Company Ventures

Applications for the Spring 2025 Grand Central Tech Cohort are now open! Grand Central Tech (GCT) has served as the launchpad for more than 200 teams, helping them to establish and grow their companies from the ground up. GCT companies have raised more than $4Bn over the past 11 years. If you are a founder pre-idea through seed stage, Company Ventures is the best place in NYC to build your Company from -1 to 1. Just ask alum like Ali Hussain and Tabs, Daniel Wertman and Noetica, Ryan Janssen & Zenlytic, Carl Madi and Stepful. What does it mean to join GCT? 💡 Join a community of some of the best builders in NYC. Across our two current cohorts, 26% of companies are founded by multi-time founders, 52% by senior leadership from growth stage or public tech companies, with the remaining being among the best up-and-coming tech talent in NYC. 👩💻 Work alongside 25-30 other early-stage teams building at the intersection of AI and key industry verticals at no cost to your team. 🌇 Build your team and attract customers and investors with access to premium workspace and event facilities next to Grand Central. 🤝 Receive support from our investment team while retaining the breathing room to have a self-serve experience and the ability to tap into our time-tested programming and formidable alumni network. Learn more here: https://bit.ly/424sMpO Apply now: https://bit.ly/4abteEH Applications will be open until February 3rd, with decisions expected by late February for an April move-in.

We have over 200 RSVP's for tonight's kick off event with Every Inc.'s Dan Shipper and Google's Steven Johnson. We can squeeze a few more folks in. RSVP NOW for tonight's event (4-6pm)! https://lu.ma/7o21mt0i

Congratulations to Samuel Weaver, Michael Guarino and the Plural team on securing their $6M Seed round! The round was led by Primary Venture Partners with participation from Company Ventures and Capital One Ventures . The increasing complexity of micro-services infrastructure at enterprise is driving the need for intelligent and scalable cloud management systems that are purpose built for hybrid and multi-cloud instances. Our belief is that the escalating demands of AI and machine learning workloads will only further catalyze this need. Plural's AI-powered Kubernetes management platform (KMP) addresses challenges by automating cluster management from a unified control plane - providing self-service workflows and a platform that enables enterprises to streamline operations, reduce costs, maintain security and compliance, even in increasingly complex Kubernetes environments. The funding will enable Plural to supercharge engineering, product innovation and go to market to meet growing demand. Learn more about the recent raise: https://lnkd.in/g3MQbEHA

We’re excited to announce that we have partnered with Every Inc. to launch AI Review: A Year-Long Conversation Series on the Current and Future State of AI. Company Ventures has been investing in exceptional AI entrepreneurs for over a decade. We're awed by the incredible progress in AI capabilities and how this has unlocked a whole new class of startups in New York City. That's why we're launching AI Review, a series of monthly events from luminary talks with the likes of Jonathan Frankle from Databricks and Steven Johnson from Google (NotebookLM) to hackathons hosted with Adam Chan at HackerSquad, starting this year. We'll be tackling themes across AI, including building, research, recruitment, fundraising, responsible use, and commercial use. We’re thrilled to have partnered with Every Inc. on this series. Every has emerged as a definitive resource with a singular point of view on the current and future state of AI. But they’re more than a publication, they’re a builder: exploring key themes in AI by building new technology capabilities themselves. Like so many others, we applaud and admire this approach and welcome their leadership in ensuring this series is a success. A special thanks to our incredible industry partners Rho, Tech:NYC, New York City Economic Development Corporation, and Gunderson Dettmer for your knowledge and for your consistent support of New York’s thriving startup community. Big thanks to our community partners Timescale, Rogo, ParadeDB, Noetica, Tabs, Didero, 1Fort, Alinia AI, Coherence, Distill, Docsum, Elaborate , Fleet AI, Knock2.ai, ldgr, Lume Security, Manuscript, pantheon ai, Permanence, prosper, revin, Sunrise AI, Sublayer, Sweep360, traversal, Tropic, unityai, Workmate Labs, Zenlytic - we’ve tapped into your expertise a lot over the last few months, and this series exists in large part for and because of you. 💡 Read more about our thinking behind this series: https://lnkd.in/eijmDccf ⚡ Learn more about AI Review, and register for our kickoff event (co-hosted with Every): https://www.aireview.nyc/ We’re bringing together the best and brightest to deepen industry understanding and create a lasting conversation on AI's evolution - join us. #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #MachineLearning #Tech #Startups #VentureCapital #NYC

Recently we had the pleasure of hosting some of our friends from OpenAI for a demo of some of their latest and greatest products and features, namely their o-Series models, agent capabilities and Realtime Voice. Given the pace and scale of innovation in AI, we’re focused on hosting practical, skills-development sessions for our community of founders as often as we can (more to come here…) We had a packed house digging in. Three of many takeaways that came from the discussion: 🔈It was fascinating to witness live the extent to which OpenAI capabilities are able to integrate more and more domain specific models (e.g. speech to text, text to text, and text to speech) into a singular model experience that can achieve near state of the art results in a real time stream. 💡Builders should consider using real-time voice as the high level interface mechanism of their user experience, then doing a hand-off to a more powerful reasoning model for more complex queries with real-time voice continuing to run as a buffer experience of sorts while the more powerful model derives results.  📖 Similarly, in the future, we may see more hybrid architectures where user voice input gets an immediate voice response, while a chain of models handles tool use to take action or provide text response. Sincere thank you to Larry James Erwin and Prashant M. for sharing their knowledge with our founder community - the conversation was invaluable.

