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LM Studio - AI Engineer, Desktop App Engineer, Python SDK Engineer

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The SpaceX Constellation: The Ultimate Talent Incubator and the Genesis of the Next Deep Tech Era

Comma Capital — Tue, 11 Aug 2026 16:06:17 GMT

Comma Deep Dives: This is the first post in our series of Deep Dives into important companies that are shaping the future of technology. This post was put together by our Comma Deep Tech Fellow .

The global technology landscape is undergoing a profound structural and macroeconomic paradigm shift. After more than two decades defined primarily by consumer software, mobile applications, and SaaS, the venture capital and engineering ecosystems are aggressively pivoting. We are witnessing a renaissance in deep technology, advanced manufacturing, and aerospace engineering.

At the absolute epicenter of this global industrial revitalization stands Space Exploration Technologies Corp. (SpaceX).

While SpaceX is universally recognized for its historic achievements in redefining space exploration and deploying global satellite internet infrastructure, its most enduring legacy is not just the rockets themselves. Its greatest legacy is its role as a platform for human capital: arguably one of the most potent deep-tech engineering talent incubators of the twenty-first century.

This phenomenon has catalyzed the emergence of the “SpaceX Mafia,” a sprawling, interconnected network of former engineers, mission operators, and executives who have departed the aerospace giant to found an array of highly ambitious deep tech startups. Functioning similarly to the historic “PayPal Mafia” that fundamentally defined the Web 2.0 era, the SpaceX alumni network is distinguished by an uncompromising focus on atoms over bits. These founders are applying a rigorous, hard-charging mentality and first-principles engineering methodology to solve legacy bottlenecks in capital-intensive sectors. In fact, the scale of this talent migration is unprecedented. As of mid-2026, approximately 1,330 SpaceX alumni have founded new ventures, collectively raising over $9.2 billion in funding.

Crucially, SpaceX acts as a dual catalyst. It is simultaneously forging the elite founders who will build the future, and providing the physical infrastructure required to make those businesses viable.

Here is how the talent pipeline, the foundational space tech infrastructure, and the massive liquidity event of SpaceX’s recent IPO are culminating in the next frontier of deep tech innovation—and why, at Comma Capital, we believe backing these founders at the pre-seed stage is one of the most asymmetric investment opportunities of this decade.

The scale of the SpaceX alumni migration, by the numbers.

The Talent Incubator: Forging the “SpaceX Mafia”

To understand the operational speed of the spin-out ecosystem, we must first look at how SpaceX functions as a platform for talent development.

SpaceX was founded in 2002 under extreme engineering challenges, constrained capital environments, and a mandate to achieve what the traditional aerospace industry deemed physically and economically impossible. The resultant culture demanded vertical integration, hyper-iteration, and fully rejecting legacy supply chain dependencies.

Engineers at SpaceX were required to design, manufacture, test, and iterate hardware concurrently, stripping away the bureaucratic friction typical of legacy defense primes. This grueling but deeply empowering environment created a highly specific archetype of founder: the dual hardware and software engineer capable of navigating complex physical systems while deploying modern software architectures.

The crucible that working at SpaceX really is, transforms top-tier graduates into seasoned operators capable of managing high-stakes capital projects. But the most ambitious of these alumni don’t join competitors; they start their own. Armed with a profound understanding of systems engineering, they leave the company to build the surrounding ecosystem.

How SpaceX Transformed into a Space Exploration Platform

Historically, a company wishing to operate in space had to build everything from scratch. Today, SpaceX has commoditized the core barriers to entry in deep tech, allowing alumni to build directly on top of their infrastructure.

Pillar 1: The Collapse of Launch Costs

The foundational achievement enabling the broader space tech ecosystem is the dramatic and sustained reduction in launch costs per kilogram.

The Space Shuttle delivered payload at roughly $54,500 per kilogram once program costs are amortized across its flights — about $14,200 counting only the incremental cost of each launch, and some forty-five times what NASA promised Congress when it sold the program in 1972. Commercial space stalled for three decades not because the engineering was impossible, but because nothing closed at those prices.

Reusability broke that constraint. Falcon 9 today lists at ~$70 million for 22,800 kg to LEO — roughly $3,000 per kilogram at the sticker price. The more important number is the one customers don’t see: with a flight-proven booster, SpaceX’s internal marginal cost per launch is estimated at $10–11 million, closer to $600 per kilogram. Reuse didn’t collapse the price so much as it collapsed the cost — and it handed SpaceX a margin structure that no legacy provider can approach.

The second structural step-change is still ahead of us: Starship. The current V3 vehicle is specified at 100 tonnes to Low Earth Orbit, and SpaceX targets a marginal cost as low as $100 per kilogram — though that remains a design target rather than an achieved price, with independent analysts modeling something closer to $500–1,000 per kilogram once full reuse and cadence mature. This means that founders are now able to rely on significantly cheaper flight costs to envision grander solutions to build on top of SpaceX’s platform.

Pillar 2: Global Connectivity via Starlink

While initially marketed as consumer broadband, Starlink has transitioned into a foundational infrastructure layer for global IoT, defense communications, and remote edge robotics.

For deep tech startups operating outside of urban cellular networks, Starlink is the vital connective tissue. Take Carbon Robotics, which develops autonomous agricultural machinery like the LaserWeeder G2 and now operates across fifteen countries. Its Carbon AutoTractor, an autonomy retrofit for existing tractors, ships with Starlink connectivity built into the installation package — because AI-driven systems that stream real-time data and hand off to remote operators during edge cases need broadband that rural cellular simply cannot provide.

Similarly, Robotic Assistance Devices (RAD) integrated Starlink to expand autonomous security robotics into remote oil fields and mining operations. Starlink provides the platform that makes remote physical AI possible.

Pillar 3: The Intelligence Layer (xAI & Cursor)

The most recent—and perhaps most overlooked—shift in the SpaceX ecosystem is its expansion into an intelligence layer through strategic acquisitions and consolidations, specifically integrating xAI and the AI-powered code editor Cursor.

By pulling xAI’s frontier models and massive inference infrastructure closer to SpaceX’s operations, and acquiring Cursor to supercharge internal engineering workflows, SpaceX created a unified intelligence stack for hardware. For SpaceX alumni starting new companies, the playbook is clear: the modern hardware company must be fundamentally software-defined and AI-accelerated. Although the deal is expected to fully close in Q3 2026, the integration of tools like Cursor proves that the speed of hardware development is now inexorably linked to AI-assisted software generation. This intelligence layer drastically reduces the friction of deploying complex systems, acting as a massive tailwind for the entire ecosystem.

The Macroeconomic Shock: The IPO Liquidity Event

The systemic impact of this talent network has been rapidly accelerated by a massive macroeconomic shock: SpaceX’s highly anticipated transition into the public markets.

Over the past two decades, SpaceX granted stock options to thousands of employees that steadily vested over time. The recent massive IPO event acted as a historic wealth unlock, transforming early employees and middle management into millionaires and billionaires overnight.

Historically, large liquidity events at foundational tech companies precipitate a massive, 12-to-24-month lagged wave of employee departures. Census microdata covering three decades of IPOs finds that completing an offering roughly doubles the rate at which employees leave for key startup positions — from about 2.3% to 5.3% of the workforce over the following three years. As these engineers finally gain the ability to diversify their wealth, we are currently witnessing a torrent of highly capitalized angel investors and seasoned engineers flooding the startup ecosystem.

This labor reallocation is shifting value capture away from incumbent defense primes and legacy aerospace toward agile, VC-backed startups. The alumni are funding each other, sitting on each other’s boards, and heavily relying on their shared proven ability to execute capital-intensive projects at unprecedented speeds.

Building the Ecosystem: The Spin-Outs Restructuring Industry

When the talent pool is unleashed and the constraint shifts from “how to get to space” to “what can be built in space,” entirely new business models emerge.

The SpaceX Mafia constellation — alumni ventures grouped by the bottleneck they attack.

Re-architecting Orbital Infrastructure

For decades, satellite manufacturers engineered systems to be as compact as possible (like CubeSats) to circumvent exorbitant launch costs.

K2 Space, co-founded by former SpaceX Mission Director Neel Kunjur, recognized that Starship’s payload capacity inverted this legacy logic. Their thesis? When launch becomes cheap and voluminous, the satellite itself should scale proportionally. K2 Space is designing massive satellite buses to leverage heavy-lift vehicles. The company expanded its production facility to 180,000 square feet in 2025 and recently closed a $500 million Series D (July 30th, 2026, Kleiner Perkins + ICONIQ) valuing the company at $6.8B, while also securing over $1 billion in customer contracts.

Meanwhile, Apex Space—co-founded by former SpaceX propulsion engineer Max Benassi—targets the systemic manufacturing bottleneck. While rockets are reusable, satellite buses take years to build. Instead of bespoke architectures, Apex offers standardized, off-the-shelf spacecraft platforms (the Aries, Nova, and Comet), applying the SpaceX ethos of rapid productization. Apex’s recent $200 million Series D underscores the massive market demand for constellation-scale production.

The space infrastructure layer is further populated by alumni like Tom Mueller (SpaceX employee #1), whose company Impulse Space raised a $500 million Series D to build orbital transfer vehicles; Will Bruey and Delian Asparouhov’s Varda Space Industries, which crystallizes active pharmaceutical ingredients in microgravity and returns them to Earth in reentry capsules; and Jordan Noone, who co-founded Relativity Space before leaving in 2020, pioneered, 3D printing for entire launch vehicles.

Terrestrial Automation and Defense

The most immediate returns on SpaceX human capital are also materializing right here on Earth, in sectors constrained by labor shortages and ripe for automation.

