Suzanne Rabicoff

New York City-based Betaworks has closed its third fund at $66M to invest in early-stage AI startups. Betaworks, a staple of the NYC tech ecosystem since 2008, will focus its new fund on investing in pre-seed and seed-stage AI companies. The firm has been investing in AI since 2016 and has backed companies like Hugging Face. Fund III is larger than the firm's previous funds ($46M Fund II in 2020 and $48M Fund I in 2016) and saw many of its previous limited partners return to invest, a strong signal in a challenging fundraising environment for VCs. The fund will seek to make at least 25 pre-seed to seed investments, as well as 50 investments into startups as part of the Betaworks Camps program. Congratulations to the Betaworks team. TechCrunch: https://lnkd.in/d--hfMpa #VentureCapital #AI #EarlyStage #SeedFunding #NYCTech #Fundraising

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Every time a “deal” like Renalytix’s agreement with Tempus #AI is announced, executives seem oblivious to how it turns patient lives into mere bargaining chips while bragging about being first to market, saturating the industry, and cashing in on “innovation.” It isn’t just Renalytix and Tempus AI; this pattern of top-down dealmaking and mutual self-praise is infecting the entire sector. Companies like Carna Health and DeLorean Artificial Intelligence push for what amounts to “science fiction math” as the solution only at ground level, and the same basic human needs go unmet, and vital reforms gather dust. There is still no seamless integration of comprehensive mental health support for #CKD or #dialysis, no genuine access to true Medical Nutrition Therapy that could prevent decline instead of just treating numbers on a chart, and the bill of rights for kidney patients remains outdated and unenforced. As these companies race for market share, leaders congratulate each other for “unlocking data” and “increasing metrics.” In reality, they’re just perfecting reciprocal back-patting, unspoken quid pro quo, and revisionist storytelling Executives hide in their boardrooms, never facing the anguish endured each day by those supposedly at the heart of their work. They refuse to name or fix the exhaustion, system failures, and suffering that define the experience of families dealing with kidney disease. They still pretend that a new contract or another data-driven solution actually improves care while patients fall through the cracks—misdiagnosed, unsupported, and left alone to navigate the treacherous space between hope and despair. This is not a missed opportunity; it is the result of an industry culture that exploits the vulnerable, celebrates greed, and cultivates an insular, unaccountable rat race. CEOs and board members do not walk into clinics, do not answer patient coalitions, and never take responsibility for why even the most basic reforms in mental health, nutrition, or patient rights remain stalled while they aggressively cash their paychecks. What’s most telling is this: when patients—sidelined and deeply frustrated—muster enough courage to voice dissent in public forums, the executives and corporate players seldom acknowledge it where others can see. Instead, those courageous individuals often receive private direct messages from staff or even clinicians who quietly agree with what’s being said and confess the system really is broken But such truths are never voiced publicly because everyone is terrified of upsetting the investors who bankroll these “innovations.” Eric Lefkofsky Ryan Fukushima Christina Antoniou Fergus Fleming Mary Miller Sallah, MHA Tim Fitzpatrick Salvatore Giovanni Viscomi, MD Boris Berat Karin Hehenberger Michael Morales aizebhughele kelvin David Moskowitz The real bottom line: in this industry, speaking the patient’s truth gets you a private nod and a public cold shoulder—because profit always drowns out pain

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Everyone's talking about AI, but hype drowns out concerns voiced about the challenges Generative AI creates. Advika Jalan from MMC Ventures spoke at Google Best of Next for startups about new data access techniques that enable AI startups to build models ethically and affordably without inviting massive licensing fees or lawsuits. The most illuminating part of her talk shed light on how Pokémon Go has actually led to real world geo data collection at massive scale for AI models to train on!! 🐒

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Black Forest Labs' new model to create a "flood of new startups"? 🚀 → Virtual try-on could improve 10x. → New creative experiences beyond basic filters. → 12B params, fine-tunes on consumer hardware! → Platforms like FAL support LoRA training. What new startups will this model inspire? 🤔 Image credit: Artificial Analysis Learn more here: https://lnkd.in/gzp5iaGt

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Recently in a client interaction I called POC an outdated concept, this article has gone one step further and says it's dead, can't agree more. You have to deploy and test simultaneously and evaluate results and not do a POC on some random sample or fudged data!! A full blown implementation is the way forward in AI projects else start ups will waste a lot of time and resources!!

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Health tech should be invisible, humble, and ambient. Evaluating a digital health company by number of patients, churn rate, and revenue. Is not wrong, but is not right either. Reason of not wrong because more patients means more growth potential for sure. But our ultimate goal is better population health. Big population is one of factors, but more importantly is their health. So I think we should look into outcomes delivered by those companies as the first step, then see if their solution is scalable. Not the other way around.

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