Veronika Sonsev

Today we officially kick off our $2M pre seed round for Salubrum (Backed by Forum Ventures), supported by Forum Ventures, Coeus Collective Ventures, and Draper House Americas. Healthcare companies spend over $30B a year trying to acquire patients. The problem is not media. The problem is timing. Every time a patient approaches a healthcare decision a moment opens. Which doctor to see. Which procedure to pursue. Which treatment to start. For the companies involved in that decision, knowing that moment exists is incredibly valuable. Salubrum (Backed by Forum Ventures) is building the intelligence layer that maps those decision moments across the U.S. patient population. Our system aggregates large healthcare datasets covering 300M+ patient identities and uses them to predict when individuals are approaching important healthcare decisions. That signal can then be used by providers, pharma companies, payers, and other healthcare organizations trying to reach patients at the right time. Our first wedge is patient acquisition for healthcare providers and brands, but the underlying intelligence layer has much broader applications wherever patient behavior influences economic decisions. Over the past months we have quietly built the foundation. • Early pilots validating our patient intent scoring system • Distribution partnerships forming across healthcare platforms • Backed by Forum Ventures, Coeus Collective Ventures, Draper House Americas, NEXT Canada and Metta World Peace Starting tomorrow we will be meeting investors as part of the Forum Ventures showcase. If you are an investor interested in building with us get in touch. Calendly: https://lnkd.in/e5j-VvGC Investor Memo: https://lnkd.in/e5HyemAp

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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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Such a great conversation - we covered all things healthtech, from building inclusive and engaging products to managing regulatory pathways and scaling. Highlights from the panel with the incredible Laura Stembridge and Kayla-Jade Butkow: - User needs keep increasing and systems are less and less equipped to deal with this at scale, especially within mental health and neurodiversity - Products like Outset Wellness, InsideOut®and auryx can help filling the gaps, but regulatory red tape still makes adoption challenging - Respecting users' privacy and earning their trust remains crucial as more and more personal and health data is shared with services - and how we deal with it will shape adoption moving forward Everyone at the Google office was an absolute star and we all felt pretty much at home (plus I have scored my new favourite water bottle!).

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Excited to announce Top Shelf Ventures's latest investment: Eileen Inc. Eileen is a retail intelligence platform that gives brands on-demand, real-time visibility into their shelf presence by connecting them to a network of 12,000+ “shoppers” who capture in-store data via photos of live shelves. If you’re a CPG brand, big or small, that wants to see what’s going on on ALL your shelves today for as little as $1/shelf, you need to check Eileen out. It sort of blew our minds the first time we tried it. Because here is the problem they’re solving: Retail execution failure is one of the most expensive and least visible problems in the CPG industry, and out-of-stock events alone cost brands approximately 8% of potential sales. Most brands have literally no independent mechanism to verify what's actually happening at the shelf level, which means brands can spend months landing distribution in a major retailer, only to find out a year later that a third of stores never put the product on the shelf. Eileen fixes that. We're particularly excited about Eileen's potential to become the Nielsen or IRI for the modern CPG landscape, and we believe its founder, Jordan Karcher is the right person to build it. Much more to come on this one.

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One of my agentic commerce predictions for 2026 in this recent Forbes piece: Matt Nichols, General Partner at Commerce Ventures, notes that the mechanics are already in motion. Looking ahead, he predicts that this year, "Agentic commerce transaction volume reaches meaningful levels as consumers advance from research to buying on AI platforms. 2026 will be the year that transactions are completed in these platforms." To this prediction, Nichols adds another: retailers will be forced to build "super-feeds" specifically for AI platforms. “These data feeds may involve monetary transactions that could include payments to AI platforms or payments to the retailer/brand (depending on balance of power).” https://lnkd.in/g65RAerA

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Who will win online shopping in the next decade - ChatGPT + Shopify? Emergent AI-powered marketplaces? Or titans like Amazon? TL;DR: Amazon. Why not ChatGPT and its new integration with Shopify? Software innovation (like conversational commerce) will never compete with Amazon’s physical innovation (same-day delivery). And Amazon is probably months away from deploying its own magic natural language search bar, closing the gap on the software edge that ChatGPT may have out of the gate. Why not new marketplaces that are vertically focused on a specific shopping category (like fashion or wellness)? Yes, the conversational commerce experience will be better when shopping for that specific category on a great vertically-focused marketplace, but Amazon’s awareness is so strong, it will be a massive uphill battle to steal shoppers away from a marketplace where 50% of online transactions are taking place. Can there be any other winners alongside Amazon? D2C companion tools that allow shoppers to gain proprietary insights overlayed ontop of their Amazon or other online shopping experiences is where I’d invest my money… Imagine you have a shopping assistant extension that appears while shopping for clothes on Amazon or Target, etc., that automatically generates a rendering of how that outfit will look on your AI-generated replica instead of only looking at pictures of models wearing the outfit — that tool wouldn’t be competing with titans like Amazon, it would enhance the experience and be welcomed by titans (boosts sales for retailers!). Titans may build their own version of that, but customizing your AI replica and having it learn your preferences across purchases from many sites is probably value-add for the shopper. In this rapidly evolving AI + shopping race, I think real moats will come from companies that create new sources of data or insights for shoppers, because the advanced search bar is going to become commoditized quickly… https://lnkd.in/g-ZN7Kc9'

