Paulina Klimenko

Today Isembard announced a $50m Series A fundraise led by Union Square Ventures, less than a year after Notion Capital led their Seed round. 💥This is a company right at the intersection of AI & supply chain sovereignty & they’re exceeding even our most optimistic expectations. By the end of the year they will have 25 factories across the UK, US, Germany, France & Ukraine. 💥Isembard is rapidly scaling its network of AI-first factories for precision manufacturing at the same time as market demand is accelerating. Macro forces (reshoring, rising defence spend, concentration risk in Asia, and the growth of neo-primes) are structurally increasing demand for fast, local, flexible manufacturing that the current industry is unable to deliver on. 💥The innovation is in the way the company builds and franchises factories as a product with tightly integrated units of machines, software, robotics, & process intelligence that turn design files into certified components with speed & reliability. 💥Their AI software platform, MasonOS, connects all sites into a single operating system, replacing fragmented shops with standardised, high-performance industrial nodes & enabling real-time quoting, predictable delivery, & low defect rates. By owning the full production stack, Isembard delivers premium manufacturing performance with the scalability & flexibility of a software platform. 💥We are at the top of the AI hype cycle and there are understandable concerns about the ROI on the vast sums of money being invested into this new super-cycle. But, the ROI for Isembard is both clear and compelling. They will deliver components 10x faster and at 50% of the cost of current suppliers. They will also build a de-centralised, global network of factories to meet the growing demand for national or regional sovereignty. 💥This is a company with a clear vision to disrupt a massive, fragmented $1.8tn component manufacturing market. Today marks another huge stride towards that vision. And they are only just getting started. We’re thrilled to be on this journey with Alexander Fitzgerald & the team & we’re also excited to welcome Rebecca Kaden & USV into the investor base. Notion Capital Union Square Ventures Alexander Fitzgerald Rebecca Kaden Maximilian Eichler Stephen Millard Britt Mulder

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Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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I am excited to announce that Shine Capital has led AudioShake’s $14M Series A. Our investment represents the culmination of two years of searching for a company that will define the next generation of audio. Since 2023, we have been asking ourselves the question, "What technology will be used pervasively across the totality of the audio landscape?" Then we met Jessica Powell and Luke Miner, founders of AudioShake. AudioShake makes a suite of AI-powered tools for processing audio that include stem-splitting, voice isolation, speaker separation, and more. These primitives are critical infrastructure for almost any task involving audio, as evidenced by the breadth of use cases that the company serves. The Walt Disney Company and Downtown Music use AudioShake to make tracks available for sync licensing. Film studios and post-production houses use AudioShake to clean up sound from microphones to prevent re-recordings and manual audio engineering. Sports leagues and broadcasters use AudioShake to separate stadium noise from commentary to enable clean captioning and crisper audio. And Big Tech and frontier labs use AudioShake to prepare their audio data for multimodal AI training. We believe that audio will be the most important medium in the age of AI, defined by explosive growth across three categories that are even better with AudioShake: 1) Audio-as-AI-Interface: For the first time, people can perform complex compute operations using their voice. Conversing with AI will propel voice assistant usage well beyond its current ~50% adoption. 2) Explosion of Content: The rate at which user-generated content is made continues to accelerate, which will be further amplified by the possibility of AI-generated content. Audio is a superset of video — nearly every video uses sound to convey meaning, message, or emotion. 3) Voice Agents for Business: More than $100B of phone labor is performed annually in the United States. While some of it sits in call centers, most of it is fractional work. Businesses across finance, healthcare, and beyond have rapidly adopted phone agents. We are fortunate to partner with Jessica Powell and Luke Miner, passionate entrepreneurs and audiophiles dedicated to making audio as easy to work with as images or text. Audio contains vast amounts of information and creative possibility, and AudioShake will help unlock it. Thank you to our friends at Indicator Ventures for connecting us to Jessica. We are thrilled to support the AudioShake team with them, alongside Origin Ventures, Thomson Reuters, Precursor Ventures and Background Capital.

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Imagine the impact when the world’s leading Open Innovation experts collaborate across a single global network. After building the Innovation Hunters network in Israel, Ruth Arazi is taking the vision global. In our interview, Ruti breaks down the three pillars of The GIN - The Global Innovation Network: ▪️Technology: Driving cross-industry innovation. ▪️Process: Seamlessly bridging the gap between startups and corporations. ▪️People: The heartbeat of the network. Watch the clip to hear Ruti explain more. Full article and episode coming soon.

