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Topic: PearX

PearX W25 applications are now open

Posted on by jill

The S24 batch of PearX is underway and the founders have been pushing hard to launch products, grow customers, and get their products to scale. This year we have seen a surge in AI companies with over 95% of S24 companies focusing on AI. Our AI team is ready and looking for companies in AI infrastructure and vertical applications. Read more about our AI thesis. We couldn’t be more excited about the S24 batch of companies, which we will share more about publicly in the fall.

Simultaneously, we have been hard at work preparing for the W25 batch kicking off in January. Today, we’re opening applications for our W25 cohort and encourage all teams from idea stage to companies with traction to apply. Apply here now.

Key Dates:

Early applications and interviews: Early application deadline on August 30th. If you apply by this deadline, you will hear from us by mid-September.

Regular Applications: Applications close on October 1st. You will hear from us by November 25th at the latest.

PearX is an immersive small-batch 14-week accelerator which counts top performing companies like Viz.ai, Affinity, Xilis, Capella Space, Cardless, Nova Credit, Federato, Valar Labs among its alumni. Pear has also backed DoorDash, Dropbox, Vanta, Aurora Solar, Gusto, Guardant Health at the seed stage.

At PearX, we provide custom services and support for each company. From capital, hiring, founder-led sales, to fundraising support, everything we do takes into account the unique needs that each company has.

Here is what you get with PearX:

  • Capital to build your company, your way: We invest between $250k and $2M in all PearX companies. We know that some founders only need a small amount of capital to ideate and other teams are in more cost-intensive verticals that require more funding. All companies are unique so we’ll work with you. 
  • Credits: We provide up to $650k in credits from top providers like Azure, OpenAI, AWS, Google, Anthropic, and many more.
  • Founder to founder: Work 1:1 with a partner who has been in your shoes and knows your industry. Our team has started and sold 10 companies to the likes of Cisco, Instacart, Plaid, and Zynga.
  • Join the best community: Entrepreneurship doesn’t have to be a lonely journey. Joining PearX means joining a community of like-minded founders. We kick off each cohort with Camp Pear: a 3-day retreat for the entire cohort to come together, learn key company building tactics, and get to know one another. Not only will you work alongside your PearX batch for 14+ weeks, but you’ll also have the wider PearX alumni network to lean on. 
  • Access Pear Studio: Everyone in PearX receives dedicated office space in Pear Studio SF, our 30,000 square foot state-of-the-art office space with standing desks, conference rooms, phone booths, and more. This space is completely free to you for the first 12 months.
  • Build a scalable sales motion: Our go-to-market team, Pepe and Ana, will guide you through the critical steps of sales: nailing ICP, prospecting, customer discovery, messaging, and more. 
  • Recruit the best talent: Our dedicated PearX Recruiter, Nate, will find your founding engineer, co-founder, or whatever critical hire your team needs. In the last two cohorts, Nate has hired 25 people for our PearX companies. Nate leads the full cycle of recruiting for your team – from sourcing to closing candidates. This is an unprecedented level of support for an accelerator, but that’s how much we believe that hiring impacts company building. Last batch, Nate hired an average of two people per PearX company.
  • Fundraise strategically: We help you raise additional capital when you’re ready. From perfecting the story and creating a pitch deck to creating a target investor list and negotiating and closing your round. In fact, 90% of companies that go through PearX raise capital from institutional investors.

Join us for PearX W25:

Are you interested in joining our PearX W25 cohort? We’re looking for the next generation of category defining companies. Please apply at pear.vc/pearx.

How three PearX S19 alums raised $50M this quarter

Posted on by jill

Today, raising capital is far more challenging than it was a few years ago. There are no fake Series A’s— most businesses require a good foundation, strong unit economics and growth as well as a moat to get there. We talked to three alums from our 2019 PearX cohort to hear how they raised capital this year: Andrew Powell from Learn to Win, John Dean from Windborne, and Parth Shah from Polimorphic. 

PearX is our exclusive, small batch, 14 week program. 90% of our companies go on to raise a successful seed round from top tier investors. PearX alumni companies include Affinity (S14), Viz.ai (S16),  Cardless (S19), Federato (S20), Valar Labs (S21), and more. 

Answers have been edited for brevity. 

