloton. In 2019, he departed to launch his own venture capital firm, Addition, which focuses on early- and growth-stage startups.

During the past six years, Fixel and Addition have built an investment portfolio that includes companies like Hugging Face, Lyra Health, Satispay, Chainalysis, and Snyk.

83. Ramtin Naimi

Founder and general partner, Abstract

Notable investments: Solana, Rippling, WorkOS, Hebbia, Passes, Replit

City: San Francisco

Naimi kick-started his investment career at the age of 15, trading options. He then founded a hedge fund at just 18. Naimi later founded Abstract in 2016, where he focuses on leading seed-stage deals across all sectors. He says the firm has $1.6 billion in assets under management, and recent investments include the AI agent developer tool Anon, the autonomous-robot maker Watney Robotics, and the AI defense tech startup Kela. As for what Naimi looks for in a founder, he said, "I like high-momentum founders that operate with a relentless sense of urgency and demonstrate novel thinking."

84. Ludwig Pierre Schulze

Title: Managing partner, Alumni Ventures

Notable Investments: Clarium Health, Nixtla, CompScience, ForceMetrics, Synthesis School

City: New York

Pierre Schulze is a managing partner at Alumni Ventures, where he writes checks ranging from $50,000 to $10 million to pre-seed to Series B companies. Through Alumni Ventures, Pierre Schulze manages Waterman Ventures, Brown University's VC community, and 116 Street Ventures, Columbia University's VC community.

"One of our companies went from single to triple-digit millions of revenue in a year," Pierre Schulze said when asked about his biggest accomplishments from 2024.

85. Milad Alucozai

Title: Cofounder and general partner, Pamir Ventures

Notable investments: Fathom, Character Biosciences, Axonis Therapeutics, Talus Bio, Seqera Labs

City: San Francisco

Alucozai started in venture capital at BoxOne Ventures, where he spent nearly six years leading 70 of the firm's early-stage investments as its head of life sciences and deep tech. While at BoxOne, he helped cofound Revalia Bio, a startup spun out of Yale that's working to enable drug discovery and development through the study of revived human organs. Alucozai led Revalia Bio's pre-seed round and invested in its 2024 seed round.

With a background in neuroscience, Alucozai said his singular focus as an early-stage investor is identifying brilliant technical founders. He said he looks for technical leaders from humble backgrounds setting out to build long-lasting products.

Alucozai left BoxOne this past summer. This year, he said he's focused on building and launching an unannounced early-stage venture fund with two of his friends dubbed Pamir Ventures.

86. Meltem Demirors

General partner, Crucible Capital

Notable investments: Double Zero, CentralAxis, Ostium

City: New York

Demirors has had a busy year launching her new firm, Crucible Capital, which invests in energy, compute, and crypto startups. Crucible ended 2024 with $36 million in committed capital from a $50 million target fund and is now oversubscribed, Demirors told BI. The firm also recently made its third investing hire.

For Demirors, Crucible Capital is the natural extension of her long career as an investor outside the traditional venture capital space. Rather than spinning out of a VC fund, she built investment firms and asset managers in crypto while she was angel investing. Prior to launching Crucible, Demirors was the chief strategy officer at the digital-asset investment company CoinShares.

At Crucible, her LPs are mostly builders, operators, and investors, rather than institutional investors or funds of funds.

"I feel like Crucible is a bit of an anomaly and it can be challenging considering how clubby venture can be sometimes," she said.

87. Mathilde Collin

Title: Cofounder and executive chairperson, Front

Notable Investments: Retool, Mercury, Vanta, Copilot, Meter, Browser Use

City: San Francisco

Colllin cofounded Front, a customer service platform startup, in 2013 after working as a project manager at another startup. She served as Front's CEO until October and is now its executive chairperson. Collin also angel invests in a variety of companies, which include the fintech banking startup Mercury and the tool-building platform Retool.

In founders, Collin looks for "a delicate balance between humility, self awareness and self confidence," she told BI. "Enough self confidence to inspire people to be on the journey with them, enough humility to get people to help them, enough self awareness to work on themselves."

88. Christopher Golda

Founder and managing partner, Rogue Capital

Notable investments: Apex Space, Benchling, Coinbase, Stoke Space, Supabase

City: San Francisco

Golda began his entrepreneurial career as the founder of BackType, an analytics company that raised funding from Y Combinator and firms such as True Ventures. Twitter acquired BackType in 2011, and Golda stayed at the social media company for three years, leading product efforts at its advertising center. He left to launch Rogue Capital in 2014 to back seed and Series A startups.

Like many of the investors on this list, Golda said he focuses on the founder when choosing bets — but he's specifically looking for "a high tolerance for chaos and uncertainty," a critical skill he says can be especially difficult to develop later in life. "Without that, even the most resourceful founders will struggle to overcome the day-to-day challenges of a startup," he said.

89. Warren Weiss

Title: Managing partner, WestWave Capital; general partner, Foundation Capital

Notable investments: Theta Lake, Solo.io, Binarly, Secuvy, Cigent, Savant Labs

City: Redwood City, California

Weiss, a four-time CEO, founded WestWave in 2017 to invest in emerging software companies. In the past year, he has backed a number of software companies, including Secuvy, Elate, Savant, and Discern Security. He also serves on the boards of Trufa, Cyphort, Moxie, SilkRoad Technology, Silver Spring Networks, and Visier.

"This is the most distributive and exciting time to be in the early-stage venture capital market that I have ever seen," Weiss told BI. "AI will drive the reinvention of every single category that WestWave Capital invests in. This will create many new multibillio companies."

90. Ann DeWitt

General partner, Engine Ventures

Notable investments: Cellino, Bexorg, Matrisome Bio, Terragia, Anthology, Kano Therapeutics, Source Bio

City: Boston

DeWitt has spent her career helping companies build new transformative biotechnologies. She began in VC at the Massachusetts life sciences firm Flagship Pioneering, then moved to Sanofi, where she guided the pharma giant's investments.

She joined The Engine, an MIT spinout, in 2018, two years after its launch. First as The Engine's chief operating officer, then as a general partner, she supported the startup incubator and accelerator's work with "tough tech" companies, offering an array of resources from lab space to capital for startups building in areas like climate and human health.

In 2023, DeWitt stayed on the investing side of the business when The Engine split its startup support operations from its venture arm. She highlighted Engine Ventures' investment in Cellino, which announced in February plans to open a stem cell manufacturing facility on-site at Massachusetts General Hospital in partnership with the top health system Mass General Brigham's Gene and Cell Therapy Institute.

91. Michael Sutton

Title: Cofounder and general partner, Runtime Ventures

Notable Investments: StepSecurity, SplxAI, System Two, Todyl, GreyNoise, Orca Security

City: Arlington, Virginia

Sutton worked in cybersecurity for more than two decades before investing in the space as a venture capitalist. He started his career at EY and then worked at the internet infrastructure and security company iDefense, which VeriSign bought in 2005. Sutton then served as the chief information security officer at Zscaler, which helped establish the security-as-a-service industry.

Before cofounding the cyber-focused firm Runtime Ventures with David Endler, a cybersecurity veteran, Sutton worked in VC at Blu Venture Investors, YL Ventures, and StoneMill Ventures. Runtime's first $32 million fund closed in January 2025. "Starting a VC fund from scratch, especially as a former operator, took a tremendous amount of hard work, unwavering determination and exhausting our network, but it was all worth it," Sutton told BI.

"Runtime Ventures is the culmination of my experience and passion building and funding cybersecurity startups. It's what I know and love," he said, adding: "We are blessed to be able to do this every day."

92. Justin Kan

Title: Cofounder, Goat Capital

Notable investments: Torch, Sendbird, Paystack, ForeVR Games, Cruise

City: San Francisco

Kan is best known as a cofounder of livestreaming startup Justin.tv and Twitch, the internet live video streaming platform that was sold to Amazon in 2014 for $970 million. He's also invested in some of the well-known startups in tech, including Reddit, Cruise, and Rippling. Kan, who makes seed investments through his firm Goat Capital, recently founded Stash, a direct-to-consumer platform for games.

93. Nicolas Dessaigne

Title: General partner, Y Combinator

Notable Investments: Encord, Flower AI, Continue.dev, Wordware, Unsloth

City: San Francisco

Dessaigne knows a thing or two about Y Combinator — not only because he's currently a general partner at the famed accelerator, but also because he was in a Y Combinator cohort as a cofounder of Algolia. The search API startup last raised funding in 2021, which valued it at more than $2 billion. Now on the other side of the table, Dessaigne has invested in a slew of Y Combinator-backed companies, such as the multimodal data labeling AI startup Encord, which raised a $30 million Series B led by Next47 in August 2024.

