Nearshoring is often framed as a logistics story: shorter routes, lower geopolitical exposure, faster turnaround, and closer customer relationships. But in practice, one of the biggest barriers is much more basic: buyers need to know what factories can actually make.

In a Mexico Business News interview, Yumari’s Andrés Díaz lays out the core challenge. China’s manufacturing ecosystem has spent decades digitizing factory offerings through platforms like Alibaba, Global Sources, and Made-in-China. In Latin America, no equivalent data layer has existed at scale. The region has technically sophisticated factories, but structured information on capacity, materials, quality levels, pricing ranges, timelines, compliance, and specialization is fragmented or missing.

That missing infrastructure makes it difficult for global buyers to move programs from Asia into the Americas, even when the underlying manufacturing capability is already there.

Yumari is addressing that gap with AI agents that gather and structure operational data from both sides of the market. On the factory side, those agents help capture the real context behind production claims: available capacity, material constraints, quality standards, shift schedules, delays, logistics steps, and price targets. On the buyer side, agents identify exact procurement needs, from product specifications and volumes to delivery timelines.

The result is a more precise model of what regional factories can execute, when, and under what conditions. That matters because nearshoring only works if buyers can trust the visibility behind the match. Proximity alone is not enough; the market needs a reliable way to map demand to real manufacturing capacity.

The interview also highlights why this shift is timely. As brands face greater pressure around supply chain resilience, sustainability, labor standards, and tariff exposure, Latin America has a compelling opportunity to become a more competitive manufacturing hub. Yumari’s platform helps make that opportunity legible by digitizing the specialized capabilities that already exist across the region.

Congrats to Andrés Díaz and the Yumari team on the Mexico Business News feature and on building critical infrastructure for the next chapter of regional manufacturing.

Read the full Mexico Business News interview.

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.

It is an exciting moment for Eudia, which recently announced a collaboration with Microsoft to bring enterprise intelligence and specialized AI agents directly into the tools where knowledge work already happens.

Eudia is integrating across the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, including Word, Outlook, SharePoint, and OneDrive, while building on Microsoft Azure infrastructure. The collaboration also includes a joint go-to-market motion with Microsoft’s enterprise sales organization and plans for Eudia to become available through the Microsoft Marketplace.

For us, the announcement is particularly interesting because it reflects an important evolution in how enterprises are beginning to adopt agentic AI.

The opportunity is not simply to automate repetitive tasks. The much larger opportunity is to scale the judgment, expertise, and institutional knowledge of an organization’s best operators and make that intelligence available to the broader organization.

That is the idea behind Eudia’s Expert Digital Twins and specialized AI agents. Rather than functioning as generic assistants, these systems are designed to capture how experts within an organization think and operate, then make that knowledge accessible across teams and workflows.

Eudia initially built deeply within the legal function, where institutional knowledge, judgment, and context are particularly important. But the same intelligence can increasingly extend into the business teams legal supports, including sales, procurement, marketing, and finance.

Embedding that intelligence directly into Microsoft 365 is an important part of the equation. Enterprise AI becomes significantly more useful when employees do not need to leave their existing workflows to access it. Instead, the intelligence can appear inside the documents, emails, files, and collaboration environments where work is already taking place.

Eudia is already working with major enterprises including ServiceNow, Cargill, Toshiba, Ecolab, and Bayer, with its technology being used within Microsoft 365 environments.

The Microsoft collaboration provides another meaningful distribution channel for Eudia as enterprises increasingly move from experimenting with general-purpose AI toward deploying specialized agents that understand their organizations, workflows, and institutional knowledge.

We continue to believe that some of the most valuable enterprise AI companies will not simply replace individual tasks. They will create a new intelligence layer across organizations, enabling expertise that was previously concentrated in a small number of people to become available much more broadly.

Big congratulations to Omar Haroun, Ashish Agrawal, and the entire Eudia team on this milestone.

Read more: Eudia Announces Collaboration with Microsoft

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.

Tim is a portfolio CEO, so the most interesting part of the conversation is not simply what VetraFi does. It is the lens he brings to the work: how veterans move from military service into civilian life, how they make sense of what comes next, and how that experience can shape the companies they build.

The group discusses several parts of that transition. They talk about the pressure many veterans feel to follow familiar civilian paths, whether that means graduate school, a large company, or another more conventional next step. They also talk about the role of veteran networks, the adjustment to civilian workplaces, and the process of figuring out which instincts from military service still serve you in a new context.

The conversation gets beyond the usual shorthand of military experience as “leadership.” The founders talk about operating habits, team expectations, cultural rituals, and mission-driven work. Tim also brings up examples like challenge coins, showing how traditions from military life can carry meaning inside a company when they are adapted thoughtfully.

That is what makes the episode useful: it is not just a story about leaving one institution and entering another. It is about translation. What do you keep? What do you leave behind? What becomes an advantage once you are building something from scratch?

That connects directly back to VetraFi. Building for military families requires more than a generic fintech playbook; it requires understanding how service shapes people’s financial lives, communities, and expectations. Tim’s reflections in the conversation reinforce why founder-market fit matters, and why VetraFi’s mission is rooted in lived experience as much as product opportunity.

Watch the full Founder Group Chat from Inc.

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.

Say “tech founder” and most people picture the same guy: young, bold, a little reckless, definitely male. Zuckerberg. Elon. Kalanick. Move fast, break things, never apologize.

But that’s one archetype. Not the only one.

Anna Barber and Jenny Fielding have spent the last two decades building our own companies and investing in hundreds of others. Four years ago we built a framework for the founder types we kept seeing over and over again - and it’s held up, even through the AI boom.

We call them: the Wallbreaker, the Empath, the Scientist, and the MBA. Each has strengths, each has blind spots. We find this framework useful because when you can name your archetype, the strengths and blind spots become easier to identify and then compensate for.

It’s useful for us as investors too. We each gravitate toward certain types and go easy on their flaws, which also means we’ve definitely passed on great founders simply because they weren’t “our type.” I have one painful example of this that I won’t name - a “wallbreaker” founder I was just allergic to and passed on, who went on to have great success with his company. The more we understand these archetypes and our own leanings as investors, the better decisions we can make.

The Wallbreaker

The Wallbreaker is part visionary, part tyrant. They see something no one else can see, and they’ll go through (not around) anything in the way. Ambitious, hard-driving, magnetic. They can raise money, tell a big story, and pull top talent into their orbit. Inside the company, that same intensity has a dark side - control and impatience. People describe Wallbreakers as both charming and arrogant.

