This is not a hypothetical risk. As foundation models become the default interface for mental health support, medical triage, and youth engagement, the gap between what AI can say and what it should say is widening fast. The companies building these models know it. They’re actively seeking partners who can bring clinical rigor to a problem that engineering alone cannot solve.

Enter, mpathic.

mpathic is a clinician-founded AI safety company that helps foundation model developers and LLM-powered application teams stress-test, evaluate, and monitor AI behavior in high-risk scenarios. Think “clinical-grade QA for AI” — or, in Foundry parlance, safety “glue” for the AI stack.

The company’s approach is rooted in something most AI safety efforts lack: real clinical expertise. mpathic has built a global network of thousands of licensed mental health clinicians who create ground-truth evaluation datasets, identify failure patterns in sensitive conversations, and monitor live interactions with safeguards that can flag, redirect, or intervene when needed. Grin Lord, mpathic’s CEO, describes it well: “It’s kind of similar to people that create synthetic data for visual AI. It’s not every day a child runs in front of a Waymo, but we can simulate it 10,000 ways with synthetic data. That’s basically what we’re doing, but from a psychological angle with language.”

The results speak for themselves. In one early engagement with a foundation model builder, mpathic’s clinician-led evaluation program helped reduce undesired and dangerous model responses by more than 70%. The company is working with leading AI model developers serving tens of millions of users, alongside clinical partners including Seattle Children’s Hospital and Panasonic WELL.

mpathic is led by co-founders Dr. Grin Lord and Dr. Danielle Schlosser (CIO). Based in Seattle, Grin is a board-certified psychologist and NLP researcher who saw children, clinicians, and patients increasingly turning to AI tools before human support — often in moments of real distress. Together with Danielle, a leading Bay Area clinician and tech innovator, they’ve built the team that has become the foremost experts in translating real-world clinical judgment into repeatable safety workflows for AI systems. They’re a mission-driven team tackling one of the most consequential problems in AI, backed by deep domain expertise and the credibility to match.

To fuel mpathic’s expansion, we led a $15 million financing in 2025 alongside our friends at Next Frontier Capital, who introduced us to the company. The shift toward foundation model safety resulted in 5x quarter-over-quarter growth at the end of last year. The team has grown to roughly 34 people and is, in Grin’s words, “hiring like wildfire,” with notable additions including Rebekah Bastian (a founding team member at Zillow) as CMO and Dr. Alison Cerezo (an American Psychological Association AI advisory member) as Chief Science Officer.

At Foundry, we believe in the power of technology to unlock and augment human potential, especially in critical and high-stakes settings. We’ve seen this through our investments in Meru Health (improving provider capacity and patient outcomes through digitally native mental healthcare), Regard (an AI-powered physician co-pilot for diagnostics), and Ferrum Health (a governance platform for healthcare AI). mpathic extends this thread into what may be the most urgent frontier: ensuring that AI itself — now the first responder in millions of sensitive interactions — does no harm.

We’re thrilled to partner with this extraordinary team in making AI safer for the people who need it most. You can read more about mpathic and its expansion here.

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Managed Service Providers (“MSPs”) are the unsung heroes of this moment. SMBs globally are increasingly working with MSPs to keep up with the accelerated pace of digital adoption. These firms have evolved well beyond “IT guys” into trusted, strategic partners that provide mission-critical services while acting as the outsourced CIO for their clients.

Ironically, MSPs face their own technology challenges. Legacy solutions force manual processes, offer limited automation, and lack modern integrations. The MSP’s back office bears the brunt of this burden, with countless hours spent on invoicing, collections, reconciliation, and even dealing with paper checks. Payment cycles are slow, creating suboptimal cash flows. These dynamics hinder potential growth, diverting time away from clients and capital away from investment.

FlexPoint launched in 2023 to solve these problems, starting with modern digital payment solutions purpose-built for MSPs and their clients. FlexPoint serves as critical “glue” infrastructure, connecting vertical MSP platforms with horizontal back-office software. MSPs leverage FlexPoint’s full suite of Accounts Receivable automation tools and financing solutions to enhance operational efficiency and grow revenue. Clients of MSPs use FlexPoint’s Accounts Payable solution to easily set up autopay, securely save payment methods, and schedule payments. 