"I'm amazed by how AI is giving superpowers to new founders, from codegen tools that 10x development speed to new models that unlock massive value," Dessaigne told BI. "Incumbents simply can't keep up with their pace. There's never been a better time to start a company."

94. Abhishek Sharma

Managing director, Nexus Venture Partners

Notable investments: Apollo.io, Fingerprint, Nx, Daloopa, TileDB,

City: Menlo Park, California

An engineer by training who studied at one of the prestigious Indian Institutes of Technology, Sharma cofounded the startup HelloIntern.com, worked as an associate at the consulting firm Booz & Company, and did a stint at eBay before jumping into venture capital. Since 2015, he's been with the VC firm Nexus Venture Partners, which focuses on enterprise SaaS startups in the US and digital companies in India. Sharma has led some of the firm's deals with companies such as Clover Health, which went public in 2021.

Sharma said that last year he was an early investor in the fast-growing AI agent development startup StackBlitz, known for its product Bolt.new. He's also excited about his recent investments in the AI workflow automation startup Gumloop and the AI call center startup Leaping AI.

Sharma said he "loves partnering with first-time technical founders" and values those who have "product obsession, single-minded focus, clarity of thinking, and humility."

95. Wally Wang

Title: Founding managing partner, Scale Asia Ventures

Notable Investments: Weaviate, Argilla, Array, CAST AI, Fiddler AI, AppZen

City: Palo Alto, California

Wang started in tech as a product manager for Microsoft's Bing search engine. After founding two startups and working at enterprise software companies, he led venture investments for the Asian conglomerate Fosun International and a family office.

While Wang is a solo GP at Scale Asia Ventures, the small but mighty team has already had three acquisitions in the past year. When investing in AI infrastructure, Wang scouts founders "who can adeptly adapt successful strategies from the previous cloud era to the emerging generative AI landscape," he said.

96. Andrew Vigneault

Founder and general partner, Flexcap Ventures

Notable investments: Helicone, Kindo, DraftAid, Crossmint, Nium

City: New York

Vigneault has made his way onto the cap tables of some of the biggest startups through his early-stage fund, FlexCap Ventures. He wrote an early check to the NFT trading marketplace OpenSea and a seed check to the cybersecurity startup Material Security, which hit a $1.1 billion valuation in 2022.

Vigneault said he made 16 new seed investments in 2024, including a startup developing agentic AI to automate silicon engineering and others building AI models to enable early detection of chronic illnesses. Of the 50 seed investments he made from 2022 to 2024, 60% have been marked up through raising follow-on capital, he said.

When evaluating new opportunities, Vigneault said, he focuses on "partnering with founders who exhibit a profound and authentic comprehension of their industry and prospect customers."

97. Zachary Bratun-Glennon

Cofounder and general partner, Gradient Ventures

Notable Investments: Lambda, Rad AI, ELSA, Venn, Syrup, Clarify

City: San Francisco

Since cofounding Gradient, Google's venture fund focused on AI, in 2017, Bratun-Glennon has invested in more than 35 companies, and he's on more than 25 boards. Before Gradient, Bratun-Glennon helmed acquisitions and strategic investments for Google Cloud. He also worked as a technology banker at Deutsche Bank and began his career as an analyst at the energy-focused firm DC Energy.

At Gradient, Bratun-Glennon invests in pre-seed, seed, and Series A startups building in areas such as applied AI technologies, fintech, and B2B software. This includes Lambda, a startup most recently valued at more than $2 billion that develops a cloud computing platform for AI training and inference, which Bratun-Glennon backed in its seed round in 2017.

"We've been focused on backing the best founders in applied AI at the earliest stages for a decade, and we think the space is just getting started," Bratun-Glennon told BI. "Today's 'wrappers' are tomorrow's software platforms, built by layering unique user value, proprietary data and deep workflow integration."

98. Nitesh Banta

Cofounder and CEO, B12

Notable investments: Codeium, Cognition Labs, Grammarly, ZeroEyes, Varda, Chai Discovery

City: New York

Banta started the professional services firm B12 in 2015, the same year he began angel investing through a fund called Stellar Capital. Before B12, he cofounded the car-sharing app Getaround and the student-focused VC firm Rough Draft Ventures, and spent five years as an investor at General Catalyst backing early-stage tech companies.

He said the rise of AI has made the current moment the most exciting time he's experienced in more than two decades of early-stage investing, highlighting AI's ability to enable founders to do more with less.

"With less capital, founders can leverage AI to build better products and scale faster than ever," he said.

99. Ash Egan

Cofounder, Archetype Ventures

Notable investments: Privy, Farcaster, Reservoir, Parcl, Chainalysis, Bison Trails

City: New York

Egan has been leading investments in seed-stage crypto companies and protocols since 2015, writing early checks to startups including Chainalysis, Mina, Near, and Balancer. He also previously led investments for the VC firm Accomplice in Dapper Labs/Flow and Bison Trails (which was acquired by Coinbase), among others. One of Egan's early investments, Privy, hit 50 million wallets this year and raised a new round of funding led by Ribbit Capital.

Egan said he's interested in investing in startups at the "intersection of crypto and AI; programmable social networks and applications that will be built atop; and infrastructure and middleware that will make blockchains as fast and as cheap as an API call."

100. Morgan Flager

Managing partner, Silverton Partners

Notable investments: AlertMedia, Ping Identity, Self Financial, The Zebra, The Helper Bees, Repairify

City: Austin

Flager has spent the past 18 years at Silverton Partners, where he has been a managing partner since 2009. At Silverton, Flager has sponsored 24 investments, as well as overseeing 11 acquisitions and two IPOs. Before that, he briefly worked at FTV Capital in San Francisco as an associate. He got his start as an operator at the then startups Ingrian Networks and Kintana. Flager also cofounded the e-commerce infrastructure startup Woosh in 1998.

Flager said that in his 25 years in venture capital and startups, there had never been a more exciting time to be an early-stage tech investor. "We're witnessing an unprecedented wave of innovation, where advances in artificial intelligence are rapidly transforming every industry, from healthcare and finance to education and entertainment," he told BI. "The pace of progress is accelerating, and startups natively leveraging AI are not only solving complex problems faster and more effectively but they are also creating entirely new markets."

Interactive development by Annie Fu and Randy Yeip.

• Artificial intelligence is helping startups do more with less.
• Some founders are using AI to keep extremely lean teams while supercharging their business growth.
• These 10 AI startups have hit billion-dollar valuations with 50 employees or fewer.

The advent of AI has enabled startups to do more with less, prompting some founders to maintain extremely lean teams.

"We're going to see 10-person companies with billion-dollar valuations pretty soon," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in February 2024. "In my little group chat with my tech CEO friends, there's this betting pool for the first year there is a one-person billion-dollar company, which would've been unimaginable without AI. And now [it] will happen."

Some of AI's biggest names have built upon tiny teams, such as Anysphere, the maker of coding copilot Cursor, which grew from $1 million to $100 million in annual recurring revenue in less than a year with fewer than 50 employees, per private market research platform Sacra.

As a general rule, companies hire more employees when their businesses grow. Small tech teams aren't entirely unheard of — Facebook bought Instagram in 2012 for $1 billion when the photo-sharing app only had 13 employees — but they're exceedingly uncommon for startup unicorns.

Now, the venture ecosystem is powering a new generation of billion-dollar companies, made so efficient with AI that they only need a handful of employees.

Business Insider compiled a list of the highest-valued AI startups around the world with teams of 50 employees or fewer, according to PitchBook data.

PitchBook said its data only includes VC-backed companies with known employee counts and may not be the most up-to-date information. Business Insider independently contacted the companies listed and cross-referenced PitchBook's data with the number of employees associated with the startups' LinkedIn pages.

Here are the 12 AI startups valued at $1 billion+ with teams of 50 people or fewer.

Safe Superintelligence

Latest valuation: $32 billion, according to PitchBook

Employee count: 20, according to PitchBook

What it does: OpenAI cofounder and former chief scientist Ilya Sutskever launched Safe Superintelligence last June, a month after leaving the generative AI giant. Built by Sutskever, former Apple AI lead Daniel Gross, and ex-OpenAI technical staff member Daniel Levy, the research startup wants to create AI that surpasses human intelligence and is aligned with human values.

The Financial Times reported in April that Safe Superintelligence had raised $2 billion at a $32 billion valuation, bringing its total funding to $3 billion. Safe Superintelligence has never publicly disclosed its funding.

Safe Superintelligence declined to share its specific employee count for this story.

