Happy Friday! If you can recall, a week or two back I highlighted Delve as a company to watch. This week…they are under fire for faking compliance reports to their clients. Turns out more people are watching them now than I expected.
Currently, the weather is better in the east coast just in time for Hill & Valley, and I am so ready for spring.
Enjoy reading!
What Matters on X This Week (If You’re Busy Building)
1. Marc Andreessen mentioned that being introspective is something that none of the greats did, so don’t try wasting time thinking about your feelings and just BUILD. This goes for many young students chasing the aesthetic that comes with being a founder. “People who dwell in the past get stuck in the past”. He’s right! But, if you spend time thinking about introspection and its role in the psyche of great founders and yourself, aren’t you being introspective? Just a thought, but I do think this is a good take from him.
2. You basically need to be ex-Palantir, Anduril, or SpaceX to raise a $30M round out of stealth. I am half kidding. I don’t make the rules, it’s just a common theme here. If you have an elite pedigree, investors are much more comfortable writing a big check early (sometimes can be fund dependent but I find this true for most). See reference: Another raising propaganda post from tech crunch
3. More people are getting comfortable with using peptides. I won’t be turning to the dark side but am so interested to see how Hims & Hers, Eli Lilly, and so many other players come to market once they are cleared and if insurance coverage will be included for certain patient pools. Also very curious to see the research and literature produced around potential risks AKA infertility???
4. Jensen Huang went on the All In Pod this week and actually hyped up people building in healthcare and it warmed my heart. Healthtech will have its defensetech moment in the next 5 years.
5. The Hill & Valley forum schedule came out this week. Notable speakers include Vinod Khosla, Jamie Dimon, and so many awesome builders. I know you all are wondering, but I am not invited to the event. Hopefully next year I can be invited, or the year after that would be great too.
Founder of the Week
For this week's “Founder of the Week” I interviewed Sravani, a friend of mine at GW who I met through Girls into VC. She is a superstar and her startup is only a look into the type of world domination this girl can accomplish.
Sravani Mannava is building what I would describe as the anti-Mint. Not another budgeting app that tells you that you spent too much money on Sweetgreen this month, but a forward-looking financial planning layer that actually helps you understand what is coming next. The core insight here is that personal finance is not about tracking past behavior, it is about managing future obligations. Rent, loans, taxes, trips, life events, all of it.
The product introduces this idea of an “obligation layer,” which I think is very right. Instead of reacting to transactions, you are proactively mapping out your financial life. What is also interesting is that she is not building this as a single-player tool. There is a strong collaborative angle here. Think weddings, group trips, shared expenses, even broader life planning. Financial decision-making is rarely solo, and most tools completely ignore that.
Where this gets even more compelling is the AI layer. Pulling in documents, understanding contracts, surfacing insights, and actually helping you make decisions in real time instead of just showing you charts. If this is executed well, this becomes less of a “tool” and more of a system you rely on to run your financial life.
Also worth noting, Mint is gone. Consumer fintech is in a weird reset moment where trust is low and most products feel interchangeable. I think there is real whitespace for something new here, especially something that feels more like an operating system than a tracker.
Big picture, I like founders who are not just incrementally improving a category but are reframing how people think about the problem entirely. Sravani is doing that with financial planning.
Pre-Seed + Seed Rounds of the Week
Eileen raised $1M in pre-seed funding led by Top Shelf Ventures. The company is building an AI-driven retail execution platform that pairs in-store shopper data with prescriptive analytics to bridge shelf insights to operational execution for CPG brands.
Certiv raised $4.2M in pre-seed funding with participation from Aviso Ventures, Founders Co-op, Fortson, and other strategic investors. The company is building a runtime assurance layer that governs and secures AI agent decisions on employee workstations, enabling safer enterprise deployment.
Understood Care raised $8.4M across pre-seed and seed funding led by 1984 Ventures, Rethink Education, and Zeal Capital Partners. The company is building an AI-native patient advocacy platform that combines human advocates with an AI copilot to automate care navigation and scale personalized support.
Dentronic raised $1M in pre-seed funding through South Park Commons’ Founder Fellowship. The company is building a chairside robotic arm to automate repetitive dental assistant tasks and expand into physical AI applications within clinical environments.
X posts I liked this week
