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Topic: Founder Stories

PearX alum Transcera announces seed round to further advance innovative delivery platform for biologic drugs

Posted on by jill

Last month, PearX S21 alum Transcera announced its seed round led by Xora Innovation, joined by Tau Ventures and existing pre-seed investors Pear, Digitalis Ventures, and KdT Ventures. To mark this milestone, we wanted to share more about Pear’s partnership with Transcera and its founders, Hunter Goble (CEO), Justin Wolfe (CSO), and Wayne Lencer (scientific co-founder).

We first met Hunter and Wayne when they applied to Pear Competition. Hunter was still an MBA student at HBS and Wayne was a professor at Harvard Medical School and researcher at Boston Children’s Hospital. At the time, they were part of the Nucleate program and looking to commercialize a new drug delivery platform they were working on. 

S21 PearX Demo Day

When we met the team, we were excited about Transcera for several reasons:

  • Enormous unmet need and market opportunity. Today, many of the most impactful and best-selling medicines are so-called biologic drugs, comprising complex molecules that are typically synthesized via living systems rather than chemical means. These are large, bulky molecules including peptides or proteins that often exhibit little-to-no uptake upon oral dosing, and instead have to be injected into the blood or under the skin. For obvious reasons, when given a choice, patients strongly prefer the convenience of a self-administered pill. For example, pharma companies are now racing to develop orally administered versions of GLP-1 receptor agonists for obesity, as the first such drugs approved for this blockbuster indication have required administration via subcutaneous injection. 
  • Broad, differentiated, and defensible technology platform – inspired by nature, informed by high-quality science, and validated preclinically. For almost three decades, Wayne and his group have been studying how large, orally ingested bacterial toxins, such as cholera toxin, are able to cross the intestinal epithelial barrier to cause disease. The lab discovered that structural features of key membrane constituents called glycosphingolipids directly influence the cellular sorting of these lipids and any associated payloads. Building on this foundational work, Transcera has demonstrated preclinically that synthetic lipids can be harnessed to achieve transport of biologics across intestinal barrier cells, enabling oral delivery and enhanced biodistribution. This active transport mechanism is differentiated from most existing approaches to enhancing oral bioavailability, which have primarily focused on passive diffusion enabled by permeation enhancers and other formulation excipients, and have suffered from relatively low absorption and narrow applicability. 
  • Ambitious operating team with complementary skill sets. Prior to HBS, Hunter spent 5 years at Eli Lilly working on the commercial launch of a key drug product, and he also served as an internal consultant around new product planning for the pharma company’s immunology division. Justin completed his PhD in the Pentelute lab at MIT where he focused on delivery strategies for biologic drugs, including novel conjugation approaches for peptides, and he later worked as a scientist advancing the discovery and medicinal chemistry of macrocyclic peptides at Ra Pharmaceuticals through its acquisition by UCB.  Whereas Hunter brings a savvy commercial mindset and disciplined financial rigor to Transcera, Justin in turn brings apt academic and industry domain expertise and strong scientific leadership skills. Hunter, Justin, and Wayne all share a passion for translating basic science research into technologies and programs that can make a tremendous impact for patients.

We have been impressed with the Transcera team’s execution and scientific progress so far. During PearX S21, we worked closely with Hunter on shaping the story and crafting the pitch ahead of Demo Day. Before joining the Pear team full-time as Pear’s biotech partner, I served as an industry mentor to Transcera, advising the team on questions related to IP in-licensing. After joining Pear, I continued to work closely with Transcera and fellow syndicate co-investors on scientific strategy, fundraising, and partnering.

The full PearX S21 cohort after Demo Day

Over the past two years, the Transcera team has proven to be resilient and resourceful. The production and scale-up of the synthetic lipid conjugates were challenging to master, but the team’s diligent efforts yielded multiple promising lead compounds. Critically, the team has expanded to bring in hands-on expertise in chemistry, cellular biology, and preclinical development, among other areas. 

With this recent financing, we are excited to continue to back the Transcera team, and we are eager to see further development of the platform, with the ultimate goal of unlocking the full potential of biologic drugs for patients.

The Transcera team is hiring! Please check out the job posting here: https://jobs.polymer.co/transcera/28175. If you’re interested please reach out to Eddie and we can connect you!

Honey Homes raised $9 million Series A to continue their work building a membership service for busy homeowners

Posted on by jill

Honey Homes, closed their Series A recently, led by Khosla Ventures and supported by Pear and others. To mark the occasion, we thought we’d do a little lookback of our history working with the Honey Homes team over the last few years.

We were first introduced to Honey Homes’ Founder and CEO Vishwas Prabhakara through DoorDash alums, including Evan Moore. The Khosla team knew that the Honey Homes team had a promising early idea and felt Pear would be great seed partners in shaping it into a venture-scalable business. 

