Jonathan Chen

San Francisco-based Onos Health has raised $6.3 million in an oversubscribed venture round to transform how health plans manage behavioral health. Onos Health is a healthcare AI company tackling the estimated $60 billion lost each year to care misalignment and administrative waste. Its platform uses proprietary AI models to analyze payer data in real time, helping health plans identify optimal care pathways, eliminate outdated processes like prior authorizations, and direct more dollars toward high-quality care. The round was co-led by Haystack and Pathlight Ventures, with participation from pre-seed investors Bertelsmann Healthcare Investments and Nebular. The funding will be used to support growing demand from the nation's largest health plans and to expand its clinical and data science teams. Congratulations to founder & CEO Akshay Agrawal and the Onos Health team. Business Wire: https://lnkd.in/dD95z7ZZ Deals like this are reshaping the AI landscape. For weekly analysis on the funding, valuations, and strategic moves that matter, subscribe to the Charted Growth newsletter: chartedgrowth.beehiiv.com #AI #HealthTech #BehavioralHealth #InsurTech #DigitalHealth #Funding #VentureCapital

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New York City-based Betaworks has closed its third fund at $66M to invest in early-stage AI startups. Betaworks, a staple of the NYC tech ecosystem since 2008, will focus its new fund on investing in pre-seed and seed-stage AI companies. The firm has been investing in AI since 2016 and has backed companies like Hugging Face. Fund III is larger than the firm's previous funds ($46M Fund II in 2020 and $48M Fund I in 2016) and saw many of its previous limited partners return to invest, a strong signal in a challenging fundraising environment for VCs. The fund will seek to make at least 25 pre-seed to seed investments, as well as 50 investments into startups as part of the Betaworks Camps program. Congratulations to the Betaworks team. TechCrunch: https://lnkd.in/d--hfMpa #VentureCapital #AI #EarlyStage #SeedFunding #NYCTech #Fundraising

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Having more capital doesn’t fix weak fundamentals. I’ve seen startups raise bigger rounds… only to fail faster. Because money amplifies whatever already exists. If your foundation is strong, capital accelerates growth. If your foundation is weak, capital accelerates collapse. More hires won’t fix a broken product. More marketing won’t fix poor retention. More runway won’t fix a confused strategy. Early-stage founders sometimes believe funding is the milestone. It’s not. Funding is pressure. Funding is expectation. Funding is accountability - to investors, to your team, and to the market. In my journey over 25 years, we fundraised a number of times for multiple ventures. We failed to fundraise many times too. Sometimes it was a decision made not to accept an offer to invest. Reflecting back, I see clearly now how it was a blessing that these transactions did not go through. What matters is not the fundraise. The best founders I know didn’t chase capital first. They chased clarity. Clear problems. Clear customers. Clear execution. They built traction before attention. Revenue before vanity metrics. Discipline before scale. Investors today are looking for exactly this. Growth with resilience. Ambition with fundamentals. It is time for the Camel startup. Resilience, strength and value. Incredible physical characteristics to survive the desert (see https://lnkd.in/gu9rSnUa). In our founders’ community, we see a shift toward founders who want to build sustainable companies. Because in the long run, strong fundamentals attract the right capital. Not the other way around. Curious to hear from founders and investors, have you seen capital strengthen a startup… or expose its weaknesses?

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BOSTON STARTUPS: TiE Boston is excited to share that applications are now open for the TiECON East 2025 Emerging Company Showcase & Awards.   TiE Boston seeks leading Seed-to-Series A-funded companies in AI, Life Sciences, and India-US ventures. - They do not have to be TiE-affiliated companies. - Companies do not have to be registered in the US, but need to address US market needs   Why should startups apply?   Selected startups get: 🔹 Investor Access: 1:1 meetings in an exclusive Investor Lounge 🔹 Stage Time: Pitch in front of 500+ investors, founders & ecosystem leaders 🔹 Stall/Table Space: Demo at the East Coast’s biggest entrepreneurship conference 🔹 Media Coverage: Potential coverage from our Media partners 🔹 Prize Money: Awards in 3 tracks with cash prizes, powered by Sunoh.ai 🔹 Alumni Access: Ongoing network of top founders, mentors & TiE Boston Angels Chris Sauer Alok Prasad Sunil Bhatia Mike Grandinetti Veera Anantha Joseph Falcão Thomas Arul Vipin Mayar Raman Sud Adam Carter Siddharth Kundalkar Judah Phillips Sara Fraim John Sviokla Michael Davis   Application Deadline: August 27, 2025 TiECON East 2025 is Sep 26, first day of Boston AI Week #BostonAIweek

