Ab Emam

I just read this compelling Forbes piece on how femtech startups are increasingly turning to strategic partnerships to overcome headwinds like limited funding, clinical and regulatory complexity, and go-to-market constraints. Thank you, Theresa Neil for writing it! Some takeaways that resonated with me: -Partnerships can unlock resources and credibility. Collaborating with established institutions, payers, insurers, or healthcare systems provides not just capital but validation, access, and trust. -Risk sharing matters. For many investors, women’s health is still seen as high risk. Joint ventures or co-development deals can distribute that risk and make investment more attractive. -Aligned incentives win. The most successful partnerships are ones where all parties benefit—patient outcomes, cost savings, reputation, and market reach. Data & outcomes are key. To scale, femtechs must shift from promise to proof: demonstrable results, real-world evidence, and strong metrics. If the women’s health / femtech sector is going to break through the ceiling, we need more of these bridge-building partnerships—between startups, payers, tech platforms, providers, and public health. A few questions I’m reflecting on (and would love your feedback): 1. What partnership models have you seen work in medtech / healthtech / femtech? 2. How do we encourage more institutional investors to commit capital to women’s health? 3. What role should government, non-profit, or philanthropic funding play in de-risking these ventures? If you’re actively working in femtech, women’s health, or health innovation, I’d love to hear your thoughts or examples. Let’s keep pushing this frontier together.

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I am excited to announce that Shine Capital has led AudioShake’s $14M Series A. Our investment represents the culmination of two years of searching for a company that will define the next generation of audio. Since 2023, we have been asking ourselves the question, "What technology will be used pervasively across the totality of the audio landscape?" Then we met Jessica Powell and Luke Miner, founders of AudioShake. AudioShake makes a suite of AI-powered tools for processing audio that include stem-splitting, voice isolation, speaker separation, and more. These primitives are critical infrastructure for almost any task involving audio, as evidenced by the breadth of use cases that the company serves. The Walt Disney Company and Downtown Music use AudioShake to make tracks available for sync licensing. Film studios and post-production houses use AudioShake to clean up sound from microphones to prevent re-recordings and manual audio engineering. Sports leagues and broadcasters use AudioShake to separate stadium noise from commentary to enable clean captioning and crisper audio. And Big Tech and frontier labs use AudioShake to prepare their audio data for multimodal AI training. We believe that audio will be the most important medium in the age of AI, defined by explosive growth across three categories that are even better with AudioShake: 1) Audio-as-AI-Interface: For the first time, people can perform complex compute operations using their voice. Conversing with AI will propel voice assistant usage well beyond its current ~50% adoption. 2) Explosion of Content: The rate at which user-generated content is made continues to accelerate, which will be further amplified by the possibility of AI-generated content. Audio is a superset of video — nearly every video uses sound to convey meaning, message, or emotion. 3) Voice Agents for Business: More than $100B of phone labor is performed annually in the United States. While some of it sits in call centers, most of it is fractional work. Businesses across finance, healthcare, and beyond have rapidly adopted phone agents. We are fortunate to partner with Jessica Powell and Luke Miner, passionate entrepreneurs and audiophiles dedicated to making audio as easy to work with as images or text. Audio contains vast amounts of information and creative possibility, and AudioShake will help unlock it. Thank you to our friends at Indicator Ventures for connecting us to Jessica. We are thrilled to support the AudioShake team with them, alongside Origin Ventures, Thomson Reuters, Precursor Ventures and Background Capital.

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Some quick and candid / not just bullish observations on AI in digital health, especially given the enormous level of noise at #JPM2026. Last (5th) post in the 5-on-5 series, opening 2026 with 5 different pieces with 5 observations each on the market for digital health founders. We are passed the hype phase. I actually think 2026 will be the year when saying 'AI' or 'Agentic' will raise more questions than applause. Too many pilots are not scaling, too many promises are yet to be fulfilled. When building a product takes less time, the path to commoditization also takes less time. Scribes, chart summarizations, etc. which leads IMO to NRR being much more important than ARR (show you are resilient to price pressure and churn) Most real impact of AI is on the back end of new companies. This is massive and hence any budget that looks similar to 2023 / 2024 or even 2025 budgets should render a very serious question As a byproduct, and unlike 2021, increased head count becomes a negative signal if the company is indeed AI-centered (proxy to inefficiency) And another key difference from 2021: raising a lot of money (with a big valuation) while the public market is at best open for high 9-digit revenue, is really playing very aggressive poker. For additional color, see this interview with CTech by Calcalist (first comment)

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it took a chat with chief (bot) to get an accelerator application for Founder Village ready without writing one sentence here is who did what: Chief of Staff coordinated the whole flow and filled the application form directly in the browser dr eggbot built a custom bot called Jurado, a brutal AI accelerator judge Jurado scored the deck across 6 rounds, ending at 8.1/10 Slides rebuilt our Canva deck in Google Slides CFO bot closed our last 12 months of revenue straight from bank statements what worked: the judge loop caught weak spots I wouldnt have seen, and CFO bot caught an investment that had been counted as revenue I still review everything and hit submit myself how are you using bots in your stack?

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