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Scaling Up: Building Israel’s Largest Logistics Community 🚀 Following a productive meeting in Tel Aviv today regarding the gaps in Israel’s trucks and heavy equipment sector, we have officially agreed on a strategic partnership to build the country’s largest logistics community. By using MyTruck as a mobile-based digital ordering center, we are streamlining operations and setting a new industry standard. In the coming weeks, we will hold joint sessions to onboard hundreds of additional trucks to the platform. The digital disruption is here. Stay tuned! 🚚🏗️ #MyTruck #LogisticsTech #ConTech #Innovation #IsraelTech #Trucking #Logistics

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A Special BizLabs Session with Gigi Levy-Weiss Today we hosted a unique and intimate session for the founders in our BizLabs Technology Scalerator, a candid conversation with one of Israel’s most influential tech investors: Gigi Levy-Weiss. Gigi, formerly CEO of 888 and a senior executive at Amdocs, is considered one of the leading “super angels” in the industry. He has invested in companies like Playtika, Similarweb, Moon Active, MyHeritage and many more, and he co-founded NFX, a venture fund managing over $1B and investing in pre-seed and seed-stage startups. But beyond the impressive résumé, he brings a sharp worldview on how real, scalable companies are built: a culture of learning, rigorous performance, and an obsession with what truly matters. During the session, we discussed what actually catches his attention when meeting a founder: Not “another nice SaaS,” but startups that can scale fast, win global markets, build a real competitive moat, and leverage AI and data in smart and meaningful ways. And he was clear: the Haredi angle can be an advantage, but only when it translates into real business value, not just a nice story. Our founders came prepared, sharp, and focused, with their numbers in mind and a global mindset. It was a rare opportunity to learn directly from someone who operates at the top tier of the tech world and is willing to share his insights openly. Proud of our BizLabs community and of the Haredi entrepreneurs who continue raising the bar every day. The next generation of Haredi innovation is here — and it’s playing in the big leagues. Bizmax | The KEMACH Foundation | Nitzan Adler | Eli Dynovisz

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It's been interesting to watch the journey of Dstillery. An AI native company (in the last wave of predictive AI) well positioned to capitalize and accelerate growth with the current wave of generative AI. It's clear that companies that have strong AI talent can adapt much much faster.

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Team8 and Battery Ventures are excited to lead Koi's $38M A-Round, joining seed investors Picture Capital, NFX and Cerca Partners for a total of $48M in funding. Huge shoutout to founders Amit Assaraf 🎏, Itay Kruk 🎏 and Idan Dardikman 🎏 for pioneering the next wave of endpoint security, covering the blind spots that traditional EDRs and MDMs were never built to protect! [Coming full circle and partnering again with Itay and Idan from Sygnia, a Team8 portfolio company! Amit, you chose well!] From packages and containers to extensions, AI models, and MCPs, Koi delivers visibility, AI-driven risk analysis, and automated enforcement to secure the software perimeter of today’s enterprises. Already protecting over 500,000 endpoints worldwide, Koi’s platform is helping some of the world’s largest companies govern self-installed and unmanaged software. By giving security teams control without slowing innovation, Koi is defining a new category in cybersecurity. Read more here: https://lnkd.in/ewtqE4Pk Ori Barzilay, Sarit Firon, Amir Zilberstein, Assaf Mischari, Ori Yankelev, Asaf Azulay, Eyal Eliakim, Uri Shamay, Rakesh K. Loonkar, Dan Amiga, Mickey Boodaei, Barak Schoster Goihman, Dharmesh Thakker, Gigi Levy-Weiss

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**Exciting Acquisitions in the Startup Ecosystem: Base44's $80M Sale to Wix** Base44, founded just six months ago, demonstrates how innovative solutions can rapidly scale in the tech landscape. With 250,000 users and impressive monthly profits, the acquisition by Wix underscores the potential of niche products in driving user engagement. At ElevenX Capital, we believe this trend highlights the importance of early investment in agile startups. What key factors do you consider when assessing the potential of a new venture? #investing #innovation #venturecapital #entrepreneurship

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"If you think building Auth is easy, you're doing it wrong." Rolling your own auth often means wrestling with security protocols, session management edge cases, password breaches, and compliance requirements...all while trying to keep users happy. Colin Sidoti and Braden Sidoti built Clerk.com to solve just this, creating authentication that developers actually want to use, and users never think twice about. Their component-first approach means implementation drops from weeks to hours, and users can stay on your domain throughout the entire flow. And, importantly, agents are about to make auth a lot harder. As AI agents increasingly authenticate and act on behalf of users, managing permissions, audit trails, and ensuring secure data access becomes exponentially more complex. Most auth providers are scrambling to retrofit old architectures, but Clerk was built with this flexibility from day one.  They're pioneering agent identity while maintaining the best-in-class developer experience that made them the go-to solution for over 15,000 applications. Menlo Ventures is thrilled to lead their $50M Series C and welcome Colin, Braden and the rest of the Clerk team to the portfolio. 🚀 CC Rama Sekhar

