Andres Blank

Today we officially kick off our $2M pre seed round for Salubrum (Backed by Forum Ventures), supported by Forum Ventures, Coeus Collective Ventures, and Draper House Americas. Healthcare companies spend over $30B a year trying to acquire patients. The problem is not media. The problem is timing. Every time a patient approaches a healthcare decision a moment opens. Which doctor to see. Which procedure to pursue. Which treatment to start. For the companies involved in that decision, knowing that moment exists is incredibly valuable. Salubrum (Backed by Forum Ventures) is building the intelligence layer that maps those decision moments across the U.S. patient population. Our system aggregates large healthcare datasets covering 300M+ patient identities and uses them to predict when individuals are approaching important healthcare decisions. That signal can then be used by providers, pharma companies, payers, and other healthcare organizations trying to reach patients at the right time. Our first wedge is patient acquisition for healthcare providers and brands, but the underlying intelligence layer has much broader applications wherever patient behavior influences economic decisions. Over the past months we have quietly built the foundation. • Early pilots validating our patient intent scoring system • Distribution partnerships forming across healthcare platforms • Backed by Forum Ventures, Coeus Collective Ventures, Draper House Americas, NEXT Canada and Metta World Peace Starting tomorrow we will be meeting investors as part of the Forum Ventures showcase. If you are an investor interested in building with us get in touch. Calendly: https://lnkd.in/e5j-VvGC Investor Memo: https://lnkd.in/e5HyemAp

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I’m thrilled to officially announce our $3M seed investment in Propel People, a company we built inside the 1848 Ventures studio to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing the #construction industry today: the skilled #labor shortage. For small and medium-sized contractors, hiring isn't just a challenge. It's the number one threat to their growth, profitability, and safety. With 94% of contractors struggling to find qualified workers, it’s clear that traditional hiring methods aren't built for the trades. That’s why we built Propel People. It’s a mobile-first, AI-powered hiring platform designed for how construction actually works: in the field. By leveraging smart candidate ranking, instant #SMS-based screening, and a fully #bilingual interface, Propel helps contractors build great crews faster and more efficiently. I’m also thrilled to formally announce that industry veteran Dexter Bachelder is at the helm as CEO. Having worked with Dexter and the team over the last few months, we've already seen the impact of his leadership. His 25 years of experience scaling construction tech companies will be instrumental as Propel People enters this initial stage of growth. This investment reinforces our core thesis at 1848 Ventures: building AI-native companies that solve fundamental pain points for the #SMBs that form the backbone of our economy. A huge congratulations to Dexter and the entire Propel People team on this milestone. We are incredibly proud to partner with you to support the people who build our world. Read the full announcement below. #constructiontech #venturecapital #seedfunding #ai #skilledtrades #smb

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Dayna Grayson is a leading VC who has “sat in every chair” at a young age. She founded Construct Capital with Rachel Holt, an early leader at Uber. Together, they are tackling the digitization of industry. Dayna will discuss macro trends, what it takes to be a founder, and the potential for AI. She is one of the few who have successfully blended a career of operations and investing.  Check out our discussion at: https://lnkd.in/eYBUGjbW #leadershipdevelopment

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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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Peoplepath x Mana Tech Scaling Startups Starts with Scaling Talent Miami founders, you showed UP. Vision. Courage. Fire. And one shared question: “How do I build a recruiting model that actually scales with me?” Here’s the truth we anchored in this week at Scale2Miami: Your talent engine IS your growth engine. Your next milestone, product, and breakthrough, all built by your people. That’s why Peoplepath loves and partners with ManaTech to support founders with exactly what they need in their earliest (and craziest) stages: 🔥 A scalable recruiting model 🔥 A hiring strategy tied to your runway + milestones 🔥 A process that adapts fast, pivots fast, and always aligns to your vision 🔥 Access to top talent, globally From zero-to-one hires to building out GTM, tech, ops, and customer-facing teams across LATAM, the US, and Europe, we’ve lived this journey 100+ times. And we’re bringing it straight into the Miami ecosystem. Thank you, scale2miami founders. Your grit, your ambition, your clarity, this is what builds cities, industries, and movements. And Miami… you’re becoming the talent capital of the world. More to come. 🚀

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What does it take to create speed in a regulated industry? For Allie Carey, Chief Strategy Officer at SEI, it meant designing a system that could turn hundreds of ideas into real ventures (without adding chaos). Over three years, she: • Built a culture of experimentation across SEI. • Launched a company-wide innovation contest (with real stakes). • Narrowed 30 ideas down to 10 pitches, to 2 experiments, to 1 live business. • Took one idea from concept to paying customers in just 18 months. We tried something new this week on Beyond The Core and built her full playbook live. It’s how SEI increased decision speed, improved throughput, and built a pipeline of repeatable ventures. Catch the full episode, now live wherever you get your podcasts, and download the playbook at https://lnkd.in/gPRvAK_n