Earlier this year, we led FlexPoint’s Series A financing, alongside existing investors Techstars (a Foundry partner fund and portfolio company), Haymaker Ventures, Far Out VC, and Garuda Ventures. FlexPoint’s value proposition of seamlessly connecting disparate systems to automate and optimize crucial workflows for the back office is shared with several past and present Foundry portfolio companies, including AvidXChange (NASDAQ: AVDX) and Wholesail.

Techstars introduced us to the FlexPoint team, which participated in the Techstars Boulder accelerator in 2022. We were immediately drawn to this high-velocity, mission-driven team that is deeply obsessed with providing simple yet effective solutions for its customers. Furthermore, the dual-sided approach to serving both MSPs and the businesses they serve creates a compelling network effect and distribution advantage to support FlexPoint’s long-term vision of building the leading back office platform for SMBs.

FlexPoint was founded by Victor Lopez and Sam Kushner, who bring deep domain expertise from their prior roles at Blue Owl Capital, where they served the MSP market. They founded FlexPoint with the belief that MSPs represent the gateway to $2 trillion in SMB technology spend. Their mission is to build the largest network of partner-led payments to power that economy. We’re thrilled to partner with this team on their journey to serve and empower millions of small and medium businesses worldwide.

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Our healthcare system stands at a critical juncture. Skyrocketing costs, widespread physician burnout, and overwhelming administrative complexities lead to limited access to quality care and, ultimately, compromised patient outcomes. Health systems are acutely aware of these issues and urgently seeking a better way forward. The promise of technology, particularly AI, offers the potential for transformation toward a more efficient and effective healthcare system.

If data is the fuel of AI, our healthcare system is sitting on an untapped oil field of epic proportions. Healthcare produces 30% of the world’s data volume: more than 2 zettabytes (that’s 2 trillion gigabytes!) annually. By 2025, healthcare data volume is expected to grow at a compound annual rate of 36%. 

This mountain of data, however, has not yet translated to better healthcare outcomes because most of it sits dormant. According to the World Economic Forum, 97% of the data produced by hospitals each year goes unused. This is rapidly changing, however, with an estimated $83 billion invested in FDA-cleared healthcare AI models, not to mention the volume of models in the FDA-clearance process. 

With this growing supply and arguably existential demand, one would expect significant adoption in this market. But…healthcare. Stringent patient data regulations, antiquated IT infrastructure, and persistent budget constraints create a massive bottleneck to the deployment of technology in healthcare. As for AI, adoption by health systems has been slow, currently estimated at just 5% of approved use cases.

Ferrum Health is building the platform to solve the adoption problem for AI deployment. Think “Plaid for healthcare AI” or, in Foundry parlance, “glue” for healthcare AI. 

Ferrum’s platform offers validation, orchestration, security, and management capabilities to enable health systems to securely and scalably deploy AI. The platform is vendor-neutral and privately deployed. It empowers clinicians to validate the performance of AI on local datasets and deploy AI more broadly into their existing workflows, all without protected health information (PHI) leaving the health system firewall. Ferrum is starting with imaging AI, serving specialties including radiology, oncology, neurology, musculoskeletal, women’s health, and cardiology.

With Ferrum, health systems are deploying AI to augment providers. This powerful combination of humans and technology can lead to earlier and more accurate detection, better health outcomes, and reduced cost of care. One early health system partner saw a 77% higher rate of early lung cancer detection using AI models delivered through Ferrum. The company powers these outcomes in a cost effective way, delivering a 75% reduction in internal IT staffing and compute costs and a 98% reduction in AI implementation timelines, from an average of six weeks to less than a day. 

