Tech
New York’s top VCs under 30
The next generation of New York City investors are already making their mark in the Big Apple.
They come from big-name venture firms like Female Founders Fund and Lerer Hippeau and smaller ones like Chai Ventures. They work in areas like growth, consumer, and health. They canoe, hike, and play pickleball on the weekends. We chatted with some of the young investors — think, under 30 — who are helping to shape the future of venture capitalism in New York City.
Here’s who is on the list so far.
(This list will be updated periodically.)
Layla Alexander — Female Founders Fund
Background: Alexander, 25, first entered the industry through an internship with Cleo Capital and Harlem Capital, before landing at FFF as an investor in 2022.
Why this VC is notable: She’s excited about the care economy, enterprise climate tech, and healthcare (all very buzzy — and lucrative — sectors these days). Her firm’s portfolio includes the astrology app Co-Star and model Winnie Harlow’s Cay Skin.
Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include running, reading, the sauna, and Pilates. She’s looking for founders who deeply know their market, retain users, and have research that shows their companies can scale.
Lori Berenberg — Bloomberg Beta
Background: Berenberg, 29, worked in technical and product management roles after college until she caught the eye of Bloomberg Beta. Transitioning from product management to venture capital was a risk, but she says her background gives her a unique perspective while evaluating startups, allowing her to “bridge the gap between technical innovation and go-to-market,” she told TechCrunch.
Why this VC is notable: One of the features she led while working at MongoDB as a product manager is now awaiting a patent.
Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include needlepoint and vintage fashion. She wants to back companies with the potential to be more than great. “It needs a shot at the extraordinary.”
Alex Chung — Chai Ventures
Background: Chung, 26, got into the venture industry through her mentor, Serena Dayal, a partner at SoftBank Vision Fund, who shared tips on how to navigate the ecosystem. “Most importantly, she imbued me with confidence,” Chung told TechCrunch.
Why this VC is notable: She’s into women’s health, identifying it as an area for much potential as the sector — and its need for innovation — steps into the national spotlight.
Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include running, racquet sports, and needlepointing.
Besart Çopa — Antler
Background: Çopa, 27, started at Antler just this year. He previously held an internship at a16z, then started Chestr, an online shipping platform. The company closed and Copa then joined Antler. He thought about founding another startup but felt he didn’t have an idea he was passionate about, “so the second best thing was to support others who did.”
Why this VC is notable: He’s a founder turned principal investor at one of the hottest accelerator programs around. “If I hadn’t chewed glass myself, I would have found it impossible to truly sympathize with the journeys of the founders I support.”
Fun facts and interests: He disagrees with the industry’s seeming obsession with young founders. “Let teens be teens,” he said. “Fall in love. Watch the stars. You can still build on the side. If you have an idea you feel in your bones that it must exist, then go for it. Otherwise, you can always start a B2B SaaS [company] later.”
His hobbies include reading history and painting. As a pre-seed investor, he has a founder-centric approach to investing and says he’s looking for those who are building focused solutions for niche user problems. “The more niche, the better!”
Ethan Daly — Shine Capital
Background: Daly, 27, started out in investment banking before moving to Shine, where he has been for the past four years. He is now a partner at the firm.
Why this VC is notable: He was recently promoted to partner at Shine.
Fun facts and interests: Shine Capital’s portfolio includes the collector community Flamingo and the workplace platform Notion.
Marina Girgis — Precursor VC
Background: Girgis, 29, started out on the finance side, researching data and semiconductors. She loved learning about emerging tech but said she wanted to have more of a direct impact on the companies she researched, so she pivoted and has since become quite bullish on investing in companies at the pre-seed stage.
“I chose to become a generalist and invest at the earliest stage possible, idea-stage companies, so I could get to know the people behind the companies and witness their transformation from the very beginning,” she told TechCrunch.
Why this VC is notable: Known for her knack at picking pre-seed companies, like AI security startup Edera, and for moving fast to make the end-to-end investment process feel seamless.
Fun facts and interests: Her outside hobbies include jigsaw puzzles and reading murder mysteries. One thing she would like to see change in the industry is rigid thinking on what type of founders to back. “There are no hard and fast rules in venture,” she said, adding that anyone can fail regardless of background. “You should learn from your past experiences as an investor, but my hope is to stay open-minded.”
Laura Hamilton — Notable Capital
Background: Hamilton, 26, has been an investor at Notable Capital since 2023. She got her start in the industry by sending many cold emails and making cold calls to alumni. She landed her first VC job by applying cold on LinkedIn, “proving the hustle strategy works,” she told TechCrunch.
