Kal Freese

Rubbish is partnering with Replate to bring AI to food recovery 🍝🎉 Our goal is to use image recognition to estimate the quantity and weight of food recovered from donors. Replate is one of the largest food recovery organizations in America - when you have thousands of meal pickups a week, saving precious minutes on filling out forms means getting food to those in need sooner and fresher. We’re excited to apply the computer vision technology we’ve been fine-tuning for waste, litter, and brand recognition to this important and impactful space. We couldn’t ask for a better industry partner than Maen Mahfoud and the amazing team at Replate. We’re at ReFED this week to explore how Rubbish can help with food recovery can as part of its mission to create clean, healthy, and sustainable communities for everyone. Check out some live in-conference demo action 🎥👇 https://lnkd.in/gKD6AzzJ [Fixed the video link so it's not tiny.] #refed #foodrecovery #sustainablewastemanagement #circulareconomy #ai

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NY friends! Please come see me at Tech Day on my panel discussing the future of the NY tech ecosystem and what I hope to bring to it!

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A SAFE and convertible note had a baby and Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati was the midwife- out popped the D-SAFE! 👶🏽🎉 A new #climatetech funding instrument was announced by Elemental Excelerator last week. One of the company’s main goals is to support smaller, up and coming companies during the awkward “Scale Gap” phase between #VC funding and natural growth. It’s called the #DSAFE (Development Simple Agreement for Future Equity) and it aims to aid the process by giving companies a small amount of cash to overcome initial risks and expenses during the developmental stages of a product launch or company. How does it work? D-SAFE has a redemption clause meaning companies can choose to have their payments offered as a loan or convert to equity at the investor’s discretion. Funders and companies will have clear communication and expectations about where the money is going and how it will be applied to either the company or the projects at hand. Financiers and companies will work together with more #transparency, and that’s a great boon for #startups and VC alike. As of this month, Elemental has already invested using D-SAFE in eight different companies, including Dimensional Energy and Origen — both companies investing in innovative and out-of-the-box solutions to environmental issues! Seems like a win-win on the surface. What do you all think about the D-SAFE? Alfredo Coppola Momoka Ueda Tim Wagner Stephen D. Torres Olya Irzak Natsuho Toyama Noriya Tarutani Shin Ogawa

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Pipedream Raises $13M as It Looks to Build Underground Middle Mile Delivery Network Delivery startup Pipedream Labs has raised $13 million in a funding round led by Starship Ventures, with additional participation from Cortado Ventures, Myelin Ventures, and other investors, as reported by Michael Wolf for The Spoon. The infusion of capital will primarily be directed towards enhancing Pipedream’s “Instant Pickup” service and initiating the construction of an ambitious middle-mile network in an undisclosed city. This innovative network aims to facilitate faster and more cost-effective urban deliveries. Pipedream’s Instant Pickup service deploys its underground delivery technology at grocery stores, restaurants, and retail locations. McCurrach explained that this system allows a restaurant or grocery store to transfer an order to a customer in under 15 seconds. The company has received 100 preorders for the Instant Pickup systems, likely including its pilot project with Wendy’s announced last year. In addition to expanding Instant Pickup, Pipedream Labs plans to select a city for its first large-scale middle-mile network installation. Although McCurrach did not reveal the specific location, he shared a graphic depicting the Phoenix metro area with a diagram of a "small middle mile network." “This year, we will be selecting a city to build our first middle-mile network—a large-scale underground delivery network that makes current deliveries faster and cheaper in a city—and collaborating with local government and city officials to maximize the benefits of our low-cost, fast delivery system for all their citizens. Construction is set to begin this year, with plans to start utilizing the network by next spring,” McCurrach stated. The company is expected to find more immediate traction with its Instant Pickup service, as deploying extremely short-range delivery systems within a confined area is considerably easier than implementing a city-wide installation. The growing demand for curbside pickup and fast food drive-thru innovations presents a timely opportunity for Pipedream Labs to expand its presence in these sectors. Pipedream Labs' push into curbside pickup and drive-thru technology aligns with current trends in grocery and quick service restaurant industries, which are increasingly focusing on enhancing their pickup services and reimagining drive-thru experiences. By advancing its underground delivery technology, Pipedream Labs is poised to transform urban logistics, offering a glimpse into the future of efficient, rapid, and cost-effective delivery solutions. Stay ahead with the latest in food delivery news from the weekly Boolanga Business Bites newsletter, brought to you by Wear Your Brand. Sign up for our LinkedIn newsletter now to receive weekly updates directly to your inbox every Monday.