Ferrum was co-founded by Pelu Tran (CEO) and Kenneth Ko (CTO) in 2018. Prior to Ferrum, Pelu was co-founder of Augmedix, also bringing technology to the clinical setting. Pelu was inspired to start Ferrum after a missed diagnosis resulted in the death of a loved one. The company’s mission is simple and deeply aligned with their health system customers: to achieve better patient outcomes.

At Foundry, we believe in the power of technology to unlock and augment human potential in critical industries and use cases. We’ve seen this first hand in healthcare through our investments in Meru Health (improving provider capacity and patient outcomes through a digitally native mental healthcare solution) and Regard (closing the clinical insights gap through an AI-powered physician co-pilot focused on documentation and diagnostics). 

To accelerate the company’s growth and to address these market needs, we recently led Ferrum’s $16M Series A, alongside Catalyst by Wellstar, Headwater Ventures, UnitedHealthcare Accelerator, and our friends at Urban Innovation Fund, who were seed investors and helped introduce us to the company. You can learn more about Ferrum and the financing here.

We’re thrilled to partner with this mission-driven team in unlocking the power of AI to transform our healthcare system.

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Earlier this year, we announced that our current fund, Foundry 2022, will be the final Foundry fund. We are excited to complete the initial work of building the Foundry 2022 portfolio over the next 18 months. As stewards of capital to our LPs and engaged partners to our portfolio companies, we are all in on every investment we make and committed to the decade plus of post-investment work ahead.

As we think about crafting the composition of our Foundry 2022 portfolio, we look forward to continuing to partner with world class founders building disruptive, delightful products that empower their users and unlock new capabilities. As Colorado residents and proponents of our startup community, we know that Colorado is a special and powerful place to build a business. We would love to count a few more Colorado founders among our engaged community of portfolio founders and operators who consistently support and learn from one another. 

If you’re a Colorado-based startup that has already raised a seed round or are bootstrapping your way to a Series A, we’d love to hear from you. In addition, starting in September, we’ll be holding monthly office hours (by appointment) at our office in downtown Boulder.

A few things to note re office hours:

• Each month, we’ll open three scheduled meeting slots – 9am, 10am, 11am, followed by a group lunch with all founders visiting that day and members of our team. We’ll provide space for you to work/hang out between your meeting and lunch.

• If you are interested in participating, please provide information about your company here and we’ll circle back to schedule. We are focused on meeting companies that are a potential fit so as to not waste your time or ours.

• We like to meet companies well ahead of a fundraise. We are focused on Series A as an entry point but will occasionally invest slightly earlier or later. While the round names are not always instructive, we’re looking for companies with a product built, live customers, and indications of product-market-fit.

• We can’t invest in every company, but love meeting and supporting local founders. If nothing else, we’re committed to give first and be helpful even where we can’t invest.

While we are generalists, we have several current areas of interest:

• the evolution of work with products that empower end-users and unlock new ways of working 

• B2B solutions for technologically underserved industries

• online marketplaces with large shadow markets and characteristics that unlock supply/demand and drive liquidity

• the new consumer — demographic shifts amongst consumer buyers: millennials as the sandwich generation, working families, addressing the needs of an aging population

• leveraging technology to foster and enhance human experiences

We look forward to hearing from you!

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From intimate dinners at local bistros to conferences, celebrations, and vacations at luxury hotels to Taylor Swift arena shows, the hospitality industry is at the core of our social fabric. It’s where memories are made, relationships are nurtured, and communities are built. 

Frontline workers are the backbone of the hospitality industry and make these beloved experiences possible. Hospitality businesses like restaurants, hotels, and venues need a reliable and adaptable workforce to maintain high service standards amidst constantly fluctuating needs. Service jobs are hard work and require the right mix of competence, communication skills, and grit. Shifts are long and can be physically and mentally taxing. These factors make staffing both crucial and challenging. 

The global pandemic exacerbated the hospitality industry’s workforce challenges, shifting them from acute to existential. Many workers left the industry in search of safer and more stable employment. While society has returned to seeking out restaurants, hotels, and event centers for rich real-world experiences, the labor market has not kept up with the resurgence of demand. As the hospitality industry adapts and evolves, gig workers play an essential role in the path forward.

