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The Headline family is experiencing incredible momentum, and today our portfolio company DeepIP is announcing a $25M Series B, bringing total funding to $40M.  This is the kind of company that doesn’t just add AI to a workflow, but it sets the standard for an entire category. The momentum speaks for itself: 1️⃣ 10x ARR growth in < 18 months 2️⃣ Trusted by 400+ law firms and leading corporate IP teams globally 3️⃣ 2M+ chats on the DeepIP platform We’ve had the chance to back FX (Francois-Xavier) L. and Edouard D., leading their Seed round with Headline. Watching them take on a problem as complex and high-stakes as patent work has been genuinely impressive. And working with them has been an absolute pleasure: these 2 are coupling very high ambition and humility. Tech built in Europe, but opening the US office very early and FX starting a life in NYC with his family with 0 hesitation in order to build a global category leader in the IP industry. What convinced me early is still what stands out today: patent teams don’t need another standalone AI tool. They need something that fits the way the work actually happens: documents, long-running matters, multiple stakeholders, and zero room for sloppy context handoffs. Big congrats to the whole DeepIP team + Korelya Capital, Balderton & Serena Proud that we’re doubling down at Headline and continuing the support for what’s next!

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📣 Female Tech Founders in NYC — New Accelerator Alert! Scale Ready Studio is a new 12-week, revenue-focused growth program for women building tech startups in NYC, created by Women.NYC in partnership with Get Sh!t Done. This program is designed to help founders scale sustainably through: - Revenue and profit growth - Strong systems and operations - Weekly strategy labs - Hybrid coaching (1:1 + group) - Technical assistance - In-person Founder Days The program culminates in a Deal Day, where participants pitch to a curated group of investors. 🗓 Applications close January 12

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VC schedules, and thoughts on being a VC noob. -- VC schedules to know -- Most venture capital firms hold partner meetings on Mondays. This is typically when the investment committee votes on new investments and other key decisions. Savvy founders learn the exact timing and may need to provide additional data over the weekend to stay in motion. It is also well known that many venture capitalists observe a “European summer,” with August often being light or fully off. Similarly, the winter holidays reduce activity across much of December. That said, data from Carta shows a meaningful year-end push to close deals in December, followed by a flurry of activity in January. Founders should be cautious about kicking off fundraising during these slower periods. You do not want a raise to go stale and fall apart. VCs talk to each other, the industry is highly interconnected. -- I’m a mid career Noob! -- I am an “emerging manager,” effectively a new VC, less than three years in. In venture capital, the timeline is long. On my Linkedin you'll see I have two roles at Blitzscaling: Limited Partner means I put money into a fund, but have no decision making ability, and General Partner means I'm actively finding startups, bringing them to the partnership, and funding. As a General Partner, you are often considered an emerging manager for close to a decade, as it takes years for a fund to fully mature and establish a VC track record. Investing is a long game, but the upside can be extraordinary. Fortunately, I entered this role with a positive angel track record from my own bank account, which is often a good idea to have as a VC. When I learn a new VC concept or term, I’m an AI first, I’ll link to my post a few days ago in the comments, I totally live for constant growth and learning, if you’re not growing you’re dying. Fun fact: Many/most start their VC career in their 40s, as they need to have enough tech and biz cycles, a broad enough network, resources, and a platform to stand upon. As we end the year, I'm sharing more career thoughts, and productivity thoughts, rather than industry trends and market maps and frameworks and forecasts. I wrote all of this by hand myself, but used AI to edit some of it.

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I’m thrilled to announce defy.vc’s investment in Birches Health as part of their $20M combined Seed and Series A funding round, alongside incredible partners like AlleyCorp, General Catalyst, Will Ventures, and others. As someone deeply passionate about backing companies that tackle important problems for our society, I couldn’t be more excited about what Birches is building—a national virtual clinic dedicated to treating gambling addiction and related behavioral disorders like gaming, sex, porn, and internet addictions. What excites me most is Birches’ innovative health assurance model: proactive, accessible, and affordable care that’s evidence-based and delivered right at home. With the explosion of legal sports betting—think nearly $1.5 billion wagered on this year’s Super Bowl alone—we’re staring down a looming public health emergency. Traditional options like hotlines or generic therapy fall short for this high-acuity issue, but Birches changes that by offering specialized therapy from trained clinicians, multimodal treatment, and peer support, all covered by major insurers like United Healthcare, Cigna, Aetna, and Blue Cross Blue Shield. It’s available in all 50 states, breaking down geographical and financial barriers that have left so many without help. The impact is already profound: 96% of patients report an improved quality of life, and 94% give Birches a 5/5 rating. By partnering with state governments, payors, and policymakers, Birches is pushing gambling addiction into the spotlight of behavioral health conversations, where it’s been neglected for too long—often leading to shame, worsened outcomes, and higher suicidality risks. This funding will supercharge their growth: expanding the provider network, boosting clinical excellence, scaling infrastructure, and deepening insurance and state partnerships to meet surging demand. Very excited to partner with Elliott Rapaport and the entire Birches team! See more about our POV in the blog post linked in the comments. #GamblingAddiction #BehavioralHealth #HealthTech #VentureCapital #Innovation

