The biggest trends young NYC investors are bullish about — and why

by with No Comment Tech

Lori Berenberg, Bloomberg Beta

Image Credits: Courtesy of Lori Berenberg

As twenty-something-year-old investors enter the venture landscape, they bring fresh vibes and spot new trends that could become the next multibillion-dollar tech businesses. Already, we are seeing some young investors carving out new niches.

Alex Chung, 26, is an investor at Chai Ventures. Her firm has backed companies like consumer health platform Unfabled and emotional well-being company MentalHappy. Chung says she’s taken an interest in how the broader ecosystem has reframed women’s health in the past few years. Women’s health companies were long thought to only address menstrual health, maternal health or menopause management. But Chung and her firm are interested in much more. 

Consider that drug companies were not legally required to include women in clinical trials in the U.S. until 1993, meaning the impact of many popular drugs and medical devices was never originally studied. That enormous research hole creates opportunities today, and there are many others that are very much worth pursuing. Deloitte found that women are typically the ones in charge of a family’s medical decisions, making at least 80% of a household’s medical spending decisions. 

“We’re bullish on the expanded definition of women’s health to include companies that are creating innovative solutions to help manage chronic conditions that disproportionately affect women,” Chung says, citing certain thyroid disorders, endometriosis and osteoporosis as examples. “Increasing recognition of women’s unique healthcare needs, coupled with advances in technology, makes women’s health a compelling space for investment and development.” 

Over at Female Founders Fund (FFF), investor Layla Alexander, 25, says she’s interested in the care economy and enterprise climate solutions. She’s also quite bullish on women’s health. Though her firm is technically generalist, given its focus on women, it has always seen women’s health as an underserved market. FFF has Maven Clinic in its portfolio, the first unicorn in the women’s health space. Last year, women’s health companies raised 4.3% of the $26.5 billion invested into healthcare companies, according to a Forbes article. That is a substantial increase from the years prior, but there is still much work to be done, Alexander says. 

“Despite the success of Maven and other businesses in this category, women’s healthcare remains underfunded and overlooked, presenting a massive market opportunity,” she tells TechCrunch. 

Then there is AI

Young investors are having a love-hate relationship with artificial intelligence and are looking for ways to make this revolution more grounded in reality. 

Zehra Naqvi, 25, an investor at Headline Ventures who writes the popular newsletter No GPs Allowed, is dead set on the consumer sector. 

She likes technologies like the a16z-backed party-planning app Partiful, which helps merge the online world with the in-person — an effort she calls “IRL to URL.” She’s also into “AI social rehab,” or looking for tools that can make people better people and citizens of the world. She says right now that many of the AI companion apps, those that purport to be one’s friend or partner, are reinforcing self-isolation. Because of this, some form of social rehab is necessary, especially since so many young people — Gen Z and Gen Alphas — spent critical formative years online during the pandemic. 

“Think AI therapy apps, AI journaling, AI mental health, AI well-being apps, that encourage and facilitate human-to-human connections with guided self-reflection,” says Naqvi, whose firm’s investments include Bumble, the fintech Acorns, and the e-commerce platform Elyn. “It’s like prosumer tools but for greater efficiency, development and progress with who we are as people.” 

Plus, young people are going to be spending so much time online anyway, there might as well exist tools to make them feel less lonesome amid what has become America’s loneliness epidemic. 

Naqvi also believes that every creator is bound to become a small business owner — a “solopreneur” — and that every “solopreneur” will inevitably become a creator. Naqvi sees a world where solopreneur tools become advanced enough to sustain individually operated businesses at massive scales. AI has a part in that too. 

“As Sam Altman said, we’re getting closer to a one-person-operated billion-dollar business,” Naqvi said. “To get there, we need a whole new generation of solopreneur tools and gig economy platforms.” 