Once we met the team, we were excited about backing them for a few key reasons:

  • First of all, we knew this was a massive and unsolved market opportunity. US homeowners spend $250 billion annually on their homes via a highly-fragmented vendor network. The Honey Homes team saw a big opportunity to streamline that network and create a product experience that has never existed for home owners. Most home services companies are marketplaces or managed marketplaces, so it is challenging to make the economics work and keep the quality bar high while scaling. This results in churn from both the supply and demand side. Honey Homes saw an opportunity to do things differently and build out a new model – a homeowner subscription business where they employ handy people. This changes the economics and raises the quality bar substantially.
  • Secondly, they had a clear vision for a product to meet that market demand. The Honey Homes team wanted to build a membership service for busy homeowners to manage and complete to-do lists. I was a new homeowner myself at the time, could easily relate the never ending list of tasks to maintain my home and  the difficulty of finding and keeping handymen. I found the idea of a reliable membership service really enticing. 
  • Finally, we felt that the team was really strong and perfectly suited to tackle this problem. Vishwas was Yelp’s first General Manager and he was also COO of Digit, where he gained valuable experience as an operator. He understood first hand the piecemealing that homeowners have to do for maintenance and improvement work. Avantika Prabhakara, who leads Marketing at Honey Homes, has a rich marketing background from organizations like Opendoor, Trulia, and Zillow, so she’s also deeply familiar with the challenges people face on finding reliable contractors and handyman services.
The Honey Homes app is easy-to-use for homeowners.

Khosla and Pear co-led the seed round in July 2021. Over the last two years, they’ve focused on building out the infrastructure to make this service work, growth in their initial markets, and eliminating key risks in order to raise their Series A. They grew from just a co-founding team to 12 employees and 14 handymen during this time. They also expanded across the Bay Area and Dallas and onboarded 500+ subscription customers. In total, over 20,000 home tasks have been completed for members through more than 10,000 Honey Homes visits over the last two years. 

I’ve been lucky enough to not only be an investor into Honey Homes, but also an early customer. I started using Honey Homes in March 2022, and I’ve had hundreds of tasks completed in my home ranging from fixing a frustrating leaky pond to helping us move our furniture to fixing water-damaged cracks in our ceiling to cleaning out dryer ducts. We use the service so regularly that even my daughter knows our handyman, Miguel, by name. Honey Homes has had an incredibly strong customer response: everyone who hears about it wants to join and they’ve done an excellent job retaining customers. 

We’re so proud of the team for successfully raising their Series A and cannot wait for their continued growth and success!

PearX S20 alum Federato raised $25 million in Series B funding to accelerate their work running a RiskOps platform for property and casualty insurance

Posted on by jill

Last week, PearX S20 alum Federato announced their $25M Series B round led by Caffeinated Capital and joined by Pear and Emergence Capital. 

We first met Federato’s Co-founders Will Ross and William Steenbergen in March 2020, when they were first year grad students at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business. They were winners of the 2020 Pear Competition and we also invited them to join PearX, our early-stage bootcamp for founders. 

The early Federato team.

When we met Will and William, they only had a product concept and some initial customer validation. But even though they didn’t have solid proof yet, we decided to partner with them in building Federato for a few key reasons:

  • First, we saw a big market opportunity. New risks like climate change, cyber security, and social inflation were changing the landscape. In the insurance industry, risk is the opportunity, and it’s a really hard problem to solve. Insurers operating processes are unable to accommodate emerging risks, but Federato brought a solution to the table to help insurers take on risks of under utilized data assets. We knew at the time that climate change was already affecting the insurance industry in dramatic ways. The elevated frequency of damaging weather events drove more than $100B in uninsured losses between 2018-2019 alone, and this number has only continued to grow since then. 
Elevated frequency of weather events drove more than $100B in uninsured losses in 2018-2019. Read more: SwissRe “Closing the Protection Gap Together”

  • Second, even though they were early in their journey, the founders had a clear vision. We believed in their vision to bring AI into how insurance companies manage the risks associated with an ever-changing world, including the elevated frequency of damaging weather events caused by climate change. They concluded that the best way to achieve this was through a federated learning mechanism (hence the name Federato) that would allow insurance companies to benefit from their own data, as well as other entities’ and insurance companies’ data, safely. We also appreciated that their solution delivered a simple, convenient, and beautiful UX experience, where every interaction was optimized for the user. 
  • Third, we believed in the team from the get go. In their early days, they described themselves as “two deeply passionate, data science/product people who came together to do something about climate change with machine learning.”  Will conceived of the concept behind Federato when he was an Associate at Venrock and William built ML models for the insurance industry at his prior startup, Building Blocks. Together, they researched and deeply understood the space. They didn’t just bring us an idea on a slide deck, but instead they brought a thoroughly thought out plan with multiple in-depth customer interviews, a light proof of concept built on publicly available data, and a clear understanding of the end user and end buyer. We could see that this was a team with a clear analytical mind and a bias for action, which is a rare occurrence.

During PearX, the team coined the term RiskOps, which is about realizing that risk cannot be priced without taking distribution into account. This is a tricky concept to explain clearly, but we worked closely with them to articulate this vision at Demo Day. We also partnered closely with Will and William in developing the first version of their operational underwriting software that continuously monitors risk at every underwriting decision, rather than only a few times per year. Arash and I remember working together to create hand drawn mockups of their initial software over long Zoom meetings during the height of Covid lockdowns. 

Federato’s Co-founder Will presented to thousands of investors during PearX’s first ever virtual Demo Day at the height of the COVID pandemic in 2020.

Shortly after presenting at Pear’s S20 virtual Demo Day, Federato closed a Seed round led by Caffeinated Capital. Between their Seed and Series A rounds, we worked with them on important company-building milestones, like refining the product, building a strong company culture, and navigating long sales cycles through acquiring their first few customers. 

We also helped the Federato team prepare for a successful Series A raise through our Series A Bootcamp. They successfully raised their Series A from Emergence in 2022. 

Federato sharing their vision and progress with Pear’s team and investors in 2022.

In less than a year following the Series A raise, Federato proved itself even more. They truly became an economically efficient marketplace that connects data to the value it can actually create in underwriting. In this year, Federato team tripled their customer base, doubled their spend with existing customers, and entered new segments. 