Learn to Win (PearX S19):

Learn to Win is a training platform that empowers companies to design, deliver and assess the impact of employee training. They serve customers across commercial and government markets in primarily high-intensity training situations. Learn to Win closed a $30M Series A round in June 2024, led by the Westly Group and joined by Pear and Norwest Venture Partners.

Windborne Systems (PearX S19):

Windborne is a full-stack, vertically-integrated weather intelligence company. They operate the largest balloon constellation on the planet, running a base weather forecast with the data they collect from those balloons. Windborne raised a $15M Series A round, led by Khosla Ventures and joined by existing investors Footwork VC, Pear VC, and Convective Capital.

Polimorphic (PearX S19):

Polimorphic digitizes government operations, helping governments provide a great customer service experience to their residents and businesses. AI-powered search and voice software empowers municipal employees with saved time and resources, while delivering a modern service experience that delights residents. Polimorphic raised a $5.6M round, led by M13 with participation from existing investors Shine Capital and Pear VC.

It’s been five years since you went through PearX. What did you learn from this accelerator program that still provides you value today? 

Windborne: Mar played a big role in us even founding a company. Our very first check came from Pear Dorm. Fundamentally, we learned how to be entrepreneurs, and every connection in those early days came through Pear. 

Polimorphic: One of the most interesting pieces of it was thinking about how venture-scale businesses are different. When we came into PearX, we didn’t even have a company yet, and we hadn’t even landed on this iteration of Polimorphic. 

It takes time to find product market fit. PearX supported us during the exploration phase— you need to be nimble, trying stuff until you find what clicks. COVID interfered with a lot of our plans to work with the government in the early days, and recently we’ve really found product market fit.  

Where has Pear helped your company the most? 

Learn to Win: Hiring and fundraising. Pear has helped hire our first few engineers and our first few executives. 

Windborne: Especially in the last year and a half, Pear’s talent team has been insanely helpful with hiring. Beyond that, they offer general advice on people ops: compensation, policies, equity splits— everything around managing people. We use Ashby for free through Pear. It’s very convenient to have a VC you trust a lot to help you get set up with these things. 

One of the single biggest challenges that all companies face is talent. If you’re good at talent, you’ll win. If you’re bad at talent, you’ll lose. To have a VC that stands out in talent is incredibly valuable. 

What’s a piece of advice for founders trying to raise a Series A? 

Learn to Win: When it comes to Series A, there’s certainly more of an emphasis on metrics and scalability. Talk to other folks in your sector and ask them what key metric they were gunning for, what pieces of evidence they gave to investors to help them understand your business opportunity.

At seed, we proved we could build a great product and deliver great value for customers. What needs to change is an engine that can repeatedly do that at scale. 

Windborne: My biggest piece of advice is to be wary of advice that isn’t relevant to you. Think about where you want advice and where you don’t. For us, we disregard a lot of things people tell us when it comes to engineering and manufacturing when they don’t understand the way we run our business. You’re not going to win by only following commercial industry wisdom. 

As the rounds progress, things definitely get harder— riskier, scarier, more challenging. But they also get so much more fun. 

What sets Pear apart from other venture firms? 

Polimorphic: Pear’s willingness to be involved. We were pre-idea, pre-company when we met Pear; we just knew we were interested in the political realm. Pear stuck with us as we started to explore government. Their ethos of investing in people manifested in sticking with us through a few different iterations.

Learn to Win: Pear is an expert at early stage— even what comes before it. We were still students at Stanford working out of our dorm room, and Pejman and Mar were some of the first people to believe in the potential of our business. In the early days, there’s so many people that could point out a million reasons why your startup will fail. Pear believed in the one reason out of a million and helped us understand how to dig into it. 

What are your goals for the next phase of your company? 

Learn to Win: We’re trying to ramp up our defense business and grow aggressively across the board. We’re just scratching the surface, and we’re excited to see what we can do with this new capital.

Windborne: We want to scale up data collection operations. We’re launching around 100 balloons a month, and we want to be doing a few hundred a month. By the next round, we want to be doing over 10 million a year in revenue. And more importantly, we want to be collecting more in situ weather observations than the rest of the world combined.

