Led by founders Marc Hermann and Anshul Jain, Everlab is building around a different model: identify risks earlier and make it easier to act on them.

The team raised a A$65 million in Series A funding led by Airtree, with participation from Plural, b2venture, Left Lane Capital, and several angel investors, including Australian cricket captain Pat Cummins.

Everlab combines advanced diagnostic testing with doctors, specialists, prescriptions, wearable data, and AI-supported care through a single platform. Rather than leaving patients to interpret isolated test results, the platform organizes their health information and helps coordinate the screenings, interventions, and follow-up steps that come next.

The company has already analyzed more than 20,000 clients across Australia and New Zealand. The company’s testing has uncovered previously undetected health issues in more than one-quarter of clients.

That is the larger opportunity behind the round. Preventive care is not only about running more tests. It requires an operating layer capable of connecting fragmented health data to meaningful clinical action.

Everlab will use the new capital to expand into the UK and continue building its clinical and technology infrastructure. As healthcare shifts from episodic treatment toward continuous prevention, platforms that can hold the full picture of a person’s health may become an increasingly important part of the system.

Read the full article on the Startup Daily.

Game developers and publishers pour years into building worlds, characters, and experiences, only to lose direct access to their players the moment a game is published. Once a title launches on platforms like Steam, PlayStation, or the App Store, the player relationship is largely controlled by the platform rather than the developer. LootLocker is the game backend platform that gives developers and publishers the tools to own and grow their player relationships directly. LootLocker was built around the idea that, aside from the game itself, a developer’s most valuable asset is its customers. They’re locking up and protecting the developer’s most valuable “loot”: player relationships, identities, progression systems, and content that keep players engaged over time. By keeping those systems accessible and buildable, LootLocker helps developers maintain ownership of that relationship regardless of where a game is distributed.

Co-founder and CEO Alexander Bergendahl brings nearly 20 years of gaming industry experience to LootLocker, having seen the ecosystem from nearly every angle: building and running studios, working inside publishers, and launching startups of his own. After exiting a previous venture, he decided it was time for developers to own their player relationships the way other digital businesses own their customers. He partnered with Andreas Stokholm, CTO, a longtime collaborator and backend engineer, to build the infrastructure that gives game creators the tools to actually own and grow their player relationships, not just their content.

What’s LootLocker’s mission?

Our mission is to change who really owns the player relationship in games. I believe the most successful publishers of tomorrow will have direct lines to their players for communication, engagement, and commerce, instead of renting access from big platforms. As direct-to-consumer models gain traction (helped by things like Epic challenging Apple and Google, and the rise of third-party stores) we want LootLocker to be the infrastructure that lets game companies talk to, understand, and serve their communities wherever those players choose to play.

Tell us about some recent milestones that LootLocker crushed.

Earlier this year we passed 10,000 active games on the platform and we now power a game with well over a million players. We also signed our first publicly traded customer. For a relatively small startup, those are strong signals that both emerging teams and larger companies trust our technology. They also feel meaningful against the backdrop of the last few years, where the funding boom in games created a lot of new studios, many of whom were potential customers for us, and then a lot of that capital dried up, leading to shutdowns and layoffs across the industry.

How does LootLocker inspire “customer love”?

We work with everyone from first-time indie developers and hobby teams to established studios and publishers with multiple titles. Indies use LootLocker to go from zero to one without building a backend from scratch, while larger teams use us to connect their catalog, cross-promote between games, and re-engage players who might have churned. What people love is that we’re very responsive (both on support and in product development) and that you can do a lot without being a backend engineer. When a customer has an idea for a new way to engage players, we try to ship the underlying tools quickly so they can experiment and push their games, and our platform, in new directions.

How has your background influenced you as a founder?

Besides being in the gaming industry for over two decades, entrepreneurship has always been part of my life. All of my five siblings have started businesses of their own, both for-profit and nonprofit, so building things from scratch never felt unusual to me. That mindset gave me the confidence to take risks, learn from failures, and keep starting new ventures. We started the company in Sweden and later went through Techstars Philadelphia, which ultimately led us to become a U.S. company. That journey taught me how differently startups operate across markets and reinforced the importance of staying close to customers.

Any favorite podcasts?

For anyone in games, I highly recommend “GameCraft” by Mitch Lasky and Blake Robbins. It’s a very well-produced, deep dive into the business of games, with a lot of historical context and analysis of what’s happening now. Outside of games, my two favorites are “Strong Songs,” where a jazz musician breaks down well-known songs in incredible musical detail, and “Sticky Notes,” which does something similar for classical music. My wife is an orchestral musician, so those two shows get a lot of play in our household.

Fun fact:
I’ve been baking sourdough for about 10 years, long before it became a pandemic trend. It’s now a weekly ritual, and my kids get fresh bread every weekend. Their favorite is an olive and gruyère loaf.

Listen to Marty Ringlein with Jenny Fielding, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Highlights, Hype, & Hot Takes on NY Tech. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

In episode 122 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, Managing Partner at Everywhere Ventures, sits down with Marty Ringlein, co-founder and CEO of Agree, for a founder’s-eye recap of New York Tech Week 2026. Marty breaks down his week — from demoing Agree at Intercom to a poker night at Bessemer — and what the energy on the ground said about where New York’s tech scene is heading. Together they dig into what had every founder and VC buzzing — agents, commoditization, and whether New York is finally having its moment as the center of the tech universe.

In this episode, you will hear:

• New York Tech Week reaching its inflection point.

• The best and worst events of the week as a founder on the ground.

• Agents and commoditization turning once-defensible products into overnight features.

• Regulated industries as the last viable moat against AI encroachment.

• The question every founder is now asking: what won’t Claude or ChatGPT build?

If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.

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Transcript:

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So, the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.

00:00:32 Jenny: Hi, everyone. Welcome to Venture Everywhere. Today we’re excited to talk to one of our founders, Marty, the CEO and co-founder of Agree. Welcome, Marty.

00:00:42 Marty: Hey, thanks for having me. This is going to be exciting.

00:00:44 Jenny: I thought, no better person to talk about what’s happening in tech in New York, across all these things than you, because I think you go to more events and are part of more interesting circles than any other founder I know.

00:01:01 Marty: Sometimes it’s contentious for founders whether they should be, quote unquote, “wasting their time at events.” But for us, it’s always BD. I think we’ve just found a lot of success and meet the customer where they’re at IRL. And so, we, by that nature, end up at a lot of events.

00:01:16 Marty: And then I just think New York’s a little bit more social where the events are always twofold where I will meet some interesting people. But also, it’s usually like a pretty good time, whereas in San Francisco, you’ll meet really interesting people, but it’s kind of a snooze fest. It isn’t always the most socially engaging time.

00:01:32 Jenny: Well, also, like what you do. I mean, I know there is that controversy, you know, amongst people of just heads down, should we be going to events?

00:01:40 Jenny: But I feel like for you and what you do, and maybe you can give us a little bit of a plug of what Agree is up to, you kind of have to get the brand out there. Give us the one-minute on Agree and how you guys are doing.

00:01:54 Marty: Agree’s full contract to cash. That really just means the second a customer says yes to the second that the revenue hits the account and all the workflows that go in between there.

00:02:03 Marty: So, e-signature on the contract signing, invoicing, billing, payments, revenue recovery, all-in-one. But essentially, rip and replace of your DocuSign, a rip and replace of your bill.com, even your Stripe. Those are some big brands to go up against.

00:02:18 Marty: One of the things that we always try to do, especially when we do the event marketing is when we get on a demo with somebody, have them say, “Oh, Agree, I’ve heard of you. You’re everywhere.” And the reality is I can’t afford to be everywhere.

00:02:28 Jenny: Wait, that’s my line. You’re everywhere. Don’t take my line. You are everywhere because this is my go-to hat that I wear all around the neighborhood. So, I am doing free advertising for you. And I feel like people stare at me when I wear this hat.

00:02:46 Jenny: One, because I wear it really low. So, they think I’m important and famous. But also, because people are like, “Oh, Agree. You’re a New Yorker. That’s so funny because you’re so unagreeable.” But this is my go-to hat. It’s like right on the little hook by my door.

00:03:01 Marty: I appreciate that. I’m going to make sure that you’ve got plenty of backups in case anything ever happens to that one. But I do feel like when we talk to folks that they do think that they’ve seen or been exposed to Agree a lot.

00:03:10 Marty: But the reality is we just stay within the four block radius virtually or in real life of wherever they are. And I think part of that is you’re just showing up.

00:03:19 Jenny: For sure. So, a little bit of fun history. I started my first company in New York City in 2008. Everyone said, “That is a shitty place to run a startup. Go west, young woman, to California if you’re going to be running a startup, especially software.”

00:03:34 Jenny: And I kind of looked around. I was like, all right. Well, there’s not a lot going on here. I will give you that. But it kind of had all the raw ingredients.

00:03:42 Jenny: So, since 2008, I’ve been really long New York tech and small contributor to it. Over those years, it has really blossomed and now, second biggest tech ecosystem and so much going on.

00:03:56 Jenny: And the thing that I find amazing about New York is like, when I was building my company here, there were some ad tech and media. There were obviously lots of industries, but those were the things that were starting to bubble up in tech. I wasn’t building in one of those categories.

00:04:09 Jenny: But then we saw it become the center of fintech and healthcare, to some extent, and crypto. Now, you know, it’s really developing on AI as well, which is exciting. So, what I love about New York is that it kind of embraces whatever the thing is and figures out how to build an ecosystem around it.

00:04:29 Jenny: Even hard tech, which everyone said it’s just inherently hard to build product in New York cause like the space. But all these amazing spaces have opened around hard tech.

00:04:38 Jenny: I kind of love the resilience and the buoyancy of New York to create what needs to be created. It’s been fun to see that. Tell us a little bit about your journey here in New York.

00:04:48 Marty: I think the biggest differentiator is the diversity of the people and that like, you have to like, will it into existence. Not all founders are going to make it. Not all startups are going to make it, but everyone building in New York, they’re going to will that thing into existence. They’re going to do whatever it takes. Brute force.

00:05:04 Marty: I appreciate that probably more than anything else because I’m just now exposed to so much creativity, especially on the go-to-market side. How they’re building things, how they’re launching things.

00:05:14 Marty: And it is getting a little bit easier to build things like prototypes and get them to market with AI. But it is getting much harder to stand out, getting much harder to launch because we are seeing this influx of people building and launching.

00:05:30 Marty: And now it’s just, you’re over what’s signal to noise has never been more out of whack, but far exceeding anything that happens in the San Francisco Bay Area. New Yorkers are the most creative and relentless when it comes to taking their thing to market. So, I’ve appreciated that probably more than anything else.

00:05:45 Jenny: For sure. Let’s fast forward to New York Tech Week. I’ve obviously been here a long time, building in and around the startup ecosystem. I do remember back in the day there were these startup weeks.

00:05:56 Jenny: I think Startup Weekend and Techstars were actually kind of involved early on in getting them going. And then they petered out. And I remember they were never particularly big. They were very like insidery thing.

00:06:08 Jenny: But I remember asking a couple of very prominent VCs, “Why isn’t Tech Week here a thing?” And they literally looked me in the eye and they were like, “Well, because we’re just busy and we can’t really agree on a week and everyone’s just doing their own thing.”

00:06:27 Jenny: And I thought like, wow, it’s weird because we saw around the world, other ecosystems really coalesced around the important dates. And in New York, everyone was over it. You can’t get all the firms to agree. There’s no center of gravity in New York. Everything’s so dispersed.

00:06:41 Jenny: It’s very different than doing that in like Boulder, Colorado or somewhere where you can actually hit everyone up. And I remember thinking to myself like, “Oh, that kind of sucks, but it does make sense. I mean, we’re a city of radical individuals, so it makes sense that like they don’t want to be part of a club that wants them.”

00:06:57 Jenny: Then this thing happened that Tech Week came into existence. And I would give real props to Andreessen Horowitz for making that happen. I think they started in L.A. as the L.A. scene was coming together as well.

00:07:10 Jenny: You know, I remember when they set their sights for New York and everyone was like, “I wonder if this will actually work.” But I think it took a huge giant like that to kind of get everyone on board.

00:07:19 Jenny: And now we’re a couple of years in. I looked at the calendar a couple of weeks ago before Tech Week. I mean, it was thousands and thousands of events. It was just insanity. So, thoughts on just seeing that all come together?

00:07:33 Marty: I think I saw some 40 to 50,000 attendees throughout all of the New York Tech Week events. That’s wild. That’s a huge turnout. I’ve seen these ebbs and flows of communities and local geographic constrained networks come together.

00:07:46 Marty: Sometimes, you know, you just need those like one or two breakout startups to come back. There’s been a few in New York, but Ramp sort of ramping up so much has helped because there’s just this energy.

00:08:00 Marty: And then you see other folks like Rho and just a handful of other startups like really coming together and launching in a big way that the level of excitement just gets larger. I feel like, especially in New York, it compounds and compounds quickly. That’s been pretty cool to see.

00:08:16 Marty: It’s very classic New York. You know it’s good, but it’s also annoying because there’s a line and I’m just trying to constantly bob between the ones in which I can either skip the line or get there early enough that I don’t have to wait in the line.

00:08:28 Jenny: It’s also interesting because the guidance given by Andreessen, if you are organizing things, you’re kind of on the organizer side. And there’s this whole team of people at Andreessen that are there to really set you up for success.

00:08:42 Jenny: They’ve put a lot of infrastructure into this, but there are a couple of people there and they email you the calendar and to get your Lumas up to date and your Partifuls.

00:08:50 Jenny: And one of the things that they sent emails around was saying that in other ecosystems, other Tech Weeks, the drop off from people that sign up to people that actually attend is 50 to 70%.

00:09:03 Jenny: We’ve done these a number of years. We actually don’t get that drop off, but you do get paranoid. And so in every event, the ones that we were doing and the ones I attended, we over-admitted. We had hardly any drop off.

00:09:19 Jenny: Every event I went to was heaving with people and every event I hosted, we ran out of seats, which I felt really bad about. So, something happened. More people came, more people decided to show up for the things that they signed up for. There was something in the air this year.

00:09:35 Marty: For San Francisco, the weather is almost always consistently the same. But in New York, if it’s really beautiful out, like one of two things are going to happen. Like everyone’s just done working because it’s like, “Oh, my gosh. This is a rare moment. Go out and grab it.”

00:09:48 Marty: Or it just draws more people outside and everyone ends up showing up. And I think like this week, it was just almost perfectly idealistic and everyone wants to be outside. New York, there’s no shortage of beautiful rooftops. Just almost every single event I went to was on a rooftop and the weather was just perfect.

00:10:05 Jenny: And then also, like there’s so much concentration around a couple neighborhoods that you just find yourself walking to one or another. And when the weather is nice, you’re like, “Oh, yeah. I can pop into that other one.”

00:10:15 Jenny: I was pretty much speaking at four events a day and I was mostly walking to each one and bopping between them. So, I think the good weather helped.

00:10:25 Jenny: But getting back to the people, every event I went to, lines at the door had to turn people away. So, that seemed like a little bit of a change from other Tech Weeks I’ve been to or even years past in New York. That was a bit of a shocker.

00:10:39 Jenny: You also mentioned Ramp and Rho and some of those folks. One thing I noticed is just how much resource they’re putting in to, not just sponsoring their own events, but like co-sponsoring events with startups and VCs and other people.

00:10:54 Jenny: There were so many events that were sponsored by what we would call the service providers, but a lot of them were startups. I also noticed a couple of the usual suspects doing more than usual. One of them was Microsoft.

00:11:09 Jenny: We, as a venture fund and before when I worked at Techstars, there was always the like Microsoft for Startups crew. They offer credits and they help startups. But I’d say the last couple of years, they haven’t been as active as some of the other folks like AWS.

00:11:23 Jenny: And then this year, not just for Tech Week, they’re making a huge push into startups and they’re everywhere right now. They’re doing tons of events. They’re sponsoring lots of folks.

00:11:34 Jenny: It’s been interesting just to see them rise up. I guess these things ebb and flow. AWS used to be the one sponsoring everything. They’ve been a little more quiet. Now it seems like Microsoft is really on the prowl.

00:11:45 Marty: It’s been cool just to even go into some of these spaces where there’s so much collaboration and co-sponsorship. I went to a poker event for a startup but then, it was at Bessemer.

00:12:03 Marty: I mean, it’s a beautiful view. You’re just looking over the New York Public Library. But then there’s other ones where like they’re at law firms or like Fenwick. And so pretty interesting to see those.

00:12:12 Marty: And this is another thing I think that’s unique to New York is they just found the shell of a building and then completely renovated it and took it over. Like they were literally installing the bathrooms the night before.

00:12:24 Jenny: Oh, my gosh.

00:12:25 Marty: Yeah, it was this epic space where you walk in and you just kind of assumed it’s been there for like 15 years. It was beautifully designed. And they’re just like, no, this literally just got built up for Tech Week.

00:12:34 Marty: And I was like, “That’s a lot of infrastructure, a lot of effort.” They did one of those things where they had the building for the whole week. It was a constant… every hour, every day they had a different event going on. And so it was pretty cool use of space.

00:12:47 Jenny: That’s fun. One of the best events that I participated in was… Mercury had this like Mercury Vinyl Lounge. And it was at one of my favorite restaurants, Port Sa’id, which is an Israeli restaurant originally there is one in Tel Aviv.

00:13:05 Jenny: And if you go to the Tel Aviv one, it’s super cool. Like everyone’s hanging outside. It’s just very like chic, but laidback. You can never find the waitress. They’re like too busy smoking or doing whatever they’re doing. Like super cool.

00:13:18 Jenny: And then they open one in New York and I was kind of like, “How could it be as cool as like being on Rothschild Boulevard in Tel Aviv?” But they opened this space, it’s like all windows has this like loungy vibe and then they have all these records and things. So, it’s like actually a really cool space.

00:13:32 Jenny: So, maybe they don’t serve except for during the day or something. So, Mercury took over their space and they made it a coworking and content and lounge space. I just thought it had like the best vibes.

00:13:45 Jenny: They didn’t let in too many people. They had it so it was just kind of enough to be packed, but not painful. They had food going all day and I did a live pitch feedback session. So, people just lined up like whoever wanted to and they pitched and we gave them like real time feedback.

00:14:03 Jenny: It was with Brandon from Harlem Capital. And we just had such a good time. It was like great vibes. It was really good spirited and it was such a beautiful space. I had lots of people that I ran into later in the week that pitched or at that event and they really appreciated it. I feel like that was one of the best events I went to. It was just good vibes.

00:14:21 Marty: I love the ones where they purposely make it so you’re just not shoulder to shoulder. I feel like that’s another thing that can inadvertently happen in New York City.

00:14:29 Jenny: Yeah, you had to sign up in advance. They monitored it. There were a lot of people there from Mercury mingling about, but they had this whole lounge where you could essentially just like work with your laptop and it was super nice and clean and like they serve really good food. That was my favorite. What was one of yours?

00:14:45 Marty: I do go to a handful of events at my Tech Week. I am the super nerd in the back corner that finds the table and just got the laptop out. So, I’ll usually try to show up early so I don’t have to wait in the line.

00:14:55 Marty: I mentioned a Gamma one. I think it was called a Gammarama or something, but it was in Hammerstein Ballroom. So, it’s a pretty cool venue. Malcolm Gladwell shows up. So, it’s like, that’s cool. Bobby Brown’s there who like I’m not that big into fashion, obviously.

00:15:08 Jenny: I signed up for that and I couldn’t go. That one looked really phenomenal. I didn’t realize that’s where it was.

00:15:15 Marty: Mike Birbiglia is there, which is like… Awesome Comics. I’m just like, okay, you got fashion, you’ve got literature, you’ve got comedy. But my favorite one, which is a very like… can only happen in New York, this local guy in New York who I know you know, Andrew Young, hosts a lot of events and does a lot of the collaborations.

00:15:31 Marty: I think this was like a HubSpot event. It’s one of the closing events for the week. I love Andrew. Andrew’s a big Agree user. So, I go to that event. A lot of my friends are going to be there. So, it’s just a good catch up.

00:15:41 Marty: But it’s maybe six to eight blocks away from Times Square area. End up leaving and going to go grab dinner and just start heading in the Times Square direction.

00:15:53 Marty: And you talked about vibes earlier. There’s a vibe shift. I don’t know what’s happening. I don’t know what’s going on, but something is going on in New York, near Times Square. And I don’t know what it is.

00:16:03 Marty: I just walk up and I’m in a free Madonna concert in Times Square, which is not a New York Tech Week related thing. My most popular tweet of the week was that the ultimate New York Tech Week power move is find events within a 10-minute walking radius. And so this is just Madonna within 10-minute walk of my last event. That’s cool.

00:16:25 Jenny: That’s insane. I thought you were going to say you saw the Everywhere logo in Times Square because we were up on a digital billboard with a few folks. Thank you, Microsoft for Startups.

00:16:36 Jenny: A few people saw it and messaged me, which was really cute. They’re like, I think your logo is in Times Square. It was above the Pele store. That was really fun.

00:16:45 Marty: Like you go to San Francisco, like that is not the equivalent of a digital billboard on the 101. Or like Sam Blond’s getting a lot of credit right now for how successful his airplane ads are. Those are cool. But like we’re talking, you get a billboard in Times Square. That’s a once in a lifetime feeling moment of like, this is cool.

00:17:04 Jenny: Yeah. Do you want to tell us the worst event you went to?

00:17:07 Marty: Oh, man.

00:17:09 Jenny: You don’t have to name names, but you can tell us what happened.

00:17:12 Marty: There’s always a few where you kind of walk in and you realize, one, there’s like nobody you know here, but you’re not early and that’s the reason it’s empty. It’s just empty. But you can kind of tell like they weren’t prepared. And this is one where I dropped the ball. I’m only here because it was in close proximity.

00:17:27 Marty: And I love like learning something new. So, it’s like, hey, there’s a track around AI. I want to hear like a different take. But it’s kind of a ghost town, half assed the AV set up. So, it’s just someone on a higher level than everyone else yelling to the crowd. It’s just like, I would rather just go to Starbucks and open my laptop and get some work done. When that happens, you know it’s not good.

00:17:47 Jenny: Yeah, that’s no good. I had a couple of events where the founders were just aggressively pitching. My piece of advice on that for founders is you have to read the room a little bit.

00:18:00 Jenny: It’s totally fine to go talk to speakers after they’re on a panel, but better off just make conversation and like, thread a needle of something that was spoken about as opposed to like, having to get your two minute pitch out because it’s just a lot when there’s like hundreds of them. So, I found that to be a little bit overwhelming.

00:18:18 Marty: I’m usually a fan of these things. Like at the intercom space, they gave us a slot to do like a demo of something we’re building at Agree. And the cool thing is they had a full on AV team recording it.

00:18:28 Marty: So, they’ll do a video. They’ll do a promo spot around like, all the social media content that you can use and clip up later use on this particular feature you’re launching. So, I was like, that’s cool.

00:18:36 Marty: But you could tell there were some founders who got up where it was just a sales pitch. And some of them almost treated it like a VC pitch and just kind of felt awkward to the room of other founders.

00:18:45 Marty: On your same vein of your advice is like, they want to go grab you afterwards and ask you questions. That’s the goal. Then do your little subtle pitch there, follow up with them afterwards. Like I look at it as like a retargeting thing. Just make them fall in love or get them really curious and spark that curiosity when you’re with them.

00:19:00 Jenny: One of the funniest things was during that thing where people were pitching us, this one guy comes up and he was pitching a pretty interesting story. But it’s like a very hot day and he’s wearing a long sleeve turtleneck, cashmere sweater. He’s wearing dress shoes and socks. And then he’s wearing very short shorts.

00:19:19 Jenny: And Brandon, we’re like, “What would you call that look?” It was so distracting because we’re like someone had stolen his pants. He was in a full on winter outfit with his dress shoes, his dark socks and his long sleeve sweater. And then he was wearing like the shortest gym shorts ever. And we were like, “Oh, okay. Well, that’s interesting.”