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This one is close to my heart! It’s always a great feeling to see an early investment raise follow-on capital, but it feels even more special when you’ve known the founder for 16 years - from business school, to the first job, to backing him as an angel in his first startup (which, yes, went bust 😬) Inamo wasn’t an easy bet in the beginning. There were real questions around the model - whether it was “venture investable,” how large the outcome could be, and what the path to scale would look like. What we were certain about, though, was that quick commerce was seeing unprecedented growth and consumer love, and that C Sumit Anand and Rupesh Thakare were battle-hardened operators who would out-execute anyone else in the market. The “how” - good founders always figure that out.. Glad that we took the leap and grateful to the Inamo team for giving us a ringside view of the journey. The execution so far has been exceptional, and we’re excited to welcome Brij Bhushan and Pankaj Agarwal from PrimeVP as Inamo enters its next chapter. To enabling Quick for everyone! 🚀 Shastra VC PrimeVP Antler Gemba Capital

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I recently joined Surge.xyz for a conversation on where the onchain economy is headed and how the underlying infrastructure is evolving. In this episode, Pawel Czech and I discuss how traditional financial systems and onchain models are beginning to converge – including the growing role of nature-based assets – and what needs to be built for this next phase to scale responsibly. We touch on market structure, trust, and why infrastructure ultimately matters more than narratives. You can listen to the full episode here: https://lnkd.in/gVYpzJ2U

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Super excited to support Cameron Witkowski and Aman B. as Bread Technologies, Inc. emerges from stealth with the announcement of their $5m seed round led by Menlo Ventures. Today We Rise!🍞 Cameron and Aman both studied Machine Learning at University of Toronto and co-authored their research paper (https://lnkd.in/gBS8PTZJ) on the concept of 'prompt baking' that formed the foundation to launch Bread. Prompt baking allows a user greater control over their AI by allowing people to 'baking' a prompt into an LLM's weights thereby embedding the prompt's behaviour permanently into the model. You can check out their latest blog post here that goes deeper (https://lnkd.in/g7vpX-hz) Northside Ventures

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From the beginning, we believed Lumana was building much more than a smarter surveillance tool. Lumana's platform reflects the next evolution in video intelligence — physical AI. This approach enables systems to go beyond basic detection capabilities to understanding context, infer intent, and deliver real-time insights that improve safety and operations at scale. Further, we decided to take the longer and more difficult direction of building a whole new generation and fully featured Video Management System (VMS). With the company’s $40M Series A, led by our friend Peter Wagner from Wing Venture Capital and our seed partners from SCAPITALVC, we’re doubling down on a platform that’s already proving its value in the real world. We are serving now close to ten thousands enterprise cameras in production! Founders like Sagi Ben Moshe bring a rare mix of vision and execution to the table. From our earliest conversations as an EIR at Norwest, it was clear that Lumana had the potential to reshape how organizations use video. Congratulations to the team on this well-deserved milestone. https://lnkd.in/gwHdaGPZ

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We are thrilled to be part of the Syntracts journey with Douglas Bemis, Christopher Martin! Syntracts is solving the crucial industry paradox of how enterprises can harness the "magic of AI" without compromising data security. We are deeply impressed by their fundamentally different and innovative approach: building secure on-prem legal AI infrastructure at scale. Syntracts utilizes thousands of experts—small language models fine-tuned with synthetic data—to provide reliable, accurate, structured data for complex legal documents. This is the purpose-built, privacy-first data layer the legal industry desperately needs. We are excited to support Syntracts as they scale trust and performance in enterprise AI. Top Harvest Capital is pleased to join Hyperplane, Myriad Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Fortitude Ventures, and Point72 Ventures and other respected firms in backing Syntracts. Adam Ghobarah M Waleed Kadous Top Harvest Capital

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Exciting highlights for investors from Startup Nation Central’s H1 2025 Israeli Ecosystem Report: - $9.3B in private tech funding, up 54% from H2 2024 - Median round size up 28%, reaching $9M - 32 mega-rounds ($50M+), up from 20 - Global investors participated in 69% of deals - Signs of recovery in early and mid-stage activity, including a 60% jump in Series B/C capital Link to the full report in the first comment.

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Honored and excited to partner with Drew Baglino and the incredible team at Heron Power as they re-imagine the electric grid for the modern world. Power in America is not zero sum. We deserve access to cheap and abundant electricity and we should win the AI race. And we must build the capacity to manufacture critical technology here at home. When faced with existential challenges, we deploy technology against them. And we win.

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