AAF Seed Radar #15: PicassoMD, SuperFocus, DashyDash, Apata, Lore Machine & Debbie
We track early stage investments of 250+ funds at AAF as part of our offensive strategy to have our finger on the pulse of what’s happening in the overall startup ecosystem. This list is a handful of those seed investments that we invested in, or liked that we’ve found through Crunchbase, Pitchbook, and our own network. All information is publicly available and none of this is financial advice. :)
PicassoMD
Summary: PicassoMD provides primary care providers real-time access to a network of value-based specialists across all major disciplines. By accessing specialty care through “curbside consultations,” PicassoMD allows for more appropriate triaging of patients. If a referral is deemed necessary, it helps automate the transition of care from the primary to specialist office. The result is a reduction in unnecessary referrals and ER visits, a smoother transition of care, and better patient experience and outcomes. PicassoMD has an 800% ROI for payers.
Team: PicassoMD is led by two co-CEOs, Dr. Reza Sinai and Sam Pollaro. Sam is a 3x entrepreneur who was previously SVP of Strategic Initiatives at Kayak-OpenTable after that company acquired Venga, his last start-up.
Reza developed the concept for PicassoMD when he was Co-Managing Partner of Cardiocare, an independent cardiology practice in the DC area. He has been consistently recognized as one of Washingtonian’s Top Doctors for optimizing patient experience through novel workflows and experiential design.
“I went into medicine with the hopes and desires to provide care and comfort to my patients but quickly came up against the realities of inefficient and unnecessary medicine practiced in silos,” recounts Dr. Sanai. PicassoMD’s mission, our WHY, is to “transition quantity care into quality care” by helping to facilitate the shift from fee-for-service to value-based care, where the economic interests of providers are aligned with patient outcomes.
Funding: PicassoMD raised a Seed round with contribution from AAF, Greycroft, Humbition, GOAT Capital, Operator Ventures, Metradora Ventures & Blue Venture Fund to name a few.
SuperFocus
Summary: SuperFocus (SuFo) builds LLM AI’s that are focused on your private data, stored securely in a separate memory module outside of the LLM, to stop hallucination.
Focused LLMs have many use cases as knowledge co-pilots in every industry where large amounts of information must be reliably understood, summarized, analyzed, or acted upon. This includes education, finance, medicine, science research, written media, customer service, consumer goods, government, internal workflows and knowledge management and many others.
The memory module is your internal data — what customers define as the ground truth. In testing, SuFo used college textbooks as the memory module. SuFo’s AI answers chapter questions with ~100% accuracy using only the information in the textbook. In other words, no hallucination.
SuFo has live pilots across print media, PE Funds, corporate travel companies and more.
Team: SuFo was Co-Founded by Stephen Hsu & Tushar Sheth who have collectively raised $100M+ in capital. Hsu boasts extensive entrepreneurial experience in past positions as the Founder of Blockapps, Genomic Prediction, and Othram while Sheth contributes a diverse perspective as the former Deputy Policy Director at The White House.
Financing: SuFo is closing a Seed Round backed by AAF and other venture capital funds + angels with an unmatched track record in AI and deep tech investing.
DashyDash
Summary: DashyDash (DD) is building the Restaurant-to-Restaurant Network and Commerce Platform, transforming how restaurants purchase $275B of supplies each year. Restaurants spend over 30% of their revenue on supplies, but most restaurants grossly overpay due to an inefficient, opaque market dominated by predatory price practices.
DD’’s network-powered software helps restaurants triple their bottom line by making supply procurement dead simple: aggregating restaurants’ data on products, prices, and vendors, identifying immediate cost savings, and consolidating members’ buying power to drive cheaper prices.
Team: DD’s Founder & CEO is Mike Flynn. Mike has spent the last decade as a marketing leader at various organizations within the food supply chain. Mike spent five years at Heinz, where he oversaw a $150M+ portfolio of tomato products sold into retail and foodservice. His most recent role was Head of Marketing at Farmers Business Network (FBN) where he helped grow the company to a $4B valuation while growing revenues 5x during his time there. FBN is a high-growth B2B network startup that provides farmers with the data they need to make better business decisions and where the idea of DD spawned.