Riding off of this strong momentum, they just closed their Series B round from Caffeinated, Emergence, and Pear, and we’re excited to continue working with Will, William, and the entire (growing!) Federato team on their mission to modernize the insurance industry!

PearX alums WindBorne closed a $6 million round to improve forecasts and mitigate the climate crisis with smart weather balloons

Posted on by jill

Last week, PearX S19 alum WindBorne Systems announced their $6M seed round led by Footwork Ventures and joined by Pear, Khosla Ventures, and others. We love WindBorne’s founding story as it embodies everything we believe at Pear about mission-driven, high perseverance founders. 

I was lucky to meet the founders of WindBorne back in the spring of 2019, when they were undergraduate students at Stanford University. They showed up to my office hours with a balloon in tow, similar to the one pictured below. 

Early prototype of a WindBorne balloon

I had no idea that the homemade-looking device was a low cost, highly durable weather balloon that could fly at a wide range of altitudes. They called this balloon ValBal for (Vent to sink, Ballast to rise).

We decided to partner with WindBorne for two reasons:

  • First, we believed in the founding team. They had demonstrated a clear mission, a strong passion, and an incredible ability to execute. They’d been addicted to this idea since they were freshman at Stanford as members of the Stanford Student Space Initiative. Constrained by a student budget, they used ingenuity and engineering to build weather balloons that would fly for a few hours and then pop. Over the years, they kept adding sensors and extending flight time, steadily improving their product. By the time I met them, they had already completed 26 test flights and broken four world records. 
Map of flight tests the WindBorne team conducted while in college
  • Second, they were capturing data that no one else was capturing. At the time, we were not 100% sure of the value of such data, but after making a few calls, we discovered potential customers were interested in learning more about what the balloons could do. 
WindBorne team testing balloons during their time at Stanford

With that, we invited WindBorne to join PearX’s Summer 2019 cohort, where we partnered closely with the founders to understand the most attractive market opportunity to go after. Through customer interviews, they discovered a massive data gap: only about 15% of the Earth’s surface has regular in-atmosphere observations, but weather is a global system. To better predict the weather, you need better weather data. Existing technologies couldn’t plug that gap, because the laws of physics prevent satellites from collecting the most critical weather observations. That’s where balloons come in: they’re able to collect data where satellites can’t.

Kai during PearX Summer 2019

Investors were convinced of the potential, and following S19 Demo Day, Windborne closed a successful seed round led by Khosla and Ubiquity Ventures. They spent the last four years growing the company: from iterating on their go-to-market strategy to team building to customer interviews to strategy sessions and more. We had the privilege to work side-by-side with John, Kai, Joan, Andre, and the entire WindBorne team every step of the way.

WindBorne team at PearX 2019 Demo Day

Last fall, the WindBorne team went out to begin raising their next round, in the midst of a tough economic climate. As PearX alums, we invited them to participate in our PearX S22 Demo Day, where Kai shared the latest happenings with thousands of investors in the Pear network. We’re so proud of the entire team for this next step in their journey.

PearX S22 Demo Day Presentation

I recently visited the new WindBorne HQ in Palo Alto, just a few weeks after the team moved in, and I left with a smile on my face. The offices were scrappy, the team was as determined as ever, and they were telling me all about the new advances with their product. I couldn’t help but look back and remember the first time they ever walked into my office as Stanford students and feel proud of how far they’ve come. I know this is just the beginning for WindBorne. We are so excited to continue to partner with them and to welcome Footwork and others to the team. 

Investing in Infinimmune

Posted on by jill

This past December, Pear VC was proud to invest in Infinimmune’s $12M seed round. Infinimmune is reinventing antibody drug discovery by focusing solely on human-derived antibody drugs and mining the insights uniquely gathered from deep characterization of the functional antibody repertoire. Here, we reflect on the broader field of antibody-based therapeutics and why we are excited about Infinimmune’s team, technical approach, and vision.

Antibody drugs have made an undeniable impact on modern medicine. 

Since the FDA’s first approval of a therapeutic monoclonal antibody in 1986, more than 160 marketed antibody drugs have been developed to treat various ailments including cancer,  autoimmune disease, infectious disease, and more.

Seven of the top 20 best-selling drugs of 2022 were antibodies, including Humira, Keytruda, and Dupixent. Collectively, antibody sales that year likely topped $200B, roughly on par with the sales of Apple’s iPhone.

Antibodies play a central defensive role in the adaptive immune system. Recent decades have witnessed tremendous, hard-won advances in the science of these amazing molecular machines and in their application as research tools, diagnostic reagents, and therapeutics. 

Scientists have deciphered their molecular structures; decoded many of the intricate genetic and cellular processes that create and select functional antibodies; devised a variety of sophisticated approaches to identify novel antibodies that effectively bind a given antigen; and developed the tools and processes to reliably characterize, manufacture, and distribute them at scale. 

Newer therapeutic modalities that rely on antibodies or components of them for their function, such as antibody-drug conjugates, targeted radioligand therapies, bispecific T cell engagers, and CAR-T cells, have become established drug classes in their own right. And in recent years, in silico design techniques, aided by ML/AI, have been used to engineer antibodies with better binding, stability, and expression.

Despite all of this progress, our state of understanding regarding the vast diversity of the antibody repertoire actually produced in humans remains shockingly low.

Limitations in the characterization techniques previously applied to this diversity, estimated at 10^11 to 10^18 unique protein sequences in humans, have stymied efforts to fully understand and gain insights from it. Even the advent of next-generation sequencing has not deeply impacted this space—most studies of the antibody repertoire still rely on bulk sequencing technologies, which only capture half of most of the variable region of one antibody transcript at a time.