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Harpoon Ventures + Black Flag is teaming up with Microsoft for Startups to provide founders with access to up to $250,000 in Azure credits, empowering builders to scale faster, train models more efficiently, and access world-class AI infrastructure. What’s included: ⚡ Up to $250K in Azure credits (usable across Azure OpenAI, Grok 3, Llama 4, and more) 💻 On-demand GPU VMs for model training and fine-tuning 🧠 Access to GitHub Enterprise + Microsoft 365 Business Premium 🤝 Dedicated Microsoft technical + GTM support This partnership is designed to give deep-tech and dual-use founders the tools and resources they need to win. Because when they win, we all win. 🏴‍☠️

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YC is backing younger and younger founders. In the internet era, being a college founder was seen as young and edgy, but nowadays, in the AI era, there seems to be more aura in being a high school founder. In fact, my YC batch had a handful of high school dropouts that were set on ditching college and jumping right into starting a billion dollar company. While they are young, these founders have tons of energy and optimism with nothing to lose and only skills and connections to gain by starting a company. What they lack, however, is industry knowledge and experience that can guide them towards working on the right problems. AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude are instrumental in helping discover the base level problems, but for this next generation of founders, getting in front of industry experts and asking the right questions will become the real challenge to unlock true value. User research will become 10x more important as these young founders seek to discover traditionally hidden workflows in lesser-known industries to accelerate using AI. If you're a young founder who wants to iterate on your ideas in hours instead of weeks to find that perfect idea, comment RESEARCH and I'll get you set up. Image credits: Jared Heyman from Rebel Fund

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22yo founders. $20 million Series A led by Bessemer. One of the fastest growing YC startups. HockeyStack is a cracked team working out of a true fortress🏒 We toured their new space with one of the co-founders Emir Atli. This is the first episode of "Localhost": a series where we tour the offices the best startups around the world. If you have a suggestion for where we should tour next, tag them in the comments!! 💡 Fun fact about HockeyStack: Their logo looks identical to their ARR chart.

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We’re thrilled to share that Usul (YC S24) has raised $3.3M in Seed funding led by Scout Ventures with participation from BVVC, Teamworthy Ventures, True Ventures, Y Combinator and more. Usul is the modern platform for defense contract capture and federal growth. Our customers have won hundreds of millions in defense contracts for capabilities across Air, Land, Maritime, AI/ML and more. When Oliver Gomez, Joonghyun Lee and I joined forces during Stanford’s Hacking 4 Defense class, we interviewed 300+ defense companies to intimately understand how difficult it is for national security solutions to get deployed quickly at scale. In normal capital markets this is called dead weight loss. In warfighting, this costs lives. We're building an elite team of hackers and defense enthusiasts in San Francisco. If you’re interested in powering the next 1000 defense primes, email us at founders@usul.com or dm me. Read more about our journey in Erin O'Brien's Tectonic article below in the comments. Lastly, thank you to our amazing cap table for joining the ship. Bradley C. Harrison, Cody H., Nate George, Zach Beecher, Michael Keane, Joe Musselman, Gene Ebersole, Nick Nowlin, Thomas Lehrman, Stephen Schmalhofer, Michael Montano, Gustaf Alströmer 🇺🇦, Jared Friedman, Steve Blank, Jacqueline Tame, Jack Shanahan, Peter Newell, Steve Weinstein, Jeff Decker, Ivan Kirigin, Jeff Heitzman, Keith W. Gibson, CFCM, SCPM, John Tincoff, Michael Malis, Austen Allred, Tom Hsieh, Donald Donckers

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