Q2 Newsletter

Our community has continued to actively host pitch days and webinars that provide timely insights for our angel and founder members nationwide. Summaries of learnings from recent events are below.

Along with signing up for our next webinar, Investing in AI Start-ups, you can hold dates for in-person events across the country this summer as shown below. Our next pitch event is July 15.

Checkout our new feature: Co-founder Classifieds. If you're looking for a co-founder or team member for your startup, please let us know so we can share your role in our next Newsletter.

Virtual: Investing in AI Startups

DATE: Wednesday, May 28, 2025
TIME: 4 - 5pm PT on zoom
Register: https://groups.stanford.edu/events/124008

Join our panel with AI Fund's Warren Packard, BS '89, MS '91, MBA '97 and Tau Ventures's Amit Garg, BS '03, MS '04 as they delve into the dynamic world of AI startup investing and identifying the next emerging stars. Learn from their decades of experience and gain a competitive edge within this rapidly evolving market.

Virtual: Curated Pitch for Stanford Angels

DATE: Tuesday, Jul 15, 2025
TIME: 4 - 5:15pm PT on zoom
Register: https://groups.stanford.edu/events/127932

Join Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs United to hear pitches from 5-8 curated startups and meet the talented founders. This event is open to accredited investors with angel membership. To pitch your startup or recommend one to pitch at the event, please use this form to apply.

Summer Networking Events

Boston Summer Networking Mixer

Wednesday, Aug 20, 2025
6:30 - 8:30pm ET at Felipe's Taqueria (Cambridge, MA)
Register: https://groups.stanford.edu/events/126226

Join local and visiting Stanford alums and students in Boston from various industries, generations, and backgrounds for a happy hour. All levels of experience are invited to come mix and mingle.

Chicago Summer Networking Mixer

Thursday, Jul 17, 2025
6 - 8pm CT at 444 West Lake (Chicago, IL)
Register: https://groups.stanford.edu/events/126988

Join local and visiting Stanford alums and students in Chicago from various industries, generations, and backgrounds for a happy hour. All levels of experience are invited to come mix and mingle.

DC Summer Networking Mixer

Tuesday, Aug 19, 2025
6:30 - 8:30pm ET at Stanford in Washington (Washington, DC)

Join local and visiting Stanford alums and students in the DMV from various industries, generations, and backgrounds for a happy hour. All levels of experience are invited to come mix and mingle.

Registration: Opening soon!

Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs United Mixer in Miami

We collaborated with the Stanford Club of South Florida and GSB Florida for a Perk Me Up mixer at the XO Espresso Bar on March 27. Alumni attending eMerge Americas, local and visiting Miami Beach enjoyed a coffee break with an opportunity to refresh their Stanford connections.

Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs United Mixer in DC

We organized a Connect and Collaborate event on April 29 for Stanford DC founders and investors. The event, hosted by Skip West, MBA '80 with generous support from Cooley LLC, provided an excellent forum to connect with fellow Stanford alumni founders and investors, explore collaborations and learn more about the DC ecosystem.

Complogic

Complogic, an early-stage start-up focused on AI hardware, efficient computation and crypto, is looking for a team member with technical expertise. For more information, please contact Jyotindra Shakya, MS 2013, at jrshakya@gmail.com

Slay Platforms

Slay Platforms, a pre-seed start-up in the San Francisco Bay area, is developing a new social media video platform that creates a better user experience by employing an innovative recommendation system that excels at both exploration and exploitation. Slay Platforms is looking for a team member with sales and marketing expertise. For more information, please contact Nick Tran, CS 2006, at nick.tran@gmail.com

Venture/Growth Rollup

A venture/growth roll-up in the Miami area focused on tech, media, telecom, infrastructure and energy is looking for a team member with operations expertise. For more details, please contact Matty Yohannan, MBA 2003 at matty@brownoak.com

Co-Founder Classifieds Submission

If you are a Stanford alumnus at a start-up and you're looking for a co-founder or team member, use this Classifieds section to connect with potential teammates. To share your co-founder information, please submit at the form below. Reach out to saeUnited@alumni.stanford.edu with any questions or suggestions.

Four start-ups presented at the most recent SAEU pitch event at the end of April. Short summaries of the pitches are below. As an angel member, if you would like to watch the recording or connect with any of the startups, please contact Sheila Proeve at sheila@stanfordalumni.org or Richard Hartung at rlhartung@stanfordalumni.org.

Chronica

Chronica describes itself as a next generation, remote patient management company. Remote patient management delivers real time engagement and monitoring of patients remotely at home. These services cut costs and improve health outcomes, benefit public and private insurers, and incentivize physicians to offer these services to patients and to pay for them. It offers a trio of success - high margins, patient satisfaction and client staff happiness - which it says generates value for its customers, which are physician practices.

Halo Science

Halo is an AI-powered R&D partnering platform that supports the $2.5 trillion that is spent on R&D annually. Instead of relying exclusively on their internal teams to do research and find new technologies and make advancements, companies are looking to academic researchers, startups and other companies. Halo is helping companies find partners more efficiently so they can bring new innovations to market faster. It says 16,000 researchers and science-led startups across 150 countries have joined the network organically.

Resonant Health

Resonant is building an AI-native practice-in-a-box for doctors. Providers are overwhelmed with administrative work, documentation and fragmented software that is built around billing, not actually healing. Resonant offers full scope workflow automation in a box, so it can integrate with labs, pharmacies and payers, and help doctors set them up. Healthcare providers like having one place where they can do everything, so they can focus on the patient and still optimize billing, which makes primary care sustainable.