00:19:41 Marty: But there’s got to be a backstory to that.

00:19:43 Jenny: Got to be a backstory of why he was up on stage pitching. I had a fun one. I did a reverse pitch. So, I was the person pitching to a room full of startups. So, that was really fun.

00:19:54 Jenny: I did a very alternative pitch. So, everyone was pitching what their fund does. And then I got up there and I was like, I’m not going to tell you what our fund does. You can look on our website. I’m going to tell you about me, my startup journey.

00:20:08 Jenny: I launch into like being a startup founder, having a co-founder breakup, having a term sheet pulled, running out of money, like sob story, Jenny. And I think it went over pretty well. So, that was fun just to like mix it up.

00:20:21 Jenny: That’s the other thing, whether you’re a founder or anyone pitching, at least in these performative pitch competition things, that can be a good way to go as well.

00:20:31 Marty: Anything that sparks people’s interest, gets them to peek up from their laptops and phones – and then maybe just anything memorable.

00:20:50 Jenny: Another highlight of the week for me, we always do a pre-seed founder breakfast. This one had 800 founders apply. We do it at a restaurant in a private room, seated. Everyone sits down. They share a meal. They get to know everyone.

00:21:03 Jenny: We did a little bit of content, but that one’s really special for me because I get so many pings after. And someone messaged me afterwards, saying that like, they’re collaborating with the person that they sat next to, it turns out. Like, they’re going to go work on something, which was super cool.

00:21:18 Jenny: And then someone said that they think they might join forces with someone, like become a co-founder. So, there were 800 people applied. We only had 60 seats. And it was a great moment of just connection with founders because I feel like they were all pre-seed. Sometimes there’s just not enough camaraderie or like it’s just hard to find other like-minded people.

00:21:38 Marty: We don’t qualify anymore, but I was super jealous not to come hang with you guys because that looked like a really, really cool event.

00:21:44 Jenny: That was a fun one. That was my Tech Week, all in all. I was dead exhausted on Friday. I like collapsed in my bed after that. I had such a great time. I feel like I covered a lot of ground.

00:21:55 Jenny: I was at and part of a lot of events. I got to see a lot of founders, meet some new founders, hang out with all the amazing sponsors. I mean, literally, I was the agnostic like, “Sure. AWS, Microsoft, Google.” So, I did events with everyone. It felt very collaborative this year. I was pretty pleased, but exhausted.

00:22:15 Marty: I thought it was awesome because I did the same thing. It was Thursday night. It was last night. Friday, I’m exhausted. Still have some work to do. And then I remember on Sunday, I got one of those emails from Katie at A16Z about like, Last day!” I was like, “It’s still going?”

00:22:30 Jenny: I know. I had the same response. Friday to me, it was done.

00:22:34 Marty: Yes. But she had a whole long list of events. I often glanced at it thinking like, “Oh, maybe I could get up out of bed and make it out.” But no, no. Same. Quick roundup. I started off with a podcast interview and then I went to a demo session where I demoed Agree.

00:22:51 Marty: Then I got to play poker at Bessemer and then got to party and then hang out at a free Madonna concert, which was epic. But bouncing around. And for me, it’s get to connect with some VCs that, usually, I only ever see on Zoom, which is weird, even in New York.

00:23:05 Marty: Sometimes we’ll get a coffee meetup but then there’s a handful like, I only ever see them at these larger things. I think that’s what makes Tech Week easy, too. It’s easy for a lot of in-person catch ups. It’s like, “Oh, we’ll be at the same thing together. We’ll just meet up there.”

00:23:19 Marty: Because I think we are sometimes looking for that person we know and, you know, kind of hang out with them for a little bit and then meet some new people, too, and like, broaden our collective circles. Those were all cool, too.

00:23:29 Jenny: What were some of the themes that you saw across all the programming? For me, I was at mostly like, startup-focused things geared towards startups who are fundraising a lot. The number one theme that I heard was defensibility.

00:23:44 Jenny: How do we build and convey defensibility when we’re pitching, when we’re building, you know, when we’re scaling? That was an interesting one just to hear many people’s take on that. But I think in general, startups are really worried about it.

00:23:59 Jenny: And VCs are actually worried about that as well. Like, what are your moats and are those moats durable? And I think there’s just so many unknowns. So, as much as it was like a celebratory week, there also was this air of just uncertainty and unease when it comes to building in the age of AI.

00:24:17 Marty: I think I saw three things. One was the Knicks, which is New York-related, but not Tech Week related. But everyone was talking about it. And then the other one, a little bit of a IPO talk.

00:24:27 Marty: Despite how the economy may or may not be doing, maybe we’re back. We saw a few IPOs last year with Chime and Figment. And then, now it’s SpaceX on Friday, then Anthropic to follow, and then OpenAI after that.

00:24:37 Marty: So, that seemed to bring a little bit of energy and excitement to the room. And then, I think the big one is just agents, agents, agents. I don’t think people are saying headless like they did two or three weeks ago.

00:24:48 Jenny: That was a quick trend. That was a two week trend. We’re done with headless.

00:24:53 Marty: I don’t know if they’re just using the term that Benioff used, but I do think a lot of people are stuck on this, hey, the world might be powered by like APIs and MCPs. So, there might be like an interface-less world. You know, it might be more text-based or voice-based.

00:25:09 Jenny: Oh, I heard the MCPs are dead, Marty. You’re… that’s passe.

00:25:13 Marty: Oh, I’m late.

00:25:14 Jenny: You’re late.

00:25:15 Marty: I think what’s interesting about the headless MCP narrative was what was once defensible or had a moat or could stand on its own is now a commodity. DocuSign can stand on its own, but nobody net new is going to build a business on e-signature.

00:25:30 Marty: Nobody’s going to build a business on invoicing. I don’t even think anyone’s coming to the table and building a business on like payments like Stripe did. Those are all now just commoditized features that a lot of people have.

00:25:41 Marty: And so I think the big conversation is what else is like that? Are the CRMs going to be commoditized? For us in FinTech, it’s revenue reporting, revenue recognition.

00:25:50 Marty: People built their standalone companies even within the last 18 months and raised a bunch of money. But like those seem like they’re going to be just commoditized features that live within someone’s MCP, another MCP. But they’re just calls.

00:26:02 Marty: We’re seeing a lot of CFOs now being able to do real time contextual like financial reporting. But the big caveat is if they connect all their data sources to some model.

00:26:13 Marty: We’re seeing older incumbents be a little uncomfortable with that, especially enterprise. But left and right, some new startup pops up, they just… they connect everything for better or worse.

00:26:23 Marty: But they’re doing a lot with that. And I think that’s going to like change the game. That was the spirit I saw was headless, MCPs, but what was once defensible now just a commodity feature.

00:26:33 Jenny: I’d agree. I think general consensus, if you’re building a single player tool, that might not have a lot of longevity. If you have multi connectivity to your customer and you’re solving many problems through various channels, then that seems like a little bit more messy integration, which… hard to conceive that, you know, an LLM can do that anytime soon. But we’ll see.

00:26:59 Marty: The other one I saw too is people asking, like, if in theory, Claude or ChatGPT, you know, Anthropic or OpenAI, if they could build anything in and Claude could do anything, what would it not do? I think it was Claude or ChatGPT that released basically like a Mint.com for personal finance. So like PFMs.

00:27:19 Marty: They were always kind of dead, but now they’re definitely dead. You just do it within the native environment that you’re working in. But like, what will they not do seems to come up a lot.

00:27:27 Marty: Will they not do payments? Will they not do other like, things that are highly regulated or have compliance? You know, there’s stuff in healthcare they won’t do. And then is that the safer place for a founder to go where they’re not going to – because now everyone’s asking, you know, before it was, what if Google did it? Now, what if Claude releases it?

00:27:43 Jenny: Well, we invest in a lot of regulated industries. I haven’t seen much automation impact there yet because human-in-the-loop and the trust layer is so important in things like healthcare and finance. But I think it would be naive to say, never say never. We’ll see.

00:27:58 Jenny: But I think also the enterprise, not just the sales cycle, but like, to get integrated into a hospital system can take years. And so it’s hard to imagine how a tool would be able to do that without a lot of buy-in from a lot of stakeholders. I think that gives it a little more longevity right now.

00:28:18 Jenny: The problem is you can’t rush into doing a regulated industry. They’re very painful to work in. The friction is huge. The sales cycles are long. So, I mean, yes, there’s more defensibility because they’re more painful.

00:28:31 Marty: You reminded me another popular thing that’s been coming up recently is it was the like death of the SDR. You know there’s those famous billboards in San Francisco. Artisan like, “Don’t hire any more humans.”

00:28:41 Marty: But, especially in New York being so GTM heavy and sales heavy, the death of or the automation of GTM seems to be very hot topic right now. Fire your head of marketing, get rid of your marketing team, let an agent do it all. I haven’t quite seen it yet, but it definitely seems narratively it was very popular.

00:28:59 Jenny: I totally get that that billboard can be on the 101 in San Francisco and like people get it. But it was on a bus stop in my neighborhood on the Upper West Side. And it’s this robot looking woman being like, you know, whatever that tagline is about not hiring people.

00:29:13 Jenny: And I just remember like walking by, cause it’s right around the corner from where I live. And there’s this older woman and she’s just standing by the bus stop and she’s just looking at this, trying to understand.

00:29:24 Jenny: And I was like, well, I’m not sure the Upper West Siders are on board with this. It was so funny just to see like, she had no context of what this was, but like the words just seemed so crazy to her. And I was like, “Well, it’s not really your tech market up here.”

00:29:39 Marty: I love in New York, you’ll see… you’re going to just see the juxtaposition of you’ll have one ad that says stop hiring humans. And then you’ve got another one that says like friend.com. It’s like, AI is your friend. AI is going to take your job. I don’t know which one it is.

00:30:07 Jenny: On that note, Marty, this was so fun. It’s always so great to chat with you. I’m glad you had a good Tech Week. I did as well.

00:30:22 Marty: No, thanks for having me.

00:30:24 Jenny: Shout out to everyone who came out for such an epic week. We’ll catch you soon.

00:30:28 Marty: And go Knicks. Tonight’s a big night.

00:30:30 Jenny: Go Knicks. Woo.

00:30:32 Marty: All right. Take care.

00:30:33 Jenny: Bye.

00:30:36 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

Read more from Marty Ringlein in Founders Everywhere.

If you walk into a private healthcare clinic, you might see large screens with dozens of browser tabs open: one for scheduling, one for patient records, another for lab results, a separate messaging tool, and a handful more just to get through a single patient interaction. That’s the reality for most private practices today, and it’s costing them hours they don’t have. Tabflows is the AI patient management platform that fixes it without asking clinics to start over. Rather than replacing the tools that practices already rely on, Tabflows sits on top of systems like Elation, Hint, Spruce, and 30+ others, unifying data in real time and distilling complex cross-system workflows into a single, collaborative care layer. It’s become the go-to solution for the Concierge Medicine and Direct Primary Care (DPC) communities in particular, where high-touch patient relationships are central to the model and operational complexity can stand in the way of delivering exceptional care. By bringing every task, conversation, and patient workflow into one place, Tabflows helps care teams spend less time managing software and more time caring for patients.

Founder and CEO Adam Bragg combines the discipline of a professional athlete with the experience of a seasoned builder to reimagine how independent clinics operate. As a former Princeton pole vaulter who competed at the U.S. Olympic Trials, he saw both the best of elite medicine and its limits. After a serious back injury and surgery, he navigated both sides of the healthcare system: big hospital environments that felt impersonal despite world‑class surgeons, and independent providers delivering incredible, one‑on‑one care but were drowning in messy software setups. Tabflows is his third company and second in healthcare, born out of that gap between clinical excellence and operational friction.

Tell us about Tabflows.

Tabflows automates cross-system patient management, processing millions of patient data points into one-click workflows for private healthcare organizations. Instead of forcing providers to switch EMRs or practice tools to drive better outcomes, we plug into the systems they already use. We pull data across their tools in real time, and give them a single, actionable view of what’s happening each day with every patient. With one click, we pull the right information together, suggest next steps, and automate the tedious parts of messaging, follow‑ups, and workflows, so private practices can handle more patients with the same time and attention.

What’s Tabflows’ North Star?

Our North Star is to cut the administrative burden of clinic growth by 90% while keeping the same level of personalization in care. We’re not trying to replace the provider or their staff. We want their style, judgment, and humanity to stay at the center. The goal is to let each clinician deliver the same quality of care to more people (think 20% more patients per provider) without feeling like they’re working 20% more hours.

Tell us about a recent milestone that Tabflows crushed.

Today we’ve processed over 10 million patient records from more than 30 EMRs and healthcare technology tools, serving 100+ private healthcare organizations across the U.S. We added a million records in May and are on track to double that in June, with product usage and the number of automations we drive up 5x in the last month alone. We’re able to be very flexible in how we reach across different systems and workflows, which gives us a rare window into how private practices actually operate.

Under the hood, we’ve solved incredibly difficult engineering problems to connect historically siloed systems and make cross‑system workflows run on-demand, in real time — distilling millions of workflow data points into one-button flows that feel obvious to healthcare teams. On the ground, that means private practices are seeing response and task times drop by around 10x in some workflows, helping them serve more patients without burning out and needing to grow their teams.

How does Tabflows inspire customer love?

Tabflows eliminates one of the most frustrating parts of running a private clinic: managing patient care across a patchwork of disconnected tools. Because it drops into existing workflows, our clinics can get started in under a minute and see value almost immediately. Our strongest traction today is with Concierge Medicine and Direct Primary Care practices, where communication is constant and clinicians are juggling hundreds of patient relationships across multiple systems. When teams see all of that information unified in one place for the first time and routine work reduced to a few clicks, they often describe it as emotional relief to a deep problem they had accepted as normal. That combination of instant value, simplicity, and more time for patient care drives strong word-of-mouth and organic adoption within clinics.

How has your background shaped you as a founder?

Tabflows is my third company and my second in healthcare. My first startup was in education and focused on caring for people, which planted the seed for what I think of as the intersection of culture and care: using technology to meet people where they are and amplify their ability to support others. My second company was in healthcare. It was a big swing at rebuilding the entire clinical operating system as an AI-native, all-in-one EMR. In hindsight, I think there was some athlete ego in that idea. That experience taught me that lasting change in healthcare often comes from accepting fundamentals, and working with the existing ecosystem, not against it. Tabflows grew out of that realization. We integrate with the technology tools clinics already rely on, reduce friction instead of adding it, and still deliver that same vision of scaling human‑to‑human care.

Fun fact:
We’ve set up a 24/7 livestream of our HQ office; a come build with us window into how we work. It comes from our belief that if you’re building tools around care and trust, people should be able to see who you are and how you show up every day.

Listen to Louise Fritjofsson with Scott Hartley, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Shop Smartie with Martie. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

In episode 121 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, a General Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Louise Fritjofsson, co-founder and CEO of Martie, a marketplace creating access through the world of excess by selling surplus and overstocked food and household goods from name brands at a discount. Lou shares how a leftover holiday cookie mix from an earlier startup exposed a broken industry: up to 40% of perfectly consumable products go to landfill because brands have no outlet for their overstock. She discusses Martie’s vision to become the household name in liquidation, building a brand where quality, savings, and sustainability all come together.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Sourcing surplus from brands locked out of traditional liquidation channels.

• Landing partnerships with large retailers to anchor the vendor marketplace.

• Deploying MATE to screen 6,000 SKUs weekly with a lean buying team.

• Prioritizing assortment depth and loyalty over membership tiers.

• Testing mystery boxes and new formats to diversify the customer base.

If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.

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Transcript:

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.

00:00:32 Scott: Hi, everyone. I’m super excited to have Louise Fritjofsson. Lou, as I would call her, is a four-time founder. She’s the co-founder and CEO of Martie.

00:00:42 Scott: Martie is an incredible marketplace that helps provide surplus and overstocked foods and household goods. I personally use Martie all the time. I love getting my Martie pizzas in the mail.

00:00:51 Scott: It’s really a mission-driven business that thinks about economic and environmental impact. I know that there’s a lot of food waste out there and you’re doing a great job helping get things that are off the shelves into people’s homes that maybe haven’t moved.

00:01:04 Scott: Lou, welcome to the podcast. Thanks so much for being with us today. Tell us a little bit more about Martie.

00:01:10 Lou: Thanks for having me. We’ve been around for about four and a half years. Martie really is about creating access through the world of excess.

00:01:16 Lou: We stumbled into this market, as you mentioned, as my fourth startup. I really came into this wanting to build companies that make people healthier. Was looking at the CPG space, the food space.

00:01:28 Lou: Thinking deeply about the 80-20% rule. 80% is what you eat, 20% is how you move. So if I want to build a company that makes people healthier, how can I do so in food?

00:01:37 Lou: It’s an interesting journey of getting here. I spent a couple of years looking at where’s the gap in the market, MVP-ing a ton of different things. In this period of time, I found my co-founder, Kari, who’s a seasoned CPG founder and operator. She had just sold her company, Morris Kitchen, and was looking for something new.

00:01:53 Lou: Some of the things that we really felt deeply worried about when we started looking at this is we have 40 million Americans that are food insecure. We have more people than that that are just struggling to put good food products and general consumables in front of their family. And cheap usually comes with less quality.

00:02:11 Lou: So when we started looking at this space, we said, how do you change the narrative? How do you create access with good products to more people? In this period of MVP-ing, we actually started different companies.

00:02:22 Lou: We went out and we said, what if you would build the next Procter & Gamble that don’t have ingredients that cause cancer, that actually are accessibly-priced still? What would that look like?

00:02:33 Lou: We started spinning up multiple brands with the help of influencers as brand owners. We came to the holidays and one of our companies had a holiday cookie mix. And the holiday came and the holiday went, but we still had a lot of holiday cookie mix on our hands.

00:02:47 Lou: We started looking around and we were trying to figure out who could buy this after the holidays. There are some massive companies out there operating in this space. The liquidation industry here in the U.S. is $800 billion so there’s plentiful of buyers.

00:03:00 Lou: But we were a small up-and-coming brand and we did not want to work with any of them because of the brand erosion of living in a space like the dollar store or the Five Below Five.

00:03:11 Lou: We started talking to many of our other brand owners that we knew and everyone more or less had the same experience of like, yes, it’s a necessary evil at times. We prefer not doing it. Many of them reported actually tossing their products to landfill instead of giving it a second chance.

00:03:28 Lou: When you start looking at that, 30% to 40% of products that are being produced actually go to landfill despite the fact that they’re perfectly fine to consume.

00:03:35 Lou: This was a light bulb moment of saying, wait, there’s definitely a space here to build a good brand, a brand in the space of liquidation where we buy overstock, we buy things that is, in this world, considered short-coded.

00:03:49 Lou: And I will say here in the U.S., anything that is less than 12 months before best before date is considered short-coded because some of Whole Foods will not take it on at that point.

00:03:59 Lou: Me and Kari, we felt very strongly that we have two different positions here to win this market as it pertains to moat. We said, we know that we can build a brand that vendors want to be connected and work with.

00:04:10 Lou: We know that we can build a brand where we take care of the brand affinity in the market and we actually can use this experience as like, a new customer acquisition tool almost for these vendors. We know that we can build an experience where consumers feel like they’re winning when they’re shopping us.

00:04:24 Lou: And then on the other side, we also realized that this is a very old school industry when we’re looking at liquidation. None of them have really come into this world of tech or AI or any of it to make their life easier, more efficient and higher margins.

0:04:42 Lou: So we said we actually were coming from that world too. So now we have this position to win with brand and win with technology as it pertains to selling consumables, the brands you know and love at 40% to 80% off, sent to your door with high efficiency. That’s how it started.

00:04:59 Lou: Today, we offer around 1,500 SKUs at any given one point in time. Martie is an experience where you don’t have to pay membership. You don’t have to pay subscription to come and shop. You simply pick the things that you want. You get free shipping at $50.

00:05:12 Lou: We operate mainly in consumables. We do shelf-stable grocery. We do beauty and skincare. We do home goods, household and pet. The future definitely is a space where we’re looking at electronics. We’re looking at small kitchen appliances as well. Definitely a future where we can continue expanding our TAM here.

00:05:27 Scott: It’s amazing. When we first met you, the real light bulb moment for me was in realizing that even shelf-stable products that have a long duration of quality really are being liquidated off of the shelves of the Whole Foods. And these are perfectly good products that still have six months, nine months of longevity.

00:05:46 Scott: Just because they’re below a certain threshold, they get pushed off the shelves, to your point, 30 to 40% of those, into landfill, which is just outrageous when you think of those 40% of Americans that don’t have access to just filling their pantry or filling their kitchen.

00:06:00 Scott: Talk a little bit about how you built this two-sided marketplace in some sense. It’s always tricky. Did you go more to the supply side first and get partnerships with some of the large retailers on the liquidation side and then build the brand and brand presence around demand generation?

00:06:16 Lou: It’s interesting. Many, many, many moons ago, I read a book called Crossing the Chasm, which is a marketing book. And it really resonated at the time that I read it. It’s remained a true North Star in how I’m thinking about building demand for any business. And it really is about building the top of the iceberg first.

00:06:32 Lou: When we launched this business, we knew that we want to get the best vendors on our platforms. Because when we get to sell their overstock and other brands start seeing that we’re working with the Drunk Elephant and the Osea and the Fishwife and the Momofuku and they’re online and they’re 50% off, that brings such trust to our platform.

00:06:51 Lou: That we can continue building assortment with not only the tippy-top, coolest brands that are up and coming, but we can actually widen the scope after that.

00:07:00 Lou: The second thing that happens when you start working with these best brands in each category and you make sure that you build a close relationship and you get their inventories, the audience that you’re getting.

00:07:09 Lou: So we’re looking at the same process when we’re looking at who’s shopping. Martie. We have shoppers today. We have shoppers nationwide. We have actually quite a wide swath of users as it pertains to who the customer is. But 80% is women. The largest age group that we have is 30 to 40 years old.

00:07:24 Lou: It’s interesting because the largest densities that we have is New York and Los Angeles. These are actually shoppers that are quite affluent who otherwise shops Whole Foods and sometimes Sprouts and Erewhon and Credo.

00:07:35 Lou: Why they’re coming is because they’re seeing that they’re feeling really smart. They’re like, oh my God. I get Whole Foods products at 50% off? It’s brag-worthy at this point. So they tell all their friends. All of a sudden what’s happening is that’s also then an affluent aspirational audience where we can continue building audiences as we go.

00:07:53 Lou: It’s really hard to start super wide or lower down on kind of like totem pole and build yourself up. But if you start just getting the aspirational brand and getting the aspirational shoppers, it is easier then to build wider and more audiences as you grow.

00:08:08 Scott: Two fun facts. Geoff Moore used to sit next to me at my old venture fund, Moore Davidow. He was a venture partner, the author of Crossing the Chasm. Geoff and I have had many conversations about the early adopters, the early majority, the late majority, the laggard.

00:08:21 Scott: It’s so true that Fishwife, Becca, they have such an aspirational brand. And that is something where even though I love the product and I’m paying full price for it, sometimes I love even more seeing it on Martie.

00:08:32 Scott: So you go after the aspirational retailers, those key brands, build this brand worthy platform that scales the demand, and then you can move into these adjacent categories.

00:08:41 Scott: Now that we’re on the precipice of AI and agentic commerce and all of these new tools, how are you guys seeing that change how you’re building product or how you’re interfacing with customers? Has it made inroads yet or is it still early days?

00:08:55 Lou: I will say, first of all, it is such an interesting time to be building a company. It is the most fun and it’s the most challenging. And it’s the most challenging because it’s always been fast to build startups, but the speed of things happening now is just exponentially faster.

00:09:11 Lou: One of the things that we did, which is core to our business, is building out a system called MATE, Martie Agentic Trade Engine. It’s an agentic buying tool. This is very important for what we’re doing.

00:09:22 Lou: How we’re operating, what we’re doing could not have been done five years ago. We look at more than 6,000 SKUs every week as an organization, and we buy between 200 and 500 of those.