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At last week’s ClimateTech Coffee 🚲 Bryan White and I were joined by Kimberly Gilbert, PhD to hear about her work on Carbon Neutralization and Ocean Storage (CNOS) through her company pHathom. Here’s a recap: The ocean naturally absorbs CO2 over time, but we’ve added so much that the ocean has become increasingly acidic. Ocean pH has dropped from 8.2 to 8.1 globally over the last hundred years, and as pH drops it becomes harder for coral-based organisms to form shells. To combat this, Ocean Alkalinity Enhancement (OAE) is an intervention that both reverses ocean acidification and removes CO2 from the atmosphere. Challenges with traditional OAE: - When you add the alkalinity into the ocean, it spreads out. It’s hard to measure the change in pH. - You don’t know exactly when the extra CO2 will be absorbed. Modeling and measurement companies are trying to help with this problem. Advantages of CNOS: - Co2 is captured directly at a coastal power plant or refinery, and then the concentrated Co2 is pumped into water that has limestone (and/or other alkaline materials) in it.  - This means the Co2 is dissolved onsite and the pH can be equilibrated onsite, which makes accurate measurement more feasible. Factors that affect progress:  - We’ll start seeing more companies enter in this space as the chemistry and its impacts are better understood and seen as safe  - Local and national permitting are a huge bottleneck - On the international permitting level, the London Protocol has a blanket ban on ocean geoengineering for anything except for research. There were good reasons for doing that, but it’s unclear who decides when that can change and the circumstances under which the ban is lifted. (Note: pHathom is not doing geoengineering; it’s doing water treatment on-site and releasing it back as ocean water) Open questions for the category/technology: - Can they come up with enough low-cost alkalinity sources, and get them in a way that doesn’t cause additional environmental damage or Co2 emissions?  - This approach will require pumping a lot of water. How much will that cost and how can the cost be driven down?  - Putting 100 plants’ worth of bicarbonate into the ocean is likely fine for ocean health relative to the climate benefit, but what is the point where the tradeoffs cross over? Some groups doing good work in this space:  [C]Worthy Carbon to Sea Initiative  University Research: UC Santa Barbara, University of Tasmania, GEOMAR, Dalhousie University, Scripps Join us for the next one in May! Details coming soon, and you can get updates by subscribing to the series page here: https://lnkd.in/g7DTGm2V

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🚨 🚘 An exciting day here at 8090 Industries as we ‘roll out’ our latest investment in ENSO - 2023 Earthshot Prize Finalist, to revolutionize a stagnant industry undergoing the largest shift since its inception, with no solution in place, an aging workforce, lacking ingenuity and a business model out of touch with the dynamic needs of its customers - TIRES. World, meet Gunnlaugur Erlendsson, the industrialist pioneering a new dawn for the tire industry. But first, a quick history lesson: __________________________ In 1898, Franklin "Frank" Seiberling, jobless, with a wife and three children, borrowed $3,500 for a down payment from his brother-in-law, to purchase an old strawboard factory in Ohio, to open a rubber company. A science and history nut, he named it after Charles Goodyear, the pioneer of vulcanization, the main method of how rubber was produced. Over the next decade, they brought mechanization and technology to the cumbersome and time-consuming process of hand building tires — enabling one man to produce 60 tires in ten hours as opposed to five tires built by hand in a day. His Seiberling State machine revolutionized tire building and led to an explosion in tire production output. By 1907 - it caught the attention of Henry Ford who purchased 1,200 sets of tires for the Model T. And as they say, the rest is history. By 1913 - Over half the tires made in the U.S. were manufactured on Seiberling’s machines. By 1916 - The The Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company became the largest tire producer in the world. _____________________ Today much has changed. @Goodyear is no longer the largest tire producer and tire manufacturers no longer own the direct relationship to fleets. That capitalistic, swashbuckling energy and entrepreneurial spirit that built Goodyear and pioneered the tire industry is in short supply, just when it needs it most as a global transition towards EVs compels the greatest growth opportunity for the tire industry in over a century. Led by Gunnlaugur Erlendsson, Enso produces tires perfectly fit for a world increasing run on EVs - that are tailored to endure the heavy weight and torque, last longer, cheaper and increase range by more than 10% today while bringing circularity to the supply chain and data through owning the direct relationship with fleets.  Don’t just take our word for it, some of the largest fleets in the world from Amazon to city cab fleets in Europe are already running on Enso tires and this is just the beginning. 👀 Stay tuned. Much to come! cc Kerem Ozmen Wes Mendenhall Filip Vurdelja Haluk Sabanci Dincer Grant Brown Ishan Meswani Garuth A. Andrew Irwin #climatetech #decarbonization

