Roy Azoulay

She dropped out of MIT at 17, raised a fund that produced 5 IPOs, and now she’s building cryotech to keep patients alive until cures arrive. In 3rd grade, Laura Deming learned we were all going to die of a condition called aging, and decided she was going to fix it. By 12, she was volunteering in Cynthia Kenyon’s lab, studying C. elegans, a tiny worm used in aging research. Kenyon’s work had shown that a single genetic mutation could double a worm’s lifespan. Laura was ablating gonads and peering into microscopes, absorbing biogerontology fundamentals. At 14, she enrolled at MIT to study physics. At 17, she dropped out, with $100K from Thiel’s 20under20 fellowship, and started a VC fund focused on longevity. She called it The Longevity Fund . She funded Unity Biotechnology, Fauna Bio, Rubedo, Navitor, Spring Discovery, and others. To date, her portfolio has produced 5 IPOs. Her firms raised over $1B in follow-on capital. Today, she’s the cofounder and CEO ofCradlee, a startup focused on medical hibernation—cryopreserving patients with terminal illness so they can be revived in the future. She’s spent years studying not just the biology of aging, but the philosophy of it. She’s read Derek Parfit, Buddhist no-self meditations, and Rilke’s Duino Elegies to understand the self, not just as a body, but as a continuous identity that evolves. She’s debated whether it matters if you survive, or just someone similar to you. Whether the goal is physical continuity, or value preservation. Whether being “you” in 100 years means anything at all. She’s studied game theory, and how lifespan extension might change incentives across society. Longer time horizons might incentivize more prosocial behavior. But they might also entrench power and capital even further. To her, biology is best understood not through words but through mental play. She calls it embodied thinking. In her imagination, she’s a molecule floating through a cytoplasm. She sees how randomness governs motion. She realizes cells run on passive diffusion. And from that, she derived insights into how cryopreservation might work. Her fixation on cryo started with a simple idea: sometimes, the medicine you need is just 12 months away. If we could pause your biology for 12 months, you could survive. Cradle wants to build that bridge. Cryopreservation isn’t immortality. It’s one way to make death a choice—not a deadline. She believes in creating conscious entities that evolve over centuries, not decades. “I think the interesting thing about transhumanism is that you’re trying to become something that you don't understand. It’s like Flatland. You’re like a 2D thing. And then you’re trying to become a 3D object. But you can’t even conceive of what that 3D object is in your current 2D form.” 💡 In 2025, I’m sharing 365 stories of women entrepreneurs in 365 days. FollowJustine Juillardd to learn how they built and owned their stories.

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The race for the AI future isn’t really about more computing power or better large language models, as important as those things are.    The true revolution will happen in AI’s interactions with what I call nature’s intelligence – the logic of the natural world, evolved over billions of years – and human intelligence.    Nowhere is better positioned to facilitate those interactions and lead that revolution than Massachusetts, with its world-leading life sciences ecosystem, highly educated workforce, and burgeoning AI sector.    I shared some thoughts about how my home state can lean into the uncertainty it’s facing and win the AI future in Boston Business Journal. https://lnkd.in/e7AtE93F

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$110M raised in 5 months.   A one-year-old startup just raised $85M in a Series A round led by Redpoint Ventures, with participation from 8VC, Shopify Ventures, Autotech Ventures, and others.   That tells us investors believe:   – Workflow-native AI (trained on logistics data + processes) creates defensible moats.   – Adoption curves are faster when AI feels like a teammate, not another SaaS login.   – The TAM is huge. Logistics is a trillion-dollar industry with margin pressure and labor bottlenecks.   Logistics is just one example. Similar vertical plays are emerging in:   Legal → Contract review agents. Finance → AI underwriters, wealth management agents. Construction → AI safety monitors and project schedulers. Healthcare → Ambient clinical documentation, revenue cycle AI.   Augment’s raise is a datapoint in the larger trend:   📌 Capital is moving from broad AI platforms into applied, industry-specific AI.   What AI are you building?   _______________ P.S. My newsletter (Join 20K+ subscribers): https://lnkd.in/dNVbGxXv My reading list: Reading List | https://lnkd.in/dS8XJ9_W

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I’m proud to share that Isaacus has just completed its pre-seed round, raising $700k from Australian tech VCs Aura Ventures and Galileo Ventures 🎉. This is the first VC-backed investment in foundational legal AI research globally, and one of the first investments in Australian-made sovereign AI. As we leverage our investment to execute one of the most disruptive legal AI missions of the decade, we're sharing a primer on who we are, what our vision is for the future of legal AI, and how we plan on powering the next generation of legal tech companies. In a nutshell, we believe legal tech companies will be the law firms of the future. In fact, we’re already seeing legal tech companies like Josef and AccuFind Law directly competing with law firms by selling their own lawyer-grade, AI-enabled legal services to consumers and enterprises alike. We think that this new market of, what we call, legal tech firms deserves to be recognized as an industry of its own, one that is worth having solutions tailored to its unique pain points. Our mission is to solve each and every one of those pain points, whether by delivering superior legal research capabilities that cut far above and beyond those of general-domain retrieval models or by providing direct access to enormous amounts of high-quality legal data from the Blackstone Corpus, our proprietary, living, multijurisdictional repository of legal knowledge. We’re calling on like-minded, forward-thinking legal tech companies, AI-first law firms, and legal AI engineers interested in being a part of our mission to power the data and AI stack of the legal tech industry, whether as an early design partner or as a founding team member, to reach out. If you’d like to learn more about Isaacus, our vision and our plans for the future, you can read our full vision statement on our website: https://lnkd.in/gKsdqCni