Take TerraFirma, founded by former SpaceX engineers Noah Schochet and Noah McGuinness, who between them worked on Starlink, Starshield, and Starship. Observing that mass manufacturing automation was completely absent from civil construction sites, they built a vertically integrated construction company utilizing robotic earthworks. Their proprietary software lets a single operator supervise three to five massive bulldozers and excavators simultaneously from a remote command station, with an Xbox controller kept on hand as a teleoperation fallback for edge cases the system hasn’t yet automated. In July 2026, TerraFirma raised a $100 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins, bringing total funding to $115 million, to go after the ~$2 trillion U.S. construction market.

In defense, Hadrian is building highly automated, software-driven factories for precision-machined aerospace hardware. Founder Chris Power built the company by recruiting SpaceX manufacturing talent, including Chris Baker (Former SpaceX Director of Dragon Production) and Corey Black (Former SpaceX Manager of Machining Operations (Raptor Machining)). Hadrian says its factories deliver components in one to three weeks against an industry norm of four to sixteen, roughly a tenfold speedup. With ~$477 million raised and a $1.6 billion valuation as of January 2026, it is offering “Factories-as-a-Service” to rapidly rebuild America’s hard-power supply chains.

Similarly, Anduril Industries — now a $61 billion defense company, and reportedly in talks near $100 billion — competes directly for the same hard-tech engineering pool, bypassing the slow pipelines of legacy primes and importing SpaceX-style iterative hardware loops to scale high-rate production of interceptor drones and passive sensors.

The Missing Software Layer

To build complex hardware at unprecedented speeds, legacy Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) software proved wholly inadequate. Alumni realized they needed to build the software infrastructure for the rest of the deep tech industry.

First Resonance, founded by Karan Talati and Neal Sarraf, developed the ION Factory Operating System. Talati built the core of SpaceX’s testing systems for Falcon 9, certifying components for thermal, vibration, and shock performance, and saw firsthand the friction caused by disjointed data silos. ION connects workflows from prototyping to full-scale production, bringing modern API frameworks to the factory floor.

Parallel to the factory, Epsilon3, co-founded by SpaceX veteran Laura Crabtree, provides an end-to-end operational software suite that synchronizes complex hardware testing. Replacing archaic Excel and Word documents in deep tech operations, Epsilon3’s software alone was used during 30% of all orbital space launches in the US.

Data Centers in Space

As global demand for AI accelerates, terrestrial data centers are triggering a catastrophic strain on the Earth’s electricity grids and water resources. The deeply contrarian solution engineered by the latest generation of deep tech founders is to physically relocate data center infrastructure into Low Earth Orbit. Enter Starcloud.

Founded by a trio that includes Adi Oltean—a 20-year Microsoft Azure veteran who later engineered Starlink’s tracking beams at SpaceX—Starcloud represents the apex of this ecosystem. Their fundamental proposition is that space offers two infinite resources: unattenuated solar power and near-absolute-zero background temperatures for passive radiative cooling.

Operating at true SpaceX velocity, Starcloud hit a $1.1 billion valuation just 17 months after Y Combinator. In late 2025, they launched the Starcloud-1 demonstrator aboard a Falcon 9, successfully operating an Nvidia H100 GPU in the vacuum of space and training an AI model directly in orbit.

Starcloud’s strategic brilliance is operating strictly as an orbital utility — selling power, cooling, and connectivity while partners supply and operate the chips. In October 2025 it announced a partnership with Crusoe to put the first cloud operator in space, with a Crusoe Cloud module launching in late 2026 and limited GPU capacity available from early 2027. The longer-term framework CEO Philip Johnston has described publicly is far larger: ten gigawatts of orbital power from 2032, over five years, at three cents per kilowatt-hour — roughly $13.1 billion of energy. As hyperscalers hit severe terrestrial energy limits, orbital compute becomes the ultimate expression of building on top of the infrastructure SpaceX popularized.

Capital raised by a sample of alumni-founded ventures (Starcloud shown as valuation).

The Next Deep Tech Epoch

SpaceX has functioned as an apex training ground, embedding a philosophy of extreme operational velocity and first-principles reasoning into a new generation of founders. The “SpaceX Mafia” proves that the execution principles forged under Elon Musk—pursuing the absolute limits of performance while ruthlessly managing complex systems—are universally applicable across the global economy.

The ongoing reindustrialization of the global economy is being led by the hardware-native founders forged in the crucible of the modern space race.

At Comma Capital, our core thesis is rooted in identifying and backing exceptional talent at the very beginning of their journey. The alumni spinning out of SpaceX—armed with deep technical expertise, a relentless execution mindset, and liquid capital from the recent IPO—represent the most asymmetric pre-seed investment opportunity of this decade.

The legacy of SpaceX will ultimately be measured not just in rockets launched, but in the founders they built and the terrestrial and orbital industries they transform. We’re here to fund the builders laying that new foundation.

If you’re building something in the space, please reach out to David (david [@] comma.vc).

The Comma, Periodical. - July 2026 Edition

Comma Capital — Fri, 17 Jul 2026 21:02:04 GMT

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Comma Periodical!

Some upcoming events in New York, San Francisco and Toronto. Yes we have 10 events coming up — it’s basically hot Comma summer 🔥 ! Some people ask us why we do soo many events and how… we love building community, partnering with our portfolio companies, meeting cool people and most importantly having a little bit of fun (or in the case of our Pickleball meetups, A LOT OF FUN!).

[NYC] July 20 - Deeptech NYC Meetup with Intelligence Factory

[NYC] July 21 - Hedge Fund Dinner with Valyu

[NYC] July 22 - AI Rollup Economics for Engineers with Modus

[NYC] July 22 - AI-Native Fintech Happy Hour with Revamp & Valyu

[NYC] July 23 - Private Equity Dinner with Valyu

[SF] July 23 - SF Comma Summer Hangout

[SF] July 24 - SF Intern & New Grad SummerFest with Pylon

[Toronto] July 27 - Toronto Founder Mixer

[NYC] July 29 - NYC Healthcare Operator Exchange

[NYC] July 29 - NYC Startup Pickleball Meetup #6

Last week for applications for the Comma Blueprint Future Founders Program! Deadline July 24.

We opened up applications for the third cohort of the Comma Blueprint program. Comma Blueprint is our equity-free evening in-person program in NYC for a small cohort of the best engineers and operators who are:
- Still at their day jobs or recently left
- 3 to 6 months from leaving their companies
- Ideating or looking for co-founders
You can find the link to apply to this year's summer cohort HERE. Deadline is July 24.

What we’re thinking about this month: World Cup, Prediction Markets, Commodities, SF vs NYC, Heatwave

World Cup craziness — luck or skill?

With the world cup in full swing and Argentina pulling off every possible come back, this summer has been the summer of sports in New York and around the world. With the summer of sports has come all time highs for apps like Kalshi and Draftkings. How many of you downloaded those apps for the first time this summer because of the Knicks or the World Cup? It’s not too late to place your pick for Sunday!

Losing all my underdog picks in the quarterfinals has kept me up at night thinking, “But how do we know when something is luck vs skill?” As they say though, better lucky than good.

Every company is a data labelling or inference company… commodity or not?

This month I’ve had several conversations with founder and investor friends on how some of the fastest growing companies of the last year have been companies where a lot of people had labelled those companies ‘commodities’ and ‘low differentiation’ that would be a race to the bottom, specifically data labelling and inference companies. Turns out, when something is a good commodity, it sometimes also comes with extremely high demand and when demand is high, being able to scale providing the commodity in the most efficient and easiest way then becomes the moat.

I’ve now had to work on changing my mind on how I approach companies that historically might have looked like a ‘commodity’ and spend more time really understanding the challenges that comes with providing this commodity. With data labelling and data collection, there’s true moats that get developed both with the ops expertise that is required and the network effects that you get once you’ve been able to build the right relationships on the demand and supply sides. If you’re building a commodity in the AI space, please reach out.

Every week I get the question, “why aren’t you in SF? do you not feel the fomo living in NYC?”

And the answer is no I do not feel the fomo. I used to feel the fomo but being based in NYC has allowed us to be away from the AI craziness right now while still being plugged into a tech ecosystem that is seeing unprecedented growth. We continue to be bullish on the NYC ecosystem and can’t wait to invest in more great founders based here in the upcoming months and years. That said I’m excited to be visiting SF after 6 months of just staying in NYC.

Heatwaves, climate tech, air conditioning and energy infra

One thing I am looking forward to in SF is being able to breathe the fresh air and escape the current NYC summer heatwave. It’s been hotter than ever and every time I step out, it makes me want to find a climate tech startup to invest in. Who is building in the space? I have a funny feeling that the next big European unicorn will be a company in the air conditioning space…

Featured Comma Capital Portfolio Companies:

LM Studio launches Bionic

Introducing LM Studio Bionic. The Agent made for Open Models. You can learn more here.

Nitra launches Flexpay, BNPL for the biopharma industry!

Nitra is building the healthcare company of this generation. If you’re interested in learning more about open roles, you can find them here.

Other Open Roles

If you’re starting to think about what’s next or exploring something new, you can reach out to the Comma Capital team here to help connect you with the companies below.

Quanta - Engineers, Founding Marketer, Product Designer

About Comma Capital:

The Comma, Periodical. - June 2026 Edition

Comma Capital — Thu, 18 Jun 2026 17:19:00 GMT

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Comma Periodical!

Some upcoming events in New York that we’re hosting:

June 23 from 8-10pm - NYC Startup Pickleball Meetup #5

June 24 from 7-9pm - NYC Tee & Tech: Startup Founders Night at Five Iron Golf

Launching applications for the Comma Capital University Fellowship

We opened up applications for the fifth cohort of the Comma University Fellowship program. This cohort based educational program is geared towards students interested in exploring the world of startups and VC. If you’re interested in applying, you can find the link to apply here.

If you’re a current student, dropout or new grad exploring startup ideas, please reach out here as well.

