Siva Visakan Sooriyan

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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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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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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📣 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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NYC is losing young technical founders to SF — and it’s not about vibes. It’s about cost of entry. SF has far more entry infrastructure than NYC: i.e. the housing, community, and early support (financial and otherwise) that lets founders start building before they raise capital. This is widening the gap between the two cities' tech sectors. We are specifically calling for ideas (and hopefully action) to address NYC’s dearth of hacker houses: physical spaces that combine housing, workspace, community, and early peer support. I’m convinced that seeding hacker houses, if done right, is a low-cost, high-impact way to attract more young technical founders to NYC — and critically, something this community can actually do. And we should. The data is stark. Venture investment in NYC is ~19% of SF’s total — the lowest since 2017 — and the biggest, most innovative companies (especially in AI) are overwhelmingly being built in San Francisco. People who want to be entrepreneurs tend to work where those companies are. Unsurprisingly, many students and young builders assume they must go west. But do they actually want to — or is it just easier to get started there? I spent significant time in the Bay last year, and one difference stood out immediately: SF is dense with hacker houses and founder residences that help people get from 0→1. These resources are especially critical for recent grads and first-time founders who might lack capital or built-in networks. NYC may have long-term pull, but at the earliest stage, higher upfront costs and friction (recent Economist data suggests ~50% higher rents than SF) push many founders away. Hacker houses may sound anachronistic, but they’re real centers of gravity. We estimate SF has at least ~10x more active hacker houses than NYC, and that these houses have helped foster hundreds of billions of dollars in market value. I’m an NYC tech evangelist. I’ve worked on tech ecosystem development at New York City Economic Development Corporation, helped design national innovation programs for the Obama White House, and now invest in early-stage companies as a GP at Max Ventures. From a dollars-to-impact perspective, seeding hacker houses in NYC is one of the most efficient levers the city can pull. We wrote an overview doc (linked below) that explores this concept — and we'd welcome feedback from the NYC tech community. We are also hosting a small series of conversations — starting with a dinner in February co-hosted with Tech:NYC, Keel (Brent J. Smith), Company Ventures and Inspired Capital — to bring together leaders across tech, real estate, and policy. 👉 If you’re a founder, operator, VC, student, or have built / lived in a hacker house: • Does this resonate? • What would make this work in NYC? • Who’s already doing something adjacent we should talk to? Would love to connect if you’re interested in contributing or joining the conversation.

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Excited to launch the TPH Rural Health Transformation Lab. We’re building an open innovation platform to help design scalable healthcare solutions for rural communities, starting with Alaska. Proud to partner with Jonathan Strong, who runs Medicaid-funded care facilities in Kodiak and brings deep operational experience in rural healthcare. Our mission is to bring together innovators, clinicians, and technologists to solve real rural healthcare challenges. If solutions work in frontier environments, they can scale anywhere.

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Reading Metronome’s Monetization Operating Model, I kept coming back to one idea: pricing has become product. Software now delivers outcomes, not access. Yet most companies still charge as if they’re selling seats or licenses. That disconnect creates friction: for customers, unpredictability; for companies, stalled growth. The paper’s argument is simple but sharp—monetization isn’t a late-stage decision. It’s strategic infrastructure. Pricing needs the same ownership and iteration as any feature. Treat it like a surface that customers touch, not a spreadsheet buried in finance. If value is continuous and dynamic, pricing must be as well. That means product, GTM, finance, and engineering working from one system of truth. How many of us still treat pricing as an afterthought—when it should be a growth engine? https://lnkd.in/gnH7WzYf #Monetization #ProductStrategy #AI

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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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