Participated · Series A · Mar 2026

Oryon Cell Therapies develops autologous neuron replacement therapies derived from a patient’s own blood cells, which are induced to pluripotency and then driven to become dopaminergic neurons for implantation into the putamen. Its lead program is in a Phase 1b/2a clinical trial aimed at treating Parkinson’s disease motor symptoms. The company plans to use recent financing to complete the ongoing trial, scale manufacturing, and engage with regulators to enable a Phase 3 trial. Oryon was co-founded in 2020 by Ole Isacson, M.D., Ph.D., and Nikola Kojic, M.D., Ph.D., and is based in Belmont, MA. The company announced the appointment of Ron Cohen, M.D., as CEO. As of the latest tranche, Oryon has raised $42M in equity and grants in total.

Participated · Seed · Jan 2026

Founded in June 2025 by former Google DeepMind researchers Shumeet Baluja and Ian Fischer, Poetiq builds a meta-system that pairs with any frontier LLM—such as GPT-5.2, Gemini, Claude, or Llama—to make the underlying model learn faster, reason more deeply, and operate at lower cost. Instead of requiring thousands of fine-tuning examples, customers supply only a few hundred samples, after which Poetiq’s system spins up an agent that recursively refines itself for the target problem. The technology recently set a new state-of-the-art on the ARC-AGI-2 benchmark, achieving 75% accuracy on the public evaluation set using GPT-5.2 and eclipsing prior leaders at roughly half the cost per task. An August 2025 MIT study highlighting that 95% of enterprises see no ROI on GenAI underscores the commercial need Poetiq addresses. The company positions itself as model-agnostic, augmenting rather than competing with frontier providers, which broadens its potential customer base across diverse AI platforms and use cases. Poetiq currently employs six people and is headquartered in Mountain View, California. To date, it has secured $45.8 million in seed financing to fuel product development and commercialization.

Participated · Equity · Apr 2017

GrokStyle develops computer-vision visual search that lets users point their camera at furniture and immediately find similar or identical items for purchase. The team, led by Sean Bell and Kavita Bala, spun the company out of computer‑vision work at Cornell University. Its core product is integrated into IKEA’s Place AR app, and the company is rolling out pilots and APIs for retailers. GrokStyle is also building recommendation systems and business‑intelligence tools to monetise search data. Financially, the company attracted $2 million in funding last year and has secured competitive grants from the U.S. government to support development. Management says the immediate plan is to execute on the IKEA deployment and use that proof point to win additional retail customers. GrokStyle builds computer-vision and machine-learning systems that identify furniture and home decor from photos and return close matches from a library of millions. Users can upload or take pictures from almost any angle and the service finds the same item or visually similar alternatives, with hooks into individual stores’ inventories and filters like price range. The company offers its technology as an API for retail apps and web interfaces and plans to push hard in the furniture space while exploring other visual markets. GrokStyle spun out of Cornell research—co-founder Kavita Bala led the lab where the work began and co-founder/CEO Sean Bell was a grad student—and presented foundational work at SIGGRAPH in 2015. The team is focused on improving algorithm accuracy and flexibility and is hiring engineers while working to establish partnerships with retailers. Financially, the company has secured early funding including a $225,000 NSF grant and additional investor financing.