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Sam said that OpenAI will take around 2% on LLM purchases - I think it's going to be more like 10-15%. Here's why. Honestly, it was inevitable that each LLM would launch its own checkout. Consider the alternative disjointed LLM purchase experience - purchasing items one at a time... myriad purchase confirmations from all over? If consumers want to shop in LLMs, which it seems they do based on recent behavioral trends, then owning the checkout is an objectively better customer experience. But where does this fit into the broader land grab over commerce margins as a % of GMV? 👉 Discovery (Google paid search, Meta paid social, Amazon ads): 3-8% 👉 Access (Amazon Marketplace, Walmart Connect, etc...): 15% 👉 Affiliates (Influencers, Buy Guides, etc...): 3-10% 👉 Checkout (PayPal, Stripe, Shopify, etc...): 2-3% 👉 Logistics / Fulfillment (Pick / Pack / Ship fees, e.g. 3PLs, FBA, etc...): 8-15% With $400 billion dollars globally spent across discovery, checkout, etc... this area is ripe for LLMs to tap into for revenue growth, but which fees will LLMs impact first? Well, the prospective benefits to retailers and brands include more targeted discovery, '9x' better conversion rates, lower purchase friction, fewer intermediaries... That creates a massive margin compression opportunity, so my bet is that the LLMs come in quite a bit higher than a 2% affiliate fee. If I had to guess, I'd say 10-15%, while pitching retailers / brands that they're going to actually save 10-15% by eliminating other intermediary fees they pay today. So many retailers and brands are focused on tariffs right now, which of course affect them in the near term, but the rules of engagement for the next 10 years of commerce are being drafted as we speak. Right now is a critical time for retailers and brands to stake their claim - they have a massive amount of leverage in facilitating this behavioral transition. Top 3 critical negotiation points: 1️⃣ Intent data pass through - "I’m training for my first marathon and I’ve been getting shin splints. Can you recommend the best shoes under $150 that are good for long-distance road running and offer lots of support?" 2️⃣ Get the customer data - Name, email, marketing opt-in, phone, SKU-level order data, shipping address, post-purchase control, etc... 3️⃣ Control the product data - Don't allow janky screen scraping of your DTC site, you determine which products are distributed through this sales channel, pricing, description, etc... Look, this is 2004 Google Ads all over again. If retailers and brands play it wrong, they'll be renting their customers back from an LLM 3 years from now.

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Last year sequel had the privilege to be an early investor in Daniel Reid Cahn & Neil Parikh latest venture Ash by Slingshot AI The timing of such a product couldn't be better and be more needed. Democratizing access to high quality therapy is a world changer and I implore people to give it a go: https://lnkd.in/g4Va_CKn Today, they launch Ash, a first AI for therapy. Ash is the only psychology model in the world trained on clinically relevant behavioral health data, developed with clinical oversight, and using pioneering RL to continuously improve the models. Unlike general-purpose AI, Ash isn’t going to just say what you want to hear, it’s designed to support you, challenge you, and help you grow. Ash has been built not to digitize traditional therapy, but to create something new, something that meets people where they are. In addition to this public launch some exciting new advisors and new fundraising is being announced, co-led by Radical Ventures and Forerunner Ventures, joining previous investors a16z, Felicis, Menlo and us of course, bringing total capital raised to $93 million. Ash's Expert and Clinical Advisory includes globally respected mental health leaders, such as Dr. Tom Insel, Dr. Devika Bhushan, and Pat Arean, among many others.

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Elad Gil is a solo GP raising $1.5 billion. Some of his early bets include Harvey, Perplexity, Character.AI, Mistral AI, Braintrust and others. In a recent post, he says: “We’ve entered an era where the first set of AI markets have solidified.” 🔍 Which AI markets have crystallised? 1. Foundation Models (LLMs) – OpenAI, Anthropic, Mistral AI, Meta, xAI, Google Gemini. 2. Code Generation – GitHub Copilot, Cursor, Cognition, Claude Code, Replit. 3. Legal AI – Harvey, Casetext, Part of Thomson Reuters, EvenUp. 4. Medical Scribing – Abridge, Ambience Healthcare, Nuance Communications. 5. Customer Support – Decagon, Sierra, Forethought. 6. Search + IR – Perplexity, OpenAI, Google, Meta. These markets have matured from chaos to clarity, with revenue ramping fast and agentic workflows (AI doing tasks for you) reshaping how value is captured. 🧭 What’s next? Elad sees the next frontiers forming in: – Accounting – Compliance – Financial tools – Sales agents – Security – …and AI-driven rollups of legacy service businesses. He also introduces the concept of the "GPT Ladder" where new markets open as models cross capability thresholds (e.g., GPT-5 or Claude X enabling previously impossible use cases). An interesting thought is on usage based pricing; “We’re shifting from selling seats to selling units of cognition.” Read the full post in the first comment 👇

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