Why this VC is notable: At Notable, she’s focusing on data, cloud infrastructure, developer tools, and cybersecurity. “Right now, I’m especially interested in agent infrastructure,” and she is looking to back more founders with deep passion and purpose.
Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include hosting a podcast called Partner Path, where she dives into the success stories of rising investors and founders. She also helps run FemBuild Collective, a community for female engineers and technical founders in the City.
Emily Herrera — Slow Ventures
Background: Herrera, 25, is an investor at Slow Ventures, whose portfolio includes delivery service Postmates, women’s footwear brand Birdies, and the social app Citizen. She previously worked at Night Ventures and specializes in consumer investing and the creator economy.
Why this VC is notable: Her forward-thinking approach to creator economy investing came as others were still pondering the sector’s impact.
Fun facts and interests: She has a long history in venture, interning everywhere from Harlem Capital to Dorm Room Fund. Fast Company hailed her as one of the “savviest creator economy investors” in 2022 for her work at Night Ventures, which backed companies such as influencer marketing platform Pearpop and NFT app Zora.
Bryce Johnson — Primary Venture Partners
Background: Johnson, 25, spent time working in software and product at Big Tech. He heard Josh Wolfe from Lux Capital speak at an event one year and became fixated on the idea of early-stage investing. He pivoted to management consulting and used that network to land an analyst role at Primary.
Why this VC is notable: One of the only junior VCs at his firm, he is known for being an advocate for diversity within VC.
Fun facts and interests: He loves classical music and backpacked Southeast Asia last summer. For work, his focus is in healthcare, consumer, SMB tech, and vertical SaaS.
Will McKelvey — Lerer Hippeau
Background: McKelvey, 29, partnered with a few classmates and raised a fund to start backing startups while attending UC Berkeley. After graduation, he moved to New York and joined Lerer Hippeau.
Why this VC is notable: Launched a student venture fund at Berkeley that is still making investments.
Fun facts and interests: One thing he would like to change about the industry is the amount of ego and arrogance that persists, which can cause investors to miss out on opportunities and talent. “Many VCs have always been the star student, went to the fancy schools, and got the fancy job, so they misguidedly carry that attitude into this role,” he continued. “This industry could use a heavy dose of humility.”
His hobbies include softball, basketball, and beach volleyball. He wants to know two things from the founders who pitch him. “What is the insight you have that everyone else is missing, and how did you unearth it?” he said. “What is driving you to take on the titanic effort of building a company from scratch?”
Mason Murray — NEA
Background: Murrary, 28, joined the firm after a brief career in investment banking. He’s mostly a generalist but focuses on software companies selling to businesses or consumers.
Why this VC is notable: Unprompted, three people on this list asked to make sure he was included. According to NEA’s website, he has made six investments, including in the solar-powered robotics platform Aigen and the wellness ecosystem The Well.
Fun facts and interests: He joined the firm after a brief career in investment banking. He’s mostly a generalist but focuses on software companies selling to businesses or consumers.
He’s bullish on AI and wouldn’t mind seeing more AI founders coming to New York. “We have talent, customers, capital, and great academic institutions,” he told TechCrunch. “I’m bullish on New York.”
In his personal life, he’s a hobby collector, musician, singer, and amateur cook. In his professional life, he’s looking for founders with a clear vision on how the world can be different, “paired with a precise hypothesis on what it takes to get there.”
Zehra Naqvi — Headline Ventures
Background: Naqvi, 25, worked at a few consumer startups before officially becoming an investor for Headline last year.
Why this VC is notable: She’s known around town for her popular venture capital newsletter No GPs Allowed, which offers networking opportunities to investors around New York.
Fun facts and interests: She loves being an investor and says even though the market is down in the consumer sector right now, “history has proven time and time again that now is the best time to double down on investing in the future of consumers,” she told TechCrunch. “Be a contrarian.”
Her hobbies include going to art galleries, traveling, playing tennis, and watching movies (she’s an AMC Stubs member). She’s looking for founders in the consumer space, in both tech and consumer packaged goods, between pre-seed and Series A.
David Ongchoco — Comma Capital
Background: Ongchoco, 28, has a background in tech, sales, and investing, working for places like Dorm Room Fund, interning at Learn Capital, and working in sales and growth at Amplitude and Rutter.
Why this VC is notable: Ongchoco is a co-founder of Comma Capital, which invests at the pre-seed and seed stages.
Fun facts and interests: He, alongside his co-founder Adarsh Bhatt, made Forbes’ 30 Under 30 this year for their work in venture capital. Comma has backed more than 50 companies to date, some of which have gone on to be acquired by companies like Stripe and Airtable.
