First Star Ventures

First Star Ventures, established in 2014 and based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, is a venture capital firm that focuses on early-stage investments in technology and biotechnology sectors across the United States. The firm seeks to partner with visionary founders who are addressing real-world challenges through applications of advanced technologies, including artificial intelligence, computational biotech, connected sensors, augmented reality, virtual reality, and blockchain. By leveraging its industry experience and a network of strategic partners, First Star Ventures aims to support startups in their growth and innovation, fostering the development of solutions that harness frontier technologies for a better future.

Teddy Blank

Principal

Liu, Millie

Co-Founder, Partner

38 past transactions

Blumen Systems

Pre Seed Round in 2023
Blumen is an early-stage technology company building software to streamline the regulatory challenges associated with upstream natural resources production in the US. We are focused on producers building and utilizing land-based assets powering the energy transition including carbon sequestration, geothermal, critical minerals, hydrogen, and RNG projects.

FYTO

Series A in 2022
FYTO provides personalized solutions that improve the economic and environmental sustainability of agriculture for farmers around the world. FYTO specializes in developing crops that have ultra-high yields and ultra-low resource requirements, cultivation and harvesting systems for quality and consistency, climate-friendly methodologies for resiliency and long-term sustainability, and a range of groundbreaking agricultural products such as animal feed and biofertilizers.

VistaPath Biosystems

Seed Round in 2022
VistaPath Biosystems develops a tissue grossing platform that automates the process of inspecting, describing, inking, and measuring tissues that are to be processed for diagnosis. The company's platform automatically locates, measure and image tissue as it's placed into the cassette, eliminate mix-ups and errors, visualize specimens and easily see and react to changes in workload, enabling pathologists to prepare samples for diagnosis automatically and reduce errors involved with the process.

Salient

Seed Round in 2022
Salient creates a weather intelligence platform that combines novel ocean and land-surface data with machine learning and climate expertise to provide accurate subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) weather forecasts 2 to 52 weeks ahead. Salient's tools sift through large datasets to identify complex climate system relationships in order to provide accurate forecasts used in agriculture, energy, finance, supply chain, and other industries. Salient utilizes scientific knowledge to assist individuals and organizations in better understanding and preparing for the increasing volatility of climate change.

Enzymit

Seed Round in 2022
Enzymit's vision is to transform global manufacturing by eliminating dependence on scarce resources through local, sustainable, affordable bio-production. Enzymit is developing cell-free bio-production, the next generation of bio production technology eliminating the inefficiencies, complexity and cost of current bio-production technologies. Enzymit’s small, modular bio-reactors can efficiently convert available and abundant feedstocks into valuable products, from pharmaceuticals and cosmetics to food and materials. We are offering global resource independence while reducing the environmental impact. Enzymit uses artificial intelligence to design new-to-nature enzymes, the molecular machines in living cells that perform life-enabling functions. Our novel enzymes create molecular assembly lines that transform any feedstock into desired products. This approach reimagines bio-production by moving away from traditional, complex, and costly whole-cell methods to using nature’s elemental building blocks, making bio-production competitive with traditional chemical manufacturing in cost, efficiency, and sustainability, while also offering greater flexibility in product customization.

Robigo

Pre Seed Round in 2021
Robigo is a biomanufacturing company engineering microbes to create more sustainable crop protection solutions.

Sia

Seed Round in 2020
Sia is the leading decentralized cloud storage platform. No signups, no servers, no trusted third parties. Sia leverages blockchain technology to create a data storage marketplace that is more robust and more affordable than traditional cloud storage providers.

Nebulous

Seed Round in 2020
Nebulous, Inc. is a company focused on developing blockchain hardware and software for the decentralized internet. Founded in 2014 and based in Boston, Massachusetts, it operates Sia, a decentralized cloud storage platform that creates a marketplace for data storage by connecting users in need of file storage with hosts offering underutilized hard drive capacity. Utilizing blockchain technology, Sia enhances security and cost-effectiveness, enabling transactions through smart contracts without the need for intermediaries. In addition to Sia, Nebulous offers Skynet, a decentralized content delivery network and file-sharing platform designed for developers, and SiaStream, which provides affordable storage solutions for media files, facilitating quick streaming. Through these initiatives, Nebulous aims to deliver a robust and economical alternative to traditional cloud storage providers.