What we’re thinking about this month: Knicks, Collectibles, TCG, Sports, Space(X), Energy Infrastructure, Data Centers

Knicks in 5! The energy in New York has been incredible the last few weeks as the Knicks came back in several games in the NBA finals to win the NBA championship (happy celebrating to everyone who went to the Knicks parade today).

(New York truly is the greatest city in the world)

There’s nothing like sports to bring people together. It has been a reminder that even in the world of AI, there are some human things like sports that will never be replaced by AI.

Related to that, we have been spending more time in areas that we think are AGI proof which includes collectibles, TCG, sports and luxury - areas that have scarcity value, nostalgia, community and help people express themselves in the physical world.

The last few weeks has brought me back to the days when I used to play Pokemon trading cards competitively when I was 12. If you’re exploring this space or know people who are, please reach out!

To the moon and beyond!

On that note, what an inspiring time to be alive! We loved reading the SpaceX & the Sentient Sun post that a16z just put out this week - what a time to be alive!

We are spending more and more time in deeptech these days and would love to meet folks building in the frontier around space, physical AI and energy infrastructure. What will the space economy look like? Similar to how the launch of AWS created all these Saas and cloud companies, we believe that in this next decade, we will be seeing so many more Space startups and applications that are built because of the SpaceX platform.

Let’s build the moon and mars city together!

Screenshot from the a16z SpaceX & The Sentient Sun post quoting Elon Musk

Featured Comma Capital Portfolio Companies:

Vali Health Announces their Seed Raise

They are hiring across the board - check them out here and reach out to Serena Dang if you’re interested in learning more.

Welcome to our summer interns Julia and Cristina!

Julia and Cristina who are both rising juniors at Penn are joining us as summer interns in New York! They’ll be on the ground meeting founders in New York so if you’re building something new, reach out to them here (for julia) and here (for cristina).

Other Open Roles

If you’re starting to think about what’s next or exploring something new, you can reach out to the Comma Capital team here to help connect you with the companies below.

LM Studio - AI Engineer, Desktop App Engineer, Python SDK Engineer

Quanta - Engineers, Founding Marketer, Product Designer

About Comma Capital:

The Comma, Periodical. - May 2026 Edition

Comma Capital — Mon, 11 May 2026 18:50:51 GMT

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Comma Periodical!

Some upcoming events in New York that we’re hosting:

May 15 - Comma Deeptech Meetup #2: Robotics NYC ft. Intelligence Factory

May 19 - NYC Startup Pickleball Meetup #3: AI x Private Equity

May 29 - Bagels & Builders (&Crepes) by Eniac Ventures & Comma Capital

June 6 - Queens NYC Tech Mixer at SPOT and Comma Capital

June 9 - NYC Startup Game Night #2 by Comma Capital & RRE Ventures

We had our first Comma Deeptech Meetup: Robotics NYC last month and had over 130+ folks join us in New York to meet several robotics startups building in New York. We’re hosting our second meetup next week - register here.

What we’re thinking about this month: Personalized Medicine, Peptides, GLP-3, Tech Bio, Surgical robots, Pharma and more.

We had the first set of thesis presentations from our Comma VC Fellowship program and a big topic was around the state of healthcare, personalized medicine, tech bio, pharma, robotics in healthcare and more.

We’ve been paying attention to some of the latest when it comes to "GLP-3" which is the new generation of "triple-agonist" weight-loss drugs, most notably retatrutide by Eli Lilly, which targets three receptors (GLP-1, GIP, and glucagon) rather than one or two. In Phase 2 trials, it showed significant results, with participants losing up to 24% of their body weight in 48 weeks. Some folks who’ve tried it as well talk about how it helps with muscle preservation and not just weight loss.

There are also some upcoming updates to regulations around peptides. The FDA’s Pharmacy Compounding Advisory Committee will meet on July 23-24, 2026, to discuss easing restrictions on seven specific peptides that were previously removed from the permissible compounding list in 2023. We believe that these tailwinds will lead to a lot of growth in the peptides category and broader adoption across consumers as well.

In the public markets, Intuitive Surgical has been accelerating with demand for their surgical robots reaching a new high. As we dig more into healthcare and robotics more broadly, it’s been interesting for us to see the different types of business models across selling the robots, owning the operating system or in Intuitive Surgical’s case, being able to sell services and additional robotic parts as you do more surgeries. Healthcare has always had a labor shortage and we think robotics will have a lot of applications in the healthcare space.

If you’re building something in personalized medicine, peptides, healthcare robotics or tech bio, please reach out.

Featured Comma Capital Portfolio Companies:

Chasi builds AI Agents for Industrial Commerce. Apply for roles here.

We’re HQ’d in San Francisco, backed by Y Combinator and top investors, already working with Caterpillar, John Deere, AGCO, Bobcat, and other top OEM dealers and rental companies. Every building, road, warehouse, and farm depends on equipment - excavators, forklifts, cranes, tractors. Every hour a machine sits idle, whether broken down on a job site or waiting in the yard, is lost productivity and lost revenue.

This is one of the biggest opportunities to bring real-world, multi-modal AI to an industry that has very low actual software adoption in the field. Learn more at chasi.ai

Drogue is using Ocean Thermal Energy to power data centers. Apply for roles here.

Drogue is determined to change how the world generates and uses electricity. The ocean is the largest, untapped energy source on the planet, and we’re set out to build an entirely new economy on it. We envision a future where it’s obvious for energy intensive activities to exist offshore with colocated power generation. Data centers are the best place to start.

Valyu AI just launched the best DeepResearch API - Check it out and get started for free today!

Other Open Roles

If you’re starting to think about what’s next or exploring something new, you can reach out to the Comma Capital team here to help connect you with the companies below.

LM Studio - AI Engineer, Desktop App Engineer, Python SDK Engineer

Quanta - Engineers, Founding Marketer, Product Designer

About Comma Capital:

The Comma, Periodical. - April 2026 Edition

Comma Capital — Wed, 08 Apr 2026 18:45:41 GMT

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Comma Periodical!

Some upcoming events in New York to check out:

April 15, 2026 - NYC Game Night with RRE Ventures x Comma Capital

April 29, 2026 - Robotics NYC Meetup #1 hosted by Comma Capital

May 6, 2026 - Pickleball NYC Meetup #2 hosted by Comma Capital & Rho

What we’re thinking about: Anthropic taking over the world, Physical AI & Robotics in the East Coast and our real world investment thesis (consumer goods, live events, sports, etc.)?

The last month has been a dizzying month with so many things happening in the AI world and beyond. Anthropic leading the charge and now growing faster than OpenAI. It has been cool to see how so many of our friends and community members have been experimenting with different ways to integrate Claude into their daily life.

As more uncertainty comes about with software and how AI is impacting it, we have been spending more time thinking about other areas that will see growth in the coming years as AGI approaches.

We continue to be bullish on the New York ecosystem and the broader east coast and have loved meeting great founders building in physical AI, hardware and robotics. We also have been spending more time meeting folks building in consumer AI and consumer goods and other categories like live events and sports. We’ve looked at companies ranging from skincare brands to pet food to sporting meetup platforms to emerging sports (we love pickleball!) and more. If you’re building something weird in these categories or want to cohost a pickleball event with us, please reach out.

As more jobs get augmented by AI agents, we think humans will be prioritizing live events and experiences even more. We see this ourselves in New York as more social clubs, communities and sports groups become more and more popular. We are very interested in talking to founders who are reshaping the way consumers experience live events, social interactions and the world as well.

At the same time, we think we are still early in the adoption curve and we continue to be bullish on companies that are focused on making it easier for legacy industries, non technical people and the rest of America to adopt AI and get up to speed to harnessing the power of the latest technologies whether at the infra, consumer or the application layer. What an exciting time to be building!

Lastly, we have started to spend more time on energy infrastructure as well. As AI proliferates, it has become very clear that we do not have enough energy to power all the data centers in the US and that alternative energy sources will be very important. We are digging in and would love to meet anybody exploring ideas in nuclear, solar, energy storage, batteries, ocean thermal, data centers, etc.

As always you can get in touch here.

Featured Role: Technical Chief of Staff at Cassidy AI

Hey all, Cassidy (Series A) is growing fast and we’re hiring across a few critical roles in NYC.

Senior & Mid-level Software Engineers - end-to-end product engineering and helping build systems that scale
Technical Chief of Staff - CTO’s operational right hand. Picks up hard, ambiguous problems across engineering, compliance, and commercial conversations and owns them end to end.

We’ve got a few other open roles here. There’s a $5k referral bonus across roles, so if you know anyone who might be a good fit, reach out here.

Other Open Roles

If you’re starting to think about what’s next or exploring something new, you can reach out to the Comma Capital team here to help connect you with the companies below.

LM Studio - AI Engineer, Desktop App Engineer, Python SDK Engineer

Arbor - founding Product Manager (email us to learn more)

Quanta - Engineers, Founding Marketer, Product Designer

About Comma Capital:

The Comma, Periodical. - March 2026 Edition

Comma Capital — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 20:58:55 GMT

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Comma Periodical!

Some upcoming events in New York to check out:

March 18, 2026 - Building MVPs with AI: The Modern Stack with Vercel, Anthropic, & LM Studio hosted by Avid Ventures & Comma Capital

March 19, 2026 - eNO badge: World’s first mini AI bodyguard comes to NYC

April 8, 2026 - NYC Founders Pickleball Meetup #1 w/ Comma Capital, Bessemer & Stifel Bank

In Search Of Our Comma Capital Summer Interns!

We’re excited to open up the applications for our Comma Capital Summer Internship! We’ve had several interns join us over the last few years and we’ve continued to run various fellowship programs to help students get exposed to venture as well. We want to continue to double down not just in young builders but in young aspiring investors as well.