0G Labs

Latest valuation: $2 billion

Employee count: 40

What it does: 0G Labs, also known as Zero Gravity Labs, launched in 2023 to build a decentralized AI operating system to help AI applications run more easily on blockchain technology.

The startup says it's raised about $350 million to date, including a $40 million venture seed round in November, led by Hack VC and raised at a valuation cap as high as $2 billion, as well as $250 million in capital commitments that the startup can draw on once its 0G token is available on crypto exchanges.

Magic

Latest valuation: $1.58 billion, according to PitchBook

Employee count: 20, according to PitchBook

What it does: Magic is building AI models that can read massive amounts of code at once to help software developers easily write, review, and fix their code.

Magic said in August that it raised $320 million from investors, including Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt, as well as firms including Alphabet's CapitalG and Sequoia Capital, bringing Magic's total funding to $465 million since its 2022 founding.

Magic didn't respond to requests for comment for this story.

Sakana AI

Latest valuation: $1.5 billion

Employee count: 28, according to PitchBook

What it does: Tokyo-based Sakana AI was launched in 2023 by a team of former Google researchers. Inspired by natural processes, like evolution and collective behavior, the startup is creating tech to combine smaller AI models to perform complex tasks. To date, it's raised roughly $244 million, including a $214 million Series A round in September led by New Enterprise Associates, Khosla Ventures, and Lux Capital.

Sakana AI told BI it couldn't comment on its exact employee count, but confirmed the startup employs 50 people or fewer.

Skild AI

Latest valuation: $1.5 billion

Employee count: 25, according to PitchBook

What it does: Founded in 2023, Skild AI is building models to power robots to interact with real-world environments.

Skild AI last raised $300 million in Series A funding in July at a $1.5 billion valuation. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Coatue, SoftBank Group, and Bezos Expeditions.

Skild AI didn't respond to requests for comment for this story.

Black Forest Labs

Latest valuation: $1.28 billion, according to PitchBook

Employee count: 24, according to PitchBook

What it does: Black Forest Labs' AI tools turn text prompts into realistic images. The German startup, which emerged from stealth in 2024, powers image generation for platforms including Elon Musk's Grok.

Black Forest Labs is backed by VC firms such as Andreessen Horowitz and led by AI researchers behind Stability AI's image generation tech.

The startup didn't respond to requests for comment for this story.

Accutar Biotech

Latest valuation: $1.03 billion, according to PitchBook

Employee count: 40, according to PitchBook

What it does: Accutar Biotech uses AI to discover and develop new medicines. Founded in 2015, it's the oldest startup on this list, and last announced an undisclosed amount of funding in 2021 from investors such as Coatue. At the time, Accutar said it had raised more than $100 million to date.

Accutar Biotech didn't respond to requests for comment for this story.

Andalusia Labs

Latest valuation: $1 billion

Employee count: 22

What it does: Abu Dhabi-based Andalusia Labs builds AI infrastructure to help make cryptocurrencies and other digital assets safer and more secure, with tools to protect developers against hacks and financial risks.

Andalusia Labs last raised a $48 million Series A funding round in December 2023, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, at a $1 billion valuation.

OpenEvidence

Latest valuation: $1 billion

Employee count: 22

What it does: Launched out of top health system Mayo Clinic's healthtech accelerator, OpenEvidence's AI copilot helps doctors quickly access and understand the latest medical research to support clinical decisions.

The startup, which provides its platform for free to healthcare professionals and medical students, has raised $127 million to date, including a $75 million funding round led by Sequoia Capital in February at a $1 billion valuation.

World Labs

Latest valuation: $1 billion, according to PitchBook

Employee count: 20, according to PitchBook

What it does: World Labs is building AI models to perceive, generate, and interact with 3D environments.

Its CEO, Fei-Fei Li, is often called the "godmother of AI" for her work in computer vision as the creator of ImageNet, a massive image database used for advances in deep learning.

World Labs launched out of stealth in September with $230 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA, and Radical Ventures. The startup didn't respond to requests for comment for this story.

• Ascertain raised a $10 million Series A round to ease healthcare administrative burdens with AI.
• Ascertain's CEO, formerly on Amazon's life sciences team, is bringing AI agents to health systems.
• It now has more deals on the horizon with private equity firm Deerfield Management.

Ascertain CEO Dr. Mark Michalski, a radiologist by training, loved practicing medicine. But the administrative burdens he faced as a clinician eventually drove him to stop seeing patients.

It's the very problem Michalski wants to fix at Ascertain, a healthcare startup that's collaborating with top New York health system Northwell Health to relieve clinicians of those administrative burdens using AI.

"It's so hard to deliver care in a scalable way that's fulfilling for providers and meaningful for patients," Michalski said. "I don't want to pass the baton on to the next generation [of clinicians] with the same story."

In its efforts to change that story with AI, Ascertain just raised $10 million in Series A funding, led by private equity firm Deerfield Management with participation from Northwell Health.

The startup launched in 2022 out of New York-based startup studio Aegis Ventures, in partnership with Northwell Health. Its AI agent platform helps hospitals tackle a wide range of administrative tasks, from clinical documentation to prior authorization to compliance management.

Michalski joined Ascertain in 2023 from Amazon, where he worked on Amazon Web Services' life sciences business and on Amazon's healthcare brands, from primary care chain One Medical to Amazon Pharmacy. There, he saw how new AI technologies could be hugely useful to automate the brands' rote administrative tasks — and, soon, could be revolutionary for clinical care.

"While I was at Amazon, there was early proof of concept that AI agents were going to be very effective for healthcare minutiae, which the industry is drowning in," he said. "I came to Ascertain with that thesis, and we retooled the company around it."

Ascertain launched its AI agent platform as a copilot for case managers, who are typically nurses who coordinate patient care, payments, and hospital discharges.

Ascertain is one of many startups gaining ground to tackle healthcare administrative tasks with AI. Some have already raised tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars from VCs, such as General Catalyst-backed Hippocratic AI, which raised $141 million in January at a $1.64 billion valuation for its AI agents to help providers automate some patient-facing tasks.

Michalski said Ascertain has intentionally moved more slowly, improving its tech thoughtfully over the past two years according to Northwell Health's needs. Northwell Health treats about 2 million patients every year, more than any other New York health system, volumes that would leave any hospital overrun with administrative tasks.

"It's almost impossible to solve these problems at a large health system like Northwell without a really intimate partnership early on," Michalski said.

He said Ascertain's focus on case managers also sets the startup apart. "For the life of me, I can't understand why people are not looking at case managers. They are the nexus of so many things — denial rates, length of stay, patient satisfaction," he said.

Ascertain's next phase of customers will come from its Series A lead investor, Deerfield Management, where Michalski will now also serve as Chief Information Officer. Deerfield's portfolio includes a number of healthcare delivery companies that Ascertain will soon sell into, Michalski said.

Dr. Julian Harris, an operating partner at Deerfield, said he sees lots of opportunities for Ascertain to enhance the firm's portfolio companies' workflows, as well as to connect with the hospitals and health systems that Deerfield has previously partnered with, co-invested with, or that are limited partners in Deerfield's fund.

Deerfield also has relationships with health plans, Harris said, which could help Ascertain expand into payer contracts in the long term. "But out of the gate, the health system opportunities are massive," he said.

Here's the 10-slide pitch deck Ascertain used to bank $10 million from Deerfield.

• Nourish just raised $70 million in Series B funding led by JP Morgan Growth Equity Partners.
• Nourish connects patients with dietitians for virtual, insurance-covered nutritional care.
• The raise catapulted Nourish's valuation over $1 billion, per people familiar with the efforts.

The nutrition care market is exploding as weight-loss drugs like Ozempic bring rising costs to health insurers and patients alike.

Healthcare startup Nourish is at the forefront of that wave — and it just catapulted to unicorn status with a fresh infusion of cash.

Nourish has raised a $70 million Series B round led by JP Morgan's growth equity investment division, Business Insider learned exclusively.

The Series B included new investors Atomico, G Squared, and PineGrove Venture Partners, alongside returning backers Index Ventures, Thrive Capital, Y Combinator, and BoxGroup.

Four people with knowledge of the round said the Series B put Nourish's valuation over $1 billion. The company declined to comment on its valuation.

Nourish connects patients with registered dietitians for virtual, insurance-covered nutritional care, a space that's seeing huge momentum as payers grapple with the costs and limitations of GLP-1 drugs for weight loss.

CEO Aidan Dewar told BI that demand from health plans and patients has surged in the past year as weight-loss costs collide with the already escalating healthcare spend on chronic conditions — and meet an increasing consumer interest in health and wellness.

