This year marks the 10-year anniversary of Grand Central Tech (GCT), our Founder in Residence program for zero to one founders in New York City. The Fall 2024 Cohort joins impressive company; since 2014 there have been: 🏢 179 Alumni residency companies 👨🔧 👩🔧 362 Early stage founders supported 🚀 $4bn+ VC raised by participating founders We've also completely overhauled our HQ at 22 Vanderbilt (come visit if you haven't yet) and have amassed $140M in AUM across our funds. We took this milestone as an opportunity to reflect on our mission and brand with our re-launched website: www.companyventures.com. (Long time followers may notice we locked down the .com and have moved on from .co!) As a firm, we specialize in providing our founders Exceptional Venture Community. We have witnessed time and again how catalytic being a part of such a community can be to a company's success, and have distilled the recipe down to three key elements: 📈 Capital: We are first check investors who leverage an extraordinary residency model to identify and back exceptional founders from day one. ✨ Community: We set up founders to go further faster by being in the company of other uniquely qualified entrepreneurs. Other firms may host founder summits annually; we host them daily. 🌇 Place: We provide members of our community a remarkable day-to-day environment to recruit talent, host marquee events, close customers, and secure investment. The future looks bright for Company Ventures and we are just getting started. Come build with us. And with that, we are thrilled to announce the Fall 2024 Grand Central Tech Cohort, and provide a refresher on the current Spring 2024 cohort - see the full list here [https://bit.ly/4eb4kWr]. Please join us in welcoming these teams to our community!

When we reached out to Carl Madi in 2021 about joining our founder residency, Grand Central Tech, he was in the very earliest stages of building Aja School, the company now known as Stepful. Carl built his early career on incentivizing gig-economy workers and understanding the dynamics of these markets while at Handy and Uber, and had seen firsthand what living–and working–through a pandemic was like for those whose livelihoods depend on these jobs. Carl knew that most of them wanted better jobs–more stable, more secure, higher paying, and with opportunities for growth. They wanted careers. Stepful’s vision to reimagine healthcare education to better serve those contemplating new career paths, as well as the health systems that face critical staffing shortages and a crisis of burnout and turnover, has always been squarely aligned with our healthcare thesis. As technology investors, we are inclined to invest in software businesses that optimize for efficiency–to do more with less (often, less people). But, as healthcare investors, we know that providing care to a population that needs a lot of it requires a lot of skilled people. We invested in Stepful very early on because they were doing both– building tech to optimize the biggest bottlenecks in workforce entry, upskilling, and retention by making education and training requirements far more accessible, and growing the human workforce as a result. Stepful has built the fastest, most scalable training platform for healthcare jobs ever created, launched it in all 50 states, and already changed thousands of people’s lives for the better. They are just getting started. We are thrilled to participate in their $31.5m Series B led by Oak HC/FT, having previously invested in their Seed and Series A rounds alongside Y Combinator, Reach Capital, SemperVirens Venture Capital , and AlleyCorp. The conviction with which we initially and subsequently invested in Stepful has carried over into a doubling down on our workforce thesis within healthcare. If you are building a company or exploring ideas in healthcare workforce solutions, please reach out! Read about why we invested in Stepful: https://bit.ly/3AIepwc Learn more from TechCrunch: https://tcrn.ch/4hKw9Yv Apply for Grand Central Tech: https://bit.ly/4fLz5Cp

For several years now, our firm has had the honor of collaborating with NYCEDC to operate Boost - a fellowship program for first time entrepreneurs. For the less initiated, the world of venture is a bit of a black box with specific jargon, unusual industry mechanics, and tight investor networks. We run our Boost program to demystify things a bit, and equip folks from less experienced backgrounds with a means of coming up the curve. If this sounds appealing to you or folks in your network, please consider applying: https://bit.ly/48HlFFl

Recently, we were fortunate to host Mike Maples, Jr in conversation with Company Ventures CEO Matthew Harrigan on Mike’s book: Pattern Breakers. A few insights we took away: ✨ There are three elements to most breakthrough startup ideas: inflection (an event that creates the potential for radical change in how people think, feel and act), an insight (a truth about how one or more inflections can be harnessed to radically change human capacities and behaviors), and founder-future fit (the ability to live in a valid future and build what’s missing for that future). 💭 If you're spending time in the valid future, you're tinkering with inflections, and you see firsthand the opportunity to break the current patterns of how people think, feel, and act. 💡 For a startup that is going to break free, it's not just about the product but also the point of view –  early believers often buy from them because they believe what the startup believes, moreso than because it solves their immediate problem. A big thank you to Mike and his team for all the knowledge shared with the founders in our residency program, on how to build a company for the future.

