Deepak Goel

From our PearX S25 cohort, meet Pravāh, the AI-native operating system for the electric grid When Mohak Mangal, Dhruv Suri, and Aman Gupta looked at the strain on the U.S. electric grid, they saw a system pushed to its limits. Exploding demand and unpredictable supply have made blackouts increasingly common. This costs the economy more than $150B a year, a number that could 10x in the next five years. Mohak Mangal and team founded Pravāh to help fix it. Their platform helps utilities and grid operators make real-time decisions on load, generation, and congestion, reducing blackout risks, optimizing power procurement, and bringing much-needed stability to the backbone of modern life. We’re proud to support the Pravāh team as they take on one of the toughest and most important infrastructure challenges of our time.

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What a joy to speak with this brilliant cohort of innovators in the The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) ENTICE (Energy Transitions Innovation Challenge) 2.0 program and taking on their sharp questions at the investor bootcamp. 80% of global GHG emission reduction goals for 2050 can be met through energy system decarbonization, efficiency and electrification. This represents a US $100 trillion opportunity according to the IEA.     A stronger, more stable grid is at the heart of building a #resilient #energy future. This year’s program challenges innovators to tackle:  1) Behind-the-meter digital twins: #AI tools to analyse consumption and create appliance-level insights  2) Industrial flexibility at scale: AI solutions using smart meter data to identify flexible assets and operational inefficiencies    Kudos to the entrepreneurs and the GEAPP team for curating and executing such a thoughtful program.     Looking forward to seeing how these #innovations scale #impact.  Synapses Dalberg Media Vaishali (Vish) Mishra Anukul Tripathi (He/Him) Jayant Sinha Saurabh Kumar

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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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Today marks a milestone for Salesforce Ventures, and a defining moment for enterprise security. Alphabet’s acquisition of Wiz has officially closed. Wiz has been a cornerstone of our portfolio since May 2021, when Nowi Kallen, Kartik Gupta, and team first invested in their Series B at a $1.5B valuation. We saw the potential early and invested deeply, backing the team through their Series C, D, and E rounds. From a $1.5B Series B to a $32B acquisition, one of the largest in enterprise tech history, the Wiz team’s execution has been nothing short of extraordinary. This outcome reflects our mission at Salesforce Ventures: identifying the companies that define the next era of technology and staying behind them for the long haul. But the real credit belongs to the entire Wiz team on the ground. Beyond the technology, it was the relentless grit and day one mentality of Assaf Rappaport and the team that turned a vision into a $32B reality. Huge congratulations to the entire Wiz team on this historic achievement.

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On the latest episode of Embracing Erosion I sat down with Suyog Deshpande, Co-Founder & CEO of Webless (a Fluvio Ventures portfolio company). Before starting Webless, Suyog spent years at Amplitude, Salesforce, and Samsara - shaping products and GTM strategy at scale as a product marketing leader. That perspective is now fueling one of the boldest bets in tech: 🏗️ rebuilding the web for LLMs. Instead of optimizing for clicks and SEO, Webless imagines an agentic web -where sites are designed to interact directly with AI models and agents. We dug into: - What an LLM-native web could actually look like - How companies can prepare to be LLM-ready - What metrics will matter beyond pageviews and clicks - Why safety and trust are core to agent-driven experiences - Lessons Suyog brings from “big tech” into this transformation If you’re curious about how discovery, trust, and value exchange will evolve online, this one’s worth your time. Link to the full episode in the comments 👇

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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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In a recent interview, Baiju Shah (CEO, AKQA) offered advice that resonates deeply with the current state of venture and innovation. He speaks of the "intersection of tech and creativity." It's a crossroads that will define the next era of digital commerce. As AI begins to shape the shopping experience, it's predicting our needs, curating our choices, and designing our digital environments. We face a critical question: Are we designing for efficiency, or are we designing ethically? True innovation requires what Shah calls "responsible application." It's not enough to build algorithms that can sell; we must build systems that understand context, ethics, and the value of human agency. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/eJyxua86 #Innovation #Technology #ResponsibleApplication #Ethics

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🎙️ From Square to Mercury: How Rohini Pandhi became one of fintech’s top product leaders—and how velocity of learning at high slope companies shaped everything. Rohini dropped so many gems in our first episode of First Builders: 💎 Generalist → Specialist: In her early career, she was a generalist and tried everything. This led her to critical discoveries. She specialized in product and fintech when the “time was right” 💎 Follow the Engineers and Designers: Square was a high slope environment for Rohini, packed with talent density and learnings. She finds high slope environments by studying where smart engineers and designers are going. 💎 Fake News about PMs: PMs don’t just “move fast and break things.” Her team runs 30-50 customer interviews per quarter, providing rigor behind every decision. 💎 It’s Usually Too Early to Hire a PM: A top question she gets from founders is whether they should hire a PM. She usually says: “it’s too early.” 💎 Hiring a World Class Team is Like Tennis: When finding a tennis partner, you want someone a little better than you who can challenge you to improve your game. Give us a listen and leave a review on your favorite podcast location (see comments for links)! #FirstBuilders #StartupPodcast #ProductLeadership #TechCareers #Leadership

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Fascinating conversation on solving population scale problems in the health domain with visible use of AI with fundamental sciences at work.

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