• September Breakfast Club: Come watch Liz eviscerate VC’s

• Bucephalus (Sponsor)

• Tech Week Kickoff Party (Sponsor Announcement!)

• 10 NYC Startups you should know

Thank you to Bucephalus, the ultimate inventory planning tool for e-commerce brands of all sizes, for sponsoring today’s newsletter

Final Chance to sign up for September’s Breakfast Club

Join my cohosts, Laura Hamilton and Wil Hagen, and I as we celebrate the launch of Jerry Neumann and Liz Zalman’s new book, Founder vs Investor.

Jerry is a legendary angel investor with early (and I mean extremely early) investments in Trade Desk and Datadog (both $30bn+ publicly traded companies now).

Elizabeth Zalman is a two-time founder and CEO of venture-backed companies, building the first to a successful exit and the second to a multi-hundred-million-dollar business. Elizabeth has raised more than $100 million in venture capital from the most renowned investors in the world.

Laura and Wil are going to interview Jerry and Liz about the book. There will also be plenty of time to sip coffee, eat a bagel, and chat.

Click here to register:

Pre-order the book on amazon.

Bucephalus: The Next Evolution in Supply Chain Planning

Bucephalus is not just another supply chain ops platform. They crunch billions of data points to help brands to move products faster, cheaper, and more sustainably using bespoke AI models. Bucephalus is the brainchild of Nick DeGiacomo, who brings a wealth of experience from his stints in cloud infrastructure/data engineering and AI research at tech giants like Amazon and Bloomberg.

Why Bucephalus Stands Out:

Precision Inventory Planning: As a world expert in AI and supply chain, Bucephalus helps brands & retailers of all sizes make data-driven decisions about how much inventory to buy, when, and where to place it, dramatically reducing excess stock and missed sales opportunities.

Proven Results: Bucephalus has doubled the accuracy of forecasts across hundreds of customers, leading to increased service levels, reduction in carrying costs, and greater cashflows. This means more profitability and happier customers.

Sustainable Operations: Bucephalus is committed to sustainability. Their AI reduces waste and transportation needs, leading to a decrease in carbon footprints for partnering brands.

VCs and operators should take note: As e-commerce continues to grow, the challenges of supply chain management will only become more complex. Bucephalus is positioned at the forefront of this evolution, offering a solution that addresses both the current needs and future challenges of the industry.

Be a part of the future. Join the Bucephalus revolution.

For demos, reach out to Nick ([email protected]). For all my DTC homies, I hear he generously rewards those who referred converted customers - particularly enterprise.

NYC Tech Week Party: Sponsor Alert 🥰 

I’m teaming up with Popl and Bulletpitch to throw a blowout opening night party for New York Tech Week. Food, Drinks, Elite Entertainment.

Thank you Mercury for sponsoring the event! More sponsors to be announced as the event approaches.

Popl and Bulletpitch are only giving me an allotment of 100 tickets for Tech Breakfast Club members, though. (half are gone now - thank you to those who’ve bought one already)

I know it’s a ways off, so if you buy a ticket now and end up not being able to make it, I’ll refund the ticket

If you have any questions or want reassurance that you’ll have a very good time, reply to this newsletter.

To purchase, click the button below:

10 NYC Based Startups to watch 🚀 

Novig:
Jacob Fortinsky, founder of Novig, recently announced their $6.4m seed round that they’ll use to democratize sports betting. Led by Lux Capital, the seed round comes just before Novig’s launch in Colorado. The hope is to eliminate the need for traditional sportsbooks by allowing users to bet directly against one another, making the experience more efficient, fairer, and profitable. Jacob, explaining Novig’s model, says “we generate revenue from three main sources: charging institutional traders, data monetization, and internal market making.” Congratulations to the Novig team!

Clik:
I’ve been chatting with Conner Roach, co-founder of Clik, about how Clik solves the problem of “hey there was a photographer at the event but I never saw any photos she took of me.” Using facial recognition, Clik is able to deliver photos of a guest directly to that guest in a branded email. Pretty cool - and it’s surprisingly inexpensive. Raising a preseed.