The rise of gig work started long before COVID, but the pandemic gave it tailwinds. The way we work and live has materially shifted. Workers desire flexibility and control over their schedules, which is more possible today than ever. Platforms like Uber, Lyft, Doordash, and Instacart have popularized and democratized access to the gig economy for transportation and delivery. Foundry’s newest portfolio company, Gigpro, is at the forefront of bringing the power of the gig economy to the hospitality industry.

Launched in 2021, Gigpro is an on-demand labor marketplace for hospitality. With Gigpro, businesses in 28 cities nationwide can post shifts for a variety of hospitality roles and receive applications from qualified, vetted professionals within minutes. On the talent side of the marketplace, Gigpro empowers hospitality workers (“Pros”) to take more ownership over their professional lives. The marketplace enables Pros to select shifts and establishments that work best for them. Pros on the platform can gain skills, exposure, and credibility in their local markets while maintaining flexibility. 

We recently led Gigpro’s Series A financing, alongside Stage 1 Ventures, Stage 2 Capital, who introduced us to the company, and Detroit Venture Partners. Gigpro is based in Charleston, South Carolina and led by Sam Mylrea, a seasoned entrepreneur and fellow marketplace nerd. Sam and the team are mission driven and as service-oriented as their customers. Gigpro customers rave about the company’s customer service and, in many cases, credit the platform for playing a fundamental role in surviving the pandemic. One customer even told us: “I would have left the industry altogether if not for Gigpro.” 

In addition to an exceptional team and demonstrated product-market-fit, we’re excited about the many vectors of overlap between Gigpro and Foundry. The company fits squarely in our marketplace theme alongside portfolio companies like Rover and Xometry, which create liquidity and optimization for fragmented markets with large shadow demand. We’ve gained experience building technology for the hospitality industry via investments in companies like Wholesail and Arryved. We’ve closely followed the emergence of the gig economy via The New Builders (co-authored by our partner Seth Levine) and our investment in gig economy payments company, Gig Wage. Lastly, we’ve long believed that great companies can be built anywhere and are thrilled to add Gigpro, the fastest-growing company in South Carolina, to the mix. We now count both Carolinas among the homes of Foundry portfolio companies–AvidXchange (AVDX) is based in North Carolina.

You can read more about Gigpro and the Series A financing here. And if you’re in the industry, post a gig or apply for one!

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While VC firms rarely make decisions like this, it’s precisely what we planned to do when we started Foundry in 2006. From our founding, we intentionally decided not to build a legacy or generational firm —one meant to live beyond the tenure of the founding partners. Instead, we intended to focus on the work of investing, re-evaluating each potential new fund as our fundraising cadence required. For nearly 20 years now, that cadence has been to raise a new fund every three to four years. Each time, we make a deliberate decision to raise a subsequent fund. But not this time.

Choosing not to be a legacy firm is one way we’ve challenged norms in the venture industry and just one of many things we take pride in as we reflect back upon our time building Foundry. As a Colorado-based firm, we were early believers that great companies could be built anywhere and, while we’ve made numerous investments in Silicon Valley, we’ve also invested up and down both coasts and many places in between. We have always believed that venture capital should be inclusive and accessible instead of opaque and one-sided, and we have actively worked to bring transparency to our industry through our writing, speaking, and other media. We are passionate advocates for the power of entrepreneurship, believing in its ability to transform people and communities, and have tried to be supportive of entrepreneurs around the country and the world, even when we weren’t direct investors. We located our firm in Boulder, Colorado, where we helped to co-found Techstars and joined local entrepreneurs, technologists, and educators to catalyze a thriving startup community – one that has served as a model for other startup communities around the country and the world. 

In 2015, with a changing venture landscape, we saw an opportunity to institutionalize a practice of investing in other venture firms, expanding upon the personal investing in venture that we had been doing for years. We launched this fund investment strategy in 2016 and built a portfolio of both established and emerging seed-stage managers who we believe represent some of the best of the newest generation of investors. 

