Lorimer Ventures

Exciting news! We’ve increased our Series A financing to $53.9M! On the heels of recently surpassing 100,000 fleet production hours and more than 1.2 billion products packed and stacked by our Robots-as-a-Service automation equipment, this additional round adds $27.4M in financing to continue scaling the easiest and most reliable way for US manufacturers to deploy automation and unlock greater production capacity across the supply chain. The new investments from Blackhorn Ventures, Mitsubishi HC Capital America, Inc., NEC and Translink Orchestrating Future Fund, Alumni Ventures, FJ Labs, and additional investments from Lux Capital, Initialized Capital, and Lorimer Ventures allow us to double down on our strategy to bring more Pay-for-Productivity automation to US manufacturers by:  - Expanding our fleet of standardized automation solutions - Increasing our network of support and service people across the U.S. - Enhancing our equipment-agnostic software offering that includes AI-based motion planning, predictive maintenance, system design suite, and more intuitive customer interfaces and dashboards A huge thank you to everyone who has been a part of this journey. This milestone is a testament to the dedication, innovation, and hard work of our incredible team, as well as the trust and support of our customers and investors. Stay tuned for more updates and announcements as we embark on this next phase of our adventure! #SeriesA #Funding #Innovation #Tech #Growth #Automation #Robotics #Formic https://lnkd.in/d5pShmRV

Last year, 1 in 10 teens attempted suicide. It almost never starts there. Instead, it begins with a mild or moderate, treatable mental health issue. Structural features in our healthcare system render it virtually impossible for teens to get the help they need. Between acute provider shortages and low insurance participation, kids have no access to timely, effective care. And without treatment, symptoms that were once mild can rapidly devolve. Meet Marble Health: Our mission is to increase access to timely, preventative care for all teens. Marble accepts all insurance plans, including Medicaid, and offers virtual care with an emphasis on group therapy. No insurance holdups. No waitlists. I’m thrilled to announce that Marble has raised 5M in funding from Khosla Ventures, Town Hall Ventures, IA Ventures, with participation from Rex Woodbury at Daybreak, Lorimer Ventures, and strategic advisors, including the CEO of Rightway, among others. Tackling the teen mental health crisis requires an exceptional team. If you’re interested in joining us, we’d love to hear from you. We’re hiring across the board.

Last September, I left Stripe after 8+ years to build something new with my friend Rob Cheung. Today, we're launching Substrate, the first inference API optimized for multi-step AI workloads. https://substrate.run With Substrate, you connect nodes from a curated library that includes optimized ML models, built-in file and vector storage, a code interpreter, and logical control flow. By simply connecting nodes, you describe a graph workflow, which Substrate then analyzes and runs as fast as possible. Entire graphs of many nodes will often run on a single machine, with microsecond communication between tasks. With this launch, we're announcing our $8M Series Seed led by Lightspeed with participation from South Park Commons, Craft Ventures, Red Swan Ventures, and Lorimer Ventures, joined by industry luminaries like Guillermo Rauch, Immad Akhund, William Gaybrick, Chris Best, Gokul Rajaram, Shreyas Doshi, Jana Messerschmidt, Michael Manapat, and Matthew Hartman. We’ve been working on Substrate privately for nearly a year. We’ve battle-tested the product with great customers like Substack, and we’re finally ready to open access to everyone. Substrate was built by an exceptional team: Liam Griffiths, Rishabh Parikh, 💭 Kyle Pitzen, and Chris S., who bring years of experience building world-class software at Stripe, Pulumi, Robust Intelligence, Confluent, Zendesk, and Grailed. Truly, I have never enjoyed working with a group of people more in my entire career. Thank you to all our friends and early supporters for helping us in the first chapter of this adventure: Aditya Agarwal, Ruchi Sanghvi, Shreyans Bhansali, Namrata Patel, Andrew Kortina, iqram and the immigrant groove, Sam Lessin, Julian Connor, Mike Cohen, Jairaj Sethi, Chris Mueller, Stanislas Polu, Sabrina Hahn, Anne Lee Skates, Audrey Kim, Quinn Garner, Jason Cui.

VC Emerging Managers Need Your Help: Part 2 It will still be another year before the tech/VC world starts to really recover There will be huge repercussions if the earliest and riskiest investors don't have the money to seed the startup environment - less founders will be able to start companies. Yes yes I know “Trace you don’t have to raise money to start a company!” To which I say you’re right BUT some do; while it’s not for everyone, we the angels and VCs, are only in business because they need to raise capital. The proverbial pendulum has swung back towards investors being in control for everything that isn’t Ai hype. We also have to consider all the orphaned and zombie startups that have raised a few million to even hundreds of millions that can’t raise anymore and/or exit (there are 1000+ unicorns worth $1B+). It’s really heart wrenching to meet some of these founders who know they’re between a rock and a hard place - they’ve worked years and will never see any liquidity. While the odds were always against them, the reality is starting to set in and they wont just shut down their company because of employees, a sense of failure to themselves, friends/family and their investors. They are their startup. https://lnkd.in/eh3_AMgE

These are the best-in-class AI tools every early stage startup should be using: Video: Runway, Pika, krea.ai Bots: Claude by Anthropic, Perplexity Content creation: Copy.ai, Writesonic Grammar: Wordtune Short videos: Submagic Image generation: Midjourney, Ideogram Design: Modyfi, Galileo AI Voice & music generation: Suno, ElevenLabs Knowledge management: Notion AI Transcription & meeting assistants: Fireflies.ai, Otter.ai Scheduling: Reclaim.ai Decks: Gamma Website builder: Durable Coding: Codeium, Devin by Cognition Email: Inbox Zero Outbound sales: SellScale Dubbing: Deeptune Prompt engineering: PromptLayer

I talk a lot about the future of presentations, so it's always fun sitting down with someone like Jeremy Caplan because he knows the space so well. He just shared a deeper dive on Gamma's approach in his piece on Fast Company. https://lnkd.in/gPUhMp6r

Gamma just raised a $12M Series A led by Accel! For ~40 years, slides have been the go-to for presenting ideas. We're reimagining things from the ground up. Our story so far: Gamma started at the end of 2020. Peak pandemic, the world was in a different state. • We bet on SF, and started a sublease during shelter-in-place • Team of 16 now (first 7 ex-Optimizely) • Profitable and growth accelerating • Over 60 million gammas created Our product strategy is dead simple: Bring together modern primitives and the right AI. And our 2024 roadmap remains stubbornly consistent. Our mission: Make content creation feel effortless — whether you have design skills or not. You might be asking: → “Haven't there been plenty of failed attempts at disrupting powerpoint?” → ”What's different this time?” → “Why us?” It’s simple. We're the first writing-based design tool — and the fastest (and easiest) way to structure your ideas. Gamma is used for more than just traditional presentations. Our users share links async, export pdfs, and save images. Since our websites feature launch a couple months ago, we've seen 100K+ sites published. 👀 Gamma is a malleable medium you can mold to your needs. We're pumped we get to partner with the very best: → Vas Natarajan → Accel → Script Capital → South Park Commons And an incredible group of investors and early supporters including Amy Saper, Julie Zhuo, Claire Vo, Dan Siroker, Pete Koomen, Siqi Chen, Ben Lang, Ben Tossell, Dave Lu, Allison Pickens, Afore Capital, Lorimer Ventures, LocalGlobe, Fellows Fund. If you haven't built anything with Gamma yet, give it a try! We also have some exciting product announcements coming, so give us a follow → Gamma