Initialized Capital

If you’re headed to Fortune Brainstorm Tech next week in Park City, Utah, catch Initialized Capital partner Jennifer Fleiss in her conversation with Andy Dunn as they talk about the importance of mental health in the startup community. Jenny will share her journey from startup founder to the corporate world to VC - the challenges, her support system, and how she advises founders today. #BrainstormTech https://lnkd.in/eFRi8gbF

Exciting news from Runway: we’ve peeled off our early access sticker and are officially Generally Available today. For the last 4 years, we’ve been working hard to make finance truly strategic and collaborative. The world is changing faster than ever, and finance is expected to change even faster — there’s constant pressure to create more value than last quarter, every quarter. To keep up, you have to be more strategic. And to do that, you need real collaboration. But real collaboration only happens when everyone at your company shares the context of how your business works and where it’s going. The problem is: you could share every spreadsheet, every data source, every document in the world — if your team doesn't understand what they're looking at, it won’t help them see the big picture. Which is why most people don’t. This lack of clear, deep understanding is why finance seems inaccessible — it’s what holds teams back from delivering the kind of impact they know they can. That’s why we’ve been on a mission to create understanding. We’ve spent years talking to customers, understanding their pain points, to find how to clearly show the “why” behind your numbers. We connect data, business context, and narrative to deliver holistic understanding. In plain English. For every. last. person. So you can invite your whole team to play with your model, see the impact of their decisions, and understand how your business actually works. We’ve already helped companies like AngelList, Superhuman, ConvertKit → Soon to be Kit and many others create clarity for their teams, and unleash their full potential. But don't just take our word for it — we’ve put together real stories of struggle from real people, to show you why we’re here and what Runway can do:

Rent The Runway started in 2009 as a pop-up shop on Harvard’s campus for students to try on and rent dresses on the spot. On the “High Bit” podcast, our partner Jennifer Fleiss spoke about the early days of the business, highlighting the importance of fresh perspectives in problem solving. “I was not an engineer or in the fashion industry or a logistics or dry cleaning person, so it gave me the set of fresh eyes but also this curiosity, just running at problems without the intimidation of how hairy and hard the full situation actually was.” Watch/Listen: YouTube: https://lnkd.in/e-uQ5Dy3 Spotify: https://lnkd.in/evAuHkgW Apple Podcast: https://lnkd.in/dA7a_EDv

Portfolio Job of the Week: PermitFlow is hiring! 📍NYC: fullstack software engineer, senior frontend engineer, staff software engineer, head of people, head of business operations & finance, and more. 📍Remote: US based recruiter/ HR coordinator and administrative assistant (international). Apply here: https://lnkd.in/gUEhdreh PermitFlow provides workflow and automation software to developers and general contractors to streamline their construction permitting process. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gDBgXPwc

In this month's founder spotlight, our partner Parul Singh sits down with Glass Health CEO and cofounder Dereck Paul, MD. Glass Health is a company that is empowering doctors with an AI-powered platform that supports clinical decision-making. During the interview, Dereck shared how his background in biotechnology inspired him to start Glass Health during the pandemic. His goal is to use AI to improve healthcare software, enhance patient outcomes, and support doctors. Here is a slightly edited version of the full conversation. Q: Tell us a little bit about your background and what led you to become a founder. A: I was interested in becoming a founder even before medical school. While studying biotechnology at Johns Hopkins, I was inspired by professors who were inventors. I tried to start a company as a pre-med student, but it didn't work out. During medical school at UCSF, I served as the chief of staff at a Y Combinator-backed AI drug discovery company, where I learned the importance of execution, market, and solving real problems. During the COVID-19 pandemic, I saw the weaknesses in our healthcare system and the lack of support for doctors, which led me to co-found Glass with Graham Ramsey. We aimed to provide better software for doctors, and our focus on AI has evolved over the past two years to create products that were previously impossible. Q: How Glass will help improve healthcare in the future? A: Many focus on efficiencies and optimization, but what's special about Glass is our focus on patient outcomes. We care about whether our product improves a patient's quality of life, wellness, or lifespan and saves lives. As AI models rapidly improve and outperform human experts in many tasks, including medical and clinical reasoning tasks, it seems inevitable that AI models will become the standard of care. This creates a moral imperative for us to build safe, reliable, responsible AI implementations that doctors can use. My biggest hope is that in 5-10 years, we'll look back and see that we made significant improvements in patient outcomes and saved lives through the application of AI as an assistant to doctors. Q: What challenges did you face in starting Glass? A: We've been fortunate to be a Y Combinator and Initialized company, receiving a lot of belief and support. However, the challenges of starting Glass included making something out of nothing—building a founding team willing to work without pay, developing the first product version, and acquiring the first 100 users. These initial steps were tough. Then came raising money, scaling the user base, and scaling revenue. Each stage of the startup presented new challenges. Fortunately, we've had great investors and mentors helping us overcome these barriers. Check out our blog for the full conversation ⬇

