John Balen

AlleyCorp is thrilled to announce that we led Birches Health’s Series A and are now joining forces with General Catalyst and Will Ventures to expand access to treatment for gambling addiction. We backed Elliott Rapaport and the team early because we believed they could take on one of the fastest-growing behavioral health challenges with clinical rigor and scalable care. Since then, Birches has proven the urgent need for solutions that meet patients where they are—helping payors and providers address a condition too often left untreated. At AlleyCorp, our Economic Infrastructure thesis focuses on backing founders tackling problems that matter for the world. We invest in companies reshaping work, wealth, and health. Birches exemplifies this mission, and we’re proud to continue supporting Elliot and the team as they scale. General Catalyst Reva Nohria AlleyCorp Youssef Kalad Operator Partners Olivia Benjamin Zach Goldstein Haystack Bertelsmann Investments defy.vc

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🚀 Early-Stage VC Is Shifting: Bigger Seed Rounds, But Fewer Graduates 🚀 I've been following the latest Aumni data closely, and the trends in early-stage venture capital are becoming increasingly pronounced: Seed deal sizes are climbing—the top quartile is now surpassing $7M. The number of deals is contracting: We're seeing fewer seed rounds, and an even steeper drop in the number of startups progressing to Series A. Graduation rates from Seed to Series A have sharply fallen—from 41% for companies seeded in Q3 2020 to just 12% in Q1 2023. There’s been a slight uptick, but it’s still far below historic norms. It's clear to me: the environment is more selective and demanding than ever. Startups may secure bigger funding rounds, but only if they meet increasingly high benchmarks. Progressing to the next stage is taking longer, and the “spray and pray” approach is quickly becoming a thing of the past. 🔮 My Prediction: In this environment, founders who can balance bold vision with operational excellence will pull ahead. At Jet Ventures, we're betting on teams who leverage knowledge, data, and AI in their respective domains and laser-focused on execution—especially those building innovative solutions in industrial and tech-heavy sectors. Going forward: Demonstrable product-market fit and clear, tangible progress will set the top startups apart. VCs with real operator experience and industry expertise—like our team at Jet Ventures—are in the best position to support and guide the next generation of champions, particularly in Central Europe. For both founders and investors, it’s a time for disciplined execution and outsized ambition. #VentureCapital #Startups #SeedStage #SeriesA #InvestmentTrends #JetVentures #VCInsights https://lnkd.in/eHHcXyUi

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Hexcel Adds Independent Director in Deal With Activist Investor "Hexcel added a new independent director to its board in a move that avoids a potential proxy fight for the aerospace materials company with activist investor Vision One Fund. "As part of an agreement between the two sides, Vision One will withdraw their nominees to the board that were to be voted on at the company's annual shareholder meeting. Vision One will also support Hexcel's board nominees, and agree to certain standstill restrictions and mutual non-disparagement provisions, according to a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday. "The new director, former Kaman Chief Executive Officer Neal Keating, was appointed effective Tuesday." Keating's experience in aerospace may make him an ideal director choice. Yet from a bigger picture perspective, I wonder if this settlement is the right move for investors. More and more activist campaigns are settling rather than running the full process of a proxy fight with typically a greater number of directors nominated by the activist. Hopefully, activists are becoming like the public company boards they battle, i.e. more focused on reaching consensus than big results. #governancearbitrage #proxyfights #corporategovernance #activistinvesting #valuecreation https://lnkd.in/gazBUGFp

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🦄 $150M to improve tutoring and education globally. Preply just announced a new round, putting the company on a clear trajectory to become an iconic global marketplace. In a world obsessed with fast wins and volatile growth, some companies quietly beat their goals year after year — for more than 6 years in this case (as long as we’ve at Acurio Ventures been partners). A few learnings from this journey, relevant for founders and investors: Pick a growing market with an unsolved problem. 2 out of 8 billion people globally are learning a second language. Despite many options, outcomes are still poor. Our original thesis was simple: if you build the reference platform, everyone who wants to learn will eventually come to you. Category leadership matters. When we backed Kirill Bigai and Dmytro Voloshyn back in 2019 (together with Rob Kniaz), there were dozens of similar startups. Small details showed Preply had already built a superior tutor base and a scalable growth engine. Build a product customers love. Speaking a language and teaching it are very different things. Preply transformed the learning experience by combining a motivated base of +100,000 tutors with tools that actually drive outcomes. Never stop experimenting. Few companies maintain a strong experimentation culture as they scale. Preply’s DNA reminded me of Booking.com — enabling them to execute 10x better than most marketplaces. Great companies turn every change into an opportunity. From riding the post-COVID shift to online learning, to betting early and heavily on AI as Dmytro Voloshyn has excelled at. What once sounded like sci-fi is now reality. Great companies become talent magnets A company maturity can't be addressed only by looking at the revenue, profit or product. I like to see how much better they become at attracting talent and retaining it. Proud that Acurio Ventures made this possible and the WestCap team saw things as bullish as we do and are now supporting the next phase of Preply’s journey. Huge congratulations to the entire Preply team!!