"All of these things have led to patients taking their health into their own hands, and patients and payers both looking for solutions like this," Dewar said.

Since its founding in 2021, Nourish has raised $115 million. But it didn't technically need to raise the JP Morgan-led Series B round, Dewar said — Nourish is now profitable, a rarity for a fast-growing digital health startup. Dewar said the startup hasn't touched any of its Series A capital, either.

Paris Heymann, co-managing partner at JP Morgan Growth Equity Partners, first invested in Nourish's Series A when he was a partner at Index Ventures. Index led Nourish's $35 million Series A in March 2024.

When Heymann left Index in October, Nourish was one of the top-performing companies in the firm's portfolio.

JP Morgan's growth equity arm has made 13 investments to date. Nourish is their first digital health investment.

"This is one of the fastest-growing companies we've seen at scale in a long time," Heymann said.

The perfect storm for a nutrition care boom

Nourish got its start in 2021, when childhood friends Dewar and COO Sam Perkins, along with Perkins' college friend CTO Stephanie Liu, set out to solve a problem they'd each faced firsthand. Dewar had struggled with migraines for years. Perkins dealt with irritable bowel syndrome. Traditional healthcare hadn't helped much — but nutrition care had.

"We realized it wasn't just things like migraines or GI issues that are downstream of what you eat, but some of the most prevalent, costly, and deadly conditions are downstream of nutrition," Dewar said.

Today, Nourish says it's built the largest nutrition care platform on the market, with more than 3,000 registered dietitians on staff.

The startup has landed dozens of partnerships with health plans, employers, health systems, and provider groups, treating hundreds of thousands of patients to date. About 95% of its patients receive that care entirely covered by insurance.

Nourish isn't the only startup capitalizing on the food-as-medicine boom. Fay Nutrition raised a $60 million Series B round in February led by Goldman Growth Equity, while Culina Health raised a $7.9 million Series A in December, led by Healthworx, the investment arm of CareFirst BlueCross BlueShield.

Dewar said Nourish sets itself apart, for one, by employing all of its nutritionists directly as W-2 employees rather than contracting them. Contracting providers is a common practice in telehealth, especially for startups like Nourish that offer care in all 50 states. "They're the stars of the show, and we want to treat them as such," Dewar said.

Then there are Nourish's heavy investments in AI. The startup built an in-house electronic medical record to integrate a number of AI tools for dietitians, including capabilities for automating chart notes, prepping clinicians for sessions, summarizing visits, and handling administrative workflows behind the scenes. On the patient side, the Nourish app offers AI-powered meal logging, personalized feedback based on wearable or lab data, and messaging with care teams, plus meal delivery options.

Those investments further help Nourish support patients on GLP-1 medications like Ozempic. Earlier this month, the company launched a GLP-1 companion program that provides nutrition support alongside any prescriptions, plus an "off-ramp" program to help patients taper off the drugs without losing progress.

The company says its GLP-1 patients lose 33% more weight, on average, than patients who take the drugs without its nutrition support, and they're less likely to stop the medication due to side effects. The programs aim to mitigate common complications like muscle loss and bone density decline, and support sustained weight or blood sugar outcomes post-medication.

Late-stage diabetes startups Virta Health and Omada Health have also started offering obesity care in the past year; both startups have published research suggesting their programs can help patients maintain their weight loss after they stop taking GLP-1 drugs.

But Nourish hasn't had much trouble competing with the rest of the startup landscape so far. Dewar said Nourish's growth is still accelerating, and it has no plans to slow down anytime soon.

He said the startup plans to use the Series B capital to keep hiring across its business, including by bringing on more registered dietitians; continue building out its AI capabilities; and notch more partnerships with health plans, employers, and provider groups.

• Doctronic just raised $5 million from Union Square Ventures for its healthcare AI agents.
• The startup's AI gives personalized advice on users' health questions and access to virtual doctors.
• It's competing in a hot space against startups like Roon and tech giants like OpenAI.

Doctronic is Matt Pavelle's twelfth startup. He's launched and led companies for renters' rewards, wine shopping, and luxury fashion. About two-thirds of them have been direct-to-consumer, while the rest have contracted with businesses to reach consumers.

Doctronic brings Pavelle's longtime consumer focus to a new domain: healthcare AI. And Doctronic has raised $5 million in seed funding, led by Union Square Ventures, with participation from Tusk Ventures and startup accelerator HF0.

Google, and now AI models like ChatGPT, receive hundreds of millions, if not billions, of health-related questions from their users every day. Doctronic wants to use AI to improve that system by connecting patients with AI agents that can provide them with fast, anonymous, and personalized healthcare advice and connect them with a doctor when necessary.

Pavelle built Doctronic after seeing numerous friends and family members struggle to get timely and actionable responses from their healthcare providers about their own symptoms.

"If people who have some of the best health insurance possible in the country are having this much difficulty getting answers from their doctors, what happens to everybody else?" he said.

He and cofounder Adam Oskowitz launched New York-based Doctronic in September 2023 as a free service. Doctronic users share their age and sex, input their symptoms, and get four likely explanations and a plan of action, including a standardized note to share with their provider.

As of December, if those users want immediate care, they can book a video visit with a licensed medical professional through Doctronic. Patients can request a visit 24/7 in all 50 states and be connected with a provider, usually within 30 minutes, starting at $39.

Behind the scenes, the system is more than just an AI chatbot. It's a multi-agent framework: different AI "specialists" handle different areas of medicine, debate their findings, and pass their work to a human clinician for validation. The platform is LLM-agnostic — depending on the question, it might route to OpenAI, Anthropic, or multiple models at once and take the consensus.

"We're trying to build a seamless way for someone to come in and ask questions, or look for help navigating the medical system, and for us to figure out what they need and pass them to the right experts," Pavelle said.

Doctronic is competing with other healthcare startups like Roon, a Sequoia-backed company that raised $15 million in November to create a database of videos on health conditions, and tech giants like OpenAI, which has spawned numerous intelligence models used by doctors and patients alike, whether or not they're designed specifically for medical information.

Pavelle said Doctronic may eventually consider partnerships with gig economy marketplaces or employers to bring more users to its platform, but for now, Doctronic is staying firmly consumer-first. That's where most of the demand is coming from anyway — Pavelle said Doctronic gets most of its users from organic search, including from patients looking up their health questions on Google and finding Doctronic's site that way. The startup has also created some specialized landing pages, including for women's health and COVID-19.

"We see around 50,000 people a week — we've built something people really like, with lots of repeat users," Pavelle said. "We just want to keep improving to streamline the health system."

Here's the 11-slide pitch deck Doctronic used to raise its $5 million seed round led by Union Square Ventures.

• The markets jumped after Trump paused his tariff plans — but the IPO window is still closed for now.
• Experts told BI the public markets won't reopen for IPOs until volatility drops significantly.
• Companies like Klarna and StubHub delayed their IPO plans after last week's tariff announcement.

After a brutal week for public markets, the major indexes jumped Wednesday when President Donald Trump said he would pause his plans for tariffs on most countries.

But industry insiders say the IPO market isn't out of the woods.

"People that are saying 'let's thread the needle' are desperate," a healthcare banker told BI on condition of anonymity. "Anybody can jump out of a window."

Tech companies and investors have been anxiously awaiting what they hoped would be a big year for public market debuts after a multiyear IPO drought. Trump's announcement last week that nearly 90 countries would face reciprocal tariffs ranging from 10% to 50% on their imports to the US shattered those hopes.

Some companies gearing up to IPO, including Klarna and StubHub, delayed their plans after the reciprocal tariffs announcement. Hinge Health was also considering a delay, Business Insider reported, although the physical therapy startup hoped to push through the market volatility to enact its IPO plans.

When Trump abruptly paused most of the tariffs on Wednesday, the public markets soared, with the S&P 500 posting its biggest single-day gain since 2008 at 9%.

But it's the market volatility that's giving bankers and analysts pause. Even if the stock market improves, as it did Wednesday, the whiplash of its rapid fall and rise in the past week isn't inspiring confidence.

Indeed, the S&P 500 tumbled by nearly 4% on Thursday as Wall Street reacted to the additional tariffs Trump still plans to levy on China.

Only a sustained period of market stabilization will be enough to reopen the IPO window for most companies, experts told BI. A temporary tick-up in stock prices just won't cut it.

Why volatility is such a deal killer

Bankers, who requested anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak with the press, said they're watching one major metric as they advise companies on their next steps toward the public markets: the volatility index.

The index, which has the ticker VIX, is designed to measure the 30-day expected volatility of the stock market. VIX values of 30 or above generally signal high volatility, while values of 20 or below signal more stability.

