Ferdinand Stockmann

NY Climate Tech Founders! 1) YES PLEASE save the date to join us at #techweek (6/3!), and 2) YES PLEASE share your top NY resources to complete our NY INSIDER GUIDE, in collab with NYCEDC!

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Next week is NY Tech Week, and on Wednesday, I'll be co-hosting TechWalk at 2 PM in Central Park. More details here: https://lnkd.in/eFey-aBd I look forward to connecting and chatting about the dynamic world of early-stage startup investing, go-to-market strategies, and the venture capital ecosystem. As a Venture Fellow at Fordham Angel Fund (FAF), I bring hands-on experience evaluating startups, conducting market analysis, and developing go-to-market strategies. Let's discuss founder due diligence, growth hacking techniques, and the nuances of crafting effective term sheets. I'm also passionate about discussing programs like Vencapital and Venture Cooperative that support minorities and women breaking into VC. Additionally, I'd love to share insights on content creation and storytelling from my experience hosting a YouTube podcast. If you're interested in personal branding, networking, or leveraging LinkedIn for career growth, let's connect! Join me for a walk and chat about the global business landscape, embracing diversity, and adapting to new environments. See you there! #NYTechWeek #TechWalk #Startups #VentureCapital #ContentCreation #PersonalBranding #Networking #GlobalBusiness #DiversityInVC

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I'm so excited to continue supporting Prolific Machines, Inc., and the incredible Deniz Kent, PhD ,Max Huisman, and Declan Jones. Today's cellular biology processes are incredibly expensive, inefficient, imprecise, and sometimes purely ineffective. These processes are used from everything from making antibodies to treat diseases, to fermentation used to make high-value nutritional proteins in baby formula, to whole cuts of cultured meat. Prolific has developed a biology platform that leverages light to guide cell behavior and optimize performance over time using AI. By combining light, bioengineering, hardware, and AI in fundamentally new ways, Prolific can help pharmaceutical, nutritional, and therapeutics companies get to market faster, less expensively, and more efficiently — ultimately in hopes of helping improve outcomes — a mission any of us can get behind. Mark Cuban Peter T. Frederick Blackford Cooper Rinzler David Adelman Darco Capital Breakthrough Energy Michael Schulson Kevin Love Tobias Harris Breyer Capital Charles Besser Brennan Besser Lettuce Entertain You Restaurants https://lnkd.in/ea2TqdQk

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Breaking down our latest newsletter section by section, starting with our expanded focus in Deep Tech: --- We have built expertise in the robotics sector, and will continue to double (and triple) down on investing in this category, but we have been increasingly finding that robotics is naturally steering us into two exploding adjacent areas: Aerospace, and Advanced Manufacturing (which we define as industrials, semiconductors, materials science, and energy production). Stepping back, this expansion makes perfect sense. Robotics is an inherently horizontal platform - meaning it can be applied productively across multiple industries. This quality, paired with the fact that robotics has long shown the highest TRLs of any deep tech technology, makes it a kind of “gateway” to other sectors in the hard sciences. Now with the recent breakthroughs in AI for robotics, growing semiconductor demand, and the resurgence of aerospace and defense tech, we are seeing a dramatic uptake of robotics and relevant technologies in both advanced manufacturing and aerospace. As an added bonus of the expansion, many of the founder (and funder) networks across these landscapes have natural overlaps and linkages. For AlleyCorp Deep Tech this means that we can be extremely helpful, knowledgeable, and engaged across all three sectors right away, and continue to be the best-in-class investing team across these categories.  --- More in our newsletter: https://lnkd.in/ewiTuYq6

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Today, I was reminded of two remarkably prescient 1997 ACM, Association for Computing Machinery presentations: the first by Nathan Myhrvold and the second by Bran Ferran. If you are not a member of the ACM - I highly recommend joining. Nathan Myhrvold The future of software, the software industry, and Windows '47 https://lnkd.in/egMwYty Bran Ferran How IT will transform the experience of telling and listening to stories https://lnkd.in/gqF7C7TK

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Wonderful article about Emily Knight and the whole The Engine Accelerator team on the amazing work their doing changing the world with #ToughTech!