Polimorphic: We’re on path to having 100 government clients, which is a big milestone. We started with cities and counties and are about to do our first state-level deal. That’s the next big phase: acquiring more customers, delivering a new paradigm for governments to provide customer service to their residents. 

All three of these companies were in the same PearX S19 cohort. At the time, these startups were all just a few founders and an idea. It’s amazing to see their growth and to see them collectively raise $50M+ over the last quarter. Read more about PearX here. Applications for PearX W25 open on August 20th.

Camp Pear: PearX S24

Posted on by jill

PearX is our accelerator for early stage companies and our S24 batch is officially underway. We welcomed 22 companies into PearX’s S24 class at Camp Pear: a 3-day immersive retreat for the entire cohort to come together, learn key company building tactics, and get to know one another. This class of PearX founders is overwhelmingly comprised of AI companies, with 21 of the 22 being AI-first. As is now our tradition, we kicked off the cohort with Camp Pear. 

Practical advice from PearX alums

The founders learned from expert speakers about key company building tactics – from hiring to go-to-market to fundraising and more. And they heard from Pear founders who have been in their shoes before – like Ray Zhou, Co-founder of Affinity (PearX S14), Scott Kazmierowicz, Co-founder and CEO of Cardless (PearX S19), Nicole Rojas, Co-founder of Lasso (PearX S22) and Lucia Huang, Co-founder and CEO of Osmind.  

The power of community

Camp Pear provides a unique way for founders to build community right from the beginning of each cohort. Through team building activities, bonfire conversations, and shared meals – founders got to know each other on a personal and professional level. Building a company from scratch is really hard, and we believe community plays a key role in the success of an entire cohort. 

Kickoff to a fast 14-week company building sprint

PearX starts at Camp Pear, but it’s really just the energizing start to a 14-week program. The 14 weeks between Camp Pear and Demo Day are all about company building. During the cohort, each startup will work closely with the Pear team to get their startup off the ground. This includes weekly 1:1 meetings with their primary Pear Partners, weekly talks from experts across the tech and startup world, hiring help from Nate, founder-led sales training from Ana, fundraising bootcamp from Mar, and loads of fun activities (like our upcoming founder Olympics competition!). It all culminates in Demo Day, where the PearX founders will pitch to thousands of top tier investors – and each batch, 90%+ of our companies go on to raise capital. 

We’re so incredibly excited for this S24 cohort of PearX. If you’re interested in learning more about Pear, applications for our next cohort will open August 20th for W25. Stay tuned!

PearX S20 alum Seven Starling raises $10.9M to expand access to specialized women’s healthcare

Posted on by jill

Today, PearX S20 alum Seven Starling announced a $10.9M Series A round to expand access to specialized women’s healthcare. The round was led by RH Capital and supported by Pear, Emerson Collective, March of Dimes, and others. 

We’ve been backers of Seven Starling since day one of their company, and we’re excited to double down on them in this round. Not only have they proven to be an unwavering team but they have built an important and high growth business.

We met the Seven Starling founding team (Tina Keshani, Sophia Ritcher and Julia Cole) over a Zoom call in March 2020. At the time, they were students at Harvard Business school working on a startup called June Motherhood at the time, an on-demand support service for expecting mothers, providing personalized care at home and online throughout pregnancy, birth, and early motherhood. 

Tina, Sophia and Julia when they were students at HBS

Ten days after our first meeting, COVID-19 shutdowns began. Despite the uncertainty at that moment in time, we decided to not only award them the Pear Competition, but also to invite them to join our PearX S20 cohort. 

Here are a few characteristics that made Seven Starling stand out to us:

  • Exceptional consumer DNA: The Co-founders, Tina Beilinson (CEO), Sophia Richter (CPO), and Julia Cole (COO), were a fantastic group. They were exceptional, clear thinkers and communicators, scrappy operators that had spent months researching the space, and had strong consumer DNA, having worked at great consumer brands like Warby Parker and Kind.
  • Proof of execution. During the time in business school the team had tirelessly worked to validate their idea. By the time we met them, they had built a no-code prototype and had enrolled their first patients. 
  • Strong mission and product vision: Seven Starling took flight to help women navigate the most meaningful transitions in their life.
  • Untapped opportunity in Women’s Health: 33 million suffer from mental health conditions every year. Women are also 2x more likely to suffer from depression than men. Just last year, one in three new mothers suffered from perinatal mood disorders. Maternal mortality in the US is higher than our peer countries and is actually worsening. According to the CDC, the number one leading cause of maternal deaths in the US is undiagnosed mental health problems. Seven Starling saw this gap four years ago and has reinvented the clinical standard for women’s behavioral health.