Apply here. Deadline for application is March 15. Applications will be considered on a rolling basis so apply as soon as you’re interested.

Comma Capital x Dorm Room Fund Collaboration

We announced our Comma Zero 2.0 program last month and we’re excited that we’re also partnering with Dorm Room Fund for this second addition. When you apply for Comma Zero, you will immediately be considered for funding from Dorm Room Fund as well. Apply for Comma Zero 2.0 here.

What we’re thinking about: What happens to SaaS from here? What does the new creator economy look like with AI?

In February, the public markets took a massive hit especially when it came to SaaS. While we think the public markets are overreacting, it does beg the question of as VCs, where should we be spending our time and how should we be thinking about these next generation of SaaS companies?

It’s also been interesting meeting dozens of folks building around similar categories around vertical software, enterprise tooling and vibe coding in the last few months with the big question being - when might Anthropic and Claude enter this market? More than ever, it’s become extremely important to be nimble and to be open minded to what new opportunities, areas, roles, jobs and products might be invented in this time period that might not have existed prior.

While public companies like Block decided to do a big 40% rift recently, Citadel rebukes a lot of doomer views with their recent report - they cite how ‘In spite of the current displacement narrative – job postings for software engineers are rising rapidly, up 11% YoY.job postings for software engineers are rising rapidly, up 11% YoY’, and how new business formation is actually rapidly expanding.

We are very excited to meet founders building around this new creator economy and this feature where everyone can be an entrepreneur, small business owner or founder and can unleash their creative potential. It’s time to get creative!

Inside the Comma Portfolio: Longwave launches!

Check them out here.

Featured Role: Founding Engineer at Cascade Health

Cascade Health is a NYC-based startup founded by healthcare builders, clinicians, and operators with deep experience across oncology and specialty medicine. Our founders, Mina Iskarous and Kate Murdock, work closely with providers to solve one of the hardest problems in modern medicine: delivering advanced cell, gene, and immunotherapies safely and at scale.

Our mission is to equip every provider with the technology, workforce, and operational capabilities needed to deliver cell and gene therapies. These therapies are redefining what’s possible for patients across oncology, autoimmune, and rare diseases - yet today, operational and clinical complexity means fewer than 20% of eligible patients ever receive them.

Reach out to Mina Iskarous if you’re interested in this role.

Other Open Roles

If you’re starting to think about what’s next or exploring something new, you can reach out to the Comma Capital team here to help connect you with the companies below.

LM Studio - AI Engineer, Desktop App Engineer, Python SDK Engineer

Arbor - founding Product Manager (email us to learn more)

Quanta - Engineers, Founding Marketer, Product Designer

About Comma Capital:

The Comma, Periodical. - February 2026 Edition

Comma Capital — Mon, 09 Feb 2026 22:16:19 GMT

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Comma Periodical!

It’s crazy how fast the first month of 2026 has flown by! I can’t believe we’re already in February. We're excited to get back to our regular cadence of events with a few upcoming in New York including:

Some of our upcoming events in New York and Boston:

[NYC] February 12, 2026 - Single Mingle NYC Pre Valentines Mixer for Young Professionals

[NYC] February 18, 2026 - Chessboards & Dashboards for the Data Community w/Primary Venture Partners

[Boston] February 23, 2026 - Harvard + MIT Startup Career Fair w/Bessemer

[NYC] February 26, 2026 - David from Comma Capital Fireside chat at Columbia University

Comma Zero 2.0: Investing in more young builders

To kickoff 2026, we continue to be bullish on young talent coming from universities and are looking to invest in atleast 5 young builder teams this half. If you’re exploring ideas, apply for our Comma Zero 2.0 program here. We also just did a recent trip to Philly visiting Penn and will be at Harvard + MIT on February 23 - come say hi!

H1 2026 Focus Areas: Robotics, Manufacturing, Energy Infra, Physical AI, Hardware, Quantum & Legacy Industries

As a fund at Comma Capital, we have started to spend more time in these areas this year and have loved exploring the scene in New York and the broader East Coast (Philadelphia, Boston, Toronto, Pittsburgh, etc) including attending the New York Hardware meetup and the New York Space tech meetup. We’ve been pleasantly surprised by the number of folks working in these deeptech areas in New York. We continue to be excited by these categories so if you’re exploring in these areas please reach out.

Breakneck by Dan Wang - What we can learn from China when it comes to building physical infrastructure

One of the areas we’ve been doing research around more recently as we’ve ramped up spending more time in physical AI and hardware has been China. China has built so much more infrastructure and is now leading the world in robotics, hardware, manufacturing, biotech, clinical trials and more.

In the Breakneck book, Dan Wang writes about how the US is run by lawyers and how China is run by engineers. His early example of what this leads to is how the Beijing-Shanghai and LA-SF super rail projects were started in 2008 and the former was completed in 2011 while the latter is predicted to be completed anytime between 2030-2033.

Here’s a cool Linkedin post + video from our friend Zoey Tang at B Capital recapping takeaways from a recent China trip she led to dig into the world of robotics.

If you’re interested in joining our Breakneck bookclub, reach out.

What happens in a Post AGI world?

Another question that we’ve been thinking about as AI continues to break records and make advancements everyday, what does a post AGI world look like? What are the industries that will become even more important? We would love to connect with more folks in New York exploring the creative world, content, media, fashion, sports, live entertainment and restaurants. Reach out here.

Inside the Comma Portfolio: Unify Superbowl Ad

We loved seeing Comma portfolio company Unify get scrappy in putting together a Superbowl Ad that only cost them a total of $48.52. If you need inspiration for your growth team, this is one to check out!

Featured Role: Growth Marketing - Community & Partnerships Lead at GoodLabs

Goodlabs is reimagining how Americans access preventive health. Our mission is to strengthen the national blood supply while democratizing access to personalized health insights. When someone donates blood through Goodlabs, it’s a rare win-win: more blood for life-saving treatments, and more data for people who normally can’t access preventive care.

We’re looking for a Growth Marketer to build and own the community and partnerships function. Our users love Goodlabs, how can we enable them to be our biggest advocates? On any given day, you might be managing a blood drive at a major company, designing a creative activation to get people excited about donating blood in a new market, moderating a community of thousands of engaged donors, or hopping on a call with a prospective partner to scope a new distribution deal.

Apply here.

Other Open Roles

If you’re starting to think about what’s next or exploring something new, you can reach out to the Comma Capital team here to help connect you with the companies below.

LM Studio - AI Engineer, Desktop App Engineer, Python SDK Engineer

Arbor - founding Product Manager (email us to learn more)

Quanta - Engineers, Founding Marketer, Product Designer

About Comma Capital:

The Comma, Periodical. - December 2025 Edition

Comma Capital — Wed, 31 Dec 2025 13:51:22 GMT

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Comma Periodical! Thank you for signing up and joining us for different events we’ve hosted in the last few years. We had so much fun meeting all of you across all the events we hosted in the last year.

It’s been an incredible 2025 and we can’t wait to see what everyone does in 2026 and all the new friendships that will be formed!

Some of our upcoming events in San Francisco:

January 9, 2026 - Comma Collective SF New Year Meetup

January 12, 2026 - SF Ivy Plus Alumni Mixer

Comma VC Fellowship Cohort 5

We’re excited to open up applications for the Comma VC Fellowship. We have been doing this program for the last 5 years and we’re excited to launch applications for the next cohort.

This is a 4 month fellowship program from Jan 26-May 11 with 10 sessions total. Through this program, you will work closely with the Comma team, going through workshops on sourcing, diligence, winning and portfolio support. You will join our meetings with prospective founders and portfolio founders. And you will be an extended member of the Comma team. We think of this as a crash course on the inner workings of venture capital for Comma community members.

Past alumni of the program have gone on to start companies backed by a16z, ycombinator, general catalyst and more. They also end up working in various high growth startups and landing roles in venture capital as well.

Deadline for applications is Jan 16. Apply here.

Go behind the scenes into the world of venture

2025 Wrapped - Recapping the crazy year of AI acceleration

Only the Paranoid Survive the AI Wars. We started the year thinking OpenAI was the clear winner. We were quickly proven wrong with various releases that seemingly happened every week and month from Deepseek to Claude to xAI to Gemini. As the legendary Andy Grove once said, “Only the paranoid survive.”
Vertical AI for Legacy Industries goes mainstream. Dozens of companies in every “legacy industry” category whether it’s home services, manufacturing, medspas, legal, insurance, etc.
Private Equity meets Venture Capital. AI rollups became a thing. GC’s rollup strategy started showing early signs of momentum. Thrive launched Thrive Holdings. HVAC became one of the hottest categories in VC.
Distribution and convergence of startups, creators and influencers. Everyone can and has become a creator. Vibe coding became a thing. LinkedIn became a platform every founder needed to start learning. Influencers started getting hired fulltime by AI startups.
Explosion of Voice AI & Multimodal Generative AI. This year was the year of the voice. AI receptionists started working and getting adopted. Generative creative models blew people’s minds away. Sora 2.0 and studio ghibli trended worldwide. Infra cos like ElevenLabs and Fal saw unprecedented growth.
The Return of the Dropout Founder. The average YC age has gone down from 30 to 23. The iconic breakout companies in AI Cursor, Mercor, Etched all started by founders 22 and below.
The Chase for More Training data. ScaleAI acquisition. Mercor hitting $10b.
Hardware becomes cool again. Physical AI & Robotics is the next frontier. The impending SpaceX IPO will only lead to more in the coming years.
SF is so back. 996. Folks have moved back. The most ambitious founders are finding their way to Hayes Valley. The hacker house culture is in full swing.
Real life is cool again. Communities. Social clubs. Consumer apps that encourage in person.

If there’s one thing we know from all of this is that change is the only constant. We can’t wait to we what 2026 has in store for all of us. We’d love to hear from you and what your favorite themes of 2025 were!

