Coalition Operators

Congrats to Arman Jaffer and the Brisk Teaching team on the $15M Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners! When Coalition Operators invested in the pre-seed alongside Springbank and South Park Commons before Brisk's launch in the fall of 2023, it was a bet on a mission-driven founder with a unique product insight: rather than building yet another tool for teachers, Brisk's AI-powered browser extension would help them work seamlessly across dozens of apps and data silos. Today, there are more than one million educators across 100 countries using Brisk to automate the most time-intensive teaching tasks—and as we know, teachers need all the extra time they can get. Fun to have this announcement on the heels of the Campus Series B. Our edtech portfolio is on ??! Jaclyn Rice Nelson Lindsay Ullman Toyin Ajayi

I’m thrilled to share that Nace.ai is officially emerging from stealth mode with MetaModel 1! It’s been such a privilege to work alongside my co-founders, Dos Bahá and Zhanibek Datbayev, whose vision and passion have made this journey incredibly rewarding. I’ve watched with joy and awe how their leadership has shaped Nace.ai into what it is today. MetaModel 1 brings our vision to life with Hypernet architecture for dynamic in-weights injection, allowing us to create task-specific small language models that deliver real precision for real business challenges. Our first target: audits, loan applications, billing, and compliance—tackling complex challenges with speed and precision today. You will enjoy this open letter: https://lnkd.in/gqqWPS4e.

Huge congrats to Tade Oyerinde and the Campus team on the $46M Series B led by General Catalyst. With student loans approaching $2T and a rapidly changing labor landscape, now is the time to reimagine higher education to reduce the financial burden and lean into human potential. Campus is doing just that, and we’re thrilled to support this incredible team and mission at Coalition Operators. cc Toyin Ajayi Lindsay Ullman Jaclyn Rice Nelson https://lnkd.in/eQ9dMyNb

Henry AI is an amazing example of two things we look for in vertical AI startups: 1) A founding team that brings together deep sector and technical expertise (bonus: Sammy Greenwall and Adam Pratt have known each other since high school). 2) A vertical approach to a problem—in this case, deck creation—that succeeds where horizontal plays have floundered, and is a great wedge into other workflows. And while we’ve backed sibling co-founders before (adonis ftw), this is the first time we’ve backed the sibling of an existing founder in our portfolio (Channi Greenwall of Olympix). We are long the Greenwalls at Coalition Operators!! cc Jaclyn Rice Nelson

Excited to announce that Henry AI (YC S24) has raised a $4.3M Seed Round. This is for all the analysts who are spending 40+ hours aligning logos on maps, researching niche submarkets, copy pasting head shots, and formatting tables. With Henry, drop in your financial model and we build an institutional quality deck with the click of a button. Shoutout to my amazing co-leads Misha Gordon-Rowe and Chad Byers @ Susa Ventures and Gregor Watson and Ginny Miller @ 1Sharpe Capital and David Lieb for taking the initial bet on us. And of course a special thanks to Josh Tatum, Matt Boras, Jaclyn Rice Nelson, Ashley Mayer, Adam Hardej, Jonathan Wasserstrum, Kulveer Taggar, Tim Suzman, Ryan Bednar, Rami Essaid, Yahya Mokhtarzada, Brian Chen, and Joe Teplow. Thank you to Philip Russo for covering the story. You can read more about it in the Commercial Observer Lastly, couldn't do any of this without my amazing co-founder Adam Pratt. https://lnkd.in/e5VQqdwJ

So thrilled to back Aja Beckett and the amazing Shotsy team from Coalition Operators. Aja originally built Shotsy for herself to track GLP-1 medication levels and side effects on her life-changing weight loss journey. Just eight months later, Shotsy has more than 100K downloads and a $1M run rate…and most importantly, a community of people who LOVE the app. GLP-1 medications have already transformed the lives of so many people: tens of millions in the US alone. Beyond weight loss and improved insulin sensitivity, there are early indications of improved cardiovascular health, neuroprotective effects, and the potential to treat other addictive behaviors. And as Aja so eloquently shares in this article, even less tangible upsides like reduced "food noise," which gave her fresh bandwidth for pursuits like building Shotsy on her nights and weekends. While there's been a ton of focus on prescribing GLP-1s, we see true white space when it comes to helping people navigate the life-changing impacts of these medications. Our bet is that a startup led by an incredibly talented and technical founder who is building for a customer and community she knows deeply is best positioned to shape this category. Bonus: it's such a delight to be on a cap table with a few of my favorite investors, April Underwood and Elana Berkowitz. Thank you Melia Russell for sharing Aja’s story!

