Super charging startups one investment at time. Pre-seed, Seed, occasional Series A. East Coast centric, but investing nationally. We want to be your first call out and your first check in. It's never too early to connect.
External link for Impellent Ventures
Rochester, NY 14608, US
Impellent Ventures reposted this
Truly excited to announce that Impellent Ventures has been selected for the 2026 RAISE Select cohort! Since starting the fund this has been billed as the GP/ LP event for top emerging managers so quite honored to be invited. Will be great to be in SF for the week to see old friends and connect with new ones. 101 VC firms. 330+ LPs. October 22 at The Presidio. https://lnkd.in/gUzAjsqE Thanks again to the team at RAISE Global
Great op with a great team!
We're growing and we need some help...! We're looking for a Director of Growth to own scaling our Membership base. If you're a marketing who loves finding creative ways to grow, thrive in startups, and want to help build something from the ground up alongside an incredible team, reach out If you're a friend who refers the right person, I'll bake you cake xx Dave McLaughlin Jenny GorensteinJosh WilsonShay McNamaraKendra LevyJami-lyn Fehr TroopDan KinsleyBen F.Philip H. BeauregardDavid BrownTroy Simpson
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Today, Axios broke the news: We have raised $35M to scale America's first federally regulated sports-native prediction market and accelerate the growth of our B2B platform. Prediction markets are now a permanent fixture of the American financial landscape, and ProphetX intends to lead them. Read the Axios exclusive by Ryan Lawler here: https://lnkd.in/eieKdE6Q Full press release here: https://lnkd.in/ei8V_mJu Parlay Capital Holdings LLC Data Point Capital FDJ UNITED Ventures Greenwave Ventures LLC Connexa Capital Impellent Ventures The Operating Group Sharp Alpha
Impellent Ventures reposted this
Standing in Manhattan and watching Ognomy Sleep light up the Nasdaq MarketSite big board, I kept thinking about how far we’ve come, from an idea born in Buffalo, to make sleep care simpler and far more accessible, to this moment in the heart of NYC. I’m humbled to share this moment with you all. I’m a sleep medicine physician first. And I started Ognomy Sleep because I watched too many patients wait months for care full of friction, or worse, never get it at all even though sleep apnea was truly ruining their days and hurting them mentally and physically. And while this moment was of course sweet, as we walked away from the Nasdaq building I kept thinking, there’s so much more we get to go do! There’s around 80M people in the US alone who suffer from Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) and we’ve barely made a dent. I’m grateful beyond words to lead this next chapter at Ognomy Sleep. Let’s see just how many lives we can make better, together. To our investors, clinicians, our team at Ognomy Sleep, and our amazing patients. Thank you. Nasdaq Ognomy Sleep Tannay Chandhok Russell Greenspan Ken Rosenfeld Catalyst Investors Blue Heron Capital Impellent Ventures Upstate Biotech Ventures Excell Partnership LLPartnership Launch NY University at Buffalo School of Management, The State University of New York
Our very own Philip H. Beauregard making waves with our good buddy Keith Cline on the VentureFizz podcast
Episode 430 of The VentureFizz Podcast features Philip H. Beauregard, Managing Partner of Impellent Ventures: https://lnkd.in/gcjpNHVZ There is a phrase that Phil commonly uses, which is “why join the Navy when you can be a pirate” and I think it speaks volumes to his mentality and how they deploy capital at Impellent Ventures. They don’t just simply follow the herd, especially when it comes to finding elite entrepreneurs. They are entirely location-agnostic and welcome working with exceptional founders who are tackling massive, real-world problems in emerging ecosystems... not just out in Silicon Valley. Impellent Ventures is focused on making seed and pre-seed investments. The firm is led by Phil, David Brown (who previously appeared on Episode 190), and Tariq Trotter, aka Black Thought of The Roots, who serves as a General Partner at the firm. In this episode of our podcast, we cover: * A conversation around building startups outside of San Francisco, and why we are living through the "consumerization of the enterprise" era. * The correlation between smaller fund sizes and investor returns. * Phil’s background growing up in New Bedford and studying business at The Wharton School at UPenn, plus how he first caught the entrepreneurial bug and met his co-founder, Matthew Grace. * The inside story behind his two exits: Objective Logistics to Carbon Black and Rekindle to HubSpot. * His transition from operator to investor at Impellent Ventures, plus all the details on their unique investment criteria, portfolio company examples, and how Tariq Trotter joined the firm. * His role as an early advisor to multiple successful tech companies, including the critical advice that Toast luckily chose not to take. * How Phil is leveraging AI to build his own Relationship Intelligence System, helping him scale his ability to "pay it forward" to the ecosystem. * Plus, so much more! This podcast is brought to you by one of the strongest longtime supporters of the local startup ecosystem, Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank. With more than 1,500 bankers and relationship advisors and $44B in loans as of Q4 2025 – SVB delivers expert guidance, specialized products and a team that knows the innovation economy inside and out. Learn more at SVB.com.