Phaseshift Technologies

Pre Seed Round in 2020
PhaseShift Technologies is addressing the critical need for new materials that can overcome limitations in performance, efficiency, cost, availability, and sustainability. Traditional material development relies heavily on trial-and-error, requiring costly and time-consuming physical experiments. This approach can extend projects over 10-20 years and cost millions of dollars, with no guarantee of success. PhaseShift's Rapid Alloy Design (RAD)™ technology revolutionizes this process by using AI to create optimized alloys tailored to specific use cases. Paired with Multi-Scale Simulations to accurately predict material performance, RAD™ minimizes the time and effort spent on unsuccessful trials. This leads to faster, more efficient development cycles and a significant reduction in resources required to meet design goals. Through the RAD™ platform, PhaseShift designs a portfolio of innovative alloys, which are commercialized via strategic partnerships with manufacturers.

FYTO

Pre Seed Round in 2020
FYTO provides personalized solutions that improve the economic and environmental sustainability of agriculture for farmers around the world. FYTO specializes in developing crops that have ultra-high yields and ultra-low resource requirements, cultivation and harvesting systems for quality and consistency, climate-friendly methodologies for resiliency and long-term sustainability, and a range of groundbreaking agricultural products such as animal feed and biofertilizers.

EnPowered

Debt Financing in 2020
EnPowered helps businesses take charge of their energy usage and costs. We provide free audits on energy bills to deliver up to 70% in cost reductions. We also run analytics on our customers’ energy usage to help them save even more, offering energy retrofits to reduce energy consumption. We are working to give Power to the People. We help our customers control their energy usage and costs, and also allow small businesses to group together to get lower electricity rates; group-buying for energy.

EnPowered

Seed Round in 2020
EnPowered helps businesses take charge of their energy usage and costs. We provide free audits on energy bills to deliver up to 70% in cost reductions. We also run analytics on our customers’ energy usage to help them save even more, offering energy retrofits to reduce energy consumption. We are working to give Power to the People. We help our customers control their energy usage and costs, and also allow small businesses to group together to get lower electricity rates; group-buying for energy.

Salient

Pre Seed Round in 2020
Salient creates a weather intelligence platform that combines novel ocean and land-surface data with machine learning and climate expertise to provide accurate subseasonal-to-seasonal (S2S) weather forecasts 2 to 52 weeks ahead. Salient's tools sift through large datasets to identify complex climate system relationships in order to provide accurate forecasts used in agriculture, energy, finance, supply chain, and other industries. Salient utilizes scientific knowledge to assist individuals and organizations in better understanding and preparing for the increasing volatility of climate change.

Winterlight Labs

Series A in 2019
Winterlight Labs builds technology that can quickly and accurately detect signs of cognitive impairment from a sample of speech. WinterLight Labs develops a novel AI technology platform that can quickly and accurately quantify speech and language patterns to help detect and monitor cognitive and mental diseases. This platform can analyze natural speech to detect and monitor dementia, aphasia, and various cognitive conditions. Using a short one-minute sample of speech, WinterLight can characterize the speaker's cognitive, acoustic, and linguistic state, including lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, semantic content, and articulation. Winterlight was founded in 2015 and is based in Toronto, Canada.

Gradient

Venture Round in 2019
Gradient’s Stealth MFA is a passwordless MFA solution that transforms your user authentication flow into a seamless, silent, and continuous authentication experience that users and IT teams love, with vastly reduced overhead burden and <50% the TCO of Yubikeys.

Swiftly

Seed Round in 2019
Swiftly is an innovative technology platform that delivers turn-key solutions to retailers by offering the same digital tools used by large chains and e-commerce giants. This platform also helps store managers to distribute the deals most relevant to each individual shopper, track consumer behavior, and recommend items accordingly.

Nomic

Pre Seed Round in 2019
Nomic is a bioengineering company working to make the human proteome as broadly and easily accessible as the human genome. They are building the nELISA, a next-generation ELISA platform for measuring proteins at scale and at high throughput. They offer scientists protein profiling solutions to empower them to decide the scope and scale of their experiments.

MotionHall

Seed Round in 2019
MotionHall is built by a world-class team of data software and business development leaders. We focus on predictive matching algorithms for biopharma deals. Our tools streamline optimal deal planning - improving financials and confidence in product success. Meet the MotionHall expert system, providing predictive advisory on deal partners and deal transactability. A smarter (and easier) way to get to yes.

Scoot Science

Seed Round in 2019
Scoot Science offers advice across operations, sustainability, and finance. They provide fish farmers with ways to protect assets, operate sustainably, and increase profits by enabling more assessment solutions.