Market volatility doesn't necessarily correlate with lower all-time public market valuations. But high volatility makes it much harder for public investors to price a potential IPO, like trying to hit a moving target, bankers said. Plus, the volatility makes those investors less confident that the company's stock won't tank after the IPO, they said.

Matt Kennedy, a senior strategist at Renaissance Capital, said the index would need to settle below 25 for several consecutive weeks for IPO activity to meaningfully pick up. Other sources told BI they'd want the index to stay below 20.

Right now, that target looks far away. At its peak Thursday, the index leaped 52% to 54 points.

"The volatility certainly isn't encouraging companies to start the roadshow now. Whether the stock market goes up or down over the next couple of weeks, there will be very few quality companies going public," said Jay Ritter, a finance professor at the University of Florida.

Even if the market stabilizes, expect discounts

If the market ticks back up and volatility remains low for multiple consecutive weeks, some public investors may be willing to put funds toward IPOs again. But they'll expect a significant price cut, Kennedy said.

"Any sensible investor would still demand a pretty substantial discount to buy IPOs in this market," he said. "After all, if we get more turbulence, IPOs will be the first to sell off."

Bankers said that if companies are willing to accept that discount, they may still be able to go public in the second quarter of this year, provided that the market stabilizes further.

Still, Kennedy said the market slump has undoubtedly pushed many companies' IPO plans back into the later quarters of this year, at the earliest.

The slump may also further encourage companies to stay private for longer and look for payouts elsewhere, Ritter said.

"The volatility and valuation drops in public markets will be good for EquityZen, Nasdaq Private Market, Forge Global and other secondary markets, where companies that would be otherwise going public will say, we're going to let our companies sell stock on these venues, and the markets are going to have higher volume as a result," he said.

• A Beckley Psytech investor is looking to invest up to an extra $20 million in the biotech startup.
• Noetic Fund wants to back Beckley Psytech at a $200 million valuation, per an email seen by BI.
• The startup is developing a psychedelic-based nasal spray to treat depression.

Beckley Psytech's investors are trying to drum up enthusiasm to put fresh funding into the biotech startup, Business Insider has learned, as Beckley advances through clinical trials for its new psychedelic-based depression drug.

Noetic Fund, a venture firm that backs healthcare and biotech companies and a previous investor in Beckley Psytech, is seeking participants for an investment vehicle to put up to $20 million into Beckley Psytech, according to an email Noetic sent to prospective investors seen by Business Insider.

The raise would value the company at $200 million before the additional funding, giving Beckley Psytech a post-money valuation of up to $220 million after the fundraise, per the email.

The efforts are ongoing and terms of the deal could be subject to change. Noetic Fund didn't respond to requests for comment.

"We are regularly in discussions with both existing shareholders and potential new investors to ensure the company remains well-capitalized. However, there is currently no term sheet in place with any partner and no active transaction is underway," A Beckley Psytech spokesperson said in an email to BI.

Beckley Psytech is developing a drug in the form of a short-duration intranasal spray to target treatment-resistant depression and alcohol use disorder.

The Oxford, United Kingdom-based startup has raised $143 million to date, according to PitchBook. It last announced $50 million in funding in January 2024 from Atai Life Sciences, a German biotech that went public in 2021.

Beckley is one of many companies jumping on the promise of psychedelic compounds for treating depression, alongside multiple public rivals such as GH Research and Compass Pathways.

Those companies are following in the footsteps of Johnson & Johnson, which got approval for its own nasal spray for treatment-resistant depression, Spravato, in 2019. The spray, derived from the dissociative drug ketamine, was the first drug approved to treat depression in more than 35 years.

Still, the Food and Drug Administration has never approved a drug based on classic psychedelics like the hallucinogen psilocybin. (Ketamine and its derivatives are not traditionally considered psychedelics, though they have many psychedelic properties.)

Noetic told prospective investors in its email that Beckley Psytech hopes to go public within 12 months of publishing its phase 2b clinical trial data, or otherwise pursue a strategic M&A deal.

Beckley's beginnings

Beckley Psytech spun out of the Beckley Foundation, a nonprofit set up in the late 1990s to support studies into psychoactive compounds. Beckley Psytech's cofounders Amanda Feilding, founder and director of the Beckley Foundation, and her son CEO Cosmo Feilding Mellen, who spent 10 years at the nonprofit as an advisor and executive director, launched the startup in 2019 to independently develop psychedelic-based drugs for neuropsychiatric disorders.

Beckley Psytech's clinical protocol is led by chief science and medical officer Dr. Rob Conley, who was formerly the chief scientific officer of neuroscience at pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly.

The startup's first drug is based on the psychedelic 5-MeO-DMT, a compound found in the venom of the Sonoran Desert toad, as well as several plant species.

The company is also developing a second program to treat major depression disorder using a synthetic formulation of psilocin, the psychedelic compound in psilocybin mushrooms.

Beckley appears to be a bit behind on producing the trial data for its first drug. The startup said in March that it had completed enrolling patients for phase 2b of its trial and expected to share topline results by mid-2025.

When Atai Life Sciences announced its investment in Beckley Psytech in January 2024, the company said it expected to see published phase 2b data by the second half of 2024.

Atai Life Sciences is Beckley Psytech's largest shareholder, according to the documents seen by BI.

• Hinge Health is considering delaying its IPO plans amid a plunging stock market.
• The physical therapy startup still hopes its "recession-proof" model will draw investor attention.
• Some tech companies, including Klarna and StubHub, have reportedly already delayed their IPO plans.

The physical therapy startup Hinge Health is considering delaying its IPO as the public markets plunge in response to President Donald Trump's tariff plans, Business Insider has learned.

But the startup hopes to forge ahead with its spring initial public offering timeline, as a provider of critical health services.

In March, Hinge Health filed its S-1 form to go public and hoped to start pitching investors toward the end of April, a person familiar with the efforts said.

After Trump announced sweeping retaliatory tariffs on Wednesday— sending the public markets into a frenzy — Hinge Health could be forced to reassess those plans.

Trump's "Liberation Day" tariffs are set to range from 10% to 50% on imported goods from about 90 countries, the president said Wednesday. Since that announcement, the S&P 500 has plunged more than 9%.

Hinge Health had hoped to go public sometime in April or May, keeping its plans flexible with the market volatility in mind, said the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak with the press.

This person said Hinge would still seek to go public unless it couldn't draw investors' attention away from the volatility in their portfolios. The startup has plenty of cash on its balance sheet and doesn't need the IPO proceeds to finance the business, they said.

A representative for Hinge Health declined to comment.

It appears Hinge isn't the only startup considering delaying its IPO plans. The payments platform Klarna and the online ticket marketplace StubHub both put their plans on ice following the tariffs announcement, The Wall Street Journal said. The outlet added that Klarna and StubHub planned to pitch public investors on their respective IPOs next week but decided to postpone their road shows after the past two days of market volatility.

Klarna and StubHub both declined to comment to BI.

Healthcare's IPO drought

Hinge Health would be the first healthcare delivery startup to go public in nearly three years. The IPO market has been decidedly closed for digital health startups since 2021, and the healthcare companies from that year's IPOs haven't performed well on the public markets.

The San Francisco company launched in 2014 to provide virtual care for joint and muscle pain. It's raised more than $1 billion from venture capitalists, including Tiger Global, Coatue, Insight Partners, and Atomico, including a $400 million Series E in October 2021 at a $6.2 billion valuation.

The company's public S-1 filing in March showed a strong financial profile for a healthcare startup. It reported $390 million in revenue in 2024, up 33% from the previous year's revenue, and a 77% gross margin. It's not profitable but getting close, recording $45 million of free cash flow in 2024 but a net loss of $11.9 million for the full year.

The person familiar with Hinge Health's IPO plans said the startup's business is somewhat recession-proof as a healthcare benefits provider that can help drive cost savings for employers. Hinge Health also doesn't charge copays for its services, which the person said makes its platform more compelling when the cost of living surges.

Hinge Health isn't the only healthcare startup hoping for a public market debut. Omada Health confidentially filed its S-1 this past summer, BI reported in October. Hinge Health's rival Sword Health has also expressed interest in going public when the IPO window reopens for healthcare companies.

Jyoti Mann contributed to this report.

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• Trump's sweeping tariffs could hit tech startups hard.
• VCs expect rising costs and fundraising struggles for companies relying on offshore operations.
• Investors worry the tariffs could freeze exit markets as companies hope to IPO or get bought.

President Donald Trump's long-awaited tariffs have arrived — and the US markets are reeling.