Elon Musk is the archetype of this archetype. He projects a vision so big that investors, customers, and the internet at large rally around it - even while running multiple companies at once. The company becomes an extension of him. We all saw Gwynne Shotwell ringing the bell at the SpaceX IPO - but whose name do you think of when you think of SpaceX?

From Jenny: I’ve worked with plenty of Wallbreakers who became great CEOs. They’re not always open to feedback at first, but some come around once trust is built. I’ve also walked away from a few who were just too arrogant and argumentative to deal with.

Wallbreakers are unafraid of the impossible, exactly what you need when you’re building something with a hundred unknowns. They tend to be pioneers, not iterators: you’ll find them in robotics, crypto, and spacetech. They take heavy pushback simply for being bold, and their singular focus (obsession) is what keeps the ship moving forward.

That same focus can turn into a bunker mentality. Wallbreakers often keep a tight inner circle and control the flow of information, which can breed a toxic, siloed culture if left unchecked. A Wallbreaker without self-awareness makes for a hard place to work.

The Empath (Crusader)

Mission-driven. Deep founder-market fit. Usually an accidental entrepreneur. The Empath starts a company because they can’t stop thinking about a problem, not because they set out to build a business. Like the Wallbreaker, they’ll do slightly unreasonable things to get it off the ground.

Empaths tend to start with no plan and no product, just an urgency to help their chosen customers. What begins as a side project snowballs into a company. They’re natural “line leaders”: charismatic, inspiring, and they understand their customers better than anyone else in the building, because they actually listen.

Where they get into trouble is scale. They’ll put the customer ahead of the team, struggle to hire for skills they don’t have, and spend too little time thinking about how the business actually makes money. Given time to learn and the right hires around them, Empaths grow into strong CEOs.

From Anna: Empaths are my favorite founders to work with. Their passion is contagious, and it usually attracts a founding team that’s just as purpose-driven, which becomes the backbone of a strong culture. Their gifts - courage, presence, deep market knowledge - are hard to teach. When they also commit to learning resilience, focus, and management, they become exceptional leaders.

The Scientist

The Scientist is the deep-thinking, technical founder, mission-driven but relentlessly practical. They live in the product, obsess over the details, and can spiral into perfectionism. Because they tend to be introverted, they process internally instead of asking for help.

Scientists thrive on identifying a problem and solving it systematically. At their best, they surround themselves with other independent thinkers, which is great for diversity of thought, but their networks tend to be smaller, so their pool of hires, investors, and advisors is often thinner too.

From Jenny: I love working with Scientists. They’re quirky, offbeat, genuinely open to new ideas. When a Scientist is open to feedback, it’s magic. They absorb new information fast, and when they are self-aware, they hire people who aren’t like them.

Curious, technical, discovery-obsessed. Scientists will go deep on one problem until they crack it, with a kind of endurance most people don’t have. Growing up as free thinkers makes them resilient to social pressure, too.

The flip side: They can be perfectionists and avoid shipping until the product reaches their bar. They may be blind to this tendency because they are so focused on the product and not the market.

The MBA

Methodical. Clinical. Spreadsheet-first. The MBA founder finds the white space, builds the playbook, and executes with precision. Planning, research, and a well-tended network are the strengths. What’s often missing is a personal “why.” MBA founders often have deep conviction about the opportunity, but not always deep passion for it.

MBAs are built for businesses that reward planning and execution over sudden insight. Competition doesn’t scare them, which makes MBAs excellent fast followers in a market someone else pioneered. Where they struggle is when the plan breaks down: without an emotional stake in the problem, it’s harder to push through the hard stretch.

Warby Parker’s four Wharton founders are the classic example. They looked at a consolidated industry with one giant (Luxottica) and saw an opening for a digital-first, DTC challenger. They approached the business like a class project, working with their own professors on pricing, mining every scrap of customer feedback for the next move. Data and market response drove the company forward, not gut instinct. Side note: In today’s market - there are a LOT of MBA founders chasing the AI gold rush. We think in this market these founders can build great cash flow businesses but the Scientists and Wallbreakers are probably more venture-backable.

From Anna: While most people love to critique MBA founders, they have some great strengths. They treat the business like a learning problem. They ask for advice, chase customer feedback, and follow the data even when it means killing an idea they loved. They can also build strong brands, because they’re wired for consistency and a clean, end-to-end customer experience.

So, what’s your type?

If you’re a founder, you probably already know. If you don’t, ask your co-founders, your team, your family. (Side note: asking for feedback is itself a leadership strength.)

No framework this tidy captures everyone perfectly - most people are a dominant type with streaks of the others. Anna’s an Empath with a dose of MBA and a sprinkle of Scientist. Jenny’s a Scientist with a healthy dose of Wallbreaker and a touch of MBA. We both had to learn to shore up our tendencies and strengths with other skills.

Does this resonate? Jenny and Anna would love to hear your thoughts, and your type!

AI security is moving from a future concern to an immediate infrastructure problem.

As enterprises deploy more AI applications, coding agents, MCP-connected workflows, and autonomous systems, the security question is no longer just whether an AI model is safe in isolation. It is whether the full application and agent stack can be discovered, monitored, governed, and protected in real time.

That is why it is great to see Operant AI recognized by CRN as one of the 10 hottest AI security startups of 2026 so far.

CRN’s list focuses on emerging vendors building in areas like AI security posture management, agent security, AI governance, runtime protection, and AI red teaming. Operant was highlighted for its work to embed security for AI and agents directly within AI inference infrastructure.

In March, Operant announced its AI Infrastructure Ecosystem Partnership Program, designed to bring Operant‘s runtime defense capabilities directly into the inference stack with leading AI infrastructure companies. The idea is simple and important: as AI becomes part of core production infrastructure, security needs to live where those systems actually run.

That follows another channel-focused move from the company: the launch of Operant AI‘s Channel Partner Program, led by Katherine Mills, to help VAR partners bring advanced security for AI and agents to customers.

This is a useful signal for the category. AI security is not just about prompts or policy. It is about protecting the runtime environments, APIs, agents, tools, and infrastructure pathways where AI systems take action.

Operant AI has been building around that reality from the start.

Read the full CRN article here.

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.

Cloud costs are climbing as companies juggle AWS, Azure, and GCP bills alongside a fast-growing new line item: AI spend. North.cloud is a financial automation platform that uses AI to help companies autonomously control cloud, data, and AI spend. Trained on years of data achieving over $100M of savings, North takes just 5 minutes to set up and can cut a company’s cloud expenses by 30% or more within the first day. Originally focused on AWS and GCP, the platform has since expanded to Azure and is now integrating with AI and data platforms like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Snowflake. Their goal is to give companies a single tool to manage cloud, data, and AI spend.