Why does this matter in antibody drug discovery? 

Because every day, inside every human, the body conducts the equivalent of 100 billion antibody clinical trials, testing each antibody for safety and efficacy in parallel. And these techniques have been developed and optimized over 500 million years of evolution of the adaptive immune system. 

For instance, by studying the immune reactivity of blood samples donated from adults living in a malaria-endemic region, researchers were able to identify broadly reactive antibodies that exhibited non-canonical features (Tan et al., Nature 529:105-109, 2016). These antibodies were found to contain a large insert of an extracellular LAIR1 domain located between key antibody segments. This domain, which is non-canonical and which was not observed in narrowly reactive antibodies, increased binding to malaria-infected red blood cells. These results demonstrated a novel mechanism of antibody diversification that the human immune system can use to create therapeutically effective antibodies.

Clearly, human B cells produce antibodies that mouse B cells and humanized mouse B cells do not. However, the most common methods for discovering therapeutic antibodies today rely on screening antibodies produced in transgenic mice that have been immunized with the desired target antigen, or panning for binding to the antigen in relatively shallow pools of engineered human antibody-like binders expressed via phage or yeast display. 

These approaches are not capable of leveraging the unique insights that can be captured by studying functional antibodies produced by the human immune system.

Enter Infinimmune.

Infinimmune is a startup that is reinventing antibody drug discovery by focusing solely on human-derived antibody drugs. 

Infinimmune was founded by Wyatt McDonnell, David Jaffe, Katie Pfeiffer, Lance Hepler, and Mike Gibbons, a multidisciplinary team of scientists and technologists. These founders have deep expertise in immunology, genomics, computational biology, single cell sequencing, and data analysis, and they take a first principles approach to therapeutics platform development as drawn from previous experiences at 10x Genomics, Pacific Biosciences, and the Broad Institute.

As an example of this expertise, Wyatt, David, and Lance co-authored a paper in Nature last year that discovered a new property of functional antibodies coined light chain coherence (Jaffe et al., Nature 611:352-357, 2022). In this work, the authors used single-cell RNA sequencing to determine the paired heavy and light chain antibody sequences from 1.6 million B cells from four unrelated humans and incorporated a total of 2.2 million B cells from 30 humans.

They compared antibody sequences from pairs of B cells that were isolated from different donors and which shared similar heavy chain segments, specifically, the same heavy chain V gene, and the same amino acid sequence for a key antigen-binding region called CDRH3. [Note: an antibody is composed of a pair of one heavy chain and one light chain that are generated through a process of sequential gene recombination involving V, D (for heavy chains), J, and C segments.]

The authors found evidence of previously unrecognized determinism in the light chain segment (i.e. light chain V gene) used in functional antibodies, which were derived from memory B cells, as opposed to naive antibodies. The discovery of light chain coherence suggests that the sequence space for the light chain of a functional antibody, which has undergone selection by the human immune system to be useful, safe, and effective, is more restricted than what was previously believed. It also carries important implications for the design of therapeutic antibodies, transgenic platforms, and diversification strategies of antibody drugs.

With these types of capabilities and insights at hand, Infinimmune is developing an end-to-end platform to deliver antibody drugs derived directly from the human immune system. 

These truly human antibodies are designed to drug new targets with improved safety and efficacy. Infinimmune is building its own pipeline of drug candidates while also aiming to partner with pharma companies to expand treatment options and reach more patients.

This past December, we were proud to co-invest alongside our friends at Playground Global, Civilization Ventures, and Axial in Infinimmune’s $12M seed round. We are delighted to work closely with the Infinimmune team, and we look forward to sharing many exciting updates to come. Infinimmune’s new HQ is in Alameda, and their team is always interested in hearing from smart, curious, and passionate scientists with a track record of innovation and building things from scratch. If you want to build better drugs for humans, from humans, you can reach the founders directly at founders@infinimmune.com or careers@infinimmune.com—there’s no better way to get in the hiring queue before more job postings go live in 2023!

Pear Competition: Harvard Winners

Posted on by jill

At Pear, we have a long history partnering with students to build the next wave of category-defining companies. In fact, we started working with the founders of companies like Branch, Aurora Solar, Bioage, and Affinity when they were still students.  Each year, we host Pear Competition where students can receive up to $100,000 to launch their startups.  

This year, there were five winners of Pear Competition at Harvard, and they received prizes between $25,000 and $100,000 each. These winners were selected based on their ideas across various fields from AI infrastructure to virtual reality and more. We’re excited to shine a spotlight on this year’s winners:

Civic Roundtable 

Civic Roundtable is a collaboration platform for public servants: a “Reddit meets LinkedIn”– designed with and for public servants. Founders Madeleine Smith and Austin Boral are joint Harvard Business School / Harvard Kennedy School of Government student with experience working in and with the public sector, where they saw firsthand the inefficiencies that state, local, and federal workers face in their attempts to collaborate. Civic Roundtable brings these workers together in one place to share knowledge and coordinate their joint efforts. 

Gigit.ai

Gigit.ai was founded by Harvard Business School student Inez Wihardjo, is a plug-and-play infrastructure to enable enterprises to own and train specialized AI models. Unlike existing players, Gigit offers an integrated self-hosted system of AI + subject-matter experts to ensure no hallucination, utmost accuracy, while preserving the data privacy of the enterprises.

