Pear VC

Really grateful for Margaret Vo for educating Pear's FFC AI cohort on Anthropic's latest developer tools and Anthropic's emphasis on safety and alignment. Really excited for the future of Computer Use, Tool Use, Evaluation Tool, and the ecosystem around Anthropic's foundational model and amazed how intuitive it can be for non-technical founders as well. We learned the importance excellent prompt engineering and leveraging RAG tools like Voyage AI ( ?? portco) so that there is less need to do extensive fine-tuning! Thank you to Jo Zhu for setting this up for our group and supporting the next generation of female founders!

Introducing Lynk — a smarter, more transparent way to shop, powered by Consensus. lynksearch.com V1 now in limited beta.

SweatPals is a case study of what Pear VC loves to see in a consumer-focused business: ? Founders with clear founder-product fit. Salar Shahini and Mandi Zhou, both immigrants to the U.S., uniquely embody the mission behind SweatPals. By creating a platform that helps people forge real connections through fitness, they’re translating their own journey of finding community into an app that can genuinely resonate with millions around the world. Founder-product fit like this is central to building lasting consumer trust. ? A compounding moat. The more people use Sweatpals, the more useful its network becomes. The team has deployed impressive ingenuity and grit to build momentum around the country. In a short period they've helped organize 25,000+ events. ? A clear why now. Did you know that according to Forbes 79% of Gen Z reports dating app burnout? SweatPals is tapping into a movement that prioritizes IRL experiences over screens. ? A market expansion opportunity. It’s incredible to hear about event organizers earning more money leading events through Sweatpals than from their 9 - 5 jobs, a testament to the platform's potential to enable economic opportunity. Congrats to the Sweatpals team on their recent $3M fundraise. Pear is excited to support your mission of connecting people through their shared passions! If you're looking to connect IRL with your local community, and yes, get a little sweaty, I highly encourage you to check out SweatPals.

Yesterday Matter Intelligence (PearX S23 Pear VC) announced?their $12M Seed round led by Lowercarbon Capital. Many people ask how we make decisions about companies at the zero stage. I met?Vishnu Sridhar?in January 2023 when I was providing?feedback to some Harvard Business School teams as part of a class led by?Prof. Thomas Eisenmann. I was smitten. First, Vishnu Sridhar had deep expertise in space- he had worked at NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory for almost seven years, where he led the work on Mars Rover Perseverance Mission’s research instrument known as the SuperCam and where he received multiple awards. Vishnu's interest in space dates from childhood. He talks about watching National Geographic, and “Cosmos: A Personal Voyage,” a thirteen-part, 1980 television series and sending a weather balloon up to ~110,000 feet with a couple of instruments as pivotal moments that sparked his love?for space. Second, Vishnu was on his own personal mission to build a company to collect data about earth never collected before.?He wanted to build?a?hyperspectral sensor, deploy it on a satellite and then across an entire constellation. It sounded a bit crazy but it was clear that nothing was going to stop Vishnu. Vishnu's knowledge, ambition, clarity of mind and building a company that would end up with proprietary data convinced us to make an investment. We backed Vishnu and his team a couple of months?later and they joined?PearX S23. At PearX, we worked closely every week for?fourteen weeks with?Vishnu and his team,?understanding the most urgent market opportunities, closing initial LOIs and developing a detailed plan for the first satellite. Following PearX, they closed their seed round.? We are excited?to work with?Vishnu Sridhar, Thomas Chrien and Nathan Stein as they build?Matter Intelligence. Their advanced sensor technology, with 500x data density of any existing?solution, delivers?sub-meter resolution and opens up the door for many commercial applications - insurance, agriculture, mining, government and others. https://lnkd.in/gHnHshp9

Excited to feature Counsel Health, our new Pear VC Portfolio company on the Pear Healthcare Playbook with Muthu Alagappan, MD, CEO and Founder of Counsel Health, on defining a new healthcare paradigm in asynchronous care. Hope you enjoy the candid conversation I had with Dr. Muthu on his journey to founder market fit at the intersection of AI and clinical medicine, on the origins of Counsel, and how Counsel brings a novel solution to increase access to care and address the 100,000 clinician shortage that we'll see in 5 years. P.S. They're hiring - this is an incredibly rare opportunity to join a world class team: Rishi Khakhkhar, MD, MBA, Justin Yu, Jessica Fan, Uzair Khan, Jaisal Friedman and growing!

Adam Foroughi has built a $50B public company and almost every VC firm passed on him. Here is your chance to listen to his story. Space is limited! AppLovin Pear VC Adam Foroughi https://lnkd.in/gEB9rD46

We're so proud to share that ixlayer has announced their Complete Blood Count test with their direct-to-patient biopharma programs through ixEngage. ixLayer is paving the future for at-home testing access for patients. “Remote CBC testing as part of ixEngage accelerates patient-centered healthcare,” explained Pouria Sanae, CEO and co-founder of ixlayer. “At ixlayer, we continually merge medical and technological innovations to shift the healthcare paradigm from reactive to proactive care so patients can get the care they want and need when it’s convenient for their schedules.” Congratulations! #HLTHUSA

Super excited for Counsel Health and its impact on everyone's health and well bering. Welcome to the new age of healthcare — personalized, convenient, and accessible.

Our PearX S24 Demo Day was a showcase of 21 cutting edge AI-first companies. Read more about our PearX program and our recent Demo Day in Marina Temkin, CFA's article in TechCrunch today. We're proud of how we've grown the program: from offering direct hiring support to free office space, PearX is always getting better. You can also read about a few of the exciting startups in our PearX S24 cohort. This batch was diverse -- from a product search and price tracking company to cloud computing for scientists. We couldn’t be prouder of the founders who took the stage to share their incredible work with GPs and the wider tech community. https://lnkd.in/dUxEGq2h

Our PearX S24 Demo Day was a showcase of 21 cutting edge AI-first companies. Read more about our PearX program and our recent Demo Day in Marina Temkin, CFA's article in TechCrunch today. We're proud of how we've grown the program: from offering direct hiring support to free office space, PearX is always getting better. You can also read about a few of the exciting startups in our PearX S24 cohort. This batch was diverse -- from a product search and price tracking company to cloud computing for scientists. We couldn’t be prouder of the founders who took the stage to share their incredible work with GPs and the wider tech community. https://lnkd.in/dUxEGq2h