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We’re in. That was basically our response upon learning that Nir Zicherman and Mike Mignano were building another company. After having had the pleasure of backing Anchor, their previous startup, which democratized podcasting (and exited successfully to Spotify), we were excited they were turning their attention to learning with Oboe.

In Nir’s own words:

Today, so much of our focus is spent on making machines smarter. At Oboe, we believe it’s time for machines to make humans smarter.

At Oboe, we’re building products aimed at empowering those billions of people to learn exactly what they want to learn, ten times more efficiently, effectively, and affordably than ever before. Our vision for the future is one in which knowledge is much more easily attained, not only because it can be, but because it should be.

The time is right. The mission is right. Oboe is currently building their core team — looking for a product designer in particular. If you or someone you know is based in the NYC area and interested in joining them, please reach out at jobs@oboe.fyi.

For everyone else, sign up here if you're interested in beta testing Oboe once it's ready, and follow them on X @oboelabs and Threads @oboelabs.

If “Data is the New Oil” then data security is more important than ever. The Concentric team knew helping companies deal with a fundamental question would be the foundation of their vision: how to classify the sensitivity of your data no matter where it exists. In their own words:

When we started Concentric AI five years ago, it was obvious that enterprises had a massive data security problem. On one hand, data volumes were growing, data was sprawled across their environments – both cloud and on-premises – and the nature of business-critical data spanned the gamut from IP to financial data to business confidential data to PII/PCI/PHI. And on the other hand, customers were still relying on age old techniques – from cumbersome rule writing to pattern matching to complex policies just to answer basic questions on where their sensitive data might be. It also meant that if you don’t know what you have, you can’t protect it.

And now, in 2023, the problem is bigger and more urgent than ever - which is why Concentric has grown 300% year-over-year and tripled its customer base in six months.

To meet the enthusiastic market demand the company is also announcing a $45 million Series B fundraise. And of course, they’re hiring.

FinTech ain’t easy. You need to really understand where value accrues in global networks, build deep product in a regulated environment, and often employ a business model that only works at scale. But when it works, it produces some of the most valuable and durable companies in the world. Well, Finix is working. And it just announced a $75 million Series C fundraise to continue building.

In CEO Richie Serna’s own words,

“If Stripe is building for developer-centric startups, Square for micro-merchants, and Adyen for multinational enterprises, Finix is building for the 22M businesses without development teams that still want leading payment technology to better serve their customer needs. Today, over 60% of our customers utilize our no-code tools.

Finix’s suite of payment solutions supports the entire spectrum of customer preferences—allowing them to pick and choose what to build vs. outsource—enabling both experienced developers and those with little to no technical experience to get up and running in hours.”

Having had the opportunity to see the company build from their earliest beginnings, we know the team is focused not just on what’s been accomplished, but very much on what’s ahead. To that end, they are HIRING.

Riffing on McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” today’s AI can be summarized as “the interface is the product.” That is, the new and powerful capabilities of AI models are often limited to and by the way users are being instructed to interact with them. And that’s why we’re excited about Cove.

Cove’s mission is to build a useful and evolving collaboration layer for AI, getting beyond the chatbot. The company envisions a layer that sits above and across the many public models, and accesses your personal/team/company content, to end up with a collaborative space that’s as unique as the work you need to get done. Ranging from conducting your own research to working across teams, vendors, collaborators - anyone you want to bring into your Cove board.

It takes a special team to bite off this large an opportunity and our relationship with cofounder/CEO Stephen Chau dates back to his earliest days at Google. So it was an easy decision to back their seed round alongside several other wonderful investors and operators.

You can dive into Cove today to give it a try.

Some speculate we’re heading for an “AI Winter,” and that’s not because it’s already October. Rather, the term refers to a chilling in enterprise adoption as organizations struggle to integrate, productize, and secure the disparate AI “R&D” occurring within their business units. In the end, you need value, not just innovation. Thread AI is here to warm that chill.

How? It starts with their origin story. Prior to founding Thread, founders Angela McNeal and Mayada Gonimah were AI Product and Engineering leads at Palantir. In their own words referring to the complexity of building across systems and teams:

“Back when we were at Palantir, we witnessed hundreds of different AI use cases across Fortune 100 companies and government agencies building AI systems in some of the most stringent environments. In doing so, we saw a clear pattern emerge: the most successful enterprise applications of AI, especially those used for workflow automation, were deeply integrated across teams and embedded into every part of the business.”

And now, with Lemma, their AI infrastructure platform, they are bringing this capability quickly to ALL companies, already working with some of the leading brands in luxury hospitality, digital marketing, public safety and financial services.