Delilah

Delilah is a personalized AI assistant founded by Harvard College undergraduates Khoi Nguyen and Raunak Daga, two members of Pear Garage at Harvard. Khoi and Raunak are hackers at heart, and have built and battle-tested a suite of productivity tools with their target market of GenZ students. We couldn’t be more excited to support their mission to bring the game-changing tools of an all-purpose AI assistant to this demographic. 

BuyXR

BuyXR, founded by Harvard College undergraduates Sam Suchin and Will Schrepferman, is a virtual reality e-commerce platform that allows any seller – from the world’s biggest brands to limited edition creators – to offer their merchandise in an immersive, gamified world. 

Stealth 

More to come about our fifth winner when they launch! 

We’ve long believed that, with the right tools and resources, student builders can build extraordinary companies. These five Harvard Competition winners embody the spirit of student entrepreneurship and innovation, and we’re excited to see where they go!

Pear Competition: Stanford GSB Winners

Posted on by jill

At Pear, we have a long history partnering with students to build the next wave of category-defining companies. In fact, we started working with the founders of companies like Branch, Affinity, Aurora Solar, Viz.ai, and Bioage when they were still students.  Each year, we run Pear Competition where students can receive up to $100,000 to launch their startups.  

This year, there were four winners of Pear Competition at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business (GSB), and they received checks between $25,000 and $100,000 each. These GSB winners were selected based on their ideas across various fields from BioTech to Climate Tech and more. We’re excited to shine a spotlight on this year’s Pear Competition winners:

RadarTx

RadarTx is a biotech company that aims to revolutionize the treatment of a broad array of diseases by bringing precision targeting to gene- and mRNA-based therapies. Most current nucleic acid therapies suffer from a lack of specificity due to expressing their payload protein drugs in every cell – a problem that can severely limit their efficacy and safety. RadarTx has developed a proprietary RNA sensing platform that can precisely control the expression and activity of such drugs at the cell type or even cell state level, thereby improving the therapeutic potential of this important class of medicines.

Komo

Komo is redesigning how search and discovery works for both users and businesses. Komo’s platform is designed to help users find the right information faster and more efficiently especially when it comes to exploration. The company’s AI-powered algorithms deliver a personalized and interactive search experience, making discovery both easier and more delightful. This innovative approach has the potential to revolutionize the way users interact with digital content, making information more accessible to millions of people worldwide.

Stellarr

Stellarr is a talent acquisition platform that connects the right talent to the best opportunities in tech. Stellarr’s platform uses advanced AI-powered algorithms to identify the most suitable candidate for a particular job, reducing the time and costs associated with hiring. The platform also includes features like job matching and automated scheduling to make the hiring process more efficient for employers. 

Optimus

Optimus is a manufacturing technology company that is building the brains for advanced manufacturing. The company is starting with batteries and extending to other manufacturing verticals critical to the clean energy transition. Optimus’ technology is designed to make manufacturing more efficient and cost-effective, reducing the environmental impact of production while promoting renewable energy. 

We’ve long believed that, with the right tools and resources, student builders can build extraordinary companies. These four Pear Competition winners embody the spirit of student entrepreneurship and innovation, and we’re excited to see where they go!

Earth Day spotlight: interview with David Bromberg, the trailblazing Climate Tech founder behind Pearl Street Technologies

Posted on by jill

In celebration of Earth Day, we’re excited to spotlight a company changing the game when it comes to clean energy and moving the needle on scalable sustainability: Pearl Street Technologies. Pearl Street is a Pear VC-backed company that is making big waves in the clean energy space. Their mission is to accelerate the decarbonization of the grid, addressing the problem from two angles: by delivering software automation solutions to grid operators for timeline optimization, and in providing a risk assessment platform to help project developers successfully deploy and manage more projects. To date, grid operators have processed more than 60 GW of renewable energy and storage projects (equivalent to almost 200 million solar panels!) across more than a dozen states using Pearl Street’s software, reducing months of engineering effort to a matter of hours.

In this Q&A with David, Co-founder of Pearl Street Technologies, we explore their unique approach to solving some of the biggest challenges facing the clean energy industry today.

Can you tell us more about interconnection bottlenecks that are getting in the way of clean energy being deployed in a scalable way?

Before I do, it’s helpful to first define the term: “interconnection” is shorthand for the engineering study process to evaluate the potential impacts of one or more energy generation projects on the electric grid. Grid operators or utilities run these studies to make sure the power grid is capable of handling the proposed amount of generated power, and if not, to identify what upgrades to the grid are needed to handle that power without compromising reliability. The costs to pay for these upgrades are then returned to the developers of these potential projects, who decide if they want to move forward in the process (i.e., agree to pay those costs to upgrade the grid) or withdraw their project (i.e., decline to pay those costs, and therefore lose their ability to interconnect to the grid). Generally speaking, the interconnection process ends with a signed “generator interconnection agreement,” or GIA, between the project developer and the companies that own and operate the grid where the project is located.

The amount of time it takes to complete all the phases of an interconnection study is measured in years in most parts of the United States. The number of renewable energy projects submitted for interconnection has exploded over the last few years, and these two factors together have led to “interconnection bottlenecks.” There are a lot of projects to study, the studies take a long time, and as a result, we have gridlock. No pun intended.

How is Pearl Street working to accelerate this process?

