Modernist Venture Club: Startup Pitch Night & Founder/Investor Social
Modernist Venture Club: we support & invest in member-founded & funded companies. Stage & industry agnostic.
Hear founder pitches from early stage (pre-launch -> seed) Modernist Member founded/funded companies, hear feedback from leading Modernist Member VC's, & (maybe) get a chance to invest in their round(s) through our Modernist SPV's.
7p-8:15p | Startup Founder/Investor Reception (private member dinner beforehand with investors & presenting companies)
8:15p-9:30p | Pitches, Feedback, q&a
9:30p-11:30p | Founder/Investor Social
~~~~~
Presenting Companies: (all Modernist members)
BioDaVinci - AI Renaissance in Biology, Co-founded by member Nigam Arora
Stage: Seed / Series A
AI drug development using multimodal technology to create better medicines. Our tech is anchored in human biology, providing the high quality data sets necessary for using AI in drug development. We sell B2B to Big Pharma providing de-risked drug candidates specifically designed for their clinical trial and commercial pipelines. Our world class team has self funded the MVP of our technology and are launching a pilot program with Big Pharma buyers later this year.
Our team are pioneers of AI drug development and disease modeling from Harvard, MIT, and Purdue University. We have seven PhD scientists on the team including professors that have managed billion dollar projects and started multiple companies. Key team members have working relationships of 20+ years and the collective team holds 100+ years of experience with R&D and life science entrepreneurship.
Nigam B. Arora, PhD - CEO - Previously co-founded drug development consulting firm servicing billion dollar clients.
Natasha Arora, PhD - Chief Scientific Officer - Built next gen disease modeling systems at MIT, Harvard and venture backed startups to support drug development programs.
Bartek Rajwa, PhD - Head of AI and Bioinformatics - 25 years building AI tools to understand biology.
V. Jo Davisson, PhD - Head of Drug Development - 40 years creating and commercializing drug development technologies.
~~~~~~~~~
Interweb, Inc. Founded by member Dan Lynch
Interweb, Inc. is building the “printing press” for software development, streamlining the creation process and enabling developers to work on a higher conceptual plane.
Our software suite, starting with a backend builder and evolving into Web3 tools for developers, has collectively amassed over 20 million downloads. LaunchQL, our flagship PostgreSQL suite, is powering over 1M+ databases for leaders like Supabase and Neon DB. Cosmology, our suite of Web3 tools, plays a critical role in supporting more than 150
blockchains, including multi-billion dollar market cap giants like dYdX, Celestia, and Osmosis, which process billions of dollars of transactions monthly.
Interweb, Inc.’s approach to software development hinges on no-code, low-code, and no-chain paradigms, operating at the very DNA of software. Our products enable application development to transcend the low-level details of the technology they’re built on, paving the way for more innovation and better user experiences.
For nearly three decades, our Founder, Dan Lynch, has been shaping the Web, including through the founding and scaling of pioneering low and no-code companies famo.us and brandcast.com. His ventures have attracted over $120M in funding and power Fortune 100 brands. Our team includes pioneers in the Cosmos ecosystem who developed the first
Ethereum bridge, contributed to the design and implementation of the IBC protocol, and spearheaded development of the Cosmos SDK, Cosmos Hub, and Osmosis.
~~~~~~~~~~
MyCompanions, Co-founded by member Maggie Sin
Stage: Pre-Seed
Website: www.MyCompanions.AI
Website/Social Media: www.instagram.com/mycompanions.ai | https://twitter.com/MyCompanionsAI
MyCompanions is an AI-enabled creator copilot, showcasing a suite of tools for creators. Our first product is an AI twin for creators to offer 24/7 personalized multimodal communication (text, voice, media) to their fans on Telegram, keeping their fans engaged and unlocking direct monetization opportunities. We've worked with 25 creators and have over 30k users. Our second product is a creator platform browser extension to help creators and agencies automate interactions and monetizations.
Our team is led by a creator herself, Maggie Sin (AI product lead at Adobe), who has seen firsthand how difficult it is to find time to do everything it takes to maintain a creator business and engage with her fans. The other two co-founders include an AI expert (Ph.D from Cambridge and senior AI/ML engineer manager at a top pharma company) and an investor / entrepreneur (co-founded a startup valued at $125M, ex-hedge fund, ex-McKinsey.