Job opening
Big news — CAKE is hiring a Director of Integrated Marketing! I’m SO EXCITED about this moment. Job posting here: https://lnkd.in/eZ5-jP_Y More and more incredible women are becoming CAKE Members, and more and more amazing brands. We’ve created a world that both sides of the market absolutely love, and now we get to level up our team with someone that can help us make all of this even more magical! This is a category-creating opportunity. The future of premium shopping is more personal, more rewarding, and more insider than anything that exists today — and we’re the ones building that, in close partnership with the brand and marketing leaders at many of the best names in premium fashion & beauty. For my network ... Check out the job posting. Send it to that friend. DM me intros. If we don't know each other, say hi! Estelle Palandjian Jenny Gorenstein Shay McNamara Jami-lyn Fehr Troop, MBA Téa DiPrima Ben F. Peter Blacklow Philip H. Beauregard Jennifer Coogan David Brown
Impellent Ventures reposted this
Every sailor understands from bootcamp, training in survival swimming, that the man-overboard is a dangerous race against time. Digging deeper, I discovered the survival rate in the US Navy is only 28% and in the cruise line industry it's only 17%. I'm proud to share that the my company, Gander Robotics, closed a $1.1M pre-seed round, co-led by Impellent Ventures and Underscore VC, to change that. My co-founder Lael Ayala and I are building the Autonomous Rescue Swimmer — an unmanned submersible that uses sonar and AI-enabled object detection to find people in the water and keep them alive until help arrives. 🚀 🚀 🚀 This is just the first step in our mission to save lives at sea. Learn more here at our new website: https://lnkd.in/eBdfHb4W We're #hiring. Join us on our mission to save lives! https://lnkd.in/eGMB3hhN US Navy CLIA | Cruise Lines International Association MIT Sloan School of Management MIT Sloan Fellows MBA Program Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences Massachusetts Institute of Technology Harvard University QLab Technology & National Security Conference Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship MIT Sloan Alumni Department of Ocean Engineering at Texas A&M University USNA Electrical & Computer Engineering Department MIT $100K Entrepreneurship Competition Bill Aulet Nina Teng Ana Bakshi
Let’s go!