What we’re thinking about: Where are we in the AI cycle?

Where are we in the AI cycle?

NVIDIA continues to be on a tear. Free cash flow from the major cloud companies continues to be spent on NVIDIA with a lot of these companies getting close to 100% of their free cash flow spent on GPUs and now going into using leverage to purchase more. NVIDIA investing in Intel. Meta acquiring Magnus AI. Tons of spend and M&A activity happening in this AI race. Nobody wants to get left behind.

Where do we go from here?

It’s hard to time markets but you can be there when the market timing is right. There’s never been a more exciting time to build and invest. We continue to take the long term view that legendary companies will be started in these next few years regardless of the market ups and downs.

As the model companies and infra continues to get better, we continue to think there’s still a ton more opportunity for application layer companies to make it easier for the end user to utilize the power of these latest AI models. Distribution continues to be a big thing we think about both in startups we invest in but as a fund ourselves. Never as it been more important to develop your audience and build your following for unfair distribution.

We also continue to be even more excited to back extremely technical founders that are pushing the cutting edge in both software and hardware. We think as it becomes easier to build, there were will be more people building the easier application layer companies but the most ambitious technology companies going after hard problems will be able to attract the most hardcore engineers to join them.

Featured Role: Engineers @ Amigo

Amigo builds AI agents for healthcare. The platform handles both clinical workflows and patient engagement at scale: post-discharge monitoring, intake, medication adherence, care gap closure, and more. Amigo is a Series A startup based in New York and currently hiring for staff, senior and agent engineers (find full careers page here). If you’re interested, reach out with your bio and resume here.

Other Open Roles

If you’re starting to think about what’s next or exploring something new, you can reach out to the Comma Capital team here to help connect you with the companies below.

LM Studio - AI Engineer, Desktop App Engineer, Python SDK Engineer

Arbor - founding Product Manager (email us to learn more)

Quanta - Engineers, Founding Marketer, Product Designer

About Comma Capital:

The Comma, Periodical. - November 2025 Edition

Comma Capital — Tue, 25 Nov 2025 18:51:14 GMT

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Comma Periodical! Thank you for signing up and joining us for different events we’ve hosted in the last few years. Hope you’re all gearing up for Thanksgiving and the holiday season. For upcoming December events, we are hosting:

Dec 4 - AI x PE Invite Only Future Founder Dinner (request an invite)

Dec 7 - NYC Canadians Holiday Meetup

What we’re thinking about: Next Generation of Builders

Our recent trip at Penn was very inspiring and we loved meeting so many students building and exploring startups. We’re looking to visit more campuses in the new year so reach out if you want to collaborate on a campus trip. In the last few months, we’ve released a few initiatives to invest in more young builders (dropouts + new grads) in the US through our Comma Zero initiative and also in Canada through Comma Maple. You can find the application link for Comma Zero here and Comma Maple here.

Now that’s it’s been a few months, we’re excited to share some of these investments we’ve made including into Lemma which was started by USC dropouts and is in the current YC batch and just raised from top investors. We also recently invested in Succession AI which helps small business owners with succession planning and selling their business. You can learn more about Avril and her backstory in Wendy’s LinkedIn post and video interview feature.

Winter + Fall interns for Comma Capital

At Comma, we believe in opening up the world of venture capital. We’ve had several interns join us over the last few years and we’ve continued to run various fellowship programs to help students get exposed to venture as well. We want to continue to double down not just in young builders but in young aspiring investors as well.

This winter + fall, we’re looking to work with 2-3 part time interns that want to learn the craft of venture. Apply here. Deadline for application is December 15.

NYC AI Infra Demo Night in New York

The energy was electric at our recent AI infra demo night cohosted with MongoDB Ventures with great demos from Comma portfolio companies LM Studio and Hathora.

Hathora launched their new AI infra models product to make it extremely easy to launch AI voice applications and test out various AI models. You can start exploring models here.

The Search Wars for AI Agents

The search API space is heating up. Every AI agent company is using some form of search API and this has become one of the most important categories in AI devtools and infra. a16z recently published an article on the Search wars and how they’re thinking about the space.

As investors, we think a lot about how competitive companies raising a ton of capital can suck the air out of the room but for early spaces where things are rapidly changing, you often see that it’s not the first player to market that ends up winning.

In the case of Google in the previous generation of search, they ended up being the Nth company in the search space yet had the biggest technical and product breakthrough that led to them winning (How Google Works is a great book around this that even goes into the partnership they had with Yahoo and all the unique partnerships that alongside their product helped them win).

Within the Comma portfolio, we are investors in Valyu AI which was started by Harsh, Alex and Harvey and recently hosted a few hackathons in UCL in collaboration with several great AI companies. They recently released their benchmarks against other Search APIs showing top performance across the board. If you’ve been building in the AI space, make sure to check them out and let us know your feedback as well.

What ideas are we excited about?

As a team at Comma, we continue to spend time in the intersection of legacy industries, private equity and AI. We’ve also been meeting more people building in robotics and the intersection of software + hardware. If you are interested in exploring ideas in this space, we’d love to chat with you.

We have started working with folks pre-idea to match them with potential cofounders and to seed them with ideas and initial funding as well in these areas that we’re exploring. If that sounds like you or someone you know, please reach out.

Featured Role: Founding Engineer @ Autumn

Autumn is building the AI marketing suite for independent hotels. Autumn was started by second time founders who previously scaled a tech enabled hotel business and have spent 10+ years across different parts of the hotel industry. They are backed by top tier investors based in New York and currently hiring for founding engineers. If you’re interested, reach out with your bio and resume here.

Other Open Roles

If you’re starting to think about what’s next or exploring something new, you can reach out to the Comma Capital team here to help connect you with the companies below.

LM Studio - AI Engineer, Desktop App Engineer, Python SDK Engineer

Arbor - founding Product Manager (email us to learn more)

Quanta - Engineers, Founding Marketer, Product Designer

LM Studio - AI Engineer, Desktop App Engineer, Python SDK Engineer

About Comma Capital:

The Comma, Periodical. - October 2025 Edition

Comma Capital — Tue, 14 Oct 2025 15:29:40 GMT

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Comma Periodical! Thank you for signing up and joining us for different events we’ve hosted in the last few years. With the summer coming to an end and fall welcoming us, we’re cohosting a few upcoming events in October and November:

October 21 Tuesday - Immigrant Founders NYC Networking Night

October 22 Wednesday - NYC Pre-seed Happy Hour with Work-Bench

October 23 Thursday - NYC AI Engineers Happy Hour by CRV & Comma Capital

October 29 Wednesday - NYC Builders & Engineers Meetup by MongoDB x Comma Capital

October 29 Wednesday - Support Zebra x Comma Capital Webinar on hiring global talent and setting up offshore support and ops teams (hiring, vetting, communication, compensation, legal, etc.)

November 6 Thursday - Penn Happy Hour by Slow x Comma (for current Penn students. We will be visiting Philadelphia on Nov 6)

November 7 Friday - Bagels & Builders with Eniac Ventures

What we’re thinking about: SF Tech Week and the 996 Culture in Silicon Valley

We just got back from San Francisco where we got to experience the craziness in SF right now. There is a renewed energy in the city and reminds us a lot of the pre-2021 days in San Francisco. There’s a ton of new people from all over the world who have moved to San Francisco to start companies and the density of young ambitious talent is at an all time high.

The biggest theme everybody was talking about during this trip? The 996 culture. Every conversation we had would end up on this topic with some people being full believers in this culture while others being very skeptical if its long term productive at all. Some folks think it’s just performative while others think that the best startups have always had this grind culture in them and it’s now just being put on a new spotlight. Regardless, it definitely did feel like everyone in SF was working harder than ever (or appeared to be atleast).

A few ~fun~ takes and anecdotes from our trip:

One of our friends who now works at Etched talked about how Etched specifically picked their office to be in San Jose and offers a $2k stipend if you live in the building right beside the office. The magical thing? They were able to convince 80+ folks out of 250 to take them up on the stipend.
The average age for YC founders has now gone down from 30 years old to 24 years old in the last 2 years.
The world of influencers and startups is blurring very quickly. We met several folks who were techies that have become influencers with millions of views and influencers with millions of views being hired fulltime by startups.
The increase in number of DJs and raves in San Francisco. Not sure if this is correlated with the 996 culture but it also did seem like there were more founders turned DJs in San Francisco more than ever. I guess folks need an outlet to decompress as well.

DJ performance at Temple SF sponsored by various tech startups during tech week

What ideas are being built in Silicon Valley?

During our trip to San Francisco we got to attend the Pear Demo Day and the a16z Speedrun Demo Day where we got to see a sampling of the different types of companies being started right now. It was very interesting to see so many companies going from $0 to $500k-1M in ARR really quickly in the span of a few months. It will be interesting to see how durable this revenue ends up being.

Some of the thematic areas that we saw a lot of companies building around:

Legacy AI - Legacy AI and vertical AI continues to be a hot space. We saw companies using AI to build for manufacturing, police officers, different healthcare specialties, mortgage lending, insurance, pharma, etc. These companies usually have some form of forward deployed model or copilot wedge with the eventual goal of collecting data to become a system of record.

AI Dev Tools - In the category of dev tools, agents orchestration systems, AI compliance, permission-ing and security and reinforcement learning environments were some of the most common pitches we heard.

Consumer AI - more than ever, there was a ton of next generation consumer AI companies ranging from next gen dating apps to anime avatar companies to AI 3D generation to AI fashion stylists.

Next wave of AI application software - We also saw a ton of new companies being started in legal AI (IP, personal injury, immigration, contracts, incorporation, etc.), vibe coding / no code / low code AI, AI recruiting, AI user interviews and AI GEO marketing optimization.