A huge congrats to Ali Hussain and the Tabs team on their $25M Series A led by General Catalyst. Tabs has built an AI driven revenue management system for businesses to streamline structuring and organizing all of their commercial records (from customer contracts to even usage) and then automate related workflows (e.g. billing, revenue recognition, reporting and payments). This enables companies to reduce tedious manual labor, and focus on strategic decision-making and customer solutions. Since coming out of stealth ~6 months ago, the market demand for the product has been incredible. Learn more about the recent raise: https://bit.ly/4f9D9MJ

Announcing our $25M Series A led by General Catalyst 🎉 We started Tabs less than 24 months ago Our mission is to build the world’s most powerful Revenue Automation Platform for Finance   Why? Relative to other areas of the Finance Stack (e.g. AP, Spend, Payroll), Revenue has been left behind Most teams manually aggregate critical commercial data in spreadsheets or rely on insanely painful custom integrations between ERP and CRM ...and after all this get paid late and spend hundreds of hours a year building custom reports Tabs via our powerful AI driven “Commercial Graph” handles Billing, Collections, Payments, Revenue Recognition, Renewals and Reporting, all purpose built for B2B Since coming out of Stealth ~6 months ago with our Seed led by Lightspeed, we’ve quickly scaled to 7-figures and built a product used daily by some of the fastest growing B2B companies and respected operators in the world! Thank you to our customers, accounting partners / advisors and operators who helped us get started and build so quickly Special shoutout to our Seed investors who believed in us and doubled down: • Brian Schechter and Rachel Pavey from Primary Venture Partners • Justin Overdorff, Sam Eisler and Aaron Frank from Lightspeed • Joe Montana / Matthew Mulvey from Liquid 2 Ventures, Vivek Krishnamurthy from Commerce Ventures, Jonathan Weiner, Matthew Harrigan and Nelson Boone Schubart from Company Ventures, Lex Zhao and Semyon Dukach from One Way Ventures and Wesley Yiu from Alumni Ventures And a warm welcome to the new investors joining us in this round: • Alex Tran and Nathaniel Levy-Westhead from General Catalyst (Joining our Board) • Gokul Rajaram • Casey Woo and the entire FOG Ventures syndicate  • Kiran Lingam and Greg Raiten from The F Suite  • Imraan Ahmed and Zunaira Arshad Watershed Ventures  Learn more about the fundraise and our future (blog post and media linked in comments).

A couple of months ago I was privileged to give a TedX talk reflecting on the meaningfulness of working in healthcare and sharing some pragmatic ideas on how AI might let us simplify and improve our healthcare systems. Thank you to TEDxNashville for the opportunity to speak, the leaders and teams at HCA Healthcare for bringing me initially into healthcare and showing me the way, our incredible team at UnityAI that is creating a brand new and exciting future, and all the many other good people engaged in this work every day. I gave a lot of myself in this talk; it was personal and unusually difficult, and so I hope it is inspiring.

Congratulations to David Mace, Tiger S., Georgios Kontominas and the team at Pantheon AI for exiting stealth and announcing their $25M funding round to drive US expansion. Pantheon is building an AI copilot for architects that, in the long term, will automate a significant portion of the end-to-end pre-construction and design processes, delivering streamlined architecture services for commercial, multifamily and hospitality buildings. We believe that Pantheon’s novel approach - using LLMs to understand 3D space and separating blueprint generation across building systems - has potential to completely change how buildings are designed and built. We are thrilled to be part of Pantheon’s journey. Learn more: https://bit.ly/3YADGRZ

Thrilled to partner with Tech:NYC to host a conversation with Brian Chesky, Co-Founder and CEO of Airbnb, interviewed by serial founder Kevin Ryan, Founder & CEO of AlleyCorp. These two leaders have not only shaped iconic companies but the entire tech ecosystem. True gems being traded back and forth.

Applications for our 2025 Founder Fellowship are live! Next year’s program will serve 75 NYC-based tech startups across five unique cohorts led by Chloe Capital, Company Ventures, Gold House, Newlab, and Visible Hands. Nearly $1M in funding and $375k in OpenAI credits will be available, along with critical opportunities for networking, coworking, mentorship, and more. Apply by December 6: https://bit.ly/4f5jj4Z Since launching in 2022, the program has supported over 250 NYC-based founders across 168 companies. Read more about the Founder Fellowship program here https://bit.ly/4dKqG0t