Collaborative Fund

🚀 Exciting News: WeaveGrid secured $28M in Strategic Funding led by Woven Capital, Toyota's Growth Fund! This strategic investment from the world’s largest automaker distinguishes WeaveGrid as the market leader in EV charging software and validates our approach of custom, authorized integrations with automakers and charging manufacturers. WeaveGrid’s EV managed charging platform empowers utilities, automakers, and charging providers to unlock the value of grid-interactive vehicles and enhance the charging experience for drivers, whether through passive solutions or more complex value stacking like distribution-focused optimization or V2G. With this strategic round, WeaveGrid will deepen automaker and charging manufacturer integrations, expand our EV charging platform capabilities, and continue to advance a smarter, more sustainable mobility ecosystem. Big thanks to Toyota North America, Toyota Connected North America, Woven Capital, and our existing investors for supporting our vision of accelerating EV adoption and maximizing grid potential through intelligent, cybersecure technology. Let's power the future, together. ⚡️ Consider the grid… WOVEN 🪡 🧵 🚘 #Toyota #WovenCapital #ElectricVehicles #PHEV #ClimateTech #Innovation #Sustainability #WovenGrid #GridInteractive

We’re very excited to announce that we’ve raised a $78m Series C from Accel at a $1b valuation! This is a huge milestone for Speak and continued validation of our founding idea: that AI would fundamentally transform how humans learn. Eight years later, we’re well on our way and believe in this idea more than ever. We started with language learning, one of the most universal and largest industries worldwide. Today, Speak is one of the fastest growing consumer AI applications in the world. Our learners have spoken billions of sentences into the app in 2024 alone. We have even bigger plans for 2025, and are excited for this new funding to let us move even faster on these goals: • Bring Speak to everyone in the world by adding many more languages • Build the world’s best AI teacher, starting with language Our long-term vision over the next decade is to build the transformative AI-native learning platform and make it accessible to everyone on the planet. The world is going to look completely different in the near future. A huge thank you to our amazing team at Speak and all of our learners, believers, and supporters over the years. We’re so grateful and are more motivated than ever to keep building. https://lnkd.in/gVHKamaK

We're proud to see our partner, Andrew Montgomery, named one of Business Insider's rising stars in VC. After helping scale Lovevery to an $800M valuation, Andrew joined Collaborative with an operator's playbook and a clear vision for the future of consumer companies. Thank you for being instrumental to our team and founders.

Starting the day off with portfolio founders is more invigorating than coffee. This week we hosted an intimate breakfast gathering with founders and ecosystem partners at Stable Cafe in San Francisco (one of our fav spots) It was great to see our portfolio companies including Bolt Threads, MeliBio, Rubi Laboratories, Verne, Ammobia, Focal and others connecting with peers and sharing insights. Thanks to our friends from Unruly Capital, Princeville Capital, Congruent Ventures, and Activate for joining, and to Keely Anson and Craig Dalton for bringing everyone community together. We're looking forward to the next one!

Photonics is creating a faster, more energy-efficient computational infrastructure - from today's data centers to tomorrow's quantum computers.  At Ephos, we're leading the development of scalable glass-based photonic technologies, and we're thrilled that The Wall Street Journal took notice! https://lnkd.in/eWD8SjG9 None of this would be possible without our customers, investors, and partners. Special thanks to Quandela and NATO DIANA for your continued trust and support! #technology #innovation #chips #photonics #AI #quantum

Forethought now powers over 1 billion customer interactions every month! 🤯 We’re so excited to announce this milestone, and to truly usher in the era of Agentic AI. At our core, we’ve always been about going beyond the “AI washing” and the marketing noise, to delivering the most value for our customers, and for the humans they serve every day. With Generative AI, only 20 to 25% of customer service inquiries can be addressed with information-only, knowledge-based answers, which is where most so-called “AI Agents” stop. To truly make a dent, the rest demand action, multi-step reasoning, and executing nuanced business logic. Think about the last time you had to reach out to customer support to reset a password, to process a refund, or help you troubleshoot complicated logic in a SaaS app. You don’t want a “bot” that just tells you information you could have looked up on your own. You want AI that will actually resolve the issue for you, end-to-end. Powered by our patent-pending Autoflows technology, Forethought is the only fully agentic AI in the world. (A bold statement, but despite all the noise many giants in the space are making, happens to be true.) This is how we truly resolve 60-80% of customer service issues, as we’ve done for our customers like Airtable, Cotopaxi, Upwork, Lime, and Fetch. And this is why Forethought was recognized as an Emerging Specialist in the Gartner Innovation Guide for Generative AI Technologies this October. I’m immensely proud of the Forethought team for this milestone. And immensely proud of the pioneering businesses we get to work with, who have chosen to trust Forethought to power their customer touchpoints. Please check out the press release below 👇, and tune into Bloomberg: The Close today at 1:30pm PT / 4:30pm ET where I’ll be talking more about this news and the future of Agentic AI. https://lnkd.in/gYWfUwPa

We're thrilled to share that Rubi has been awarded a $1M Phase II grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) Small Business Innovation Research program to scale our breakthrough carbon-to-materials technology! 📣 🥳 Awarded to less than 5% of SBIR program applicants, the competitive grant is a testament to our technology, achievements, and ambitions. It will help us: 🧪 Accelerate the commercialization of our first-of-its-kind cell-free #biocatalysis technology to make CO2-derived materials and chemicals. 🧪 Scale our CO2-derived materials technology for decarbonized textile production with CO2-derived cellulose. 🧪 Bridge our proven science with existing supply chains to meet the urgent global demand for low-carbon materials. Thank you to the NSF, our program director Rajesh Mehta, and our supporting retail partners including H&M Group, Patagonia, Reformation, Ganni A/S, Walmart, & Nuuly – we couldn’t have gotten here without your support! We have big things ahead in 2025, so you’ll hear more from us soon. In the meantime, check out our press release for more details on our platform, plans, and path to commercialization 👏 https://lnkd.in/gdYcBe_P Neeka Mashouf Leila Mashouf #carbonutilization #decarbonization #sustainablefashion #textilemanufacturing #Innovation #DeepTech #Biocatalysis #CO2ToMaterials #NSFGrant #TechForGood #RubiLabs #SymbioticEra

Seaweed Plastic + Protein?... Coming soon! 🤘 I'm thrilled to announce Umaro Foods new collaboration with Sway, a leader in using seaweed polymers to make biodegradable, flexible film plastics. ➡ With the right chemistry, seaweed has enormous potential to solve two problems at once: the need for sustainable materials and the need for sustainable proteins. ➡ Until now, no commercial process could generate both of these products from the same piece of seaweed. ➡ Making plastic + protein from the same regenerative starting material is a major unlock for getting to super competitive unit economics for both products. ⚡ Made possible by a grant from the Department of Energy's $20m MACRO program, advancing seaweed tech as a solution to reducing our reliance on fossil fuels. More details in our joint press release. https://lnkd.in/ggsDAV9K Julia Marsh, Matthew Mayes, Activate, Daniel Fishman, Simon Freeman, Elaine Watson #seaweed #bioplastics #alternativeprotein #protein #regenerative #biorefinery

Early stage friends in NYC, join South Park Commons & Collaborative Fund's December Rise & Run next Tuesday morning — an easy loop down to the East River and back at 7:30am. Cinnamon buns & hot coffee after at the Collab Fund office. Susannah Laster and I are looking forward to jogging along with all you founders, operators and investors. Temps so far are looking a little less frosty!

Andrew Montgomery captures it perfectly - watching founders transform vision into impact inspires us every time.