Tamara Mendelsohn

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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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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📣 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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Talking to users and thoughtfully integrating their needs and wants was woven through everything we did at IDEO—threaded through every prototype and product decision. Reading my colleagues Joanne and Leo's latest work brought that to mind. They describe a future where research runs continuously, with AI agents recruiting participants and instantly surfacing insights. Synthetic personas, carefully trained on consumer signals, mirror human behavior closely enough to extend live studies and compress timelines from weeks to hours. Today user research mostly runs in fits and starts, prohibitively expensive and locked away in dedicated project cycles when it could be a constant companion, seamlessly integrated into the product development process. Joanne and Leo lay out the full vision here: https://lnkd.in/gEUBSG_J

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This a seductive idea; that organization's context fragments, decision logic gets lost, and an organization is prone to tackle collective amnesia. BUT this comes with a lot of caveats!! - MONOCULTURE: When one system becomes the authoritative interpreter of "why things are the way they are", it will collapse pluralism. An organization actually benefits from various "contested memories". An engineer and sales guy remember different things from a discussion and that helps. Employees can stop arguing with the system not because its correct but its "coherent". - OBSERVER's EFFECT: When people know that the reasoning within systems is being captured, they will change what gets recorded. The negotiations will become "safer" and will contaminate raw signals. - CENTRALIZATION: Interpretation gets centralized upwards. It may appear leadership or executives are gaining synthesis and becoming closer to the ground. But there is no comparison to living through the frictions, not even eclectic summaries. LEADERSHIP MUSCLE NEEDS TO PRACTICE LIVING THROUGH FRICTION OTHERWISE IT WILL TURN SENILE. - BIAS AMPLIFICATION: Model's inbuilt biases can combine with company's cultural quirks resulting in misinterpretations and distortions, worse they get reinforced over time. System will learn how the company thinks and then will optimize for continuity. AMNESIA IS SOMETIME A FEATURE. - SEMANTIC TRUTHS: Unlike objective truths this system will play on subjectivity and will build "causal" relationships that are based on semantics. This over time can form mythical decision norms with no external validity. The real question isn't "CAN IT BE BUILT?". Of course it can be. But "HOW IT SHOULD BE POSITIONSED". #llms #leadership #ai

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One of my agentic commerce predictions for 2026 in this recent Forbes piece: Matt Nichols, General Partner at Commerce Ventures, notes that the mechanics are already in motion. Looking ahead, he predicts that this year, "Agentic commerce transaction volume reaches meaningful levels as consumers advance from research to buying on AI platforms. 2026 will be the year that transactions are completed in these platforms." To this prediction, Nichols adds another: retailers will be forced to build "super-feeds" specifically for AI platforms. “These data feeds may involve monetary transactions that could include payments to AI platforms or payments to the retailer/brand (depending on balance of power).” https://lnkd.in/g65RAerA

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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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Two things we learnt in insurance very early on. 1. Buying insurance is a very important and complex decision, with so many variables.. you don't make that decision online by seeing a facebook ad. You need and deserve a trusted Agent on the other side who can help fit these variables, and make this decision simpler for you. 2. Brokers and underwriters perform very complex and knowledge intensive tasks daily. Specially for Business/Commercial insurance. You know how litigation ridden our country is. Try reviewing a 300 Page policy or contract with 29 endorsements and then endorsement overriders on top of that. Policies are contracts, financial contracts. This work is no different than of a lawyer many times. And then more. So we set out to provide the help insurance industry eco-system badly needed, but was not being given. The industry is also dealing with a legacy ecosystem of software which takes you back to the 90's (no exaggeration). And thus was born Outmarket AI. We are constantly creating a 2 decade leap forward in the software and tech experience of our clients.

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The other week I sat down with Krish Ramineni Co-founder & CEO of Fireflies.ai We were in person, that helped produce one of my fav SaaS Revolution show podcasts of the year. And it also created a full circle moment. More on that in a bit. Krish started building Fireflies.ai 9 years ago. Being too early in AI and building a meetings note taker came with it's challenges. He was on podcasts talking about his journey and AI before Chat GPT was released and gave us all an AHA moment. Since then Fireflies has gone on to Unicorn valuation. It's riding the wave very well and the guy is a workaholic. 996 culture and then some. The podcast covers: ✅ Why AI is the worst place to be complacent ✅ Building AI businesses ✅ AI Automations ✅Worklife balance and more. Back to the full circle moment. Krish shared on the podcast that when he was starting out building fireflies.ai he used to watch SaaStock videos on youtube to help him learn and one in particular, I think it was 'How to build a massive SaaS business selling to SMBs' by Mark MacLeod, helped Krish maintain the SMB focus, whilst everyone else was telling him to be successful he needed to move upmarket. Now Krish is running a Unicorn AI company and will be speaking at next years SaaStock USA conference, that will help the next wave of builders. I love that. You can listen or watch the podcast 'Building an AI Native company before LLM's on all podcast players or our youtube channel. Here's to more full circle moments and helping founders like Krish through SaaStock events and content and to more in person podcast episodes. Here's a clip from the podcast around complacency (in the AI era)

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