The president debuted broad "Liberation Day" tariffs on Wednesday, announcing a 10% baseline tariff on all countries, as well as higher tariffs of up to 50% on imported goods from specific countries. The Trump administration's goal, as they put it, is to manage "highly unbalanced" trade deficits and bring manufacturing and supply chains back into the US.

But the tariffs have plenty of US-based investors and founders worried. The S&P 500 index fell more than 4% after Trump's announcement, with some companies' individual stocks tumbling far further.

Investors and founders told Business Insider the tariffs could have significant consequences for the tech industry, including for startups and venture capital — potentially raising the costs of doing business, stunting exit opportunities, and forcing startups to further tighten their belts.

Here are five ways Trump's tariff policy could affect tech workers and startups.

Tariffs could lead to a broader market correction that makes fundraising harder

President Trump's trade war has rattled stock markets and stoked fears of a recession. That has some in tech worried about how a broader market correction could trickle down to startups.

A tighter economy could force some limited partners to call off investments in venture funds as the value of their public assets tumbles — a phenomenon known as the "denominator effect." This would make it harder for investors to close new funds. They might also whittle down the target size of their funds, recognizing that startups will raise smaller rounds in a funding winter.

"If the tariffs stick, and if we see kind of a broader market correction, you're going to see venture going the same way it has over the last two years, where it's difficult to raise capital and to manage funds," said Marcos Fernandez, cofounder and managing partner of Fiat Ventures. "Unless you have a really differentiated model, it's going to be difficult to weather that storm."

The IPO window could close shortly after it opened

Just as startups have begun to queue up for IPO listings, Trump's latest round of tariffs has raised questions about whether companies will shelve their plans to go public.

"If tariffs affect the equity markets and that affects the trading of tech stocks, then that could affect the ability of later-stage companies to go public," said Justin Stevens, founder and chief executive of Overlap Holdings, a frontier-tech-focused venture capital firm.

Fernandez of Fiat Ventures shared that sentiment, saying the backlog of companies seeking to go public is shrinking as they wrestle with value multiples out of line with their own.

Both Klarna and Hinge Health have filed their S-1s to go public.

The stock market's reaction to the tariffs could hit potential mergers and acquisitions in addition to public listings, said Jordan Nof, managing partner of Tusk Venture Partners.

"The big headline number on the Google-Wiz deal, other M&A activity that's just heating up, and the momentum in the IPO market — this really does throw a wet blanket on all of that," he said.

Spiking costs for hardware and manufacturing startups

Investors said startups building hardware or other physical goods could be especially impacted by Trump's new tariffs.

Hardware startups rely on a host of manufacturers that are mostly based in China. Those Chinese manufacturers now face a 54% total effective tariff on goods imported to the US — a combination of a 34% Liberation Day tariff imposed on China and a previous 20% price hike.

Andreas Schwarzenbrunner, a Paris-based general partner at Speedinvest, said industries that depend on complex manufacturing, such as electronics, machinery, and chip production, and hardware-dependent sectors could see spiking costs and supply chain disruptions.

Even healthcare companies could feel the sting of tariffs if they manufacture their drugs and devices offshore, said Sunny Kumar, a partner at Informed Ventures. Those companies "now have to decide whether to pass on these new costs to their customers or absorb them themselves, given the significant time and infrastructure needed to onshore," Kumar said.

However, Overlap Holdings' Stevens maintains that some high-margin businesses in categories such as robotics, life sciences, or space may more easily weather the price hikes. "If you're building a robot, the cost of the metal inputs into the robot is a very small fraction of what you're selling that robot for. And so you have a lot more profit margin to work with," Stevens said.

The growth of US manufacturing may lead to rising demand for global talent

President Trump said on Wednesday, "Jobs and factories will come roaring back" as he rolled out sweeping tariffs. If that happens, the creation of new jobs could exacerbate an already stretched labor market.

The tariffs may also deter some skilled foreign workers from bringing their talents onshore, said Krish Ramadurai, a partner at AIX Ventures, which invests in the software and biotech industries.

"Tariffs signal a closed-door stance that repels global talent," he said. "The US innovation edge depends on openness, and losing that could prove more costly long-term than any tariff."

However, a manufacturing revival could also lead companies to seek out top global talent.

Sophie Alcorn, a business immigration attorney who advises tech workers and startups, predicts that the construction of state-of-the-art factories, such as Apple's new Houston digs and Hyundai's Georgia plant, will actually create job opportunities for high-skilled immigrant workers.

"The technicality of some of these advanced manufacturing processes is going to require a lot of brilliant talent," Alcorn said. "We will certainly need to rely on brilliant people from around the world to help us build them in the US."

Companies may face a pricing conundrum

Companies now face a difficult choice: absorb the increased costs or raise prices for customers.

The companies that are best positioned to pass rising costs onto customers are those making and selling "mission-critical" products, said Tusk Venture Partners' Nof.

"If you're providing a mission-critical product to anyone that's a must-have rather than a nice-to-have — groceries, medications, shelter, things you have to have to survive — you're going to buy that regardless, so you'll be more willing to take an incremental increase in price," Nof said. "Everything else starts to get cut."

The same is true for business software. "You're not going to stop buying software altogether," Nof said, but enterprises will become more discerning about the subscriptions they keep.

• Palantir launched its healthcare business four years ago, with two 25-year-olds at the helm.
• The $193 billion data giant builds AI tools for health systems like Mount Sinai and HCA Healthcare.
• Co-lead Jeremy David said healthcare now makes up 15% of Palantir's commercial revenue.

Jeremy David and Drew Goldstein had no healthcare experience when, in their mid-twenties, they set out to use Palantir's software platform to disrupt hospital operations.

Now, they're working with top health systems like Mount Sinai and HCA Healthcare, competing with dozens of healthcare startups in the AI race.

The $193 billion data giant Palantir is best known for its AI-powered military surveillance software, which it sells to customers like the US Department of Defense, and data analysis tools for finance, which it sells to corporate clients like Morgan Stanley.

But Palantir's healthcare business, which launched around four years ago, is picking up steam. David said the healthcare segment now accounts for about 15% of Palantir's commercial revenue, which reached $702 million in 2024. Palantir said it's helped hospitals save millions of dollars with its tech for healthcare revenue optimization and workforce management and improved patient outcomes with tools for everything from sepsis detection to hospital-at-home care.

David and Goldstein attribute the business's rapid growth to a combination of its robust partnerships — Palantir has signed numerous multiyear contracts with health systems such as Cleveland Clinic, Tampa General, and Nebraska Medicine — as well as its focus on AI at a time when, as Goldstein put it, "folks are worried about getting left behind, and starting to question if the partnerships they already had are actually creating any value."

Palantir's unfair advantage in healthcare is obvious: the company has a depth of resources and financial backing at its fingertips rarely afforded to healthcare startups, plus the software capabilities to build personalized AI-powered solutions for health systems.

Palantir isn't entirely pushing out other healthcare companies, however. The data company launched a partnership in March with R1 RCM, the revenue cycle management company acquired by TowerBrook and CD&R in a $8.9 billion take-private deal in August. Palantir also launched a program called HealthStart last year to equip healthcare startups with tools like Palantir's developer platform.

"It's very hard to get access to problems in healthcare because of the monopolistic electronic medical records players and the information security challenges of working with patient health information," Goldstein said. "If we could make it easier for startup teams all over the place to get access to those problems and solve them faster, and democratize that, I think that's valuable for the whole market."

How Palantir is trying to transform healthcare

Palantir kicked off its healthcare push in 2021, working with Cleveland Clinic and Tampa General, when Goldstein and David were both 25 years old.

They were given a tall task: promise these giant healthcare institutions that, in two months, they would deploy Palantir's software customized for healthcare to drive value.

"When we've been cast as the people here to fix the hospital, but we show up as two 25-year-olds, it's a hilarious position to be put in because they hate you by default," David said.

Goldstein and David, now 29 years old, set out to build software for health systems in three buckets: revenue cycle management, staffing and scheduling, and patient capacity management.

For revenue cycle management, Goldstein and David set out to automate the whole process of how hospitals capture and manage revenue — from coding to submitting claims to handling insurance denials. They decided to partner with R1 RCM because its business can help manage the whole RCM process on top of Palantir's platform. In contrast, many startups are only able to tackle a subset of revenue cycle tasks, Goldstein said.

On the workforce management side, Palantir began working with Nashville-based HCA Healthcare in 2023 to create medical provider schedules with AI, taking into consideration clinicians' preferences and other staffing constraints. Palantir says it's now deployed its customized workforce management software across about 75 of the health system's hospitals for more than 40,000 nurses.