Besart Copa, a principal at the accelerator Antler who also has a consumer newsletter, The Zero State, has similar thoughts. “We are at the precipice of a Cambrian explosion in consumer apps,” he tells TechCrunch. “Artificial intelligence has given visionary founders new possibilities to reimagine how consumers live their lives. AI has also made it cheaper, faster and easier than ever to ship.” 

Lori Berenberg, 29, at Bloomberg Beta, is excited about another, perhaps simpler, aspect of AI. Her companies include legal timekeeper Ajax and construction payroll company Trayd. She is interested in software and user-centric applications that use AI as a tool, like Figma Slides’ tone dial, which uses AI to adjust sentence structure and language. 

She says AI reveals what humans are good at, like strategy, problem-solving, and having gut intuition. But AI is in a good position to better software development, handling everything from data management to cloud setup, freeing developers from their most tedious work.

“Once the ‘wow’ factor of AI started to cool off and businesses seriously started looking at implementing new AI tools, many got stuck on the unreliable inconsistent results they get from generative AI,” Berenberg tells TechCrunch. “It’s exciting to see how many founders have started using clever product touches or different system architectures to get more deterministic responses, both for end-user interactions and backends that use AI.” 

As TechCrunch previously reported, AI companies made up 41% of all U.S. deals in the first half of  2024. AI and machine learning companies raised $38.6 billion out of the $93.4 billion invested in the first half of the year, PitchBook reported. Last year, AI companies raised $27 billion, much of that money coming from Big Tech, the Financial Times reported. The flush of capital into the sector has some people debating on whether or not an AI bubble is coming for the industry. 

Then come the trends that these young investors don’t believe will be successful. 

Chung is not too keen on circular commerce — which is the process in which resources are kept in circulation to reduce waste — saying the industry still faces too many hurdles like consumer adoption and supply chain bottlenecks. 

Copa has a problem with free apps. “Stop making free apps,” he says point blank. “Consumers are more willing than ever to subscribe to things. Put up a paywall and make money. If people are not willing to pay, pivot to something they will.” 

Berenberg, meanwhile, thinks companies are prematurely focusing on optimizing infrastructure for AI agents, rather than building an AI agent that people want. Berenberg says people looking to build for specific sectors should take a step back and see how that industry would actually want to use an AI agent. That’s why she backed Ajax, which helps lawyers automate their billing timekeeping, something that should directly impact their revenue.

Alexander says she’s interested in AI tools that help advance research and health care delivery but, at the same time, she feels that many AI investments today are just “extremely capital intensive,” requiring so much infrastructure, talent and data, without clarity about their return on investment. It’s led to inflated valuations and what she considers to be “unsustainable funding strategies.” 

“While I’m bullish on AI’s potential across investing categories, it’s crucial that we remain disciplined and focus on backing founders with sound, scalable business models,” she said. 

Their fears match what many others have noticed. Naqvi is always wary of tech that becomes a trend and has seen a few of them — the web3 revival, and now the AI revolution. “I am not inherently against any particular trend, but I feel that AI is naturally at risk of overindulgence and may become too frothy soon.”

Discipulus Ventures mentors young founders to revive a Norman Rockwell vision of America

by with No Comment Tech

Image Credits: Discipulus Ventures (opens in a new window)

Scores of accelerator programs run every year with the aim of identifying and cultivating founders in the earliest stages of building a company. Only a fraction seek out founders who are explicitly aligned with some set of values — let alone classically conservative values like family, patriotism and faith.

Discipulus Ventures, which kicked off its first 10-person cohort yesterday, is a singular exception. The mentorship program for young founders is interested in bringing together a rather idiosyncratic type of person, at least in tech: those with the idealism of Plato and the rationalism of Aristotle, with a strong drive to revive a Norman Rockwell–esque Americana.

And instead of building B2B SaaS companies, the cohort will all be working on problems related to hard tech, defense, or industry — what’s sometimes broadly called “American Dynamism.”