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I recently sat down with Josh R., Co-Founder & CEO of Gusto, for a fireside chat at Afore Capital's Pre-Seed Summit.   Gusto is a testament to solid fundamentals. We partnered at the Series B over a decade ago (Jason Green). Since then, they've steadily built a business that's amassed more ARR than Cursor, Lovable, and Harvey combined, is executing profitably, making accretive acquisitions and integrating the latest in GenAI to improve their stack.   Here are 5 tips Josh shared for early-stage founders with similar goals:   1. Start with co-founder selection, not the problem   Unlike most founders who begin by identifying a problem to solve, Josh prioritized finding co-founders based on relationship quality and complement. The investment in those relationships has paid dividends—their families are so close that the founders' moms have a group text thread.   2. Problem authenticity accelerates product-market fit   Josh and his co-founders had experienced payroll pain firsthand at previous startups. I've observed this same pattern repeatedly with portfolio founders who reach PMF fastest. Austin Hughes at Unify knew the GTM space from his work at Ramp. Eric S. Yuan was VP of Engineering at Webex before founding Zoom. Authentic problem experience creates both passion and expertise that compound over time.   3. Sequence your biggest risks first   When Josh started Gusto, he took a methodical approach to de-risking. Before burning cash on frontend or go-to-market, they built the backend systems—tax calculations, payments, and all the complex infrastructure. Then they manually tested these systems at friends' companies to validate that they worked before building front end. This sequential risk management helped proved technical feasibility before they committed resources elsewhere.   4. Don't trust surface-level competitive analysis   Payroll looked terrifying from the outside. ADP, Paychecks, and Intuit all dominated SMB, while Zenefits was an aggressive upstart. But when Josh dug deeper, a different picture emerged: the incumbents combined only had 50% market share, and 40% of SMBs were still doing payroll manually. Markets often have more white space than initial analysis suggests.   5. Find why you can win the untapped market   Identifying opportunity is one thing. Capturing it requires a superior go-to-market motion or a better product than incumbents. Josh developed both over time. The question every founder should answer: "Why can we tap the market segment the established players have left behind?"

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CoCreator Selected for the National HWP Accelerator! We’re proud to announce that CoCreator—the builders of Hakim, the world’s first AI growth partner for small business owners—has been selected to join the 2025 Hispanic Wealth Project (HWP) Accelerator, a national initiative powered by NAHREP, in partnership with KeyBank, Airbnb, and the San Diego Foundation. The HWP Accelerator is one of the most impactful programs for Latino founders in the U.S., offering mentorship, leadership development, business education, and access to strategic networks. It’s a holistic program that uplifts both the founder and the business—exactly what we believe in at CoCreator. This opportunity will help us take Hakim to the next level. 🔹 Hakim is an AI growth partner that will support entrepreneurs like a strategist, mentor, and CFO—providing real-time insights, emotional intelligence, and financial automation to help small business owners scale sustainably. Being part of the HWP Accelerator is not just an honor—it’s a milestone in our mission to democratize access to high-level mentorship and financial intelligence for underserved entrepreneurs. We’re grateful to the HWP team and partners for believing in the power of inclusive innovation. This wonderful program is starting on June 25th #HWPAccelerator #CoCreatorAI #HakimAI #LatinoFounders Hispanic Wealth Project #SmallBusinessSupport #AIForGood #LatinxTech #EmotionalIntelligence #NAHREP #KeyBank #Airbnb #SanDiegoFoundation #GrowthPartner

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Most investors don't know how to underwrite the first 20% of risk in a physical infrastructure project. Not because it's unknowable, but because the frameworks were built for SaaS multiples and software margins. When the asset is a network of intelligent nodes deployed across a metropolitan region, the spreadsheet looks different. Tomorrow I'm joining Surge, a Public Benefit Corporation CEO Miguel Jaramillo for their Town Hall to work through exactly this. We'll get into what it actually takes to evaluate intelligent infrastructure as an investable asset class, including deployment economics, capital structure, and how to think about returns when the value compounds in the physical world. If you've been watching the AI infrastructure buildout from the sidelines, this is the session to come get oriented. 📅 Wednesday, March 4 · 4PM CST 🔗 https://lnkd.in/gwCzVbp6 #Surge #AIInfrastructure #AlternativeAssets #EdgeComputing

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“A great co-founder relationship is like steering a ship together—you both have your hands on the wheel, and if you’re not aligned, you’ll drift off course. Authenticity, transparency, and trust aren’t optional—they’re everything.” –Tanis Jorge A huge thank you to Tanis Jorge for joining our recent Founders Network global keynote! As a serial entrepreneur and expert on co-founder dynamics, Tanis shared heartfelt insights on what makes—or breaks—the most important relationship in a startup. She reminded us that beyond metrics and milestones, true success often comes down to the human connection between founders. When nurtured with honesty and empathy, that partnership can become one of the most meaningful relationships you’ll ever have—regardless of the company’s outcome. Tanis, thank you for your wisdom, optimism, and for reminding our community that great partnerships build not just strong companies, but lifelong bonds. #FoundersNetwork #CoFounders #StartupJourney #FounderWisdom #Leadership #Entrepreneurship #StartupLessons #TanisJorge #BuildingTogether #GlobalKeynote

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