The Sunday Edition
ICYMI
Last week we had some big-tech M&A with Salesforce acquiring unstructured data management platform Zoomin.
$280.4M raised across 12 funding announcements, with a theme around AI-powered investing with Bloks (VC AI platform) raising $1.5M in a Seed round led by Storytime Capital and Mistral Ventures, Desia (AI for investment professionals) raising $3.3M in a Pre-Seed round led by Dig Ventures, Mako AI (AI investment associate) raising $1.55M in a Seed round led by Khosla Ventures, and Tetrix (AI for capital allocation) raising $5M in a Seed round led by Innovation Ventures.
Mako AI was also featured in new company alerts having emerged from stealth. The company provides an AI Investment Associate to supercharge complex research, analysis, and drafting with AI agents built to tap into a firm's knowledge.
13 people moves and promotions, including multiple President and CEO appointments: James Corrigan joining GoldenSource as CEO, Michael Finnegan promoted to CEO at Eagle Alpha, Katie Gross promoted to President at Suzy, and Mark Hale joining Pirum as CEO.
5 interesting roles across companies of all types and sizes, including Brightwave hiring a Software Engineer - AI & Machine Learning, The NHL hiring a Director, Research - Innovation & Growth Strategy, and Takeda hiring a Head of Data Strategy and Innovation.
About Last Night (Week)
Caught up with old friends and met some new data-focused VCs at Ethan Aaron’s Low-Key Data Happy Hour at Flannery’s Bar. Be sure to sign up here for calendar invites to the monthly event. It’s always a great mix of data industry execs, investors, data scientists, engineers, and commercial folks.
Had coffee with Karen Tai at Ground Central. Karen and I met recently at the first GLG Alumni event. She is currently leading investment research and data science at Neuberger Berman and was previously Head of TMT Market Intelligence Data at Point72. Karen also started a contemporary fashion brand, but I still haven’t forgiven her for absolutely shredding my fashion company idea (more on that to come if I ever get around to launching it). Refreshingly though, we didn’t talk data! We chatted all about non-profit boards and affinity groups.
Met up with Ted Merz at Classic Car Club (my Friday office). Ted was at Bloomberg for 32 years, most recently as Head of News Product. More on our discussion to follow on LinkedIn.
Headed downtown for lunch with Shrey Verma at PJ Clarke’s On The Hudson. Shrey is founder of Mindgram (I’m an Advisor) which specializes in building tools to unlock data and insights from complex legal, regulatory, news, scientific documents. The company has some of the most advanced biopharma and therapeutics research capabilities in the industry, and it was exciting to hear the updates on Mindgram’s growth and traction across the life sciences vertical and with investors specializing in the sector.
The highlight (sorry everyone above) was coincidentally running into Ally Rodrigues. Ally is one of the top ESG data and climate-tech experts, holding senior roles at Nasdaq and MSCI Sustainalytics. She and I worked together on the same team at AlphaSights at the beginning of our careers and both happened to be doing some lunch-break shopping for our respective soon-to-arrive nieces.
The Week Ahead
I’ll be Market Data vs Alternative Data Convergence: Best Practices Workshop for Sourcing and Managing Vendors, hosted by Archedata as part of Eagle Alpha Data Week. Unfortunately won’t be able to attend the rest of the week’s great events as I’m headed to Nashville to talk all things data on the Talk Tuah podcast.
Now that I caught your attention, I’ll actually be at the Teamworthy Ventures Founder Forum. Let me know if you are in Nashvegas / Music City!
Top 10 newsletters by % opens year-to-date
Personal Update - who wants to be a podcast guest? (self reminder that I never got around to that podcast)
We’re building the Uber for… - haven’t heard from the Bloomberg Killer crowd in a while
