Led · Seed · Nov 2025

Hearvana is pioneering a platform that delivers real-time, on-device audio augmentation and comprehension, enabling machines and people to achieve superhuman listening abilities. The technology allows AI assistants, hearing aids, smart glasses and other voice-enabled products to detect intent and context accurately even in noisy, complex environments. Founded by Professor Shyam Gollakota together with embedded-systems and audio-AI experts Malek Itani and Tuochao Chen, the team previously introduced innovations such as Target Speech Hearing, Sound Bubble, Full-Duplex Dialogue Agents and Proactive Conversational Assistants. Their deep expertise in auditory computing, embedded intelligence and deep learning underpins a product roadmap that bridges cutting-edge research with scalable real-world use cases. Hearvana plans to deploy its new capital to grow engineering and go-to-market teams and to initiate commercial pilot programs with consumer-electronics and AI-ecosystem partners. The article provided no revenue, user or other operating metrics.

Participated · Equity · Apr 2025

Theo issues tokenized gold and money-market products, including thGOLD (introduced in January) and thBIll (a tokenized money-market fund launched last July). The company plans to launch thUSD, a stablecoin designed to maintain dollar parity via reserves of thGOLD and by shorting gold futures to capture cash-and-carry spreads. thGOLD is backed by secured lending agreements with gold retailers such as Mustafa Gold, allowing retailers to hedge and continue manufacturing while reducing price exposure. Theo expects thUSD’s yield to come from both the underlying thGOLD yields and returns from short futures positions executed on venues like the CME and crypto-native platforms including Hyperliquid and Binance; its CIO estimated potential annualized yields around 10% in favorable conditions. Theo says thUSD will be compatible with DeFi lending protocols such as Morpho, but initial access requires investor registration and whitelisting. The company previously raised $20 million last year and used capital to bring Wall Street-style trading strategies to retail on-chain investors.

Participated · Seed · Nov 2024

Jimini Health builds clinician-supervised AI infrastructure for behavioral health provider organizations, with a flagship platform called Sage that integrates into regulated clinical environments. Sage is designed so licensed clinicians maintain oversight of every patient interaction while enabling providers to deploy AI at scale. The company emphasizes compliance with regulatory requirements and direct integration with clinical workflows. Jimini plans to expand AI development across additional clinical settings and scale partnerships with large behavioral health providers nationwide using proceeds from its recent financing. Financially, the company raised a $17M Seed round led by M13, bringing total funding to over $25M. Jimini Health is based in New York and is led by CEO Luis Voloch.

Participated · Equity · Sep 2024

Vana builds an EVM-compatible layer-1 blockchain designed for collective ownership of private digital assets that power AI. The network natively supports pooling data through data DAOs and rewards for the top 16 data liquidity pools. Users pool their data via data DAOs secured by proof of contribution, and contributors earn ownership stakes in the AI models they help create. EVM compatibility enables flexible incentives such as dataset-specific tokens and AI model-specific tokens. The company plans to use the new funds to accelerate development of the Vana network and to support an ecosystem of decentralized AI projects built with user-owned data. Vana is based in San Francisco and has raised a total of $25M to date.

Participated · Equity · Aug 2024

Sahara AI offers a decentralized blockchain platform designed to ensure security, equity, accessibility, and provenance for AI development and deployment. The platform is built to support open and equitable AI, with features that prioritize sovereignty and provenance of AI models and data. The company is used by 35+ tech innovators and research institutions, including Microsoft, Amazon, MIT, Motherson Group, and Snap. Sahara AI has partnered with strategic angels and advisors from industry and academia, such as Laksh Vaaman Sehgal, Rohan Taori, Teknium, Vipul Prakash, and Elvis Zhang. The company intends to use new funding to expand its global team, enhance the performance of its AI blockchain, and grow its developer ecosystem. Sahara AI is headquartered in Los Angeles, CA. Sahara operates a decentralized AI network built around personalized Knowledge Agents that let businesses and individuals monetize proprietary data and expertise while preserving privacy. The company also offers Sahara Data, a data infrastructure service providing data annotation and AI model training services that has attracted interest from more than 30 enterprise clients, including Fortune 500 companies and unicorn startups. Sahara describes a Collaborative Economy model that rewards knowledge developers, providers, compute providers, execution node operators, validators, and knowledge consumers for their contributions. The team announced coming out of stealth on March 5, 2024 and reported rapid community demand: more than 50,000 people joined the waitlist within five days. Founders Sean Ren and Tyler Zhou have discussed the product and web3 architecture in interviews with Coindesk, emphasizing transparent tracking of contributions and rewards via blockchain. The company is actively building community engagement on Discord, Twitter, and LinkedIn as it develops Sahara Knowledge Agents and expands Sahara Data enterprise traction.