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🚀 Big milestone for Attio: today announcing a $52M Series B led by GV (Google Ventures), with Michael McBride joining the Board. This follows incredible momentum in customers, revenue, and team growth. But what excites us most remains the same as the very first day I met Nicolas Sharp four years ago, and the reason we have continued to back Attio from Seed through to Series A to now: game-changing product philosophy, world-class technological leadership and delivery, and resulting customer delight. From day one, Nicolas Sharp and Alexander Christie set out to build a new kind of CRM: ✨ Lightning fast and a delight to use ✨ Built on a flexible, modern data model ✨ All designed to give users full control to build a CRM that works for their GTM motion and seamlessly plug into the rest of their stack That foundation has proven to be exactly the right one. A new generation of GTM builders is emerging with Attio as their central pillar - including companies like Lovable, Granola, Modal and more. And the data model is perfect for building native AI functionality and allowing agents to work with the CRM - some of this is live, some is coming soon 👀  Nick and Alex have assembled a stellar team and have impressively scaled the organisation. Congratulations to them all on this funding milestone. Thank you for having us along for the ride over the past few years, and here’s to an epic next chapter ahead.  More from Nick here: https://lnkd.in/easA6jYV

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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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I'm excited to share my latest podcast conversation on Notable Perspectives with Elizabeth Weil, founder and Managing Partner of Scribble Ventures. Elizabeth's career spans some of the most influential chapters in tech. She helped scale Twitter from 50 to 3,000 people, built the market development function at Andreessen Horowitz, and has invested in over 60 companies, including Slack, SpaceX, Coinbase, and Figma. In our conversation, we explore: - Her early days cold-calling founders (including one to a little podcasting company called Odeo, where Ev and Biz mentioned they had a beta for something called Twitter) - What it was like building at Twitter during hypergrowth and why it felt like contributing to a "public utility" - How she and her husband Kevin Weil built a personal angel portfolio of 100 companies (23 are now unicorns) before raising Scribble's first fund - Her contrarian takes on AI valuations and why speed alone isn't a moat - The future opportunities she's most excited about, from AI-powered education to how our knowledge might outlast us Elizabeth's advice to founders: Don't chase higher valuations just for the sake of it. Focus on why you, why this, and why now. Link in comments. Would love to hear your thoughts.

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Welcome Rose Johnson, Marketing Partner for Tech Week at Andreessen Horowitz on this episode of 🔥 The Lantern 🔥 TECH WEEK by a16z is one of the largest founder-focused events in the U.S., and for the first time ever, it's coming to Boston May 26th - 31st. 🏙️ Why Boston, why now? 🏙️ Boston is the #3 U.S. tech hub by venture funding, behind only SF and NYC. In 2025 alone, our city raised $17B+. Rose said it best: Boston is a city for builders. Technical, heads-down, less focused on hype. That's exactly why the decentralized Tech Week model fits here! 🗓️ What should Boston builders know about Tech Week? 🗓️ Tech Week isn't your typical conference. It's a citywide takeover, spread across 80+ Founding Host events over a condensed week (May 26th - 31st coming out of Memorial Day). Alongside household Boston names like WHOOP, HubSpot, Klaviyo & DraftKings will be Anthropic, Lovable, Cursor, xAI, and ElevenLabs all committed to host events locally. Last year's edition across all cities saw 3,000+ events and 100,000+ unique attendees across all Tech Week host cities. 🤝 How can you get involved? 🤝 Submissions are open through Friday, April 17th. Whether you're a scrappy early-stage team running a community meetup or an established company hosting a keynote, there's a place for you. The official calendar drops at the end of April. Head to tech-week.com/host to submit your event idea. 🤔 What has Rose learned building a program like this? 🤔 First, hand an open brief to the community and trust what comes back. The decentralized model works because people bring creativity you'd never plan for. Second, she's had to unlearn a lot of traditional marketing. Her new operating principle is to "ship it" and learn from there. In a world where every channel is experimental, speed beats polish. Boston builders, get your events on the calendar and show the rest of the world what we’re building here! The Lantern is brought to you by MGMT Boston & Invest Northern Ireland – Americas this month

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