It’s been a joy to work with Angela, Maya and the Thread team. They’ve proven themselves to be strategic, action-oriented, and dedicated, which along with $6 million of seed capital, has created impressive business and product momentum.

If you are interested in growing your career and AI expertise at a startup where you’ll be proud of not just what you’re building, but how you’re building it, ThreadAI is hiring.

Enhancing our country’s manufacturing capabilities requires rethinking every step of the process, from what we’re building, where it’s being built, how it’s built, and who is doing the building. Fortunately there are entrepreneurs rushing in to help. The Purchaser.ai team has deep experience in this industry, now coming back together to build solutions for manufacturing procurement processes.

Now that Purchaser has announced its seed round, we’re happy to share that Homebrew is a supporting investor, alongside our friends at Ludlow Ventures and Long Journey. We’ve long believed that industries that pre-date the PC will continue to reap the benefits of software transformation. But that building these companies requires founding teams who disrupt with love, not contempt, for the customers they serve. Alongside you need a time-to-value and scale of impact that makes your product adoption a priority, otherwise there’s too much to get done to just run innovation pilots.

In addition, we’ve been investing in vertical applications of AI for years and continue to believe there is massive opportunity for category-leading companies to be created where there is no incumbent software provider because simply increasing efficiency or improving workflow is only a nice-to-have. We’re confident that recent advancements in AI enable software to not just aid the worker, but do the work. Combining existing models with needed context from the customer and first party data can allow that work to be done. Purchaser team shares this perspective and their vision is to not just improve procurement workflows but to get procurement done.

If this sounds interesting to you, they’re hiring.

We're happy to share the news that Treat has been acquired by Typeface, one of the leaders in bringing AI to brands for enterprise content creation. We became supporting investors in Treat’s seed funding, and have continually been impressed by the team’s foresight in how brands would use generative AI both now and in the future. Their first product uses data on customers to generate product images that incorporate elements known to perform well with certain target demographics. For example, if a fruit vendor’s data suggests that younger men prefer seeing food ads that show a person eating the product, Treat may create an ad that depicts someone biting into fruit.

It’s no wonder that Typeface wanted to bring this team and technology into their company and we’re continuing along for the ride with them. If this mission sounds interesting to you, Typeface is hiring.

Our Character.ai story begins with meeting their founder/CEO Noam Shazeer back in our early Google years together, so it seems appropriate that Google appears again in this phase of our relationship! This time in the form of a strategic licensing agreement for the Character.ai technology.

As Character investors we’re thankful for the opportunity to have shared in what Noam and team created thus far, and as (legacy) Google shareholders from our previous employment, also happy to see him and parts of the team back at the company. It’s not often you’re on both sides of a transaction like this (well kind of), even in this small way.

Thank you Noam and onwards for Character.ai!!!

Subcity was founded with the belief that a strong American economy required a health manufacturing sector. And that one way to assist this industry, which often runs on tight margins and high sensitivity to cash flow, was to assist them with taking advantage of tax incentives and other government rebates. And over the last several years they did just that - finding millions of dollars for their customers that were otherwise going unclaimed while building an unparalleled database of these programs.

Industry incumbent Engineered Tax Services saw what value Subcity’s product, technology, and team could bring and decided it belonged in-house with them. We know Alex White (Subcity cofounder & CEO) will make a tremendous contribution to the ongoing success of ETS and American businesses broadly.

“Love in their heart, and a chip on their shoulder” is my favorite personality type for founders. In the case of Adonis, we saw these characteristics from our very first meetings with Aman and Akash. They believed that despite the multiple customer constituencies in healthcare (providers, care systems, insurers, patients, and so on), it wasn’t a zero sum game - you could actually innovate in ways which were productive for multiple groups and that gains didn’t need to come at the expense of another. The Adonis founders also believed you could build a company with strong technology DNA and maintain that culture even as you scaled other parts of business.

Two years ago these were statements of intent. Now in 2024, they’re well on their way to proving their beliefs true at scale. As of this fundraise, Adonis “works with over 10,000 providers and has processed tens of millions of claims, totaling over $13.3 billion in charges. Adonis works with over 3,000 different payers, equating to nearly all of the payers in the United States, and integrates with over 35 different EHRs and Clearinghouses.” There’s no ceiling on this startup’s future with ambitious expansion plans across the billing and financial stack. If you’d like to consider continuing your career at Adonis, they are hiring.

We believe startups and software can be incredible drivers of positive change, but not without deliberate focus on ‘how’ you are building, in addition to the speed and success of outcomes. This is especially true when the company serves vulnerable populations such as children, and why when it comes to pediatric health care, Homebrew has searched for combinations of founding teams and missions that we’re proud to put our reputation behind, not just our capital. Clarity, which this week announced its initial $10 million funding, is an A+ example of what we seek.

