stationery.

News From Our Portfolio

Antares closed a $470M Series C, and we were proud to double down. The raise builds on the momentum of Jordan Bramble and the team reaching criticality last quarter, and reflects just how fast demand for nuclear capacity is moving right now.

Flex closed a $70M Series B1, and we joined as new investors. The CFO workflow has been fragmented for years, and Flex is building the fix: an AI-native financial operating system that brings business and personal financial workflows for owner-operated, mid-market businesses into a "full financial home.”

Wealth.com announced its collaboration with Anthropic, bringing estate and tax planning intelligence directly into Claude. It's a natural extension of the enterprise thesis we backed at the Series A and puts the Wealth.com team’s expertise right where advisors are already spending their day.

News From the Team

53 Stations showed up for Chicago Tech Week. Managing Partner Jason Pritzker shared our investment thesis and what we look for in founders at Founders & Funders' VC ReversePitch, then returned the next day for the Bank of America/Merrill TechChicago Week panel on where AI, fintech, and investing are headed. In between, we hosted a poker night at our Chicago office for the founders and investors in town.

Investor Ben Sack joined Chicagoland AGC's webinar on evaluating construction vendors, sharing frameworks and case studies for anyone trying to make sense of the market.

Beyond Chicago, we joined our friends at the Jackson Hole Tech Partnership for the Wyoming Global Tech Summit, where frontier tech founders and investors gathered to talk energy and the future of American technology. Jason headed to Los Angeles for the All-In Summit, where he also toured Antares and SpaceX and met with founders building in nuclear. And Principal Chris Oh and Senior Associate Chinedu Udeogu represented us in New York at Primary's annual summit.

Wrapping up Q3, we hosted a curated Chief of Staff breakfast at our NYC office overlooking Central Park, where we were joined by 40+ strategy and ops leaders at organizations including Fireworks, Patlytics, Rillet, Primary Venture Partners, Charlie Health, Deeptune (Mercor), Evvy, and J.P. Morgan.

MBA Fellowship: Class Four

Alex Hammerman built an original framework, "investing at the joints," for finding alpha in the built world, using in-depth trend research across several inflecting physical technology sectors.

Lynn Kha took on drug discovery. "At the end of the day, this is a search problem," she said, arguing that AI's real value is narrowing which molecules are worth testing before costly mistakes reach clinical trials.

Sam Souleles explored inference economics, tracing how a ~330x surge in token volume and scarcer, pricier silicon are colliding with a token price that's collapsed to $0.06 per million. His takeaway: Getting more useful work out of the same hardware is worth real money.

Thank you, Alex, Lynn, and Sam, for a great summer.

We’re spotlighting Jake Varsano, the newest addition to our Wayfinder network. Jake spent his career in the energy sector, from Charles River Associates to grid resilience work at Enel X, and now leads customer growth at Kraken, commercializing software platforms for utilities with a focus on distributed energy resources.

Jake's advice for founders building in energy starts with finding a real grid constraint, not just chasing the interconnection and load-growth headlines everyone else is chasing, and building an incentive framework that accounts for what utilities, regulators, OEMs, and customers each actually want. He also spoke to timing: The grid is shifting from reactive emergency response toward proactive coordination of distributed energy resources, and founders who understand that shift early have an edge.

Read his full piece here.

Everything Hinges on the Nuclear Fuel Supply Chain

Energy security is national security, and as the U.S. races to build up its nuclear capacity, it's time to invest in the fuel chain behind it. Investor Ben Sack broke down why fuel matters just as much as the reactors themselves. Read his take on the blog.

Thanks for reading.