As we’ve built Foundry, we’ve had the privilege of doing this work in partnership with an incredible network of founders, operators, VCs, and Limited Partners, investing in over 200 companies and nearly 50 venture firms. 

With each new fund, an early-stage venture firm extends its life by at least a decade, more realistically, quite a bit longer than that. Over the past year, as we reflected on what we each wanted for our future, we kept the original idea for Foundry front of mind. We’ve had several moments over the last decade where we thought the fund we were raising might be our last. Each of those times, after reflection and discussion, we decided to raise another fund. 

But not this time. Foundry 2022 will be our last fund.

However, our work is not finished. We’re excited to make new investments out of Foundry 2022, from which we will continue to lead Series A and B financings. We are energized to continue supporting our portfolio of companies and funds. And, given the lifespan of venture funds, we expect to continue this work for at least the next decade. Our work continues to energize us, and we are as committed as ever to the mission of Foundry – building a network of entrepreneurs, investors, and LPs that benefits everyone in our ecosystem.  

We greatly appreciate the many people with whom we have had the opportunity to work, especially our LPs, who have supported us along the way. We hope you feel we have been good stewards of your capital. We will continue to work extremely hard to generate returns for you. We feel incredibly lucky to have had the chance to work with so many amazing founders, CEOs, management teams, and co-investors. There’s a lot of work left to do, and we’re excited for it. 

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Vendasta is a scaled B2B SaaS company that sells marketing, sales, and other software solutions to SMB customers (SaaS SMB) via a well-developed reseller channel. The SMB market is a particularly challenging one to sell to, and the venture-backed landscape is littered with companies that have tried to sell point solutions, specialized products, or proprietary solutions directly to SMB customers and have yet to scale successfully. Vendasta’s reseller channel is a key differentiating factor that has allowed it to unlock the SaaS SMB market successfully.

We got to know Vendasta through their acquisition of Yesware, one of our portfolio companies with a SaaS SMB customer base for sales enablement. After that acquisition, we began discussing Broadly, another company in our portfolio with a SaaS SMB customer base. Vendasta acquired Broadly, and soon after, we expressed interest in investing additional capital directly in Vendasta.

Vendasta is a company we think of as a Silent Killer. While not widely known in the broader venture community, Vendasta has built a sizable, unique business that solves a crucial part of the problem of selling SaaS software to SMBs. 

We are excited to be part of helping Vendasta on the next stage of its journey.

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This week our friends at Springbank announced their debut fund with $35 million in capital commitments, and we are thrilled to partner with them. Courtney, Elana, and Jen were introduced to us by our partners at Union Square Ventures as they began putting together their new fund. We couldn’t be happier to share the news of their initial fund.

Springbank is an early-stage venture fund building the infrastructure to support women and working families. The companies they are backing are building the tools, products, and services that define the future of inclusive work, the new care economy, and the next wave of financial progress. They started Springbank with a singular belief that the needs of women and working families were under-estimated, under-innovated, and under-invested.  Areas like flexible and remote work, care infrastructure, women’s health, and the financial health and productivity of households have historically been viewed as “women’s issues” and therefore nice – but not need – to have.  Their perspective is that these are in fact “everyone issues” that greatly impact our society, labor markets, and economy at large. Since starting Springbank in 2019 they have partnered with incredible founders actively building for a more equal future, including: Carefull, Copper Banking, Daivergent, Dandi, Great Wrap, Guaranteed, Little Otter, PlantBaby, Season Health, Summer Health, Wellthy.

Springbank is a great example of our network-driven model of investing, and we look forward to continuing our close partnership with them. Congratulations, Courtney, Elana, and Jen! You can read more about their new fund here and here.

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We are pleased to announce that we have raised a new fund to continue our network-driven investing. Foundry 2022 is a $500 million fund that invests in early-stage technology companies and early-stage venture funds. We began investing the fund in 2022 and are excited to continue partnering with founders, GPs, and LPs.

We transitioned to our network-driven strategy in 2016 with the first Foundry Next fund. Since then, we’ve had the privilege of building our partner fund portfolio, which includes a fantastic set of established and emerging early-stage investors.