Our software automates some of the more time consuming aspects of running interconnection studies, particularly around creating the simulation models on which the studies are run. These models are just snapshots of what the grid would “look like” with the new projects added, built from similar models of what the grid would look like without those projects (i.e., the default plan). But they’re not trivial to create – interconnection studies often involve modeling dozens or even hundreds of proposed projects, which represents a very big change over that default plan. Without getting into the weeds of the math, what our software does is automate the creation of these study models by adjusting existing grid facilities (like older fossil fuel plants) and at times the placement of new facilities required to support the new projects without causing a blackout. Through our software, weeks or months of engineering effort is reduced to minutes. So the bedrock of these studies gets built much faster in a repeatable, automated way.

Through our software, weeks or months of engineering effort is reduced to minutes.

Your new product focuses on helping developers better deal with risk and uncertainty in deploying renewable energy on the grid. Can you share some examples of how this product will help your customers overcome these obstacles?

Interconnection being a years-long process and the explosion in proposed renewable energy projects has become a huge driver of uncertainty for developers. They’re constantly trying to answer: What will my interconnection cost be when the study is finally done? What happens if a nearby project reduces its size? What happens if a project I was counting on to pay for a grid upgrade withdraws? What if it doesn’t? There are a ton of variables, and today, no scalable way to assess their impacts to inform decisions on projects. But with the same technology we’ve developed for grid operators to quickly build simulation models, we’ve created a platform to provide developers the ability to model and analyze all of the scenarios they care about and finally get a comprehensive sense of their “interconnection risk.” With our interconnection intelligence platform, they can answer the questions above and not just choose better locations for projects, but make better decisions along the way to improve the odds of signing a GIA. Interconnection will still be a tough hurdle, but we’ll be offering the first real solution to help grapple with the massive uncertainties.

We hear a lot about the problems getting in the way, but rarely the solution, so that is very cool. What sets Pearl Street Technologies apart from other companies working in the clean energy space, and what do you see as your unique value proposition?

We have an incredible team behind what we do. We bring together experts in simulation, optimization, software engineering, renewable energy project development, grid planning, and just all around good, motivated people to build technology with impact. We have folks who have developed massive solar and wind projects, and we have folks who have built industry-leading simulation software for nanoscale computer chips. We’re very collaborative and communicative as a company, and as a result we don’t shoehorn ourselves into one way of thinking – there is always an outsider perspective on a problem, and it’s the fusion of ideas from different backgrounds that enable everything we do. I could go on and on about our specific value propositions to different interconnection stakeholders, but at the root of it all is that our customers recognize us as an agile team with a deep understanding of today’s processes without being constrained by yesterday’s ways of thinking.

How do you envision your products contributing to the broader goal of decarbonizing the US energy sector, and what impact do you hope to have in this regard?

The Energy Information Administration estimates that electricity generation in the United States is responsible for 1.5 gigatons of annual carbon dioxide emissions – that’s about a quarter of the country’s total annual emissions. More electrification is coming – electric vehicles for cars and trucks, heat pumps, data centers – and we want it all to be powered reliably by renewable energy sources. When we talk about accelerating interconnection studies or helping developers navigate the interconnection process successfully, at the end of the day we mean one thing: more renewable energy coming online faster and reliably. To fully decarbonize, we need everything from policy changes to adoption of new technologies to help manage a nation-sprawling machine. But we hope to play a key role in unlocking the flow of clean energy onto the grid.

We hope to play a key role in unlocking the flow of clean energy onto the grid.

As a founder, can you speak to any personal challenges or lessons learned along the way in building Pearl Street Technologies?

Nobody who has met me would ever describe me as an optimist, but it’s not possible to start a company in a notoriously difficult market without at least being somewhat of a dreamer. My biggest challenge since starting Pearl Street has been balancing idealism with pragmatism – I want to see radical change to rapidly decarbonize the grid, but I understand the difficulties involved. Developing a deep understanding of all of the stakeholders in our corner of the electricity industry has been critical to growing Pearl Street, and I’ve found that the more we’ve learned, the better we’ve been able to find those opportunities to sneak some of our idealism into the mainstream.

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Pearl Street Technologies is a company taking big strides when it comes to accelerating the deployment of renewable energy on the grid. By providing innovative solutions that reduce interconnection bottlenecks and help developers better manage risk and uncertainty, they’re making it easier than ever before for clean energy projects to get online quickly and efficiently. Pearl Street is poised to become synonymous with interconnections of renewables – a crucial gating issue in scaling up clean energy across markets nationwide. We’re excited to see what’s next for this innovative company, and encourage readers to check out their website and Knowledge Center for more information.

Female founders leading the way: Q&A with Causal’s Christina Pawlikowski

Posted on by jill

Throughout Women’s History Month, we’re delighted to share some of the remarkable female founders at Pear. We’re dedicated to supporting diverse entrepreneurs and are proud that 41% (and growing!) of our investments are in companies with at least one female founder! This is a truly remarkable statistic in our industry, and we take immense pride in it.

Throughout March, we’ll be featuring Q&As with some of these inspiring entrepreneurs. In this series, you’ll hear from them about their experiences in founding burgeoning startups and how they’re collaborating with Pear to turn their visions into reality.

This week, we’re excited to share this Q&A between Jill and Causal Labs Co-founder Christina Pawlikowski. In this week’s installment of our series, I’m excited to share more on Christina’s career path and journey building Causal from the ground up. 

Tell us a little bit about Causal and what problem you’re tackling.

I’m a product person: prior to co-founding Causal I worked at TripAdvisor and Circle. My co-founders are also TripAdvisor alums. We are building Causal to solve some of the most frustrating problems we’ve experienced while building software: crappy, messy data generated by tracking code that’s difficult to maintain, code that’s so full of old ideas and branches that adding to it feels like a nightmare, and a general feeling that all the work we were doing to optimize our products might be adding up to nothing.

