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Brian Ascher shared thisCongratulations to the Kauffman Fellows on #kfday day. I am forever grateful to the program for giving me the opportunity join the venture industry 28 years ago at Venrock, and supporting me with a network of talented peers. Thanks to each of my Fellows 4 classmates Jim Broderick, James Roberts, Patrick J. Ennis, Lisa Skeete Tatum, Nelson Stacks, Dan Malven, Rob Kornblum, and Mike Partsch for allowing me to learn from each of you as we entered the industry during the craziness of the dotcom era. I am also grateful to my mentors Ray Rothrock and Tony Sun for taking me under the wings. Wishing www.kauffmanfellows.org many more years of success and positive impact!
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Brian Ascher shared thisCongratulations Jason Wenk and Altruist for the great exit to Vanguard, and congratulations to my Venrock Partner Nick Beim on an outstanding investment. You had total conviction from Day 0! Not only is this a great combination for Altruist and Vanguard, but it will benefit American households by providing better and much cheaper financial advice, just as Vanguard revolutionized index funds.Brian Ascher shared thisVanguard announced today that it will acquire Altruist. Vanguard very rarely makes acquisitions, so to acquire a company of Altruist's scale and momentum is a statement of conviction and a big deal. Venrock seeded Altruist in 2018 when it was just an extraordinary entrepreneur and an idea. The entrepreneur was Jason Wenk. His idea was to create a vertically integrated platform for financial advisors spanning custody, practice management software, asset management and AI – a non-obvious and very big swing. We worked closely with Jason for 8 years to further develop this idea, build out the team and scale the company. 😎 Two cool facts about Jason's background and how Altruist got started: * I first met Jason when he was running FormulaFolios, his prior company. I was fascinated that he had built it to $31m in revenue and $4m in EBITDA in 4 years with only $100K of his own capital. We didn’t ultimately invest, but I was super impressed with what he had achieved and knew that I wanted to invest in him in the future. * At a dinner ceremony when Jason was receiving an E&Y Entrepreneur of the Year Award for his work at FormulaFolios, he was already restless with the bug to start a new company. He told his wife that he wanted to build something bigger and more impactful, and she told him to go for it. He left the dinner for 15 minutes to call me, and we were off to the races to create Altruist. 🚀 One of the wildest moments in Altruist's history is when it launched its powerful AI tax planning agent, which led public stocks of wealth management companies to lose $130 billion in market value (which McKinsey dubbed the “Altruist moment”), a signal of the scale of the disruption the company was bringing to the industry. 🙏 It’s been an extraordinary privilege to work with Jason and the Altruist team. They are the most disruptive innovators the industry has seen in decades, and it was a very smart move by Vanguard to acquire them. Congrats to an exceptional group of people: Jason Wenk, Mazi Bahadori, Harpreet Ahluwalia, Amit Miglani, CPA, Piret Loone, Michelle Schotts, Anna Wiggins, Dan Petty, Robert Mennow, MBA, Adam Grealish, Nimesh Patel, Kunal Joshi, Gokul Ramanathan, Cecilia Chen, Ken Vincent and the whole team at Altruist. Here’s today’s WSJ story on the acquisition: https://lnkd.in/ggFzGjbV Here’s a blog I wrote with some reflections on Altruist: https://lnkd.in/gCCT3FcT Thanks also to Endeavor, Linda Rottenberg and Antonio Lück for their awesome support of Altruist.