We are incredibly excited to announce the 2025 Boost Founder Fellowship cohort! Company Ventures is proud to support 15 startups tackling critical challenges across a range of industries, from AI-powered communications to sustainable finance. We were blown away by these exceptional founders and we cannot wait to work with them. In partnership with New York City Economic Development Corporation, the Boost Founder Fellowship provides mentorship, community, and tailored programming to help early-stage, first-time founders refine their business models and prepare for fundraising. A warm welcome to Catherine Wang, Rose Huang, Emeka Kanu, Trisha Goyal, Kathryn Thiele AIA CSI, Samir Pendse, Nizar Dhamani, Ayan Roy, Bonnie Gurry, Elizabeth Landau, Sarah Donnelly Patel, Shivangi Khanna, Sophie Jewsbury, Roger Lin, Nini Fan MBA., M.S, Yanjiao Zhou, John Taylor Garner, Anuj Patel, Roma Vishwanath-Deutsch, MS, Mary P., Jason Scoon, Echo Wu. 🔗 Learn more about the cohort and their ventures at https://lnkd.in/dqFuf78C

I’m excited to share that I started a company called Workmate. We’ve assembled an amazing founding team to build the Executive Assistant you deserve — powered by AI. Today, we’re opening up beta access to early users. My journey to founding Workmate Labs is personal. Despite leading AI products that helped billions connect on Facebook and Instagram, I had trouble solving the most personal connection of all — being present for my family at night. Night after night, I found myself in a meeting during the family time I wanted to protect. Or, delaying going to bed just to clear up the next day’s scheduling conflicts before it was too late. Often, the coordination cost of rescheduling a meeting led me to avoid moving things around, pushing higher priority work after dinner. It was a vicious cycle. Everything changed when I got promoted and started working with a great Executive Assistant. The transformation wasn't just to my calendar and inbox. It transformed both my life and my work. For me, having an Executive Assistant unlocked a new level of productivity and balance! I had tried every productivity and calendar tool out there, but nothing came close to having a human EA who truly understood my preferences and would proactively protect my time and think two steps ahead. Delegating all my scheduling meant more meetings planned on my terms and longer blocks of time to get focused work done during the day. Help with my inbox led to fewer distractions and dropped balls. I could have used this kind of support years earlier, long before I reached a position senior enough to have an EA. And I knew my team and countless others were stuck in the same trap. Perhaps you are too. Recent advances in LLMs and AI agents got me excited about the potential to not only replicate an EA's scheduling tasks but also their strategic thinking. All while being reliable 24/7/365. With the help of AI, having a dedicated assistant doesn’t need to be limited to those who can afford the $50k-$150k per year cost. Today, you can have your Workmate schedule meetings, manage your calendar, and proactively clear conflicts — leaving you free to focus on what matters most at work and in your life. And scheduling is just the beginning of the busywork we’ll tackle. We’re already working on email support, reminders about dropped balls, research, and more. We envision everyone having the support of a Workmate – on every team, at every company. If you’re interested in building everyone’s AI teammate, please reach out. We’re actively hiring for key roles.  To experience the impact that an Executive Assistant can have on your work and your life, check out the link in the comments or send me a message. You deserve a Workmate!

We are excited to announce the launch of Terrarium, a venture studio building the next wave of transformational healthtech companies! Company Ventures has always been a talent first venture platform. We seek to work with the most exceptional early stage talent in the market, investing first check capital in traditional pre-seed and seed rounds. Now we are able to partner with founders even earlier at the idea stage. Increasingly, entrepreneurs are seeking out the accelerated and de-risked pathway to build new companies that Terrarium represents by combining best-in-class research, talent, capital, and deep industry relationships. In this way, we see Terrarium as a natural and exciting complement to our core market investing strategy. Thank you to everyone who has supported Terrarium in reaching this milestone and to our incredible team including Mark Rosenblum, Margaret Davidson, Matthew Harrigan, Nelson Boone Schubart, Hunter Hillenmeyer, John Ciccio, Tony Ferullo, Troy Bannister, Austin Dirks, and Stephen R. Saine. A special shout out and thank you to our partners and advisers including Noah Waxman and Lucas Werthein at Cactus, Hank Capps, MD FAAFP, John D. Cooper, CFA, and Jaimie Clark at Wellstar Health System as well as Ken Moelis, Marc Wolpow, and Eric Felder. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/ek_ijkWA #venturestudio #incubator #artificialintelligence #healthtech #digitalhealth #healthcareAI #digitaltransformation #venturecapital #startupfunding #investing

We’re excited to announce that we’ve extended the application deadline for the Spring 2025 Grand Central Tech cohort to Monday 10th February 🎉 We’re still seeing applications roll in, so we’ve extended the deadline by a week. If you’re on the fence about whether to submit an application - this is your sign! Please feel free to reach out to us if you have any questions about the program, we’re here to help. We still expect to notify successful applicants in late February for an April move-in.   🔗 Apply now: https://bit.ly/4bxfOm5, or learn more: https://lnkd.in/eDbZEVpf

“Joining GCT in 2023 has been transformative for Tabs. The space is amazing and has nurtured our company from 2 to 40; the Company Ventures investment team is exceptional - advising us throughout our fundraise process and participating at every stage - and a supportive, talented community of fellow founders that has made us smarter and helped us move faster. We couldn’t have asked for a better foundation.” Hear first hand below what Grand Central Tech alumni Ali Hussain, Kate Ryder, Neetu R., Daniel Wertman, Roja Garimella, MD, MBA and Carl Madi have to say about their time growing at GCT. There are less than 2 weeks left to apply for the Spring 2025 Grand Central Tech cohort, with applications closing Monday 3 February, so be sure to get your application in: https://bit.ly/4bxfOm5 💫