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These days staying ahead means continuously evolving. SWARM Engineering, one of Serra's portfolio companies, has released AVA an Agrifood Virtual Advisor designed to help you do just that. By using advanced AI on a SaaS platform, combined with ChatGPT, AVA can hold meaningful conversations to uncover and prioritize challenges, offering actionable insights and even fully working applications. Whether it’s optimizing logistics or improving supply/demand planning, AVA accelerates problem-solving while simultaneously capturing essential corporate knowledge. AVA is designed to enhance operational decision-making, for million dollar savings. I’d encourage you to take a look at what SWARM Engineering is doing with AVA. #Agrifood #Sustainability #AI #Innovation #Operations   https://lnkd.in/g5tQKvZ5

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🔥 Thrilled to see Hydrolix crushing it with a $35M Series B! 🔥 Data is the new oil, but too much gets discarded due to prohibitive storage costs. Hydrolix cracks this with its streaming #datalake platform that leverages object storage, decoupled compute, indexing, & compression. As Marty Kagan puts it: 'We’re cheaper than cold storage and faster than hot storage' Hydrolix’s streaming data lake platform is a game-changer for #AI, #observability, & #security workloads. 💥 Real-time query performance at terabyte scale 💰75%+ savings on log mgmt & 4x more data retained  ☁️ Stateless & containerized for seamless scaling with Amazon Web Services (AWS) S3, Google Cloud GCS, Microsoft Azure Blob 💡 Had the early conviction (first investor) that data is key to unlocking AI & enterprise workloads. It's proving right. Huge thanks to Marty Kagan Hasan Alayli for letting me early on their journey to build an impessive company 🙏 Super pumped to have awesome Aaron Perman at S3 Ventures leading this round along with other strong existing investors - Nava Ventures (Manish Patel) Wing Venture Capital (Peter Wagner) Oregon Venture Fund (Matt Compton Scott Grout) and others 💪 Onwards! 🚀🚀🚀 #cloud #data #ai #ml #llm #largelanguagemodels #analytics #security #loganalytics #datalake #datawarehouse https://lnkd.in/g5i6afP5

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One thing that has really changed about seed investing in the last three or four years is what it means to have coverage on seed opportunities. A few years ago, good seed firms saw the vast majority of interesting companies raising seed rounds. The persistent presence of multi-stage firms at seed had changed the game (again). There are many categories where seed firms see great companies raising $2-4 million seed rounds and multi-stage funds see most (but not all) of those companies *and* see teams raising $5-7 million (or more) seed rounds from scratch. I have seen many seed companies surprised to learn that there are stealthy companies in their categories who have raised a lot more money to pursue the same ideas and their investors never saw the company. Doesn’t mean the better-funded company will win, but it does change the calculus around perceived competition.

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A good dataroom makes a great impression, but is not that obvious what that looks like and what consumer VCs are looking for! Having gone through hundreds of these at dmg ventures and seen the good, the bad and the ugly we want to help entrepreneurs putting their best foot forward. So Taos Edmondson, CFA wrote a great piece on how B2C founders can build data rooms that investors will love. Have a read!