Jellyfish

Seed Round in 2019
Jellyfish is an engineering management platform that helps engineering leaders align their teams' work with strategic business objectives. The platform analyzes engineering data and contextualizes it with business data to show how the team's efforts impact bottom-line growth. They also help track engineering work, communicate its value, and deliver business results.

Plus One Robotics

Series A in 2018
Plus One Robotics develops a parcel-handling robotics platform for logistics applications. Plus One's intelligent solutions combine computer vision, AI, and supervised autonomy to pick parcels for the Global 100's leading logistics and e-commerce companies. Plus One's AI-powered software determines the precise movement of millions of SKUs in routine tasks like sortation and depalletizing. Plus One focuses on logistics application development and logistics robot deployment for material handling tasks in warehouses and distribution centers.

Tranquil Data

Pre Seed Round in 2018
Tranquil is a computer software company that specializes in the fields of digital transformation, cloud, governance, context, and business policy. It enables compliance officers take control over their rules and requirements, and business roles can map data to its intention and opportunities. The company was founded in 2018 and headquartered in Massachusetts, United States.

Plus One Robotics

Seed Round in 2018
Plus One Robotics develops a parcel-handling robotics platform for logistics applications. Plus One's intelligent solutions combine computer vision, AI, and supervised autonomy to pick parcels for the Global 100's leading logistics and e-commerce companies. Plus One's AI-powered software determines the precise movement of millions of SKUs in routine tasks like sortation and depalletizing. Plus One focuses on logistics application development and logistics robot deployment for material handling tasks in warehouses and distribution centers.

Everbloom

Seed Round in 2018
Everbloom is a decentralized exchange which utilizes the blockchain for settlement.

Feature Labs

Seed Round in 2018
Feature Labs builds tools and APIs for data science and feature engineering automation. The startup, with roots in research begun at MIT, was founded by Max Kanter, Kalyan Veeramachaneni and Ben Schreck. Feature Labs products have their roots in research by its founders at MIT’s Computer Science and AI Lab at MIT, also known as CSAIL.

Plex Research

Seed Round in 2018
Plex Research is the Boston area start-up that's transforming the humble search bar into a drug discovery powerhouse. Their search engine will scour all the world's biomedical research data, and find the bit you were looking for.

Reniac

Venture Round in 2017
Reniac is a group of passionate entrepreneurs with data, software and systems experience from companies such as LinkedIn, IBM, Xilinx, Samsung, Riverbed and Napatech.

Genialis

Seed Round in 2017
Genialis is a computational precision medicines company that develops a clinical biomarker discovery platform. It engages in unraveling complex biology to find new ways to address disease. Its platform defines, models, and validates actionable biomarkers and optimally positions novel drugs to accelerate translational research and clinical development. Genialis was established in 2015 in Boston, Massachusetts by Rafael Rosengarten.

Resilinc

Venture Round in 2016
Resilinc is a supply-chain management software developer that provides supply-chain resiliency and risk management services. By mapping actual manufacturing sites and providing early notification of disruptions close to supplier locations, the company's software assists in identifying and quantifying potential supply-chain vulnerabilities, allowing companies to access advanced multi-tier mapping and part origin intelligence.

Nebulous

Seed Round in 2016
Nebulous, Inc. is a company focused on developing blockchain hardware and software for the decentralized internet. Founded in 2014 and based in Boston, Massachusetts, it operates Sia, a decentralized cloud storage platform that creates a marketplace for data storage by connecting users in need of file storage with hosts offering underutilized hard drive capacity. Utilizing blockchain technology, Sia enhances security and cost-effectiveness, enabling transactions through smart contracts without the need for intermediaries. In addition to Sia, Nebulous offers Skynet, a decentralized content delivery network and file-sharing platform designed for developers, and SiaStream, which provides affordable storage solutions for media files, facilitating quick streaming. Through these initiatives, Nebulous aims to deliver a robust and economical alternative to traditional cloud storage providers.

Upskill

Venture Round in 2015
Upskill provides wearable technology to connect hands-on workers from the factory to the warehouse to the jobsite. Its robust platform, Skylight, connects the industrial workforce with the people, processes, information, and equipment they need to do their jobs with greater efficiency and fewer errors, leaving them hands free to focus on their tasks at hand, and their tools. For organizations in the competitive global market looking to increase productivity, improve quality, reduce costs, train new workers, retain tribal knowledge, and provide a strong foundation for further investments, the future starts with Upskill.

