Charge Ventures

We are beyond excited to announce we've successfully closed a new funding round, backed by Eleven Ventures, Uni.Fund, and Charge Ventures! This investment is a significant milestone in our journey to provide enterprises with private, personalized LLM agents they can trust! We're deeply grateful for the confidence our investors have shown in us, and we're even more motivated to continue pushing the boundaries of innovation. https://bit.ly/3XlXIiC

I am happy to announce today that my new Kids' AI company, Heeyo(heeyo.ai) is launching today and got 3.5M seed from OpenAI startup fund, Amazon Alexa Fund, Pear VC, Charge Ventures, StoryHouse Ventures and other top VCs and angels. TechCrunch did a review today and hopefully we did ok! (https://lnkd.in/gxQEAkUW) Growing up in China, I was fascinated with building paper airplanes, especially ones that could perform flips in the air. However, my parents weren't experts in aerodynamics, and my teachers were too busy to provide me with the guidance I needed to explore this passion. That’s why I wanted to build an AI that can help provide every single kid with their own dedicated coach and playmate that can chat with them and help the kids learn. While 81% of U.S. households with children own tablets, popular AI apps like ChatGPT, Character AI, and Claude do not serve children under 13. Heeyo aims to fill that gap by providing COPPA-compliant, age-appropriate AI friends for children, helping them learn and grow! Kids can choose or design their own AI friend to interact with. We offer over 2,000 interactive games and activities, including books, trivia, and role-playing adventures. Parents and children can also create their own learning games, whether it's Bible trivia or a truck treasure hunt. Our goal is to empower 1 billion kids to accomplish their wildest dreams leveraging AI, and we couldn't be more excited for what's ahead! If you have kids, would love to have you try our app at https://www.heeyo.ai/ Thank you our investors Ian, Brett, Mar, Pejman, Benny, Howard, Miles T., David, Chris, Andrew, Andrew, "Dr.V", Ada, Weston, Alexander, Jaggie and others.

Today is a moment to share a HUGE thanks to our entire Clay community ❤️ Your support over the last few years has helped us build a special product all about helping businesses grow. We just announced our $62M in total funding at a $500M valuation with Bloomberg. This includes our pre-seed led by BoxGroup, our seed led by First Round Capital, our Series A led by Sequoia Capital, and our Series B led by Meritech Capital. This milestone is a testament to your support. We see you championing us in comments, inventing new use cases, and helping each other in Slack. You’ve shared countless tables, tutorials, and memes about Clay — we wouldn’t be here without you and we’re so grateful. Our mission is to help GTM teams turn their growth ideas into reality by improving their customer research, so they can send relevant outreach to the right people. We’re excited to use this funding to continue to improve Clay, serve even more use cases, and grow our community of GTM practitioners. Thanks to your feedback, we’re building powerful new features that will help you do better customer research and run successful campaigns. It’s been a wild ride: We’ve 10x-ed YoY for each of the past two years, powered growth for tech’s biggest names like Anthropic, Intercom, Notion, and 2,500+ others, and expanded our team to fifty of the world’s best engineers, designers, and thinkers. And we’re just getting started! Read more in our announcement post (link in comments). We can’t wait to build more together!

https://lnkd.in/gXZX3-FM So proud of the team at Clay and all the work they’re doing! Kareem Amin & I started Clay back in 2017, with the idea to explore how to make it easier to quickly adapt and build software that fits your needs. Our thought was that teams would want to build internal tools for a wide variety of needs, and we saw an opportunity in helping teams build flexible software to find, and engage their target customers in creative ways. The idea was could we make software feel a little bit more like playing with Clay, and help people quickly try out their ideas and experience the feedback loop of building and seeing something in action. The team just announced a new round of funding led by Alex Kurland at Meritech Capital along our previous funding to date. This is the first time we’ve publicly announced any of our funding, and shared more about what the journey has been to date. It’s been awesome to watch the team push forward the product and build an incredible ecosystem and community around it. Thanks to the early supporters who believed in us and gave us time to build a product that captured the ideas of flexible, creative software that enables programing like superpowers for GTM and customer facing teams. Phin Barnes, Brett Berson & Josh Kopelman @ First Round Capital, BoxGroup, boldstart ventures, Mike Vernal at Sequoia Capital, Charge Ventures, Notation Capital, Maple VC, Andy Sack and all the other amazing folks who took a chance on us early on - very appreciative of your ongoing support! Thanks also to the early team members who joined and believed in us to get something off the ground including - Théo Powers, Felice Kofler, Nashilu Mouen Makoua, Devin Lewtan, Roger Tabchouri, Roger Zurawicki, Zachary Caceres, Theo Ephraim, Roman Dimov, William Zhang, Justin Liu - it was a joy building with you all in the early days! The Clay team is an incredible group of people, surrounded by a community that really loves the product - if you’re looking to join a team that is thinking about re-imagining how software should feel, with real customer traction, please do consider joining them - they’re hiring across all functions! https://lnkd.in/g3iEghJb

Empire gameshows mix up the standard agenda by turning the panelist-and-moderator expectation on its head. This year, we had 2️⃣ gameshows take center stage: Our fan-favorite FinTech Family Feud, alongside a new addition, The Newlywed Game: FinTech Edition. The goal of each? Testing team compatibility, FinTech "street smarts", and most importantly, bringing fun and dynamic formats to the Empire stage. #NYFinTechWeek #EmpireFinTech