While Palantir's 120-person strong healthcare team has worked exclusively with hospitals to date, David said he and Goldstein have been having more conversations about where Palantir could plug into other parts of the healthcare system, like by helping to manage interactions between payers and providers.

"If you can automate and improve the interface between the payer and provider, that market is hundreds of billions of dollars, and no one's doing a good job at it," David said.

Palantir's entry into healthcare hasn't come without criticism. In 2023, the company won a roughly $415 million seven-year contract with the National Health Service in the United Kingdom to create a unified patient data platform. The contract was met with a public outcry over concerns that the data would be mishandled, in part because of Palantir's work with the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement, which human rights groups argued was used to facilitate family separations and deportations.

Goldstein clarified that a separate team inside Palantir works with the NHS, and noted that he hasn't encountered the same degree of data privacy concerns in the US.

In response to mention of the criticisms, he pointed to Palantir CEO Alex Karp's long history of outspoken support of American innovation — and outspoken criticism of Europe's pace of tech development.

"You can find about a million videos of our CEO talking about why America is a hundred times better of a place to solve problems than Europe right now," Goldstein said.

• Kind Snacks founder Daniel Lubetzky is going all in on longevity.
• The boutique fitness chain Barry's is among his VC firm's first longevity investments.
• Lubetzky's Camino Partners joins a growing cohort of investors throwing cash at antiaging startups.

Kind Snacks founder and Shark Tank regular Daniel Lubetzky is making his next bet on longevity.

Lubetzky launched his own venture firm, Camino Partners, in 2023, three years after selling Kind Snacks to Mars in a deal reportedly valued at $5 billion.

He no longer has a stake in Kind. Now, he's looking for companies to back that share Kind's ethos — creating natural, healthy products accessible to consumers, as he described it to Business Insider.

With that strategy, Camino Partners has invested in the global fitness chain Barry's, joining lead investor Princeton Equity Group.

The firm also backed medical spa acquirer WellLabs and home health company LiveWell.

Those three investments kick off Camino's full turn into longevity, Lubetzky said. Camino's portfolio includes 17 total investments, most of which are food brands, including the fast-casual Mediterranean franchise Cava and the regional burger chain Whataburger.

"There's overlap between consumer-packaged goods and longevity, but we're now going to focus not just on that overlap but on other areas of longevity as well," Lubetzky said.

Camino is capitalizing on a surge of interest in the burgeoning longevity industry, with scientific advancements in longer living emerging alongside tech entrepreneurs like Bryan Johnson spending millions to reverse the aging process.

But Lanning said Camino isn't chasing a trend.

"This space is certainly having its moment, but we're not here for the moment. We're here for the long-term durable solutions that will truly better people's lives," she said.

On nature's side

Johnson and much of the growing throng of tech bros following in his footsteps don't just want to extend their lifespans. Instead, they want to elevate their bodies to superhuman status and, perhaps, prevent death entirely.

While Lubetzky says he's comfortable with some degree of technological intervention in longevity, he's more interested in backing companies scaling proven wellness solutions in areas like exercise, nutrition, and sleep.

"My predilection as we go into longevity will be not to do things that don't feel like what nature intended," he said.

Within longevity, Lanning said Camino is considering investments in aging, women's health, digital health, and overall well-being achieved through those more natural means.

Many of Camino's investments, including the new longevity bets, draw on a $350 million sum Lubetzky committed to the firm in 2023. Camino Partners president Elle Lanning, who leads the firm's investing practice, didn't say how much of the $350 million Camino has deployed to date. However, she said the firm is able to invest capital beyond that initial funding to go after "high-conviction opportunities."

Taking the long view

Camino exclusively makes growth-stage investments. Lanning said the firm is focused on backing businesses with demonstrated traction and efficacy.

In particular, she said good investment candidates have $20 million in revenue, great gross margins, and the ability to draw in customers organically by solving a problem in the market.

She's wary of point solutions popping up in longevity, such as companies that identify biomarkers with blood tests or other tools but don't follow up with care options.

"In the long term, a business that gives you problem identification only and isn't giving you tracked solutions is going to lead to consumer fatigue," she said.

Lanning said she's all for people like Johnson experimenting with their personal longevity routines. But she and Lubetzky noted that they're prioritizing evidence-based solutions in Camino's portfolio with the goal of building credibility in a sector often characterized by unsubstantiated claims.

"We want to build a brand where whenever we invest, consumers can trust," Lubetzky said.

• Washington, DC's tech scene is surging under the Trump administration.
• Local startups are gaining ground, with defense tech leading the charge.
• DMV investors think the district has all the makings of a new tech hub.

DC investors have long hoped to make the capital a tech startup hub. In Trump's second term, those ambitions are finally taking hold.

The new presidential administration has brought a number of Silicon Valley heavyweights to DC. Big names in tech and venture capital like Tesla's Elon Musk and Andreessen Horowitz's Scott Kupor now hold positions in the federal government, while other Big Tech billionaires like Mark Zuckerberg are spending more time in Washington, hoping to exert their influence on new tech policies.

DC is already seeing rising VC interest — top-tier venture firms Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst have opened offices in the area in the past year, and hot defense tech startups with significant DC footprints like Anduril are landing more checks and contracts. Just last week, A16z hosted an "American Dynamism" conference in DC, opened by Vice President JD Vance.

"It's time to align the interests of our technology firms with the interests of the United States of America writ large," Vance said at the summit.

Now, DC is welcoming a wave of tech elites, many with backgrounds in startups and VC, that are "startup-curious," said James Barlia, executive director of the startup incubator Station DC.

"There's a new power base that's forming in DC, and it's creating a real opportunity for founders," he said.

Paige Soya, a managing partner at local VC firm and angel syndicate K St Capital, said the arrival of the tech aristocracy, along with other affluent officials in Trump's administration, is driving a real estate rush for luxury, multimillion-dollar properties in the district — and bringing the potential for those elites to angel invest in local startups.

"A lot of these people would have never thought of DC as a place to find good deals. But because they're here, they're organically starting to see it. I think that's going to impact funding on its own," she said.

Barlia is optimistic that tech's elevated presence in the district will do more than bring money to the DC startup community: it could inject DC with a dose of Silicon Valley's culture of disruption.

"I feel like there's now deeper connectivity between Silicon Valley and DC, including ideologically and philosophically," he said.

Capital flows to the capital city

In the past year, as AI took over Silicon Valley and Trump effused a pro-tech, anti-AI-regulation stance during his presidential campaign, several powerful VCs emerged to support Trump's administration. Delian Asparouhov, a partner at Founder's Fund, posted on X after Trump chose Vance as his running mate, '"IT'S JD VANCE. WE HAVE A FORMER TECH VC IN THE WHITE HOUSE. GREATEST COUNTRY ON EARTH BABY."

Their exuberance brings new momentum to DC's tech ecosystem, which has been steadily growing as startups seek government contracts and influence on Capitol Hill.

The district now boasts the fifth-most developed VC ecosystem in the US, according to PitchBook, despite being the country's 23rd-largest city, per 2022 Census data.

Tech giants like Palantir, which runs an office in Georgetown, and Microsoft, which has offices in DC's Mt. Vernon Square and across the Potomac in Arlington, Virginia, have helped draw in tech and investment talent over time.

Now, VC firms like A16z and General Catalyst aren't the only ones interested in the DMV's startup scene — the district itself is now betting on area startups.

Mayor Muriel Bowser launched DC's first Venture Capital Program in December, with $26 million to invest in early-stage DC startups. Soya's K St Capital was picked to manage the funds. Every dollar of public funding has to be matched by private funding, Soya noted, so DC startups could receive up to $52 million through the program.

K St Capital has been building its DC firm for over a decade, alongside other early-stage investors such as Saas Ventures, founded in 2017. Newer projects such as District Angels launched last year to pool local angel investors to back DC startups.

However, while the Trump administration has forged a newfound alliance with the tech industry, the Department of Government Efficiency's slew of cuts to federal agencies could threaten the industry's growth in DC. The district's chief financial officer has estimated that the layoffs could cost DC more than 40,000 jobs over the next four years.

But Barlia said he thinks Elon Musk's much-criticized push to "trim the fat" in the federal government will make DC stronger.

"Elon's approach may make some people uncomfortable, but the underlying problem is undeniable. Yes, there's near-term disruption — RIFs and potential economic contraction — but in the long run, it should push DC to build a more resilient, opportunity-rich economy," he said.

"That won't come from more government or big corporate jobs, but by embracing new ideas, startups, and innovation."

