186 Ventures

Check out our latest edition of "idiosyncratic phenomenon", highlighting our fastest growing portfolio companies and what we found to be non-obvious indicators at time of investment. We're honored to be partnered with Jose Luis Cruz, Jr and the entire Integrated Projects team.

Please join us for an incredible panel discussion hosted by 186 Ventures on May 1st covering some of the "real innovation" happening within AI here in Boston! We are joined by founders from some of Boston's most innovative AI companies: Meghan Verena Joyce of Duckbill, Mikey Shulman of Suno, Slater Victoroff of Mythica, Christina Pawlikowski of Causal, and Chia Jeng Yang of WhyHow.AI. You won't want to miss this one. RSVP at the link below! https://lnkd.in/egUXcDhH

We had such a special, high energy evening yesterday celebrating our continued work and expansion to the NYC early stage innovation ecosystem with 186 Ventures. The founders, operators, investors, and other industry stakeholders in NYC are very special and myself, Julian Fialkow and Sophie Panarese couldn't be any more excited to partner with the next generation of builders there! Shout out to our fantastic sponsors for the event Latham & Watkins, Rho, and Trinity Capital!

At this year's Game Developers Conference, Mythica hosted #Canopy, a unique rooftop World Building event full of food, connections and a series of panels about the state and future of video games. In the first of these panels, Samuel Kaminer sits down with Gaurav Bhogale of Galaxy Interactive, Moritz Baier-Lentz 🎮 of Lightspeed, Giuseppe Stuto of 186 Ventures and Graham Brooks of .406 Ventures to discuss the state of funding in video games and what investors see for the future of games. Check out the video below! Remember to like, comment and subscribe. 😄

Last year I published thoughts on how we assess startups beyond the typical VC pattern matching, dubbed the "idiosyncratic phenomenon" in seed investing. In an attempt to demystify some of the non-obvious elements we found when we first met the founders of our fastest growing portfolio companies at 186 Ventures, we're kicking off a series to highlight these fantastic companies through this lens. The inaugural highlight will be on Anthony Mironov and Greg Franczyk and their journey building Wingspan to bring world class financial services products to independent contractors everywhere (~$2 trillion in annual payments to contractors in the US alone!). Since we led their December, 2021 seed round, the company has grown revenue by 30x and exceeded $1B in total payment volume!

Had a blast yesterday at Mythica's Canopy event catching up with long-time industry friends and had the opportunity to sit on a great panel alongside Gaurav Bhogale of Galaxy Interactive, Moritz Baier-Lentz 🎮 of Lightspeed, and Graham Brooks of .406 Ventures, moderated by Samuel Kaminer of Mythica to discuss the current state of AI and Gaming!

At 186 Ventures we spend a fair amount of time thinking about what non-obvious trends may be in motion or may exist around the corner. As a generalist early stage investment strategy, these 2024 trends inform how we think about the world and our approach to partnering with founders. Big thank you to Stéphane Nasser and the rest of the OpenVC team for publishing this piece on what myself, Julian Fialkow, and Sophie Panarese are keeping at top of mind as we enter into what should be one of the best vintages in recent times to invest in seed stage tech enabled startups. https://lnkd.in/exTzRPDU

Massive congratulations to 186 Ventures porfolio company Causal for winning Emerging Tech Comapny of The Year at the New England Venture Capital Association awards! Shoutout to the rest of the winners and nominees, we feel very lucky to play a small part in this exciting ecosystem. Christina Pawlikowski Jeff Palmucci Alexander May

186 Ventures is so incredibly proud and honored to be on this journey with you Anthony Mironov, Greg Franczyk and the rest of the Wingspan team as you continue to democratize access to high quality payroll & benefits software for the TRILLIONS of dollars in independent contractor payroll here in the US! To many more billions (and eventually trillions!) of contractor payroll processed :-)

Great piece by Akash Pasricha from The Information on some of the highlights behind the recent explosion in Generative AI startups. I share some thoughts on how I think incumbents in many (not all) industries are well positioned to capitalize on the GenAI related innovation at hand beyond the LLM layer. Now that we are over the "honeymoon phase" of GenAI and its prospective technical ability, proof points are becoming increasingly important for VCs when assessing a startup. https://lnkd.in/eYVRp7_2