Mantis Venture Capital

We’re super excited to be part of the pre-seed launch of Kaya AI, a company integrating AI agency into infrastructure planning. The founders of Kaya AI set out to solve the problem of inefficiency on construction sites by removing bottlenecks and other issues that slow down projects, and rack up billions of dollars in delays. Like… Pushed deadlines because everyone’s running off 3 spreadsheets that aren’t consistently updated. Resource mismanagement when orders arrive too early or late, or in the wrong quantities because there were two versions of the same budget. Unproductive lags because everyone showed up at 8am and 5 people weren’t needed until the afternoon. Etc. These aren’t hypothetical problems—they’re real issues the industry faces every day that are both frustrating and costly. And yet they weren’t adequately being addressed. Kaya AI offers construction teams visibility and direction across their entire supply chain, keeping projects on time, on budget, and aligned with sustainability goals. It’s not replacing construction workers, it’s taking care of admin and suggesting better workflow. The results are phenomenal, especially for a company this young. Kaya AI is already integrated with some of the nation’s largest general contractors, helping to manage over $9B worth of construction projects. It’s saved customers $15,000 per month and $250,000 per project, reducing processes from months to weeks and improving the accuracy of lead times by over 90%. This is what’s possible when AI and human expertise work together. Kaya presents an opportunity to come in and reimagine what's possible in a novel and niche space still dominated by old status quo incumbents - a big reason we got involved. Huge shoutout too to Founder Ojonimi Bako for his expertise and passion - not many people could have pulled this off. More info below in comments...

Today’s forecast is Sunny! ☀️   We're excited to share that Sunny has partnered with Costco Wholesale, one of the leading retailers in the U.S., to enable Medicare Advantage Plan members to use their supplemental benefits on eligible items, including OTC, food, hearing, and more. In this first-of-its-kind program, Sunny is empowering health plan members to stretch their dollars further while enjoying a Costco membership, which offers access to a wide range of high-quality products at competitive prices. For payers, this means a unique value proposition with a differentiated offering that drives new plan member acquisition and retention.   Our partnership with Costco is a major step towards enabling people to save more on popular products while maximizing their benefits. Discover how Sunny turns member satisfaction into lasting loyalty: https://lnkd.in/gh77PTut #HealthCare #HealthTech #MedicareAdvantage #SupplementalBenefits #Costco #SunnyBenefits

Hey, come work with us 🙋 We're hiring a Senior Engineer to build the ultimate Client-side detection engine. Apply here: https://lnkd.in/ez-pH28s

Today, Pipe is officially live in the UK. Congratulations to our launch partner, GoCardless, for being the first to bring this fast, frictionless embedded capital solution to UK small businesses. Already, more than 600 businesses have accessed ~£7,000,000 through our Pipe x GoCardless pilot, and this is just the beginning. With this launch, GoCardless is rolling out Capital to all qualified customers, and Pipe is making Capital available to software and payment companies in the UK. Pipe Capital makes it simple and seamless to offer an embedded financial solution to your customers based purely on transaction and business data, with no credit checks or personal guarantees required. This is what it looks like to underwrite the future of small business. But don’t take our word for it. Check out the video to see how Pipe Capital is helping platforms and small businesses in the UK to grow on their terms. 

🚀 I am excited to announce that I’ve joined Mantis Venture Capital as a Principal! 🚀 At Mantis, I’ll be focused on early-stage investments in AI, Enterprise Infrastructure, Developer Tools, and SaaS. The team at Mantis has built an impressive six-year track record, not only providing capital but also leveraging their powerful network to help category-defining companies accelerate their growth. Having worked closely with Alex Pall, drew taggart, Jeffrey Evans, Milan K., Saveena Mandadi, Caroline Menkes, Stephen O'Brien, Jason R. Johnson, Emlyn Thompson, and Malisa Gandevani, I’m thrilled to be part of a world-class platform known for its people-first, hands-on investment approach. I would like to express my gratitude to the Galaxy Interactive team — Sam Englebardt, Jeff Brown, Ryan You, Michael, May Wang, Devin Maa, Cole Mora, Kona Yee-Wong — and to the incredible founders I’ve had the privilege of working with, including folks at TetraMem - Accelerate The World, Protopia AI, Solsten, Hour One, Avia, Oasys, WolfEye Studios, Notorious Studios, Inc. and others. 💡I’m incredibly thankful for the mentors, sponsors, and friends who have supported me at every step of this journey. Special shout-out to John Davis, Sri Pangulur, Bhaskar Ghosh, Ashmeet Sidana, Jeff Brown, Jonathan Brovda, Rob May, Apoorv A., Hilary Caplan Somorjai, Joshua Browder, Rishi Ratan, Arun Saigal, Karanveer Mohan, Udit Jain, Divyang Arora, and so many more! If you’re building an enterprise company tackling complex challenges and share our values, I’d love to hear from you. Feel free to reach out at gaurav@mantisvc.com 🙌

Many new machine learning tools for protein engineering have popped up in the last year. In these early days, it might be unclear how to actually use them for real molecular design tasks. After working with academic labs and biotech teams on real problems in research and industry, we’ve assembled a curated toolbox of graphically accessible machine learning tools for protein engineering. We demonstrate how to string them together to build a cholesterol drug and plastic degrading enzymes. To build enzymes we: 1. Finetune ProtGPT2 on enzyme sequences 2. Use finetuned ProtGPT2 to generate a library of novel enzymes 3. Create 3D protein structures with OmegaFold 4. Predict thermal stability with TemStaPro 5. Calculate electrostatic potential and hydrophobicity with PEP-Patch 6. Evaluate aggregation propensity with Aggrescan3D To build PCSK9 binders we: 1. Use Pymol to identify the region of PCSK9 we want to bind 2. Diffuse 10 scaffolds near binding hotspots on PCSK9 with RFDiffusion 3. Use ProteinMPNN to generate 100 sequences for these scaffolds 4. Predict 3D protein structure with ColabFold  This work was spearheaded by Tahir D'Mello and Brontë Kolar. Their intelligence, hard work and passion for science is contagious. Read the detailed flow and reference citations here - https://lnkd.in/grpw-THA.

If you’re seeking out a financial analyst who’s willing to put in 160+ hour weeks, you’re not likely to find one…if they’re human. You might still need one, however. Financial markets have always demanded constant attention and urgency, but on top of that, the volume and complexity of data an analyst has to manage today is unprecedented. We invested in Rogo, a genAI platform for banking and private equity, because we know that inevitably, human intelligence will need to be augmented by machine learning. Rogo has the potential to transform how Wall Street does business by automating time-consuming tasks, running analyses with greater efficiency, and providing quality insights to decision-makers. It’s a conversation platform that sits in the bullpen and corner office with you. To be clear, this is not at all a replacement tool - it’s an opportunity for finance professionals at all levels to spend more time on the truly interesting and impactful work that moves markets forward. And Rogo will work 160 hours a week without overtime. Congrats to the team for closing their Series A this month!