Hardware + software - lastly, there was a good amount of new companies across drones, robotics, manufacturing, etc. We heard a few folks using drones and cameras for better security and folks going after building next gen factories for robotics and some using software + sensors to help with the technical operations in manufacturing.

a16z speedrun demo day

What ideas are we excited about?

As a team at Comma, we continue to spend time in the intersection of legacy industries, private equity and AI. If you are interested in exploring ideas in this space, we’d love to chat with you. We have started working with folks pre-idea to match them with potential cofounders and to seed them with ideas and initial funding as well in these areas that we’re exploring. If that sounds like you or someone you know, please reach out.

Featured Open Roles

If you’re starting to think about what’s next or exploring something new, you can reach out to the Comma Capital team here to help connect you with the companies below.

Arbor - Chief of Staff, First Business Hire (email us to learn more)

Quanta - Engineers, Founding Marketer, Product Designer

Flipturn - Software Engineer, GTM analyst

LM Studio - AI Engineer, Desktop App Engineer, Python SDK Engineer

About Comma Capital:

The Comma, Periodical. - September 2025 Edition

Comma Capital — Fri, 05 Sep 2025 14:24:46 GMT

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Comma Periodical! Thank you for signing up and joining us for different events we’ve hosted in the last few years.

With the summer coming to an end and fall welcoming us, we’re hosting a few upcoming events:

Prosumer Hackathon with Creator Ventures and free credits from Anthropic, Bolt, ElevenLabs, Flora (RSVP HERE)

Toronto AI Meetup with Georgian and CrashLabs AI (RSVP HERE)

NYC Bagels & Builders Breakfast with Eniac Ventures (RSVP HERE)

NY AI Builders Happy Hour with Inspired Capital (RSVP HERE)

PRAX NYC Healthcare Summit (MORE INFO HERE)

Comma Zero Program for Ambitious Young People

Calling current college students, drop-outs (from middle school to college), and new grads. In the next few months, we are carving out part of our fund to invest in you. Introducing Comma Zero, a first check program for young builders. This isn’t an accelerator. It’s capital, from our core fund, for young builders no matter the background. Start from zero today: bit.ly/commazero

Applications are rolling until September 30th for this first batch. We will review applications until program slots are filled. Check-out our first Comma Zero investment: Lemma started by Cole Gawin and Jerry Zhang.

PE x AI Founders Program in New York

We’ve been running our PE x AI Founders Program in New York the last few weeks and have learned a lot from bringing together various PE professionals, operators, founders and engineers into one room.

It’s very clear that there is a lot of opportunity for AI in these PE-backed industries but a lot of these PE firms are facing innovators dilemma and don’t have the background or talent to implement the best AI solutions today. If you’re exploring building for PE or interested in legacy industries, please reach out to us here.

What We’re Thinking About: We’re coming to Toronto!

We’re going to be in Toronto from September 13-15 visiting University of Waterloo for Hack the North with one of our fastest growing portfolio companies Rilla. If you’re around, we’d love to see you! We’re also hosting a few meetups in Toronto and looking to meet ambitious young people who want to build in AI. If that’s you, come say hi!

21 Questions with Helen, founder & CEO of Quanta

This summer, our Comma intern Annie is visiting our various portfolio companies to go behind the scenes in part office tour, part ‘vogue style’ founder interview, part highlight reel of the early stage startup ecosystem.

Beyond the Quanta team's many talents, they are apparently also incredible chess players. It was a blast learning more about Helen Hastings, Quanta's Founder & CEO, for our "21 Questions" series! Watch the full video here.

Quanta is an AI-powered, full-service accounting platform built for growing software companies. Learn more about at: https://www.usequanta.com/

Featured Open Roles

If you’re starting to think about what’s next or exploring something new, you can reach out to the Comma Capital team here to help connect you with the companies below.

Arbor - Chief of Staff, First Business Hire (email us to learn more)

Quanta - Engineers, Founding Marketer, Product Designer

Flipturn - Software Engineer, GTM analyst

LM Studio - AI Engineer, Desktop App Engineer, Python SDK Engineer

About Comma Capital:

The Comma, Periodical. - July 2025 Edition

Comma Capital — Tue, 29 Jul 2025 20:29:55 GMT

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Comma Periodical! Thank you for signing up and joining us for different events we’ve hosted in the last few years. Coming back from our San Francisco trip and we’re energized to continue hosting community events across both coasts.

The summer is in full swing and we’re hosting a few more upcoming events:

NYC Bagels & Builders Breakfast with Eniac Ventures (RSVP HERE)

NYC AI Builders + Engineers HH with GV (Google Ventures) (RSVP HERE)

Welcome to NYC Summerfest with a16z (RSVP HERE)

PRAX NYC Healthcare Summit (MORE INFO HERE)

Get free blood tests in San Francisco with Goodlabs!

Stealth Builders Program for Ambitious Young People

We were amazed by the energy in our SF Intern + New Grad Summerfest with our friends at Pylon, Unify and Convoke (they’re all hiring).

Many of you asked us for advice on how to think about career as a young ambitious person in this AI age — we think there hasn’t been a better time to build than today.

With that, we are piloting a stealth program for ambitions builders (high schoolers, college students, dropouts, new grads) that are building a startup and need a bit of inception stage funding to get started, cloud credits, community, GTM advisory and support. We want to bring back the early YC ethos and create a tight knit group of 5-7 teams for this cohort based program.

If that quote resonates with you, you can express interest for the first batch of this program here.

What We’re Thinking About: Designing A Winnable Game

As a startup fund ourselves, we often as a team spend time trying to learn from more experienced investors while deciding what game we want to play as an emerging fund 5 years old based in New York.

In line with our recent time spent exploring the intersection of PE x AI x VC, we’ve enjoyed learning about the birth of various PE funds and the history of the asset class. One PE fund story that stood out was on Alpine and its founder Graham Weaver. We really enjoyed listening to the Invest like the Best episode covering his story and his lecture at Stanford more recently as well where he talks about “how to design a winnable game”.

We loved this idea he shared around how do you continue to think like an olympian and raise your ambition even after having gone through various setbacks, negative priors and reasons to believe that you can’t do something. He encourages people to ask themselves:

‘How do we build the best performing PE fund in the world and have 5x returns for every fund that we raise?’ was the question the Alpine team asked themselves which to them thinking about the type of game that they wanted to play in order to achieve that, what was true to the Alpine team DNA and what was working that they could double down on.

21 Questions with Sid, Cofounder & CEO at Hathora

This summer, our Comma intern Annie is visiting our various NYC portfolio companies to go behind the scenes in part office tour, part ‘vogue style’ founder interview, part highlight reel of the NYC startup ecosystem.

For the second of our “21 questions” series, we interviewed Sid, founder and CEO of Hathora.ai. To gain an insider look into Sid’s vision, some of his high school shenanigans and their latest approach to the AI infra world...watch the full video here.

Hathora is a real time inference and model deployment platform powered by Hathora Cloud. You can learn more here. If you’re building an AI application and you’re interested in using Hathora for real time inference, you can get a Comma discount by booking time with them here and mentioning Comma sent you.

Featured Open Roles

If you’re starting to think about what’s next or exploring something new, you can reach out to the Comma Capital team here to help connect you with the companies below.

Ponder - Founding Designer

LM Studio - AI Engineer, Desktop App Engineer, Python SDK Engineer

About Comma Capital:

The Comma, Periodical. - June 2025 Edition

Comma Capital — Wed, 25 Jun 2025 19:19:41 GMT

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Comma Periodical!

The summer is in full swing and we’re hosting a few events:

SF AI for Legacy Industries HH with Emergence Cap (RSVP HERE)

Intern + New Grad Summerfest with Pylon, Unify and Convoke (RSVP HERE)

NYC AI Builders + Engineers HH with GV (Google Ventures) (RSVP HERE)

The applications for our inaugural Comma AI Founders x Private Equity PE Program (applications here) are open until June 30th.

Our friends at Unify are also hosting this NYC HH event on June 26th and our friends at Baselayer are hosting a NYC fintech social club on July 2nd.

Lastly, we’re organizing a few smaller NYC hangouts - think dinners, board games, poker nights, wine club, coworking, writing club, etc. this summer. If that’s of interest, fill out this form here and feel free to share with friends in NYC too.

What We’re Thinking About: Vibe Coding, Hard Industries, The Next Wave of Jobs and the ‘VC Engineer’

We couldn’t help but hop on to the vibe coding train at Comma Capital. In the last 2 months our team has started building internal tools to help with our day to day. It’s truly incredible seeing what can be built even with minimal software engineering experience. On the flip side, it also makes us skeptical when we see demos during pitches knowing that the founder could have easily just vibe coded it to existence.

We caught up with several of our engineer friends in the community and most of them have talked about how 90% of their code is now written by AI. Folks who were skeptical about AI at the start of this year have been converted. And junior engineers are now scrambling to figure out how to be more competitive in this job market.

Where does this lead us to?

For founders, distribution becomes even more important and going after hard industries where the in person relationships still matter and where having distribution expertise allows you to compound much faster
For engineers, getting better at system design and thinking in frameworks and how to leverage the AI tooling has become even more important
For everyone, being flexible in thinking and being able to throw out priors to adopt to this fast changing world has become essential alongside learning how to use AI tooling in your workflow
For us investors, we’re constantly asking the question of where does value accrue, where are the next big opportunities going to come from and how do we disrupt our own industry?

Additionally, we’re excited to see what new roles get created in these next phase of technology. 10 years ago, people would have scoffed at the influencer industry and now it’s one of the fastest growing industries. In the last year, the ‘GTM Engineer’ has become a job role in itself. We have several portfolio companies now hiring for ‘Agent Engineer’ roles. We’re just scratching the surface on what new roles get created and which companies and platforms lead to the creation of these new roles— the ‘VC engineer’ might be the next job description we put out ourselves.

