Participated · Seed · Sep 2023

Tune Insight is a Swiss cybersecurity startup developing privacy-preserving machine learning and interoperability solutions for Electronic Health Records (EHR) in clinical settings. Its current project focuses on a federated learning platform to enable secure, patient-centered research across pediatric emergency departments. The platform is designed to create secure connections among hospitals and serve as a blueprint for collaborative clinical research using advanced privacy technologies. Initial deployment will be in partner hospitals in Italy and Switzerland, with the aim of expanding to the global Pediatric Emergency Research Network. Through that expansion Tune Insight expects to access data from over 100 hospitals and about 2 million pediatric emergency presentations yearly. The company has received recognition in Swiss startup programs and has engaged in seed fundraising activities to support growth. Tune Insight builds a platform that orchestrates secure collaborations on sensitive or confidential data across organisations, domains, and jurisdictions, enabling collective analytics, federated machine learning and approved computations while protecting data in use. The technology applies applied cryptography and privacy-enhancing technologies and was spun out of several years of research at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL) to address personalised healthcare collaboration without transferring patient data. Tune Insight is deployed at University Hospital Zurich, CHUV in Lausanne, Inselspital in Bern and University Spital Basel, powering use cases such as survival analysis for precision oncology and the generation of personalised reference ranges. Its reference-range application leverages a collective dataset of 9 million data points from over 250,000 patients. The platform is also used in law, financial services and cybersecurity, and Tune Insight is extending support for privacy-preserving generative AI. The company aims to reduce data liability, streamline compliance and reinforce data security while enabling cross-jurisdictional collaboration. Tune Insight offers a software solution that lets groups of organizations run collective computations on sensitive data while keeping individual data on each organization’s premises. Its platform uses multiparty homomorphic encryption to perform computations under encryption and only release authorized final results. Customers can define the partner group, the data types to share, and the permitted operations and functionalities for that group. The product targets sectors that cannot freely share data for strategic or regulatory reasons, including health, insurance and cybersecurity. The company plans to expand its development team and create a sales and customer-satisfaction team to move from proofs-of-concept and pre-scale deployments toward recurring licensing revenue. The approach is rooted in years of EPFL research and emphasizes compliance with personal data laws and mitigation of data-leak risks. Tune Insight builds infrastructure-agnostic B2B software that enables secure collaborative analytics and machine learning across multiple organizations without transferring raw data. Its platform can be deployed on-premise or in cloud instances and keeps all communications and computations encrypted. The software enables federated scenarios where participants retain full control of their own data while extracting collective insights. The company emphasizes privacy-enhancing technologies (including homomorphic encryption expertise) and says its approach is fully decentralized, widely scalable, and more secure than federated learning without relying on trusted third-party hardware. The founding team includes CEO and co-founder Juan Ramon Troncoso Pastoriza, co-founder and COO Frédéric Pont, Romain Bouyé, and Prof. Jean-Pierre Hubaux, and the team highlights experience with sensitive health data. Tune Insight plans to capture opportunities across multiple domains where firms need to augment their datasets with external data while preserving trust and regulatory compliance. The company closed a pre-seed financing round with Wingman Ventures a few weeks after incorporation.

Led · Equity · May 2023

LabDAO is focused on open-source drug discovery and is building an exchange to connect scientists with laboratory and computational services. The project launched PLEX, a client that lets scientists interact with the Lab exchange and run containerized, resource-intensive computational services. PLEX currently supports computational workflows only; physical laboratory services are planned for a future release. LabDAO enables outputs to be linked to NFTs so scientists can prove ownership of their data. The DAO governance structure is not yet fully in place; the team is prioritizing building utility and an active community before deploying the DAO and affiliated token. The project raised $3.6M in a funding round co-led by Inflection.xyz and Village Global.

Led · Seed · Feb 2023

Salsa is a San Francisco-based provider of a web3-native messaging platform delivered via a mobile application. The app helps web3 users form meaningful connections by using social proof from on-chain data to add context to wallet-native messaging. Salsa’s wallet-based login verifies on-chain ownership and highlights what users share in common; many users currently communicate on web2 platforms like Telegram and Discord that don’t natively understand on-chain data. The company plans to launch a public beta integrated with POAP to surface event- and collectible-based insights. Salsa intends to use its recent funding to expand the app to brands already using NFTs and looking for a crypto-native way to engage their audiences. Founded in June 2022 by Grace Wang and Helena Gagern, the company recently closed a Pre-Seed financing.

Led · Seed · Aug 2022

GitPOAP integrates POAP issuance into GitHub to bridge off-chain contribution platforms and the on-chain world of DAOs and decentralized identity. The platform identifies meaningful contributions via configurable patterns and awards claimable POAPs when contributors sign in with their GitHub accounts. It serves two user groups: contributors, who gain public, immutable records of their work, and project leaders, who can recognize and nurture contributor communities. GitPOAP is memorializing contributions to 617 repositories at the center of the Ethereum ecosystem, including protocol and client teams and major tooling and infrastructure projects. Led by CEO Colfax Selby, the company plans to grow its team, onboard more projects, and build integrations to add utility to its ecosystem. The product positioning focuses on turning socially-sourced contribution records into a web3 representation of identity and community engagement.

Participated · Equity · Nov 2021

Maker produces canned wines by partnering with small production wineries that use sustainable farming and low-intervention winemaking. Its wines are dry, made with minimal sulfur additions, contain 0g sugar and under 5 carbs per serving. The company sells online with options for holiday and group gifting and a customizable Can Club membership. Can Club perks include ordering via text on Maker's Wine Line, 10–20% off all wines, and access to limited-production, members-only wines. Maker is based in Marin County, California and was founded by Sarah Hoffman, Kendra Kawala, and Zoe Victor. In November 2021 the company raised $2.3M to support expansion plans.