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Brian Ascher shared this🎙It was my pleasure to host INRIX CEO Bryan Mistele on Venrock's Running Through Walls Podcast to talk about how their Innovation Week engages the entire company and keeps innovation thriving in this late stage company. Tune in to hear how INRIX architects these internal hackathons to foster true innovation and how an astounding 25+ projects a year turn into production code and internal improvements that move the needle for INRIX. https://lnkd.in/gRmzcNHQ
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Brian Ascher shared thisA huge milestone! SmartBiz is now SmartBiz Bank! You will now be able to do even more for small businesses nationwide! #SmallBusinessGrowth #SmartBizBankBrian Ascher shared thisExciting News: We are now a bank! We’re thrilled to share a major milestone in our journey: Regulatory approval and the successful acquisition of United Community Bancshares and Centrust Bank, N.A. With this acquisition, we’ve officially become SmartBiz Bank, N.A., operating under SmartBiz Bancshares, Inc. What does this mean? SmartBiz Bank is now equipped to step in as a true financing partner and provide a broader range of technology-enabled financial solutions to even more small businesses across the U.S. We have always believed that small businesses are the backbone of the U.S. economy, yet traditional banks have often overlooked their banking needs. So we’re thrilled to be able to continue empowering small business owners to thrive by giving them access to the financial services they need, now in an expanded capacity as SmartBiz Bank, N.A. Member FDIC Read more at https://hubs.ly/Q03c9Cv10 #SmartBizBank #smallbusinessbanking
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Brian Ascher shared thisCongrats Raj Kapoor and Josh Felser! Important work you are doing and the whole planet is rooting for your success!Brian Ascher shared thisOur big day has arrived! Though Climactic has been talked about often in the media, we have yet to officially and publicly launch our fund. Today we are doing jumping jacks as we reveal Climactic to the world. None of this would have been possible without the incredible support of so many and we are grateful! Team Climactic is Raj Kapoor, Josh Felser, Peter Sun, Paul Hawken and Van Jones. We created Climactic to leverage our collective skills and knowledge to help #climatetech #founders build and scale big, bold, impactful companies. Our unified mission is to decarbonize the Enterprise and mobility with a software-first mentality and yes #AI is a vital ingredient in the mix. (https://lnkd.in/d3XnPn75) Today we have a timely request to help us spread the word, especially to climate founders, that we are open for business. We have worked hard to get here, though not as hard as our founders of course, and we truly need your influence to help us grow! Thank you for your ongoing support. You can read more scintillating details about us here https://tcrn.ch/41ogxlJ and here https://lnkd.in/dzhvsAgYClimactic launches first fund as its partners eye looming M&A boom in climate tech | TechCrunchClimactic launches first fund as its partners eye looming M&A boom in climate tech | TechCrunch
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Brian Ascher shared thisExcited to see @Nightfall help make GenAI safe from a data privacy perspective. "With great power comes great responsibility."Brian Ascher shared this🚨 "GenAI has the potential to offer substantial productivity benefits for employers and employees, but the lack of a complete DLP solution is impeding the safe adoption of AI," says Nightfall CEO and Co-Founder, Isaac Madan. "As a result, many organizations have either completely blocked these tools or have resorted to using multiple security products as a patchwork solution to mitigate the risk." This struggle is ultimately what drove the creation of Nightfall’s latest innovation: Nightfall for GenAI. Learn more about Nightfall for GenAI on our website, and check out our latest integration, Nightfall for ChatGPT, on Product Hunt! 👇 https://lnkd.in/eRRWiHy8Nightfall for ChatGPT - Stay compliant and redact sensitive data in ChatGPT | Product HuntNightfall for ChatGPT - Stay compliant and redact sensitive data in ChatGPT | Product Hunt
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Brian Ascher shared thisBrian Ascher shared this🚀 Exciting News at Nightfall! 🏆 We are thrilled to announce that Nightfall has once again been recognized as a Data Security Leader by G2. 🌟 We extend a sincere thank you to all our customers who took the time to share their positive experiences with Nightfall. Your feedback is invaluable, inspiring us to constantly innovate and enhance our product to meet the evolving security challenges faced by organizations. Thank you for being a part of Nightfall's journey. Together, we are shaping the future of data protection and security. 🌐 #g2 #cybersecurity #dlp #datasecurity
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Brian Ascher shared thisBrian Ascher shared this🎉We’re excited to announce the launch of Nightfall AI for Zendesk! Discover, classify, and protect sensitive data in your Zendesk instance with the single click of a button. Over the last four years, we have seen rapid growth of sensitive data stored in the cloud, particularly for customer support agents using Zendesk. These findings are further validated by a recent study we conducted on thousands of organizations. On average, they found 10+ API keys unprotected in Zendesk for every 100 employees, making it an attractive target for hackers looking for PII, PHI, Passwords and API Keys, and payment information. In response to this growing problem, we have launched Nightfall for Zendesk. Nightfall for Zendesk is the only cloud-native DLP solution that has: 1️⃣ Automated ticket remediation actions - redaction, deletion of attachments, and marking tickets as private 2️⃣ Agentless install in minutes via a single click 3️⃣ AI-powered detection for the most accurate data classification #cloudsecurity #fintech #PCI #PII #Zendesk #cybersecurity #customerservice #DLP
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Brian Ascher shared thisEnjoyed chatting with Anne Sraders about OpenAI's ChatGPT and the future of Generative AI in the Enterprise. #ai https://lnkd.in/gxTPfYYcA.I. tools like ChatGPT are exploding on the internet—and one VC believes companies could be using it in every department somedayA.I. tools like ChatGPT are exploding on the internet—and one VC believes companies could be using it in every department someday
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1mo
It came out awesome!