Earlier this month at Tech Open Air, Brett Gibson shared insights on traits we look for in founders, go-to-market strategies, and the future of AI with an audience of founders. Key takeaways from the fireside chat include: - Founders who stand out have the fortitude to get through challenges, the drive to build something big, and are relentless in attacking problems and moving things forward. - As a VC, many of the next big opportunities aren't obvious. We trust talented founders who are close to the metal, and watch where they're going. - Build from a base of people who really love your product. Listen to users, and build in a loop to get the most valuable feedback.  

Portfolio Job of the Week: Runwise is hiring! 📍NYC: territory manager, sales development representative, lead field services technician. Remote: product manager Apply here: https://lnkd.in/ghuqeAy7 Runwise monitors and automatically controls heating and water systems for large residential and commercial buildings. Looking for other roles? Join the Initialized Talent Den so we can share your resume with our hiring companies: https://lnkd.in/g-kT-ihk

Egg freezing is becoming more popular in the US, but it's an expensive process, averaging around $10,000. Despite the high cost, about 30,000 egg freezing cycles were performed in 2022, a huge jump from 7,600 in 2015. Cofertility’s Split program makes family planning more accessible by offering women more options. CEO and cofounder Lauren Makler was recently featured on 'CBS Mornings' where she discussed the company's egg-sharing program alongside participating members. Watch the full segment ⬇ https://lnkd.in/et3B_7sk

The US manufacturing industry faces a severe labor shortage, with over 2 million jobs expected to go unfilled by 2030. The lack of skilled robotic programmers makes automation complex and expensive, resulting in only 1.1% of equipment purchases in 2021 being for robots. Formic's Robots-as-a-Service provides a simple and affordable solution to these challenges. Businesses don’t pay upfront and only incur a low hourly rate when the robots are in use. Formic handles all monitoring and maintenance, ensuring smooth and efficient operation. This approach is already showing improved results. Formic's equipment has logged over 100,000 production hours, and its robots have packed and stacked more than 1.2 billion products, effectively tackling the labor shortage and improving manufacturing efficiency. Big congratulations to Saman Farid, and the entire team at Formic, for building a cost-effective solution to bolster American manufacturing capacity and for raising a Series A financing round.

Exciting news! We’ve increased our Series A financing to $53.9M! On the heels of recently surpassing 100,000 fleet production hours and more than 1.2 billion products packed and stacked by our Robots-as-a-Service automation equipment, this additional round adds $27.4M in financing to continue scaling the easiest and most reliable way for US manufacturers to deploy automation and unlock greater production capacity across the supply chain. The new investments from Blackhorn Ventures, Mitsubishi HC Capital America, Inc., NEC and Translink Orchestrating Future Fund, Alumni Ventures, FJ Labs, and additional investments from Lux Capital, Initialized Capital, and Lorimer Ventures allow us to double down on our strategy to bring more Pay-for-Productivity automation to US manufacturers by:  - Expanding our fleet of standardized automation solutions - Increasing our network of support and service people across the U.S. - Enhancing our equipment-agnostic software offering that includes AI-based motion planning, predictive maintenance, system design suite, and more intuitive customer interfaces and dashboards A huge thank you to everyone who has been a part of this journey. This milestone is a testament to the dedication, innovation, and hard work of our incredible team, as well as the trust and support of our customers and investors. Stay tuned for more updates and announcements as we embark on this next phase of our adventure! #SeriesA #Funding #Innovation #Tech #Growth #Automation #Robotics #Formic https://lnkd.in/d5pShmRV