Springbank

Congratulations to our friend and advisor Sarah Leary!

Congratulations to Carefull on this award. Building in this space is hard and critically important.

Our co-founders Courtney Leimkuhler and Elana Berkowitz were invited to join the first-ever National Child Care Summit in Washington DC last week.

That's a wrap on NYC TECH WEEK by a16z! We had an amazing time co-hosting four events. A huge thank you to all the fantastic operators and investors who participated in the various events throughout the week. We kicked off NYTW, hosting an intimate All Raise breakfast for 20 NYC female GPs. Thanks to Hayley Bay Barna Barna from First Round Capital Round for co-hosting and Bloomberg Tech anchor Caroline Hyde for stopping by to share some wisdom. On Monday evening we teamed up with our friends at Bessemer Venture Partners, BBG Ventures, Alpaca VC, Dorm Room Fund, Correlation Ventures, and PsyMed Ventures to celebrate the tech scene in Brooklyn. Together, we enjoyed cocktails and conversations with Brooklyn founders and funders at the iconic Refinery at Domino Sugar Factory in South Williamsburg. On Tuesday, we delved into why building startups across social and economic infrastructure is venture-scale and defensible. We heard from Nikita Singareddy at Fortuna Health about Medicaid innovation and Matt Donahue at Kodex on the public safety data layer. Elise King and Manu Sharma also shared valuable insights from the investing side. Special thanks to Youssef (AlleyCorp) and Manu (Tusk Venture Partners) for co-hosting and to Savills for hosting us! We concluded the week with the second annual Fierce Female Founders Lunch. The engaging panel discussion on securing capital in the current venture environment featured Jenny Fielding of Everywhere Ventures, Jillian Williams of Cowboy Ventures, our very own Elana Berkowitz and Agatha Kluk, and Sonia R. Farber of Perkins Coie LLP. If you're a founder in New York or building a company aligned with our thesis, we would love to meet you.

Emerging manager friends: Make sure to check out the application for the RAISE Global Summit in October. It is a great event with even better people!

An oldie but a goodie: rewatch our webinar with Courtney Leimkuhler, current founding partner Springbank and former CFO of Marsh, as they discuss the future of family-friendly benefits. Post pandemic, 50% of employees say family-friendly policies are a top priority and 70% of employers believe workplaces need stronger family focused offerings. This is a must watch for our benefit broker community to understand how paid maternity and paternity leave factors into existing packages. https://lnkd.in/eXBybGfY #parento #benefitbrokers #webinar #parentalleave #paidleave

We are thrilled to recognize several of our members that have been recognized by ImpactAssets 50! This recognition is a testament to their unwavering commitment to impact investing with authenticity and integrity. A huge congratulations to all of our recognized members: - 1st Course Capital - Achieve Partners - AiiM Partners - Amplify Capital - Apis & Heritage Capital Partners - Arborview Capital - Avesta Fund - Better Ventures - Community Investment Management - Clean Energy Ventures - Closed Loop Partners - Core Innovation Capital - DBL Partners - Ecosystem Integrity Fund - HCAP Partners - Impact Engine - JFFVentures - Learn Capital - Lime Rock New Energy - Maycomb Capital - Mission Driven Finance™ - Regeneration.VC - Renewal Funds - Rethink Capital Partners - SJF Ventures - Springbank Collective - Trailhead Capital - VoLo Earth Ventures - Zeal Capital Partners Keep up the great work! #ImpactInvesting #Sustainability #ImpactAssets50 #InvestingWithPurpose

“While we’ve seen abundant investment in tools designed to assist software developers and free up time for them to focus on the more challenging parts of their jobs, there has been far less investment in technology that could assist construction workers, the service sector, teachers, nurses, or other care workers. Many of these jobs are ripe for innovation, and responsible AI technology could bring more good than harm in assisting parts of our workforce that are stretched to the breaking point.” Elana Berkowitz and Courtney Leimkuhler of Springbank VC urge investors to fund AI and technological innovation that will help the struggling care economy and its workers in the United States: https://lnkd.in/eR_8Pbhj Learn more about the ways AI can be developed and deployed responsibly to help workers in an in-depth series of articles from the Ford Foundation: https://lnkd.in/gw-uziGT #artificialintelligence #MakeTechWork #workers #technology

Outdoor activities, play, and community building are more important than ever in our age of screens and mental health challenges. Our latest investment Rec underscores the urgent need to modernize how families interact with and enjoy our public spaces. We got excited about Rec for so many reasons:  1. A huge problem. Parents have wasted infinite hours registering their kids for activities, sometimes in person with paper and pen, with websites that break and require refreshing at midnight. We need a modern system that meets the needs of working parents. According to JAMA Pediatrics, one-fifth of the negative effects of screen time on daily living skills of young children can be mediated by increasing outdoor playtime, which also increases kids’ socialization skills. We’re all in for anything that makes it easier to get outdoors.  2. The right team. Birju Kadakia and Rachel Williams are passionate, thoughtful, and tenacious founders with the right experiences at Uber, Masterclass, and The Athletic to make booking a tennis court or a kids after-school activity as easy as ordering dinner online. 3. The kind of cities we want to live in. By facilitating easier access to outdoor recreation by upgrading government software experiences and bringing under-utilized physical assets online, we're not only fostering healthier lifestyles but also paving the way for more inclusive and engaged communities. 4. Enormous market opportunity. Global recreation and leisure spending topped $975B in 2022 and is growing 14% YoY. The 91k municipal governments in the U.S. manage over 10M courts, parks and other spaces and 47% of Americans already have a relationship with their Parks and Rec Department.  Big congrats to our friends at Rec for officially announcing what they are bringing to communities and families and for their oversubscribed seed round led by NFX. We are excited to be on this journey with them.  https://lnkd.in/gYiGw8Jz

Our own Courtney Leimkuhler, has been featured in FT Partners' latest industry report, "Women in FinTech: Perseverance & Resilience.”