00:09:32 Lou: The data that goes into understanding what those products are and how we price them and how we present them to our audience, I would have needed probably 15 to 20 buyers as a buying team minimum.

00:09:43 Lou: We would probably have missed a lot of the inventory still that we’re seeing. We would not have been buying inventory to be cash flow positive and neutral, which is the fact of what we’re doing now. I have two buyers in my team just operating all of this, using our tech tool as the go-to agentic buying tools. This is the heart of our organization.

00:10:01 Lou: When you’re looking at MATE, MATE is completely rebuilt if you’re looking at the technical pipelining in the last year. Whatever we had done before, all of a sudden, we’re not up to speed. Was not up on par with how we’re building and how tools are accessible and how efficient they are.

00:10:18 Lou: Which means that you constantly need to go in and redo the work to not fall behind and for the system to have the best chance of succeeding as it pertains to its self-learning capabilities, in terms of how it’s using all the data that we’re piping in.

00:10:33 Lou: It is super exciting. We’re a very small team. We’ve been around for four and a half years. We’ve 3X our revenue in the last two years. There’s nine of us. When you start looking at how you can build very efficient teams as you’re surrounding each core team member with agentic tools, it is incredible.

00:10:51 Lou: The efficiency is just out of this world, but you’re moving incredibly fast. The most challenging part with that is keeping everyone aligned. I’ve always thought one of the hardest things is everyone locked in with what we’re doing because one week can be different than last week.

00:11:06 Lou: We’re moving very fast, and that moving fast is no longer just our own business. It’s the entire environment and the tools that we’re using, how we need to redo the things that we’ve done previously. It’s a different speed. It’s a different process of trying to keep everyone up to speed.

00:11:22 Scott: What we see a lot is the adoption of AI tools, supercharging some of the folks in your team, giving them, for the same input or the same effort, 10x or 100x the output. There’s an amplification of the skills that you hire for.

00:11:36 Scott: And it’s not that you can cut staff and leverage AI to produce the same output, the skinny argument. It’s really you go strong and you supercharge your output.

00:11:46 Scott: It sounds like you guys have built MATE to help optimize SKU purchasing based on demand throughput. Are there certain categories that you’ve seen that have surprised you?

00:11:58 Lou: 100%. I think is where we saw the gap in the market and the industry as well. Buying inventory for this type of business is really hard because you can’t restock the products that sell well.

00:12:06 Lou: That’s normally what you do with an e-commerce. Buy from a marketplace. You just sell more of whatever is popular. In our case, the popular product will sell out and it will not come back in stock immediately. We usually see it again, but not on a stock-to-stock basis.

00:12:19 Lou: Then you need to predict sell-through on products that you’ve never seen to fill the gap for that one product. What this tool is able to do is look at each individual shopper and their shopping patterns. We know when they’re coming back.

00:12:30 Lou: We understand what they have in their cart as it pertains to category, but also what’s the ingredients? What’s the attributes? Where are these products normally selling? Is it a Whole Foods product or a Walmart product? What was the price off? What was the other certifications that this product has?

00:12:45 Lou: Because we can’t come back and say, hey, you bought Barebell’s Protein Bar and here’s a KIND bar. That will never jive. So if we’re going to come back to you and say we’ve stocked their store with the things that you want, it needs to be a BUILT Bar or a Prima Bar that is on par to the Barebell’s.

00:12:59 Lou: To put that work on a buyer, to understand what is it that we need to stock the store with, with such detail, all the intricacies, it’s too much if you’re keeping pace and you’re buying 2 to 500 SKUs a week, launching that number of SKUs on the side and you have such a small team.

00:13:14 Lou: It’s super powerful. And again, it’s wild to think about where we were five years ago. You could probably build something similar, but it would have cost you a lot more money and it would have taken you a lot more time to set this up. Where we are today and all the things that we’ve been able to do with such a small team is actually just incredible.

00:13:31 Scott: As a buyer and user of Martie, it is something that I noticed, that product adjacencies, like here’s a Nutri-Grain Bar, here’s another type of Nutri-Grain Bar.

00:13:40 Scott: It’s drilling down into the data of where did this bar come from? What’s the quality or price point? What’s the discount? The adjacencies that I see when I go to the site really help me increase my basket size. And I do feel that.

00:13:52 Scott: Over the four and a half years that you’ve been building this company, you and your co-founder, what would you say the breakdown is between the two of you or your particular superpowers and what you’ve been able to build over these four to five years?

00:14:04 Lou: We do have a very clear division. I’m more on the marketing and tech side. And Kari, she has a background building her own CPG company. She has a really good handle of building inventory, building relationships with our vendors, understanding how that all comes together.

00:14:20 Lou: She has been a big part of setting up operational warehousing and that partnership as well. Both of our backgrounds really comes into play. It’s been really cool to see how we have just different strengths and together we really have been able to make everything come together.

00:14:36 Scott: On the operational side of the business, how do you guys think about density of population, density of shoppers, where you build these inventory stocks? Because obviously with a national product, there’s some complexity to that.

00:14:51 Lou: Maybe even more so with our product because we constantly rotate our inventory. A SKU usually stays in stock for about 30 days. And again, we have about 1500 SKUs. The operational overhead of getting SKUs in and getting SKUs up on the side and then something sells out, it’s an ongoing.

00:15:07 Lou: We decided a couple of years ago to try and remain with one warehouse as long as we can, just for the efficiency of building that. We know that we have two big growth levers.

00:15:16 Lou: One is the inventory depth and the amount of SKUs that we offer. We’re getting higher AVs. We’re getting lower CAC. We’re getting all the things as we’re building our inventory. It’s a huge growth lever for us.

00:15:27 Lou: And then of course, we have our other growth lever, which is acquisition marketing. We’ve made a conscious decision of trying to stay in one warehouse as long as we can. That is actually in Dallas, in Texas.

00:15:36 Lou: It’s very cool for the purposes of we know who we are. We promise savings. We promise you’re going to get the best deal on the internet when you’re shopping Martie. You’re going to get quality goods. It’s true to that initial mission vision of creating access to the world of excess.

00:15:52 Lou: But we’re not the most convenient. What I mean with that is you will wait for your box. If you’re in California, you will wait four days to get your box. You will save 50, 60% from going to shop the same products at Whole Foods, but you will wait four days.

00:16:07 Lou: We don’t sell you your eggs and your milk. And we have no plans of going into reefer, like refrigerated or frozen aisles. Everything is shelf stable. We’re just very, very clear with who we are, what we promise the consumer and are very gung-ho staying true to those savings.

00:16:22 Lou: It’s really easy to get off track and start having everyday low prices. All of a sudden your pricing is similar to what you find at Walmart. That’s a dangerous path to go because if you’re not staying true to your moat, you could never survive with a four-day ship time if you don’t have really, really good pricing.

00:16:37 Scott: In that same vein, one of the biggest challenges as a founder is having the conviction to stay in your swim lane and know who you are and what you want to build. And also have the ability to listen to feedback from other folks that also have experiences in and around the category.

00:16:53 Scott: Over the four years, what are some of the contrarian viewpoints that you’ve held or disagreed with investors, disagreed with board? Have you had those moments and how did you stay true to that north star?

00:17:05 Lou: Many, and that’s for the purpose that we are a small team. And it’s hard. It’s hard to be very mindful and say no to things because there is so many shiny objects. There are so many things that you wake up being excited, wanting to build and try and figure out how to get it done.

00:17:20 Lou: But this could be anything from, we have really strong opinions that this should be a subscriber-based access, for instance. That you should pay something to get access to these prices.

00:17:31 Lou: Just from a vision standpoint, that goes against what I’m wanting to do. I want to create access through the world of excess. We want to change the narrative that cheap usually comes with less quality.

00:17:39 Lou: We currently have an affluent audience. Again, I think it’s a very great position to be in. It’s not the end all. I’m here to build a household brand name. I want everyone to be able to shop Martie. I don’t want it to be bougie. I want it to be accessible, fun, modern, and all the things.

00:17:55 Lou: I want to be the IKEA of liquidation. Everyone should know us and everyone should know that we’re affordable, but no one should be ashamed to shopping it. That goes against an idea of having a subscriber wall, for instance, where you need to pay to access these prices.

00:18:09 Lou: So that’s something that I’ve come up again and again, where we’ve said this is not what we want to do. And similar programs, which probably will come in our future. And I think some of them are just a timing where, again, what’s the biggest upside for all the things that we have to work on?

00:18:21 Lou: Should we launch membership right now where it’s choose your own adventure and you can pay up for a membership? That’s absolutely going to be a future of what we can offer to get faster shipping or free shipping at a lower threshold, et cetera.

00:18:35 Lou: Do I think that’s where we’re going to make up most our revenue now more than focusing on building deeper assortment or building better loyalty funnels or all the things that we’re working on? No. We’re pushing that in the future.

00:18:47 Lou: There’s so much to do and it’s really hard to stay focused. We definitely have had a lot of pull from even internally to do something like everyday low prices. But again, I am very, very cautious and wary about “We need to be a lot cheaper than Walmart to succeed,” and stay true to our mission and vision.

00:19:06 Scott: I love that you brought up IKEA. Just building the brand, Martie, and the colorful palette and the friendliness of the brand, I think you guys have done an excellent job making it accessible, making it fun and forward-leaning.

00:19:19 Scott: But as you brought up IKEA, and I know you’re from Sweden originally, was there any influence or inspiration, perhaps, from that experience or just the scale of that opportunity and that being locally Swedish in origin?

00:19:32 Lou: I started my first company when it was not cool to be an entrepreneur. I was 19. I was very lucky to get a job out of school. I didn’t know what I wanted to do at university. So I was like, let’s take some time.

00:19:43 Lou: I started working for this entrepreneur and a small company. And everyone’s like, why would you do that? Startups was not a cool thing. But I did that. And in that experience, I’m like, yes, he’s asking me to do things where I have no idea what I’m doing.

00:19:56 Lou: I saw these opportunities swirling around me. And I was like, oh, if I can work for him and just figure it out, maybe I can do it for myself. I was very lucky to end up at that job and end up in a community in Stockholm that was the post-IT bubble, still working in startups, doing all the things.

00:20:13 Lou: I just got to know a lot of people that were real, founder DNA, had done it for multiple years. Again, they’d gone through the IT bubble and had successes and then crashed and they were at it again. Seeing that had me feel very confident that I could try and do my own thing at 19.

00:20:31 Lou: Again, it was not a cool thing. All my friends were like, what’s wrong with you? Are you not able to go to school or get a real job? That’s how my journey started. And then two years later, my first business was acquired.

00:20:42 Lou: And then I started another business. In that period of time, as I was building my second business, Spotify came up. Mojang started being built. Klarna started coming up as a shooting star.

00:20:53 Lou: And the tech ecosystem in Stockholm formed in the years that I was having my first couple of years as a founder. That was super formative. So all of a sudden, it was cool to be a founder.

00:21:03 Lou: You could see these great successes and you could start feeling like you could also be on the trajectory of building a unicorn and so forth. I think it was just a very exciting time to be young and have those couple of first startups and couple of first early successes with these companies being built around me.

00:21:20 Scott: Fun fact for those of the listeners who haven’t been to Stockholm. Stockholm has a parallel to San Francisco in Soma. In San Francisco, it’s South of Market. And in Stockholm, it’s Sodermalm.

00:21:30 Scott: And I love that when I went to Stockholm, I said, oh gosh. I feel at home. It’s like I’m in Soma again, except for it’s way more beautiful. Tiny bit cleaner, a tiny bit nicer, a tiny bit better in all respects.

00:21:42 Lou: It was a cool time. Stockholm is not a huge city. So you get to know everyone in the tech ecosystem and everyone’s super helpful and supportive and the tight knit community. That definitely was super formative.

00:21:53 Scott: Shifting gears a little bit, just to ask you about the marketing side of the business. How do you think about channels and how have channels changed over the last few years?

00:22:02 Scott: Do you guys lean heavily on content development? Or how do you think about the mix of channels to drive CAC down and get to this first order revenue profitability and then obviously huge retention over time as people get to know the brand?

00:22:17 Lou: As a startup, you want direct conversion. We live and die with our products. So for us, we launch more than 30 new products every day that is brands you know and love at high discounts off. It is kind of like a marketer’s dream.

00:22:31 Lou: When you put those in product ads on Meta, the likelihood of them converting pretty well is fairly high. We’ve been doing that throughout these years.

00:22:39 Lou: Anytime we put on our big girl pants and wanna get out and try something that is more content driven or other channels, we get cold feet pretty quickly because the cycle is longer and the customer acquisition cost just is higher. We, again, are gearing up to say we need to diversify our marketing portfolio. We need to do more things.

00:23:00 Lou: With the recent build in categories for us like beauty and skincare, I do think there is other channels that we are ready to get into now that we haven’t yet but that we have on the roadmap for this year. But we are looking to do more but we’re just very efficient with our product ads still.

00:23:17 Scott: Are you seeing in that mix of products that you put on to Meta changing consumer grocery habits or behaviors that you’ve noticed shift over the last four years? Is there a push toward greater health more than there was four years ago? Do you feel that in the market?

00:23:33 Lou: Honestly, even when we started like, the fastest moving segments in grocery was better-for-you, organic, specialty. If you’re looking at any growth report throughout the last four or five years, that has been the strongest segment and that just continues growing faster and faster.

00:23:49 Lou: That is our biggest assortment. That’s really interesting because we’re seeing that what we’re doing is we’re also getting a lot of users that consider themselves being air quotation but like, “a Whole Foods girly” but priced out of Whole Foods.

00:24:02 Lou: We’re just getting a really big audience to come find us with huge excitement because these are products that they want to get but they’re priced out. So we become just super important for this audience and that’s also how loyalty and retention really builds.

00:24:17 Scott: Do you guys foresee a world where you would have product adjacencies created by Martie in the mix given your co-founder’s background?

00:24:24 Scott: I know that obviously you’ve got off-the-shelf white label products in Whole Foods and obviously in Trader Joe’s. Is that a direction that you could foresee where there’s maybe higher margin opportunities by taking on categories that you see hype movement in?

00:24:39 Lou: We’re not writing it off. We don’t have it on the roadmap as of yet. It is also something that I’ve come up as a question again and again. And I think we are seeing some interesting brands working with the same type of inventory.

00:24:52 Lou: But there’s a lot of cool companies using the end parts, the inventory that is not being used up, et cetera. where you could probably create some pretty cool brands and products where we see the data of it moving.

00:25:05 Lou: But as of now, we’re very heads down with what we’re doing and supporting the vendors and brands that we’re working with to make sure that they get the best outcome for anything that is overstocked for them.

00:25:15 Scott: I know that you guys to some have been likened to… it’s TJ Maxx of Whole Foods. Do you like those comparisons? This is a… absolutely enormous category with a huge opportunity. But how do you think of that next five years and where you want to take the business?

00:25:30 Lou: I want to build a household brand name. I want everyone to know Martie. I want everyone to know that you’re smartie because you’re shopping Martie. It’s great for the environment. It’s great for your wallet. It has some discovery.

00:25:40 Lou: We’re seeing a phenomenal pattern amongst our users where they usually come and pick out 12 units in a box. Half of them are just, I don’t care what it is. It’s staples for my home. It’s a pasta sauce. It’s nut butters, pasta itself. It’s rice. I don’t really care about the brand. I just want a good brand at a good price.

00:25:58 Lou: And then it’s some of the things that maybe draw them in. Like, oh my God. Drunk Elephant at 50% off. Or maybe someone else is obsessed by another Supergoop. We’re seeing this pattern where we can continue building compounding revenues effect. So I want to build a household brand name. I want to build enormous loyalty and just compounding revenues.

00:26:17 Lou: For me as a founder, when I’m looking at unit economics, I think it’s really interesting to think of your business as a SaaS business when it’s a direct-to-consumer business.

00:26:24 Lou: How can you make sure that revenue just compound month over month because you’re building your cohorts and they keep spending with you? That’s what we want to produce and create. I truly think if you’re focused on building that type of value and that type of loyalty in a direct-to-consumer, you will have phenomenal outcomes.

00:26:42 Lou: That’s, every day, what we’re marching towards and what we’re looking at is are we creating those habits and that behavior? Are we seeing revenue compounding over time? Because then we’re going to be safe from all the unit economics and revenue that we need in the future.

00:26:55 Lou: And thinking deeply about our brand. How do we show up and what channels? How are people talking about us? How do we make it fun? How do we make it a treasure hunt? How do we sincerely help people saving money and just having an easier everyday?

00:27:07 Scott: On the fun bit in the treasure hunt comment, I know you guys recently launched these surprise boxes where people get a number of goods. Talk a little bit about how you had that idea and what’s the market? It’s resonating quite well.

00:27:19 Lou: It’s wild. Who knew people love some mystery? I will admit we were looking at a couple of items that we transparently overbought. Phenomenally great products. They had great velocity in our store. We knew people love them.

00:27:35 Lou: We were just not moving at high enough pace to sell out before we wanted to. We wanted to realize the revenue here. So we said, what about putting it in a mystery box? Because we do think there might be a different behavior for a mystery box buyer than our core buyers.

00:27:49 Lou: Our core buyers are on our site every week, picking the things that they love. They’re just in there. And then we said, there is some buyers that just want to make it easy and they want savings.

00:27:58 Lou: Why don’t we present the mystery box and see if we can get a couple of new users from our database to commit to mystery box and they can also get these great products?

00:28:07 Lou: And the first time we did it was only probably at 500 boxes, but it sold out in 20 minutes. We didn’t even have time to send the email. We put it on the site, it was gone. It led up to a couple of weeks of trying different price points. Is it a theme box? Is it a mix box?

00:28:21 Lou: So it’s really exciting. We have been building on this. We’re doing a bigger launch for a mystery box at the end of the next week as an ongoing product because it definitely seems to have legs.

00:28:31 Lou: For us as an organization, this is the year we can continue 2, 3X-ing our revenue. But as a startup in the consumer landscape today, figuring out what are the green shoots that you can get out and really put efforts behind testing and either doubling down or killing it, if it works or not, those are the things that can 4X your business.

00:28:48 Lou: So mystery box is just one of multiple things that we have slated this year to see how else can we merchandise and present our products to attract an audience who’s slightly different than the everyday shopper from Martie.

00:29:02 Scott: I was gonna say I am a smartie because I shop at Martie, but I have not yet bought the mystery box. But I do think this user behavior for somebody that’s busy, that’s just fatigued with decision fatigue, you go to the shopping page and you say, oh, another 20 things I need to decide today.

00:29:18 Scott: There is a user behavior that just wants to click mystery box, have it come every month, have it be full of delicious snacks, whether you’ve got kids or it’s for yourself. It’s a great innovation that I think will drive really interesting behavior for Martie.

00:29:32 Lou: It’s super fun. One of the best parts of building a company is getting to try these new things and getting to learn about user behaviors across multiple different cohorts and products.

00:29:42 Scott: Just to wrap up, I know that you spend some of your summers in the beautiful archipelago of Sweden. If you weren’t in Los Angeles and you weren’t in Stockholm, where on planet earth would you choose to live?

00:29:55 Lou: Man, I have such a boring answer for you because I think about where I should live all the time. If I didn’t want to live here, I would live somewhere else. I freaking love living here.

00:30:04 Lou: And this is through extensive conversations and looking at everything from business opportunity to weather to where is kids happy? Where is our family? Where is our community and friends? Where do we feel most grounded and home?

00:30:17 Lou: Me and my husband are the crazy people who we travel to someplace and we’re like, should we live here? So we’re just constantly gauging. Is the grass greener somewhere else? But I’m so happy to report this is where I want to live.

00:30:31 Scott: Los Angeles is incredible. Tell me as a founder of a business and four-time founder of a business, what’s one of your biggest productivity hacks, especially as a mom as well?

00:30:40 Lou: Some people may have heard this. There’s different versions of this. Again, it’s funny when you think back at the things that you kind of like learned when you were very young and that stuck with you.

00:30:49 Lou: I felt very scattered with spinning tons of plates in one of my earlier businesses. Having a team and how do you make everyone happy and someone comes into your room and you want to help them. So you’re like, letting everything go to like, figure this thing out for them.

00:31:04 Lou: I got this productivity hack to say, every task is a monkey. If you don’t contain the monkey, everything is going to be just whack. Monkeys are tossing papers and they’re stepping over your computer and it’s just wild. It’s not a good thing to have in your office. You never want a monkey in your office.

00:31:20 Lou: So everyone that comes to you with anything that they’re asking you for help with or to do, that is a monkey. If you’re going to take that monkey, you better contain it. You better understand you need to then figure it out, contain it. That’s on you.

00:31:35 Lou: But best case scenario is that this person leaves with a monkey. You don’t have time for another monkey. Another monkey is going to wreck your day.

00:31:42 Lou: It sounds so stupid, but thinking about anyone coming to you with things and that’s a freaking monkey. And I can’t have it here right now because I don’t have time to contain a monkey. I have other things happening.

00:31:52 Lou: For me, it worked really well. Figuring out how that person leaves and taking the monkey with them sounds stupid, but it’s a very good visualization for me.

00:32:01 Scott: I love that. So one question off script, I have to go back to Stockholm roots. Between the duality of Spotify or SoundCloud, where do you come down across the fence?

00:32:12 Lou: Oh, Spotify.

00:32:14 Scott: Spotify? Okay. Good answer. That’s my answer, too.

00:32:17 Lou: Oh, but here’s the thing. I’m a SoundCloud user, but if I’m looking at the corporate structure and how I want to build my company, it’s Spotify. But that’s only because I know more people at Spotify.

00:32:27 Scott: For those who don’t know, this is a classic Stockholm-Berlin debate.

00:32:31 Lou: Yes, but I’m definitely a SoundCloud user more than a Spotify user for my own music.

00:32:35 Scott: Love it. Finally, where can listeners find you online?

00:32:39 Lou: My name is great because you can find me on LinkedIn super easily. I am pretty active on LinkedIn, but Martie Goods. Instagram is @martiegoods. And I pop in there, and that’s a super fun account to follow. I’m probably most active on Martie’s Instagram account more than my own. Martie Goods is probably actually the best location.

00:32:59 Scott: That’s where to find Lou. Thanks so much for being with us today. If you’re able to get outside and enjoy the perfect LA weather, I wish that for you.

00:33:08 Scott: Thank you for everything that you’re doing to help solve food waste in America and make America healthier. It’s an incredible platform, and I hope that everybody who listens is able to pop on there and buy a mystery box.

00:33:18 Lou: Thank you. Me, too. Get on with the mystery, guys.

00:33:22 Scott: Thanks, Lou.

00:33:22 Lou: Thanks.

00:33:24 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

Read more from Louise Fritjofsson in Founders Everywhere.

As technologies roll out, initial advantages go to incumbents who can adopt the new technologies for efficiency gains, and margin expansion. I’ve heard a number of friends say, “If companies like Harvey and Legora are growing so quickly, how come my law firm bills haven’t gone down?” If a lawyer is able to perform commoditized legal work in a fraction of the time, shouldn’t this hit billable hours, and therefore the cost for services? In the short run, this margin accrues to the incumbents.

But let’s take radiology as an example.

A decade ago many heralded the death of radiology as a field. The logic went as follows: radiologists predominately look at pictures of MRIs, AI driven image recognition and cognition was getting better and better, so therefore an image-heavy field like radiology would be one of the first things to disappear.

What happened, however, was two-fold:

1. AI impacted hardware (atoms): MRI machines became more powerful, faster, cheaper to build, manage and operate, and more came online

2. AI impacted software (bits): image-processing obviated the need for radiological review on rote and routine cases, and shifted their focus to the edge, where practitioner experience mattered, nuance and context were needed

These two impacts meant that more MRI machines became available to more people, and the number of radiologists needed to process the images went down. For a brief interregnum, image labs could have accrued margin due to being able to run MRI scans more cheaply, and perhaps with fewer doctors on staff as overhead.