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1mo
Congratulations Jason Wenk and Altruist for the great exit to Vanguard, and congratulations to my Venrock Partner Nick Beim on an outstanding investment. You had total conviction from Day 0! Not only is this a great combination for Altruist and Vanguard, but it will benefit American households by providing better and much cheaper financial advice, just as Vanguard revolutionized index funds.
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Brian Ascher reacted on thisBrian Ascher reacted on thisToday is KF Day, celebrating the power of the Kauffman Fellows and the incredible connections that have made an impact above and beyond venture capital. I want to share just one of these many moments. Meeting Phil Wickham in 2009 changed my career. It was over ice cream that Phil, then CEO of Kauffman Fellows and a member of the KF Charter Class, encouraged me to join KF 14. A month after becoming a Kauffman Fellow, Monica Gomez Chico (my wife) and I enrolled in an adoption process, following a long struggle to conceive. Three months later, Endeavor asked me to move to NYC and become president of the organization. This was a lot to take in in a matter of months. My first daughter, Fernanda, came into our lives two weeks before a Kauffman Fellows Module. I called Phil and explained why I would miss it. Shortly after, I received my daughter's first present and her first book: Good Night Gorilla, from Phil and the Kauffman Fellows team. This is how the KF Network shows up, not just for career wins but life’s big moments. At the next Module, which always starts with our traditional Debrief where Fellows in the class share ups and downs since we last met, I took a bit longer to explain my new life, new family, and new job. My class erupted in supportive cheers and started calling me “El presidente,” which, to this day, kind of stuck. I don’t believe in mysterious powers, destiny, or esoteric forces. But if I did, meeting Phil over ice cream would be the equivalent of the rupture: a life-changing event that unleashed a chain reaction. 16 years later, with two wonderful daughters and the privilege of continuing the work Phil once did, I feel that thanking him for buying ice cream is a good way to celebrate KF Day. Thank you, Phil, and cheers to all of our wonderful Fellows! #KFDay #KauffmanFellows
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Brian Ascher liked thisBrian Ascher liked thisIn December 2024 Bryan Roberts and I predicted that HCSC would walk away from Cigna's Medicare Advantage book. My reasoning: the benefits were too rich, the risk pool was adverse, and the whole thing was "too big to clean up." We got that wrong. They bought it for $3.3B. A year later, grading our predictions, the best we could do was list HCSC under “Things That Surprised Us” — specifically, their "willingness to incinerate a ton of money." Today HCSC announced it's exiting MA entirely in Connecticut, New York, DC and 11 other markets, cutting HealthSpring from 580 counties to 450, and terminating plans covering ~6% of members. 2025 underwriting loss: $4.57B, up from $1.33B. So…in the spirit of private school grading, we are resubmitting our homework and going to take credit for our prediction. Turns out the right prediction wasn't "HCSC walks away." It was "HCSC walks away — it'll just cost them $3.3B and two years first." Here is our [correct] 2025 prediction: https://lnkd.in/g5F6bqKmDr. Oz turbocharges Medicare Advantage and everyone monitors their glucose: 10 health care predictions for 2025 from top investors | FortuneDr. Oz turbocharges Medicare Advantage and everyone monitors their glucose: 10 health care predictions for 2025 from top investors | Fortune
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Brian Ascher liked thisBrian Ascher liked thisNick Beim was the earliest supporter of Altruist, helping me organize the vision for the business before the company existed. The pitch deck we worked on for hundreds of hours led to Venrock leading our first financing round, and stayed >80% the same for the next 7 years. He even made the introduction to Bill McNabb (former Vanguard Chairman and CEO) shortly after our first lines of code we written. We've since become dear friends and have co-invested in many of the top fintech/wealth AI startups of the past decade (Vanilla, Arca, Moment, FINNY, and more). We have a bunch of incredible investors and board members at Altruist. It's great to see them become more familiar in our industry journals. https://lnkd.in/gBJ5WWMGAltruist investor "always thought an IPO would be possible"Altruist investor "always thought an IPO would be possible"