A friend and Coalition Operators LP told me this was the LAST DAY to post a year-end reflection. Message received! 2024 was by far my favorite year of Coalition. For the first two years of Fund I, we were focused on building our portfolio, while honing our product and processes as a firm powered by active founders and operators. Year three was the most dynamic, as our startups hit big milestones and raised subsequent rounds, and we challenged ourselves to think about the role we want Coalition to play in the ecosystem for decades to come—all while continuing to find and back unstoppable founders. We made 13 new investments in 2024, including (Re)vive | B-Corp Certified (helping brands and retailers turn returned and damaged apparel into revenue), Solace (connecting people with experienced healthcare advocates to navigate care) and Hamming AI (automated testing to create reliable AI voice agents). The others have yet to be announced. And while supporting a growing portfolio stretched us, we found there’s new magic to unlock at scale. Not to mention the incredible leverage we get from connecting founders with the 100+ brilliant leaders in our operator network, like Gail Airasian, Poppy Thorpe, Shonu Gandhi, Zoelle Egner and Yvette Pasqua, to name a few. There were some big raises, like Ghost's Series C and adonis’ Series B (both companies have raised multiple rounds since our initial investment). Overall, there were 14 follow-on raises totaling more than $250M across our portfolio in 2024 (not counting extensions), including four Series Bs (what crunch!?). Toyin Ajayi, Jaclyn Rice Nelson and Lindsay Ullman have all raised venture capital for their own startups, and we love supporting founders through these processes. We also had our first company shut down, and while that’s not normally touted in these roundups, it’s an important and inevitable part of early stage investing. This founder took a huge swing, and we couldn’t be more proud to have backed him. We originally started investing together as angels and scouts five years ago, so our first inflection point was going from investing to managing a fund. Even more exciting is the shift from managing a fund to building a firm, especially in this moment, when so much is in transition: the continued bifurcation of venture, a massive platform shift with AI, a new administration and regulatory environment, major shifts in the media landscape and how startups tell their stories. Startups are purpose-built for change, and so are we: it’s a great time to be small, nimble, and rabidly focused on solving big, important problems. We feel lucky every day to be backing founders at the earliest stages, and getting to support them in tangible, impactful ways through the ups and downs of company building, alongside our amazing ecosystem of operators, co-investors and LPs. My only prediction for 2025 is that it’ll be another wild ride. Founders, we are actively investing: $250K-$500K, pre-seed and seed.

We're thrilled to back Hamming AI and its all-star founding team with experience from Citizen, Tesla, Anduril and Square. Voice is the next big frontier for AI, and reliability is the most important problem to solve, especially as this technology transforms customer support for sectors like healthcare and financial services. If you're building in this space, automate your testing with Hamming!

Love this interview with Revive founder and CEO Allison Lee, a finalist for the “Entrepreneur of 2024” list. Some great lessons for fellow founders, including the value of an outsider mentality, staying open-minded about your customers’ most critical problems, and being willing to make hard decisions in the short term (like firing a vendor who didn’t treat their employees well) in service of building in a more humane and responsible way. We use the word “resilience” quite a bit in the startup world, but for me, Allison really is the embodiment of this trait. Revive's incredible momentum is the product of seven+ years and multiple chapters. Her first business, Hemster, helped brands provide in-store tailoring services…until the pandemic shuttered those stores overnight. When Hemster moved online to serve consumers, Allison and team saw that brands’ need to restore lightly damaged apparel far outstripped consumer demand. They’re now tackling one of the most critical problems in the apparel world and turning a cost center into a revenue generator for brands and retailers, not to mention making a real dent in the estimated 9.5 billion pounds in returns that end up in landfills each year. Grateful to be an investor at Coalition Operators! https://lnkd.in/ePR9Wn4e

Congrats to Lauren Makler, Halle Tecco, MPH, MBA and the Cofertility team on this incredible feature in Forbes. When you’re backing a startup at the earliest stages, it’s usually a bet on the founders and some unique insight they have about a problem or market. In the case of Cofertility, the founders were proven company builders with a genuinely radical idea: would young women be willing to donate half their eggs in exchange for free egg freezing? If so, Cofertility could solve two of the biggest problems in the fertility world: making fertility preservation accessible for young women at a time when their egg quality is high but they can least afford it, and helping intended parents start families with donor eggs without resorting to dubious channels. I remember in a conversation about the investment, one of my Coalition Operators partners commented, “this is why venture exists.” It’s exhilarating to make a bet on an idea that challenges cultural norms and assumptions, and gratifying to watch the Cofertility team prove out their thesis over the past few years. I’m inspired by the many young women who are not only comfortable with Cofertility’s innovative “Split” program, but see their role in helping others start families as a positive part of the process.