Company Ventures

This year marks the 10-year anniversary of Grand Central Tech (GCT), our Founder in Residence program for zero to one founders in New York City. The Fall 2024 Cohort joins impressive company; since 2014 there have been: 🏢 179 Alumni residency companies 👨🔧 👩🔧 362 Early stage founders supported 🚀 $4bn+ VC raised by participating founders We've also completely overhauled our HQ at 22 Vanderbilt (come visit if you haven't yet) and have amassed $140M in AUM across our funds. We took this milestone as an opportunity to reflect on our mission and brand with our re-launched website: www.companyventures.com. (Long time followers may notice we locked down the .com and have moved on from .co!) As a firm, we specialize in providing our founders Exceptional Venture Community. We have witnessed time and again how catalytic being a part of such a community can be to a company's success, and have distilled the recipe down to three key elements: 📈 Capital: We are first check investors who leverage an extraordinary residency model to identify and back exceptional founders from day one. ✨ Community: We set up founders to go further faster by being in the company of other uniquely qualified entrepreneurs. Other firms may host founder summits annually; we host them daily. 🌇 Place: We provide members of our community a remarkable day-to-day environment to recruit talent, host marquee events, close customers, and secure investment. The future looks bright for Company Ventures and we are just getting started. Come build with us. And with that, we are thrilled to announce the Fall 2024 Grand Central Tech Cohort, and provide a refresher on the current Spring 2024 cohort - see the full list here [https://bit.ly/4eb4kWr]. Please join us in welcoming these teams to our community!

We had a great time last night discussing emerging use cases for AI in Kubernetes! We even did some live troubleshooting when OpenAI was down 😅. See you all at the next one! Thanks to Company Ventures for hosting!

We are thrilled to share that the application deadline for the 2025 Boost Founder Fellowship has been extended to December 11, 2024, at 11:59 PM ET. This is an unmissable opportunity for first time founders in NYC to gain access to typically hard to find resources, including nearly $1M in funding available and $5K in OpenAI API credits for each team. Apply now and share this with anyone who you think is a good fit. 💡 Learn more: https://bit.ly/4imcNsY 🔗 Apply: https://bit.ly/3DaDY9W

Today I am tremendously excited to begin sharing the Cake story in public. Cake makes cutting-edge AI available to everyone by solving hard infrastructure problems that unlock production-readiness in the vibrant open source AI ecosystem. Reach out if you are following the deluge of breakthrough research, but struggling to apply those new capabilities in your business environment. I am amazed by the tireless effort of our team over the last two years and proud of our customers who are in production today. So much gratitude to the entire Cake circle, and much much more to come. Introducing Cake https://lnkd.in/dic8RypR TechCrunch https://lnkd.in/deYzSq7f A huge thank you to Cake's investors: Gradient, Primary Venture Partners, Alumni Ventures, Friends & Family Capital, Correlation Ventures, Firestreak Ventures, and more.

Company Ventures, alongside existing investors, Lightspeed, Bling Capital, The LegalTech Fund and Flybridge couldn’t be more thrilled to continue partnering with Noetica through their $22m Series A. Noetica uses proprietary ML models and NLP frameworks to ingest thousands of capital market deal documents, identify the key deal terms, and benchmark those against the rest of the market. This allows deal professionals to more thoroughly analyze, visualize, and understand the risk of a given transaction or group of transactions, within minutes, versus hours our days. In only 18 months, Noetica’s platform has analyzed $350B of transactions and indexed >100mm capital markets terms. In doing this, Noetica has built the industry's largest knowledge graph of corporate transaction terms, which will grow as the platform is used on more deals. Today, Noetica has created the best platform for debt professionals to understand & benchmark corporate debt transaction terms. We doubled down from our earlier Seed investment in the Series A led by Lightspeed because we believe that in the future, Noetica will become the industry standard for not only understanding risk in a corporate market transaction but also utilizing it to effectively reprice it. At Company Ventures, we believe that machine learning and AI models will continue to unlock opportunities to accelerate and automate workflows across all professions for the next decade. Noetica has long known what many are discovering more recently: combining semantic knowledge graphs with powerful AI models unlocks unique capabilities to search and analyze documents at scale. Like them, we are bullish on that future. If you are building a company or exploring ideas at the intersection of machine learning or large language models with capital markets & legal tech, we would love to hear from you. Read about why we invested in Noetica: https://bit.ly/4g4rsqJ Learn more from Bloomberg: https://bit.ly/3V9tqhB Apply for Grand Central Tech: https://lnkd.in/ejrXnndA Daniel Wertman Tom Effland Yoni S.

