The Angel Nest

The Angel Nest

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The Angel Nest episodes

  • New York Angels is Investing in Tech to Provide Better Nutrition for Preterm Infants

    Preterm birth affects one in ten babies in the United States, and for the smallest and most fragile among them, what they are fed in those first critical weeks can determine whether they survive and how well they thrive. The science has long pointed to mother’s own milk as the gold standard. The problem has been concentration: preterm infants need more nutrients than full-term milk provides at standard volume, and the current solution, adding formula fortifiers, introduces the very risks it is meant to solve.


    On this New York Angels edition of The Angel Nest, we meet Beth Schinkel, a neonatal intensive care nurse and nutritionist who spent years watching babies get sick from formula fortifiers and decided to build a better answer. Her company, Mother’s Milk is Best, has developed a passive osmotic device that concentrates a mother’s own milk without adding anything foreign to it. The FDA has granted breakthrough technology designation. Clinical trials are underway. And the New York Angels, co-led by member Ray Farrell, have backed her seed round.

    Ray’s involvement is personal in a way that does not happen often in angel investing. He and his wife raised 26-week-old quadruplets in the NICU, born between a pound and a half and two pounds, navigating the exact risks that Beth’s device is designed to prevent. He heard her pitch and recognized the problem from the inside.

    Together Beth and Ray discuss how a passive osmotic device works and why its simplicity is a feature rather than a limitation, how Beth secured millions in non-dilutive NIH and SBIR funding before approaching angels and why the angel capital was still essential to unlocking it, what a billion-dollar total addressable market looks like when your initial customer is a NICU, and what early-stage investors actually contribute beyond the check.

    Staying with us after the main conversation is Peter Bodenheimer, the new Executive Director of the New York Angels, who brings a rare perspective to the role: he has been a founder, an investor, and an accelerator partner. He shares where he is focusing first, why he believes angel groups get a bad reputation for wasting founders’ time, and what he thinks it takes to make an investor-founder relationship genuinely useful after the money is wired.

    Learn more about Mother’s Milk is Best and about joining or applying to the New York Angels at newyorkangels.com. Reach us with comments or questions at theangelnest.com.

    25 min
  • Volute Is Using AI to Extend Executive Education

    Higher education is under pressure. Budgets are strained, research funding is being cut, and the gap between what business schools teach and what industry actually needs grows wider every year. Executive education is the one corner of the university that has always had to face the market directly. Now it is also becoming the place where AI may finally close that gap for good.


    Today on The Angel Nest, we meet Volute, an AI-powered platform that is reimagining how business schools deliver executive education by creating live, real-time communities that connect industry leaders with faculty, alumni, and peers to solve the challenges they are facing right now, not six months from now in a classroom.

    We speak with Michael Croft, Volute's founder, Jean Hammond, one of his lead investors and a partner at LearnLaunch, one of the few venture firms in the country exclusively focused on edtech, and Elmer Almachar, Managing Director of the Kellogg Global Network and Executive MBA Program at Northwestern University, who is not only an early adopter of Volute but one of the pioneers helping to prove what this model can do.

    Together they explore why executive education is what Jean calls an island of profitability in a sea of challenged higher ed, how Volute's community-based AI differs fundamentally from content-based AI platforms, why business schools are both the most resistant and the fastest-following institutions when it comes to adopting new technology, and what it means to extend the learning beyond the classroom into the real moments when leaders most need answers.

    What makes this conversation particularly compelling is that Elmer joins not as a commercial partner but as a believer. Northwestern's Kellogg School is launching with Volute this fall, and what Elmer describes is not just a technology adoption but a rethinking of what a business school is actually for.

    Learn more about Volute at volute.education. Reach us with comments or questions at theangelnest.com. There, you can also catch up on dozens of past episodes.

    21 min
  • New York Angels is Investing in the AI Companies that are Revolutionizing Marketing

    AI is reshaping every industry, but few are as ripe for reinvention as advertising, a business built on a slow and expensive mix of creativity and manpower.


    In this New York Angels edition of The Angel Nest, host David Hemenway sits down with New York Angels member Mike Jacobs and Anna Stepura, founder of Adlyse, an AI-driven performance marketing platform built for direct response advertisers.

    Anna is a repeat founder building her third company, with nine years of experience as a performance marketer herself before she set out to fix the problems she lived inside. Mike has spent his career scaling growth systems and now invests in the founders building what comes next.

    Together they unpack what performance marketing actually measures, why relying on advertising platform algorithms alone leaves money on the table, and how agentic AI is moving the work from recommendation to execution. Anna explains why she built Adlyse to work on behalf of the advertiser rather than the platform, Mike describes what convinced him to back Anna specifically rather than just the idea, and both push back on the assumption that AI removes the need for human judgment in marketing. Brand positioning, differentiation, and knowing what a company actually stands for, they argue, are the parts no algorithm can do for you.