Oculii

Seed Round in 2015
Oculii is creating a next-generation AI software platform for radars that’s exponentially higher resolution, longer range, more accurate, and less expensive than conventional solutions – increasing safety and reliability. The promise of autonomous vehicles depends on high-performance, all-weather, low-cost and scalable perception technology, and Oculii is bringing it to the world. Oculii's AI software amplifies the resolution of any radar platform, enabling high performance perception for the next generation of autonomous systems. Traditional phased array radars have been used for decades and follow a strict size for performance tradeoff - the larger the sensor aperture, the higher the angular resolution. Oculii’s Virtual Aperture Imaging radar technology fundamentally breaks this tradeoff - enabling its sensors to trade increased compute/processing for angular resolution enhancement with the same physical aperture. Leveraging this technique enables Oculii sensors to extract unprecedented accuracy, range, and 4D positioning information from commodity off the shelf low-cost radar elements, bringing high resolution radar imaging to the next frontier. Oculii is backed by some of the top investors and corporations from Silicon Valley, and is working with the leaders in Self Driving Vehicles, Robotics, and Drones - helping them deliver on an autonomous future with an advanced, robust, affordable perception platform.

Seven Bridges

Seed Round in 2014
Seven Bridges is the industry-leading infrastructure and data analytics company accelerating precision medicine by enabling the understanding of biomedical data. Our platform, services, and support expertise are driving discovery and drug development at the world’s leading academic, biotechnology, government, hospitals, and pharmaceutical entities. Through our collaborations with the largest genomics projects, we connect the world’s biomedical information to enable the most efficient analysis at scale. Named one of the world's smartest companies by MIT Technology Review, and a three-time Bio-IT World Best of Show winner, Seven Bridges has offices in Belgrade, Boston, Istanbul, and San Francisco.

Weft

Seed Round in 2014
Much of the world's cargo travels from port to port and then on to rail and road in more than 20 million containers. Today only 77,000 containers are actively tracked. By 2016 this number is expected to increase to 1 million. Through the Weft platform, which integrates with Weft sensors as well as sensors from other providers, and with ERP and CRM systems, users log in to get the current status and to set alerts for out-of-bounds conditions (location, temperature, moisture, shock/vibration) and stages completed. Through predictive analytics, Weft takes the current location and planned route of all shipments on the platform and combines this information with historical data to identify likely bottlenecks and alert shippers to potential problems before they occur. Shippers can then adjust routes and schedules to increase the likelihood of on-time delivery. Weft is available through ERP providers, telecommunications companies, and shipping and logistics companies. The company is participating at SAP TechEd in Las Vegas on October 21, 2013. More information about Weft is at http://weft.io and via e-mail to hello@weft.io.

Parallel Wireless

Seed Round in 2014
The Parallel Wireless team has experience building every component of the cellular network through its evolution from 2G, 3G to 4G. For the past three years, our team has been reimagining the architecture of the cellular radio access network (RAN) to address the challenges presented by HetNets and the evolution to 5G.

Speedy Packets

Venture Round in 2014
Fast enough to stream your favorite videos without interruption, stutter, or stalling. Fast enough to upload photos, share content, move files in and out of the cloud, and watch high definition video effortlessly. Fast enough to keep you connected to an ever-changing world. Their unique, patent-pending technology improves Internet speed over every type of connection-fiber, cable, DSL, wireless, and satellite – enabling high speed, high quality connections everywhere. In short, it can and transform your online experience.

Contastic

Seed Round in 2014
Contastic is the simple lead nurturing system that knows who you need to follow up with and generates emails with personalized content for you to send to remain relevant.

Infinite Analytics

Seed Round in 2014
Infinite Analytics' AI platform, Sherlock democratizes data based consumer insights. It’s a SAAS platform that offers an easy-to-use UI for companies and individuals to analyze consumer behavior for their brands and action on it. Sherlock.ai does to AI-driven Consumer Insights Platform what AWS did to Data Centers. With Sherlock, companies (enterprise, medium and small) can now subscribe to consumer insights, along with recommendations of the actions required to grow their business, instead of spending time, labor and money on building complex data and analytics systems. Creating a technology stack to mine multiple data sets for signals on consumer behavior requires heavy investment, building a tech savvy and a data science team and a team with enough experience to manage infrastructure. It also requires a team to manage the interoperability of all the components of this entire infrastructure/technology stack. It takes years to get this stack together and a few more years to get it to provide the consumer insights and actions for it. This is usually only within consideration of large companies because of the significant investment in terms of capital both human and monetary. Such infrastructure also requires tremendous amounts of ongoing maintenance. Sherlock helps companies convert their Capital Expenses (on consumer insights) into Operational Insights.
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