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I asked two questions on LI this week, with wildly different outcomes: 1. What's the hardest part about scaling robotics? 2. What's the easiest part, or the one that you overestimated? Question 1 had plenty of insightful answers and great discussion. Question 2? Not a single reply! Not surprising: robotics is just hard. Every problem is a hair-on-fire problem. Scaling robotics is even harder. Your hair is on fire AND now you're responsible for keeping back the flames from your customers. This is exactly where Tangram Vision lives: helping the best robotics companies extinguish those hair-on-fire problems so that their customers stay happy. I'll keep posting questions about this in the coming weeks. We may not all have solutions, but understanding the problems is always the first step to success. Thanks Szymon Dzwończyk Krystian Gebis Nils Alstad Shaun Juncal Ivan Chernukha for your insight! #robotics #scaling

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Here are the Top 10 SaaS funding rounds of the past week (Seed to A) Starting at number 1... 🥇 Emergence, $97.2mm Seed 🤯 Emergence is developing an AI "agent-based" system that automates tasks typically performed by knowledge workers. Founded by Satya Nitta. 💸 Investors: Learn 🔗 https://bit.ly/3XSitTA 🟠🟠🟠 🥈 Formic, $27.4mm Series A Formic enables manufacturers to scale faster by making it easy to deploy robotic automations, like packing and palletizing. Founded by Misa Ilkhechi and Saman Farid. 💸 Investors: Blackhorn Ventures, FJ Labs, and more 🔗 https://bit.ly/3XGzEYr 🟠🟠🟠 🥉 normai, $27mm Series A Norm Ai is automating compliance processes, making them more efficient, cost-effective, and accurate via (you guessed it) AI. Founded by John Nay. 💸 Investors: Coatue, Bain Capital Ventures, and more 🔗 https://bit.ly/4ckpNft 🟠🟠🟠 🎖️ 4. ORA, $20mm Series A Ora is a blockchain project incorporating AI into dapps. Founded by Kartin Wong. 💸 Investors: Polychain Labs, HF0, and more 🔗 https://bit.ly/3zpW7Ph 🟠🟠🟠 🎖️ 5. Payabli, $20mm Series A Payabli builds the infrastructure that allows companies, specifically software companies, to embed and facilitate payments through APIs. Founded by Joseph Elias Phillips and William Corbera. 💸 Investors: QED Investors, Bling Capital, and more 🔗 https://bit.ly/4bwkGHE 🟠🟠🟠 🎖️ 6. Sift, $17.5mm Series A Sift develops tools to accelerate the development and ensure the reliability of complex machines (think Spacecrafts). Founded by Austin Spiegel and Karthik Gollapudi. 💸 Investors: GV (Google Ventures) 🔗 https://bit.ly/3L7zlyk 🟠🟠🟠 🎖️ 7. Ario, $16mm Seed Ario is an AI-powered assistant for parents that helps with daily tasks, from meal planning to scheduling playdates. Founded by Sumit Agarwal. 💸 Investors: Wing Venture Capital, Floodgate, and more 🔗 https://bit.ly/4eEjeG9 🟠🟠🟠 🎖️ 8. MagicSchool AI, $15mm Series A MagicSchool provides lesson-planning solutions for teachers to fight burnout. Founded by Adeel Khan. 💸 Investors: Bain Capital Ventures, Adobe Ventures and more 🔗 https://bit.ly/3RQt5Pn 🟠🟠🟠 🎖️ 9. AuthZed, $12mm Series A Authzed makes it easier for developers to build permissions in their applications. Founded by Jacob Moshenko and Jimmy Zelinskie. 💸 Investors: General Catalyst, Work-Bench, and more 🔗 https://bit.ly/4bqkh9B 🟠🟠🟠 🎖️ 10. SLUSHY.com, $10.2mm Seed SLUSHY is a creator monetization platform. Founded by David Gross and Fred Sprivock. 💸 Investors: Mantis Venture Capital, Jon Oringer, and more 🔗 https://bit.ly/4eN9Boi ⚫⚫⚫ I'm Gyan, Head of Community at Venture House. I create tools, guides, and other free resources for Junior VCs and founders. If you found this helpful, check out the Venture House website for more 👇 https://venturehouse.xyz/ #startups #venturecapital #funding #saas

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For NY Tech Week we'll be demo-ing Substrate at the South Park Commons Science Faire on Thursday: https://lnkd.in/e5JwDKKX There are so many incubator-shaped things out there these days, but there's nothing quite like SPC. It's like a chill, small-batch, locally-sourced alternative to YC, where you can either hang out as a member forever - or choose the VC-funded adventure. The -1 to 0 phase [0] they talk about at SPC is real, and it made a real difference for us to have a home at SPC. It takes a lot to quit your job and do something new, especially when it isn't entirely clear what you're doing. (1) Do it – take the leap! and (2) consider joining SPC. Though the core vision has remained the same, many of the important turns in our squiggle at Substrate (including the graph framework) came from those early days at SPC. If you're here for tech week and can't catch us at SPC on Thursday, DM me if you want to meet up! [0] https://lnkd.in/e6KEMr9V

