Coalition Operators

One of the most underutilized startup comms playbooks: teaming up with your philosophical peers to tell a much bigger story about the future than you can (credibly) tell on your own. Journalists used to play a big role here, promoting umbrella narratives like “the sharing economy” to explain what was happening at disparate companies like Airbnb, Uber and TaskRabbit. In the earlier days of cloud SaaS, at Box we’d team up with other “best of breed” startups to make the case for an unbundled approach to enterprise software. American Dynamism is a more recent example, although applied too broadly to be useful as a narrative, despite its power as a slogan/ideology. Today, influence is fragmented, and innovation outpaces analysis, at least from traditional sources. Most startups, meanwhile, are focused on promoting their own products and momentum, but these stories often fail to explain why a company's success matters beyond its existing customers and cap tables. Some founders are able to tell more expansive stories, but even then, it’s hard to make a lot of people pay attention to any one startup in a noisy, fast-paced media environment dominated by a few massive players. I was reminded of the opportunity to team up when USV’s Michael Mignano tweeted about the “rebel alliance” and his partner Nick Grossman followed with an essay, making the case for why an ecosystem of startups tackling all layers of the agentic AI stack has a structural advantage over today’s seemingly unstoppable giants: the vertically integrated AI platforms. There are lots of impressive logos in their diagram of this new stack, but few (if any) can challenge the prevailing narrative around today’s Goliaths on their own. Together, however… If you’re a startup in the so-called rebel alliance (or any other broad movement that world has yet to grasp!), here’s how to pick your peers: - Philosophical alignment: do you share certain high level beliefs about the future? Ideally those beliefs are (currently) somewhat contrarian. - Common customer: you don’t have to have the exact same ICP, but ideally you care about a similar audience. - Collaborator versus competitor: This is probably obvious, but you don’t have to invite your competitors. From the “emerging agentic stack,” for instance, you’d ideally select the strongest company from each layer. - A players: only team up with companies and founders you believe to be excellent; they reflect the quality of the broader group and the worthiness of the narrative. There are so many fun ways to bring this to life: collectively host a conference, pair up for podcast interviews, co-author an op-ed, collaborate on a content series, propose legislation, launch guerrilla marketing aimed at common enemies. If nothing else, joining forces will force you to tell your story at a 30,000 foot view and articulate a vision that contextualizes why a lot more people should care about your company’s success than do today.

Excited to share that Pool is officially live, as of today! No more waitlist. Anyone (18+, US-only) can now sign up for Pool at poolmoney.com. We re-designed our website to celebrate, special thanks to Taylor Hunt for all your help. Building a new financial account from scratch has been at times excruciating, thrilling, wildly boring and the most fulfilling work I’ve done in my career. Doing it for the second time is 2X all of those. We learned a lot from running this Pilot, specifically how starved consumers are for new ways to manage and organize money. We don’t need more analytics or budgeting tools, we need new containers that allow for multiple members, rules, permissions and on-demand cards. We think of Pool as an ephemeral account that can be used for a day or a decade, that can be spun up in a few minutes, that exists for one dedicated purpose. We’ve watched business banking and cards evolve SO much over the past few years and many of these features can and should be adapted for consumers. We’re betting they’ll be embraced, and we’re excited to do this work. It’s time.

This is a fun one: Patina emerges from stealth this week with its foundation model for the sense of smell, Sense1, and $2M in pre-seed funding. A few things that got us excited about this startup: Team: Sean Raspet and Laura Sisson bring an unreplicable combination of relevant tech and science expertise paired with a deep passion for this category. This is the first (and probably last?) time a founder has been called an “olfactory genius” during our reference process. Tech: Rather than using word level descriptors like “floral” or "woody,” Patina is creating a universal code of smell and taste by predicting how molecules activate each of the 389 human olfactory receptors. You can think of it as a QR code for scent. Industry: The fragrance industry is an unusual one, and ripe for transformation. It’s dominated by a few big fragrance houses and known for its lack of transparency. There’s a huge opportunity for tools that dramatically enhance and democratize the human artistry that goes into fragrance creation.  Doing diligence for this investment was genuinely fun. In addition to enlisting generous experts to help us think through the tech and science, I got to visit the Patina lab and smell molecules the team had created. Some transported me to the beach or a forest; the parmesan molecule was more parmesan-y than any cheese I’ve met (blasphemy). Thanks to Aadik Shekar for the intro! It’s a treat for Coalition Operators to be on a cap table with a bunch of investors I admire, including Jordan Crook and Josh Constine, who I met during a very different career chapter for us all. Link to the TechCrunch piece + the white paper below.

Patina is building the foundation model for the sense of smell, and we raised 2M to do it. Today, we are announcing our first Scent Foundation Model, which we are calling Sense1. By working at the receptor level, we created the first universal code of smell and taste, allowing us to develop never-before-smelled molecules, and reconstruct the world's rarest natural ingredients. Below is Sense1’s prediction for a single molecule: vanillin. In the same way a QR code uniquely represents binary computer data, this Scent Receptor (SR) Code uniquely represents a specific scent impression. Full details in our whitepaper. Sean and I have put together an excellent team, and we’ve been lucky enough to be backed by some great funds. I want to thank betaworks, True Ventures, RRE Ventures, Earthling VC, F4 Fund, Theory Forge Ventures Unexpected Investments (Josh Constine), Untapped Capital, Coalition Operators, POV Ventures (Aadik Shekar). Link to the TechCrunch article with this announcement in the comments (thanks Dominic-Madori Davis). From printing food that tastes completely new or exactly like what it imitates, to topical fragrances that have healing properties for the skin, there are so many possibilities for combining scent and technology. These ideas can now be made real, with Patina as the underlying intelligence layer.

One of the best parts about investing super early is you get a glimpse into a potential future before the rest of the world does. Today, Knit Health is emerging from stealth with a huge vision, killer team, unprecedented data partnership, and a totally new form of clinical intelligence. Jonathan Kolstad, Maya Petersen, Jonas Knecht, Ted Robertson and team are building a world model trained on more than 130 million electronic patient records across 30 health systems and the real-world decisions of millions of clinicians, since much of the most important healthcare knowledge isn’t written down in any textbook. Now comes the next phase: launching Knit in partnership with world class health systems. Fun for Coalition Operators to share another cap table with the Moxxie Ventures crew, and now Uncork Capital and Frist Cressey Ventures. You can read more in Endpoints News (linked below). Toyin Ajayi Jaclyn Rice Nelson Lindsay Ullman

With so much capital concentrating in so few private companies, and Anthropic and OpenAI breaking all "startup" growth norms, it’s easy to forget that we are still incredibly early in this AI wave. On that note, I am THRILLED Subquadratic is now out of stealth. This is a brilliant team pioneering an entirely new class of LLMs. Today, they’re introducing the first LLM built on a fully subquadratic architecture, with significantly increased context windows that make all-new AI workflows and use cases economically viable. My partner Jaclyn Rice Nelson saw co-founder and CTO Alexander Whedon's technical brilliance firsthand at Tribe AI, and we’re proud that Coalition is one of the earliest investors. Together with co-founder and CEO Justin Dangel, Alex has assembled a world class team with massive ambition. You can get access to SubQ and SubQ Code today. And in case you were wondering if startups can still break through the noise without announcing a megaround: they’ve already had 10,000+ waitlist signups since launching this morning!!