Ann Lai

Orange Health Labs has always been committed to six-hour reporting. Not "as fast as possible" but specifically six hours, no exceptions. This one constraint made them build everything differently. They couldn't use standard labs designed for average daily volume - they had to build for peak hourly capacity. They couldn't have doctors at each location, so they built remote pathology, where one doctor reviews slides from multiple cities. They couldn't rely on traditional logistics - so they created dedicated networks covering four times the area of competitors. Now incumbents can't copy it without scrapping their existing infrastructure. They have hundreds of labs built the old way, doctors hired locally, and established logistics. Retrofitting would cost more than starting from scratch, and starting from scratch means abandoning their existing business. I like how Orange Health's edge is that matching their model means incumbents must treat their current infrastructure as sunk cost. This is the kind of advantage that compounds.

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Very very excited about Menlo Ventures partnering with Joshua Meier Jack Dent and the entire Chai Discovery team in their Series A and on this hugely ambitious effort to broadly accelerate therapeutics using AI! We're all in on AI across many sectors and this is an important one to us that has a tremendous opportunity both economically and to change health outcomes. Love this update from Josh: With Chai-1, we delivered the ability to see the structure of molecules. Now with Chai-2, we have unlocked the ability to design and create them. 🧑‍🔬 Chai-2 allows us to design antibodies from scratch, entirely on the computer with a >15% hit rate (vs. 0.1% for previous AI methods or millions-to-billions of lab screens). Amazing 👏 👏 Look forward to what is ahead.

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More great insights from Montauk Capital and Evan Caron on the extraordinary risks, and opportunities, at the intersection of energy and the real estate industry.

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Interesting tidbit from the Women in VC Summit at Half Moon Bay. You wouldn’t necessarily think Deep Tech / AI and Consumer investors have much in common—beyond being founder-first. But post-2021/2022, the convergence is real. Across stages and sectors, the shift is toward: • Disciplined unit economics • Proof over possibility Whether it’s consumer or deep tech, the bar has moved from credible possibility to credible execution (credit to deep tech investor Kelly Chen for the phrasing). What that looks like in practice: - Deep Tech diligence → customer calls, pilots, real demand pull - Consumer diligence → channel checks, repeat purchase, retail velocity Different inputs. Same question: does the product actually work? The punchline for founders: everyone is underwriting outcomes now—not narratives. #WomenInVC #VentureCapital #Fundraising #UnitEconomics #StartupExecution #DeepTech #ConsumerVC

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The old SaaS pricing playbook doesn’t work for AI. Madhavan Ramanujam and I partnered with Emergence Capital and Jake Saper to write a new one—built for where AI is going, not just where it is today. We lay out what state-of-the-art AI pricing looks like now—and what it will look like: ✅ Hybrid pricing (seats + usage) is the current best practice 🎯 Outcome-based models are the future—pricing tied directly to impact 💰 The best AI companies already capture 25–50% of the value they create As autonomy and attribution improve, outcome pricing will go from rare to expected. Founders who move early will win. Full read here 👉 https://lnkd.in/gwp6tDtp

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Today SuppCo joined Function Health. At the end of 2024, we backed Steve Martocci and Nick Michlewicz at Greylock Partners, based on three views about where consumer health was going: 1. Self-directed health is now mainstream. Only 45% of 18–29 year olds see a primary care physician. People are building their own protocols and need trusted nodes, not influencer affiliate links, to do it. 2. The winners will own proprietary data networks. In a $175B / ~180K SKU industry drowning in marketing claims, SuppCo built TrustScore. This became an independent quality rating on 35K+ products, plus the largest network of real user stacks anywhere. That is a data asset that compounds, especially as users feed efficacy data via wearable/biomarker integrations. 3. The trust layer for AI-mediated commerce is an increasingly valuable layer to own. As discovery and purchase move into chat and agent interfaces, "which product can I actually trust?" is the question agents need someone to answer. SuppCo became that answer for supplements. Function is the right home because it closes the loop. If SuppCo answers what to take, Function answers whether it's actually working, in one continuous feedback cycle. This becomes a powerful data network. Big congrats to Steve, Nick, and the entire SuppCo team. You built something the industry genuinely needed -- on both the consumer and brand side. And to Jonathan Swerdlin and the Function team. Excited to see the impact on the broader category.