But then something perhaps curious, or perhaps obvious, happened. New entrants flooded the market offering MRI scans for orders of magnitude cheaper prices, harvesting the delta between old price and new cost, and offered these services at prices that drastically undercut historical offerings. And because at these new price points there were entirely new use cases for MRIs, like preventative scans, demand skyrocketed, new companies were formed, further compressing margins in a race for user acquisition, and the total number of not just MRI machines and scans, but radiologists reviewing these scans, went through the roof.

This is a phenomena known as the Jevons Paradox, dating back to 1865. William Stanley Jevons first observed the phenomena with coal. Technological efficiencies lead to a rise in production capabilities, a reduction in price, and an ensuing expansion of demand. The very efficiencies thought to eliminate jobs create such a great expansion in production, and fall in price, that it’s net positive for both demand expansion and therefore the need for more human labor, not less. NPR recently did a great deep dive on exactly this phenomena as relates to the expansive effects of AI.

This three part movie will likely play out in legal, and many other industries:

1. AI affords advantages to incumbents who harvest new margins, and there’s a brief interregnum where incumbents continue to dominate, and prices don’t change (this is the valley of disbelief, where people think AI hasn’t changed much)

2. New entrants leveraging these new cost advantages undercut industry norms, and attack this new margin, closing the gap between price and cost

3. Prices for the same services fall, and there is net new demand for these services at new price points, probably leading to market expansion and growth

Both incumbent and new player may continue to exist, but because the incumbent’s fixed costs are likely commensurate with old price points, they’ll have a structural disadvantage to the new players who are AI-native, and don’t carry some of the same deadweight fixed costs, making them more nimble and immune from margin erosion.

Overall, like we saw with Prenuvo, Ezra (now Function Health), EverLab, Axo and many of the consumer-facing health companies offering preventative MRI scans at a fraction of the traditional costs, we’ll likely see new supercharged AI-native law firms who will be able to offer commensurate quality to a top-tier firm, at a fraction of the price. They’ll eat into those incumbent law firm margins and profits, drive the fee per service down, and in turn perhaps create net new market expansion.

At firms like Omar Haroun’s Eudia supercharging in-house counsel with AI tools, they’re providing an AI-native toolbox for in-house counsel to drastically slash legal budgets. While they still may pay premium dollar for white-shoe litigators, mainly for the optical threat of power against peers, commoditized legal will be a race to the bottom, with new entrants cutting into incumbent partner rate charts by being able to do comparable quality work at a fraction of the cost for clients.

Early AI efficiencies accrue to legacy incumbents. Net new AI-native players leverage new cost advantages to attack margin. Prices reduce and clear. Net demand increases for services, market expands, and net new jobs are likely created due to growth. Like was experienced with coal, with radiology, legal might be next. If my legal bills fell from $2,000 an hour to $200, I might actually ask more than 10x my demand. But this new value accrual won’t go to legacy players hoarding margin. It’ll go to new players, or those AI-native firms with the structural cost advantages to support it.

—

Scott Hartley is Co-Founder and General Partner at Everywhere Ventures, a $100 million-dollar early stage venture capital fund that has backed over 250 companies.

Special thanks to Omar Haroun at Eudia, and Michael Barone at Everywhere.

The United States ranks 55th in the world for maternal mortality while spending more on childbirth than any other country. For too many families, the most significant medical journey of their lives is fragmented, expensive, and unsupported. We’re in an incredibly exciting moment for women’s health, with more innovation and attention than ever, yet the scale of unmet need means we still have a long way to go. Partum Health is addressing that gap by bringing together clinical care, doula support, and mental health services in a single, coordinated model that is delivered both virtually and in person and covered by insurance. By integrating lactation support, pelvic floor therapy, infant feeding guidance, and behavioral health under one roof, Partum helps families access comprehensive, continuous care without having to navigate a patchwork of providers during one of life’s most demanding transitions. They are currently active in Illinois, Michigan, and Texas and will be expanding geographically, so look out in your state.

Co-founders Meghan Doyle, CEO, and Matthew Rogers, COO met at Boston Consulting Group, what they jokingly call the “less intense” job they left to become founders. Both worked in healthcare, and Matt also spent time on social‑impact and public‑sector projects, which fits naturally with the public‑health side of maternal care. Meghan’s earlier career sat between consumer brands and healthcare, helping insurers and health systems design care that feels more human and easier to navigate. They share a very similar way of working: using data, telling clear stories, and giving honest feedback. They are applying that approach to deliver the holistic, hybrid care families deserve. They believe this kind of coordinated care is what will really move the needle for families throughout pregnancy and postpartum.

What’s Partum Health’s North Star?

Our North Star is making an elevated standard of care the norm for families, not the exception. We believe care should extend beyond basic OB services to support the full mental, emotional, and physical well-being of every birthing person. By bringing together a coordinated team of specialists, including lactation consultants, physical therapists, behavioral health providers, doulas, nutrition experts, and others, we aim to deliver comprehensive, integrated care that addresses the whole person throughout pregnancy and postpartum.

What makes Partum Health a must-have vs a nice-to-have?

When you look beyond the headline maternal mortality statistics, it becomes clear that the current system often falls short in supporting birthing people and families. Mental health conditions remain one of the leading contributors to maternal mortality, yet many people experiencing perinatal mood and anxiety disorders never receive the care they need. The same gaps exist in areas like infant feeding, where many parents struggle to meet their breastfeeding goals without early, hands-on support. Similar challenges arise with pelvic floor health, as many people experience dysfunction after childbirth that could be prevented or effectively treated with timely physical therapy. These challenges all point to the same underlying issue: too much of maternal care is reactive rather than proactive. By providing continuous, coordinated support across physical, emotional, and practical needs (both virtually and in the home) Partum Health helps address critical gaps in care, improving outcomes and making the transition into parenthood more manageable and supported.

Tell us about some recent milestones that Partum Health crushed.

I’m especially excited about the progress we’ve made toward expanding access to comprehensive maternal care. A key part of that effort has been partnering with major national insurance payers and accepting insurance to make our services more accessible to families. We’ve also expanded into Medicaid, which covers more than 40% of births in the U.S., because improving maternal health outcomes at scale requires serving Medicaid populations. In addition, we’ve begun partnering with health systems such as University of Chicago, integrating our services alongside OB care so patients can access support more seamlessly and clinicians have a trusted partner to address needs that often fall beyond the traditional scope of obstetric care.

How has your background influenced you as a founder?

Looking back, Partum feels like the natural intersection of my career and personal experiences. I started in the consumer world, focused on brand strategy and understanding people’s needs, which continues to shape how we design patient-centered healthcare experiences. My move into healthcare was influenced by my brother’s long cancer journey, which showed me how difficult the system can be to navigate and how much responsibility falls on families. Later, at BCG, I worked across payer, provider, and health services organizations, where I saw the growing focus on whole-person care, but also noticed that maternal health was often overlooked. When I had my own children, I experienced those gaps firsthand. Even with good insurance and strong health literacy, accessing support for feeding, pelvic floor recovery, and behavioral health was far harder than it should have been. Once I saw both the personal challenges and the broader outcomes data, it made it impossible not to act.

Any favorite resources or content?

Honestly, the most valuable resource for me has been a community of fellow founders. A trusted group of peers, especially in healthcare, helps cut through the noise with practical, specific guidance. Live, reciprocal support beats almost anything you can passively consume.

Fun fact:
I grew up traveling back and forth between the U.S. and Ireland, where my dad and all my grandparents are from, and I spent much of my childhood Irish dancing. I come from a big Irish Catholic family, and there’s a running joke at Partum that I “have a cousin for everything.”

Listen to Maria Azofra with Anna Barber, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: The Shapei Lending Edge. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

In episode 120 of Venture Everywhere, Anna Barber, a General Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Maria Azofra, co-founder and CEO of Sharpei, an AI-native operating system for embedded equipment financing that helps lenders automate and accelerate the loan origination process. Maria shares how building Yakk, a B2B equipment rental marketplace in Spain, exposed a frustrating industry-wide bottleneck: lenders taking 20 to 30 days to approve transactions, losing deals before they could ever close. Sharpei’s vision is to become the origination infrastructure for every lender in the US, modernizing a $1.3 trillion industry that still runs on emails, PDFs, and phone calls.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Iterating through multiple business models to find true market pull.

• Targeting pre-qualification as lending’s most overlooked bottleneck.

• Automating credit file creation from days to hours with AI.

• Using lenders as the distribution channel to reach merchants at scale.

• Building leasing infrastructure that captures residual asset value.

If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.

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Transcript:

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.

00:00:32 Anna: Welcome to the podcast. I’m Anna Barber, a partner at Everywhere. Very excited to be here with Maria Azofra, the co-founder and CEO of Sharpei. Today Sharpei is an operating system for embedded equipment financing, but it actually started as a slightly different company. Maria, I’d love to start there and talk about what you’re doing today and the genesis of the company.

00:00:55 Maria: Thank you for having me, first of all. Nice to meet you, Anna. We are three founders from Madrid, Spain – Lucia, Julian, and me. The first iteration of Sharpei started seven years ago in Madrid with a company called Yakk. We were a B2B rental marketplace back then.

00:01:13 Maria: By building Yakk, we identified that the industry was super manual, that everything, we needed to ask the end user for a million documents. The bigger problem in the industry wasn’t that vendors weren’t offering renting or leasing online. The main problem was that all the lenders took 20 days to give us a yes or no, an approval. That was the end cost that the end user was not actually renting out the equipment.

00:01:41 Maria: That’s when we decided to come to the U.S. and start Sharpei in San Francisco. The whole thing was building the infrastructure that allows any lender to offer super fast access to capital in the renting and equipment leasing industry.

00:01:55 Anna: That’s so interesting. First of all, in 1999, I was the early team member of a company called Rent Anything. That was a rental platform for consumer equipment, but it was just too early. So what kind of equipment do you deal with? And is it the same across Yakk and Sharpei?

00:02:12 Maria: That’s interesting because Yakk, we started as a peer-to-peer rental marketplace in Spain. The thing was, as you told me, it was a bit early for the market, especially in Spain. We started with mostly electronics, phones, computers, drones, DJ sets, and so on. But the main problem was that everyone was stealing the products.

00:02:35 Maria: So we had to pivot. That’s when we decided to go full B2B. We became one of the biggest rental equipment leasing marketplaces, but very focused on electronics, especially computers and phones for companies.

00:02:48 Anna: That’s so interesting. I like to say being early is the same as being wrong. That’s a tough lesson to learn. But you made this great pivot. You made the pivot to B2B marketplace and then you made the pivot to the financing side. Tell me a little bit about that, how you ended up there, thinking that that was really the interesting business to build.

00:03:09 Maria: We did another pivot in between Yakk and Sharpei version two. That is what we’re doing now. At first, we came to the U.S. with the idea to build a buy-now-pay-later for equipment finance.

00:03:21 Maria: So we were going to merchants saying, “Hey, LG. Do you want to offer equipment finance fully online as if you were offering a traditional buy-now-pay-later like Affirm or Klarna?” We’re seeing that more and more vendors and merchants are putting or adding their B2B online sites. It makes sense to provide the end user with more options to buy at checkout.

00:03:44 Maria: We’re able to have big logos like Mercedes, Ford, LG. We were doing our job correctly in terms of capturing demand. We were creating an embedded equipment finance at checkout. So, the ones doing the underwriting were the banks.

00:03:56 Maria: But even though we were able to get a lot of demand to the banks, the banks weren’t approving anything because they took 20 to 30 days to approve a transaction. So, the end user was leaving to another company or even buying the product instead of leasing it because the banks took very long.

00:04:15 Anna: So, I’m assuming that most of your customers are smaller businesses. And so, it’s just tougher for them to navigate financing. So it sounds like the pain you’re really solving is shortening the time to approval.

00:04:30 Anna: Being their financing partner, you’re really supporting small businesses and being able to get the equipment that they need to run. Who are your customers? Give us a snapshot of who you’re serving.

00:04:41 Maria: Nowadays we are serving small and medium-sized lenders, very specifically in the equipment finance industry. Even though Sharpei is prepared to serve any kind of commercial lending, we’ve been in the equipment finance space for a long time so that’s the first industry that we are attacking.

00:04:59 Anna: So, you’re not serving the small businesses directly. You’re the connective tissue between the lenders and the financial institutions.

00:05:06 Maria: We can speak about this in a minute, but I feel like we were going to the vendors and we were nice-to-have, because we were trying to charge a SaaS fee because we are infrastructure. We were trying to charge the vendors. For the vendors, we were like a payment option. Vendors are used to pay like a take rate per transaction if you’re a payment option.

00:05:27 Maria: As the lenders were coming to us and say, “Hey, guys, can I offer these Sharpei leasing button for my own vendors,” that’s when we decided, okay, maybe it makes sense to go to the lenders and become the lending infrastructure. We can use the banks as the distribution channel to get to the big merchants.

00:05:45 Maria: Because Walmart or LG, they’re already working with the JP Morgan’s of this world and they’re not going to skip JP Morgan or they don’t want to offer lending with other players that Sharpei has integrated. That’s when we decided to move full into the lending infrastructure playbook.

00:06:03 Maria: The go-to-market actually… much more easier because we are offering a white label solution for lenders. In terms of trust, when the customer is going to the checkout, if they see leasing powered by JP Morgan or Wells Fargo, the conversion rates are going to be much higher than if they’re going to see Sharpei.

00:06:22 Anna: You’ve pivoted so many times. You’ve become a master of pivoting, which personally, I think is one of the signals of a really successful entrepreneur. What does it look like and how does it feel different when it’s working? What was it about this version of the idea that you really saw that it was taking off?

00:06:40 Maria: Willingness to pay, actually. I feel like we pivoted so many times that even ourselves, sometimes when we’re explaining what we do, we don’t even know how to explain it correctly.

00:06:51 Maria: But now, the last pivot was six months ago. We did the hard decision to literally let everything go and start from scratch. We told to our current customers like, “Hey, we’re not doing this anymore.” Almost revenue went to zero and we decided to pivot the whole company to this new AI lending layer.

00:07:11 Maria: When we pivoted, all the lenders were coming to us. That’s when it started to feel that this is working, when people are actually using your product and you can feel that you’re building something that they are willing to use on a daily basis. You’re not a nice-to-have.

00:07:27 Anna: It’s great to hear that that flywheel has really started working and you’re seeing it. You’ve worked in circular economy as well as finance. How does your work in circular economy affect what you’re doing now or relate to the business that you’re building today?

00:07:42 Maria: I feel like sustainability and finance are more related than people think, especially in equipment finance and circular economy. When you’re leasing an asset, that asset has to come back. There’s an opportunity to resell the same asset. That’s our first iteration of the product.

00:08:01 Maria: That’s also our ambition: create the whole infrastructure layer that is going to allow people to use every single item on a lease, but then it’s going to be able to make the banks participating in the secondhand of the asset. So it’s really important to see the asset as a long term asset and also be able to calculate the residual value out of it to be able to get more margin from the second rotation.

00:08:28 Anna: I think a lot of circular economy is really about efficiency and leveraging existing resources to avoid the creation of new resources. And so it sounds like you’re doing that in the equipment field.

00:08:41 Anna: You’re also talking about this AI native lending infrastructure. Can you talk about how AI is making your product work better? What is it about the current tech platform transformation to AI that makes the business you’re running now possible for the first time?

00:08:59 Maria: I think now we call everything AI, but Sharpei is building lending infrastructure that has a layer of AI on top of it. For us, equipment financing industry is a super legacy industry, $1.3 trillion industry. Everything runs on emails, PDFs, Excels.

00:09:19 Maria: Mostly 90% of all the workloads in origination are manual. Here in the US, in Spain, in Mexico, what we’ve identified is that every single lender worldwide operates on a manual basis in equipment lending specifically.

00:09:35 Maria: We are very good at connecting the dots. So we connect the vendors with the lenders, the lenders with insurance partners, the insurance partners with the secondhand and the resellers. We build that network and that’s what we call the core infrastructure. But on top of it, we have an AI layer that automates the collection, validation and creation of credit files in minutes.

00:10:00 Maria: What we’re offering on the ROI that we are selling to the lenders is instead of having 30 people working on one transaction and collecting the docs, following up with the phone like, “Hey, you’re missing two documents. The business license is not correct,” we automate that layer of validation of data collection and validation with AI. An AI agent can do this in two hours instead of a human that has to call the end user.

00:10:30 Anna: What’s interesting about that is the borrowers, they have a massive incentive to give you that information because they want to get that loan approved.

00:10:38 Maria: We say that we only give you qualified leads because if a customer doesn’t want to fill out the form, they’re not going to receive a loan. That’s what we do. We’re very centering the origination phase, the pre-qualification.

00:10:52 Maria: There’s been a lot of innovation in the credit, in the underwriting specifically, but no one is doing anything in the pre-qualification step. That is actually the biggest manual and the biggest bottleneck for every lender because every lender receives applications via brokers, email, phones, vendors. So every channel gives the lender the data in a structured way.

00:11:16 Maria: What Sharpei does is we create a unified layer that even though the application comes via email, via phone, via vendor, we structure all this data. We package that into a very clean credit file so that someone can say yes or no. That’s when the human in the loop enters the process.

00:11:36 Anna: Pre-qualification is, in a sense, its own form of underwriting, as you just said.

00:11:42 Maria: And obviously, KYB and KYC.

00:11:45 Anna: What it reminds me of a little bit is in interview platforms, sometimes one of the things employers are looking for is how quickly does a candidate respond to the request for information.

00:11:57 Anna: That shows how interested they are in the job, but also how organized they are and shows other things. So you actually are reading really psychographic signals about potential borrowers.

00:12:09 Maria: This is really interesting because in our past company, fraud was the main issue. I was a data scientist for one of the biggest banks in Europe, BBVA, for a long time. I was in the equipment finance division, but in the fraud, specifically studying why people commit fraud in the B2B business.

00:12:27 Maria: We identified that if you had a new email, and you had a prepaid phone number, you were more keen to commit fraud than if you had a traditional email and that email was logged into Netflix or whatever socials that you had.

00:12:44 Maria: We created our own pre-scoring algorithm in Yakk. So when we were thinking about the pivot, we thought about creating a KYB company because we had so many learnings and so much information about the past company that our first option was creating a new KYC-based on social signals and email on phone validation.

00:13:07 Anna: That’s so interesting because in a sense, your clients aren’t really paying for that, but they’re getting it anyway. You’ve built businesses in Spain and in the United States, so what’s the difference and why here? What was it that prompted you to want to build this here?

00:13:24 Maria: My co-founder and me, Lucia and me, we used to be professional soccer players. We are very ambitious people. We got selected by Draper University in San Mateo. I remember our first day, it was four years ago. We saw this guy, Brett Adcock, the founder of Archer, and now Figure, the humanoid company.

00:13:45 Maria: We saw these guys speaking about humanoids and Silicon Valley. I remember that I looked at Lucia and she was like, “Man, we are playing in second division. We have to be here. If we want to build something great, we need to move.” Two weeks after that, we went home. We shut down the company in Spain and we came to the US.

00:14:04 Maria: Actually, I did my first exit in Spain. I started my company when I was 17. I sold it when I was 20. It was not a big exit. Spain is a very good country in terms of quality of life, but it’s not a country to build businesses.

00:14:17 Maria: When I go back home, everyone was asking me like, “Why are you an entrepreneur? You have the worst life ever.” And here in the US, it’s the other way around. Everyone is building things. You feel so inspired.

00:14:31 Maria: So I feel like that’s the main difference between Spain and the US. The ambition and the best people building businesses are here. We’ve been living in San Francisco for almost two years. The type of people that you meet, the conversations that we have.

00:14:46 Maria: In Spain, of course, we love to party. At 3 a.m. in Spain, I’m at this big party and I’m having a lot of fun. But in SF, I’m speaking about the energy that the protons of the rockets of the NASA.

00:14:59 Maria: So you’re surrounded with so many good people that the learning capacity and the speed of things is much higher than in Europe. I feel not even Spain, the whole Europe. The US is years ahead of Europe in terms of startups and everything.

00:15:15 Anna: What you’re really pointing to is an underlying cultural point of view about the role of entrepreneurship and how people see entrepreneurs. It is interesting how in the United States, we’ve developed a little bit of a… idealization of the whole process of entrepreneurship that really is embedded in the culture here.

00:15:37 Maria: Also, people are much more risk-averse. And if you fail, that’s not a bad thing. For example, I’ve created a lot of companies. Most of them, of course, have never worked. But at the end of the day, all these learnings compound.

00:15:51 Maria: I’ve been a super shitty CEO in my first company, but the second one, I’ve learned from the best. I keep getting all this information and all this knowledge that would make me a very good entrepreneur. I don’t know if now, but maybe in a couple of years. That risk and intrinsic risk that you Americans have is super cool. We have so much to learn from you in that terms.

00:16:16 Anna: You’re teaching me now. I love how you put that about learning velocity and also just reflecting back on how you were a leader in your last company and what this one is like.

00:16:25 Anna: Now you have Sharpei that is working. I’d love to talk about what the ultimate vision is, where you see Sharpei going when it’s fully built out and fully realized. What does it look like?

00:16:37 Maria: The whole goal here is that every lender in the U.S. uses Sharpei for pre-qualifying their applications. I think we’re getting there. We are partnering with a lot of great people to create these distribution channels.

00:16:51 Maria: But of course, it’s a very legacy industry. It’s a very niche industry. We had to create a lot of credibility in the industry to be able to sell to the first customer. Our goal is becoming the infrastructure layer for origination for every lender in the U.S.

00:17:07 Anna: What are the next big challenges or opportunities that are facing you right now as you move towards that goal?

00:17:13 Maria: As we pivoted into this new infrastructure layer, I feel the next challenge would be partnering with the right people so they can resell our solution as white label. So we did, at first, a partnership with Tamarack. It’s the biggest consultancy agency in the U.S. for equipment finance. They’re going to be the ones reselling Sharpei as one of their products.

00:17:37 Maria: For us, the brand doesn’t matter anymore, it’s all about finding these distribution channels that are going to be able to allow us to be in as many lenders as possible. We learned this the hard way because we were going one-by-one to every single lender.

00:17:53 Maria: We are immigrant founders. We don’t have the credibility that we need in the industry. It’s much easier to create a product that is fully resellable by others than having your playbook of direct sales. The challenge is finding the right channels to sell Sharpei to the mass market.

00:18:11 Anna: That’s super exciting to be at this point and having pivoted through so many things and found the one that works. What an exciting moment.

00:18:19 Maria: Now we have to raise again to be able to be in the game for a long time. But we are feeling that we have something between our hands. Super happy to be and also to enjoy this moment because we’ve been entrepreneurs for seven years now together. Now that we have something that the market is getting and that we are feeling the traction finally, it’s going to be a fun moment for us.

00:18:44 Anna: Congrats, Maria. That’s awesome. I’d love to close our conversation with a speed round. Can you tell us what’s a book you’re reading or a podcast that you’re enjoying right now?

00:18:54 Maria: I don’t read so many books. I read a lot online. I’m in love with this podcast, The Diary of a CEO of Steven Bartlett. Literally every single day I listen to one podcast. It’s two hours.

00:19:08 Maria: I spend most of my afternoons hearing about these entrepreneurs and CEOs and experts. I try to apply every single thing that they say into Sharpei. Really interesting, this podcast. I fully recommend it to anyone.

00:19:23 Anna: Okay. Diary of a CEO podcast. If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?

00:19:29 Maria: New York. I’m living the full life here. But actually I believe that I would split the year between SF and New York. So six months SF, six months New York and have best of both coasts in the year.

00:19:44 Anna: The perfect coast to coast balance. Okay. What’s your favorite productivity hack?

00:19:49 Maria: I use Granola to record every single meeting to create my follow-up messages. That’s my best productivity hack. And have a lot of coffee at the same time.

00:20:00 Anna: Coffee and Granola, a great combination. So tell the listeners where they can find you if people want to connect with you.

00:20:05 Maria: LinkedIn. I’m very active on that social. I would start my newsletter very, very soon. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time and actually I want to help other immigrant founders come to the US.