Co-founder and CTO Yassine Açoine spent years leading engineering organizations where cloud spend was a constant challenge, even when it wasn’t directly his responsibility. Ready for something new, he began exploring AI startup ideas before meeting co-founder and CEO Matt Biringer, who brought over a decade of experience selling datacenter technology and had seen firsthand how companies struggled to make smart AWS commitment decisions. Convinced by the opportunity, Yassine built a working MVP in just 40 days. It was a simple prototype, but it proved the concept and became the foundation for North.

North is growing quickly and actively hiring engineers and builders who want to work at the intersection of AI and cloud infrastructure. If you’re excited about solving complex infrastructure challenges and helping define the future of AI-powered cloud operations, they’re looking for talented people to join the team.

What is North’s North Star?

North helps companies take control of their cloud spend by enabling meaningful savings in several ways. We help teams restructure their codebases and infrastructure so they’re properly optimized. We guide engineers away from over-provisioning and help them strike the right balance between high reliability and minimal waste. We also give companies a clear view of where every dollar is going, who owns that spend, and how costs should be allocated across teams, products, and business units.

Why will North win?

We’re not trying to solve one tiny slice of the problem, and then force customers to use five other tools to complete the story. We want to be the one application for everything related to cloud financial operations. Another key differentiator is our methodology and customer success approach. Customers aren’t just buying a SaaS product; they’re buying a product plus a team that’s always there to support them, which makes adoption and impact much smoother.

How does North inspire “customer love”?

We inspire customer love by turning cloud savings into fuel for growth, giving teams real dollars back to reinvest into R&D, hiring, and new products. We focus upmarket, where leadership has already told engineering to cut spend and mature cost allocation. North delivers the visibility and maturity that makes those savings possible. Brave is a great example: North helped them save about 40% on cloud costs, freeing up capital to build their own LLM-based search engine to rival Google Chrome. They’ve said North helped make them a leading AI company. Another case is AssemblyAI, whose team told our investors they’re not sure they’d have reached profitability without North. We’re not just cutting bills, we’re impacting the balance sheet and giving leaders room to reinvest.

Tell us about a recent milestone that North crushed.

We’re approaching $1 billion in annual cloud spend under management. That’s the combined cloud spend of all the companies using or signed up for our platform. We’ve also delivered over $100 million in direct savings to customers so far. Both numbers feel massive, and they’re good indicators of the scale of the problem we’re tackling and the value we’re providing.

How has your background influenced you as a founder?

I’ve always gravitated toward leadership roles. In high school, I was captain of three sports teams (soccer, badminton, and volleyball) and I’ve always been driven to challenge myself. I grew up switching between Arabic, French, English, and Amazigh in Morocco, so talking to people from different worlds has always felt natural to me. Traveling a lot since then has only sharpened that instinct. I try to meet people where they are and explain things in a way that actually clicks. I’m very tuned in to how people react to complex topics, so I try to explain abstract, esoteric concepts using diagrams, concrete examples, and scenarios from user, product, and engineering perspectives. Professionally, my first job was in a small team that grew to over 100 people; being there early gave me deep exposure to the cloud and forced me to prove myself as a young leader. That combination of communication, early leadership, and sensitivity to how people learn has been crucial for building products and leading teams at North.

Fun fact:
When I was 13, my dad’s company couldn’t find a translator, so I spent three weeks in China translating business meetings from English to French. It was a real crash course in interpretation and international business for an eighth-grader.

From the archives: Listen to Matt Biringer with Jenny Fielding on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Cloud Cover. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

At the earliest stages of company-building, there usually is not much hard evidence to lean on yet.

No long operating history. No mature metrics. No consensus view from the market. Just a founder, a problem, and the quality of the thinking around what comes next.

That is why standards matter so much in early-stage investing.

Mercury recently featured Jenny Fielding in its Points of View series, which explores how different people think about standards: where they come from, how they hold up, and what it means to set or challenge them.

For Jenny, the standard she refuses to compromise on is founder-first honesty.

She puts it plainly: she will not tell a founder an idea is great when she does not believe it, and she will not soften a hard truth just to preserve the relationship. That perspective comes from having been a founder herself. At the beginning, clear feedback is not a nicety. It can be the difference between moving with conviction and losing time to false reassurance.

The conversation also gets at what Jenny looks for in founders. The strongest ones do not hide the hard part of the business behind a polished pitch. They lead with what is broken, what they are still working through, and how they are thinking about the problem.

That kind of honesty is a signal. So is judgment.

Jenny talks about protecting a founder’s judgment when everything else cannot be protected, and about the danger of second-guessing someone into paralysis. She also pushes back on venture’s habit of confusing pedigree for quality. Great founders can come from Lagos, Bogota, Tallinn, and everywhere in between.

That is core to the Everywhere mindset: talent is not concentrated in a few familiar places, and pattern matching can become a liability when it starts replacing curiosity.

One of the sharpest lines in the interview is Jenny’s reminder that conviction and correctness are not the same thing. Early-stage investing requires conviction, but the real test comes later, when the story changes and you have to separate what you actually believe from what you want to be true.

It is a concise conversation, but a useful one for founders and investors alike.

Read the full Mercury interview with Jenny Fielding here.

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.

ZZ Driggs streamlines the entire process of designing and furnishing real estate across the US at scale through a comprehensive turnkey solution, integrating design, procurement, logistics, installation, and financing.

Operating successfully across hospitality, commercial, and residential sectors, ZZ empowers institutional building operators, multifamily developers, hotel operators, real estate brokerages, family offices, and corporate clients to outfit and launch properties efficiently with cost-efficiency, rapid timelines, and superior design quality. By tailoring solutions to each project’s specific needs and serving as a single accountable partner throughout the entire process, ZZ lets clients focus on their core business while all the details are professionally managed and executed.

Building on years of work across hospitality, commercial, and multi-family projects, the company recently launched an exciting new vertical: ZZ Office. It’s a tech-enabled, full-service turnkey solution for high-growth startups and tech companies who are busy growing their business and need to expand into a new office. Rather than just fulfilling just one piece of the puzzle, they combine all the benefits of a design firm, procurement agency, furniture dealer, warehousing/logistics provider, project manager, and financing provider all under one roof. By reducing costs and hassle while delivering exceptional design, ZZ helps fast-growing teams create intentional and inspiring workplaces as they grow, return to the office, or rethink how they work.