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Wei D. (Founder and CEO of unicorn Clipboard Health) dropped some major 💎 gems of wisdom during her fireside chat with PearX founders at Pear VC SF Studio yesterday. These really resonated: 💎 PMF isn't something you achieve once - staying relevant to your market is an ongoing pursuit 💯 (Wei shared that to date she still LOVES talking with customers and - even at 1000+ employees and with all the success already achieved - she continues to chase unlocks for the business and recently obtained her nursing assistant certification in order to stay close to users and unlock new insights with them 🥇) 💎 If you're scared of sales, don't think of it as sales -- you're just talking to someone who you're trying to help. Approach your customers with care and listen to them as you would a friend. The moment it's an actual conversation with a friend, that's probably where you're going to get your first sale. If it feels "salesy" you're probably not doing it the right way. 🤝 💎 Do whatever it takes to get in front of your customers! (For Wei this meant driving around at 8 months pregnant and walking up to DMs at nursing homes!) 🚗 💎 The users you speak with in your market will give you the key jargon you need to use to speak back to your market. Listen intently and adopt their language! 🗣 💎 There is little you decide that can't be undone. Be smart, make calculated decisions, but don't overthink things --- err on the side of action and quick decision making. 🏃‍♀️ 💎 Iterate until your users feel passionately about what you're doing (ie. they get angry when the product is down or doesn't work). You want your users to care A LOT about the problem you're solving. 😡 Wei's resilience, grit and work ethic are off the charts. What an inspiration! 👏 #femalefounders #inspiration #techfounder #unicornfounder #hero

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Just shipped this week's Diaspora.nz podcast with Paul Copplestone, founder & CEO at Supabase. We talk about: ⚡️why open source is an unfair advantage — as a product development strategy, supercharging recruiting, and helping build customer community. ⚡️how they are building the end-to-end tech stack for AI startups — seeing many customers grow into the millions of users in just weeks, growing to be one of the most tagged products by makers on Product Hunt + most redeemed Y Combinator “perks.” ⚡️raising $116M, and scaling to ~80 people in 30+ countries over the past 4.5 years, operating as a distributed + asynchronous team. ⚡️building three startups over nearly a decade living in South East Asia. Subscribe + listen links in comments below👇 Subscribe at diaspora.nz for weekly episodes 🎧👈

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As a tech novice and code ignorant, I'm incredibly proud of one of our key achievements this year at Equal Food: automations. We've reduced our FTE needs by 15% and cut process errors by 90% through AI-based automations. Here are a few examples of manual repetitive tasks we've eliminated. And as a cost management enthusiast, I love the fact that we have accomplished this without adding any SaaS recurrent expenses. B2B Order Management (3h daily saving) We transitioned from a system that no longer met our needs to integrating individual clients' files for order management. A script compiles client data, centralizes it, and populates deliveries, routes, P&L, economic margins, and other critical data into a single dashboard with historical data. We ran our B2B without this for two years - crazy! Invoicing (5h daily saving) Previously, we manually processed over 70 invoices daily in our B2B (no e-commerce integrations) for three years. Now, we've integrated existing invoicing software with our datasets via API, automating invoice issuance with one click, taking just 10 seconds. Free of cost. Weekly Produce Sourcing (10h weekly saving) A script retrieves our produce needs from a Google Sheet, sends over 20 emails to farmers, and logs each order line item per business vertical (B2C, B2B, Offices) in our ERP system. Free of cost, forever. Accounts Receivable (7h weekly saving) An automation sources clients' open balances by location and fiscal group from our system and sends detailed breakdowns to each client in two languages via email. Our clients love the detail and simplicity of it too! Transportation Guides (1h daily saving) Similar to invoicing, a different API integration handles transportation documents with one click in 5 seconds. ERP Weekly Validation and Payments (2h weekly saving) By adding logic and scripts to our ERP, we set up tables with supplier balances to be paid weekly. This reduces errors in our +50 weekly payments, automating approval processes by sending summaries to the relevant team members. Three clicks, 10 seconds. Free of cost. Warehouse Hour Management (3h weekly saving) There are tons of apps out there for check-in at work, but I couldn't justify a €100 monthly recurring expense just for team check-ins and check-outs at our warehouse. Instead, we created a branded web-based app where each team member checks in and out, calculating their working hours, benchmarking against their weekly expected hours, and summarising overwork for payroll integration. And the web app looks great! I'm no tech expert, no previous coding experience, all self taught. AI enabled learning. Would love to hear your experiences! #HookedOnAI #buildinginpublic