Funding: DashyDash is closing on a fresh round of capital after an initial pre-seed raise from Euclid Ventures. AAF is participating in the current round and excited to join the DD journey.
Apata
Summary: Apata is a modern authentication infrastructure for fintech issuers. Its 3D secure ACS technology is designed to provide fraud prevention services to fintech issuers. The company creates optimized challenge processes, reduces abandonment by improving the user experience and offers streamlined onboarding processes that are designed with ease, efficiency and control in mind, enabling fintech issuers, challengers and processors to get modern authentication infrastructure in order to prevent threats and cyber attacks.
Team: Apata was Co-Founded by Sheikinah Adewumi & Niali Hogan who previously built Touchtech Payments which sold to Stripe in 2019.
Touchtech Payments provided advanced SCA-ready authentication technology for some of Europe’s leading fintechs and challenger banks, like N26, Transferwise, and many others. Touchtech reached €17B in annual payment volume prior to its exit and is now the core tech for Stripe Authentication post acquisition.
I’ve been working with the Apata team for 4 years. In my opinion their product engineering team is excellent. Their product design, solution flexibility and customer focus of the team makes them the best solution on the market for fintech issuers. — Erik Kaju — Director of Engineering, Wise
Funding: Shekinah & Niali bootstrapped the business for two years before raising a Seed round in 2022 from Global Founders Capital (GFC) & Byld Ventures.
Lore Machine
Summary: Lore Machine is an all-in-one AI system that makes text-to-visual storytelling turn-key. Lore Machine is building a suite of next-gen tools geared to transform textual IP into multimedia experiences — like graphic novels, games, animation and hopefully storytelling formats no one has ever heard of before.
Lore Machine is the purveyors of humane AI, generators of StoryScapes™, documentarians of the metaverse, animators of the textual realm, and summoners of the Prompt Engineering Guild.
Team: Lore Machine’s Founder is Thobey Campion. Thobey was previously the Head of Publishing & Digital at VICE Media for 15 years until 2020.
He is the Founder of Vice’s Motherboard and produced over 100 documentaries. His work has won 32 awards including 15 Webbys and a Cannes Lion.
Funding: The company is currently in market for its first outside financing round. Let us know if chatting with Thobey is of interest!
Debbie
Summary: Debbie is a “habit-shifting rewards platform” that leverages behavior psychology to craft financial products that give users a path out of debt and towards a healthier financial future. It is building the first debt payoff platform that rewards borrowers for adopting healthy financial habits.
Team: Debbie was Co-Founded by Frida Leibowitz & Rachel Lauren. As a team of folks who have personally struggled to get out of debt, receive sustainable credit, and achieve financial stability, the founding team started Debbie to make the path from debt to wealth seamless and accessible to everyone. Frida was previously on the Product & Credit Risk team at Marcus by Goldman Sachs. Rachel previously spent time as an investor at BDMI (Bertselmann Digital Media Investments) where she sourced investments in Extra, Zephr, Astra, Lance, Infinite Objects, Stix, Knockri, Gravity AI, Certa, and Fursure.
“I grew up in a single-parent, immigrant, non-college educated family that had no access to financial education and always struggled with debt. As an adult, I naturally fell into the same debt trap and racked up $15k in credit card debt by the age of 21.
Hoping to make a difference for others, I spent my early career days in digital consumer lending and had the unique opportunity to simultaneously sit in the borrower’s and the lender’s seats. I was increasingly frustrated that our current financial system is quick to knock us down when we misbehave but does not do a good enough job of celebrating our wins.” — Frida Leibowitz — Founder & CEO
Funding: Debbie raised a $1.2M Pre-Seed from Liquid 2, Green Egg, Village Global, TA Ventures, BDMI & One Way Ventures.
If you made it this far, thanks for reading! Stay tuned for our next Seed Radar.
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