WHO: Cofounders Christina LaMontagne, CEO, and Alessandro Larrazabal, CMO, combine years of operational and medical experience that informs the product, team and strategy behind Clarity. The cap table includes Homebrew, Rethink Impact, and Maverick Ventures.

WHAT: Chronic conditions in children (such as ADHD, Obesity, and Asthma) are sadly common but often undertreated due to cost and specialist limitations in the American health care system. For example, 47% of kids in the US are enrolled in Medicaid and 1 in 3 has a common chronic condition.

HOW: The cornerstone of Clarity Pediatrics’ approach to ADHD care is Behavioral Parent Training (BPT), recommended by the American Academy of Pediatrics for families of children ages 5 to 12 with mild-moderate ADHD. Unfortunately, 80% of children with ADHD don’t have access to BPT, and most families wait over a year and pay $3,000 or more out of pocket to get access to ADHD treatment. Clarity Pediatrics makes pediatric ADHD care 10x more accessible and 20x more affordable: families have access to next-day appointments, including for ADHD diagnostic screening and medication-related services, and pay an average co-pay of $15 per session.

While ADHD is the current focus, Clarity plans to expand into other care areas where there are high percentages of comorbidity and similar provider shortages.

WHY: Because healthy childhoods set kids on the path to happier, more successful lives while eliminating stress from family and caregivers. The pediatric chronic care market is huge but underserved and fragmented. We believe the startup which helps solve these challenges in a software-driven, non-incremental model will be both valuable and impactful. We believe that Clarity will be that company.

If you care for a child who could benefit from Clarity’s ADHD product they’d be happy to hear from you. And if you are interested in joining an early stage startup building the future of pediatric chronic care, they’re hiring.

In 2016, Intellimize began with an idea that the most effective web experiences would be personalized to the visitor. For example, when a potential customer from a Fortune 500 company visits your Accounting SaaS startup website they should automagically see case studies tuned to their persona, not the latest SMB customer logos. They were absolutely correct and one of the largest website builder tools agreed as well. That’s why we’re excited by Webflow’s recent acquisition of Intellimize - it gives the team and product a chance to reach scale impact very quickly.

Congrats to the Intellimize founders - you were a joy to work with - and to their new Webflow colleagues, who are getting a seasoned, smart, and hardworking team.

If you hang around the tech community long enough one thing becomes clear: it’s all about the people. Homebrew exists today because its founding partners worked a few feet from one another at Google. And that same backstory explains our participation in Reken’s $10 million seed fundraise.

Shuman Ghosemajumder, Reken’s cofounder and CEO, also sat within that small group of AdSense product managers, and as a result we’ve know him for just about 21 years. When he and Rich Griffiths let us know they were starting a new company together it was an easy “Yes”. Not surprisingly, we weren’t the only former colleagues to sign on and perhaps a little bit of that Google magic will bless this startup as well.

Reken sits at the intersection of what the team learned at Shape Security (where Shuman was CTO and Rich was VP Product) and their investigations into how generative AI was creating new threats that individuals and companies would need to address.

While the company is still being quiet about their product, they are hiring, so if the overview intrigues you, let them know.

We’re believers that software helps people be creative and that everyone has creative abilities. This informed our work at YouTube, Twitter, and Second Life, as well as our prior investments in companies like Anchor. And it drives our investment in Pika, an idea-to-video platform powered by AI.

When we met Demi Guo, Pika’s CEO and Cofounder, we were struck both by her technical accomplishments and her interest in building a community, not just software. Sign us up - for the product and for the investment, which Pika announced this week as the latest addition to what now totals $55 million in cumulative funding.

Earlier we mentioned Anchor, and it was their CEO Mike Mignano, who now as a Partner with Lightspeed, led this round (and introduced us to Demi). It’s a joy to work alongside him again!

If you are interested in joining Pika (the product), sign up here.

If you are interested in joining Pika (the company), they are of course hiring.

When shared bikes, scooters and other urban mobility offerings started multiplying, most of the startups in the market were focused on *putting* these devices into cities. Less common were founders thinking about the implications of all these new transportation options and how local governments could constructively manage their usage. As long-time advocates for public good, the Ride Report team sprang into action and built a platform which helped bring all the constituents together - from commercial companies to the public sector.

Now having been adopted by more than 75 customers across three continents, the Ride Report team will be continuing its growth as part of INRIX, the leading intelligent mobility software platform. We know they’ll continue to do mission-driven high impact work!

