Westwood Ventures (an Alumni Ventures Fund)

Honored to partner w/ 15 top VC's on our Google for Startups AI First Accelerator as VC Mentors. Each of these investors is paired 1:1 with an AI startup to provide bespoke support on growing their company. 🎉 Join them & others at AI First Demo Day on June 13! ➡ RSVP: https://lnkd.in/eVy_h6kv ⬅ (Also we have a few openings for investors / partners to join Demo Day IN PERSON at Google HQ in MTV. DM me to learn more.) Thank you our amazing VC mentors!! 🙏 Jewel Burks Solomon @ Collab Capital Charles Hudson @ Precursor Ventures Sue Xu @ Amino Capital Kanyi Maqubela @ Kindred Ventures Edward Tsai @ Alumni Ventures Tara Tan @ Strange Ventures Manmeet Gujral @ CapitalG Collin Wallace @ Lobby Capital Andrew Brackin @ Gradient Ventures Pierre-Jean "PJ" Cobut @ Newfund Manish Patel @ Nava Ventures Jason Scott @ Five Two Five Yusen Dai @ ZhenFund 真格基金 Seth Corder @ High Alpha Alok Nandan, PhD @ First Rays Venture Partners

YonedaLabs (YC W24) just raised $4 million in seed funding to develop a foundational model for chemical manufacturing, making it faster and cheaper to create and manufacture new drugs. Creating drugs is challenging, especially when it involves combining two molecules to form a compound — it's a process that requires precise conditions, such as the right temperature and solvent. To that end, chemists typically spend a lot of time experimenting to find the correct molecule combinations. "Whenever chemists need to make a new drug, we use AI to tell them how." Founded by Michał Mgeładze-Arciuch, Jan Oboril, and Daniel Vlasits, Yoneda Labs is developing an AI model to streamline this process. Traditional drug synthesis involves manual trials in labs without any technological aids. By using its advanced wet lab, Yoneda Labs aims to enhance this process with AI, potentially saving drugmakers significant time and resources. Still in the development phase, the startup needs to create its training data by conducting experiments. They're opting to generate their own data internally, emphasizing the focus on quality over quantity, creating a proprietary dataset to train their AI model. Their lab, equipped with robotic automation, can perform 200 experiments daily—work equivalent to that of 20 chemists. With an estimated 20,000 experiments needed, Yoneda Labs expects to complete these experiments by year's end, setting the stage for the release of their AI model. Congrats to the team on the round!

I’m thrilled to announce that Patlytics (www.patlytics.ai) is officially coming out of stealth mode since the inception beginning of this year. The Patlytics team has been at work to achieve a single mission: to be the most customer-centric and innovative company for the whole IP system. Our goal is to connect the patent industry to cutting-edge AI innovation and empower patent professionals. We have been working 24/7 to develop an AI-powered platform that brings a human-computer symbiosis to the patent workflow for premier law firms and top corporations with IP needs. Our product enables key aspects of the patent process, including initial drafting and office action responses, infringement evaluation, advanced search, and competitor intelligence.     I’m excited to embark on this new venture with my long-time friend and co-founder/CTO, Arthur Jen, as we build out the dream team. Arthur and I have finally teamed up after a decade or so since the University of Waterloo days together. We are creating the best-in-class, dynamite brand (1+1=3) here at Patlytics and super amped to work with some of the best law firms and top corporations already. There is so much to announce (!!): - a very strong team of 11 - our team is stacked with some of the best caliber (and we are RECRUITING and seeking hungry, top candidates always) - already a waitlist of 100+ of law firms and corporations that want to work with Patlytics – currently, we are selectively bringing on the right fit at this time - some very happy customers right now! And more to come… - presenting/unveiling our product this month live in four different networks – New York, Los Angeles, London, Palo Alto. [reach out!] - we started this with a security-first mindset. Already SOC-2 certified and have many of the table stakes security pieces in place. We have plans for 2024 and beyond to provide exceptional value. After my years of investing in top startups in Silicon Valley – I can confidently say we are running at a tier-one velocity and will accelerate faster. We are grateful for the support of our investors and advisors, including Gradient Ventures, 8VC, Liquid 2 Ventures, GenerativeIQ, Tribe Capital, Vermilion Ventures, Gaingels, Alumni Ventures, Position Ventures and several undisclosed angel investors including select partners from premier law firms and Datadog President Amit Agarwal. We are especially grateful that Patlytics was never in the market “raising a round” and instead, we have only decided/selected from the inbound interest we have had so far - there never was a pitch deck and the plan has always been and will be (1) customers first; (2) everything else second. I’m incredibly proud that we are already seeing strong pull in the market, working with some of the most innovative players in the IP industry. Here’s to an exciting new beginning of Patlytics!