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One of things DCVC looks for in iTechBio companies: early commercial progress, worth billions, from biopharma partners. It’s one of the reasons we invested in Proxima.

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A big milestone today for Grow Therapy, which just announced a $150M Series D led by TCV and Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, with BCI and Menlo Ventures joining Sequoia, Transformation Capital, and SignalFire. When we led Grow’s Series A in 2021, it was rooted in a belief that mental health access in the U.S. isn’t hindered by supply, it’s a systems problem. To win, Grow needed to be deeply integrated into the healthcare ecosystem, not operating as a point solution. In just 5 years, more than 2 million people have used Grow, with over 10 million therapy and medication management visits delivered on the platform. What stands out is the infrastructure the team has built: Grow now partners with 125+ health insurers, including Medicare and Medicaid across most states, reaching 220 million covered lives. At the same time, tools like its clinically-guided AI notetaker are reducing provider documentation time by nearly 70%, helping clinicians focus more on care. This is what durable healthtech looks like: deep payer integrations, measurable outcomes, and technology embedded directly into existing healthcare workflows. Excited to continue partnering with Jake Cooper, Manoj Kanagaraj, MD, Alan Ni, and the entire Grow team as they build trusted mental health infrastructure for insurers, employers, health systems, and most importantly, patients.

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Greenfield Partners is proud to be deepening our partnership with Capitolis as they announce today a $56M strategic round. If you’ve spent time in market infrastructure, you know how rare it is to see deep market insight paired with real product velocity. The team at Capitolis has both, and the result is infrastructure that makes capital markets safer and more efficient. We’re increasing our investment alongside Barclays, BNP Paribas, J.P. Morgan, fellow investors Canapi Ventures, 9Yards Capital, and existing investors Citi, Morgan Stanley, State Street, and UBS to fuel the next stages of Capitolis’ Capital Marketplace and Portfolio Optimization solutions. https://lnkd.in/exK8nQYx Kudos to Gil Mandelzis and the entire Capitolis team!

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Building companies in heavy industry calls for a particular kind of resilience: sustained technical iteration, disciplined capital allocation, and leadership teams capable of executing as projects move into full-scale construction and operation. Rodi Guidero shares what that journey has required from our founders, and why the real measure of value creation is the capacity to build businesses designed to operate and lead for decades. 

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"Build the event you wish existed" That's what we at Monadical did last week at #NYTW. We wanted an AI Engineers discussion for Engineers. There's always a lot of events out there for VCs to network, or for startups to learn about G2M, but very little on lessons learned from actual engineers in the field. So that's the event we hosted. Big thank yous to our awesome panel, Roy Pereira, Ben Cohen and Corey J. Gallon. Here's the key takeaways and the AI tools we're using. 🚀 All three panelists independently called AI Agents the most transformative LLM application they’ve used. They specifically called out Claude 3.5 Sonnet for its accuracy and reliability. 🪨 We dug into how LLMs are “jagged”, not general. They can be shockingly good at some tasks and completely fail at others. Everyone agreed: good evaluations are critical (and hard.) 🧪 Corey noted how public benchmarks and reality are two different things. Most public evals are saturated or gamed. ♊ Ben emphasized that AI projects are actually two projects: building the tool and building the evaluation process. 🧱 We explored how falling dev costs may impact startup defensibility and labor demand. Roy shared that founders are already shifting strategies in response. ⚒️ In a world of daily AI launches, the panel discussed how they decide what’s worth attention, and what’s just noise. They called out tools like Goose, Aider, Claude Code, and Monadical’s own Cubbi, which helps run agentic workflows safely in dev environments. (links in the comments). CTA: What would you want to hear in an AI Applied Engineering talk you attended?

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My investment framework centers on 7 layers. CASIMIR fits into the first layer which is the Observation Layer. Out of 22 billion IoT devices on earth and ~10k satellites in space in 2026 we may have a 6 billion (and growing) ultra low power devices on earth and space that can one day run on MicroSparc 👍🏼 -> Eternal power chip Harold “Sonny” White + Capital Factory #HardThings #deeptech