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The great VC implosion is coming! 📊 99% of Q1 2024 seed companies haven't reached Series A 📊 Founders wait 320 (corrected) days to make their first hire (longer than 2019) 📊 AI companies get 50% valuation premiums for adding three letters to their pitch 📊 73% of late-stage AI capital concentrated in the Bay Area This isn't capital inefficiency. This is systemic failure. 🍿🍿🍿 Ps 🔥🔥🔥 John Cowan 🙏🙏🙏

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"We've become so insular in who we talk to and listen to, and I didn't realize how much that was keeping me in tunnel vision and tunnel thinking." Seth Levine, Co-Author of Capital Evolution and Partner at Foundry, talks about seeking out more diversity of thought on Tech Scenes Unplugged. #venturebacked #vcbacked #venturecapital #leadership #ceo #founder #operatingsystem #peakOS #foundermode

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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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Today is the due date of California’s Fair Investment Practices' first annual demographic report, and my team at Fabric VC is proud to report on our 100% diverse-led portfolio. 🎉 We look forward to seeing other funds like ours changing the paradigm in VC, and will be calling out those whose numbers look far different than ours to start making intentional choices to create a more diverse VC system. #FIPVCC

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My "Investor's Hot Take" in Alex Knapp's Forbes newsletter on which technologies are overhyped, which are insufficiently discussed, and which everyone will be talking about in 5 years: AI (sort-of); microbiome Tx; and quantum computing, respectively. Plus, DCVC portfolio company Kanvas Biosciences and its deal with the Gates Foundation to create a synthetic bacterial microbiome, delivered in an ordinary pill, which will treat the 150M people in the poor world who suffer from Enteric Environmental Dysfunction, a disease that causes severe gut inflammation, preventing them from absorbing nutrients from food. https://lnkd.in/gK6zmyF8

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Thrilled to share the launch of Criticality, a $65M fund built to back founders solving hard, high-leverage problems at the intersection of technical complexity and real-world urgency. Criticality builds on the foundation we’ve laid at Antler - applying our conviction-driven approach to companies at Seed & Series A. The fund is sector-flexible but applies a deep tech lens to each opportunity, targeting non-obvious, high-leverage problems from the earliest stages of company formation. Grateful to the New Mexico State Investment Council for their support in anchoring Criticality. More to come soon from Cash Allred & I.

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We pulled together this month’s Surfacing newsletter around a simple idea: as AI matures, fundamentals matter more. Team, operating discipline, and systems that hold up under real constraints. If you’re thinking about what it takes to build through the next phase of AI, this issue is for you. Read the full issue, linked here: https://lnkd.in/g6-GSE_J

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Excited to partner with Clarify in their $22.5M funding led by USVP and Gradient, alongside Madrona, Recall Capital, and others. Sales teams spend most of their time updating CRMs instead of selling. Patrick Thompson, Austin Hay, and Ondrej Hrebicek built an autonomous CRM that handles all the manual work automatically. I use it all day every day. More on the future of the sales tech stack and autonomous CRM here: https://lnkd.in/gcG-YgcE

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HARPETH VENTURES ANNOUNCES INVESTMENT IN VENTEUR Harpeth Ventures Opportunity Fund (“Harpeth Ventures”) is pleased to announce its participation in Venteur’s recent $20 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Informed Ventures and American Family Ventures, with participation from Morgan Health, Ingeborg Investments, Catalyst by Wellstar, Plug and Play, Revelry Venture Partners, Houghton Street Ventures, and Techstars. San Francisco-based Venteur is the leading healthcare benefits technology company transforming how employers offer and manage health insurance through Individual Coverage Health Reimbursement Arrangements (ICHRAs). Venteur’s platform empowers employers to offer flexible, personalized health benefits by enabling employees to select individual plans that fit their unique needs. Through a combination of technology and concierge support, Venteur helps individuals navigate their healthcare options while driving improved outcomes and greater cost efficiency for employers. More information is available at Venteur.com. “We greatly appreciate Harpeth Ventures’ involvement from both a capital and relationship perspective,” said Stacy Edgar, Co-Founder and CEO of Venteur. “The Harpeth team has already been instrumental in several business development opportunities.” Added Chuck Byrge of Harpeth Ventures, “With our relationship-driven approach, we were fortunate to meet Stacy in early 2024 and have followed their growth closely. We couldn’t be more excited about their future and the tailwinds driving ICHRA adoption.”

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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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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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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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