Alexandra Sukin — Bessemer Venture Partners
Background: Sukin, 27, got her start in the industry while at Harvard, where she was involved with various on-campus activities like Harvard Ventures and was a founding member of the VC firm Contrary Capital. After graduating, she joined Bessemer.
Why this VC is notable: She’s a vice president at Bessemer, and her investments include the fintech Truebill (acquired by Rocket Technologies) and enterprise companies Unito, Rewind, and Contractbook.
Fun facts and interests: Her hobbies include hiking and skiing, and she loves spending time out West, as her father’s side of the family is from Montana and Colorado. “While I’m investing a lot these days in vertical and SMB software, I am also really excited about AI enabling a wave of consumer companies,” she said.
Mark Xu — Lightspeed Venture Partners
Background: Xu, 24, is a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, whose investments, according to his LinkedIn, include Glean, Stripe, Wiz, and Anduril.
Why this VC is notable: One of the youngest to ever be promoted to partner at Lightspeed Ventures.
Fun facts and interests: Attended the Juilliard School for the violin before heading to Harvard University to study math. Had a background in business development and investment banking before joining Lightspeed Ventures.
Vincent Zhu — General Catalyst
Background: Zhu, 25, is an early-stage investor at General Catalyst and, according to his LinkedIn, loves working with founders “building for the digitally native generation.”
Why this VC is notable: He’s made a name for himself around town, hosting events and helping founders get intros.
Fun facts and interests: After college, he worked as an analyst at Goldman Sachs before joining General Catalyst two years ago. The firm’s portfolio includes Stripe, Canva, and Warby Parker.
Tech
Volkswagen’s cheapest EV ever is the first to use Rivian software
Volkswagen’s ultra-cheap EV called the ID EVERY1 — a small four-door hatchback revealed Wednesday — will be the first to roll out with software and architecture from Rivian, according to a source familiar with the new model.
The EV is expected to go into production in 2027 with a starting price of 20,000 euros ($21,500). A second EV called the ID.2all, which will be priced in the 25,000 euro price category, will be available in 2026. Both vehicles are part of the automaker’s new of category electric urban front-wheel drive cars that are being developing under the so-called “Brand Group Core” that makes up the volume brands in the VW Group. And both vehicles are for the European market.
The EVERY1 will be the first to ship with Rivian’s vehicle architecture and software as part of a $5.8 billion joint venture struck last year between the German automaker and U.S. EV maker. The ID.2all is based on the E3 1.1 architecture and software developed by VW’s software unit Cariad.
VW didn’t name Rivian in its reveal Wednesday, although there were numerous nods to next-generation software. Kai Grünitz, member of the Volkswagen Brand Board of Management responsible for Technical Development, noted it would be the first model in the entire VW Group to use a “fundamentally new, particularly powerful software architecture.”
“This means the future entry-level Volkswagen can be equipped with new functions throughout its entire life cycle,” he said. “Even after purchase of a new car, the small Volkswagen can still be individually adapted to customer needs.”
Sources who didn’t want to be named because they were not authorized to speak publicly, confirmed to TechCrunch that Rivian’s software will be in the ID EVERY1 EV. TechCrunch has reached out to Rivian and VW and will update the article if the companies respond.
The new joint venture provides Rivian with a needed influx of cash and the opportunity to diversify its business. Meanwhile, VW Group gains a next-generation electrical architecture and software for EVs that will help it better compete. Both companies have said that the joint venture, called Rivian and Volkswagen Group Technologies, will reduce development costs and help scale new technologies more quickly.
The joint venture is a 50-50 partnership with co-CEOs. Rivian’s head of software, Wassym Bensaid, and Volkswagen Group’s chief technical engineer, Carsten Helbing, will lead the joint venture. The team will be based initially in Palo Alto, California. Three other sites are in development in North America and Europe, the companies have previously said.
“The ID. EVERY1 represents the last piece of the puzzle on our way to the widest model selection in the volume segment,” Thomas Schäfer, CEO of the Volkswagen Passenger Cars brand and Head of the Brand Group Core, said in a statement. “We will then offer every customer the right car with the right drive system–including affordable all-electric entry-level mobility. Our goal is to be the world’s technologically leading high-volume manufacturer by 2030. And as a brand for everyone–just as you would expect from Volkswagen.”
The Volkswagen ID EVERY1 is just a concept for now — and with only a few details attached to the unveiling. The concept vehicle reaches a top speed of 130 km/h (80 miles per hour) and is powered by a newly developed electric drive motor with 70 kW, according to Volkswagen. The German automaker said the range on the EVERY1 will be at least 250 kilometers (150 miles). The vehicle is small but larger than VW’s former UP! vehicle. The company said it will have enough space for four people and a luggage compartment volume of 305 liters.