We’ve built what we wished we’d had at Tripadvisor: a system that lets you collect accurate product data, write maintainable code, and focus your efforts on building products that really drive your business forward.

We are building Causal to solve some of the most frustrating problems we’ve experienced while building software.

What inspired you to start your own company, and what were some of the initial challenges you faced? What keeps you motivated?

I was led to start a company in part because I missed working with my co-founders Jeff and Alex, who I’d worked with at Tripadvisor.  I loved the team we built together at TripAdvisor and felt like we could build another great team.  And it was also in part that I’d gotten a taste of startup life at Circle and loved it. I wanted a chance to build my own startup from the ground up.

How did you go about securing funding for your startup and how did you evaluate potential VC partners? What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs (especially other women) looking to raise capital? 

The truth is we had a meticulous plan that did not hold up to the chaotic funding markets of May and June of last year. Ultimately, we pitched 50 VCs over four months to find a lead investor. It was worth the effort, though. We’re backed by an amazing group of investors who really understand what we’re building.

My advice to entrepreneurs who are evaluating investors is:

  • Look for people who understand your market already. It’s hard to take someone from zero to one in a couple of meetings. The conversations were so much deeper and more detailed with investors who understood the problems we were trying to solve.
  • Ask for references and do your best to find backdoor references. When you get a hold of these references, ask them where the VC shines—when is that investor the founder’s first phone call?  Ask how often they speak, where their advice is particularly wise, and what other kinds of support they’ve gotten from the firm.  Standard customer discovery rules apply: be specific, ignore hypotheticals, and ask for examples from the recent past.  
  • In talking with the fund itself, do your best to understand the fund’s structure and how that’s going to impact your experience. Will they take a board seat? Do they follow on?  How many other portfolio companies does your partner work with day-to-day?  Will other partners pitch in to help you?  How does the rest of the firm help support you?

My advice for fundraising is generally:

  • Get comfortable with hearing “no.” Most investors are going to say no, it’s just the nature of the game. Sometimes it’s about you, and sometimes it’s about something totally different—where they are in their fund, or what they’re interested in working on for the next decade, or even just whether you caught them on a bad day. You only need a few investors to believe.
  • Start building a community around yourself now. So many people came through for us in the end—with intros, with pitch practice, with angel checks. We spent years building those relationships, and I doubt we would have been able to raise without them.
  • For women, specifically (for any underrepresented founder, honestly): I found it best not to dwell on the statistics. It’s like watching Jaws before you go to the beach—it’ll ruin the experience. You have to believe that you belong in the room, because you do. Any investor who disagrees simply because of who you are sucks and isn’t worthy of a spot on your cap table.

You have to believe that you belong in the room, because you do.

What role has mentorship and/or community played in your personal and professional development, and how have you sought out mentorship throughout your journey?

They’ve both been hugely important to me.  The best advice I got when I was leaving TripAdvisor was to find a community of peers in product that I could talk to, because you really give that up when you leave a big company for a startup. I’ve been a part of a group of product leaders in Boston that has been meeting every couple months for years, and it’s an amazingly helpful community.  

The same goes with mentorship. I’ve had a bunch of truly great mentors during my career, one of whom I persuaded to come on as an advisor to Causal. I know it can feel intimidating to seek out mentors, but I think the place to start is to find someone smart, who you respect, and ask their advice. Follow their advice and report back. Then see where it goes from there.

I know it can feel intimidating to seek out mentors, but I think the place to start is to find someone smart, who you respect, and ask their advice.

What are you most proud of in your journey building Causal?

It’s a tie between the product and the team for me. I love working with Jeff and Alex, and I’m so excited about the folks we’ve added to the team this year. I also love what we’ve built and seeing it in action with customers has been such a joy.

What advice would you give to aspiring entrepreneurs (especially women!) who are just starting out on their own journeys?

Do it!  But: on your terms, when you’re ready. I love being a founder, but I’m so glad I spent time learning how to do product management from great teams and great bosses first. That foundation has been helpful to me, and I don’t regret delaying becoming a founder to get it.  Figure out what kind of foundation you want and need, and go from there.

Finally, what’s next for Causal and why are you excited about your space and your team? 

The next two big things for us are:

  • Growing the team (join us—we’re building a team of talented, funny, candid, curious folks who live in the Boston area)
  • Bringing on our next few design partners (to wit: if you need to run A/B tests and you’re struggling to collect accurate data, keep your codebase in check, and evaluate experiments accurately, we’d love to talk with you) 

I’m excited about our space for two reasons.  First, I love the customers we get to serve: product and engineering teams. Second, we’re working on democratizing access to techniques we know work at very large, sophisticated tech companies and I love giving our customers access to tools we know are going to help them.  For example, this year we’re building out our causal inference capabilities, which help you understand which leading indicators really drive your business. Without access to an advanced ML team, companies are limited to error-prone, time-consuming guesswork. Causal gives companies this superpower just through running A/B tests. 

Thank you so much, Christina. We are thrilled to be partners and cannot wait to see where Causal goes next. Thank you for tuning into our blog series throughout Women’s History Month. We’ve loved sharing stories from our incredible female founders and celebrating their achievements in entrepreneurship. If you missed it, please check out our profiles on Bella Liu of Orby AI, Isha Patel of Kale, and Marisa Reddy and Shelby Breger of Conduit Tech.

