Harmonic

Stealth founders ready for takeoff 🚀 Take a look at three highlights from the Picks of the Week brought to you by Data-Driven VC and built on Harmonic. 🔬 Princeton University and Stanford University Graduate School of Business alum Kayj Shannon is building a biotech company in stealth after leaving Zafrens. 🇩🇰 Pelle Sommansson, one of the co-founders of Strava and former Head of Product at Klarna announced he's working on a stealth company earlier this month. 🕶 Former Head of Federal Delivery at Scale AI, Brandon (Woody) G., is working in stealth. He previously worked at Palantir Technologies and Virtustream. Check out the full Picks of the Week by Dr. Andre Retterath and Jérôme Jaggi at DDVC in the comments.

VCs invest in magical user experiences—so why settle for anything less in the tools they use? At Harmonic, we’re constantly enhancing our user experience to make the best even better. This past sprint we released: - Infinite scroll - Revamped grid loading - Bulk actions - List search - Larger exports - Okta login Check out the Loom to see these in action: https://lnkd.in/ev3xQAb9

Picks Picks Picks! VCs using Harmonic find stealth and seed-stage founders 6-12 months ahead of those using the competition. Here are three exciting examples found on Harmonic and shared by Data-Driven VC in their Picks of the Week. 🇺🇸 Palantir Technologies, McKinsey & Company, and Stanford University alum Sam Bolian left her post as Head of Product at Plural in April to start something new. 🇩🇰 Serial entrepreneur Jakob Olund Kristensen was an early employee at Pleo, where he last served as Product Lead. He's now working in stealth after moving on from Weld, which he co-founded. 🇫🇷 Osium AI (YC S23) enables the development of better materials, 10x faster. Founders Sarah Najmark and Luisa Bouneder have added six people to their team since raising a seed round in late 2023. Investors include Kima Ventures, Collaborative Fund, Singular, Y Combinator, Atomico, and more. Check out the full Picks of the Week by Dr. Andre Retterath and Jérôme Jaggi at DDVC in the comments.

If you are in the VC space, you should know one of the early drivers of "Moneyball for VC". That's Gopinath Sundaramurthy, Ph.D Gopi partnered with the Kauffman Fellows Fund on implementing these concepts in their investment process. The results were staggering. 50% of the investments the fund made became unicorns. In Gopi's words 👇🏻 "We knew something was working, so we thought: Let's build this a little bigger." What did that look like in practice? 1️⃣ Gopi's firm uses a single ‘source of truth’ platform to centralize information, improving decision-making and consistency. 2️⃣ They maintain an even 50/50 split between data engineers and investors to ensure they leverage data to gain insights into teams, markets, and products. Want to learn more about what Gopi and the team at Ensemble VC has implemented at their firm? Check out the case study that our sponsor Harmonic published about the firm -->

The picks are 🔥 this week Here are three standouts featured in Picks of the Week. The picks are sourced on Harmonic and curated by Dr. Andre Retterath and Jérôme Jaggi from Data-Driven VC. 👻 David Evans: After stepping down as Director of Engineering at Snap Inc. in January, David has quietly been working on a new venture. Previously, he co-founded PlayCanvas, which Snap acquired. 🐣 Context.ai: This startup is accelerating its market presence in text analytics for LLM products, recently making its first GTM hire. Just under a year ago, Context.ai raised a seed round from 20VC, GV (Google Ventures), Theory Ventures, and others. 📈 Exaforce: Supported by Khosla Ventures and Mayfield Fund, Exaforce focuses on optimizing cloud security operations for startups. Interestingly, the company has expanded its team from 14 to 22 in the last 90 days! Check out the full Picks of the Week in the comments.

Fresh Picks! Every week, Dr. Andre Retterath and Jérôme Jaggi from Data-Driven VC, in collaboration with Harmonic, spotlight the hottest stealth, early, and growth startups. Here are three highlights from this week’s batch. Anubhav Guha, a former MIT researcher with experience at NASA, Aurora Flight Sciences, and Toyota Research Institute, announced he’s building in stealth earlier this month. Holdbar is building a system to sell experiences. Backed by firstminute capital, Seed Capital Denmark, and others, Holdbar has grown its headcount by nearly 60% in the last 90 days. AutogenAI has seen steady growth after its Series B. It added 26 people in the last 90 days, while website traffic grew 66%. Autogen offers an AI-powered bid writing engine, and its investors include Salesforce Ventures, Blossom Capital, and Spark Capital. Check out the entire list in the comments, sign up for DDVC’s newsletters and let us know what you’d like to see more of.

We just launched Investor Profiles! VCs love our product. And we love them. Now, they have dedicated profiles in Harmonic Investor Profiles include information on previous investments, follow-on rates, AUM, investment stages, sectors and much more. Check out this short video to see it in action. https://lnkd.in/gJKPtcVM

Introducing Harmonic’s exclusive investor case studies! We sat down with investors we admire and asked them about everything from investor workflows to predictions about the industry. Dive in and discover the strategies and perspectives that are shaping the future of venture capital: 🚀 Riley Rodgers of Valia Ventures covers how he evaluates location, identifies current “have” and “have-not” startup categories, admires who remain mission-focused, and wishes he had been more of an industry historian early in his career. 💪 Susannah Duke at Pelion argues that AI is underhyped, insists on the importance of “stocking a firm’s own pond,” warns that excess capital can hinder finding product-market fit, and believes a track record is crucial in an industry with ambiguous KPIs. 🔥 Salvatore Spina of Kyber Knight highlights the satisfaction of working for a first-time fund, emphasizes a firm’s network as its key differentiator, advocates for problem-first over company-first approaches, and shares time optimization strategies. 💥 Gopinath Sundaramurthy, Ph.D of Ensemble stresses data as the core of their strategy, notes the limitations of data, predicts automation and source-of-truth platforms becoming essential, explains why they don’t overly focus on founders, and reflects on learning from past mistakes. Read the articles below!

🎉 Introducing Network Mapping 🎉 💪 Investors: Your network is your superpower. You know this. Yet we constantly hear about missed opportunities—those perfect-fit deals that close before an investor even knows about them. The worst part? They’d been unwittingly connected with the founder all along. That’s why we built Network Mapping. Network mapping allows your firm to integrate its entire network with a few clicks. Everyone your firm has ever emailed, met with, or is connected to on LinkedIn gets mapped onto the complete startup database. Here’s what you can do with this feature: 🔍  Filter your searches for startups and founders with whom your firm has a connection. For example: “show me every AI startup founded this year, where someone in my team has a connection.” 🚨  Get alerted anytime someone in your firm’s network launches or joins something new 👀  View the full interaction history with a startup or founder. Know who on your team has been in touch with whom—and when, and why. Don’t miss another deal in your network. Harness the full potential of your team’s connections with Harmonic.

We're proud to collaborate with Aya Spencer on her in-depth report on #fertilitytech!