Ground Up Ventures

David Stark and Ground Up Ventures were the first VC to make a big bet on us and Weave, well before AutoIND was even a dream, let alone a reality. It turned out to be a pretty good bet, thank Gd. But we'll forever be grateful for the faith, confidence, and truly meaningful guidance that David has offered us.

We are doubling down on Israel. Excited to announce Liftoff: our new fellowship program in partnership with Microsoft for Israeli founders at the earliest stages of building deep tech moonshot companies. At Liftoff we are giving founders everything they need to get off the ground with significant momentum: capital, office space, access to customers and strategic partners, mentorship and major cost savings on cloud, AI compute and 3rd party software. If you are an Israeli founder ideating about solving a *hard* problem with a radical new approach, Navot Volk and I would love to get a matcha with you. https://lnkd.in/ezbXz54e

So proud of Ari Caroline and the Weave team for this big milestone of launching publicly and of raising a $10M seed round. Watching the ideation and development of AutoIND since we led Weave’s pre-seed round has me more confident than ever in AI’s potential to massively accelerate each stage of the development of new drugs. Weave’s flagship product automates one of the earliest manual steps in the regulatory process — drafting and submitting an IND. Welcome to Innovation Endeavors and Magnetic Ventures who Ari knew were his ideal partners from day one of kicking off this fundraise. If you’re a biotech looking to be blown away by how much you can improve your IND process - get in touch.

Congrats to Zach Roseman and the rest of the Draftboard team on announcing this funding round! Excited to be a part of the journey together with our partners at Twelve Below, Founder Collective and ANIMO Ventures. If your company is hiring and you want to increase the number of high quality, vetted candidates in your funnel, Draftboard is the only scalable solution with a guaranteed return-on-investment. 🚀

Very excited to welcome Allie Feuerstein to the team. Allie is the future author of THE book on Value Creation in venture capital and we are honored that she chose Ground Up as her new professional home 😊. We look forward to seeing the tremendous impact she will have on our portfolio companies and the broader startup ecosystem. Allie is already acting as a scout for multiple enterprise partners helping them find relevant technology solutions to address their biggest opportunities and challenges. If you are looking for an innovative solution to help you personally be more successful in your job or to help level up your business as a whole, Allie would be a great person to talk to.

Happy Valentine's Day to Our One True Love: Founders If you're starting a company and looking for your happily-ever-after, you know where to find us 😉 😘

Big announcement today from our portfolio company GLASS Imaging about their recent $9.3M funding round led by GV (Google Ventures) and the advancements they are making in neural Image Signal Processing. We have been a part of their journey since day one as their first investor and couldn't be more excited for what the future will bring. Links to English and Hebrew coverage in the comments below. Congrats Ziv Attar! 🎉 🎉

There's so much SEO fluff posing as startup advice out there that finding quality content has become quite difficult. And that's exactly why we've created this library👇

To all of our friends and followers celebrating, we want to wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. 🎅 🎄 🎁 🎉 🥂

Hello, my name is Asher Sesser, and I'm The Flash. Ground Up wanted to interview me, but I was too busy. So they spoke to my dad, Benjamin Sesser, about his startup instead: 1. Hey Ben, what was the pain point that inspired the creation of BrightHire? “Hiring is the most important activity to get right to ensure your organization's future success, but the process is very often haphazard, manual, and rife with bias. Our platform is a game-changer for hiring. It’s an AI-powered interview platform that streamlines the entire hiring process with real-time interviewer guidance, AI-generated interview notes and candidate highlights, and new talent insights for consistently better and faster hiring.” 2. What are two things you wish someone had told you before you started your company? – “The highs are never as high as you think, and the lows are never as low as you think.” – “There is no one way to be successful.” 3. What did your biggest professional failure teach you? ”Focus on controlling the controllable.” 4. Which resources have you found particularly helpful on your journey? • Endurance (the Ernest Shackleton voyage) • SaaStr blog posts • Talking to peers 5. What has been your most effective growth channel? “LinkedIn. It's where our buyers congregate, and they lean heavily on their networks and social proof when considering new investments.” 6. What's one piece of software that your business couldn't function without? “Slack... and BrightHire :)” 7. How did you go about securing your first round of funding, and what advice would you give to others seeking venture capital? "Once we had sufficient traction, validation, and the sense that this could and should be a venture-backed business, we ran a tight, time-bound process.” -- Thanks so much for sharing your wisdom, Ben. – Follow BrightHire to make your hiring process more efficient with AI. – Follow us, Ground Up Ventures, for more interviews and tips for founders. – And follow Asher Sesser for tips on running at incredible speeds, time travel, and fighting supervillains.