Tech
The hottest AI models, what they do, and how to use them
AI models are being cranked out at a dizzying pace, by everyone from Big Tech companies like Google to startups like OpenAI and Anthropic. Keeping track of the latest ones can be overwhelming.
Adding to the confusion is that AI models are often promoted based on industry benchmarks. But these technical metrics often reveal little about how real people and companies actually use them.
To cut through the noise, TechCrunch has compiled an overview of the most advanced AI models released since 2024, with details on how to use them and what they’re best for. We’ll keep this list updated with the latest launches, too.
There are literally over a million AI models out there: Hugging Face, for example, hosts over 1.4 million. So this list might miss some models that perform better, in one way or another.
AI models released in 2025
Cohere’s Aya Vision
Cohere released a multimodal model called Aya Vision that it claims is best in class at doing things like captioning images and answering questions about photos. It also excels in languages other than English, unlike other models, Cohere claims. It is available for free on WhatsApp.
OpenAI’s GPT 4.5 ‘Orion’
OpenAI calls Orion their largest model to date, touting its strong “world knowledge” and “emotional intelligence.” However, it underperforms on certain benchmarks compared to newer reasoning models. Orion is available to subscribers of OpenAI’s $200 a month plan.
Claude Sonnet 3.7
Anthropic says this is the industry’s first ‘hybrid’ reasoning model, because it can both fire off quick answers and really think things through when needed. It also gives users control over how long the model can think for, per Anthropic. Sonnet 3.7 is available to all Claude users, but heavier users will need a $20 a month Pro plan.
xAI’s Grok 3
Grok 3 is the latest flagship model from Elon Musk-founded startup xAI. It’s claimed to outperform other leading models on math, science, and coding. The model requires X Premium (which is $50 a month.) After one study found Grok 2 leaned left, Musk pledged to shift Grok more “politically neutral” but it’s not yet clear if that’s been achieved.
OpenAI o3-mini
This is OpenAI’s latest reasoning model and is optimized for STEM-related tasks like coding, math, and science. It’s not OpenAI’s most powerful model but because it’s smaller, the company says it’s significantly lower cost. It is available for free but requires a subscription for heavy users.
OpenAI Deep Research
OpenAI’s Deep Research is designed for doing in-depth research on a topic with clear citations. This service is only available with ChatGPT’s $200 per month Pro subscription. OpenAI recommends it for everything from science to shopping research, but beware that hallucinations remain a problem for AI.
Mistral Le Chat
Mistral has launched app versions of Le Chat, a multimodal AI personal assistant. Mistral claims Le Chat responds faster than any other chatbot. It also has a paid version with up-to-date journalism from the AFP. Tests from Le Monde found Le Chat’s performance impressive, although it made more errors than ChatGPT.
OpenAI Operator
OpenAI’s Operator is meant to be a personal intern that can do things independently, like help you buy groceries. It requires a $200 a month ChatGPT Pro subscription. AI agents hold a lot of promise, but they’re still experimental: a Washington Post reviewer says Operator decided on its own to order a dozen eggs for $31, paid with the reviewer’s credit card.
Google Gemini 2.0 Pro Experimental
Google Gemini’s much-awaited flagship model says it excels at coding and understanding general knowledge. It also has a super-long context window of 2 million tokens, helping users who need to quickly process massive chunks of text. The service requires (at minimum) a Google One AI Premium subscription of $19.99 a month.
AI models released in 2024
DeepSeek R1
This Chinese AI model took Silicon Valley by storm. DeepSeek’s R1 performs well on coding and math, while its open source nature means anyone can run it locally. Plus, it’s free. However, R1 integrates Chinese government censorship and faces rising bans for potentially sending user data back to China.
Gemini Deep Research
Deep Research summarizes Google’s search results in a simple and well-cited document. The service is helpful for students and anyone else who needs a quick research summary. However, its quality isn’t nearly as good as an actual peer-reviewed paper. Deep Research requires a $19.99 Google One AI Premium subscription.
Meta Llama 3.3 70B
This is the newest and most advanced version of Meta’s open source Llama AI models. Meta has touted this version as its cheapest and most efficient yet, especially for math, general knowledge, and instruction following. It is free and open source.
OpenAI Sora
Sora is a model that creates realistic videos based on text. While it can generate entire scenes rather than just clips, OpenAI admits that it often generates “unrealistic physics.” It’s currently only available on paid versions of ChatGPT, starting with Plus, which is $20 a month.