Company Ventures is HIRING for two full-time roles: an investor and a principal talent recruiter, both with healthcare experience, for our internal digital health venture studio, launching in 2025: 1. Investment Principal or Senior Associate - https://lnkd.in/eDd9QegD 2. Principal Talent Recruiter - https://lnkd.in/eU8JafCd These are both senior level, on-site (NYC) positions on our newly formed incubations team. You will be working alongside Mark Rosenblum and  Margaret Davidson to research, ideate, and fund transformational new health tech ventures (Investment Principal or Senior Associate), and to engage, incentivize, and recruit world-class founders to join us (Principal Talent Recruiter). Both JDs are linked above, and the application forms for each role are linked at the bottom of each JD. Please apply and help us spread the word! 📣

When we reached out to Carl Madi in 2021 about joining our founder residency, Grand Central Tech, he was in the very earliest stages of building Aja School, the company now known as Stepful. Carl built his early career on incentivizing gig-economy workers and understanding the dynamics of these markets while at Handy and Uber, and had seen firsthand what living–and working–through a pandemic was like for those whose livelihoods depend on these jobs. Carl knew that most of them wanted better jobs–more stable, more secure, higher paying, and with opportunities for growth. They wanted careers. Stepful’s vision to reimagine healthcare education to better serve those contemplating new career paths, as well as the health systems that face critical staffing shortages and a crisis of burnout and turnover, has always been squarely aligned with our healthcare thesis. As technology investors, we are inclined to invest in software businesses that optimize for efficiency–to do more with less (often, less people). But, as healthcare investors, we know that providing care to a population that needs a lot of it requires a lot of skilled people. We invested in Stepful very early on because they were doing both– building tech to optimize the biggest bottlenecks in workforce entry, upskilling, and retention by making education and training requirements far more accessible, and growing the human workforce as a result. Stepful has built the fastest, most scalable training platform for healthcare jobs ever created, launched it in all 50 states, and already changed thousands of people’s lives for the better. They are just getting started. We are thrilled to participate in their $31.5m Series B led by Oak HC/FT, having previously invested in their Seed and Series A rounds alongside Y Combinator, Reach Capital, SemperVirens Venture Capital , and AlleyCorp. The conviction with which we initially and subsequently invested in Stepful has carried over into a doubling down on our workforce thesis within healthcare. If you are building a company or exploring ideas in healthcare workforce solutions, please reach out! Read about why we invested in Stepful: https://bit.ly/3AIepwc Learn more from TechCrunch: https://tcrn.ch/4hKw9Yv Apply for Grand Central Tech: https://bit.ly/4fLz5Cp

For several years now, our firm has had the honor of collaborating with NYCEDC to operate Boost - a fellowship program for first time entrepreneurs. For the less initiated, the world of venture is a bit of a black box with specific jargon, unusual industry mechanics, and tight investor networks. We run our Boost program to demystify things a bit, and equip folks from less experienced backgrounds with a means of coming up the curve. If this sounds appealing to you or folks in your network, please consider applying: https://bit.ly/48HlFFl

Recently, we were fortunate to host Mike Maples, Jr in conversation with Company Ventures CEO Matthew Harrigan on Mike’s book: Pattern Breakers. A few insights we took away: ✨ There are three elements to most breakthrough startup ideas: inflection (an event that creates the potential for radical change in how people think, feel and act), an insight (a truth about how one or more inflections can be harnessed to radically change human capacities and behaviors), and founder-future fit (the ability to live in a valid future and build what’s missing for that future). 💭 If you're spending time in the valid future, you're tinkering with inflections, and you see firsthand the opportunity to break the current patterns of how people think, feel, and act. 💡 For a startup that is going to break free, it's not just about the product but also the point of view –  early believers often buy from them because they believe what the startup believes, moreso than because it solves their immediate problem. A big thank you to Mike and his team for all the knowledge shared with the founders in our residency program, on how to build a company for the future.

A huge congrats to Ali Hussain and the Tabs team on their $25M Series A led by General Catalyst. Tabs has built an AI driven revenue management system for businesses to streamline structuring and organizing all of their commercial records (from customer contracts to even usage) and then automate related workflows (e.g. billing, revenue recognition, reporting and payments). This enables companies to reduce tedious manual labor, and focus on strategic decision-making and customer solutions. Since coming out of stealth ~6 months ago, the market demand for the product has been incredible. Learn more about the recent raise: https://bit.ly/4f9D9MJ