Female founders leading the way: Q&A with Bella Liu, Co-founder of Orby AI

Posted on by jill

As Women’s History Month continues to unfold, we’re delighted to highlight some of the remarkable female founders at Pear. We’re dedicated to supporting diverse entrepreneurs and are proud that 41% (and growing!) of our investments are in companies with at least one female founder! This is a truly remarkable statistic in our industry, and we take immense pride in it.

Throughout March, we’ll be featuring Q&As with some of these inspiring entrepreneurs. In this series, you’ll hear from them about their experiences in founding burgeoning startups and how they’re collaborating with Pear to turn their visions into reality.

This week, we’re excited to present this Q&A between Aparna Sinha and Orby AI’s Co-founder Bella Liu on Bella’s journey in entrepreneurship and some of the lessons she’s learned along the way. We began working with Bella and her Co-founder, Will, in August 2022 and have loved getting to work with their team from ideation to product launch. 

Orby AI is still in stealth mode, and we cannot wait for the public launch in the coming months. We’ve been quietly at work helping the team build and scale their team and we’re proud of all they’ve accomplished in a short amount of time. I’m excited to share more about Bella’s inspiring story in this week’s installment of our Women’s History Month series!

Can you tell me a little bit about your journey to becoming an entrepreneur?

My journey really begins with my upbring – growing up in a small town in rural China, my parents instilled in me the value of education, which was not always a given for girls in the area. Despite limited resources, they did everything they could to ensure that I received an education. I remember the time when I was in middle school, they sold our furniture and took on any extra work they could, so we could pay for my tuition. They motivated me to work hard and dream big. I consider myself extremely fortunate to be where I am today, and I’m constantly driven to pursue ambitious goals and take risks when the right opportunities arise.

AI is the next big revolution that will fundamentally change people’s lives in numerous ways. However, the reality is that AI had been showcased and demoed, but had not yet been successfully implemented in many real projects. This led me to join UiPath five years ago, where I worked on AI product and business development. AI automation was still at a nascent stage – I saw that it could be the right entry point for many organizations to adopt AI and see tangible value. I was right. The market and the company grew really quickly and UiPath IPO’ed as one of the largest enterprise software IPOs in recent years. While I was proud of the impact we had on our customers, I also saw that some customer problems were not solved effectively and require a completely different approach, so I teamed up with my co-founder Will and we started Orby AI. We are excited to work in a time when public awareness of AI is at an all-time high, and we believe that this is a once-in-a-lifetime revolution, similar to the internet and mobile eras. We are already seeing our product built on foundation models being used by customers to automate tasks, and we are continuing to break the technology boundaries and deliver meaningful value to customers.

We are excited to work in a time when public awareness of AI is at an all-time high, and we believe that this is a once-in-a-lifetime revolution, similar to the internet and mobile eras.

What’s a big or surprising lesson you’ve learned as a woman in tech? What advice do you have for women in their professional journeys as entrepreneurs?

Maybe not a surprise, but living it has helped reinforce and internalize it for me – having a solid support system at home and in the workplace is crucial. My advice to women in their professional journeys as entrepreneurs are to find people who genuinely support and encourage them along the way. This is actually applicable to both women and men because we all have times when we need help and support.

Personally, I experienced this kind of support during an intense period of company and product building when I was pregnant with my first child. Prior to my third trimester, I was not sure if I would be in a position to take a month off for child bounding and recovery. My co-founder, the broader team and I came up with a plan to make sure no balls were dropped, and they all stepped up to enable me to take time off. Everyone, including our investors, were super supportive. Support from my partner and our extended families enabled me to operate at full speed upon my return. This support system allowed me to focus on my health and family while ensuring we as a team are continuing to make progress.

My advice to women in their professional journeys as entrepreneurs are to find people who genuinely support and encourage them along the way.

How have you navigated any societal expectations or biases around gender roles and work-life balance as a business leader?

I follow the advice of one of my mentors and a respected woman business leader: “you just have to always know your stuff and get things done.” Regardless of any perceptions or bias, I think the key is to demonstrate expertise and deliver value.

During my graduate school years, I worked on a pro bono project for the World Bank to establish an impact investing fund in Bolivia. We worked closely with the business and government organizations in Bolivia and frequently met to discuss the project. In the beginning, I noticed that in the meetings, the local teams sometimes looked away when I was discussing with them. One of my local contacts later explained to me that it is uncommon to work with women in business. They did not mean any disrespect – they are just not used to it in their culture. I understood where they came from and decided to focus on delivering the work. In a few weeks, the dynamic in meetings changed, and they felt more comfortable to speak with me directly and even asked for my opinion on various topics.

How did you evaluate VC partners when going through fundraising?

While we did consider typical aspects such as investment focus, reputation, and network, we placed a strong emphasis on the specific partner’s value and shared vision. We believe that it is crucial to work with someone who is equally passionate about our vision since they will be a long-term partner in our business. We would take the time to get to know the partner and ask questions about their vision of what Orby can become. We have been extremely happy with our decision on our investors.

We believe that it is crucial to work with someone who is equally passionate about our vision since they will be a long-term partner in our business.

What’s next for Orby and why are you excited about your space and your team?

Our team is heads down in executing on our vision and roadmap, and I am really proud of the product and the team that we have built. Our customers are already using the product and getting value. We are continuously pushing the boundaries of our technology, and I can’t wait to share more with you!

Thank you so much, Bella. We are thrilled to be partners and cannot wait for the world to use Orby AI. As Women’s History Month continues, we look forward to sharing more stories from our incredible female founders and celebrating their achievements in entrepreneurship.