Danielle Cohen-Shohet

Y Combinator just dropped their Request for Startups for Fall 2025 💥 It’s a blueprint of what YC wants to fund right now. The ideas they believe could become billion dollar companies. Some are no-brainers. Others are wild 👇

6

🚨 Founders: If you're not exploring cross-industry alliances, you're playing the wrong game. Some of the biggest breakout companies didn’t scale by outspending the competition they scaled by out-partnering them. 🚀 Think Figma embedding into dev workflows. 🚀 Calendly riding the rails of Zoom and Salesforce. 🚀 Zapier integrating with Trello and Slack before raising big money. 💡 The playbook? Fuse your solution with another industry's infrastructure and unlock distribution, data, or demand without burning capital. Cross-industry alliances do 3 things: 1. Collapse time by borrowing someone else’s audience. 2. Unlock non-obvious use cases that give you strategic moats. 3. Increase your valuation before the first funding conversation. If you're a startup founder and you’re stuck thinking, “We need capital to grow,” you’re asking the wrong question. Ask instead: 👉 “Who’s already serving my customer in a different way and how do we win together?” That’s how exponential growth actually happens. 💬 Founders: Which alliance would double your reach in 90 days? #Startups #GrowthStrategy #VC #EarlyStage #FounderTips #Platform #AI

2

5 Comments

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

71

3 Comments

Fullstack startups are the latest craze: Marc Andreessen talked about this phenomenon on Jack Altman's latest podcast Today Browserbase launched Director.ai for consumers to automate the web This follows Vercel launching @v0 for consumers to build sites and apps Both of these companies are infrastructure (picks and shovels) providers that have now moved "up the stack" to launch consumer applications on top of their infra This is the latest in vogue playbook following: Compound startups (multi-product - i.e. Rippling) Layer cake vertical startups (SaaS+Payments+Lending - i.e. ServiceTitan) Links in comments: Jack altman Marc podcast Director.ai launch video Paul Klein IV, Guillermo Rauch, CRV

95

5 Comments

The Headline family is experiencing incredible momentum, and today our portfolio company DeepIP is announcing a $25M Series B, bringing total funding to $40M.  This is the kind of company that doesn’t just add AI to a workflow, but it sets the standard for an entire category. The momentum speaks for itself: 1️⃣ 10x ARR growth in < 18 months 2️⃣ Trusted by 400+ law firms and leading corporate IP teams globally 3️⃣ 2M+ chats on the DeepIP platform We’ve had the chance to back FX (Francois-Xavier) L. and Edouard D., leading their Seed round with Headline. Watching them take on a problem as complex and high-stakes as patent work has been genuinely impressive. And working with them has been an absolute pleasure: these 2 are coupling very high ambition and humility. Tech built in Europe, but opening the US office very early and FX starting a life in NYC with his family with 0 hesitation in order to build a global category leader in the IP industry. What convinced me early is still what stands out today: patent teams don’t need another standalone AI tool. They need something that fits the way the work actually happens: documents, long-running matters, multiple stakeholders, and zero room for sloppy context handoffs. Big congrats to the whole DeepIP team + Korelya Capital, Balderton & Serena Proud that we’re doubling down at Headline and continuing the support for what’s next!

124

10 Comments