Impellent Ventures

Today I’m excited to announce my company Lumi. We have closed a $4m seed round led by Seven Seven Six 7️⃣7️⃣6️⃣, alongside Kapor Capital and Impellent Ventures, and notable angel investors like Mariam Naficy, David Sze, Chamillionaire, and execs from Meta, Anthropic, ContextualAI, Nike, Sleeper, Pave, and more. Lumi is an AI-powered storytelling platform that's revolutionizing how we tell stories – and who gets to tell them. Lumi is empowering anyone to be a storyteller, regardless of their skill set. Lumi enables you to create, publish, and monetize your stories all in one platform. How do we do that? By creating access to: 🤩 End to end story creation 🛠️ Simple AI tools 📚 Physical and digital publishing 🤠 Built-in merchandising The best part is CREATORS OWN ALL OF THEIR WORK! It's everything a creator needs to build and scale their stories, without having to rely on personal connections into Hollywood or having to bankroll a full team. This is how we level the playing field. This is how we create access and opportunity for the world to tell their stories. Lumi is about to turn every storyteller into their own personal Disney. Sign up now to start creating ↓ https://lumistory.ai/ Here's a link to our Tech Crunch article: https://lnkd.in/gt7kwfD2

Last week, Somak Chattopadhyay and Anthony Santaro attended Upstate Capital Association of New York's annual Saratoga Forum, where Somak spoke on a panel on the State of Private Capital in New York with Heidi Knoblauch, David Brown, Cian Cotter, and Frank McEvoy. It's always a pleasure to be part of this wonderful event!

Last week may be my favorite one this year. Our team here at Impellent Ventures played host to 150 of the most amazing entrepreneurs, investors, and influencers in our little slice of upstate NY for the Finger Lakes Summit (#FLXSummit). Attendees for this year's conference have: - created over $25B of economic value and tens of thousands of jobs (plus nearly a $1T in investment value) - drawn over 20B social media impressions - produced music that has won five Grammy Awards - built iconic media properties such as Hitch, Pursuit of Happiness, House of Dragons, The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, and Baby Shark - founded game changing companies such as Napster, Dollar Shave Club, Rotten Tomatoes, Trinet, Affirmed Networks, NTT Data, and many more - made first check investments in world changing companies that have made them Midas list VCs Yet, even with all this amazing history, the group was the most humble, generous, and caring set of folks you could possibly hope to spend time with. Small and honest discussions explored not just the fruits of success but the grit, determination, and community support that is necessary to succeed when things invariably go sideways. We talked about our businesses, but we also talked about how to create a life of meaning and how to support your family as you grow a very demanding business. Pride and hubris were set aside in favor of pay it forward mentality and deep learning. The hope is these conversations create the seedlings of our world's next great companies and I have no doubt great things will come from this. I feel fully refreshed and inspired to continue to build with friends, both new and old and inspired by the world ahead of us (even if the news paints a gloomier picture) Huge thanks go to those who made this all possible: the Impellent Family (Philip H. Beauregard, Tariq Trotter, Montinique Kniffen, and Ilana Habib); my close friend and the umph behind the party, Sasha Hoffman; our amazing sponsors, Fidelity Private Shares, Silicon Valley Bank, Goodwin, Latham & Watkins, and 1919 Investment Counsel; and all of the amazing folks who took the time to come visit us from near and far to share their love of creating a better tomorrow.

We are thrilled to announce the newest The Walt Disney Company launch with Pair Eyewear's Mickey & Friends top frames collection. At Pair Eyewear, we are always thinking about how to bring more personality into the often-overlooked optical industry. This collection speaks to the core of our values as we seek to breathe joy into eyewear. Mickey, Minnie, Donald, and Daisy – have long been our most requested and we're so excited about this capsule finally bringing them to life. A special thanks to Us Weekly's Larry Stansbury for celebrating the magic of this moment with us. Read more below! https://lnkd.in/eAsGUJg9"

Seeing Allkind on a billboard in Times Square will never get old! This moment is so surreal and a tangible reminder that hard work pays off! Raika Djalali Tiffany Lewis

We are thrilled to announce that Ognomy Sleep recently reached an incredible milestone: we have successfully diagnosed and treated 10,000 patients for sleep apnea among a few other sleep disorders! Three years ago, Ognomy Sleep embarked on a mission to make sleep apnea diagnosis and treatment more accessible through the power of telemedicine and the proprietary Ognomy platform. Today, we are proud to say that we have surpassed 10,000 patients treated across 37 states through our platform! We extend our heartfelt gratitude to all of our providers and partners for their dedication, and to our patients for placing their trust in us. Our team is continually working hard to set a new standard in patient care, ensuring everyone gets the restful sleep they deserve. #sleepapnea #telemedicine #sleep

🎉 We’re thrilled to announce that we have secured $1.9M in pre-seed funding led by Impellent Ventures with participation from Techstars and strategic angel investors. As demand for sustainable travel continues to rise, we’re on a mission to unlock ESG goals for both corporate travel buyers and hotels and are just getting started. Read more about the news below.👇 https://lnkd.in/eq5u3Dxz

Happy Friday! Today, we are thrilled to announce that Pair Eyewear is expanding its global footprint into the UK and Australia. We are also proud to officially announce the opening of our second manufacturing facility in Irvine, California. As the first company to invent fashionable switchable top frames, this milestone is a huge step forward. We are proud to keep investing in research and development to keep growing our family of patents and product line as we eye expansion into other markets. You can read Inc. Magazine Ali Donaldson's scoop on the company’s global expansion and what this move means for Pair’s future in Forbes by Alexandra York and Zoya Hasan. This achievement would not have been possible without the unwavering support of our incredible team, dedicated customers, and our valued investors who share our vision for the future. The collective support of the Pair mission to bring joy to all through eyewear has led to this incredible milestone and we couldn’t be more thankful. https://lnkd.in/egvt4pGu

Today I'm excited to unveil my new company: Grocers List. A commerce platform for food creators and the brands that sell through them. Tools that drive creator growth, and capture the insane intent behind recipe audiences. After Privy got acquired, I never thought I’d do it again, but I’m having a blast with my cofounder Mike, Evelyn (we all worked together at Privy) and a few other amazing teammates (announcing soon). Thank you to David, Eric and the entire Founder Collective team, along with Philip, David and the Impellent team, Ben and Mike for blindly backing us in our initial $1M round of funding. We're bringing everything we learned around marketing + commerce from Privy/Shopify into a massive vertical of spend that desperately needs innovation. And the market has responded quickly :) Food creators are loving our first few products, “comment for recipe”, “save recipe to email” and "Shop the Recipe™". Follow our IG account to stay up to date (@ grocerslist).