We’d love to connect if you’re building in any of these spaces: vibe coding and vibe marketing, AI influencers, code security, compliance, manufacturing, hardware robotics, data infrastructure for deep tech or overlooked industries. Reach out here.

21 Questions with Justin Fineberg, Cofounder & CEO at Cassidy

For the first of our “21 questions” series, we interviewed Justin Fineberg, founder and CEO of Cassidy. To gain an insider look into Justin’s vision, Cassidy’s protein-dense snack pantry, and the infamous “arena”...watch the full video here.

Cassidy is a no-code platform that lets teams build custom AI assistants and automated workflows powered by their company’s data. To learn more about Cassidy — including open roles — check out their website here.

Featured Open Roles

If you’re starting to think about what’s next or exploring something new, you can reach out to the Comma Capital team here to help connect you with the companies below.

Ponder - Founding Designer

About Comma Capital:

The Comma, Periodical. - May 2025 Edition

Comma Capital — Fri, 30 May 2025 16:55:34 GMT

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Comma Periodical!

We’re excited to announce two programs we’re opening up applications for this summer: the third cohort for our Comma University Fellowship program (applications here) and our inaugural Comma AI Founders x Private Equity PE Program (applications here). Learn more about both programs below.

For those in New York, be sure to check out all the a16z Tech Week events happening starting next week - we hope to see you at some of the events!

Lastly, we’re organizing a few smaller NYC hangouts - think board games, poker nights, coworking, writing club, etc. this summer. If that’s of interest, fill out this form here and feel free to share with friends in NYC too.

Comma University Fellowship Program Cohort 3

Applications are now open for the Summer 2025 Comma University Fellowship (if you’re a current student or now ambitious students that should apply, please share with them!)!

Learn directly from the experts: Engage in weekly 1-on-1 mentorship with members of the Comma Collective and hear from cohort-specific guest speakers.
Meet like-minded peers: Learn alongside a cohort of ambitious students, with weekly virtual programming and an in-person offsite in SF and NYC.
Gain lifelong access to an exclusive community: Gain membership to an invite-only network of operators, founders, and VCs through the Comma Collective — think private dinners, speaker series, happy hours, and new doors opened.

📅 Deadline: June 10th
🗓️ Program: Week of June 30 to Week of July 28
🔗 Apply here

*If you’re interested in being a mentor to one of the students in the program, you can fill out the form here.

Comma AI Founders x Private Equity (PE) Program

Why Now: AI has made building faster and cheaper — but it hasn’t solved for distribution. As foundational models, APIs, and no-code tools make it easier than ever to spin up products, the true challenge is getting those products in front of the right customers. The next generation of breakout companies will win not just on what they build, but how they reach scale — especially in markets outside of the usual startup playbook. At the same time, private equity (PE) firms now own thousands of profitable, operationally-complex businesses across healthcare, logistics, legal services, industrials, and more. These companies often have strong cash flow, legacy software stacks, and urgent modernization needs — making them ideal customers or co-build opportunities.

Target audience: This program is built to connect founders directly to that overlooked channel — through practical sessions, real relationships, and hands-on building. We’re opening this program to a select group of early founders.

Program Format: A curated, four-part program designed to accelerate real commercial relationships between software/AI founders and private equity professionals actively managing legacy portfolios.

Dates: Deadline for applications is on June 30th. Program runs from July 23-August 13: We will be having weekly Wednesday sessions for 4 weeks.

APPLY HERE.

What We’re Thinking About: The evolving venture landscape, being nimble and counter-positioning and unique distribution as a competitive edge

There hasn’t been a more unique time to be a founder and investor.

It’s very clear that the venture landscape has been evolving with mega funds getting bigger and launching new products whether its a16z and GC adding fund of funds and wealth management products or Thrive starting a holdings permanent Berkshire-type vehicle and making a very shrewd investment into Carvana in the public markets or Lightspeed becoming a registered investment adviser or Coatue launching a new private venture style vehicle open to accredited investors. On the flip side, we constantly hear LPs talk about frustrations in the lack of liquidity, private companies staying private longer and hundreds of new emerging fund managers including former founders/operators and spinouts from legacy firms.

What does this mean for founders? More options for capital, more tourist founders and VCs and more important decisions to think about when selecting which investors to partner with across different firms. We also see increasingly more companies doing tender offers as well to give employees liquidity and the megafunds being happy to buy up ownership. With record funds being raised in the last year, we also see more venture dollars chasing the same ideas also means more competition both for founders and investors. There are some signs that scream peak 2021/2022 market but maybe with AI, this time it’s different?

It’s a great reminder that when you’re in a hyper competitive environment that it’s important to constantly be pushing the boundaries and thinking differently. With all the AI companies being started, it’s become even more important to figure out unique ways to access distribution, attract the best talent, use product and engineering leverage across every function and gain momentum to unlock more resources. We continue to be excited to explore unique distribution models and partner with founders as they think about how they will counterposition against not just incumbents but in this environment the 10 other AI companies in their same category being started at the same time.

Other ideas and themes we’re interested in: Stablecoins and the institutionalization of the technology, AI first software for financial services functions (back office, front office, PE, audit, VC, hedge funds, IB, credit, etc.), advancements in video AI and its impact on media / advertising / marketing, software for hardware and robotics, etc.

Featured Open Roles

If you’re starting to think about what’s next or exploring something new, you can reach out to the Comma Capital team here to help connect you with the companies below.

Stainless - Engineering Manager, SDKs, Business Operations & Strategy Lead, Account Executive, Product Engineer, Customer Engineer

Plenful - Product Designer, Account Manager, Engineers

About Comma Capital:

The Comma, Periodical. - April 2025 Edition

Comma Capital — Tue, 15 Apr 2025 14:22:43 GMT

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Comma Periodical! We’re excited to share upcoming events we have in San Francisco and New York, our search for our next summer intern and some of the themes we’re excited about in vertical AI, rollups and voice!

SF AI Engineers Happy Hour by Comma Capital x CRV

We're back in San Francisco this April and we’re excited to bring together the best engineers in SF who are building in AI. Join us for a community happy hour with our friends at CRV. You can RSVP here. Friends are welcome (as long as they RSVP)!

About CRV: CRV is a venture capital firm that invests in early-stage tech startups. Since 1970, the firm has invested in more than 600 startups at their most crucial stages, including Airtable, DoorDash and Vercel.

Searching for the next Comma Capital Summer Intern

Last summer, we had our first ever intern Justin Young join us. Justin got the chance to join us for several deal meetings, support our portfolio companies, host events, run one of our programs end to end and learn about the world of venture capital end to end. You can view some of his LinkedIn posts about his internship experience here and here.

If you’re an ambitious and hungry individual in university or know someone that might want to be an intern for Comma Capital, please reach out here with an email on your background story and why you’re interested.

What We’re Exploring: Vertical AI, Rollups, Voice

We’ve been spending time exploring themes around vertical software for traditional industries across manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, insurance, energy, healthcare services, travel and more. We think there’s going to be a lot of change in these industries with AI and we’re fascinated to see how software gets adopted in these categories. We’re also seeing circles overlapping with traditional private equity and venture capital with General Catalyst announcing their buyout fund focused on AI rollups last year and funds writing about their thesis when it comes to AI rollups for legacy industries and other funds have started to make bets in categories like accounting as well. We are hosting a small group dinner in San Francisco for founders exploring in these areas on April 24 at 7pm. If you’re around, reach out here for an invite.

Finally, within vertical AI land, we’re spending a lot of time exploring voice applications. With the latest voice technology getting better, we’re excited to see new use cases pop up across different verticals and how companies build value overtime. We saw OpenAI launch a whole suite of tooling focused on audio and voice and we think we’re still in the early days of seeing the full application of this technology. If you’re exploring ideas in voice, would love to jam!

We’re currently planning an experiment for a program for the upcoming summer that will revolve around some of these themes around building for traditional industries and helping early founders get connected to experts in these industries, if this is something interesting to you, please reach out!

NYC Founders Happy Hour by Comma Capital x Mercury

If you’re hacking on side projects, building something new, recently left your job or starting to think about what’s next, join on May 7th Wednesday for a Happy Hour that we’re cohosting with our friends at Mercury. RSVP here.

About Mercury: Mercury is the fintech ambitious companies use for banking* and all their financial workflows. With a powerful bank account at the center of their operations, companies can make better financial decisions and ensure that every dollar spent aligns with company priorities. *Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC.

Featured Open Roles

Stainless - Engineering Manager, SDKs, Business Operations & Strategy Lead, Account Executive, Product Engineer, Customer Engineer

Plenful - Product Designer, Account Manager, Engineers

About Comma Capital:

The Comma, Periodical. - March 2025 Edition

Comma Capital — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 17:56:15 GMT

Welcome to this month’s edition of The Comma Periodical!

NYC Future Founders Happy Hour by Greylock x Comma Capital

If you’re hacking on side projects, building something new, recently left your job or starting to think about what’s next, join us this Thursday for a Happy Hour that we’re cohosting with our friends at Greylock. We’ll have snacks and drinks and this will be a great opportunity for folks to meet potential cofounders, get feedback on their ideas and find their first customers! RSVP here.

Startup Spotlights

In the world of vertical AI, Rilla which is the leading ride-along and AI sales coaching platform for field sales launched their Rilla Masters conference. For those in vertical AI or exploring building for traditional industries, check out the opening remarks that Rilla cofounder/CEO gave at the Rilla Masters.

In the world of crypto + AI, Vana is bringing back the power to users. Check out this talk by Vana cofounder/CEO Anna Kazlauskas during the Ethereum 2025 Summit where she digs into the future of Decentralized Data for AI.