Alibaba Qwen QwQ-32B-Preview
This model is one of the few to rival OpenAI’s o1 on certain industry benchmarks, excelling in math and coding. Ironically for a “reasoning model,” it has “room for improvement in common sense reasoning,” Alibaba says. It also incorporates Chinese government censorship, TechCrunch testing shows. It’s free and open source.
Anthropic’s Computer Use
Claude’s Computer Use is meant to take control of your computer to complete tasks like coding or booking a plane ticket, making it a predecessor of OpenAI’s Operator. Computer use, however, remains in beta. Pricing is via API: $0.80 per million tokens of input and $4 per million tokens of output.
x.AI’s Grok 2
Elon Musk’s AI company, x.AI, has launched an enhanced version of its flagship Grok 2 chatbot it claims is “three times faster.” Free users are limited to 10 questions every two hours on Grok, while subscribers to X’s Premium and Premium+ plans enjoy higher usage limits. x.AI also launched an image generator, Aurora, that produces highly photorealistic images, including some graphic or violent content.
OpenAI o1
OpenAI’s o1 family is meant to produce better answers by “thinking” through responses through a hidden reasoning feature. The model excels at coding, math, and safety, OpenAI claims, but has issues deceiving humans, too. Using o1 requires subscribing to ChatGPT Plus, which is $20 a month.
Anthropic’s Claude Sonnet 3.5
Claude Sonnet 3.5 is a model Anthropic claims as being best in class. It’s become known for its coding capabilities and is considered a tech insider’s chatbot of choice. The model can be accessed for free on Claude although heavy users will need a $20 monthly Pro subscription. While it can understand images, it can’t generate them.
OpenAI GPT 4o-mini
OpenAI has touted GPT 4o-mini as its most affordable and fastest model yet thanks to its small size. It’s meant to enable a broad range of tasks like powering customer service chatbots. The model is available on ChatGPT’s free tier. It’s better suited for high-volume simple tasks compared to more complex ones.
Cohere Command R+
Cohere’s Command R+ model excels at complex Retrieval-Augmented Generation (or RAG) applications for enterprises. That means it can find and cite specific pieces of information really well. (The inventor of RAG actually works at Cohere.) Still, RAG doesn’t fully solve AI’s hallucination problem.
Tech
Not all cancer patients need chemo. Ataraxis AI raised $20M to fix that.
Artificial intelligence is a big trend in cancer care, and it’s mostly focused detecting cancer at the earliest possible stage. That makes a lot of sense, given that cancer is less deadly the earlier it’s detected.
But fewer are asking another fundamental question: if someone does have cancer, is an aggressive treatment like chemotherapy necessary? That’s the problem Ataraxis AI is trying to solve.
The New York-based startup is focused on using AI to accurately predict not only if a patient has cancer, but also what their cancer outcome looks like in 5 to 10 years. If there’s only a small chance of the cancer coming back, chemo can be avoided altogether – saving a lot of money, while avoiding the treatment’s notorious side effects.
Ataraxis AI now plans to launch their first commercial test, for breast cancer, to U.S. oncologists in the coming months, its co-founder Jan Witowski tells TechCrunch. To bolster the launch and expand into other types of cancer, the startup has raised a $20.4 million Series A, it told TechCrunch exclusively.
The round was led by AIX Ventures with participation from Thiel Bio, Founders Fund, Floating Point, Bertelsmann, and existing investors Giant Ventures and Obvious Ventures. Ataraxis emerged from stealth last year with a $4 million seed round.
Ataraxis was co-founded by Witowski and Krzysztof Geras, an assistant professor at NYU’s medical school who focuses on AI.
Ataraxis’ tech is powered by an AI model that extracts information from high-resolution images of cancer cells. The model is trained on hundreds of millions of real images from thousands of patients, Witowski said. A recent study showed Ataraxis’ tech was 30% more accurate than the current standard of care for breast cancer, per Ataraxis.
Long term, Ataraxis has big ambitions. It wants its tests to impact at least half of new cancer cases by 2030. It also views itself as a frontier AI company that builds its own models, touting Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun as an AI advisor.
“I think at Ataraxis we are trying to build what is essentially an AI frontier lab, but for healthcare applications,” Witowski said. “Because so many of those problems require a very novel technology.”
The AI boom has led to a rush of fundraises for cancer care startups. Valar Labs raised $22 million to help patients figure out their treatment plan in May 2024, for example. There’s also a bevvy of AI-powered drug discovery firms in the cancer space, like Manas AI which raised $24.6 million in January 2025 and was co-founded by Reid Hoffman, the LinkedIn co-founder.
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