Mantle

For founders thriving in spaces that aren't typically venture-backed or for those who have yet to land investors, Dwayne Forde will be sharing his thoughts on non-traditional funding strategies at Black Entrepreneurship Alliance's upcoming event, "Venture Unveiled: Alternative Pathways to Funding." 📍 Friday, November 8th in Toronto 📲 Contact the Black Entrepreneurship Alliance team for details

Transforming prototype code into a production-ready system can be a lengthy process, but Dwayne Forde, CTO of Mantle, shows how using an LLM can save significant time and effort. In part two of his Working with AI series, Forde explains how his team leveraged the power of large language models to reduce development time by two-thirds and improve the efficiency of the code conversion process. By experimenting with different prompts and refining instructions, Mantle's approach allowed engineers to focus on high-value tasks instead of manual coding.

Don't miss Amit Jethani's demo of Mantle at the EY & Techpreneurs event and learn how we're transforming equity management for businesses and their law firms ⚡

Halloween may be over, but there's no rest for the wicked 🧹 Here's what the Mantle team has been up to... 🎙️ Open Cap Table Coalition: Last week at the Open Cap Table Coalition’s virtual summit, Jarrett Quan-Hin (co-founder, Product) and Dwayne Forde (co-founder, CTO) showcased how Mantle is building products with the coalition’s standards, including our new cap table tie-out tool and upcoming integration between Mantle and Nasdaq Private Market.  ▶️ Read more about Mantle's tie-out tool: https://lnkd.in/eaNxiZE2 🌟 Black Entrepreneurship Alliance: Dwayne shared his experience on leadership, innovation, and the importance of mentorship and finding allies in BEA’s “Leading with Excellence” panel discussion. 🎧 The Business Leadership Podcast: Jarrett discussed the future of equity management for founders and companies in one of their recent episodes, including valuable insights on how founders should be thinking about their cap tables.  ▶️ Listen to the episode: https://lnkd.in/eXXxWWqC 🍳 HSBC Innovation Banking x Primary Venture Partners: Amar (co-founder, CEO) was the special guest for a CFO Breakfast Roundtable event in New York focused on applications and adoptions of AI systems in the financial space. Thanks for having us Brian Gwiazdowski, Andrew Oddo, and Adam Millsom! 💻 Richmond Hill Small Business Enterprise Centre (SBEC): Amit Jethani (co-founder, Operations) hosted a session on “Cap Table Management: Preparing Your Startup for VC Investment,” which was attended by hundreds of founders and business leaders in the Toronto area. 🎤 TechExit.io: Amar joined Michael Garrity (Financeit), Lexi Kaplin (conversationHEALTH), and Brent Holliday (Garibaldi Capital Advisors) for a panel discussing their experiences navigating successful exits. ✨ AI Tinkerers: Dwayne presented his innovative approach to automating code conversion using LLMs to AI Tinkerers, showcasing practical applications, technical insights, and opportunities for further experimentation. An overview of Dwayne’s educational write-up was also published on BetaKit this week!  ▶️ Check out the BetaKit article here: https://lnkd.in/ebWVrDsa 👋 Peerscale: Amar was the featured guest at Peerscale’s Quarterly Dinner to share his insights on navigating entrepreneurship from start to exit. Know of any events coming up that you think we should attend? Let us know below ⤵️

"AI is supposed to be a time-saver," says Mantle co-founder Dwayne Forde, yet many companies still face challenges integrating it into their workflows. In his new instructional series, Forde offers straightforward advice for tech teams working with large language models (LLMs). Forde breaks down the process of adjusting your LLM settings to achieve a balance between creativity and precision.

Thanks to our guest for joining our quarterly CFO breakfast. This quarter focused on AI Applications & Adoption, led by Brian Gwiazdowski with Andrew Oddo and Adam Millsom from HSBC Innovation Banking. Together they welcomed special guest Amar Varma (CEO of Mantle), and brought together finance leaders to discuss how AI is transforming startup finance—from streamlining operations to equity management. Thank you to everyone who joined and a special thanks to the HSBC Innovation Banking team for helping us create this series.

Even after a weekend's reflection, I am still floored by the progress and organic growth that was on display at the Open Cap Table Coalition's virtual summit last week. The coalition rolled out v1.0 of our #OCX format, an Excel-based full cap table standard for the industry. Many thanks to everyone in the coalition's Law Firm Working Group for volunteering so much time and expertise to the effort. The members of the Law Firm Working Group include: Gunderson Dettmer; Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati; Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe LLP; Perkins Coie; Fenwick & West; Latham & Watkins; Goodwin; Cooley LLP; Morrison Foerster; DLA Piper; Lowenstein Sandler LLP; Fasken; and Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP. We had a series of awesome demos showing how members are building with the coalition's standards, including: - a cap table tie-out tool built by Mantle that generates an #OCX cap table from the underlying legal agreements, - an integration between two members (Mantle and Nasdaq Private Market) around liquidity enablement, - the creation of a blockchain protocol for the #OCF standard by Fairmint, and - a version of #OCF tailored for Japanese companies by the Startup Data Standardization Association from Japan. Members of the coalition's Technical Working Group presented some impressive tooling they have built to help with data validation. The group has also built tooling to generate vesting schedules from OCF objects and checking ISO/NSO splits for stock option grants. The turnout for the summit was robust and much of the work presented has not been formally guided by the coalition, both of which are great signs that an open source project is really gaining traction. I can't wait to see what this group will have collectively accomplished six months from now at our next in-person summit! https://lnkd.in/gQQ35dBY

Something big is on the way... 🤫

I've been doing a bunch of talks/discussions lately with folks who are also in the #AI community. I've found it to be helpful to clarify what kind of implementation we're working on at Mantle to frame the conversation. Tier 1: Going to an external website to use a AI tooling - For example, businesses might have internal workflows that instruct workers to use AI tools for day-to-day work. Tier 2: Using hosted models via API - For example, software solutions integrate prompts and LLM interactions directly into their software and workflows. Tier 3: Deploying AI-assistive architecture - Architectures that make use of vector databases, embeddings pipelines, etc. Tier 4: Developing or tuning models - Dealing with training and testing datasets, evaluating model accuracy, weights & parameters, etc.

🚀🚀 Meet your 2024 Rocketship Companies 🚀 🚀 After a large call out to our community, the votes are in, and these are the next batch of companies taking careers to the moon! If you're looking for a job in #tech, and want to know who you should be engaging with, these are the companies we think are the ones to watch 👀 Thanks to Osler, Hoskin & Harcourt LLP and everyone who weighed in on the list this year, it is truly incredible! 💥 Check out the list here >> https://lnkd.in/dgHDaz2 If you still want to know more about these companies, their founders, and how they are going to accelerate your career, we are showcasing all of them IRL and celebrating in person this evening at Toronto's City Hall from 5-7:30pm and tickets are still available if you'd like to join in on the discussion and meet the Founders 👏 Tickets to the official celebration ➡️ https://lnkd.in/eeZF_-aZ Congratulations to all of the companies who made the list, and all those who have made the list in years prior - you continue to inspire and do great things for the Canadian Tech Ecosystem #rocketships #tech #companies #torontoevents #canadianstartups #founders