The program’s website is clear about this, with its call to student founders who have “a strict devotion to truth and goodness” and whose vision of the future combines “their entrepreneurship, personal virtue, and obligation to our country.” The emphasis on values stems from a conviction, held by the program’s three founders, that young people are not working on solving some of the hardest problems confronting the country — reshoring manufacturing or providing the electricity grid with plentiful clean energy — because their values are no longer pushing them toward mission-driven companies.

In a recent interview, one of Discipulus’ founders, Jakob Diepenbrock, pointed to a recent poll from the Wall Street Journal and the nonpartisan research organization NORC that found that values like patriotism, religion and having children have fallen precipitously among Americans since the late 1990s. But while these priorities have declined, making money went up.

He and his two co-founders — Isaac Yi, Discipulus’s COO, and William Pan, the entrepreneur in residence — say they witnessed these values play out across some of the country’s top university campuses, with students flocking to entrepreneurship as essentially a means to an end: to make a bunch of cash quickly or to fit in with their peers. (Diepenbrock himself only graduated from high school in 2022, according to his LinkedIn.)

“A lot of people were starting companies; it wasn’t for the right reasons, we realized,” he said. “It’s kind of just a popular thing to do today. You go to school and you start some social media company or some ‘Uber for X’-type company, because that’s the popular thing to do, that’s what everybody else is doing.”

The issue, he says, is compounded by a more general constriction in the types of thinking and speaking that take place on university campuses: Essentially, students are becoming more afraid to say what they think, let alone voice what deeply matters to them.

“You can’t say what matters, you can’t say what you think is true, and that’s obviously not going to be good if you want to solve these problems,” he said. “If you can’t even talk about them, you can’t solve them.”

Discipulus was born a year ago as a result. An average day during the cohort, which runs from March 25–29, combines community building with talks and opportunities to work with a mentor. Each day starts bright and early with a 6 a.m. gym workout, followed by time with a mentor — those include a16z’s Katherine Boyle; Josh Manchester, GP at Champion Hill; Michael Gibson, GP at 1517 Fund; and Augustus Doricko, founder of terraforming company Rainmaker — and plenty of time to work. The week will wrap up with a demo day in front of a group of investors.

“The average or median [age] is going to be probably 21, 22 years old, doesn’t really have a network, knows something about raising money, something about go to market — very sharp, but certainly hasn’t done it before, and there’s just tons that they can soak up from each other, just as much from advisors who are helping out,” Manchester said in a recent interview. “They gain the network, they gain deeper insight into their own project and whether they should continue to pursue it or pivot to something else.”

The program is taking place in El Segundo, California, a city just southwest of Los Angeles that hosts major aerospace companies like Boeing and Northrop Grumman. The city’s reputation has grown in recent months as a breeding ground for a new type of hard tech founder, one very much like the type Discipulus is trying to attract. Much of the “Gundo” scene clarified (on the internet, at least) in February, when a group of seven – Peter Bowman-Davis, Anish Goel, Simon Pastor, Michael Gutierrez, Tommy Tietjen, Nathaniel Salander, and Rasmus Dey Meyer – organized a defense tech hackathon there. For a little while, at least, the social media site X got a reprieve from “e/acc” (a shorthand for a movement that wants to accelerate technological progress on artificial intelligence) with “🇺🇸/acc” taking its place.

Discipulus was born long before the Gundo scene came alive online, and the program seems to be taking advantage of the energy there — or rather aiming to cultivate it.

In some ways, Discipulus looks the same as other hard tech events. It’s very male, for one, and there’s a larger-than-life American flag hanging from the ceiling, to clear up any confusion about what country one might be in. But looking a little bit closer, one can see notable differences: perhaps most striking are the mentors, like Galvanick co-founder Joshua Steinman, who bring along their young children to their talks (Valar Atomics founder Isaiah Taylor, a Discipulus mentor, did the same when he brought his daughter to the February hackathon).

It’s a small thing, but it’s walking the pro-natalist walk, so to speak. And it’s not apologizing for it.

The story has been updated to include the names of the seven people that organized the defense tech hackathon in El Segundo in February.