We have some exciting news to share! Ognomy Sleep has been named the "Best Overall SleepTech Solution" in the 10th Annual MedTech Breakthrough Awards, recognized among innovative digital health and medical technology companies from more than 5,000 nominations across 20 countries worldwide. This award reflects the mission that drives everything we do: making sleep apnea care simpler and more accessible for the millions of people who need it. Over 50 million U.S. adults live with OSA, and an estimated 80% remain undiagnosed. Ognomy Sleep is here to change that. From at-home sleep testing to virtual consultations and personalized treatment plans, all without the long wait times that comes with traditional sleep care. 65,000+ virtual visits. 25,000+ patients treated. In all 50 states. And we are just getting started! Thank you to our patients, our referring practices, and our entire team for making this recognition possible. Learn more about how Ognomy Sleep is reshaping sleep apnea care: ognomy.com #MedTechBreakthrough #BestSleepTechSolution #SleepApnea #Telehealth #DigitalHealth #SleepMedicine #HealthTech #SleepApneaAwareness
Impellent Ventures reposted this
Want to put something in perspective for a quick minute, here. We just had the biggest VC quarter in history. But your company probably isn’t getting much (if any) of it. We'll do our part, but Thrive we ain't. They're too busy buying baseball teams and funding grilled cheese trucks that their partners garfield-meets-lasagna'd outside of their offices in Palo Alto (I kid, I kid...but Sequoia actually did that once. No joke. They funded a melty cheese company. Look it up). 65% of that $300 billion in capital went to just four companies - OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Waymo. Three LLM labs and a self-driving car company. The remaining ~$112 billion got split across roughly 6,000 startups around the world. Bananas. If you're a pre-seed founder in Buffalo, Chicago, or Nairobi, the headlines aren’t lying, per say. The boom is real. It just isn’t speaking your language. The money remains in the Capital, not for you in District 12, you plebs. That’s not a knock on your idea or your grit. It’s simply where capital is aimed right now - at a handful of bets so large they’ve warped the narrative for everyone else. And yet it's all we see on LinkedIn. Weird. It’s summarily misleading. It reads like a rising tide, like 2021 is back, like if you just keep showing up to enough meetings some of that will just find its way to you. Statistically unlikely. Your life is still hard. You’re still playing the same game you were six months ago. Two years ago. Small checks, hard conversations, trying to convince someone to believe before there’s anything obvious to believe in. None of that changed because a few companies raised sovereign-level money. Knowing that clearly beats spending the next six months chasing money you’ll never get. Don't lose faith. We built Impellent Ventures because this distortion isn’t new. It just keeps getting more extreme. In our opinion, some of the founders who will matter most over the next decade aren’t concentrated in four zip codes. And neither are we. Keep sailing, fellow pirates. Oh, and happy Monday!
90% of startups die because they mismanage cash
90% of the companies we see fail don’t fail because the idea was wrong. They fail after the round closes because they mismanage the one thing that actually determines survival: cash. Over time, a few patterns show up again and again: 1. Scaling for partnerships that don’t exist yet A company in our portfolio expected a partnership that would 3x the business. They hired ahead of it. The deal slipped 12 months. The outcome? They didn’t run out of vision—they ran out of runway. They raised again under pressure and paid for it in dilution. The partnership eventually materialized. The cap table damage didn’t reverse. 2. Confusing “leadership upgrades” with value creation A SaaS company brought in a new CEO who rebuilt the org to “scale.” Headcount grew quickly. Burn followed. Two years later: limited progress, reduced optionality. We reset the team—smaller, closer to customers, more accountable. The business improved. But time and ownership were already lost. 3. Buying growth before understanding it We’ve seen millions spent on trade shows, paid acquisition, and outbound before founders truly understood conversion, retention, or LTV. Revenue grew. So did churn. Growth without unit economics isn’t scale—it’s acceleration toward a reset. 4. Building the brand before earning it One repeat founder invested heavily to look like a category-defining company before proving what actually drove adoption. The market never caught up to the narrative. The company didn’t survive. In most of these cases, the companies didn’t die. But they became harder companies: more diluted less flexible operating from a weaker negotiating position with both investors and talent That cost compounds. Great founders understand something subtle: Capital doesn’t solve uncertainty. It amplifies how you respond to it. More money can buy time. It can also remove discipline. And discipline—not capital—is what builds durable companies. The best founders we partner with treat every dollar like it came from someone they deeply respect. Because it did. Their employees. Their investors. Their LPs. They spend accordingly. A startup is rarely a “good ideas” problem. It’s a capital management problem.