    The conversation also turns candid on leadership, what investors really look for when backing a repeat founder, and whether the industry's new precision is actually as precise as it looks.

    Learn more about Adlyse and about joining the New York Angels at newyorkangels.com. Reach us with questions or comments and listen to past episodes at theangelnest.com.

    17 min
  • Heroes Made is Helping Schools Teach Social and Emotional Health

    Elementary schools are no longer exclusively about academics. Now, educators also share responsibility for building students' character, as well as their social and emotional health.


    Today on The Angel Nest, we meet Maria Howard, founder of Heroes Made, a character education platform for grades one through six that personalizes lessons to every student through storytelling, eliminating prep time for overburdened teachers while giving every child the experience of being the hero of their own learning journey.

    Joining Maria is Dr. Maurice Elias of Rutgers University, a pioneer in social-emotional learning who is not affiliated with Heroes Made but believes so deeply in what they are doing that he is helping them get the message out.

    Together they discuss why character cannot be taught from the outside but must be caught from the people and environments surrounding a child, how Heroes Made analyzed why good programs collect dust on shelves and built something specifically designed not to, the circle of control lesson that teaches students to separate what they can manage from what they cannot, the role of technology in personalizing education without isolating children behind screens, and how the platform turns students into published authors whose stories are read by peers across every participating school.

    The mental health crisis reaches down to primary school age, and Heroes Made is one of the rare programs designed not just to respond to it but to get ahead of it.

    Learn more about Heroes Made at heroesmade.com and reach us with comments or questions at theangelnest.com.

    13 min
  • How NY Angels Find Great Medtech Investments Like Aim Medical Robotics

    Angel investing in medical technology can be tough. The science is complex, the timelines are long, and the risks are hard to judge without the right expertise in the room. At the New York Angels, that has changed.


    In this New York Angels edition of The Angel Nest, we meet NYA members and medical experts Vijay Aggarwal, PhD and John Younger, and learn how they evaluate life science opportunities. Joining them is Greg Fischer, founder and CEO of AIM Medical Robotics, one of the standout companies the New York Angels chose to fund.

    AIM is bringing a compact surgical robot to neurosurgery that works inside an MRI scanner in real time. The core problem it solves has haunted neurosurgeons for decades: the brain moves during surgery. Targets the size of a grain of rice can shift millimeters to centimeters mid-procedure, making preoperative maps unreliable exactly when precision matters most. AIM's robot continuously updates its guidance using live MRI imaging for conditions including Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, and brain cancer.

    Greg, Vijay, and John discuss what it takes to evaluate a medtech company before there is revenue, why AIM's FDA path is unusually clean, how existing reimbursement codes remove one of the biggest commercialization headaches in medical devices, and what the next wave of medtech investment looks like.

    Learn more about AIM Medical Robotics and find out who the New York Angels are partnering with at newyorkangels.com. Reach us with comments and listen to past episodes at theangelnest.com.

    20 min
  • Setmixer is Recording Live Music and Bringing Back the Bootleg

    When Pascal de Mul was part of a young Spotify team revolutionizing music distribution, he unintentionally killed something he loved: the live bootleg. Now he is bringing it back, legally and in studio quality.


    Today on The Angel Nest, we meet Pascal de Mul, founder of Setmixer, the UK-based music technology company that permanently installs recording equipment directly into venue mixing desks, capturing every live performance in full multitrack studio quality and delivering it to fans almost instantly. Artists keep 70% of every sale and remain in full control of their recordings.

    Joining Pascal is Daryl Clarke, incoming chairman and serial entrepreneur with a history of building and profitably exiting businesses. Daryl discovered Setmixer the way great opportunities often arrive, on a random double date, and has not stopped thinking about it since. He is joining to leverage his business relationships and open doors to major music and entertainment companies and artist management firms.

    Together they discuss how Setmixer is already operating across 75 UK venues, a weekly showcase newsletter that connects grassroots artists directly to major labels and promoters, plans to integrate fan-shot video with studio-quality audio, a festival download model that could let you leave with the full day’s sets in your pocket, and the untapped archive of legendary performances that are sitting in mixing engineer hard drives around the world waiting to be released.

    The US launch is coming, the opportunity is colossal, and the answer to why nobody has done this yet may simply be: nobody thought of it until now.

    Learn more about Setmixer at setmixer.com and reach us with comments or questions at theangelnest.com.

    16 min
  • How New York Angels is Helping SkyFire AI Soar!

    Drones have been consumer products for years, but entrepreneurs are now finding their commercial potential. New ideas are coming fast, and few are as ambitious as SkyFire.


    In this New York Angels edition of The Angel Nest, we meet Don Mathis, a former Navy flight officer who watched drones change the course of modern warfare in Ukraine and decided it was time to build something bigger at home. SkyFire is a platform that deploys sophisticated Level 2 drones to enhance public safety, streamline business logistics, support national defense, and even deliver medicine to patients who need it most.

