Participated · Seed · Feb 2024

Bioptimus is building large-scale foundational AI models trained on multimodal biological data to simulate biology from molecules to whole organisms and predict disease outcomes. The company launched H-Optimus-0, an open-source foundation model for pathology trained on millions of images to aid research and diagnosis of diseases such as cancer. Bioptimus plans to broaden its data sources across additional therapeutic areas and to deepen partnerships with pharmaceutical and biotech companies. It will leverage multimodal patient data amassed via ties to Owkin to train its models, while acknowledging the sensitivity and scale of the clinical data required. The company was founded last year by six co-founders, including CEO Jean-Philippe Vert and CTO Rodolphe Jenatton, and is based in France. Financially, Bioptimus has quickly raised capital, bringing total funding to $76M after its latest $41M round following a $35M seed raise. Bioptimus is building large foundational AI models tailored to biological and clinical data with the goal of improving disease diagnosis, precision medicine, and discovering new biomolecules. The company plans to train multimodal models on sensitive clinical datasets amassed through Owkin’s partnerships with academic hospitals. Bioptimus says building these biology models will be capital- and compute-intensive, requiring expensive GPUs and top AI researchers. The team includes Jean-Philippe Vert as co-founder and executive chairman (non-operational), Rodolphe Jenatton as CTO (formerly a senior research scientist at Google), and several co‑founders from Google DeepMind. Bioptimus has signed a partnership with Amazon Web Services to run model training in AWS data centers. The startup recently raised funding to begin model development and data work.

Participated · Equity · Nov 2023

Evolv AI (legally Evolv Technology Solutions) offers Ascend, a SaaS platform that uses artificial intelligence to automate and accelerate multivariate testing across digital properties. The technology enables marketers to run thousands of concurrent experiments, quickly identifying the best-performing combinations to boost conversion and engagement metrics while reducing manual effort. Enterprise customers such as Verizon, Celebrity Cruises, Eagle Retailing, and Innogy rely on the product across e-commerce, travel, financial services, telecommunications, and automotive sectors. Evolv recently acquired Sentient Ascend, the spin-off it previously licensed, consolidating ownership of the core technology. With offices in Austin, Amsterdam, Tokyo, Seoul, and Brisbane—and partnerships with firms like Cognizant and Rakuten Marketing—the company serves a global client base. Proceeds from its latest funding will be used to scale engineering and data-science teams and expand sales and customer-success capacity. No revenue, user, or other financial performance figures were disclosed in the article.

Participated · Series A · May 2023

Pesto is a San Francisco, CA-based fintech that launched the Pesto Mastercard, an asset-backed secured credit card, in 2023. The card, issued by Continental Bank, allows consumers to send Pesto their assets and receive credit based on asset value regardless of credit score. It is designed to help users secure liquidity and build credit over time without selling assets, enabling many who don't qualify for unsecured cards to potentially improve their credit profiles. Pesto offers rates similar to existing credit cards, which the article notes are substantially lower than what pawn and payday loan clients typically pay. The company plans to use new funding to expand its customer base across the U.S., with an initial focus on Atlanta and Los Angeles. James Savoldelli is the founder and CEO.

Participated · Seed · Aug 2021

Terzo offers a suite of contract processing tools that use AI to extract financial and operational data from business contracts, supervised by a quality assurance team to ensure baseline accuracy. The platform integrates with enterprise resource systems such as SAP and Oracle to track contractual obligations, expirations and ESG-related metrics. Terzo’s AI was trained on real-world business contracts to surface insights like inventory and costs for finance and IT teams. The company has "over a dozen" customers, including a Fortune 50 retailer and the largest financial transaction processor in the world. Management plans to drive revenue to cover over 50% of overall expenses in the next year and aims to break even in 2024 and be profitable by 2025. New funding will be used for sales and marketing and to enhance the platform’s AI capabilities. Terzo provides a SaaS-based Vendor Relationship Management (VRM) platform for enterprises to gain insights to drive innovation, improve governance, increase collaboration and optimize performance. Led by CEO Brandon Card, the platform helps enterprises manage contracts, track goals and evaluate opportunities, increasing collaboration among the right stakeholders within and across organizations. The company is gaining traction with Fortune 500 enterprises. Terzo is based in Los Angeles, CA. The company raised $3.2M in seed funding and intends to use the funds to continue to expand operations and its business reach.

Participated · Seed · May 2020

Phaidra develops intelligent control systems that use reinforcement learning to orchestrate power, cooling, and workload management across AI factories—data centers purpose-built for AI workloads. By coordinating these historically separate systems, the company unlocks efficiency gains that reduce costs and environmental impact. Current products include AI agents for liquid cooling, chiller plants, and workload scheduling, all designed to operate beyond the limits of traditional controls logic or human intuition. Phaidra already collaborates closely with NVIDIA to design next-generation AI infrastructure and plans to deepen this partnership. Proceeds from its latest financing will accelerate agent ecosystem development and support expansion to additional global operators. The company was founded by Jim Gao, Vedavyas Panneershelvam, and Katherine Hoffman, who collectively bring experience from Google DeepMind, AlphaGo, Trane, and Raytheon. Headquartered in Seattle, Phaidra positions itself at the intersection of profitability and sustainability in an energy-constrained world. Its recent Series B raise of more than $50 million underscores investor confidence in its mission.