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🤘🤘Biomining is very metal 🤘🤘 Honored and excited to be included by our friends Jackie Kossmann and Nicholas Adeyi at Congruent Ventures on their latest breakdown of Biomining with the work we're doing at Endolith 🤘Yes, we're going to need so much more of these critical minerals 🤘Yes, the industry has been trying to make biology increase yields for decades 🤘It's only now with a confluence of events like advances in synthetic biology techniques, the advent of genomics and data science, and cloud computing, are we able to do this at scale and truly unpack the black box of heap leaching. #WithBiologyWeCan https://lnkd.in/gpzNQWfr

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Berkeley SkyDeck is offering cash, resources, and critical introductions for admitted startups to its next cohort. Founders, review Darren Cooke’s great summary for health startups and other multi-stakeholder startups to convey your value proposition to potential investors and partners. I would like to add: Please include the data showing how you have validated your value proposition by talking to many, many decision makers. You must validate the key aspects of your business model with customer data to attract the key resources and partners you need to go from vision to reality. You can do this! 💪🏼 Go Bears 🐻! #startups #venturecapital #innovation #entrepreneurship | University of California, Berkeley | University of California, Berkeley, Haas School of Business | UC Berkeley Innovation & Entrepreneurship

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Interesting piece from Marc Andreessen on how startups are not getting the regulatory support they need to sustain America's technological leadership. "Regulatory agencies have been green lit to use brute force investigations, prosecutions, intimidation, and threats to hobble new industries, such as Blockchain. Regulatory agencies are being green lit in real time to do the same to Artificial Intelligence." While many investors themselves (both in the US and Europe) are worried how AI will change our lives, our jobs and social interactions, the top VC opinion leader thinks regulation is already too restrictive. #techstartups #techleadership #strategicgrowth

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Good morning New York! 3 weeks until Metal takes the stage for #NYTechWeek 🤘 If you're in PE or VC, register below to learn how you can accelerate diligence, portfolio monitoring, and reporting with applied AI https://lu.ma/9qlk7l3e

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Space tech-focused investment firm Seraphim Space Space launched its second VC fund, SSV II, to back early-stage startups in the global space tech market. The fund aims to build a portfolio of 30 startups, investing in seed and Series A stages. The latest fund's target size is larger than its predecessor's, which closed at £70M ($90M) in 2017. The fund's investment themes include AI applications for space data, in-orbit computing, space-enabled communications, and microgravity for science. Eutelsat is one of the limited partners that contributed to the latest fund. Seraphim Space aims to stand out with its track record, having returned three times the original investment from its first fund. The first fund's returns were driven by five exits, including Siemens' acquisition of UltraSOC and four IPOs of Arqit, AST SpaceMobile, Nightingale, and Spire Global. The British firm listed its growth fund Seraphim Space Investment Trust (SSIT) on the London Stock Exchange in July 2021, getting about £250M (~$300M) in gross proceeds. The fund's market cap touched an all-time low of £130M ($162M) in July 2023. The market for space tech is expected to grow significantly, with the World Economic Forum and McKinsey estimating it could be worth $1.8R by 2035.

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Serve Robotics is public on Nasdaq! With the recent surge in robotics, it's easy to forget the landscape in early 2021 when Serve was formed. It’s a story of grit. Postmates had just been acquired and the R&D division was spun out to form a new company. We were facing tight capital, global supply chain disruptions, severe chip shortages, and were in the middle of a trough of disillusionment with autonomous systems. AI had not yet caught the attention of the world. There were almost no playbooks, infrastructure, or government policies in place. Even business and consumer sentiment was murky. Creating a sustainable, autonomous delivery fleet sounded audacious but we rallied around a bold vision and created robots from the ground up that customers truly love. I'm incredibly happy for the team and grateful to Uber, NVIDIA, Postmates by Uber and our other investors for believing in our potential. Like on-demand delivery in 2016, autonomous robots sounded crazy just a few years ago and I had an absolute blast making it a reality. As Director of Product, I wore hats in PDE, research, sales, operations, policy, go-to-market strategies, strategic partnerships, integrations, and marketing. Loved all of it and learned a lot. If this resonates with any builders navigating similar challenges, I’d love to connect and hear your story. Maybe I can help 🚀 #robotics #AI #Nasdaq #productmanagement #startups