    Joining Don are Bob Peck and Alyssa Tam, New York Angels members who co-led SkyFire’s seed investment round. They’ll share what drew them to the company out of a crowded drone market, how the NYA Sidecar Fund helped amplify the investment, and why SkyFire has more levers to pull than most startups they see. We’ll also talk AI, international ambitions, and what the next year holds for one of the most versatile companies in the portfolio.

    Learn more about SkyFire and see who the New York Angels are partnering with at newyorkangels.com.

    And, listen to more great interviews from our series with the New York Angels at https://theangelnest.com.

    19 min
  • The New York Angels is Investing to Get ROI from AI

    How are investors going to get ROI, from AI? We hear a lot about the

    investment in artificial intelligence. But the New York Angels are
    working hard to find investible companies where artificial intelligence
    will yield real profits.

    In this episode, we meet Eric Tao, the founder of Mega Minds and Josh Powe, a New York Angels member and angel investor in Mega Minds. They’re using AI to scale their experiential learning model and testing it in real-world K-12 settings. By blending the game-like appeal of platforms like Roblox with sophisticated AI characters, Mega Minds creates a "non-judgmental safe space" for students to practice academics through productive struggle. This approach lowers the "affective filter" that often inhibits struggling learners, allowing them to build confidence while failing and trying again in a low-stakes virtual world.

    For educators, the platform acts as a real-time force multiplier. While students engage with AI avatars, a separate backend agent translates performance into actionable insights, highlighting learning gaps in as little as 30 seconds. Eric shares compelling results from a recent study where 67% of participating students reached grade-level proficiency in just 10 weeks—nearly triple the rate of the control group. This feedback loop allows teachers to shift their focus from grading to the high-value, one-on-one instruction students need most.

    Josh Powe joins the conversation to explain why Mega Minds is a "killer app" for investors. Beyond early RFP wins, the platform is building a significant data moat by capturing granular, individualized learning data and sentiment analysis. As school districts demand scalable solutions that provide transparency while keeping teachers in the loop, Mega Minds is leading the shift toward a unified, data-driven instructional model that was previously impossible to achieve at scale.

    Learn more about the Mega Minds AI learning platform at gomegaminds.com and see who the New York Angels are partnering with at newyorkangels.com. 

    Catch up on the rest of the New York Angels series on theangelnest.com.

     

     

    16 min
  • Innovation Double Play: How the New York Angels Helped this Entrepreneur Launch Two Successful Companies

    When David Steinberger decided to start a creator-friendly comics brand, he hoped to partner with angel investors who could help. On this special New York Angels edition of the Angel Nest, you'll learn how that initial partnership spawned not one successful company, but two.


    Today, we meet Dytslry and its founder David Steinberger, whose independent next-generation comic book publishing company has found early success by partnering with A-list creators to make unique digital innovations and turn that into a digital retail powerhouse for all comics. New York Angel Kit McQuiston led the seed round for Dytslry, but it wasn't their first collaboration.

    We'll also speak with New York Angels member Ed Levine and Helge Seetzen about a partnership they forged between the New York Angels and Tandem Launch, a group in Canada that backs high-tech startups with big opportunities, but often lower valuations that we see in New York. 

    Check out some very cool comics at dstlry.co, learn more about Tandem Launch, and see who the New York Angels are partnering with at newyorkangels.com. Be sure to also revisit the Angel Nest archives for more great conversations with founders and angel investors.

    21 min
  • How The RI Life Science Hub is Supporting New Brain Therapies

    In a special edition of the Angel Nest podcast, host David Hemenway talks with two prominent experts about the Rhode Island Life Science Hub and how the Hub’s support is integral to growing the life science sector in New England and helping to get great ideas to market faster.


    Among the most important priorities in life science today is the work being done on the human brain. Dr. Leigh Hochberg is a professor of engineering and brain science at Brown University and joins us to talk about his work and the rapid advances happening in the science now. 

    As the director of the BrainGate Consortium, Hochberg and a research team of top neurologists, neuroscientists, clinicians, engineers, computer scientists, neurosurgeons, and mathematicians develop and test implantable brain computer interfaces that could very soon restore communication, mobility and independence for patients with neurological diseases like ALS or the loss of limbs.

    David also speaks with Thorne Sparkman. Sparkman is the managing director of the Slater Fund which invests in RI-based startups. He gives us the investor perspective on the Hub and shares how investors are getting more involved now in the RI life science sector. 

    Learn about the RI Life Science Hub, the BrainGate Consortium, and the Slater Fund.

    Catch up on our two previous episodes about the RI Life Science Hub in our Angel Nest archives.

    15 min

About The Angel Nest

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Where real angel investors and entrepreneurs partner to build great companies