Ihar Mahaniok

🚀 YC-backed startup Central has raised $8.6 million in a seed round led by First Round Capital, with participation from Y Combinator and others, bringing its total funding to $9.1 million. Founded by Josh Wymer, Pranav Kashyap, and Nilay Modi, Central serves hundreds of startups and has processed over $75 million in payroll. Unlike traditional providers like Gusto or Rippling, Central operates as a conversational “teammate” in Slack, allowing users to message payroll and HR tasks that the platform then handles autonomously. With this funding, Central plans to expand its engineering and support teams, develop new features, and enhance integration with the startup ecosystem. 📖 Read the full story → https://lnkd.in/dZnvDSb4 #startup #funding #AI #HRtech #backoffice #payroll #Central #Slack

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Strawberry, the AI-powered self-driving browser, has raised $6M led by General Catalyst and EQT Ventures & Growth, with backing from founders of Lovable, Supabase, and Hugging Face. The company is now launching its beta version, offering users intelligent, personalized companions that automate complex workflows directly within the browser, from research to lead generation. Founded by Charles Maddock, Arian Hanifi, and Sebastian Thunman. With this launch, Strawberry is redefining how people work with AI , turning the browser into an intelligent workspace built around each user’s habits and goals. Full article in the comments.

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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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LizzyAI Raises $5M Seed to Expand #AI-Native Interviewing Platform LizzyAI, a NYC-based provider of an AI-native interviewing platform, has raised $5M in Seed funding. The round was led by NEA, with participation from Speedinvest and Zero Prime Ventures. The funding will be used to grow engineering and go-to-market teams, expand integrations, and further develop lizzyAI - AI interviews. Made human.’s adaptive AI-powered interview engine. Founded by CEO Yannis Niebelschuetz, LizzyAI helps companies evaluate candidates through dynamic, structured, human-like conversations. Its conversational AI conducts role-specific interviews in real time, assessing communication skills, problem-solving ability, and job-relevant traits while allowing candidates to interact naturally. The platform is available for organizations of all sizes, with offices in Berlin and Barcelona. Team- Devin Larkins Sawyer Cordes Eric Bouet Jeremy Alexander D. Amber Weaver Pedro Cabrera Michael Zeitlin Kamal Nambiar Lana Ljoka Megan O'Malley Yannis Niebelschuetz Diego Mayorga Nicolas Alvarez Craig Steinfeld Sara Bettaieb Sascha Mossner Olena Vlasenko Emanuel Pécora Matias Fessia #FundingNews #SeedFunding #HRTech #AIRecruiting #ConversationalAI #TalentAcquisition #HiringTech #StartupGrowth #LizzyAI #FutureOfWork

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I’m thrilled to officially announce our $3M seed investment in Propel People, a company we built inside the 1848 Ventures studio to tackle one of the biggest challenges facing the #construction industry today: the skilled #labor shortage. For small and medium-sized contractors, hiring isn't just a challenge. It's the number one threat to their growth, profitability, and safety. With 94% of contractors struggling to find qualified workers, it’s clear that traditional hiring methods aren't built for the trades. That’s why we built Propel People. It’s a mobile-first, AI-powered hiring platform designed for how construction actually works: in the field. By leveraging smart candidate ranking, instant #SMS-based screening, and a fully #bilingual interface, Propel helps contractors build great crews faster and more efficiently. I’m also thrilled to formally announce that industry veteran Dexter Bachelder is at the helm as CEO. Having worked with Dexter and the team over the last few months, we've already seen the impact of his leadership. His 25 years of experience scaling construction tech companies will be instrumental as Propel People enters this initial stage of growth. This investment reinforces our core thesis at 1848 Ventures: building AI-native companies that solve fundamental pain points for the #SMBs that form the backbone of our economy. A huge congratulations to Dexter and the entire Propel People team on this milestone. We are incredibly proud to partner with you to support the people who build our world. Read the full announcement below. #constructiontech #venturecapital #seedfunding #ai #skilledtrades #smb

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