Co-Founder & Chairman Matthew Brimer is a serial entrepreneur, designer, investor, real estate developer, and community builder with a personal mission to build companies and communities that support people and the planet and move the world forward in a meaningful way. He’s best known for co‑founding several influential ventures across education, culture, wellness, real estate, and technology. Before founding ZZ Driggs, he co-founded General Assembly), where he led the charge on its global community, enterprise partnerships, and social impact initiatives. He also co-founded Daybreaker, the global music and wellness phenomenon; Flying Colors, an organic bird seed and garden brand; and Everywhere Ventures (that’s us 😁). Brimer has also developed boutique hospitality properties in upstate New York and the island of Jamaica, and he has served as an advisor, board member, and angel investor to myriad mission-driven startups and nonprofits. He has been recognized by The New York Times, Washington Post, Forbes, Fast Company, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, Vogue, and others for his contributions to entrepreneurship, design, and culture.

What’s the inspiration behind ZZ Driggs?

I’ve always been a designer, tinkerer, and maker. My mom was a graphic designer, and I fell in love with visual design at a young age. At General Assembly (GA), I was deeply involved in the experiential and community design of our campuses. After GA, I started investing in historic properties in the Hudson Valley and Jamaica, getting very hands-on in the planning, research, renovation, and construction process from beginning to end. I’ve also always admired exceptional hospitality destinations, the creation of which is in many ways an exercise in multi-sensory experiential design. As a designer, helping to craft spaces and bring real estate to life in ways that feel truly human was a natural next step. ZZ Driggs blends my passion for design and startups with a long-term, craft-driven approach to furnishings and interiors, impacting people’s lives and work for the better, and creating elevated spaces through a more thoughtful, sustainable, and human-centric model for how we create the places where we live, work, and play.

What’s ZZ Driggs’ North Star?

Our North Star is to become the most trusted go‑to design and furnishing provider for the most forward‑thinking real estate projects across the U.S. We want developers, owners, operators, and employers who truly care about design, sustainability, and experience to instinctively think of ZZ Driggs when they need spaces conceived, furnished, and brought to life.

Tell us about some recent milestones that ZZ Driggs crushed.

Over ZZ Driggs’ lifetime, we’ve furnished more than a million square feet of properties around the country and installed over 1.5 million pounds of furniture. Those numbers capture the scale of spaces we’ve helped design and deliver, and we have a long way to go from here.

How does ZZ Driggs inspire “customer love”?

So often, real estate development, architecture, and construction can feel transactional and impersonal, or at the very least enormously complex and filled with hassles, delays, and disappointments. At ZZ Driggs, we take a very human, thoughtful, hands‑on approach to client service by acting as a true accountable partner and extension of their team throughout the entire process. At the end of the day, we’re creative problem solvers at our core, and our clients recognize and benefit from that. We’ve got their back. We go above and beyond. We’re honest, and we actually care about the details. Sounds simple, but the result is thoughtfully designed properties that nail quality, budget, and timeline goals, and ultimately leads to clients actually enjoying and appreciating their collaboration with us from start to finish.

How has your background shaped you as a founder?

I grew up in the Midwest with two creative parents who each ran their own small businesses. They were both makers who loved getting hands-on, who weren’t afraid to make some mistakes along the way, who valued learning and growth for themselves and our family. I admire them so much! Witnessing and learning from Mom and Dad throughout my childhood, entrepreneurship felt like a natural path and instilled in me an incessantly curious maker’s mindset, a love of creative problem solving, and a strong work ethic. I started my first company freshman year at Yale (ironically, in furniture) buying antique card catalogs that were getting removed from libraries around campus and reselling them online. I then moved on to co-founding a social gaming startup that created massively multiplayer online tournaments for college students that ultimately failed during the recession… a difficult experience, but a crash course in real life entrepreneurship that taught me resilience, leadership, and the realities of building a company. Moving to NYC after college and immersing myself in New York’s burgeoning startup ecosystem, hosting events and building community all along the way, eventually led me to start General Assembly, Daybreaker, Everywhere Ventures, and ultimately ZZ Driggs.

Fun Fact:

I love most things hands-on, whether making art, trying my hand at some new craft, refinishing an antique piece of furniture, installing some house project, or planting in my garden. In an age where most of our work happens on screens, there’s something deeply satisfying about shutting the laptop and using my hands to create something tangible that I can see, touch, and enjoy. I’ve also really been enjoying my hobby of DJing the last several years, which has been an amazing passion project and creative outlet for me in crafting musical journeys and performing at all sorts of interesting places and gatherings domestically and abroad.

Follow Matthew Brimer at:

LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/mobrimer

Instagram: https://instagram.com/brimer

SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/brimer

ZZ Driggs: https://zzdriggs.com

From the archives: Listen to Helle Jeppsson with Matthew Brimer on the Venture Everywhere podcast: The Great SCAPE. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

Trade businesses often run on a messy stack. Inventory in one place. Invoices somewhere else. Payments in another system. Customer credit and collections tracked across spreadsheets, chats, and memory.

For wholesalers, distributors, and manufacturers, that fragmentation creates real operational drag. Teams spend too much time reconciling information, chasing payments, monitoring credit exposure, and trying to understand what is happening across the business. FusePay is building for that problem.

Tech in Africa recently covered the company’s launch of Fuse360, an AI-powered business management platform designed for trade businesses. The platform brings together inventory management, orders, invoicing, customer credit, collections, and retailer relationships in one system.

That is already useful on its own. But Fuse360 is also integrated with FusePay‘s licensed payments platform, which means businesses can manage operational workflows and financial transactions inside the same ecosystem.

The AI layer is focused on the repetitive but important work that slows teams down: payment reconciliation, collections, reporting, credit monitoring, and business analysis. FusePay describes the goal as supporting employees rather than replacing them, which feels like the right framing for a category where trust, context, and relationships still matter.

Fuse360 also includes a retailer portal where customers can place orders, view invoices, download statements, and monitor outstanding balances. KYB and KYC onboarding tools help suppliers assess customers before extending trade credit, while AI-powered credit intelligence analyzes payment behavior, historical patterns, and outstanding exposure.

That matters because trade credit is one of the quiet engines of commerce. Better data and more connected workflows can help suppliers make faster, more informed credit decisions without losing control of risk.

FusePay was founded by Vidhyasahar Thiyagarajan and Francesco Rocchi, both of whom grew up around family-owned retail and wholesale businesses. That lived experience shows up in the product: Fuse360 is not generic back-office software. It is built around the operational reality of trade businesses in markets where payments, credit, inventory, and customer relationships are deeply connected.

The company launched Fuse360 in Seychelles in July 2026 and plans to expand to Mauritius in September, followed by selected East and Southern African markets before the end of the year.

We have always liked companies that use software to bring structure and intelligence into overlooked operational categories. FusePay is doing that for trade businesses, starting with the workflows that determine how money, goods, and credit actually move.

Read the full Tech in Africa article.