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Another awesome investor dinner, this time with 2x exited founder Sahin Boydas of Claros Farm. Claros has pioneered "generative nature," a revolutionary soilless farming method with 10x less water usage. Using affordable hardware, advanced AI, proprietary liquids, and bacteria, Claros enhances their products' nutritional content. For example, their strawberries contain 190% of daily recommended Vitamin C and can be grown much more cost-effectively compared to vertical & traditional farms. Website: https://www.clarosfarm.com It was great to hear the Q&A from CPG and tech investors alike. A tech leader from Silicon Valley, Sahin presented a bold vision for tech-enabled scalability while remaining humble to the advice of experienced CPG operators and investors. Claros' round is already 50%+ closed. Reach out for an intro if interested. -- At Supernova Dinners, we hyper-curate your exact investor persona for a private event with you. Investors arrive having already reviewed your deck and already been vetted as accredited, actively deploying, and matching your target industry and growth stage. We'll coach you on a 15min pitch, 45min Q&A, and then treat everyone to a buffet-style private chef dinner in a gorgeous luxury home. By lowering the barrier to entry, we're building a nationwide network of HNW private investors who invest directly into companies and funds as LPs. Website: https://lnkd.in/gukzKfD9 #investors #supernova #astronomic #austintx

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The real issue isn't the asset class itself, but rather selecting the right VC. Unlike other asset classes, the return dispersion in VC is immense. VCs that adopt a gambling approach often drag down the median returns. In contrast, those with a structured and disciplined investment thesis can significantly reduce exposure to losing companies while enhancing their upside potential by investing the right amount at the right valuation. Achieving favorable returns in VC requires a programmatic approach: 1. Great manager selection and access: Identifying and gaining access to top-tier managers is crucial. 2. Consistency across cycles: Long-term commitment and consistency in deployments across various market cycles are key. This doesn’t mean investing the same amount each year, but maintaining a relatively stable investment pace where the VC is able to invest for value not just a trend follower. Many LPs tend to commit more capital during peak periods (e.g., 2019-2021) and scale back during tougher times. This natural psychological behavior often results in suboptimal outcomes. Peak periods can lead to behavioral changes and the inclusion of 'tourist' investors, ultimately affecting valuations and returns. It's all about dollar-based risk-adjusted returns. Selecting the right VC with a disciplined investment approach can make all the difference. Consistent, strategic investments, rather than reactionary ones, are essential for capturing the best returns over the long term. Thoughts?

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It was a real honor to interview Brad Burnham co-founder of Union Square Ventures and partner Placeholder on the history of hype cycles in technology and the value they bring to capital and market formation. Brad has had tremendous success across decades investing at the frontier - when it was the frontier/ before it was obvious. Crypto is still the underdog and his views on the opportunity and its nuances are prescient. Specifically it is both a technical and financial innovation which can lead to excess volatility and a unique muscle as it relates to being a venture manager. But the returns are real. And the innovation is real despite some of the the common narratives. No one debates the breakthrough applications in AI at M13 we have been very active. It is also very clear that incumbents have massive data and distribution advantages which can make it challenging to find the right pockets to invest. AI is on its own hype cycle and as always the best teams (typically with contrarian takes) win. Very exciting times to be a venture investor.

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Nearly a year ago I wrote this post on seed extensions - why they are so prevalent and some best practices in raising one. Reflecting on the present, this still rings so true. While the start to 2024 has been more promising, the clouds haven't fully parted yet. We're seeing the bar for Series A metrics continue to be higher still (for example, revenue targets north of $2M ARR). Here are my tips for raising a strong seed extension from my learnings at Bread and Butter Ventures: https://lnkd.in/g4vEd-Pe #earlystage #venturecapital #seedextension

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Curious about Teddy B, the investor? 👀 See here for a recording of what a pitch with Teddy looks like: https://lnkd.in/guRPUR-Z this is just one of the many amazing applications of unSurvey, which is currently LIVE on Product Hunt! Would really appreciate your feedback and support 💚 https://bit.ly/unSurvey-PH Big shoutout to Anthony for the initial v0 of Teddy! #unsurvey #conversationalAI #engagement #personalization

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