00:20:20 Maria: I run a Telegram group, one of the biggest ones for Hispanic female founders. We are more than 6,000 people in two years. I have to translate all that community into something bigger. I’m thinking about creating a podcast and a newsletter for female CEOs.

00:20:37 Anna: It sounds like you’ve already built the community, so that sounds like a great idea.

00:20:40 Maria: I try to help. I try to publish things that I use or templates or my email templates for investor updates. But I feel like I don’t have enough time to put into that type of community so, I want to translate that into a more specific newsletter or podcast maybe.

00:20:59 Anna: Great. This has been a great conversation. Maria Azofra from Sharpei, thank you for joining me and best of luck.

00:21:05 Maria: Thank you. Thank you for having me.

00:21:08 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

Tax season creates a familiar kind of urgency. Refunds, assessments, payment notices, and compliance updates all arrive at once, often through the same digital channels people already trust. That familiarity is exactly what scammers are using.

Orca Fraud CEO Thalia Pillay is warning South Africans to watch for a predictable spike in SARS impersonation scams this filing season. The messages vary, from fake settlement notices and refund SMSes to letters of demand and auto-assessment prompts, but the playbook is the same: make the message feel official, make the deadline feel urgent, and push people to click before they verify.

What makes these scams more convincing is the shift to digital. With SARS now relying fully on digital correspondence for system-generated letters, legitimate communication is already happening through inboxes and SMS threads. That gives fraudsters more cover to imitate the process.

The core advice is simple: do not trust the link, trust the source. SARS will not ask for banking or credit card details by SMS or email, will not send payment instructions through random accounts, and will not route taxpayers to external sites for compliance steps. Anything suspicious should be checked directly through eFiling or the SARS website.

For Orca, the broader issue is not just scam awareness. It is about helping people recognize fraud in the moment it matters, before urgency turns into action. As more financial and government interactions move online, that layer of trust and verification is becoming increasingly important.

Read the full article on the Business Explainer.

The Philippines’ used car market is booming, but the dealers driving that growth have been constrained by how they provide financing to their customers. Many rely on their own capital or slow, traditional lenders that are not built for the speed and flexibility of the industry. Now these dealers can use OneLot, the Manila-based fintech that provides working capital and digital tools designed specifically for used car dealers. Its AI-native platform underwrites businesses in hours instead of weeks, allowing dealers to move faster, buy more inventory, and scale their operations with less friction.

Harm-Julian Schumacher, co-founder and CEO, grew up around his family’s Mercedes-Benz dealership in Germany, which gave him early insight into how car retail and financing work in practice. He did some undergraduate studies in Southeast Asia and developed a strong personal affinity for the region before eventually moving to the Philippines. He met co-founder and COO Tommy Campos, a former operator at Uber and Postmates, through their first local investor. Subramaniam Srinivasan, CTO, joined later as technical co-founder after they connected through a mutual contact in Indonesia. The three previously built a quick-commerce company together, an experience that helped them build trust, pressure-test ideas, and establish a strong working dynamic before starting OneLot.

What’s OneLot’s North Star?

As a lending business, our North Star is net interest income. It’s effectively our gross profit after cost of capital and loan losses. It’s easy to grow a loan book by handing out cheap capital, but that doesn’t mean you’re building a healthy company, so we focus on growing in a clearly profitable way. That metric forces us to balance growth, risk, and unit economics instead of chasing vanity volume.

Tell us about some recent milestones OneLot crushed.

The first few years were about building the foundation by onboarding dealers, building the platform, and proving the model. In 2026, we launched pilots for our consumer financing product, which lets us finance both dealers and the customers buying their cars. We’re also integrating AI agents across the company to automate sales, customer support, credit analysis, underwriting, and internal operations. This is making the business faster, more scalable, and more efficient.

Why will OneLot win?

It really comes down to two things. First, we’re digital and AI‑native, which lets us move faster, be more data‑driven, and take better, quicker credit decisions while always being available for customers. Second, we’re obsessively focused on a single vertical (used cars) while most competitors are horizontal lenders or marketplace players. That focus lets us build highly tailored underwriting models, specialized processes, and very specific products for used‑car dealers, all wrapped in a deeply vertical, AI‑enabled platform.

How do you think about work–life balance for yourself and your team?

For me, work–life balance doesn’t mean 9‑to‑5. In a startup leadership role, that’s just not realistic. I typically work six or seven days a week, but I make sure I have anchors like sports and time away from the laptop to clear my head, and I want everyone in senior roles to have their own version of that. At the same time, I’m very conscious about burnout: we work incredibly hard, but I don’t believe in burning through people. If I see someone online late in the evening too often, I’ll tell them to shut the laptop and go home early another day, because in the mid to long term, protecting our human capital is non‑negotiable.

Any favorite books?

I often recommend Yuval Harari’s Sapiens and, even more so, Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, which explores how potent genes shape evolution and extends that as an analogy to ideas, or “memes” that spread through societies when they help those societies function and grow.

Fun fact:
I’m really into water sports and anything with a bit of adrenaline: kitesurfing, sailing, freediving. I enjoy those activities a lot, even if my enthusiasm (and the occasional accident) doesn’t always make my mum very happy.

Listen to Anshu Jain with Scott Hartley, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Outmarket the Market. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

Insurance remains one of the largest industries in the world, but many brokerage workflows still depend on manual processes, disconnected tools, and institutional knowledge.

Outmarket AI is working to change that by building an AI platform purpose-built for insurance brokerages.

The team announced its $17 million Series A, led by Permanent Capital Ventures, with participation from SignalFire, Fika Ventures, TTV Capital, Dash Fund, and strategic investors across the insurance ecosystem. The round brings Outmarket’s total funding to $21.7 million and reflects growing confidence in the company’s vision for the future of insurance operations.

Outmarket’s platform connects directly to agency management systems and transforms structured and unstructured brokerage data into an intelligence layer that powers key workflows across commercial, benefits, personal lines, and specialty insurance.

The company is already seeing strong market adoption. Since launching in March 2025, Outmarket has grown ARR 5x year-over-year and is now used by more than 250 leading insurance brokerages. Its platform processes millions of quotes, policies, applications, and loss runs documents, helping customers save more than a decade of manual work each month.

The impact extends beyond efficiency. Customers have reported up to a 65% reduction in errors and omissions through AI-assisted policy comparison and gap detection. Brokerages are also using Outmarket to improve win rates, identify cross-sell opportunities, and deliver better service to clients in less time.

The broader shift across insurance is clear. Brokerages are moving from manual, fragmented processes toward connected, AI-enabled infrastructure that can support every stage of the brokerage workflow.

The funding will support continued platform expansion, including new AI-driven workflows for complex, high-stakes insurance processes. Outmarket also plans to more than double its product capabilities in 2026 as it expands across commercial lines, benefits, personal lines, and specialty insurance.

For Vishal, Anshu, and the team, the opportunity is to build the operating system for the modern insurance brokerage and help define how the industry works in the years ahead.

Read the full article on PRNewswire.

In episode 119 of Venture Everywhere, Scott Hartley, co-founder and General Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Anshu Jain, co-founder and CPO/CTO of Outmarket AI, an AI-native platform that helps insurance brokerages grow revenue, reduce errors, and close more policies. Anshu shares how years at IBM Research, Meta, and Ethos Life revealed that insurance agents were drowning in manual data entry, buried exclusions, and uncompared quotes, with zero tools to help them. Outmarket’s vision is to become the AI infrastructure layer for insurance distribution, modernizing a chronically underinsured market by giving every agent the intelligence of a team behind them.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Closing America’s chronic underinsurance gap with smarter agent tools

• Catching policy exclusions and coverage gaps before claims surface

• Evolving pricing from seat-based to usage-based to revenue-share

• Turning policy data and agent workflows into proprietary AI advantage

If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.

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Transcript:

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.

00:00:32 Scott: Hi, everybody. I’m Scott Hartley, co-founder and general partner at Everywhere Ventures. Everywhere Ventures is a global pre-seed fund, and I’m super happy to be here today with Anshu Jain.

00:00:43 Scott: Anshu is the co-founder and CTO of Outmarket AI. Outmarket is transforming the insurance industry by bringing AI native intelligence to brokerages so that they can grow revenue, make things more efficient, scale smarter.

00:00:57 Scott: He’s also a programmer by training who’s found his way into the heart of insurance over a storied career. But I know that prior to founding Outmarket, you worked at Meta, Ethos Labs, IBM, SAP. So, Anshu, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for being here with us today.

00:01:13 Anshu: Thank you, Scott. Really appreciate the opportunity.

00:01:16 Scott: Given you’ve been living in AI land for much longer than most of us, give us the 60,000 foot view of what you’ve seen over your career studying and working in AI and how fast the world is changing today with this new evolution that we’re all experiencing.

00:01:32 Anshu: I appreciate that question because it takes me 20 years back into my life journey when I first joined IBM Research, which is when I got into natural language processing and text analytics. That allowed me to be a part of the original AI commercialization effort, which was the IBM Watson effort.

00:01:47 Anshu: Around the constraints of computing at that time, took a very different approach, which was a rule-based approach to AI. Things, of course, evolved significantly different when deep learning and neural networks came.

00:01:58 Anshu: But even the best of us who were deep into deep learning and neural networks, except for the few who had the real vision long back, could not see it coming until it almost started tipping over in early ‘21. That this seems to start to have the appearance of a brain of its own.

00:02:17 Anshu: I think it took everybody by surprise as to how good it got, how the act of next token generation can start to define and generate what are very intelligent sounding reasoning tokens. Everybody had to react.

00:02:32 Anshu: Even though we understand that it is in the end token generation, it is not true intelligence. The technology and frontier has come so far that it’s great and good enough to change an industry landscape for the next decade, even if it were to stop all model innovation today.

00:02:46 Anshu: If there was nothing beyond Claude Opus 4.7 and GPT 5.5, it will take 10 years for the industry and world to realize all the gains from what has happened. It’s been overwhelming.

00:02:56 Scott: It’s pretty remarkable. I’m midway through reading the book by Sebastian Mallaby. He was one of our speakers at our annual meeting a couple of weeks ago in New York City. Sebastian wrote The Power Law, but his most recent book is a deep dive into Demis Hassabis and the evolution of DeepMind. He’s actually gone 10 years of interviews with Demis.

00:03:15 Scott: What’s so fascinating, as you alluded to with IBM Watson, the deterministic rote form of AI, and really his background in neuroscience and thinking about non-deterministic ways to build these neural networks that were moving in the direction toward where we are today.

00:03:33 Scott: On the investor side, I don’t think we’ve seen a fundamental shift like this since the advent of the iPhone and the App Store, and maybe before that, the internet.

00:03:42 Scott: The last 15 years, we’ve been living in sort of a rinse-repeat SaaS world of very specific growth curves, very specific KPIs to manage and navigate and scale very predictable pathways to IPO. We’re completely in a sea change that we probably haven’t seen since 2007, and maybe before that, 1995.

00:04:02 Scott: So it feels like a fundamental restructuring of venture capital the way startups are scaling. You guys predicted this going after a huge market like insurance two or three years ago when the writing was not totally on the wall, not everybody was a believer in AI. What gave you that confidence?

00:04:19 Scott: Was it the fact that you were in these worlds 20 years ago and you saw the evolution, how quickly things were changing? And you said, “Gosh, we got to get ahead of this and where are the biggest opportunities in the market? Well, let’s go after insurance.” How did you guys arrive on this particular industry, this particular go-to-market?

00:04:37 Anshu: I call this the Medici effect, where it was the intersection of different streams of thoughts which happened for us. You could always call it accidental when you connect the dots back. The fact that me and both Vishal, my co-founder, we spent our lifetime in technology.

00:04:52 Anshu: Vishal had done a startup in doing sentiment mining from social networks more than a decade ago. I was at the frontier of this at IBM Research. He was at the frontier of it in the social landscape, and we knew this technology, and we were following it very closely.

00:05:06 Anshu: But then what happened was we both were at Meta. So Vishal joined Meta, I joined the same team there. That’s where we started serving some of the largest businesses of Meta, and that’s when insurance first happened to them.

00:05:18 Anshu: I started managing the FinTech and insurance vertical, and we were serving their ads worth hundreds of millions of dollars. We started working closely with the insurance industry, and I understood, hey, how much the insurance industry spends to do distribution, acquisition.

00:05:31 Anshu: One thing led to another, we started helping Ethos Life, which was a direct-to-customer life insurance MGA reseller. We said, “Hey, we could help you do this.” And when they saw the impact our background brought into this insurance world, they said, “Hey, why don’t you just join?”

00:05:47 Anshu: So we joined Ethos Life. Vishal went there first. He headed the product there, and then I joined to head the platform team. That opened our eyes completely in two ways.

00:05:57 Anshu: From the technical side, for me, understanding how much of a big data problem insurance is was mind-blowing, because I believe that insurance is the original big daddy of big data, even before there were computers.

00:06:09 Anshu: 200 years ago, they were having these thick registers where they were handwriting the probabilities and computing the stats to insure the ships which were traveling through the sea to get to India and America. More than that, it was also about complex natural language, which is contracts.

00:06:27 Anshu: All these contracts are essentially natural language, very hard to understand by machines, at least until recently. They are the things that make or break the actual policy. They can have multi-million or even hundreds of million dollars of consequences.

00:06:40 Anshu: Understanding that technology landscape of it, that there are some technical limitations which have stopped this industry from being benefited, but they are on the cusp of being solved, was one thing.

00:06:50 Anshu: The other thing, even the consumers for life insurance would not be inclined to buy the life insurance unless there’s an agent who they can call. The single biggest experiment which increased our return on ad spend was putting an agent phone number there.

00:07:02 Anshu: So we decided to build an agent business at Ethos. Towards building that business, both Vishal and I participated in a lot of interviews where we literally shadowed them. “Hey, just show us what you’re doing.”

00:07:12 Anshu: Many of these agents were actually PNC agents who were trying to get into life. But when we saw the actual work which they do every day, it blew our minds because they had zero tools which are helping them. They just had a monitor which was allowing them to do data entry.

00:07:27 Anshu: But their actual work, it’s deep underwriting work which agents were doing without a law degree, without a data science degree. They need help. This is a technology which is ready for revolution.

00:07:38 Anshu: At that time, I had enough understanding. I was already using ChatGPT to write code. This was using the browser ChatGPT 3.0 and ChatGPT 3.5, I was using to write code. I could see this going in that speed and scale.

00:07:50 Anshu: Three years ago, I was shouting at the top of my voice on LinkedIn that “Guys, this is bigger than we think. This is not 10 to 20% productivity improvement. You could be writing three times the code with this very soon.” And we knew that this would happen in other domains.

00:08:03 Anshu: I also look back at this and say we were fortunate to choose the timing right. Because to me, when the internet was happening, I was still in high school. To me, this is the next big or as big or bigger than internet.

00:08:13 Anshu: We are at the cutting edge of this and in that confluence of we being technology providers who understood insurance as a business first was the biggest driver of the fact. We’re just lucky to have that sequence of events happen to us.

00:08:25 Scott: It’s really fun, having spent time on the ad team at Google 20 years ago, on the platform team at Meta 15 years ago, sometimes being in those positions where the day-to-day mechanics of the role maybe weren’t that interesting.

00:08:38 Scott: But getting to see the 60,000 foot view into an industry, I remember in my early 20s being absolutely perplexed by the amount of ad spend in some industries that I didn’t know were that big.

00:08:48 Scott: You would say, “Gosh, these guys are spending this amount. They must be generating 10 times this amount of revenue.” And it’s some obscure business that you had never conceived of being at that scale.

00:08:59 Scott: So part of that 60,000 foot view of you guys being at Meta, seeing the ad spend from insurance coupled with that age old idea that insurance is really an underwriting, is an understanding of data and probabilities and risk, which are maybe the things that machines can do infinitely better than humans. So it’s a natural combination of effects.

00:09:19 Scott: Taking a step back to what Outmarket is doing as a company, walk us through how you guys are baking AI into some of these agent roles and helping supplement. Because in legal, for example, there’s the black letter law of precedent of what the mechanics of the law. But then there’s also a very commercial layer that’s much more human-driven, that’s much more nuanced-based on a client risk profile, based on a client goal.

00:09:45 Scott: So I imagine there’s both agentic machine part of this, and there’s also the human layer part of this of leveraging Outmarket and some of the intuitions, but also baking in these human elements that a good agent knows how to structure a contract or how to push a deal forward. Walk us through a little bit of the business of Outmarket and how you guys are enabling these agents.

00:10:06 Anshu: You absolutely called out a very unique aspect of this industry, where the same function/role is so significantly a relationship-based role, which has so many touch points with the customer, and then so significantly a data processing and information processing role. Because they’re not the underwriters, but they have to do a lot of work, which is in the same vein of understanding risk and exposure.

00:10:29 Anshu: The legal parallel is great because they’re effectively acting as the lawyers for their clients. Some of the largest corporations, one of the biggest job of the lawyers there is actually to have airtight insurance policies.

00:10:40 Anshu: But most businesses cannot afford that set of lawyers, and that’s why they depend on their agents to do that. That’s an actual big aha for me that, “Hey, these guys are actually doing complex legal work. The precedents of law also apply here.”

00:10:53 Anshu: But also there is this notion of endorsements and exclusions, which is what makes the policy. So there is the deck page of the policy, which says, “Hey, this is the amount of coverage you have for these different sections.”

00:11:05 Anshu: And then there is a bunch, not necessarily hidden, but deep, embedded into the 400 page policy on page number 262 that, “Oh, by the way, digital theft is excluded from this.” Or, “Oh, by the way, you cannot be performing service in a specific industry if you want this insurance.”

00:11:23 Anshu: The agent, if they don’t look at it deeply, may not realize that the client I’m giving this insurance to actually is in that industry. This is a true story that the first insurance we got for our cybertech liability had an exclusion in it that you cannot be in professional services in finance.

00:11:40 Anshu: The agent failed to notice because it was buried on some last page that we are actually in the insurance industry. For six months we were exposed. And when we were putting it through our own policy review system, building that AI, we actually found out that this was a gap.

00:11:54 Anshu: This is a huge nuance of this industry, exclusions and endorsement, which make or break the industry. And we have intersected there as the first thing. So going back to your question of where are we addressing the problems of this space? It starts with a touchpoint, which is how do you gather the context of the client.

00:12:08 Anshu: Because that’s necessary to be able to tell them what’s the right risk exposure profile for them and what kind of markets I can bring them. We start from the point they have a lead. I’ll also touch upon that.

00:12:18 Anshu: Why do we start from the point we have a lead? Because bulk of this industry today is not stuck at lead generation. They have more leads than they can process on their desk, but they cannot get through enough of them.

00:12:28 Anshu: Even though our background was distribution and lead generation at Meta, we said, “Hey, let’s park that problem for now. Let’s focus on the lead to close problem and then the operations problem.”

00:12:38 Anshu: So we say from the time you get the lead, understanding the customer context, filling up the forms, taking your last two policies, and then instead of having to do data entry, use that information to automatically fill up the forms.

00:12:50 Anshu: From that point, having the quotes, application forms being submitted to comparing the quotes which come back from multiple carriers. That’s a very complex task. You’re not just looking at premium, which is what people do because they don’t have time.

00:13:01 Anshu: But buried under those 40-page quotes is some exclusion which talks about the same coverage, the same premium, but this one is much better for your client. Or in fact, higher premium, but this one is much better for your client.

00:13:12 Anshu: They fail to see it because the client themselves are also indexed on the premium and the coverage, but not the details. So now every day, our agents are coming back and saying, “Hey, Anshu, I was able to sell a policy which was the higher premium because the conversation never went to premium. It went to the details of what’s covered in these quotes.”

00:13:30 Anshu: From that point, the quote comparison to then actually the policy being issued… in these steps, there are so many issues which happen in terms of fat fingering, human errors. You had eight vehicles you wanted to cover in the input application, but somebody missed it and there are only seven vehicles, or the VIN number got wrong.

00:13:46 Anshu: Figuring out all of these, which are hidden errors and exclusions. So until the actual accident happens of that vehicle, nobody looks into the policy to say that, “Hey, it’s entirely missing in the policy.”

00:13:54 Scott: We have a number of cybersecurity companies that we’ve invested in. And thinking about pen testing, of looking for vulnerabilities in the code base or vulnerabilities in the potential threat mapping to what you’ve built, in some ways, it’s doing that in reverse.

00:14:10 Scott: What’s so fascinating about insurance is you get the benefit of the premium in the short run, but you have potential catastrophic costs of the payout or the claim in the long run. And there’s a timing mismatch where you really don’t know that you’re wrong catastrophically for a number of months or a number of years.

00:14:24 Scott: This was a pushback on some of the companies that went public, like the Lemonades of the world that were up and to the right on premium. But there’s this long tail of risk that may be baked into those companies with claims that may be poorly underwritten out a few years. You guys are effectively enabling real-time pen testing almost in between risk exposure and client archetype.

00:14:47 Anshu: 100%. That takes me to the 100,000 feet vision for the company. America is underinsured. Be it businesses, be it individuals, be it homes, we are underinsured.

00:15:00 Anshu: As an example, very recently with some of our own friends in Los Angeles, the risk was clear for many years making. Even then, most houses were underinsured. When it came to the actual recovery and rebuilding, they’re now suffering because of lack of information, lack of time, lack of attention.

00:15:18 Anshu: It’s not like there was no intention of anybody to do this right. But because of the lack of tools and information and sheer time, there was not the right advice coming to the final insured. In this case, it was individuals. In some cases, it is businesses.

00:15:31 Anshu: We want to remove that entire inefficiency in multiple layers of this ecosystem so that agents can go back to focusing on what is the most important thing: advising their clients to be appropriately insured and giving them enough reasons to say, “Hey, a higher premium is better for me.”

00:15:47 Anshu: Ask the folks in Los Angeles, they’ll pay double the premium if they have to now. I think that’s the grand vision here. And that’s the opportunity that because everybody is underinsured.

00:15:55 Anshu: This is not about automating this world and removing the efficiency. It’s about increasing the TAM of this industry. The same agents will not be losing their jobs. In fact, they will be having more because they can actually do more.

00:16:08 Scott: As somebody that has to buy insurance and pay for insurance, the biggest risk is that you pay a high premium and you’re still not covered for the catastrophic things that you want to be covered for. So it’s kind of this mismatch of I’m fine paying a high premium as long as that I’m legitimately covered for the highest risk events that I may experience.

00:16:27 Scott: But there’s probably an information asymmetry there where sometimes I’m paying a low premium for the amount of risk coverage I’m getting and other times I’m paying an extremely high premium for very low risk coverage and helping kind of align those incentives.

00:16:40 Scott: To your point, I would maybe spend more money, therefore increasing the TAM of the market if I knew for a fact that there were real risk mitigation elements that I was paying for.

00:16:51 Scott: One of the most interesting things we’re seeing in this new AI driven world is an evolution of pricing. It used to be you kind of sell off the shelf SaaS for a fixed per seat per month model.

00:17:01 Scott: We’re really starting to see where you can drive asymmetric growth and revenue or asymmetric savings and cost, a pricing based on the Delta, the increase in revenue or pricing based on the efficiency of cost savings. How are you guys thinking about pricing in this new AI led market?

00:17:19 Anshu: This is the most active thread of go to market for us right now, Scott. We’ve experimented already. We’re starting to arrive at a very good place here. We started with a seat-based model in the early days because two years ago, nobody knew how to price this based on outcomes.

00:17:33 Anshu: Now that we have the credibility in the market and we’ve been the first to arrive in some sense, what we are starting to see is that the seat anxiety is actually a much bigger problem.

00:17:42 Anshu: I’ve never seen a product market fit like this in my lifetime of building software. Once somebody uses it, they cannot unuse it. They can never get back to not using it. The validation from our customers is that, “Hey, if we drop Outmarket, I’m quitting.”