Grit.io:
You moved fast and you broke things - technical debt happens. Morgante Pell, the founder of Grit, an AI startup focused on code cleanup, announced a $7m seed round from Founders Fund, Quiet Capital, 8VC, and Uncorrelated Ventures (just to name a few). The opportunity here is huge. Teams can shorten implementation from months to weeks, skipping the time consuming and laborious process of updating their code. Check out their public beta - they’re starting with support for JavaScript, TypeScript, Python, CSS, and Terraform.

Like Uber:
You might have heard the buzz around Sam Hatem and Pavel Asparouhov’s new startup. There have been massive advancements in AI and AR/VR since Uber launched almost a decade ago. Like Uber isn’t using any of those advancements, but Sam says it’s still fun to think about. Pressed for additional details, Hugh Jazz, the PR spokesperson for Like Uber, reiterated that it is pretty much Like Uber.

Fortuna Health:
So, I think this company will make a lot of money, but even if it wasn’t going to, it still should exist. Co-founders Nikita Singareddy, Ben Wesner, and Cydney Kim are building what they describe as “TurboTax for Medicaid.” It’s a massive market with over 90m participants trying to navigate the system. And navigate might not be the word - more like stumbling through the system. I was shocked to learn that missing notices or improperly completed forms cause 75% of the disenrollments. But what if the process was consumer friendly? Not only would patients do better, plan providers could cut down on the $30bn churn they see annually. The Fortuna team crushed Y Combinator and recently raised from a16z as well as the founders of Zocdoc and Pillpack.

Vastly:
This podcast discovery app is still very much in stealth - I got a look at the beta version and loved it, though. An absolute podcast fiend, Jonathan Baer, CEO & cofounder of Vastly, spent too much time searching, discovering, and recommending podcast content. To solve this, Vastly uses AI to process video podcasts, decide what’s the most interesting content, and then recommends it to users, who can decide to keep scrolling or click into the podcast and enjoy the whole thing. Vastly, comprising of Jonathan and a team from Stanford, raised a pre-seed earlier this summer and are looking to launch the next version of their beta this fall.

Yonder:
I recently caught up with Pierre Haou and he started explaining this AI game that he was building called Yonder. More than a game, Pierre described it as a platform to play dynamic games with AI friends. It started as a hackathon project but then Pierre and his cofounder, Kai, became obsessed with it. They recently raised outside capital from Boost VC to start scaling the product - I’m excited to follow along.

Factored Quality:
Before law school I did strategy work for this discount retailer, Dollar Tree - you might have seen them - they used to sell everything for a dollar (no longer, thanks inflation!). A major pain point was quality control. Even for a fortune 200 company, tracking and coordinating inspections caused so many headaches. I can only imagine how difficult it is for smaller cpg brands. It’s a huge market. So when Rachel Braun brought up Factored and how it streamlines the process giving companies quality control as a service, the idea immediately clicked. The team, led by Prince Ghosh, went through Y combinator back in ‘20 and raised $5.6m.

Purposely.ai:
I chatted with Alex Kennedy about his AI MarTech company, Purposely. Using computed vision they’re able to analyze ad performance and tweak future content - like for whatever reason ads with green grass perform 12% better, so let's generate more ads that incorporate this slight edge. One of the first test cases was for a brand called Blue Balls that sells glow in the dark golf balls (in packs of two, of course). They’ve raised a preseed and are currently scaling the team and product.

Posh.vip:
It’s sick. The platform works. I like it better than luma for anything paid. You should try it. When Avante, co-founder of Posh, talks, you feel better about yourself, the world, New York, etc. You feel like, despite being a dorky guy who needs to nap if he plans on staying out past 10pm, that you can be a successful party promoter. Avante genuinely wants you to have fun and make money (the best combo). The tech crunch article that came out announcing Posh’s seed round makes a comparison between Shopify and Posh, and having used the platform, I’d say that’s pretty fair.

Rainmaker:
A month or so ago, I wrote about Augustus Doricko’s quest to make water abundant through a novel approach to cloud seeding and I think it’s off to a hot start. He raised a seed and is about to launch a pilot program. Could be big. Say a little prayer for Rainmaker’s success - would be good for humanity.

I’d love to hear from you about a startup you’re particularly bullish about

If you’ve made it this far reply to the newsletter and let me know - I appreciate you!