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BEYOND THE BRAND: PLATFORMS POWER THE NEXT WAVE OF CARE DTC Healthcare 1.0 proved demand: consumers want fast, convenient access to medications. DTC 2.0 will prove scale: delivering longitudinal care for chronic conditions across large populations. It won’t be retail brands that define this shift. It will be the infrastructure platforms powering them. Learn more: https://lnkd.in/gwy2PEVg #DTCHealthcare #DTCHealthcare2_0 #digitalhealth #healthcareinnovation

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Today I facilitated a roundtable discussion with Anton Osika , CEO of Lovable , along with several other members of f.ounders club at Web Summit. The biggest takeaway was simple: there is no playbook. Everyone is trying to figure out how to embed AI and agentic workflows into both their products and their internal operations. Not as a “feature,” but as a new way of working. The founders who are moving fastest aren’t waiting for perfect strategy documents or long-term roadmaps. They are: • Experimenting rapidly • Creating internal champions who push change from within • Testing, iterating, and seeing what actually drives impact on a KPI This phase of AI adoption is less about theory and more about execution. It’s about learning in real time and allowing the organization to evolve through doing. Grateful for the conversation and energized by the pace of what’s coming next. #ai #websummit #agentic

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AI x Brand Builders: Takeaways from Our Consumer Founder Forum We hosted 30 founders at our office in Soho (arguably THE cobbled gateway drug to consumerism). These companies produce everything from furniture to cat food, clothing to candles and have revenues in the tens of millions of dollars. The conversation focused on the promise – and peril – of incorporating AI into growing businesses. A few standout takeaways: 💡 Technology is easy. Changing humans is hard. Much of the conversation focused on management challenges surrounding AI. A few examples: + Management by MarioKart? Several founders had set up internal leaderboards to gamify AI tool adoption. A little competition can go a long way. + Cross Generation Culture Clashes: Veteran employees tend to resist AI because it changes their workflow. Meanwhile, younger employees may resist it on moral grounds. Turns out "adoption friction" is a lifelong affliction! + Show Me the Money: One founder offered spot bonuses for employees who identified operational improvements using AI. Adoption followed incentive. 📈 AI Tools Enables Bigger Goals – Without Bigger Headcount One founder set an audacious target: triple the business before making a single new hire. This new wave of tools isn’t just about efficiency – it’s about rethinking scale. AI Might Be More Useful to Analog Businesses For digital products, AI is an existential challenge. For analog businesses, it’s an affiliate code for margin improvement. AI Can Make Pretty Pictures and Slick Sentences. That’s Not a Brand. Taste is everything. Everyone has a junior designer and copywriter on staff (thanks, AI). But that just raises the bar. Brands aren’t built on good copy – they’re built by communities with shared taste. Everyone Thinks They Won’t Buy Salesforce A founder of a nine-figure business admitted they’ve delayed adopting an ERP system in hopes of an AI-native, agent-based alternative. Every generation of founders believes they’ll be the one to avoid Salesforce. They might be right, but Salesforce may end up the cockroach of the SaaS era. 🤖 Writing for Robots (and the Robots Read Wired) Optimize sites not just for customers or Google – but for AIs. As LLMs inhale the internet, the new SEO might be about crafting content that AI can parse, summarize, and cite. PR is also growing in influence. A mention in a reputable outlet isn’t just good for credibility – it can become canonical in influential models. 💬 Chatbots as Customer Research Tools  Chatbot logs are a goldmine for understanding the customer journey – not just handling support tickets. These transcripts reveal friction points, unmet needs, and moments of confusion in the buyer’s path. A Google Analytics for customer service that can analyze conversational patterns at scale and surface actionable insights would be helpful. The data’s there, it just needs a better narrator. Lots of opportunity to grow increasingly profitable businesses!

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