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.

For professional athletes, deciding when and how to start a family can be especially complicated.

A recent New York Times article explores how women on the professional tennis tour are increasingly turning to egg freezing and IVF while continuing to compete at the highest level. Players described navigating hormone injections, training restrictions, recovery, treatment costs, and the uncertainty that comes with fertility care.

Their experiences reflect a much broader challenge. Women across industries are balancing demanding careers, relationships, financial considerations, and the biological realities of fertility.

Everywhere Ventures portfolio company Cofertility is building a new model around that challenge.

Traditional egg freezing can cost tens of thousands of dollars, putting fertility preservation out of reach for many women. Cofertility allows women to freeze their eggs for free when they choose to donate half of the eggs retrieved to a family seeking an egg donor.

The model creates value on both sides. Women can preserve their fertility without carrying the full financial burden, while intended parents gain access to donor eggs through a more transparent and human-centered process.

Cofertility is also rethinking the traditional egg-donation experience. Rather than approaching donation as an anonymous transaction, the company gives donors and intended parents more agency over the relationship and level of communication they want to have.

The article also notes Maria Sharapova’s investment in Cofertility After delaying motherhood during her professional tennis career, Sharapova began investing in companies helping women gain greater flexibility around when and how they build their families.

Professional tennis provides a visible example of the trade-offs women face, but the underlying need extends far beyond sports.

As more women seek greater control over their reproductive timelines, Cofertility is expanding access to fertility preservation while building a more thoughtful model for egg donation and family building.

Read the full New York Times article.

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.

Most gas stations were built around the fastest possible version of a stop: fuel, snacks, payment, back on the road.

Maggie’s Refuel is asking a better question: what if that stop could actually be worth lingering for?

SlashGear recently covered the company’s planned Beverly Hills flagship, which is expected to open in 2027 alongside the existing Union 76 station on Santa Monica Boulevard. The site is already a local landmark, known for its midcentury modern canopy, and Maggie’s is building around that sense of place rather than flattening it into another generic convenience format.

The concept comes from Alex Canter, a fourth-generation member of the family behind LA’s iconic Canter’s Deli. That hospitality background shows up in the product vision. Maggie’s is not just adding nicer shelves to a gas station. It is combining fuel, curated food and beverages, EV charging, local restaurant collaborations, app-based ordering, and rewards into one modern roadside experience.

According to SlashGear, the flagship is expected to include staples like soda and chips alongside carefully selected snacks from emerging food brands around the world. The store will also offer fresh food and drinks, including craft lattes, ceremonial-grade matcha, fresh juices, artisan soft-serve ice cream, and pastries from Beverly Hills bakeries.

The app layer matters too. Customers will be able to order drinks and snacks before they arrive, turning the gas station visit into something closer to a hospitality and commerce experience than a pure utility stop. EV charging adds another reason to rethink the format: if drivers are already spending more time on site, the quality of that time becomes part of the product.

We have always liked companies that take an overlooked everyday category and rebuild it around changing consumer expectations. Maggie’s Refuel fits that pattern. Fuel may be the anchor, but the opportunity is broader: food, beverage, hospitality, rewards, real estate, and a brand that can make a routine errand feel considered.

If the Beverly Hills flagship works, it could become the launch point for a concept that expands across the West Coast. That is what makes this exciting. Maggie’s is not just trying to make one gas station nicer. It is testing a new operating model for what the next generation of convenience retail can feel like.

Read the full SlashGear article.

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.

Enterprise Security and GRC teams have no time for the “important” because they’re constantly battling the “urgent.” Audits, evidence requests, and policy updates (to name a few) leave little room for the proactive work that actually reduces risk. Complyance has cracked the code on customizable AI agents that reliably shift manual work from Security and GRC teams to AI. They lead the market with over 20 purpose-built, domain-trained AI agents that support everything the Enterprise GRC teams do: controls monitoring, risk treatment, third party diligence, policy management, and more. It’s compliance with a (wh)y!

Founder and CEO Richa Kaul is driven by a deep interest in data privacy, security, and the evolving role of technology in protecting businesses and consumers. Before founding Complyance, she held leadership roles at ContractPodAi, worked as a consultant at McKinsey & Company and the World Bank, and advised organizations across the public and private sectors. With Complyance, Richa is passionate about building solutions that help organizations go from reactive to proactive.

What inspired you to build Complyance?

This is a funny question because it all comes back to the fact that I am a huge data privacy nut in my personal life! I literally go around at parties and help people adjust the security configurations on their phones to better protect their personal data. But I started to realize some years ago that, no matter how many personal privacy configurations I put on my phone, at the end of the day I have to trust companies with my data. We all do. And yet we see the news of companies going through data breaches every day it seems. It all made me realize that the best way to actually secure our data as individuals is to help secure the companies that hold the world’s data. By doing that, we are supporting all of the millions and millions of consumers whose data they hold. Complyance is about securing Enterprises with automated security compliance monitoring and AI agents that identify and reduce risk.

What’s Complyance’s company North Star?

We protect consumer data by helping to secure the companies who hold the world’s data.

Tell us about a recent milestone that Complyance crushed.

We recently raised a preemptive Series A from Google Ventures (GV)! GV wanted to make an investment in the security compliance space, so they reviewed all of the players in our space. They approached us because our AI was far ahead, and our clients actually relied on it every day. It’s an extremely exciting milestone in our journey.

How does Complyance inspire “customer love”?

By shifting core work from the team to our AI agents, our clients suddenly have time back. They use this time to achieve their more strategic goals, which drive real business value, create a better security culture, and deliver on their executive team’s goals. Our clients don’t just ‘love’ our product, they ’need’ our product. Customers including Dropbox, CVS Health, and Major League Soccer love that our product works reliably for them every day.

How has your background influenced you as a founder?

I started my career in the public sector and thought I would work in the public sector forever. I would not be satisfied as a founder if I didn’t feel like I was contributing to a greater mission, something for the greater good. In that way, I think my start in the public sector will always influence the way that I define success for myself, both as a founder, and as a citizen of our world.

Favorite quote:

“The best day to plant a tree was 20 years ago, but the second best day is today.” Get going!

Fun fact:
I used to hurdle - that was my track & field event - and I think about that a lot at work. In hurdling, the first hurdle is everything: you time your steps, find your rhythm, and set yourself up for the rest of the race. That’s how I approach important meetings and pitches: I prepare hardest for the first few minutes, because nailing the first hurdle makes everything else easier after that.

From the archives: Listen to Mishal “Mish” Thadani with Vir Kashyap, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Off the Grid. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

Digital fraud is becoming more sophisticated, coordinated, and difficult for businesses to detect using traditional rules-based systems alone.