~~~~~~~~~
Clink AI, Founded by member Claire Xie
Stage: Pre-Seed
Website: https://clink.business/
Clink AI: AI Sales Agent for AI SaaS companies to 10X monetization. All-in-one platform that augment BDR’s full sales funnel intelligence, value-based pricing, and billing automation.
Clink AI has 3 founding team members, with skillsets of full-stack engineering, engineering management, data science, machine learning, product, and growth with over 30 years of combined experience from Y Combinator, Doordash, Uber, Apple, and Google. The team comes from the academic backgrounds of Harvard, UCSD, and Thunderbird School of Global Management.
Clink AI is looking to onboard AI software companies to join our private beta, and offer an exclusive 20% off discount for customers coming from the Modernist community. Reach out to claire@clink.business to learn more, using code: ModernistSummit.
~~~~~~~~~
Immersive Bliss - Founded by member Rodrigo Aquino
Stage: Pre-launch
Immersive Bliss - Extended reality platform for immersive experiences (initially focused on laughter).
Immersive experiences will change the way we think of Extended Reality. Beyond metaverse and avatars, we will experience real life in the headset.
We’re building an immersive experience platform initially focused on laughter. Our first niche is comedy clubs. People want to laugh more. Comedy clubs can help, but are constrained by location, space and schedules. We will start by solving that problem. We have a team of experts and the best technology to bring the comedy club experience to you. This is not watching a show, it's "being there", anytime, anywhere.
We started working on this vision in May (assembling the team, setting partnerships and alpha-testing first experience). We'll be launching late June, selling ~15min immersive stand-up shows in the Apple Vision Pro.
Our 2024 goal is to become the leading XR platform across headsets in the niche of immersive comedy shows. Our long-term vision is to become the main platform for all things immersive (proprietary library and marketplace).
- Rodrigo recently dropped out of Corporate America to pursue his dream of starting a company and making a positive impact in society. His background is exceptionally diverse: Management Consulting, Finance, Law and Music (Fun Fact: He was a professional musician, singer & songwriter in Brazil until he was 28 years old, having recorded two albums and two specials broadcast on live TV). He spent the last 8 years in Strategy and Tech (Bain & Company, Dell, Palo Alto Networks). Prior to that, he worked in M&A in Brazil (MGPartners).
Rodrigo holds an MBA from UNC at Chapel Hill (full scholarship), a Law Degree and specializations in Tax Law and in Finance from reputable institutions in Brazil
~~~~~~~~~
INVESTORS (All Modernist Members)
Jeff Herbst is Co-Founding Managing Partner of GFT Ventures. He brings to the fund over three decades of venture capital, operational, business development and M&A experience. Prior to launching GFT, Jeff spent 20 years as NVIDIA’s Vice President of Business Development where he built an ecosystem of accelerated computing applications spanning the domains of AI, Data Science, Autonomous Machines, and Graphics and Visualization. During his tenure at the company, among other things he created the Nvidia ventures and acquisitions programs, overseeing more than 40 global investments and 20 acquisitions valued over $8B. He also led the Nvidia Inception global startup accelerator, now comprised of more than 10,000 AI, Data Science and High Performance computing companies.
Prior to joining Nvidia, Jeff ran the Business Development function at the Altavista search engine, and was a Partner at the Wilson Sonsini law firm in Palo Alto. He holds a JD from Stanford University and a BS with Honors in Computer Science and Economics from Brown University.
Yasmeen Drummond, NIMA Capital ($1B AUM)
Yasmeen grew up in Berkeley California, attended UCB, and studied Public health and has an MBA. She worked in the epidemiology and biotech sector before discovering blockchain as one of the early “OGs” in 2015. She fell in love with smart contracts and the wide variety of use cases that can be leveraged by blockchain to back and build world changing companies. She’s a voting member of several DAOs(incl HPEC, a DAO for doctors), long time holder of crypto, and inspirational thought leader passionate about evolving humanity towards a more harmonious future.
In addition to investing in 50+ startups and funds over the past 6 years at a $1B+ family office in Silicon Valley, she has helped mentor and launch many early stage founders in web3, AI and health-tech. Yasmeen has also been very active as a leader in philanthropy and several communities including Modernist, Summit, Actai, Women in Blockchain, Women in AI, The Battery SF, burning man & more. Yasmeen is a dedicated mother and spends a lot of her free time learning about how we can educate this new generation in a way that will prepare them for the new world that’s coming. She’s also big into meditating and highly recommends Olo wellness app and The Art of Living community. She’s very bullish on evangelizing empathy and human connection.