00:17:56 Anshu: Now everybody wants a seat. The end customers and the CEOs are realizing that, “Hey, I need to give a seat to everybody.” But now the traditional seat model starts to sound very expensive for them also. So it’s been a great boon for us that adoption makes the traditional seat economics drive more anxiety for the customer.

00:18:12 Anshu: Then we were able to quickly experiment and pivot to a model where I think the innovation we ded was we normalize it to a very simple and understandable price point, which is per page of data ingested.

00:18:23 Anshu: Instead of trying to make it hit this workflow, this module, so many credits of usage, we said, “Hey, this doesn’t matter how many of ever times you want to use this. Bring in the data, bring the policy pages, the code pages, and we will just price it by page.” So it became a usage-based model.

00:18:38 Anshu: Within months of launching, we’ve done several deals now on that usage-based model, especially including the larger deals, because now a large insurance agency can say, “Hey, I can put it on all my 2000 employees and then just pay for usage.”

00:18:51 Anshu: The more pricier outcome for them is a happier outcome, which means it’s being adopted. So if they exhaust their entire usage, it just means that they are hyperproductive as an organization. That model is starting to play out.

00:19:01 Anshu: And then we are slowly now, from there, also evolving to a revenue-based model because even the page-based model has an uncertainty and an anxiety of, “Hey, what if I start to use it a lot? Will my budget just go double because I’ve used double the pages?”

00:19:13 Anshu: So from there, we are now able to move to a model which is revenue-based that, “Hey, this is your revenue.” If we can just say that, “Hey, this is the percentage of revenue. So forget counting pages, counting seats, nothing. It’s really tied to your outcome. The happiest case for you is the happiest case for us, that your revenue is doubling and our remuneration from that revenue is doubling.”

00:19:30 Anshu: We are evolving there, but I think the evolution cannot happen as a step function. It has to happen gradually as you build credibility. In some cases, we might still start with seat-based model, let them build trust into the environment and then say, “Okay, now that you know us, let’s do the revenue-based model.”

00:19:46 Scott: That’s a great learning that you kind of need a blunt go to market in the form of per seat per month, followed by maybe a volume-based pricing as you gain scale and then concluding with an outcome-based pricing as you’ve built credibility.

00:20:01 Scott: But a lot of people are trying to jump straight to outcome-based pricing. It’s hard. You guys have developed a simple model, but sometimes these modules with tokens and it’s very complex pricing. That’s a great intuition around seat to volume to outcome-based pricing, which I think would apply to a lot of different businesses that we see.

00:20:19 Anshu: Everybody using AI is struggling because the cost of gas in any SaaS, which is run by AI, is much higher than it used to be. Compute does not scale linearly. And for 100X usage, compute probably scales by 5X. But with AI, for 100X usage, AI usage scales 100X and that’s a big problem.

00:20:39 Scott: As you think about being on the inside of AI, a lot of the stuff that I read about and hear about is the coming crunch of compute,

00:20:58 Scott: Do you guys foreee a world in the coming couple of years where demand really outpaces the ability to keep up with compute supply? What does that do for the underlying cost structure of a business like yours? How do you think of those risks under the hood?

00:21:13 Anshu: My technology view as an AI researcher in the past, and as somebody who’s watching and reading every new paper which is published, especially in the compute efficiency domain, I believe there is a lot of hype going on in terms of this capacity issue.

00:21:28 Anshu: That’s the job of the industry to sell that hype so that they can capitalize on it right now. But I think there is a lot of people who are working on advances which drastically reduce the compute needed and the energy per token needed to do the same token generation.

00:21:44 Anshu: In a matter of a couple of years, it’ll start to show up in the actual technology landscape. In a matter of five, six years, it’ll also start to be in the chip and the silicon. That’s happening on one end. So I believe the long term, I don’t have to worry about pricing too much.

00:21:58 Anshu: In the short term, I feel like I can actually use it to my advantage. There is potentially this demand supply gap which will be there. That demand supply gap will reveal itself when, let’s say, the head of data or technology of a large insurance company says, “I’m going to build this myself using Claude and price to do it.” They will see that it’s actually hyper expensive to do it.

00:22:19 Anshu: It’s not easy to scale it out at their scale of economies. While at my scale of economies, when I am serving hundreds and thousands of those customers, I can manage that better as well as because I am having a deep technology team which is doing the token compression. When I say token compression, it’s not literal.

00:22:35 Anshu: Because of the knowledge graph I’m building, because of the knowledge compression I’m building, I don’t have to go back to AI for everything. I have actually been able to deliver the same outcome by using much fewer tokens because I’m not depending on AI to do everything.

00:22:50 Anshu: I have been able to break down the problem into many small steps, optimize each step, and then reuse the step, cache the step, whatever, to have a much higher outcome to token ratio.

00:23:02 Anshu: Then what? Somebody who tries to build the same thing themselves might still get the outcome somewhere in the vicinity. It will not still be the same accuracy, but will be paying much bigger price. So I’m going to use that to my advantage.

00:23:13 Anshu: I think that is the reason why people should not even try to do that. They should lean on somebody who’s specialized to do that. As a technologist, I feel it’s a short-lived problem and people are hyping it up more than necessary. But from a GTM, I can actually use it to our advantage.

00:23:27 Scott: What you said just there is so fascinating because one of the existential conversations that’s always bubbling around Ventureland is with the frontier models, “can’t Claude do that? Can’t Claude do that?”

00:23:38 Scott: You know, that’s the trope that constantly bandied about is that there will be no vertical specific solutions because there’s this one super model which can do many things.

00:23:49 Scott: But to your point, if you’re tapping that one model in a very blunt way and utilizing it for every bit of knowledge that you need to extract from it, you’re very quickly going to get to a price point that’s untenable as a business.

00:24:01 Scott: You’re then going to look for cost-effective alternatives. Which to your point, as a vertical specific solution, you can really do a lot of knowledge compression before ever tapping into AI so the outcome per token price or the outcome per ping to AI is actually much more economical for the business.

00:24:20 Scott: In the short run, while people may do off-the-shelf Claude builds to try to figure something out, I think they’ll very quickly eclipse a cost threshold that is tenable for the business and then be shopping for vertical solutions like Outmarket in the space of insurance, for example.

00:24:36 Anshu: Absolutely. This is really just something that any vertical stack should take into account as they build and as they start planning for this. I’ve lived through this crisis in my own head and I’ve come out on the brighter side of this that… can Claude do this.

00:24:49 Anshu: I’m going to get a little bit of flak for saying this out loud right now, and I’m happy to take the criticism that what is Claude under the hood? It’s just a model which is providing enough data centers to execute. It’s a model which is running on the chips and providing the inference.

00:25:05 Anshu: If you look at the evolution, Claude’s 4.0 technology, which is where we were starting to get very accurate results, is already there in open source right now. So Claude’s 4.7 will be there in open source in six months from now or maybe ten months from now. If you really peel under the hood, they have a great execution engine, but there is nothing proprietary about it at some point.

00:25:24 Anshu: What is the hard things Claude will never be able to do? The amount of calls I’m taking from insurance agents on a daily basis to support them. I have a big customer success team who’s saying, “Hey, these people are coming and saying, hey, my proposal needs to look like this. My output needs to look like that.” That can be done only by somebody who understands the vertical deeply and is able to invest in that.

00:25:44 Anshu: So I feel like what Claude has today is replaceable. I can actually literally replace Claude with OpenAI, but what I have today is not replaceable. I’m living much more peacefully with that concept now, now that I’ve seen it in action. And I, in fact, think that we can actually remove these technologies and these as a commodity.

00:26:00 Scott: Interesting. It’s almost the opposite of the platform reliance trope that’s often thought of in the sense that as these models get eclipsed and open sourced, there’s almost like a platform openness rather than reliance.

00:26:12 Scott: It is actually the vertical specific application that you guys are building, the deep domain expertise, the ability to service the customer, the ability to understand that nuance and that pen testing between buyer and underwriter, that really gives you guys a durable advantage.

00:26:27 Scott: We’re close on time. So I want to shift to the lightning round of just a couple of fun questions for you, Anshu. I know you’re in the Bay Area, been in Silicon Valley for a long time. If you didn’t live in the Bay, where in the world would you choose to live?

00:26:41 Anshu: I think of two places. So I’m going to put both the places which are extreme contrast of each other. I love warm beaches because you cannot get a warm beach here in the Pacific. So Hawaii would be that place. I could live and work on the beaches of Hawaii for life, not just one year.

00:26:55 Anshu: And then the other place, which I’ve always been fascinated by, I wish I grew up there, is New York City. The other place is if I could be on the Upper West Side overlooking the Central Park and spend my life there – because the energy that city brings is just next to nothing. I would definitely want to go back in New York and live there for a year.

00:27:13 Scott: That’s great. You could be Jenny’s neighbor on the Upper West Side.

00:27:16 Anshu: Yes, I know.

00:27:19 Scott: With all this stuff that’s happening in AI, you alluded to reading all the frontier papers. Are there any books or podcasts or ways that you keep up with how fast the world is changing?

00:27:29 Anshu: I’m a big podcast guy. That’s something I live and breathe by with all my rounds of dropping my kids to different places. On the AI side, Dwarkesh’s podcast is the most fascinating one. Dwarkesh speaks to most of the industry leaders in this space. He’s been doing that for many years. So that’s been a big help for me keeping pace with the future.

00:27:48 Anshu: I’m an absolute fan, if I was to not keep the AI lens on it, of the Acquired podcast, Ben and David. They literally do a podcast which is a book on a company.

00:27:59 Anshu: As an entrepreneur, I’ve actually made some choices in my startup which have been very helpful based on the learnings from that podcast because they talk about companies and how they evolve and their thinking.

00:28:10 Scott: Oh, yeah. You need a good three-hour walk or a full doubleheader soccer game with your kids or something to get through a three-hour podcast.

00:28:19 Anshu: The whole podcast lasts for a week for me, but it’s so educating in some sense. It’s my favorite. I would recommend that to every entrepreneur listening to this podcast. Acquired should be in your must-have listens always.

00:28:31 Scott: I know you guys are building productivity hacks for insurance agents and brokers. How do you guys use it internally? What do you use? How do you time block your calendar? Are there any AI hacks that you use to be more efficient as a CTO?

00:28:44 Anshu: My two biggest hacks is… one, of course, connecting Claude to my calendar and all my systems. So now I actually ask Claude a lot of questions. So Claude can connect to your Gmail, Claude can connect to your calendar, Claude can connect to your CRM and all of that.

00:28:58 Anshu: I start asking questions to my Claude rather than going into these individual tools and even ask it, “Okay, what’s my day looking like in the morning,” and scripting some of those things.

00:29:07 Anshu: The other one, from a technologist perspective, we’ve deployed in the company something called Claude Conductor. Conductor actually conducts and orchestrates a lot of parallel activities.

00:29:17 Anshu: So even as a person who’s spending all my time in client meetings and strategy and discussions, I’m able to, in parallel, have many development tasks. That is made so easy because now you’re moving out of the IDE. You’re not doing any more IDE.

00:29:30 Anshu: It’s all happening directly on the Claude Conductor console and it just manages so many threads. I’m sitting in a meeting, I think of an idea, I start that thread. It starts actually implementing it and I can come back to it tomorrow and see what’s happened.

00:29:40 Scott: Even just what you said there is a fundamental shift from the role of CTO 5, 10, 15, 20 years ago in the sense that it was sitting in the IDE, it was writing code, it was managing engineers.

00:29:52 Scott: And the fact that you’re able to spend half your day in client meetings, in strategy discussions, that is a fundamental shift already in productivity, the ability to be doing both at the same time.

00:30:03 Scott: Finally, where can listeners find you online?

00:30:05 Anshu: I’m most active on my social networks on LinkedIn. It’s my first name, last name together, Anshu Jain and always be able to answer questions or just connect.

00:30:14 Scott: Amazing. Thanks so much. Congratulations on the $17 million Series A you guys just closed and announced. I know that the business is better than ever and you guys are just in an incredibly exciting pole position on a huge market at the right place at the right time.

00:30:29 Scott: So hats off to you and Vishal for having the foresight and the conviction to be building in this space two or three years ago. We’re super excited to be a small player in the company.

00:30:40 Anshu: Thank you for this podcast, some amazing questions you asked. I mean, I’m going to go back and listen to it myself because we had some really engaging conversations. And thank you for being one of the earliest backers when me and Vishal were just two guys with not even a deck actually and just a mission. You took a bet on us and hopefully it’ll pan out in the right direction in the future as well.

00:30:59 Scott: Absolutely. I love it. All right. Thanks, Anshu.

00:31:01 Anshu: Thank you, Scott. Take care.

Read more from Anshu Jain in Founders Everywhere.

I’ll admit, I’m someone who’s been exposed to NASA since the 1980s, and have a little sister named after astronaut Anna Fisher. I grew up with framed Apollo 11 sketches signed by Neil Armstrong in the hallway, and baby dedications from Bruce McCandless on his 1984 Shuttle Mission STS-41-B framed next to soccer trophies. My childhood home was one as infused with space as it was an obsession with Steve Jobs and Apple, someone who later became my college graduation speaker.

I’ve been an investor in space technologies since 2014, and through that time have had the chance to work with companies like Spire, Relativity, Umbra, Ascend Arc, Mirala, Starcloud, Azora, and many others, across LEO and GEO, Earth Observation (EO), Launch, Signals Intelligence (SigInt), Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Satellite Communications (SatCom), alternative precision navigation and timing (PNT) systems for alt-GPS, and optical ground stations. I delivered a keynote address to 3,000 people at the 2018 GEOINT Conference, and in 2020 I wrote about how Elon Musk was building the “Railroad to Space,” not too dissimilar from how Leland Stanford connected the American West with the trans-continental railroad in 1869. The knock-on effects, and new economic power off of those rails, transformed our economy.

The newfound velocity around hardware today is being driven by a few factors, but particularly artificial intelligence as the base-layer accelerant. AI is powering hyper productivity in software, and we’re all aware of Anthropic’s Claude, and the vertical specific applications and many agentic incarnations. But this same productivity accelerant is additive to hardware development as well. Companies like VXB Aerospace are helping accelerate the ideation to production speeds for all types of complex component manufacturing around aerospace and defense.

The defensibility of software as a service (SaaS) is under perennial threat, with founders and investors alike asking the existential question, “Won’t Claude do that?” And so many are impelled by the dual tailwinds in hardware around increased prototyping and production efficiencies through AI modeling, as well as the perceived moat around building a physical product that can’t be immediately obviated.

The 2026 hardware resurgence is being driven by a:

• Proliferation of talent spin-outs from Tesla, SpaceX and others

• Perceived defensibility of a product vs merely a software service

• AI-enablement layer driving cost-efficient prototyping and development

• Renewed defense and government procurement system focused on commercial partnerships, fast-tracking contracts, and re-domesticating manufacturing. This is challenging the notion that “hardware is expensive” (meaning dilutive)

• Compounding of hardware components becoming more modular, akin to what happened with software stacking, SDKs, and the explosion of APIs

To Peter Thiel’s delight, innovation is finally moving to atoms, not just bits. In 2013 he and Marc Andreessen faced off at Milken about this exact topic. The nuance however, is it’s probably those bits that are driving the change in atoms. Both right.

Each week I see a former SaaS fund post their latest deal in robotics, space, or physical infrastructure. We need not be surprised. If anything, those who are doing this have recognized that the venture frontier has shifted. Years ago I wrote about how lived experience helps us build patterns and heuristics which inform frameworks. Our frameworks are backward-informed and time-delayed. Frameworks necessarily lag the reality we already live in. So rather than root in yesterday’s outdated thesis, or point fingers at some manager we deign to think has gone “off thesis,” we might accept that AI is driving change in not only software, but hardware as well, and markets like space, robotics, and physical infrastructure are no longer “deep tech.”

These are categories impelled by AI, fueled by talent spin-outs, and compounded by the very popularity of hardware itself. As more founders begin building hardware, component stacking becomes even easier, more modular, more assembly-block. Just like SDKs and APIs made app development an assembly project in 2008, with the Apple iPhone as distribution, today commoditized platforms like K2 make the raw satellite ingredients accessible, and SpaceX offers distribution just like Apple.

AI is driving the most significant technology wave since the Internet, and we’d be remiss to overlook hardware founders as major beneficiaries of AI. While Claude may erode software moats in SaaS, it might also bloom 1,000 flowers in hardware.

—

Scott Hartley is Co-Founder and General Partner at Everywhere Ventures, a $100 million-dollar early stage venture capital fund that has backed over 250 companies.

Every day, marketplaces need to move money to thousands of people at once: hosts, creators, sellers, contractors, and distributed workers across different markets. The workflow sounds simple, but behind it is a complex web of banking integrations, compliance requirements, reconciliation, and local payment infrastructure.

Radar is focused on making that infrastructure work.

The company automates financial operations for platforms that need to pay large groups of people simultaneously. Its specialty is payment dispersion, helping companies like Airbnb, TikTok, and Booking move money across Latin America more efficiently and reliably.

In a region where many fintechs are competing for the largest markets, Radar has gone after countries that are often underserved by global payment infrastructure, including Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay. These markets may be smaller individually, but together they represent a meaningful opportunity, especially for global platforms looking to operate across Latin America without rebuilding payment rails country by country.

That focus has shaped the company’s operating discipline as well. Founded in 2022, Radar has raised just $1.5 million, became profitable within three years, closed 2024 with $2.9 million in revenue, and is projecting $12 million by 2026.

Early on, when banks would not give Radar direct access to their systems, Herbert Schulz and the team built their own workaround using a physical bank token, a webcam, and AI to read authentication codes in real time. It was scrappy, imperfect, and exactly what the moment required.

Today, that shoebox is no longer needed. Radar now connects directly into banking systems and processes more than one million transfers per month.

From our lens, this is where durable infrastructure companies are often formed: in the messy operational gaps that incumbents are too slow to solve and larger players are too broad to localize.

As marketplaces, creator platforms, and cross-border commerce continue expanding across Latin America, payment infrastructure will need to become more embedded, more flexible, and more regional by design.

Radar is building in that direction, toward a world where global platforms can move money across overlooked markets with the same speed and reliability they expect in the largest ones.

Read the full article on Diario Sustentable

Real-world evidence is becoming a critical layer of modern drug development, but much of the clinical data needed to generate it remains fragmented across specialty care settings.

Century Health is working to change that by building a platform that accelerates drug development and commercialization by applying AI to real-world data.

The team announced their oversubscribed $5 million raise to expand its platform and accelerate adoption across the healthcare ecosystem. Co-founder and CEO Vish Srivastava and co-founder and CTO Sanjay Hariharan are focused on building infrastructure that allows life sciences teams to better organize, analyze, and generate insights from complex clinical data.

The need for this infrastructure is growing rapidly. Providers are sitting on valuable clinical insights, while life sciences teams need better access to actionable data for clinical insights, market access, and outcomes analysis.

Century’s proprietary AI abstraction engine, CHARM, extracts clinical variables from unstructured clinical data with validated accuracy and traceability to the source. This helps turn fragmented records into datasets that can support research and decision-making.

The broader shift happening across healthcare is clear. Clinical data is moving from siloed and difficult to access toward connected, disease-specific, and AI-ready infrastructure.

The funding will support continued product development, expansion of the company’s network, and broader deployment of its platform as Century continues building tools for providers, researchers, and life sciences organizations.

For Vish, Sanjay, and the team, the opportunity is to create a stronger foundation for real-world evidence generation and help accelerate medical breakthroughs.

Read the full article on MobiHealthNews

Nori is a personalized AI health advisor that captures the full picture of your health. It combines data from wearables like Apple Watch, Garmin, and Oura Ring with medical records from more than 70,000 healthcare providers across the United States. It takes into account your sleep, workouts, labs, and even how you say you’re feeling. Instead of offering generic recommendations, Nori learns over time, remembers what works, adapts to your habits, and proactively reaches out through iMessage, WhatsApp, or SMS to help keep you on track. The result feels like an always-on personal health coach, using AI to deliver personalized guidance at the right moments and help people build healthier habits, make better decisions, and ultimately live longer, better lives.

Co-founders Dave Zohrob and Harish Agarwal have been building together for over a decade. They met while working at AngelList, then left to start Chartabale, which was acquired by Spotify. After taking a step back and reflecting on what mattered most, health emerged as a top priority for both of them. They also shared a frustration that much of the standard advice (calorie counting, Mediterranean diet, “move more”) felt like advice written for someone else, and it always wore off, which led them to want to build something that would not only help them become healthier, but also help others trying to make lasting, meaningful change.

What’s Nori’s North Star?

Our North Star is to add a billion healthy years of living to humanity. We’re nowhere near that yet, but it’s deeply motivating when you talk to users and see how having always-on support changes their relationship with their health.

Tell us about a recent milestone that Nori crushed.

We’re a small team, but shipping fast and we stay very responsive to our users. We just launched Nori 2.0, which is a pretty major rewrite to make Nori more personalized, with better memory and more proactive behavior. It’s based on hundreds of user conversations about what they actually care about. Since launching the new version, active usage has grown to the thousands, and daily active users are up about 65% month‑over‑month. More importantly, users now tell us this is something they use every day and would be genuinely sad to lose.

How does Nori inspire ‘customer love’?

Health is messy and complicated for everyone. There is the generic advice like “sleep more, drink water, workout.” Then there is the reality of daily life, where sleep, stress, exercise, family history, routines, and setbacks all interact in unpredictable ways. What people love about Nori is that it does not reduce them to a generic patient or treat every conversation like a fresh start. Instead, it builds a continuous understanding over time, remembering what matters to you, what has worked or not, and how your context is changing. Users connect with the feeling that Nori is holding their entire messy picture in mind and turning it into something clearer and more actionable, meeting them where they are rather than where an idealized version of them is supposed to be.

What is your motivation to build Nori?

On the personal side, I’ve seen people in my life with both serious health issues I want to avoid and very healthy lives I’d like to emulate, and that contrast has been a big motivator. After we sold Chartable to Spotify and I finally took a breath, I went to the doctor for a check‑up and the results were worse than I expected. That was a real wake‑up call, especially as a parent who wants to be around for his kids, and I decided I couldn’t keep ignoring this part of my life. On the professional side, I have this somewhat naive but persistent belief that we’re under‑using the incredible data from devices like Apple Watch and Oura Ring, and that if we connect that data to increasingly capable AI, we can build a positive feedback loop that actually helps us, instead of just building the next doom‑scrolling machine.

Favorite books or podcasts?

Recently I really enjoyed The Infinity Machine by Sebastian Mallaby. I happened to be reading it on the train to the Everywhere Ventures AGM where the author was speaking, which was a nice surprise. Outside of tech, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels are deeply lodged in my brain. I’ve reread them a couple of times, and they’ve influenced how I think about people and relationships more than most business books. My two must‑listen podcasts are Conversations with Tyler and the Dwarkesh podcast.

Fun fact:

I used to play in multiple bands. I was the singer in a dance‑punk band that played at raves in San Francisco. While that chapter has closed, it’s still a big part of my personal story and a very fun era of my life.

Listen to Mickael Roger with Jenny Fielding, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Zero to PropHero. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

In episode 118 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Everywhere Ventures, talks with Mickael Roger, co-founder and co-CEO of PropHero, a data-driven real estate investment platform that helps everyday investors identify, buy, and manage high-return properties globally. Mickael shares how a painful personal experience losing money on an investment inspired him to build a company that takes the guesswork out of real estate. He discusses how PropHero uses machine learning across 25 years of data and hundreds of variables to consistently deliver 16% average annual returns across 4,000+ properties, outperforming every major index, by pairing machine learning with the local insight that no dataset can fully replace.

In this episode, you will hear:

• Predicting property performance with 25 years of machine learning data.

• Managing the full investment lifecycle through a single digital platform.

• Deploying AI for 24/7 support while keeping humans in high-stakes decisions.

• Launching PropHero Academy to deepen client investment knowledge.

• Building a lifetime wealth partnership over a transactional real estate model.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.

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Transcript:

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere Podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.