Fraudsters are increasingly combining tactics such as account takeovers, SIM swaps, phishing, , voucher fraud, and social engineering. These attacks are not always isolated incidents. They are often connected to larger syndicates that can quickly change tactics, locations, and targets.

That is the problem Orca is working to solve.

Orca is an anti-fraud technology company that helps businesses identify suspicious activity and stop fraudulent transactions. Its platform currently protects more than R82 billion in monthly transaction volume across several industries, giving the company visibility into how fraud networks operate and evolve.

MyBroadband recently profiled the company and the patterns emerging from its monitoring software. According to Orca CEO Thalia Pillay, KwaZulu-Natal consistently appears as the South African province with the highest level of digital fraud and active fraud syndicate activity.

Orca has also observed fraud networks beginning to migrate into other regions, including the Eastern Cape. By analyzing activity across transactions, accounts, devices, and locations, the company can identify not only individual instances of fraud, but also broader movements and connections between criminal operations.

The article highlighted an alleged scam call center uncovered in Umhlanga in April 2026. Authorities arrested 23 people suspected of participating in banking scams from an upscale property. The operation allegedly used vishing tactics to convince victims that their bank accounts were at risk before directing them to transfer money into accounts controlled by the syndicate.

This reflects the increasingly professional nature of digital fraud. For many fraudsters, these schemes operate like full-time businesses, with teams simultaneously running phishing campaigns, managing SIM card farms, laundering funds, and recruiting money mules.

Artificial intelligence is making these attacks easier to scale. Fraud networks can now produce more convincing messages, target more people, and coordinate multiple forms of fraud at the same time.

That makes real-time intelligence increasingly important. Businesses need systems that can recognize behavior and connections across a network rather than evaluating each transaction in isolation.

We have always liked companies that turn fragmented and difficult-to-detect activity into actionable intelligence. Orca fits that model by helping companies understand not only whether an individual transaction appears suspicious, but how it may connect to a broader fraud network.

As digital payments continue to grow, fraud prevention will need to become faster, more adaptive, and more collaborative. Orca is building the infrastructure to help businesses stay ahead of the syndicates operating across an increasingly complex digital economy.

Read the full MyBroadband article.

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.

Wellness is becoming a bigger priority for consumers, employers, and hospitality teams. But access has not always kept up.

Traditional spa services can be expensive and inflexible for consumers. Independent therapists often struggle to build a steady book of business. Hotels and companies want to offer wellness experiences without taking on the cost and complexity of operating a full spa. That is the gap Scape is building into.

Scape is an on-demand wellness marketplace that connects certified therapists with individual clients, companies, and hotels. Through its mobile app, customers can book premium massage and wellness services, choose therapists, and manage the experience from one place.

Pro Network recently profiled the company and its model, highlighting how Scape is combining technology, a managed therapist network, and a premium customer experience to make wellness services more accessible and scalable.

What started as a consumer offering has expanded into a broader platform across B2C, corporate wellness, and hospitality. For companies, Scape supports employee wellness programs through digital campaigns, online registration, and on-site massage sessions. For hotels, it offers a way to provide spa-quality services without major infrastructure or specialized staffing investments.

That expansion is showing up in the numbers. According to the article, Scape has served more than 250 corporate clients, delivered more than 33,000 consumer services, grown B2B 71.5% quarter-over-quarter, and is projecting $4 million in revenue while expanding further in the U.S.

We have always liked companies that use technology to modernize large, offline categories without losing the human experience that makes the service valuable in the first place. Scape fits that pattern: software makes the marketplace work, but trust, quality, and therapist-client experience remain at the center.

As wellness becomes a more consistent part of how people work, travel, and take care of themselves, Scape is building the infrastructure to bring premium services to more places with less friction.

Read the full Pro Network article.

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.

In terms of CapEx, the spending curve follows the same pattern-

• Amazon is projecting roughly $200B of capital spending in 2026, up from $131B in 2025.

• Alphabet expects $180B-$190B, roughly double last year’s level.

• Meta guided to $115B-$135B in 2026 after spending $72.2B in 2025.

All the above are planning to pour more than $630B into data centers and AI chips this year.

And obviously, while companies are committing record amounts of capital to AI infrastructure, many are also restructuring their workforces around the assumption that AI will let them do more with fewer people.

• July - Microsoft plans to lay off under 2.5% of its workforce

• June - Oracle’s workforce shrank by about 21,000 employees, or roughly 13%.

• May - Meta laid off about 8,000 employees, roughly 10% of its workforce.

• May - Intuit laid off over 3,000 employees, or about 17% of its workforce.

• May - LinkedIn laid off about 5% of staff, 875 employees.

The signals seem clear: Ramp token spend → Cut down workforce → CapEx increases

However, I believe the real question is: when will we hit the inflection point on marginal returns to compute? Having used nearly every foundation and open-source model, I think we are clearly approaching a period of diminishing marginal returns. Fable 5 may be excellent, and future frontier models will absolutely matter for certain categories, especially scientific discovery, physical AI, simulation, robotics, and other domains where the hardest problems still require the best models.

But for most organizations, the work is not always that complex. At some point, the question becomes: does it actually make sense to pay more for the next Claude or OpenAI model, or is the better answer to optimize around the model that is “good enough” for the workflow?

That is where the tradeoffs start to matter. Companies will increasingly optimize across throughput, latency, token cost, reliability, and security rather than blindly defaulting to the most powerful model available. As organizations learn how to use AI properly, the conversation will shift from “which model is best?” to “which model is best for this job at this price?”

Alex Karp has been making a version of this argument from the sovereignty angle: companies and governments should be wary of paying for tokens while sending their most valuable data into closed model ecosystems. The risk is not just leakage and dependency.

Is Fable 5 really worth a roughly 2x price increase for the average enterprise workflow? For most companies, the next wave of AI value may not come from blindly building more agents on top of the most expensive foundation model. It may come from having actual “AI specialists” who understand model routing, fine-tuning, inference optimization, orchestration layers, deployment architecture - people who can decide when to use Claude or OpenAI, when to run a company-specific local SLM through Ollama, and when to optimize a smaller model on dedicated GPU infrastructure, i.e CoreWeave. These are also areas I believe where innovation around AI will endure.

The advantage shifts from “who has access to the best model?” to “who knows how to apply the most optimal stack.

Keeping the grid reliable starts with knowing what is happening in the field.

For electric utilities, that work is still harder than it should be. Inspection programs are expensive, senior qualified workers are in short supply, and the findings often end up trapped in PDFs, spreadsheets, and systems that are difficult to use across the organization.