ChemT Biotech

ChemT boosts cell yield in biologics manufacturing. So far, most researchers have used a trial-and-error process to unlock cells potential. ChemT is addressing this problem by developing specific treatment for cells, identifying what targets on the cells are regulating a particular functionality, and developing small molecules for that functionality. ChemT says its drug discovery platform is faster in developing products and makes it easier to commercialize.

Investing in Sustainability Startups

SAEU kicked off our sector-specific investor series and hosted a panel discussion Investing in Sustainability Startups on March 26 with Amy Francetic, AB '89, Founding Partner of Buoyant Ventures, and Dan Matthies, Partner at Reaction Global. This is a summary of the discussion moderated by Co-president Richard Hartung, MBA '86.

Given the current geopolitical situation, what do you see happening in climate and climate tech investing over the next three or four years?
Amy said it's certainly a rough time. Folks are nervous, and from a climate standpoint, they are watching what is happening at the federal level and worrying about pullback from investors and other headwinds. She thinks there are a lot of opportunities in Europe because there are some better rules and regulations, though they're not immune to the volatility in the US.
Dan mentioned a book written in 1907 called the Pitfalls of Market Speculation. Data suggested that when the market is high, people do 90% of their buying at the top. When the market goes down, they do 90% of their selling at the bottom. On the geopolitical side, manufacturing is very capital intensive and has an unpredictable outcome. Those business models are going to be very tough. He is looking for companies that make customers more profitable and marketable, and that can weather the storm. This is a good time to buy.

What key themes or trends would you look at as investors?
Dan said AI is an area that people are focused on. Another trend is where insurance companies use AI and sources such as drones to calculate risk in a different way.
Amy said her fund is particularly interested in digital, with businesses delivering core business value to improve profitability, reduce cost, improve yield or productivity, simplify things, and automate things. We've described that as vertical AI.

Are there sectors that are particularly attractive or unattractive?
Amy said one area they're excited about is green computing, which is trying to make computing less energy intensive. There's going to be a lot of appetite from big tech companies, data center builders and managers, and in general, as more companies move to AI. An area we're bearish on is carbon markets.
Dan said they avoid plant-based foods. On the other hand, innovative companies such as Galy, which grows cotton in a lab 10 times faster with a fraction of the water, are attractive.

Angel and some VC investing has slowed. Do you see investments picking up again and funding becoming more available?
Dan said he is seeing a slowdown in capital availability, partly because of human sentiment. When a market goes down, you want to wait and get your money out. When M&A drives up, you're holding on. It's a great time to invest because the market is rationalized.
Amy said that in 2024, about $30 billion was deployed into the climate space, a slight decline of about 14% compared to 2023. However, there was a dramatic decline in growth stage investing. Funds are raising more later stage venture funding, but they're not deploying it. We see it in Series A. It's hard to find follow-on investors. A Series A company four years ago would have had about a million dollars of revenue. Nowadays, you have to have $2 million. Its a good time to find deals. You're seeing a lot of bridge rounds now.

One thing angels look at is how to help a company informally or formally. What do startups actually need?
Amy said investors with all backgrounds can support the companies. The biggest thing is technology. Then, they need salespeople who will make commercial introductions. A number of startups have created advisory boards to get insights from folks outside the company.
Dan said Reaction has a network of networks that is all individual Reaction investors. We are leaders all throughout different markets and industries. It's a great group to pair up with the companies.

If someone is advising a startup, how are they compensated?
Amy said it varies. Usually, they get a small option grant. Companies don't normally have cash. They probably would pay expenses, but not a consulting fee. An equity grant might be half a percent.

How are startups positioning themselves in response to requests to take the word sustainability from projects?
Amy said energy security is a big replacement phrase, or energy transition. Anything around cost savings or efficiency is being talked about. People are also using the term American energy dominance. People are definitely changing their language to try to be more appealing.

What solutions have you seen to make data centers more sustainable?
Dan said the data centers that you see today look nothing like they'll be in 10 years, because of this wave of AI and a wave of quantum following AI. The speed of computation and transmission will need to be light speed and have completely different hardware.
Amy said folks are trying to power the data centers with clean energy. They're doing Bring your own Power, to bring clean power to the data centers themselves, in addition to the grid interconnection. On the software side, they're creating code that runs much more efficiently.

How do you measure the sustainability impact of a startup?
Amy said they discuss impact before they invest and write it into the investment documents. There's usually a few metrics that are core to their operations that we can measure and aggregate with our other companies. It isn't one single metric.
Dan said we get a drastically different set of information from different companies. With one company, we get 30 pages. With some other companies, you get nothing until they're ready to raise capital.

About Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs United

Our mission is to unite Stanford's startup community in innovation centers across the country beyond California with regular remote programming and connection opportunities. In Spring 2020, we started our journey with an official charter from Stanford Alumni Association. We have grown to a community of nearly 1500 alumni members since. Our community attracts a wide variety of Stanford alumni and students from different regions, generations, industries and backgrounds united by a common entrepreneurial spirit.

Angel members of our group gain access to exclusive investment opportunities with some of the most promising founders around. We have supported 140+ founders to date. Engage in discussions, networking events, and contribute to the growth of innovative ventures.

Disclaimer: Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs United (SAEU) aims to provide a forum for interesting early stage companies at a fundraising stage to present. However Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs United (SAEU) is not a fund, does not do crowd sourced fundraising, nor does it provide investment advice or recommendations. Any due diligence, negotiation or investment activity conducted by members or officers of Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs United (SAEU) is conducted solely as an individual of their own accord as an accredited investor, not as an officer or representative of Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs United, Stanford University, or Stanford Alumni Association. Stanford University and Stanford Alumni Association are not in any way endorsing or assessing the companies or entrepreneurs who present at Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs United (SAEU) nor are they involved in Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs United (SAEU) members or officers individual investment decisions regarding these companies.