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When visionary and technical founders, like Ariyan Kabir, Brual Shah, and Satyandra K. (SK) Gupta, focus on solving customer problems with scientific breakthroughs in computer vision and robotics, industries are transformed. GrayMatter Robotics is helping some of the world's largest manufacturers deal with labor shortages by augmenting the workforce with physics-based AI automation for surface finishing -- a $2.5 trillion opportunity. We at Calibrate Ventures love seeing their hard work, proven value proposition and customer ROI, and attractive unit economics attract capital to scale the business to meet customer demand. And we're grateful to have been the largest and lead seed investor in the company. GrayMatter announced its $45 million Series B today, fueling its growth. Wellington Management led the round with participation from NGP Capital, Advance Venture Partners, SQN Venture Partners, 3M, B Capital , Bow Capital, OCA Ventures, and Swift Ventures. Read more in Brian Heater's excellent piece in TechCrunch today. https://lnkd.in/gsJGFr-b #AI, #robotics, #automation

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Congratulations to Yanwen Chen, founder of our portfolio co PHINXT Robotics, for being selected to the Female Foundry Visionaries AI incubator! 🤖 Phinxt's middleware solution enables deployment of autonomous robots to warehouses, 3PLs without running into the limitations of traditional robot deployment architectures (e.g. latency, infrastructure limitations etc), in a much shorter time frame and much more cost effectively. Watch this space as there are some other exciting news coming up soon :) #robotics #logistics #3PL #warehouserobots

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With quite a bit of excitement, we’re announcing our Seed round – led by London Venture Partners (Lvp) with material participation from Crane Venture Partners, and additional investment from Converge VC and DNX Ventures. This $3.3M of new funding will fuel the next phase of our company and we're kicking that journey off with a brand new name... Bitpart.AI At Bitpart.ai we're building a platform where game developers can find customizable pre-trained characters (aka Bitparts) for any genre of game -- virtual actors who perform as individuals or an ensemble cast. Our characters engage in multi-agent planning, interact with props and the environment, navigate the world, and of course, converse with Players and other NPCs. We are equally excited about applications of our technology to the world of robotics, film & TV production, industrial & defense simulations, and security. We are thrilled to be partnering with incredible investors on this journey. Lvp has been venture investing in games longer than anyone, since 2001, with partners who have held leadership roles at Electronic Arts (EA), Atari, Criterion, and others. Crane Venture Partners brings deep experience seeding and scaling startups built on AI & data in infrastructure, dev tools, and enterprise software. With Lvp’s investment, we welcome Matt Bilbey to our Board. We will learn from Matt’s incredible 27 year career with EA. Matt has run EA studios in North America, Europe, and Asia.  Matt was part of the leadership team responsible for the turn around of the FIFA franchise, the creation of Ultimate Team and the early live service phenomenon that is now a staple of games worldwide, seeing FIFA grow to over $1.5B/year. Matt spent his last term at EA as part of the Executive Team with responsibility for strategic growth across partner development, EA’s self publishing and subscription platform, Asia growth as well as eSports and M+A. Our institutional investors are joined by a venerable group angels: • Lowell Vaughen was the Strategy Fellow / Director of Product Strategy at Epic Games, for Fortnite and other titles. • Damian Isla is cofounder / Design Director of The Molasses Flood, and developer of the AI for the Halo series, who popularized the now ubiquitous Behavior Trees. • Tejas Kulkarni is cofounder of Common Sense Machines, generating rigged animated 3D models from words and images. HIRING: We will be expanding our engineering team, and bringing our characters to the Unreal engine, alongside our existing Roblox and Unity SDKs.  Engineers interested in Unreal, gameplay engineering, applied ML for games, HTN planning, and narrative authoring tools – please DM me.

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Cambridge Future Tech builds DeepTech ventures and last week we hit another milestone; we're co-founding our 15th venture 🤘 It's awesome building new ventures from the ground up. It's why we started CFT in the first place. It always feels great to be at the start of the build phase, helping founders articulate a new venture’s tech and potential, building a strong narrative. We’re collaborating closely with founders to transform groundbreaking ideas into companies. 🚀🚀🚀 More to come on this. I'm hyped to share what we're building 🤘 #venturebuilder #deeptech #startups #cambridge

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