At the same time, utilities are under pressure to move faster. Wildfire mitigation plans, storm hardening commitments, resiliency programs, and federal inspection requirements all depend on asset-level visibility that can stand up to regulatory review.

ThreeV is building for that operational reality.

The company develops AI infrastructure for electric utility operations, helping utilities turn inspection data into usable intelligence across asset strategy, remediation, compliance, and planning. Its platform processes visual field data, classifies assets, detects defects, and makes inspection records searchable and actionable across existing workflows.

Now, ThreeV is partnering with Reliability Transformation Solutions (RTS) to launch Vision, a managed agentic AI inspection offering for U.S. electric utilities.

The model is practical: combine RTS‘ senior Certified Journeyman Linemen and Qualified Electrical Worker expertise with ThreeV‘s Vision inspection platform, AI model training, and inspection software. Utilities can start with a bounded special project on a single circuit or area, or use Vision for a broader routine inspection program.

That matters because many AI programs in industrial settings struggle to get past the pilot stage. Utilities need expert-grade inspections now, not a multi-year data science side project. Vision gives them the inspection capacity and defensible records they need today, while each completed inspection creates ground truth for customer-specific computer vision and agentic inspection models.

Over time, that creates a flywheel. The first inspection cycle produces validated data. Future cycles can shift more routine inspection work to AI agents, with expert linemen focused on quality assurance, spot checks, and the findings that require senior judgment.

As ThreeV CEO Eren Aksu put it, the goal is value in weeks, not years: humans and agents working together to serve utility customers.

The launch also fits ThreeV‘s broader mission. The company is focused on asset-heavy industries where inspection quality is not just an efficiency problem. It is a safety, reliability, compliance, and resilience problem. Better inspection intelligence can help utilities prioritize remediation, reduce avoidable field work, and move from static records to decisions that actually reach the people responsible for the grid.

For a sector where trust, domain expertise, and regulatory defensibility matter, Vision is a strong wedge: not AI in search of a workflow, but AI embedded directly into the inspection work utilities already have to do.

Read the full announcement in Morningstar.

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.

From the archives: Listen to Oban MacTavish with Jenny Fielding, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: In the Club with Spade. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

Regulatory compliance is one of the most overlooked burdens for institutions. For years, organizations have relied on spreadsheets, emails, and outdated systems to manage compliance and governance. Reportwell replaces that patchwork with a single AI-powered platform for streamlined reporting and regulatory compliance for governmental agencies, charter entities, and school districts. The company is currently serving customers across 17 states and is fielding inbound interest from banks, law firms, construction companies, and federal agencies. By making compliance faster, more accurate, and easier to manage, Reportwell frees teams to focus less on paperwork and more on delivering impact.

Co-founders Jacob Allen (CEO), Lani Luo (COO), and Jennica Adkins (CCO) met over 15 years ago as Teach For America teachers in Chicago, where they lived together before relocating as a group to open charter schools in Indianapolis. Co-founders Jacob Peters (CPO) and David Spitz (CFO) later joined to grow the footprint of the school network. As school leaders, they became frustrated with the clunky, error-prone compliance processes that were used to deliver reports to city, state, and federal agencies. Determined to solve the problem, they moved to Detroit to build Reportwell, inspired by the robust funding and engineering ecosystem. According to Jacob, CEO, the team still travels, works, debates, and celebrates together like family, a dynamic they credit with helping Reportwell maintain 100% customer retention over the past three years. Jacob has also been named to the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, received the King of Color award from Morehouse College, and was inducted into the University of Washington Hall of Fame. He shares more about Reportwell and why modernizing compliance has become a much bigger opportunity than anyone expected.

What’s Reportwell’s North Star?

Our North Star is regulatory compliance and governance: making the messy, manual, risk‑filled processes around laws, policies, and oversight much more reliable and intelligent. We want boards, superintendents, and industry leaders to have a clear, AI‑assisted view of what they’re responsible for and how they’re performing against those obligations, instead of relying on scattered spreadsheets, emails, and human memory.

What sets Reportwell apart?

We built Reportwell around how organizations actually manage compliance, not how software assumes they do. Before us, teams relied on custom-built internal systems, disconnected software, or manual processes using documents, email, and spreadsheets. By working closely with customers and mapping decades-old workflows, we created a platform that mirrors real-world operations while using AI to simplify and modernize compliance without forcing organizations to reinvent how they work.

Tell us about some recent milestones that Reportwell crushed.

There are three that stand out:

1. We’re ahead of our revenue projections this year.

2. We’re getting serious inbound from industries we thought we’d tackle years down the line; for example, the largest hospital system in the Midwest called us and said they wanted Reportwell now, and we’re in the process of rolling out to about 35 hospitals.

3. We haven’t lost a customer in three and a half years, zero churn. Many of our customers are signing three‑ and five‑year deals and say they love both our product and our team, which is exactly the kind of relationship we were hoping to build.

How has Reportwell evolved over time?

We started in K–12, helping school boards and districts manage compliance, governance, and documentation. As we built deeper AI and workflow capabilities, other industries began knocking on our door: healthcare systems, law firms, banks, restaurants, construction companies, and even a national federal agency we can’t name yet. They all said essentially the same thing: “We have the exact same antiquated, manual problems.” What’s been surprising is how often the software just works out‑of‑the‑box for these adjacent use cases. Regulation is much bigger than education, and we’re excited to tackle large, sticky compliance problems far beyond K–12.

How has your background influenced your approach to building Reportwell?

I started in the classroom more than 15 years ago as a Teach For America teacher in Chicago, where I met my co-founders. Early on we thought the big problems in public education were mostly inside the classroom: curriculum, instructional days, teacher preparation. Later, when we opened our first charter school, we saw a different layer of problems: operations, finance, governance, legal, and regulatory compliance. Those ugly, behind‑the‑scenes issues were keeping K–12 stuck in an antiquated state. That’s why, when we decided to build something, we chose not to create another curriculum or tutoring program. Instead, we went after the hard stuff: operations, finance, governance, and regulatory compliance.

Before education, I also worked as a bartender and server, experiences that taught me the importance of listening to customers and delivering great service, values that still shape how we build our company today.

Fun fact:
My husband and I brew our own beer and make our own wine. Every Christmas, we break out our homemade beer to share amongst family and friends. One day we hope to own a hobby vineyard and farm to keep ourselves “rooted” to the land.

From the archives: Listen to Oban MacTavish with Jenny Fielding, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: In the Club with Spade. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

Healthcare access is often shaped by more than clinical need.

It is shaped by time, cost, geography, stigma, and whether the system feels built for the realities of everyday life. In the Philippines, those barriers can be especially visible: crowded hospitals, long wait times, stretched physicians, and health concerns that many people delay addressing because the process feels too difficult or too exposed. &you is building around that gap.