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Brian Ascher reacted on thisThanks Steve Vassallo and Trae Vassallo for the support and for choosing us for such a meaningful project 💙🌊Brian Ascher reacted on thisOur family spent a year building a surfboard from pieces of wood from our life - a 1950s Eames chair, a wine barrel from our wedding, and wood from the Minnesota farm where my wife Trae grew up. I've always loved beautiful old surfboards, the 50 and 60 year old ones, and I had a bunch of eBay searches running for them. At some point, I stopped looking for a board to buy and started looking for someone who could help us build one. I found a Dutch surfboard builder named Martijn, about 25 minutes from Pleasure Point. He works only with recycled wood, old chunks of the Santa Cruz boardwalk and blanks the Santa Cruz Guitar Company had set aside. He'd never built a board with a client in the shop before and so I asked if we could be his first. My youngest and I made the drive to his shop 7 or 8 times over the year. Trae came for a few of the sessions. We brought our own wood too, pieces of our life that we wanted in there, and slowly the thing took shape. It came out beautiful, but nothing beats the process. The sawdust, mistakes and do-overs. The board will also probably outlast me, and hopefully my kids will surf on it into their 50s. But the year we spent building it together is now one of my most precious memories, and something I’ll always take with me.
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Brian Ascher liked thisBrian Ascher liked thisWe announced today that Altruist has agreed to be acquired by Vanguard, subject to customary closing conditions and regulatory approvals. There are announcements you spend years imagining, and others you never really believe will be possible. For me, this is somehow both. The most important thing is not the transaction itself. It is what Vanguard and Altruist can do together for advisors and the people we serve. I first encountered Vanguard and its founder Jack Bogle near the beginning of my career. Jack believed better outcomes required more than good returns: investors also need low costs and discipline when markets become uncertain. For more than 50 years, Vanguard has tackled the first challenge with extraordinary success, lowering costs and reshaping our industry. Altruist was built to address the second. Great advisors help people make informed decisions and stay the course through recessions, bear markets, and everything life throws at them. With better tools and low prices, advisors can make high-quality advice affordable and accessible to more people. We had different approaches to the same goal: giving more people a better chance at financial success. As Altruist grew, I began asking a question every founder faces: What kind of institution can this become long after I’m gone? A principle behind everything we do at Altruist has been: if something isn’t good for the end client, we shouldn’t do it. So the question was not simply who could help Altruist grow, but who I would trust to protect that belief and carry it forward. As Salim Ramji and I talked about Altruist’s future, the answer became obvious. Vanguard’s investor-owned structure and support as an early Altruist investor for more than six years made it the right fit. Vanguard’s expertise and resources will help us build more of the technology and custody capabilities advisors rely on. Altruist gives Vanguard another way to support investors who work with an advisor. I couldn’t be prouder of the Altruist team. You have shown the kindness, brilliance, and grit that inspire me every day. 🙏 I am also incredibly excited to work alongside Salim and the Vanguard crew to continue the impact Read the announcement: https://lnkd.in/gT5KrZey Read my full letter: https://lnkd.in/gKJzB4Zr
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Brian Ascher liked thisI'm thrilled to be joining the amazing Academy Team to help build the next generation of dual use defense technology companies that make America safer and more prosperous.Brian Ascher liked thisAcademy Welcomes Rob Born to the team! Academy Securities, the nation’s first Post-9/11 veteran owned and operated investment bank, today announced that Rob Born has joined Academy Ventures, the firm’s venture capital arm, as Partner. Mr. Born’s addition to the Academy Ventures team represents an important step for the firm to grow its venture investing efforts, primarily in the defense technology sector. To date, Academy Ventures has invested in over 20 companies with internal partners’ capital and plans to allow select outside investment capital in the near future. Mr. Born brings 25 years of venture capital, operating, and investment banking experience in the technology industry. Most recently, Mr. Born was SVP Corporate and Business Development at Vocera Communications (NYSE: VCRA) where he led the strategy to transform the Company into an intelligent workflow software provider, resulting in an approximate 10x increase in stock price before it was acquired by Stryker. Prior to Vocera, Mr. Born was Partner at Thomas Weisel Venture Partners, an early-stage technology venture capital fund where he had a successful investing track record. Mr. Born started his career as a technology company investment banker at Montgomery Securities. Mr. Born holds a J.D and M.B.A from Duke University, and a B.A. from Amherst College. He is a Member of the State Bar of California. Read the full announcement here: https://lnkd.in/gnuAGrtu #AcademySecurities #AcademyVentures #VentureCapital #Partner #Leadership