The summer of PearX S20, we worked together over Zoom. In just 12 weeks, they built an app, closed key partnerships and achieved their first revenue. They closed a Seed round right after demo day that included Pear alongside top-tier VCs such as  Emerson Collective, Magnify Ventures, and Expa. They were off to the races. 

This was a Zoom check-in during PearX S20. The S20 cohort also included great companies like Expedock, Federato, Gryps, Sequel, Interface Bio, wagr, and rePurpose. 

Our partnership with Seven Starling went beyond PearX. We’ve worked closely with their team over the last four years to help them build the foundations of a long lasting company. Here are some of the ways we partnered with Seven Starling over the last four years:

Navigating to product market fit and working through a pivot:

A year after PearX, we realized that scaling the initial product was not going as planned. Despite the customer love, the acquisition costs were too high and healthy unit economics seemed elusive. We had a difficult call where we aligned that “it was not working” and decided to iterate again on the product. We worked together very closely for a few months and we went back to listening to the customers. As part of this exercise, we realized our most loyal customers were looking for mental health support. OB-GYNS were also desperate for solutions for their patients – most couldn’t offer that mental health support themselves. 

We decided to initially focus on a very narrow value proposition: maternal mental health. Then, we figured out that we also needed to innovate in the acquisition channel. We partnered with OB-GYNs to build a trusted referral network that delivered high intention patients.

By focusing on a large but narrow value proposition ($8B+ maternal mental health market), we achieved product market fit and Seven Starling can now effectively grow into the nearly $55B+ women’s mental health opportunity. By innovating in the acquisition channel, we were able to grow rapidly with little cash spent: today 90%+ of Seven Starling’s patients are acquired through OB-GYN referrals, a key wedge into this market. A core value proposition to Seven Starling’s patients and referring providers is that they’re in-network with most major health plans including UnitedHealthcare, Cigna, Aetna, Kaiser Permanente, and Blue Cross Blue Shield. 

Hiring: 

Our team has helped Seven Starling make critical hires. Early on, our partner Vivien introduced them to a key advisor: Dr. Amy Roskin. She was so bought into the team’s vision, she joined as their Chief Medical Officer in 2022. Amy was an OB-GYN for over 20 years, was previously the CMO of The Pill Club, and was also an attorney who specialized in Telemedicine law. Laura from our Talent team also jumped into hiring for Seven Starling, helping them hire their founding engineer. This was their first technical hire and they’ve had a tremendous impact on their journey.

Vivien helped connect Seven Starling with Dr. Amy Roskin, Seven Starlin’s Chief Medical Officer, pictured on the left. 

Fundraising: 

Since we started our partnership, we have helped the Seven Starling team navigate each of their fundraising rounds from  determining the fundraising strategy, to pitch creation to coming up with the target investor list. We are happy to have a phenomenal group of investors around the table, all of which believe deeply in the vision of the company. 

Tina pitched live to hundreds of investors in Pear’s network in 2022.

Where are they today? 

Seven Starling  has grown tremendously over the past year, they have also delivered industry leading time to care with seven days to first appointment (industry average is three-six months) and 90% statistically significant reduction in PHQ-9 score after completing the program. Over 85% of patients are in-network plans which means patients access care for just their copay. This is all a result of the incredible clinical and operational execution horsepower the team has demonstrated.

What is next? 

We are excited about Seven Starling’s impact on women’s health. The space is still a huge untapped opportunity and behavioral health impact is inseparable from a woman’s overall health outcome. Seven Starling is positioned to meet the specialized needs of women throughout every stage of their lives, empowering them to thrive and achieve their fullest potential. I’m excited to join their board to support them on this ambitious and admirable mission. 

It has been a privilege to partner with the Seven Starling team – their operational excellence and clarity of thought has made the journey to date an exhilarating one. 

However, we realize the work is not over; we still have a lot to build! All of us at Pear VC are excited to continue our partnership with them.