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This week in #AmTech: Heron Power raised $140 million in Series B funding co-led by Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism Fund and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, with participation from Capricorn Investment Group, Energy Impact Partners, Gigascale Capital, and Valor Atreides AI Fund. Heron Power develops solid-state transformers that replace legacy grid infrastructure, consolidating inverters, rectifiers, and transformers into a single software-regulated system capable of handling up to five megawatts per unit. By removing one of the biggest bottlenecks in connecting AI data centers, solar farms, and battery storage to the grid, Heron Power is helping America accelerate in the AI race and do it sustainably. Founder: Drew Baglino. CryoBio raised $1.3 million in pre-seed funding from Marble, AgVenture Alliance, New York Ventures, Launch NY, FuzeHub, Klessig Trust, and Jade Cove Partners. CryoBio uses precision fermentation to produce antifreeze molecules inspired by cold-adapted animals, delivering them to farmers as a sprayable treatment that shields high-value crops like apples and grapes from frost damage for up to two weeks. By giving growers a scalable biological tool to protect against unpredictable freezes, CryoBio reduces costly crop losses. Founder: Murli Manohar. Seasats raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Konvoy, with participation from Shield Capital, DNS Capital, Techstars, Tanis Venture Management, Crumpton Ventures, Dorado Group, and other strategic investors. Seasats builds small, solar-electric uncrewed surface vessels for defense, commercial, and scientific maritime missions. giving the United States affordable, persistent ocean surveillance and reconnaissance capability without putting sailors at risk. Founders: Mike Flanigan, Dylan Rodriguez, and Max Kramers. #VC #Startups #VentureCapital #AI #Energy #DataCenters #AgTech #DefenseTech #Drones

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Excited to share that Miravoice has raised a $6.3M seed round — and we’re proud to partner with Nishant Jain, Danny D. Leybzon, Shreyas Tirumala, along with the whole Miravoice team. From the beginning, what drew Unusual Ventures to Miravoice was how clearly they saw a problem most organizations have simply learned to live with: collecting structured data through voice conversations is still manual, expensive, and slow. Despite all the progress in AI, large-scale phone surveys and interviews are still largely powered by call centers. Earlier voice AI solutions struggled with reliability and accuracy, making them difficult to trust for high-stakes data collection. Miravoice takes a fundamentally different approach. Read our full post below: https://lnkd.in/e8yJEeDS

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Building Surround Ventures has been an entrepreneurial journey with a great deal of learning along the way, and I am very excited to launch our second fund. As a finance person at heart who shifted into the VC world centered around people, I always say that we are ultimately a derivative of the underlying asset, the entrepreneurs we are fortunate to work with. We look forward to continuing to work hard alongside the founders we partner with and help where we can in building some of the world’s most important deep tech startups emerging from Israel. I am truly grateful to the founders, investors, advisors, and everyone who chose to join us on this journey.

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HealthVC x Lusha: Unlocking Smarter Fundraising and Sales Workflows We’re thrilled to announce our newest partnership: HealthVC has teamed up with Lusha to bring next-gen data and prospecting tools to founders, fund managers, and operators across our community. Lusha recently launched a powerful suite of AI-powered features that redefine how go-to-market teams research, prospect, and convert. Now those capabilities are coming to HealthVC Pro subscribers. ✨ With this partnership, you’ll be able to: Surface real-time, accurate, and compliant B2B contact data Use AI Prospecting Chat to instantly uncover new investor or customer leads Tap into CRM-triggered recommendations to stay one step ahead Turn insight into action with Sales Streaming, Lusha’s smarter, connected selling framework. But Lusha’s superpower isn’t just the AI; it’s that the AI sits on top of best-in-class data. That means every signal, every recommendation, and every lead is not just fast, it’s trustworthy. At HealthVC, we’re building more than a newsletter; we’re building the operating system for venture, and this partnership helps our members move faster, pitch smarter, and close better. Available now to all HealthVC subscribers, link in comments.

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Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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🚨NEW EPISODE: Recorded live at FUTURE TITANS 2026 - Jeff Perry of Carta sat down with the iconic Seth Levine, co-founder of Foundry. Seth has been in venture for 25 years, built Foundry from scratch as an emerging manager himself, and has backed about 50 emerging manager funds through his fund of funds. He has genuinely seen every side of this table. They went deep on building Foundry, why VCs are in the influence business, not the decision business, and why the concentration problem in venture is not only bad for LPs, but also for the innovation ecosystem overall. And why Seth's new book, Capital Evolution, is so important for the future of America. 🎧 Links to listen... Apple: https://lnkd.in/ehQUQ2EM Spotify: https://lnkd.in/eU4FExpg

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From the beginning, we believed Lumana was building much more than a smarter surveillance tool. Lumana's platform reflects the next evolution in video intelligence — physical AI. This approach enables systems to go beyond basic detection capabilities to understanding context, infer intent, and deliver real-time insights that improve safety and operations at scale. Further, we decided to take the longer and more difficult direction of building a whole new generation and fully featured Video Management System (VMS). With the company’s $40M Series A, led by our friend Peter Wagner from Wing Venture Capital and our seed partners from SCAPITALVC, we’re doubling down on a platform that’s already proving its value in the real world. We are serving now close to ten thousands enterprise cameras in production! Founders like Sagi Ben Moshe bring a rare mix of vision and execution to the table. From our earliest conversations as an EIR at Norwest, it was clear that Lumana had the potential to reshape how organizations use video. Congratulations to the team on this well-deserved milestone. https://lnkd.in/gwHdaGPZ

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