ALL entrepreneurship is difficult, but sometimes it feels like those working in the health care markets have it especially hard. The health care market is in need of massive change in the US but it has so many impediments to moving quickly, even when in the hands of the most responsible founders. We’ve had a front seat to this reality as CEO Kelsey Mellard and her company Sitka built their remote specialty consult product.

Sitka has become a trusted partner to a variety of customers, including some of the most prestigious and innovative hospital systems. It allows doctors to get specialist consults virtually and from outside of their institutions, meaning patients can have access needed expertise while care providers have more flexibility in staffing. Sitka just combined forces with AristaMD to continue scaling to a future where software can help bridge cost and quality gaps in care, no matter where you reside. And that’s good for everyone.

If you think that every work conversation you will ever have in your lifetime will be IRL then stop reading now.

If you think that Zoom is the perfect tool for any type of virtual experience among teams then stop reading now.

Ok, if you made it this far let us tell you about Gatheround, a modern software product that helps teams, companies and organizations conduct high quality meetings that matter - such as All Hands, Employee Onboardings, and anything that requires talented, creative humans to interact.

Trusted and loved by customers such as Gusto, Salesforce, Lyft and Cisco, Gatheround just announced its $8 million Series A to continue development and deployment of its unique, opinionated and effective platform. We’re excited to continue our support in this round after leading the seed earlier.

As CEO Lisa Conn writes, “We’ve barely begun to scratch the surface of what distributed teams can do with the right tools. Remote and hybrid teams are already more engaged and more equitable. Gatheround is the final piece of the puzzle: a meeting platform that reflects the social dynamics that give in-person interactions their collaborative magic. Not only are engaging meetings a good business practice, they’re also essential to shared team culture and norms. Teams and companies equipped with those strong, healthy social ties are unstoppable.”

If breaking out of the tiled gray video wall for your work sounds appealing, try Gatheround. Oh and also, they’re hiring.

There are a number of financial benchmarks that validate the growth of a startup, and as venture investors, these are all of course important to our firm. But from the earliest days of Homebrew we’ve aspired to back entrepreneurs who think not just about the impact success has on their bank accounts and their speaker bios, but on the world as a whole. ShieldAI has always been a company which overflows the “mission-driven” bucket, since its founding days when one brother, returning from military deployment, asked his sibling a tear-producing question. “Can we use technology to gather information instead of putting our soldiers and civilians in danger?”

Now a decade later, Shield produces smart autonomous devices and aircraft which are deployed by our country, and other nations, in combat zones, on critical life saving missions, and for disrupting large scale criminal activity. Shield is even currently in Gaza. The company's platform has saved lives, intercepted illegal goods, and performed a host of other flight missions that will quietly stay out of headlines. Shield's board decks produce gasps, tears, and applause. And it’s still just the beginning.

Shield announced a raise of $200 million additional dollars to further the development of this industry-leading software, at an increased valuation over its previous round. There is no ceiling on where Shield can go from here, and we’re proud to be early investors and ongoing supporters.

If a responsible startup at the intersection of compelling technology and global-relevance interests you, they’re hiring.

The headline kind of says it all, but here’s more. It was clear from the earliest meetings with the Satsuma team that they were focused on building a tool that could bring value quickly to the blockchain developer community. So it’s not a total surprise that in addition to revenues coming early, so did the acquisition interest! Ultimately, the founders believed that Alchemy’s reach would help accelerate the adoption of Satsuma’s product so it made sense to bring the team and tech in-house. Best of luck to them!

We’ve always believed that magic occurs at the intersection of mission-driven founders and amazing technology. And when we find these combinations, it’s our job as venture capitalists to support these startups to our fullest abilities, hoping that the resulting company is one which delivers outsized impact to the world. AI-powered reading coach Ello is one such example, and we’re thrilled to meaningfully increase our investment in their $15 million Series A. The funding comes at a time where urgency for Ello’s product is particularly timely. Via TechCrunch, “According to a 2021 study from Stanford University, reading fluency among second- and third-graders in the U.S. was about 30% behind what would be anticipated in a typical year at the time.”

The Ello team is multidisciplinary, combining technologists with educators, to build a powerful and responsible approach to AI learning. Giving children confidence and capability in their reading is an important component of lifelong capacity building and helping anyone reach their fullest potential. Our interest in this goal transcends Homebrew, as Hunter’s first job was working in a children’s bookstore and Satya was a long-time Board member of KIPP.

Ello uses an AI-powered coach alongside books to meet your child where they are - in abilities and interests - and then bring them along to grow skills and enthusiasm for reading. And this is just the beginning of what Ello has planned.

If working at a well-funded, high quality, ethical AI consumer startup appeals to you, Ello is hiring.