Defense tech at the forefront

DC is, first and foremost, a government town, with an inherent federal bureaucracy that's at odds with many startups' "move fast and break things" ethos, said John Doyle, a former Palantir executive and founder of defense startup Cape.

Still, Doyle and Barlia said they're seeing interest from federal agencies, particularly the Department of Defense, to work with startups and move fast — faster than is typical of the government, at least. Point72 Ventures defense tech partner Chris Morales, who's based in DC, pointed to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's March memo about the DoD's plans to modernize how it acquires software and contracts with companies. Morales said the memo is one of multiple signs his firm is seeing that the agency is getting more serious about tech innovation.

While Soya and Barlia said they're seeing startups across various industries gain traction in DC, defense tech easily remains the hottest among them.

Cape landed its first contract with the Department of Defense in 2023, a deal to provide its cybersecurity-focused mobile carrier services to Naval forces in Guam after a Chinese state-sponsored hacking group targeted the base's tech infrastructure.

Cape has since raised $61 million in financing rounds led by Andreessen Horowitz and A*, announced in April 2024.

Part of the reason Cape picked DC as its headquarters was to rub shoulders with the federal agencies it hoped to partner with, said Doyle. As he noted, "proximity matters."

It's no surprise then that a number of defense tech startups have opened offices in DC, including Anduril, which recently raised $1.5 billion at a $14 billion valuation in August 2024, and Shield AI, which raised $240 million this month in a funding round that valued the autonomous drone maker at $5.3 billion.

Startups in the DMV can also tap into the area's hard tech talent, which could help continue to boost the area's presence as a tech hub.

Northern Virginia hosts one of the world's largest concentrations of data centers. Amazon opened its second headquarters in Arlington, Virginia, in 2023. Other tech giants, including Microsoft and Google, have outposts in the area. And many of the country's largest aerospace and defense companies, including Lockheed Martin and Boeing, are headquartered in the DMV.

Doyle said the DMV's deep bench of technical expertise has helped Cape find numerous backend engineers in the area. He admitted, though, that DC has a smaller candidate pool than traditional tech hubs like San Francisco and New York City. Cape also has a New York office, for which Doyle said it's generally easier to source talent, especially front-end engineers and designers.

Opposing pressures

As some VCs flock to the DC area, others are fleeing. Sequoia Capital plans to shutter its DC office at the end of March and cut its policy team there, despite other major VC firms moving in.

A Sequoia spokesperson told BI that the firm built its policy team in DC to strengthen its connections, and its portfolio companies' connections, with policymakers and other experts. The policy team set Sequoia up favorably to carry those relationships forward in the US and Europe, the spokesperson said.

Khosla Ventures managing director Keith Rabois said at a conference in February that DC "definitely still is not where early-stage venture capitalists should be spending too much time," despite saying he'd recently run into Mark Zuckerberg and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang in the city.

DC's venture scene may not yet rival San Francisco's, but it's feeling fresh momentum nonetheless. A16z's American Dynamism Summit largely set out to connect San Francisco's VC ecosystem with DC policymakers, but DC-based investors were also in attendance this year, said Jonathan Lacoste, a general partner at Austin, Texas-based Space VC, who attended the conference.

"There were plenty of investors at the event, not just from the West Coast, but increasingly from DC's venture landscape too," he told BI.

As DC's tech community grows, so does its appetite for more networking opportunities. Catherine McMillan, an analyst at tech-focused consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton, founded the DC chapter of the GenAI Collective, a generative AI networking nonprofit started in San Francisco in 2023. McMillan also helps run two other tech communities in the district: DC Tech Parties and She's In Tech.

McMillan's DC chapter of the GenAI collective now has 700 members, with each event bringing in fresh faces.

"It's an undervalued tech market because it doesn't have the same level of visibility that SF or New York have. That's part of what I'm trying to do, shed a light on the cool entrepreneurial things that are happening in the DMV," she said. "We have a Big Tech presence, but we also have an ecosystem in its own right."

• Solace is raising a Series B funding round led by Menlo Ventures, Business Insider has learned.
• Solace connects patients with healthcare advocates to simplify tasks like scheduling and payments.
• Sources with knowledge of the deal said the new round values Solace at more than $300 million.

Buzzy healthcare startup Solace just raised a fresh round of funding led by VC firm Menlo Ventures, Business Insider has learned.

Solace, which connects patients with healthcare advocates, is raising a Series B funding round that values the startup at over $300 million, according to multiple sources with knowledge of the deal.

These sources said Solace was seeking to raise around $40 million in the Series B round.

Solace didn't respond to requests for comment for this story. A Menlo Ventures spokesperson said the firm doesn't comment on rumors or speculation.

Cofounders Jeremy Gurewitz, CEO, and Sara Sargent, chief product officer, launched Solace in 2022 to help patients navigate the many complexities of the healthcare system, from scheduling hard-to-get appointments to appealing insurance denials.

The startup matches Medicare patients with former doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and other clinical professionals in all 50 states. Solace says it provides virtual support for over 100 conditions, including autoimmune diseases, chronic conditions, and hospitalizations.

Medicare didn't cover patient advocacy services until last year. Solace says its services are now covered by federal Medicare and many Medicare Advantage plans.

At the beginning of 2025, Solace had a revenue run rate of $10 million, according to multiple people familiar with the company's financials.

Before its Series B, Solace has raised $21 million to date, including $14 million in Series A funding in August led by Inspired Capital. Other firms, including Craft Ventures and Torch Capital, and angel investors Anne Wojcicki, the former CEO of 23andMe, and the late Susan Wojcicki, the former CEO of YouTube, joined the Series A.

Solace's Series B raise comes after months of growing public ire toward the healthcare system, particularly health insurance companies, following the murder of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson in December. Dozens of startups have popped up to deconstruct or simplify parts of that system, with many using AI to automate healthcare payment processes on behalf of providers.

Fewer startups have attempted to tackle healthcare's complexities by working directly with patients. Oncology startup Thyme Care has taken a similar approach to specialty care, raising $178 million from Andreessen Horowitz and other VC firms to guide patients through their cancer treatments.

• Healthcare startup Navina just raised $55 million in Series C funding led by Goldman Sachs.
• Navina's AI helps 1,300 clinics manage patient data to deliver better care and capture revenue.
• It's competing in a hot market for AI-powered clinical insights.

More healthcare clinics are getting paid based on the quality of the care they deliver rather than the volume of services provided.

Delivering better care and demonstrating better outcomes, however, requires contending with a mountain of patient data. Healthcare startup Navina says its AI can help.

Navina works with 1,300 clinics to sift through medical data from a wide range of sources, from electronic health records to insurance claims, to surface clinical insights to physicians — right in their existing workflows.

Now, Navina has raised $55 million in Series C funding to keep growing, Business Insider has learned exclusively.

Goldman Sachs' growth equity division led the Series C raise, with participation from all existing investors, including ALIVE, Grove Ventures, and Vertex Ventures Israel. The fundraise brings Navina's total funding to $100 million since its 2018 founding.

Navina's solution integrates with EHR systems like Athenahealth, Epic, and Cerner to flag potential diagnoses, identify risk factors and spot medication conflicts. The startup houses its research and development team in Tel Aviv, Israel, and its commercial team in New York City. All of its customers are based in the US.

The startup is building in a competitive market of startups using AI to harness healthcare data. Innovaccer, which announced $275 million in Series F funding in January for its AI tools that aggregate and analyze patient data to enable value-based care, is perhaps Navina's most formidable VC-backed rival.

Cofounder and CEO Ronen Lavi said Navina's advantage is its high physician satisfaction. He said the startup's tech aligns clinics' financial needs, surfacing insights during the medical coding and billing process to help clinics capture more revenue, with a great provider experience, reducing administrative burdens and helping clinicians deliver better care.

"Once you have physician trust and they find you useful, you can expand to different use cases, and the market will be almost endless," he said.

Navina mostly works with midsize private clinics, but it's expanded in recent years to serve other types of healthcare companies, including organizations providing administrative support to providers. Navina has also partnered with healthcare companies working to boost value-based care adoption, including Agilon Health and Privia Health.

For its next act, Navina wants to land more health system customers. Lavi said Navina has a few midsize health system customers now and plans to announce more partnerships in the coming months.

Lavi said Navina isn't profitable yet but hopes to hit that milestone in the next two to three years. For now, the startup is focused on accelerating its growth.

Navina plans to use the Series C funding to expand into new markets across specialty care, health insurers, and pharmaceutical companies. The company also plans to enhance its offerings with ambient scribing capabilities that will "do the full documentation for physicians," Lavi said.

See the 12-slide pitch deck Navina used to raise $55 million from Goldman Sachs.