In our 2018 Foundry Next fund, we fully implemented our strategy of investing 75% of our capital directly in early-stage companies and 25% in partner funds. This strategy creates a powerful risk-return model while accruing a structural advantage for direct investing. We patiently invested the 2018 fund over four years, as we had committed to our LPs when we raised it, rather than accelerating our pace and raising multiple funds of two, or even one-year durations. We continue to value time diversification, especially as we’ve seen the market shift over the past 18 months. We’ve lived through several cycles and recognize the opportunity the current environment, combined with time diversity, provides.

Since our inaugural 2007 fund, we’ve focused on several themes to guide our investing. The themes have evolved through our experiences and learning during the past 16 years. Today, our investment strategy combines our thematic lens with a network-driven approach. We are focused on companies in our partner funds’ portfolios and use our themes to identify potential investments where we can be additive partners.

The Foundry network is intentionally expansive. We have long believed that important companies can be built anywhere. With a focus on the U.S. and Canada, our national footprint gives us access to a diverse pool of talent and ideas.

We are committed to our way of practicing venture capital. We operate with a “give first” ethos. We aim to be open, conscientious, and steadfast. We care about the people with whom we work. We build community across our network, taking great pride in seeing the leaders in our portfolio help one another. We also try to have fun. We are serious investors but don’t take ourselves too seriously.

Today, Foundry has six partners: Lindel Eakman, Brad Feld, Jaclyn Hester, Seth Levine, Ryan McIntyre, and Chris Moody. Our partnership is an equal one, with each of us bringing different perspectives and strengths. We are collaborative, having developed deep personal connections that help us work individually and collectively to make the best decisions possible. 

We deeply appreciate the Limited Partners in our new fund. We have long relationships with many of our LPs, which remains a source of professional and personal pride. We are grateful to continue working on their behalf.

Finally, we want to recognize the incredible founders and GPs who have allowed us to invest in their companies and funds. We do not take lightly the great privilege of partnering with extraordinary builders and investors and are thrilled at the opportunity to continue this work.

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We’re excited to announce our investment in MacroFab’s Series C financing alongside Edison Partners and BMW Ventures. MacroFab was introduced to us by our partner firm, Techstars, who participated in its seed round in 2015 and we’ve been following the company’s impressive progress ever since. MacroFab is a cloud-enabled electronics manufacturing platform built to automate and optimize the manufacturing process. The company’s platform has a modern, easy to use interface to take information directly from the customer to the manufacturing floor, enabling clients to reduce the up-front cost and complexity of getting manufacturing jobs running. This is especially relevant in today’s market as companies are looking for manufacturing solutions in the face of supply chain issues. Founded in Houston, Texas in 2013 by current Chief Product Officer, Chris Church, and Lead Electrical Designer, Parker Dillmann, MacroFab simplifies manufacturing with a software-driven approach to building electronics at scale.

We have been interested in this space for some time. The digital manufacturing market is growing, fueled by the need for redundancy and resilience from off-shore manufacturing. Macrofab addresses those challenges facing engineers, purchasers, and supply chains by bringing together the best factories in North America and production expertise thus providing seamless and transparent manufacturing from prototype to fulfillment. MacroFab’s cloud platform enables next generation manufacturing with factory elasticity, supply chain resilience, inventory management, along with better cost control and time to market. With hundreds of production lines, transparent communication, and real-time manufacturing data, MacroFab is leading the emerging digital manufacturing market. 

MacroFab’s strong executive team is led by Misha Govshteyn, who previously co-founded and built Alert Logic into one of the fastest growing companies in the security industry with over 4,000 customers, $140M+ in revenue. After serving on MarcoFab’s board, Misha joined co-founders, Chris and Parker, as the company’s CEO and has built a powerhouse team of operations, product, and marketing leaders. Their customer list includes Tesla, Amazon, Stanley Black & Decker, and Dow among many others. We are thrilled to partner with MacroFab as they build innovative solutions for electronics manufacturing and fulfillment.

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