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Yuval Ben-Itzhak
AI in R&D is finally showing up in the numbers. Not through lower headcount. Through higher output from the same teams. As engineering adopts AI for coding, testing, and QA, delivery velocity increases. The result: Sales has more ammunition to win deals. One simple way CEOs and CFOs can measure this: R&D Efficiency = GM × (Revenue this year − Revenue last year) / R&D expense last year Assuming ~12 months for R&D output to translate into revenue (adjust to your cycle). The chart below shows how this metric improves as AI adoption increases across a cohort of 100 companies. Read more: https://lnkd.in/eMiRyTBW #AIinEngineering #RDProductivity #SaaSMetrics #CFOInsights #CEOPerspective #ARRGrowth
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2CarrotsVC | Healthcare
Ferry Health has raised $9M in Seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Avid Ventures, Layout Ventures, SV Angel, BoxGroup and Asymmetric, alongside angel investors including Jay Desai and the founders of Grow Therapy (Manoj Kanagaraj, MD), Hex and Chapter. The company announced the financing as it emerged from stealth. Founded in 2024 by Mehul Mehta, Keyur Mehta and Andrew Buie, Ferry Health is led by CEO Mehul Mehta and develops an AI-powered healthcare personal assistant that finds in-network providers, verifies availability and coverage, makes calls and books appointments on patients’ behalf. Through partnerships with health systems, insurers and care navigation platforms, Ferry is available to 1M+ patients across all 50 states, with access expected to grow more than fivefold by year-end. Ferry plans to expand beyond appointment scheduling into more of the patient journey. Early customers are already using the platform to coordinate imaging and home health, while longer-term opportunities include transportation coordination and prior authorization visibility. Deal summary Stage: Seed Investment: $9M Number of Investors: 7 institutional investors + angels Date: September 16, 2026 #StartupFunding #Fundraising #HealthTech #DigitalHealth #HealthcareAI #AI #PatientNavigation #CareCoordination #Seed
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Mary Grove
At Bread and Butter Ventures, we're in our 7th year of investing in digital health. I've been hearing a lot of feedback lately from both funds and founders alike that VC funding for tech-enabled care delivery is fewer and far between these days. I'm super bullish on tech-enabled care as a component of a digital health portfolio because I believe that true, lasting innovation will be driven by bottoms-up early stage innovation responding to top-down industry pain points, and that to innovate we must have distribution through the incumbent plumbing of the healthcare system - and that includes care at the center. Yes, the margins are lower than pure software, but the distribution network of healthcare is very different than pure B2B. We're super interested right now in: ✅ Applications of AI to in infrastructure and operations of health care systems, provider networks, health plans to reduce manual work and enable everyone to operate at their best and highest use ✅ Applications of AI to clinical decision support and ultimately care delivery ✅ Solutions that address population health and help with access to care in both rural and urban settings (both from a care & cost perpspective), cardiometabolic health, women's health (still wildly uninvested opportunities to serve half the population), eldercare ✅ Insurtech, fintech and the payments layer of healthcare We would love to connect with more co-investors at all stages (pre-seed, seed, later stage) who are actively investing in digital health and specifically at tech-enabled care solutions to drive the next generation of healthcare innovation. Please DM us or tag a firm/investor here!
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Keval Desai
- Can we scale the startup funnel by funding more companies at the top and expect more companies to emerge at the bottom as category leaders? - How can one identify whether a founder will scale from inception through an IPO? - Can small & big (funds) co-exist or has VC changed forever? The great folks at Uncovered Media shared our conversation on these topics & more on their recent podcast. If you get a chance to listen (link below), please share your thoughts as well. Thank you Sean Lindy Brandy Whalen & team! cc SHAKTI
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