00:00:33 Jenny: All right, everyone, welcome to Venture Everywhere, where today, I’m very excited to have our special guest, Mickael Roger, who is the co-founder and co-CEO of PropHero. I’m particularly interested in talking to him, because he’s built a data-driven real estate investment platform that helps users identify, buy, manage high-return property investments globally.

00:00:54 Jenny: As someone who has a bunch of properties, never really knows how to manage it, and is interested in the category, but really doesn’t have the skills, I was super excited to be able to talk to you and support you guys. Welcome, Mickael, to the program.

00:01:08 Mickael: Hey. Thank you for having me.

00:01:09 Jenny: Awesome. I’d love to start off a little bit at the beginning, because you have such an interesting background. Half Australian, half French, grown up across cultures. But you also started a little bit less traditional than some of our founders in that you worked at big companies, finance, places like McKinsey. Just talk a little bit about your background before we get into PropHero.

00:01:28 Mickael: When I was 16, I had a big master plan. I’ve always wanted to launch my own business and make it successful. I felt that I need to know how the world works before, and especially in terms of finances, strategy, management, etc.

00:01:44 Mickael: And so the ideal path was to study maths, because maths runs the world. Even before AI, that was already the case 20 years ago. Learn about maths, then go to banking, then go to management consulting. That was my plan and feel ready before launching my own business.

00:02:00 Mickael: What happened is that about 10 years ago, I started to fall in love with AI and being absolutely convinced, so way before OpenAI, that AI was going to change humanity. I launched the McKinsey AI practice with other colleagues. Things went really well doing that, and then I thought, “Wow, the world is changing. I have to be part of it.”

00:02:20 Mickael: And so that was five years ago. Found the business idea that I believed in, and we launched PropHero. We are celebrating our fifth birthday next month.

00:02:27 Jenny: That’s awesome. You talk about PropHero. What was that like going from more big company? I know maybe you felt entrepreneurial, and I had a similar experience. I felt very entrepreneurial. My parents worked for themselves.

00:02:38 Jenny: There was a lot of that type of ethos in our family, but I went to law school. I worked at J.P. Morgan. I’d worked at big companies before I launched my first startup. So what was it like taking that leap?

00:02:48 Mickael: Learning that in real life nothing is ever perfect. When you work in investment banking at McKinsey, people get crazy for a comma missing somewhere. In startups, you can’t get mad about this part, otherwise you just become completely insane.

00:03:03 Mickael: I must say that. When I resigned from my corporate job, I remember dropping my son at daycare at like 7:34 a.m. back at my place, sitting alone on my couch thinking, “Wow, where do I start?”

00:03:17 Mickael: This feeling of like, “Wow, no one cares about me.” I have to learn how to create a company, create an email, create a website, find my first clients, build our tech, find money. Well, this is a huge mountain to climb. And the thing is just to go step by step. Because if you only look at the top of the mountain, you will panic. Just go step by step.

00:03:39 Jenny: I’d love to jump in and just hear really where the idea came from and what was the problem you were trying to solve? Again, I I mentioned that I’ve always been fascinated with real estate. I grew up in New York City, seeing booms and busts and have participated in a very inefficient way because I have a day job. So I’d love to hear where this idea came from.

00:03:58 Mickael: From my own painful experience. 12-15 years ago, I was at McKinsey at the time. So making good money, but not that much time. I wanted to invest my money across multiple asset classes, including real estate. Because I had no time, I hired a buyer’s agent. Paid her about $50,000.

00:04:16 Mickael: I remember telling her, I’m into AI. I built this model. I’m predicting that right now in Australia, I should invest on the gold coast. I think prices are going to more than double in the next three years.

00:04:28 Mickael: “Ah, Mickael, you know nothing about real estate. I’ve been in Sydney for 20 years. Buy there. Okay?” So I spent one and a half million seven years ago. As of last week, as of CBA, my investment is worth 1.4 million. So actually, I lost money in seven years.

00:04:44 Mickael: Terrible investments, but amazing business idea. What if real estate investment was done by serious people who know about data and who make the experience ultra simple and digital and use data and local knowledge to outperform the markets? That was our vision from day one.

00:05:04 Mickael: Not thinking in real estate in transaction, okay, I just want to sell you something. But no, I’m going to help you for the rest of your life to build wealth through real estate. We’re going to use data and an amazing digital platform to make it super simple and super profitable. That’s how it started from a very bad investment, which in the end was maybe the best one.

00:05:24 Jenny: That’s an amazing story. A similar story. My investment turned out well, but it was buying when people just thought it was crazy. I bought an apartment in San Francisco in about 2010, and San Francisco was in this real estate slump.

00:05:38 Jenny: Everyone was like, “That city is dying.” I just was like, “I have a view of the Golden Gate Bridge. How can this city be dying?” But you get a lot of bad advice is my point. So can you talk a little bit how PropHero is using data as opposed to vibes?

00:05:53 Mickael: We don’t rely on gut feeling. We are relying on mathematics. If you think about it, what drives real estate? Growing demands, lack of supply, gentrifying population, growing economy, lack of land, et cetera, just like business sense.

00:06:09 Mickael: What we do, we convert these business principles into data. So evolution of land available, new build, time to market, liquidity. We’ve got hundreds and hundreds of variables over 25 years of data.

00:06:24 Mickael: We run a machine learning model on this to see – which I’m simplifying but which indicators are predictive of future price and rent growth. This is surprisingly not used by so many people.

00:06:37 Mickael: I was talking to one of the biggest trillion dollar company recently in London, and somehow they still use old school macroeconomic analysis. We use machine learning to predict where to invest and what to invest in.

00:06:50 Mickael: What’s great is we also measure our accuracy. So we know how good we are, and we know also how good we are over time during bullish and bearish times as well. Our performance is ultra consistent. So we’ve bought over 4,000 properties at PropHero over the past five years.

00:07:06 Mickael: Our average annual total return is 16% per year, 1-6, which is outperforming any index that you can look at. Great results and not because of luck, honestly. It’s just mathematics.

00:07:18 Mickael: Mathematics, and if I may just add, we have local people on the ground who find the best deals and data does not see everything. We are very well conscious of what the data doesn’t see. So we have people on the ground who know and see what the data models don’t see.

00:07:34 Jenny: Amazing. What’s been something that has surprised you most about building a startup in the property space? You hear a lot about real estate people being cutthroat. You hear about all the problems with management. What’s been something that’s actually surprised you?

00:07:49 Mickael: It will sound maybe a little bit arrogant, but how much people love us. I wanted to create a cool company that was useful for people, but in my previous life, clients didn’t really love us. It wasn’t really the point.

00:08:01 Mickael: Some of our clients are just like fanatics. My analysis on this is that most people are not passionate about real estate, but it brought them a financial independence and a peace of mind for which they feel proud of themselves for having made the decision and taken the risk.

00:08:17 Mickael: And also they feel, for many of them, grateful. I wasn’t expecting so much of that. I’ve got very often clients reaching out to me on LinkedIn, on Instagram, some even have my WhatsApp and say, “Hey, Michael, we don’t know each other. But FYI, I’m one of your clients. And thank you. We’ve done so well.”

00:08:32 Mickael: It’s one of the perks of this job. Apart from that, it’s a very fascinating industry. It’s much more complex than it seems, and it’s got a depth that I was not suspecting.

00:08:43 Mickael: While now as a business owner, I see it as a defensibility barrier. Because what we’ve built in all these country, all these revenue verticals, all these types of assets start to replicate. It’s actually a pretty deep industry.

00:08:56 Jenny: Interesting.

00:10:09 Jenny: I was looking at your website before this call. You had a lot of properties in Spain. I’ve always dreamed of owning an apartment in Barcelona, but I saaw the interesting properties and probably the best value was kind of in the South, Alicante and some of these other places. So I was like, “Gosh, that’s so interesting.” So what makes a good customer and a good high return property? How do you define that?

00:08:57 Mickael: When you join PropHero, first of all, you talk to an investment advisor and this person will understand your profile and firstly, is PropHero the right company for you? If you’re looking for a purely emotional asset, don’t go with PropHero.

00:09:13 Jenny: Right, right. That’s the Jenny apartment in Barcelona. Don’t do that.

00:09:18 Mickael: We’re super honest. Yes, we could make money, but actually we don’t want to. Our investments are purely based on where we believe you are going to build wealth, not emotions at all.

00:09:27 Mickael: Then depending on your profile, we’ll build your investment strategy. And then once you sign up, we will start sending you properties to buy, either full properties or club deals. So buying a share in a building.

00:09:38 Mickael: Then on the app, you can buy this property or this club deal ticket completely digitally. And then you can, from your phone or computer, track your wealth growth over time. So all your properties are all connected in one place.

00:09:49 Mickael: And for us, a great investment is actually super simple. It’s the sum of capital growth and net rental return. The denominator is how much the investment, the property costs you: cost to buy, to renovate, to furnish in some markets, all the fees like stamp duty, etc.

00:10:06 Mickael: And then all the money you make is capital gains plus net rental return. So rent minus all the rental expenses. Super simple. Depending on your strategy, you may want to favor more capital growth or rental yield. And we’ve got different asset classes depending on how much of each you want. But, in short, we optimize for capital growth plus net rental return.

00:10:26 Jenny: And you guys manage everything. Is that correct?

00:10:28 Mickael: Everything. What you have to do is to decide which assets you want to buy, sign a few documents and make a few bank transfers. 99.9% of our clients have never seen the property with their own eyes.

00:10:40 Mickael: Me, myself, I invest almost all of my savings into PropHero properties. I know in which cities they are. I couldn’t tell you the neighborhood or how many rooms. I’m just seeing the returns. That’s it. Pure investments.

00:10:50 Jenny: That’s really cool because I think many of us have bought some properties. It’s just a hassle to manage. And then if you buy like a REIT, you’re so disconnected from the product that it’s just a financial product.

00:11:02 Jenny: And so I love this. That was why we got interested in being involved, in investing is I love this middle where you actually get to pick. You get to understand. You get to learn about how you guys are underwriting this. But you take care of everything, which is really cool.

00:11:15 Mickael: Speaking of this, what we launched a few months ago is the PropHero Academy, courses for those of our fans who want to learn more and become much more knowledgeable about the industry.

00:11:26 Mickael: We got a few thousand people who signed up almost overnight. We’re surprised to see how interested people were. You got some people who get really, really into this.

00:11:34 Jenny: That’s amazing. Can you talk about macro trends? Interest rates in the U.S. have gone up a lot, and that’s causing some interesting bumps here. Things like inflation, AI. What are some of the macro trends that are either headwinds or tailwinds for you guys?

00:11:49 Mickael: The big thing is that at any point in time, there are always good assets to buy and bad assets that you shouldn’t buy. At any point in time. The data is ultra clear. There has never been a time where you should not buy anywhere.

00:12:03 Mickael: Maybe 2008, I didn’t check this in detail, but I’m actually pretty sure that, yes. It’s even better when the market goes down is when you make the best deals. I’m not stressed about macroeconomics ever.

00:12:13 Mickael: Personally, I prefer buying when the market is going down. Some people prefer the opposite. When you get data on a 7 to 10 year holding period, it doesn’t change much.

00:12:23 Mickael: People tend to overpanic on the real estate changes. But what happens if you buy in the right areas, rents keep going up almost always. And when they go down, it’s only a few percentage points. And by the time your lease will not be over anyway, so it doesn’t affect you anyway.

00:12:41 Mickael: Our yields are constant or increasing. And property prices in the areas where we invest, the biggest fall we’ve seen are maybe 10 percent within one year, but then with a sharp catch up. And over a 7 to 10 year holding period, doesn’t change much.

00:12:57 Mickael: And so just like the stock market, don’t try to time the market. It’s just not working. If you can try to not put all your eggs into one basket. Try to buy one asset every two to three years. And if you do this, one will be bought at a small peak, one at a low, etc. But over time, you will flatten the timing risk and will just benefit from the long term trend.

00:13:18 Mickael: And as a fact, I was saying where I sold, so we’ve bought thousands of properties for our clients. So 100% have outperformed the S&P and all other indexes. And all of them have outperformed the real estate market.

00:13:30 Mickael: Yes, interest rates can be a pain, especially in markets where interest rates are viable. So you should really be careful on your cash flows. But apart from that, as long as you can manage your cash flows, don’t worry too much about it. Based on thousands of properties bought.

00:13:43 Mickael: One mistake I see, which I think is such a shame, is people who buy at their limit borrowing capacity. And then when interest rates go up, massive trouble.

00:13:52 Mickael: My sincere advice is that brokers will often tell you, “Hey, you should borrow one million, two million streaming.” No, don’t borrow at your maximum capacity, borrow much, much less and try to invest in multiple assets in different locations to hedge your timing and location risk.

00:14:08 Jenny: Great advice. I think I read that you studied engineering. That’s your background. You just said that you were obsessed with AI before the LLM models made an appearance.

00:14:17 Jenny: Can you talk about a little bit of that journey going from V1, which was more about machine intelligence, machine learning to how you’re able to really utilize AI now and how that’s reshaping real estate in general?

00:14:30 Mickael: When we launched PropHero, AI was mainly machine learning so predicting what to buy. That’s how we started PropHero and how our clients got great investments.

00:14:40 Mickael: Now, AI, of course, with LLMs is a whole different game. What we launched about one year ago is brand new. We call it the ecosystem ERP software. It’s like a big software that runs all real estate for the entire industry for PropHero, for real estate agents, mortgage brokers, notaries, renovators, property managers, etc.

00:15:02 Mickael: So we’re building this big software to run the industry. And this, of course, we’ve got some massive help from vibe coding. What we are building now in one month before would have taken us one year. And I think we can still go even much faster.

00:15:16 Mickael: That’s one big area. So building the platform, a much more robust and comprehensive platform with LLMs. The big dream we have, which was only a dream five years ago and which is now becoming a reality, is using generative AI to have your own real estate wealth advisor.

00:15:33 Mickael: And so we are connecting LLMs to our data sets, connecting tens of thousands of properties and hundreds of hours of our call recordings, so of our advisors talking to clients. Retrain the model with all this data. And now we’re starting to advise clients with an AI model.

00:15:52 Mickael: What we’re seeing is that for simple queries, this is really amazing. Because clients can get answers 24/7 straight away. What we see, however, is that when the time comes to make the big decision, writing a big check to buy a property, our clients still want to talk to their human wealth advisor.

00:16:09 Mickael: And this, I’m actually not seeing it change because it’s such a massive amount of money. People feel safer talking to a real human being. And so that’s why we keep our wealth advisor team, who are complemented by our AI wealth advisors.

00:16:23 Jenny: That was actually one of my questions I wanted to ask you is like, what parts of the investment decision do you think will never be fully automated? So I guess you answered that.

00:16:32 Mickael: Making the big check, making the big bank transfer. This is always the big moment where we think, “Hey, am I really trusting this company? Is it really a great deal?” This is where things get serious.

00:16:43 Jenny: All right. Well, humans still have a fighting chance. This is kind of more of a macro question, not just about PropHero, but do you think that traditional real estate agents or brokers are going to be disrupted in general by AI or empowered or both?

00:16:56 Mickael: Real estate agents will remain for owner occupiers, so for emotional purchases. I don’t really see a world where they are necessary, for investors, to be honest. Mortgage brokers, apologies to my friends who are brokers, but I know they agree with me.

00:17:11 Mickael: I actually just bought a house… I don’t see why the broker was necessary. It’s the bank’s job to improve their processes and automate their processes to provide instant mortgages or mortgage approvals.

00:17:25 Mickael: I’m certain this will come. I was expecting them to be faster to deploy this, to be honest. But I think with AI development and AI checks now, I think this will accelerate. I’m not watching mortgage brokerage business.

00:17:38 Jenny: Good to know. What’s one idea that experts in your field say that you just totally disagree with?

00:17:44 Mickael: People, especially venture capital funds, always tell me, “Oh, it’s a transactional business.” Absolutely not. It’s a wealth business focusing on customer lifetime value. We are our clients’ lifetime wealth partner.

00:17:58 Mickael: I don’t care if they buy today or tomorrow. What I want is to help them throughout their lives, helping them buy, sell, renovate, manage, finance, whatever they need to build real estate wealth. And so it’s a lifetime wealth business, not a transactional business.

00:18:14 Mickael: And I think that is one of the reasons why real estate agents have sometimes some bad press, because they push you so much to buy, not procure. We are not here for the short term and just to have you make one transaction. We are here to help you for the rest of your life. Especially for investments, it’s a lifetime value optimization game, not a transaction game.

00:18:33 Jenny: For sure. So tell us a little bit just more about your team. Are you still spread across continents or mostly concentrated in Spain now?

00:18:40 Mickael: We used to think that we would hire people anywhere, just hire the best talents. That was our people and culture policy for about three years.

00:18:51 Mickael: What we realized that for the most senior roles, being able to be in the same room at least twice a month changes everything. So now the most senior roles are all in Spain. Not necessarily in the same city or Spain but at least 45 minutes flight or one hour flight from each other to be able to see each other once or twice a month at least.

00:19:12 Mickael: All the other roles can be anywhere. And what we try is for the top talents to have them see each other once or twice a year. So we went back from we don’t care where you are to well, actually, for some role, we do care. Our biggest offices now are in Spain. We still have people all around the world.

00:19:28 Jenny: Got it. So what’s next for PropHero? What should we expect next? What are some of the things that are on the horizon?

00:19:34 Mickael: So we’ve got big dreams. To be honest, when I launched PropHero, for me, success was just having a good business, maybe 10 employees, just making some revenue, being profitable, being sustainable. That was success.

00:19:49 Mickael: Well, now we are 250 people, profitable, four countries. My first dream is already achieved. So now the next one is how do we build a global sustainable institution?

00:20:00 Mickael: And so we’ve got many, many big dreams. One of them is to build this software that will run the entire real estate industry. It’s a big ERP or CRM for all the industry. It’s crazy, but I know we’re going to get there.

00:20:13 Mickael: I really, really want to launch a real estate investment fund, a listed investment fund, because I think we have the best supply. And for so many people, it would be so much easier. I know if you’re institutional, also, if you cannot have at least 50 or 100K to invest, this would be so helpful for so many people.

00:20:30 Mickael: Many dreams. Keep enjoying the ride, opening new countries and having a lasting impact on our client’s lives and our employees.

00:20:37 Jenny: I love it. Okay, speed round. So just quick answers here. Is there a book, newsletter, podcast or some type of media that you’re enjoying right now?

00:20:44 Mickael: You have to listen to A Short History on Spotify. For the past 100 years, history has accelerated like never before in human history. Understanding the past helps you so much understand what’s happening today. So A Short History Of. I listen to dozens of history podcasts. It’s by far the best one.

00:21:03 Jenny: I love it. If you could live anywhere in the world for just one year, where would it be?

00:21:08 Mickael: So I’ve lived in 12 countries, five continents already. When I could, I will do a one year road trip across Africa. So I’ve lived in Morocco and Tunisia in the past. I miss Africa. I love this continent so much and it’s so big. I want to discover the rest.

00:21:22 Jenny: I love it. Favorite productivity hack. What keeps you super efficient?

00:21:26 Mickael: If you’re anyone doing some form of corporate job, if you don’t have Claude Cowork open 24/7 on your laptop doing 80% of your work, something is wrong. Claude yesterday did the work that I would have done myself in one month and did it in one afternoon.

00:21:44 Mickael: So honestly, whatever you do, as long as there is a computer needed, have Claude Cowork open 24/7 and force yourself to use it and not do things. I know it’s not crazy. Most people are now doing it. But if you’re not doing it already, you have to.

00:22:00 Jenny: Love it. Okay, Claude Code. Where can listeners find you? Where is the best way to get in touch with PropHero?

00:22:05 Mickael: Airport lounges is where you will most likely find me. Otherwise, go to www.prophero.com, book a call with one of our wealth advisors and they will walk you through our investments and what we can do for you.

00:22:18 Jenny: Amazing. This was so fun, Mickael. Might be your next customer, so we can talk about that. But excited to see you in Spain this summer. So thanks so much.

00:22:25 Mickael: Thank you. See you. Have a great week. Bye bye.

00:22:29 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

Read more from Mickael Roger in Founders Everywhere.

The creator economy has long been dominated by influencers with massive followings, but Noise is drowning out the old playbook. Their double-sided marketplace connects brands with everyday people, turning anyone with a smartphone into a social media creator. By tapping into the interest-based algorithms powering TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts, Noise makes it possible for college students, stay-at-home parents, and side-hustlers to generate real income through organic content. No previous experience or high follower counts required. Brands, in turn, get a cost-effective, highly diversified alternative to traditional advertising, sometimes at up to 90% lower cost than conventional channels.

Co-founders Diego Kafie, CEO, Nic Weber, CPO, and Stu Feldt, CTO, have been building together for over a decade. They met at Answers, a St. Louis startup that shaped their careers and gave them the playbook they’d eventually use to launch companies of their own. The idea for Noise emerged organically from their previous consumer app company, where they discovered the effectiveness of nano-creator marketing while scaling that app. After that business was acquired by a competitor, the team saw an opportunity to productize the strategy that had driven their growth within a new company. Diego shares more about how what started as an internal growth tactic quickly revealed itself to be a scalable business opportunity: helping brands unlock authentic, high-performing creator content at scale while giving everyday people a new way to earn income online.

What’s Noise’s North Star?

We actually have two, because we serve two very different sides of the marketplace. For brands, we aim to become a permanent, must-have line item in every brand’s marketing budget by being the most reliable and ROI-positive channel for growth. For creators, we want to build the world’s largest gig-economy platform by making flexible income through content creation more accessible than traditional gig work, allowing anyone with a smartphone to participate.

Why is Noise going to win?

People are tired of the overly polished Hollywood-type on social media. They want to see real people. The structural shift in social media is working in our favor as modern algorithms don’t care about followers anymore, they’re interest-based. That means anyone with a smartphone can reach an unfathomable amount of people. We’re also riding a craving for authenticity that AI has accelerated.

For brands, the model is simple and flexible: they pay per view, there are no upfront charges, contracts, or lockups, and brands can set their own prices. If something doesn’t perform, they can even strike it and get a refund. There’s absolutely no reason not to try it. If you’re interested in talking about viral growth, sign up for free or book a call!

The internet is vast. The only way you win is by making a lot of NOISE!

How does Noise inspire “customer love”?

What inspires customer love at Noise are the stories from creators whose lives have genuinely changed through the platform. We’ve seen creators pay off student debt, stay-at-home parents build meaningful income, and families afford experiences they never thought possible. Creators are paying medical bills, getting their first apartments, funding Disney trips for the whole family, and all kinds of other fun things. Those stories remind us that we’re building more than a marketing platform. We’re creating new economic opportunities for people everywhere. On the brand side, customer love comes from consistent results, with brands seeing measurable growth in installs, sales, engagement, and ROI.

How has your background shaped you as a founder?

I’m from Honduras and I moved to St. Louis at 18 to go to college. That shaped the way I approach everything as a founder. Navigating the immigrant experience, fighting for a work visa, and fighting to stay in the country gave me a deep appreciation for the opportunity I’ve been granted to live in this country, and a strong sense of urgency to make the most of it. Early in my career, I was fortunate to join a company that invested heavily in a young kid with no real experience and gave me every tool to grow. My co-founders and I all came up through that same environment, and it shaped how we think about building teams and creating opportunities for others.

Any favorite podcasts or books?

I consume as much as I can, but I have a rule for myself to make sure I’m relaxing every now and then: all the visual content I watch (TV, movies) is purely for entertainment. All the audio I listen to is purely educational. So when I’m driving, working out, or heads-down at the office, I’m listening to podcasts and audiobooks and just constantly learning from people sharing their experiences. Some of my favorites are Acquired, Pivot, Invest Like the Best, and How I Built This. For books, I really loved Bob Iger’s Ride of a Lifetime, a full tell-all before he came back to Disney, so he probably has a few more chapters to write now.

Fun fact:
I’ve always loved soccer. I’m in my 30s now but still play 3 times per week. A big part of what I enjoy about it is the leadership and teamwork aspect, which naturally carries over into entrepreneurship.