We believe we’re still in the early days of this movement both around bringing AI to traditional industries and the future of human-owned data for AI so if you’re exploring ideas around these themes, please reach out, we’d love to jam.

Comma Capital March Virtual Career Fair Recap

We had over 150+ folks join us for the last virtual career fair we hosted 2 weeks ago. If you’re exploring what’s next and want to hear about the culture of some of the most exciting AI companies right now including Rilla, Unify, Airfold, Topsort and more, you can view the recording below.

Featured Open Roles

Plenful - Product Designer, Account Manager, Engineers

Pylon - Product Marketer, Engineers, Product Designer

About Comma Capital:

The Comma, Periodical. - February 2025 Edition

Comma Capital — Tue, 25 Feb 2025 17:18:59 GMT

We have a jam packed calendar coming up with several events both virtual and in-person. We have our Comma Virtual Career Fair coming up in March and just opened up the applications to our Comma Capital Blueprint Program as well. The Comma Blueprint program is a program for future founders in NYC exploring early ideas (sessions at the Thrive Capital Office + free OpenAI credits - learn more here).

If you’re in New York, we’re also hosting a Brooklyn Hackers & Painters Happy Hour event at the Asylum VC office on March 4 from 6pm-8pm. You can RSVP here.

Finally, if you’re looking to level up your GTM game, join us for a Comma Masterclass with Unify co-founder and CEO Austin Hughes - he will diving deeper into how to use AI to 10x your pipeline this year. Unify is the leading platform for warm outbound. RSVP here.

Comma Virtual Career Fair

Join us for our second ever Comma Capital Virtual Career Fair. In this edition, we have some of our fastest growing companies: Unify (building the future of warm outbound with AI), Rilla (AI coach for outside sales teams), Topsort (Retail Media Infrastructure), Airfold (Unstructured Data Platform for AI) sharing more about their company and open roles they’re hiring for.

This is happening on March 12, 2025 from 5pm-6pm. Registrants will also receive a recording afterwards so feel free to share with any friends who are exploring new roles in startups! RSVP here.

Comma Blueprint AI Program For Future Founders in NYC: Applications Live

This equity free program is geared towards operators who are still in their operating roles and are looking to leave their day job in the next ~3 to 6 months to start a company or have recently left their job in the last 3-6 months and haven’t raised any funding yet. This will be a month-long program with 6 sessions with 3 in-person sessions at the Thrive Capital Office in New York City.

We did our first cohort last summer and this spring’s cohort will have an AI focus with participants getting free credits with OpenAI and an AI specific session with their team as well. Application deadline is March 9, 2025. Our first session to kickoff is on March 19, 2025 from 6pm-8pm.

To learn more about the specifics of the program, go here. Applications here.

Comma Masterclass with Unify Co-Founder Austin Hughes

We are hosting a Comma Masterclass webinar with Unify cofounder/CEO Austin Hughes on how to 10x your pipeline using AI. This webinar will be on March 4 from 5pm-6pm ET. If you're interested in joining, you can RSVP here. Austin will be touching upon those learnings in addition to working with several high growth companies at Unify.

About Unify: Unify's main objective is to help you find the right contacts at the right time with the most relevant messaging. We turn automated outbound into a best performing demand gen channel. We work with hundreds of incredible companies like Lattice, Justworks, OpenPhone, Arc, and many more. Here is our product demo video to see it in action.

Other Resources

Tax Season Help with Quanta. Quanta is the accounting service for software businesses who want to get their finances right, without delay. We’re the only service that can provide critical business metrics up to date daily, and will close your books as fast as the data is ready in your financial tools.

If you’re interested in working with Quanta, reach out to Helen and she can get you setup (mention Comma for a special discount).

Running DeepSeek with LM Studio. With DeepSeek and open source AI models taking over the world the last few weeks, check out LM Studio which is the easiest way to run open source models locally on your device.

Featured Open Roles

Amigo - Software Engineers, GTM Generalists

Plenful - Product Designer, Account Manager, Engineers

Flipturn - Business Operations Associate

About Comma Capital:

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The Comma, Periodical. - Jan 2025 Edition

Comma Capital — Tue, 14 Jan 2025 14:28:48 GMT

Happy New Year to the Comma Community! For us, the new year was a welcome opportunity for us to give our newsletter its own name - The Comma, Periodical. (shoutout to Marty from Pylon for the feedback). We have a lot to share to kickoff the year - we’ll be traveling across San Francisco and New York so if you’re around, let us know and we’d love to catchup!

This month we launch the Comma Capital VC Fellowship 2025 applications and invite you to join us for our Automating Your Workflows with AI Agents Webinar and our upcoming San Francisco Community Happy Hour with Pear VC. We’re also hosting a few private dinners in San Francisco and New York as well focused on folks exploring ideas and want to start something in the next 3-6 months, if that’s you or you know someone who is, reach out here.

Comma Capital VC Fellowship 2025

We are excited to launch the applications for our fourth cohort of our Comma Capital VC Fellowship program. Our previous 3 cohorts of over 40+ operators come from companies like Flexport, Doordash, Gusto, Flatiron Health, Chime, Dropbox, Snowflake, MongoDB, Mercury, Modal, Samsara and more.

Comma Capital VC Fellows go through a 4 month program where they meet with the Comma team every 2 weeks to learn the ins and outs of venture capital, discuss startups that we’re evaluating, share a thesis on the industry they work in and more. We also pair every fellow with a VC mentor from an institutional firm that we like to collaborate with. Alumni of this program have gone on to become full-time VCs, become active angel investors, scout for VC funds and start their own companies.

You can apply for the program HERE. Deadline for applications is on February 2nd.

Automating Your Workflow With Agents: OpenSesame x Comma Capital

Join us for an interactive webinar on January 16 where OpenSesame and Comma Capital break down AI agents and show you how to boost your workflow with smart automation. This session is perfect for professionals and business leaders looking to streamline tasks, increase productivity, and make better decisions with AI. Watch a small video to see what to expect. Click Here

Signup on the Luma page here.

San Francisco Community Happy Hour hosted by Pear VC & Comma Capital

To kickoff the year, we’ll be in San Francisco and we’d love to have you join us for a SF Community Happy Hour for operators and founders. This will be on January 22, 2025 from 5-7pm. To join us, please register here. You can also invite friends that you think should attend but please have them register as well. Look forward to seeing you there!

Featured Open Roles

Pylon - Product Marketer

Amigo - Software Engineers, GTM Generalists

Plenful - Product Designer, Account Manager, Engineers

About Comma Capital:

The Comma, Periodical. - Nov 2024 Edition

Comma Capital — Tue, 12 Nov 2024 01:10:41 GMT

Hi all - you’re receiving this newsletter because you’ve attended one of many Comma Capital events that we hosted this past year in San Francisco, New York and Toronto (We’ve done 52 events to date and counting…). We’re excited to share a few upcoming events, ideas we’re thinking about and job opportunities in our portfolio as well.

We’re also excited to announce our partnership with Modal to help support startups in the Comma community that are tinkering in AI and want access to GPU credits.

Looking for flexible, reliable access to the most powerful GPUs? Modal is a serverless compute platform that makes it easy to run elastic, large-scale AI workloads like inference and fine-tuning. Startups are eligible to receive up to $25k in credits. If you’re interested in availing of their startup program, reach out to Margaret here and mention you found this through the Comma Community newsletter.

Comma Virtual Talent Career Fair

Join us for Comma Capital's inaugural Virtual Career Fair, where innovation meets opportunity! This exciting online event will showcase our fastest growing portfolio companies: Convoke, Parallax, Cassidy, Mentaya, Flipturn and Rilla. Attendees will have the chance to explore current job openings and learn about the unique missions and cultures of each company. If you’re looking to join a startup and learn about founders look for, this session is for you!

Career Fair Details:
📅 Date: November 20th
🕛 Time: 5PM - 6PM ET (Virtual)

Comma x Georgian Gen AI Workshop

This November, we’re hosting a workshop on “Design to Deployment: How Industry Leaders Launched GenAI Products”, featuring speakers Saurabh Sharma (CPO, You.com), Connor Heggie (CTO, Unify AI), Lindsay M. Pettingill, PhD (Investment Partner, Village Global), and Kyryl Truskovskyi (Founder and ML Engineer, KOML).

Workshop Details:
📅 Date: November 19th
🕛 Time: 12PM - 3PM ET (Virtual)

This Workshop is intended for ML practitioners, engineers, technical PMs, and anyone eager to sharpen their Gen AI project planning and development skills. Please register here to save your spot here.

Areas we’re thinking about

As investors, we’re constantly exploring different areas and industries. Some of the most topical things we’ve been thinking about:

Stripe’s $1.1B acquisition of Bridge and what that means for the Stablecoin market as we enter another wave of crypto bull run with Bitcoin hitting an all time high as well.

The continued rise of next generation healthcare technology startups focused on using AI to automate various workflows, providing more personalized levels of care and helping reduce the admin tasks clinicians have had to deal with. Here’s an example of NVIDIA working with Deloitte to rollout AI products in Hospitals recently. Bessemer wrote a great deep dive on healthcare AI here as well.

In the public markets, Palantir continues to crush, beating estimates again and again. It’s become clear that the AI services as software wave is here to stay - early Palantir investors 8VC writes about it here.

Lastly we continue to spend time thinking about what other areas AI will be touching whether in IT services, climate, hardware, manufacturing, logistics, consumer and more. What an exciting time to be building!

If you’re building in these areas or exploring ideas, please reach out.

Featured Open Roles

Quanta - Founding Engineer, Founding Accountant

Flipturn - Account Executive, Software Engineer

Parallax - Strategy & Business Operations

Cassidy AI - Software Engineer, Account Executive, Product Manager, Social Media

Rilla - Software Engineers, Customer Success Manager, Account Executive, Technical Recruiter