The company is a telehealth platform designed to make care more private, convenient, and supportive for Filipinos navigating health categories that are common but often under-discussed, including weight management, hair loss, sexual health, and mental wellness.

As Rolling Stone Philippines reported, the response has been immediate. &you launched in 2025 and saw 10,000 people sign up within days. More than 100,000 Filipinos have now taken the company’s health assessment.

That demand points to a larger shift. People aren’t disengaged from healthcare. Many are looking for care that feels less intimidating, less judgmental, and easier to fit into their lives.

One of &you’s core offerings is a doctor-supervised weight management program, including access to GLP-1 treatment where appropriate. The company’s approach emphasizes licensed physician oversight, safety, and consistency, aiming to give patients a more responsible alternative to navigating shortcuts or unverified options on their own.

That matters because weight management is not only a cosmetic category. Obesity is a modifiable risk factor for heart disease and diabetes, two of the leading causes of death in the Philippines. Better access to proactive, medically guided support can become part of a broader preventive care model.

Founder Emil Eriksen frames the opportunity around removing judgment from care and designing a system that feels private, normal, and supportive. &you is also developing an AI-driven telehealth engine to improve how consultations are conducted and how treatment plans evolve over time.

The bigger opportunity is not simply moving healthcare online. It is redesigning the experience around privacy, trust, affordability, and the actual constraints people face.

For categories where stigma and friction have historically kept people from seeking help, that can be a meaningful unlock.

Read the full article in Rolling Stone Philippines: https://rollingstonephilippines.com/radar/filipinos-healthcare-system-fix-andyou/

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.

From the archives: Listen to Neha Govindraj with Jenny Fielding, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Catch You on the Bonside. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

Restaurants run on a chaotic buffet of scattered information. There are staff schedules, food orders, sales systems, and kitchen operations all sitting in different places. As a result, many owners end up making critical calls based on their gut feeling alone. Restoke is building the AI restaurant manager to give operators real-time insights and business guidance so they can spot risks and make informed decisions. The platform started as a basic operational layer that has grown into a full AI-driven recommendation and guidance system built specifically for the realities of running and scaling a restaurant business. Restoke works with everything from single-location restaurants to large multi-unit chains, including one customer that scaled from 27 locations to 120 with Restoke’s operational backbone in place.

Co-founder and CEO Assaf Stizki has been in the restaurant industry for over two decades across Europe, Australia, and the US. After a rollercoaster career spanning multiple corners of the restaurant industry, it was scaling into franchising that exposed just how fragile restaurant operations really are. There are manuals that aren’t followed, systems break down, and consistency becomes almost impossible. That frustration led him to hack together his own operational system. Around the same time he met his future co-founder and CTO Ken Brand, a mathematician with a background in machine learning. They met through a series of restaurant events that Assaf hosted. They are both self described “foodies” and quickly bonded over exploring restaurants together. They realized they could combine Assaf’s operational experience with Ken’s technical expertise to turn Assaf’s solution into a scalable AI platform: Restoke.

What’s Restoke’s North Star?

Our North Star is simple: help our customers scale with confidence. If we can take a restaurant group from a few locations to dozens or even hundreds by giving them the systems to maintain operational consistency, protect margins, optimize profitability, and replicate what works, that’s success. Our goal is to be the backbone that makes expansion predictable, efficient, and repeatable.

How does Restoke inspire “customer love”?

Customers love that they don’t have to dig through endless, fragmented data just to make a basic decision. Hospitality is chaotic: POS systems, scheduling tools, managers, kitchen chaos; it’s a constant motion. We pull those signals together and turn them into clear, real‑time insights. We tell you, “You’ve got a $6,000 risk ahead of you, here’s why, and here’s what to do.” That ability to see trends, protect margins, and make sensible decisions about next week instead of relying on “gut feeling” is what resonates most.

What’s on the horizon for Restoke?

We’re building what we see as a new category: the AI restaurant manager. It’s an intelligence layer that works both at the individual location and at HQ, supporting day‑to‑day decisions and strategic planning across the whole group. The goal is for Restoke to feel like a trusted manager that never sleeps.

How has your background influenced you as a founder?

I grew up in a Mediterranean, Middle Eastern family where food was the center of everything. Both my grandmothers were incredible cooks, and holidays and gatherings revolved around eating. In my early twenties I decided to turn that love of food into a career, moved to Europe, and worked insane hours in hospitality, chasing the romantic idea of restaurants and creativity. Later I moved to Australia with my wife, worked for some truly bad operators who taught me everything I didn’t want to replicate, and then started building my own concepts: caterings, farmers’ markets, brick‑and‑mortar restaurants, and now Restoke.

Any favorite podcasts?

I’m a big fan of the podcast TRIGGERnometry with Konstantin Kisin.

Fun fact:
I love a good burger; it’s what drives me. I honestly don’t care much about having a fancy car or house; what excites me is finding or helping create the perfect burger.

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.

From the archives: Listen to Neha Govindraj with Jenny Fielding, on the Venture Everywhere podcast: Catch You on the Bonside. Now on Apple & Spotify. Check out all our past episodes here!

Egg freezing has historically been expensive, complicated, and difficult to access.

For many people, it is also tied to deeply personal questions around health, family planning, timing, and choice. Yet the traditional process has often felt fragmented and transactional, with high upfront costs, limited access, and donor systems that can feel outdated.

Cofertility is building around a different model.

The company was co-founded by Lauren Makler, a Northeastern alum who experienced the fertility system firsthand after a rare health diagnosis put her own fertility in question. That experience helped shape Cofertility’s approach to making egg freezing more accessible while also supporting intended parents who need donor eggs.

Cofertility’s egg-sharing program allows clients to freeze their eggs for up to 10 years at no cost if they donate half to another family that otherwise may not be able to conceive. Those who choose to keep all of their eggs can access discounted freezing through Cofertility’s network of partner clinics and lenders.

The company also emphasizes a less transactional, more human-centered approach to egg donation. Rather than relying on anonymous, compensation-driven donor matching, Cofertility focuses on a non-anonymized model that gives donors and intended parents the opportunity to understand more about each other and the meaning behind the match.

That is the larger opportunity here. Fertility care is not only a clinical process. It is an access problem, a cost problem, and an experience problem.

As more people think proactively about reproductive health, platforms that can make fertility services easier to understand, afford, and navigate may become an increasingly important part of the healthcare system.

Read the full article in Northeastern Global News.

Interested in investing alongside Everywhere Ventures? Learn more about joining our investor community here.