Listen to Su Sanni with Kameale C. Terry, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Worth Every Dollaride. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out to all our past episodes here!

The host of episode 117 of Venture Everywhere is Kameale C. Terry, co-founder and CEO of ChargerHelp, an EV charging maintenance and workforce development company keeping charging stations operational across the country. She talks with Su Sanni, co-founder and CEO of Dollaride, a clean transportation company electrifying small urban fleets in New York City. Su shares how growing up in East New York with limited transit access shaped his conviction that underserved communities deserve better transportation options. He discusses how Dollaride evolved from a digital app for dollar van riders into a B2B electrification platform, positioning small fleet owners as key players in New York’s clean transportation transition.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

In this episode, you will hear:

• Digitizing dollar van payments and routing through a consumer app.

• Pivoting from B2C rideshare to a B2B fleet electrification platform.

• Winning a $10 million NYSERDA grant to electrify New York’s dollar van industry.

• Offering EVs, charging, and parking as a turnkey solution for small fleet operators.

• Balancing government contracts with a commercial ground game to sustain cash flow.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and subscribe to our Founders Everywhere Substack. You can also follow us on YouTube, LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.

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Transcript:

00:00:04 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.

00:00:14 Jenny Fielding: Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We’re a global community of founders and operators who’ve come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that, founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoy the episode.

00:00:32 Kameale: Hello and welcome to the Venture Everywhere podcast. I’m Kameale, the co-founder and CEO of ChargerHelp!. I am so excited because I’m here with Su Sanni, who is the co-founder and CEO of Dollaride.

00:00:47 Kameale: And this is a bit of a treat because one, I’ve been on this podcast before. But two, I have gotten the pleasure to meet Su in a lot of places while building my company, ChargerHelp!. Let’s hear more from him. Su, introduce yourself to the people.

00:01:02 Su: Thank you so much, Kameale, for that great intro. Hey, everyone. My name is Su Sanni. I’m the founder and CEO of Dollaride. I’m calling in today from Brooklyn, New York, where I was born and raised and where Dollaride is also headquartered.

00:01:18 Su: For those of you who don’t know, Dollaride is a clean transportation company that focuses on bridging transit gaps in New York City by electrifying fleets. Happy to be here and happy to talk more about what we’re doing and our journey through the clean tech startup ecosystem.

00:01:37 Kameale: I think this is my first time interviewing a founder. And the one thing that I am always interested in, because it’s a very interesting story for me, is what sparked your idea? How did you even know to start Dollaride? Let’s start there.

00:01:51 Su: Dollaride is actually the family business for me. I say that because what inspired me was my two uncles who were immigrants from Nigeria, moving here to New York in about the 70s or early 80s. The first jobs that they were able to get were jobs as, quote unquote, “dollar van drivers.”

00:02:12 Su: For those of you who don’t know, in New York City, we have this underground network of drivers who own their own shuttle vans and buses. They’re known around town as the dollar vans. That’s because back in the 80s, it literally cost only a dollar to get on these vans. They would take you wherever you needed to go within a certain neighborhood.

00:02:34 Su: My uncles were among the early pioneers of this industry. Their story in moving to New York, starting this little business of theirs, and then it growing into a little bit of a phenomenon was what inspired me to start Dollaride.

00:02:50 Su: The name is piggybacking off of them. The problems that we’re solving have a lot to do with transportation access in communities that the dollar vans serve today.

00:03:00 Kameale: That’s so incredible. I’m from LA and anytime I learn more about the dollar rides and even your company, I was like, “Oh, my gosh. That would have been something so cool growing up in LA,” because we didn’t necessarily want to catch the bus per se. But I could imagine us getting into this really cool, sleek electric van and getting around.

00:03:20 Kameale: Could you talk a little bit about how it was for you growing up in Brooklyn and how did that shape your perspective on mobility, access and underserved communities?

00:03:29 Su: Yeah, sure. And this is an integral part of my story and like lens on building businesses and transportation, especially in New York. I grew up in East New York, Brooklyn, which is right next door to Brownsville.

00:03:42 Su: I always tell people Brownsville is the home of Mike Tyson. These are some of the most challenging neighborhoods in Brooklyn. Especially growing up in the 90s, not only was it dangerous oftentimes, but we had very limited access to public transit.

00:03:58 Su: It was common in my neighborhood for kids as young as six, seven, eight years old like I was to walk about a mile from our apartment buildings to the nearest subway where we could finally hop into public transit and then get to school.

00:04:13 Su: My earliest memories of taking public transit always started with a lonely, cold and sometimes dark walk to the subway. That always left an impression on me about why is my commute so difficult or different from other people who live in New York?

00:04:31 Su: That pretty much shaped my view on transportation, and it just made me have a soft spot for folks who live in areas that are far away from public transit or even people who might not be able to take public transit because they might have a physical disability. These transit access issues were really prevalent in my neighborhood.

00:04:49 Su: By the time I became an adult and felt like I was empowered or had the agency to do something about it, I was really driven by that experience that I had as a eight-year-old trying to get to school every day, having to start with a 25, 30-minute walk to the subway.

00:05:06 Kameale: That’s so impactful and just dope to see just how our lived experiences can really shape what we build. When did you start Dollaride again and who was your first customer and what did the business first look like when you started?

00:05:21 Su: I first started Dollaride… you can say officially in 2019. At that time, it was just me and my co-founder. His name is Chris Coles. He’s our CTO. We essentially just built a website and a prototype app. The idea at the time was to create the Uber for New York City dollar vans.

00:05:43 Su: This was an app-based service where the driver from his phone can see any nearby passengers that wanted to hail a dollar van or his particular vehicle. At the time, this was novel, very unique because the way people take dollar vans in New York City, even today, is they’ll get out onto the street and hail it just like you’re hailing a yellow cab.

00:06:07 Su: You have to physically know where the vans are driving each day in order to see them. And then you physically wave your hand so that the driver can pull over, open up his door and let you into his van or his minibus.

00:06:21 Su: Our idea initially was to make this experience digital and more transparent to both the driver and the passenger and also enable them to transact digitally. We introduced credit card payments and paying digitally into this dollar van service, which was primarily cash-based at the time.

00:06:42 Su: That’s how we started in 2019 and what the business and the service looked like then. But after COVID in 2020 and a bunch of iterations, the company has definitely evolved from that initial vision.

00:06:55 Kameale: That makes total sense. Before we get to just where you all are at today, as someone who started the company in January of 2020, it’s always interesting to hear what was your biggest challenge back in 2019? What was keeping you up at night in 2019? Because I think that probably what was keeping you up then is different than what’s keeping you up now. Tell me about that a little bit.

00:07:19 Su: In 2019, the biggest challenge that we were faced with then… it was a couple of things. I remember we were really struggling with this idea of somehow allowing passengers to still pay in cash. Believe it or not, even in 2019 in New York City, amongst people who are going to work every day, there are still a significant number of people who wanted to pay for their rides in cash.

00:07:47 Su: We just found that roughly 35% of passengers preferred to pay in cash even though they had credit cards, they have bank accounts and they were using services like Uber and Lyft. They just still had the habit of using dollar vans and paying the driver with two or three dollars in cash.

00:08:05 Su: We often had that request and we were oftentimes arguing internally about whether we should change our technology or make some new features that would account for drivers receiving cash but still providing their service digitally to the passengers who wanted to pay with credit card.

00:08:23 Su: Another challenge that we were faced with then had to do with routing. In 2019, we had a bit of a technical issue. This just was a reflection of our team’s ability to get access to real time routing data that would enable us to show a driver the most efficient route to the passengers that were in their geography.

00:09:47 Su: Traditionally, dollar vans operate on fixed routes like a bus service would. But when you can actually see everyone’s geolocation through their phones, it behooved us to give drivers the ability to pick up passengers that weren’t directly on the fixed route, but that might be only one or two blocks away.

00:09:09 Su: But we realized that when you were doing that, you do have to also take into account if there’s traffic or if there’s obstructions that you can’t really see through the Google Maps API, but would ultimately affect the driver’s ability to get to that passenger on time or within a reasonable amount of time.

00:09:27 Su: I remember we spent a lot of time just trying to optimize our routing algorithm so that it could take into account real time traffic signals or predict if there would be some traffic congestion based on weather patterns.

00:09:42 Su: Needless to say, we do not take for granted the magic that the Uber and Lyft apps have. There’s a reason why those apps work so well today. They basically have invested a lot of engineering time and many millions of dollars into making their service flawless. For us in 2019, that was not easy to do. We spent a lot of engineering cycles trying to figure that out for our startup.

00:10:08 Kameale: Thank you for sharing that. I know that this podcast is one that has a lot of founders and VCs, so it’s always super interesting to think about what kept you up at night when you first started. You guys are almost a decade in.

00:10:22 Kameale: Let’s come to the future. Talk a little bit about how Dollaride has transformed, how you guys operate now and the intersection of mobility and climate. How is the business evolving into an EV fleet solution?

00:10:35 Su: Today, Dollaride operates more so like a B2B platform as opposed to a digital rideshare service. In 2021, maybe even early 2022, we started realizing that as good as our digital product could be, it would be really difficult for us to make an impact on our customers, particularly the drivers and the fleet owners, with only a digital app.

00:11:05 Su: I’ll share an example of my uncles. My uncles became my first customers. They onboarded their drivers into our app and we started using their drivers, their vehicles as the supply in our marketplace to pick up passengers.

00:11:22 Su: But at the end of the day, my uncles and other business owners like them, whenever they would complain about the issues that kept them up at night, it wasn’t our app, it was things like the cost of a vehicle or the cost of gas or getting more customers.

00:11:40 Su: We realized that although our app was getting better and we were getting more and more users, it wasn’t really making a difference in our customers’ true day-to-day operations.

00:11:50 Su: That was when I had a light bulb moment and realized that we could probably be making a bigger impact by taking on more responsibility in the operations of our customers. That means dealing with more of the physical world that they’re in as opposed to only operating a digital app service.

00:12:10 Su: At that time, we pivoted and began providing a B2B service where Dollaride would help our fleet customers. These are the business owners who employ the drivers or who own the vehicles.

00:12:26 Su: We started working directly with the fleets and provided them services like identifying contract-based opportunities to grow their businesses, learning a little bit more about the cost of insurance and how they can optimize insurance so that they can lower their operating costs. Again, it was my uncles and then some of their competitors who became my earliest customers.

00:12:50 Su: But in early 2023, we reached an inflection point and had a huge opportunity to go much deeper in building out a platform that truly helps the business owner. Dollaride eventually won a large contract with New York State. In particular, it is an agency called NYSERDA. Which is the New York State Energy Research Development Authority.

00:13:16 Su: NYSERDA provided Dollaride with a $10 million grant and contract to electrify dollar vans. The general idea here was that Dollaride already knows the dollar van ecosystem very well. We had over 400 drivers already using our app at the time. But all of these drivers and their vehicles emit a ton of carbon or greenhouse gas emissions as they’re providing transportation around Brooklyn, Queens and the Bronx.

00:13:49 Su: As the state wants to decarbonize transportation, they chose Dollaride as an engine for decarbonizing small urban fleets. They wanted to use us as a service provider to the dollar van industry for electrifying dollar vans.

00:14:07 Su: This was an opportunity, but also an inflection point where we had to decide, do we want to get into clean energy as part of our business model in our service offering? It was an opportunity that we embraced with open arms.

00:14:20 Su: This is what Dollaride does today. We are a turnkey solution for small businesses that provide transportation. We provide them with access to an electric vehicle, a charging station and even dedicated parking so that they can electrify their fleet, whether they’re starting with one vehicle or electrifying a fleet of 50.

00:14:45 Kameale: That’s incredible. And it’s so beautiful to see this full circle moment of where you started out before, but also understanding the customer, understanding the market and then bringing something to market that people needed and then being recognized by an entire state that they saw that you all were the best folks to drive this solution. That’s incredible. Hats off to you, Su.

00:15:06 Su: Thank you, Kameale.

00:15:07 Kameale: You’re welcome.

00:15:08 Su: I want to say one thing, too. I’m condensing the story because I just want to give people the highlights. But what led to getting the contract with the state was proposing this actual solution based on the feedback that we were getting from our customers.

00:15:24 Su: We ended up getting over 40 letters of intent from small business owners who are all complaining that the cost of gas and insurance and replacing their vehicles is a big inhibitor on their growth. That gave us the framing and the narrative to propose to the state of New York that there needs to be a solution to this.

00:15:49 Su: Because if we want to electrify and decarbonize our cities and our state, we need to actually think about small businesses who are typically cash strapped and have very limited resources, but make up the majority of the vehicles on the road, especially commercial vehicles. That’s how we really bridged the gap from our experience with customers to a concept and a pro solution that even governments could get behind.

00:16:17 Kameale: I’m so glad you brought that up. You have to truly, one, utilize what you know about your customer in order to create the opportunity. It sounds like, Su, you did that so well and even did it in such an organized way to get those letters. Some people may think, oh, that may take a lot of work, but honestly, it’s totally worth it. So that’s super impressive.

00:16:36 Su: Thank you. Thank you.

00:16:38 Kameale: You’re welcome. Just revisiting the question we had before, what was your biggest challenge back in 2019, super interested to hear what is one of your biggest challenges today? What is keeping you up at night today?

00:16:52 Su: This is an easy answer. It might be a bit of a nod to you, Kameale, and what you’re doing with ChargerHelp!. What keeps me up at night today and the biggest challenge we have is simplified by two words: charging infrastructure. In short, there’s just not enough chargers in New York City to support the electric vehicle fleet transition.

00:17:16 Su: We have policies, even in New York City, that require rideshare drivers and other for-hire vehicles to convert to electric by 2030. But there’s not enough public chargers. There’s not enough chargers that work consistently and reliably.

00:17:34 Su: It’s very common that a driver, whether they have a Tesla or an electric van, will pull up to a charging station and the station doesn’t work or they have to wait in line for over an hour before they can actually start charging, which takes them another half an hour to an hour anyway.

00:17:52 Su: This is a huge problem if you’re a small business owner and you make money off of driving that vehicle. Time is money and the money lost in sitting, waiting for a charger for an hour versus the amount of time that it takes to fuel up if you go to a gas station becomes a really challenging value proposition for my company to get over, as well as something that everyone who’s considering an EV has to really deal with.

00:18:19 Su: At the end of the day, we spend a lot of time right now at Dollaride trying to figure out how to build or procure better charging solutions. It’s something that is inevitably an issue that we deal with every customer and something that keeps me up at night literally every single day.

00:18:37 Su: This is not supposed to be a plug for ChargerHelp!, but I just have to say this. I kid you not, literally today we’re dealing with an issue at one of our charging hubs. We don’t own this particular hub. All the chargers are not owned and operated by us, so we’re relying on third parties.

00:18:54 Su: From time to time, the chargers don’t work or they’re having malfunctions. It’s the worst when we learn about this the morning of when the customer is supposed to take their vehicle out and do their routes in order to earn money.

00:19:08 Su: I’ve already talked to my director of fleet ops about ChargerHelp!. We should definitely talk because we need more of your services and your technicians out here in New York City, for sure.

00:19:17 Kameale: I appreciate that, Su. The other call out here is as you build, sometimes your partners and your customers may be other startups and figuring out how to do that well. That’s a really big deal.

00:19:30 Kameale: I’m going to interject this sales cycle question. So you guys won this really big contract. I’m sure that’s not the only deal that you all have. But then also, I’m sure with transportation, at least from outside looking in and as somebody that’s been in transportation, especially working with government, it just sounds like a very long sales cycle.

00:19:47 Kameale: Talk a little bit about how has the sales cycle been, how have you guys been working towards improving your sales cycle and then, just any tidbits that you could give to founders out there that are trying to build in the transportation, working with government space?

00:20:01 Su: Flat out, working with government is definitely a long sales cycle, especially as you get into larger six figure and seven figure deals, if not more. We’ve experienced that and we’ve dealt with those challenges in a couple of different ways.

00:20:17 Su: Firstly, with the NYSERDA contract where we won $10 million, that in and of itself was at least 18 months of, quote unquote, “sales.” It started out with an RFP, but then there were many milestones and interviews and different steps along the way until we actually received that award and email that we finally got the deal done.

00:20:41 Su: That at least can give the audience some view of how long deals like this can actually take. We also had a similar experience with another contract that also took about 12 to 15 months. With this particular one, once that contract landed, it took another year before we got paid.

00:20:59 Kameale: That should be a whole segment. Just because you win the contract, don’t mean you’re going to get the money in your bank.

00:21:04 Su: This becomes a lesson for us founders about managing cash flow and figuring out how to capitalize your business properly, because you might have a huge contract from a government customer, but they pay late. They don’t necessarily pay reliably or in a predictable way.

00:21:23 Su: You still need to keep the lights on. You still need to pay payroll while you wait for the checks to come in. This is something that we had to learn the hard way, but hopefully folks can learn from our mistakes.

00:21:34 Su: But what I would encourage other founders to do if they are in a highly regulated industry, where government becomes your customer and these contracts are attractive to you… what we do at Dollaride is we do two things at once.

00:21:49 Su: We pursue government as clients. We’re always responding to RFPs and finding ways to pitch our services as a small purchase agreement, which is typically under a certain cost or threshold that might be outside of the RFP process. But we use that as a way of getting our foot in the door and then building up that relationship to a much larger contract agreement over time.

00:22:14 Su: We do that, which is like our sales approach with government. But then at the same time, we’re constantly still building the commercial side of our business, which is selling B2B. In combination, the B2B sales have a much smaller or shorter sales cycle. There’s a lot more customers out there that we can sell to.

00:22:35 Su: I use a football analogy. While you’re throwing for the big Hail Marys, which are the government contracts, you still have a ground game and you’re running these short plays with your B2B customers.

00:22:47 Su: That approach is balanced and can help you weather these long spurts of time where government pays late or they don’t pay on time. You still have a commercial business that is sustainable.

00:22:58 Kameale: That’s really smart. Everybody’s just trying to get their first contract. Once you get your first contract, you do have to start really looking at, okay, what was this process? What do I need to change? How do I go faster?

00:23:08 Kameale: I’m going to ask this last question and then we’ll go into the speed round. If you could wave a magic wand and fix one urban mobility problem tomorrow, what would it be?

00:23:21 Su: Sometimes I think about incentives as a more systematic way to influence customer behavior or markets. So if I could wave a magic wand to fix an urban mobility problem, I would want to somehow create another revenue stream that is durable for urban transportation and local transportation.

00:23:50 Su: What I mean by this is all around our country, public transportation is actually subsidized by government as much as up to 80%. The fares that we’re paying as consumers when we ride the bus or the subway or the light rail, that barely covers the true cost of transportation. It’s our taxes and loans that are covering the rest of it.

00:24:12 Su: But this makes it really challenging if you’re running a for-profit private business or a small business in this sector because the passengers can’t sustain you. You have to somehow have a revenue stream, and this is typically with contracts with government or larger institutions, to help you build a business.

00:24:31 Su: If I could wave a magic wand to solve a problem in urban mobility, it would be to create another revenue stream that helps public transit become more affordable, but also less reliant on government to actually fund its operations and its expansion. If we did that, it’d be easier to build more subways and to expand bus lanes and bus service so that we have fewer transit deserts and more mobility options overall.

00:25:03 Kameale: I love that, and that makes so much sense. Thank you for that. This has been so much fun. I’m going to close this out with a speed round. Are you ready?

00:25:12 Su: I think so. Well, let’s do it.

00:25:14 Kameale: What’s a book you’re reading or a podcast you’re enjoying right now?

00:25:18 Su: I love, love, love The Founders podcast. It’s by David Senra. He interviews founders, but he also reads biographies and autobiographies of famous founders and he talks through his CliffNotes.

00:25:33 Su: It’s a super engaging podcast. It’s helped me learn a lot about building businesses based on the stories and the tactics and techniques of founders before me. So I would highly recommend that one. And that’s one that I listen to nearly every day.

00:25:49 Kameale: Oh, I’m definitely going to have to look that up. I’ve never heard of that. Thank you. All right. Next question is, if you could live anywhere in the world for a whole year, where would it be?

00:26:00 Su: I would go with Tokyo, Japan.

00:26:03 Kameale: Oh, have you been?

00:26:04 Su: I have been. My wife is Japanese, so our family goes to Japan. We try to go there at least every year or two to see her family so that our kids can also be as close to Japanese culture as possible.

00:26:18 Su: Every time I go there, I am floored by how organized and clean and easy it is to live in Japan, especially in places like Yokohama. That’s a place that would be very easy for me to live for a whole year. Hopefully, I’ll get that opportunity at some point.

00:26:36 Kameale: That’s amazing. All right. Last two, favorite productivity hack.

00:26:42 Su: I ran a business almost 10 years ago called WeDidIt, which was a fundraising platform for nonprofits. I’ve had a decent amount of success winning RFPs and government contracts and these opportunities where you have to first know about it and then you have to apply before you actually have a chance.

00:27:05 Su: It occurred to me that the reason why I find these things so often is because I have built a little bit of a system. The productivity hack here is I literally spend an inordinate amount of time subscribing to every government agency and philanthropic foundations newsletter where they will announce when they have an RFP or some grants based opportunity.

00:27:30 Su: And then in my inbox, I filter the newsletters so that they only show me the most relevant opportunities to my business. Over time, when you are subscribed to 30, 50 or hundreds of newsletters, your inbox becomes this consistent magnet of relevant opportunities that you can apply to within your city, state, or region that might be coming from a government agency or a philanthropic foundation.

00:28:01 Su: This is something I’ve done over the years, but you could literally hack together something like this in a week and it tends to pay for itself very quickly.

00:28:12 Kameale: That’s amazing. Last question is, where can listeners find you?

00:28:17 Su: Listeners can find me on LinkedIn. That’s super easy. Just type in Su Sanni, S-U, first name, S-A-N-N-I. And on X @thesusanni.

00:28:30 Kameale: Amazing.

00:28:31 Su: Likewise Kameale. In fact, I should ask you, where can listeners find you if they want to learn more about you and your story, or follow along the journey of Charger Help!?

00:28:42 Kameale: Oh yeah, on LinkedIn as well.

00:28:43 Su Sanni: Excellent.

00:28:44 Kameale: This has been so much fun. Thank you so much for sharing with us and I hope that listeners enjoyed.

00:28:50 Su: Likewise. Thanks for your time today, Kameale. This was fun.

00:28:54 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today’s episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We’re a first-check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We’re a community of 500 founders and operators, and we’ve invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe and we’ll catch you on the next episode.

Read more from Su Sanni and Kameale C. Terry in Founders Everywhere.

Recognition often follows companies that are quietly reshaping everyday categories. Wagmo is one of them.

Christie Horvath, founder and CEO of Wagmo, was named a finalist for the EY Entrepreneur Of The Year award. The recognition reflects not only her leadership, but also the company’s growing role in redefining how pet care is accessed and managed.

Wagmo focuses on preventative care and pet insurance, offering a model that helps pet owners better plan for both routine and unexpected expenses. Rather than treating care as reactive, the platform encourages ongoing wellness through structured coverage and reimbursement.

Horvath’s approach is grounded in a simple insight. Pet owners increasingly view their pets as family, but the systems supporting their care have not fully evolved to match that shift. Costs can be unpredictable, and traditional insurance models often lack flexibility or clarity.

By building a more accessible and transparent platform, Wagmo is helping address that gap. The company’s offering supports everyday care while also providing coverage for larger medical needs, creating a more continuous and manageable experience for pet owners.

The recognition from EY highlights a broader trend. As consumer expectations rise, categories that were once considered routine are being reimagined through better design, clearer pricing, and more user-friendly experiences.

For Horvath, the focus remains on building a product that aligns with how people actually care for their pets. The goal is not just to offer coverage, but to support healthier, more proactive care over time.

As Wagmo continues to grow, its model reflects how even established industries can evolve when approached with a clearer understanding of user needs. Recognition like this signals that the shift is already underway.

Read the full article on Citybiz