Ten years ago, we launched Grand Central Tech—our zero-rent, zero-equity residency program for early-stage startups—with one central objective: to build an exceptional venture community. By combining inimitable physical space, an extraordinary community of builders, a principled view on company building, and a thoughtful take on capital, we feel we’ve done just that. The hope is that such an environment can propel already-promising entrepreneurs towards success that much faster, and that much more durably. The proof is in the results: since our inception the 191 participating companies have raised $3.7B in funding from the world’s top venture firms. Across our two current cohorts, 36% of companies are founded by 2nd time founders, 41% are founded by senior leadership from growth stage or public tech companies, with the remaining being among the best up-and-coming tech talent in NYC.

Over the last decade, our program has largely reflected where the most talented founders have chosen to spend their time creating early-stage companies. Unlike the many cycles before this, from mobile to crypto to the creator economy, we have never seen such a groundswell of talent focusing their energy in a common direction as we have with AI over the last 12 months. Unsurprisingly, this year’s cohort reflects this exciting dynamic.

Without further ado, we are thrilled to introduce you to our Spring 2024 cohort and reintroduce you to our Fall 2023 cohort.

Spring 2024 Cohort 

Abstractive Health is building an AI co-pilot for physicians to streamline clinical documentation. The company has developed a clinical reasoning engine that can be used for outpatient, inpatient, and emergency care to automate clinical notes such as SOAP notes, progress notes, transition of care, ED Provider notes, and discharge summaries.

Didero is building the autonomous supply chain, starting with an AI-native supplier management platform for mid-market manufacturers.

Fleet AI is building research and data tools.

Lilac Software’s platform solves the health insurance industry’s core data fragmentation problems by providing a cloud native modern analytics stack that aggregates and normalizes data from disparate sources then maps health insurance specific business needs to AI/ML powered analytics and insights.

Orchestra Health is reinventing care transitions, beginning with surgery. Orchestra using a combination of coordination software with virtual care services helps any surgical provider implement surgical workflows typically found in large health systems. 

ParadeDB is building an alternative to Elasticsearch on Postgres. Postgres, despite being a multi-decade-old database project, continues to grow in popularity due to its extensibility, secure foundation, and open-sourced development. Founders are making Postgres competitive for full-text search and real-time analytics, enabling developers to build fully Postgres-based products.

Penguin AI identifies the exact people and companies that visit your website and automatically re-targets them via email, Linkedin, & chat. The founders have deep domain expertise in building scalable AI products and scaling B2B software companies, which gives them unique insight into building Penguin. 

Rogo is building the secure, enterprise AI platform purpose-built for financial service institutions- helping them save time, unlock insights, and automate workflows. Rogo unlocks the power of generative AI to accelerate finance data workflows, and increase research capabilities. 

Sunrise AI empowers revenue operations and risk / compliance teams with AI-powered solutions. Sunrise’s suite of tools leverages AI and machine learning to streamline operations, enhance decision-making, and optimize customer and vendor relationships.

Workmate Labs is giving every knowledge worker their own AI teammate. Your Workmate provides proactive, human-level support to accelerate work and empower you to focus on what matters most. Led by an experienced NYC product leader, the team has several former founders and is building a personalized, AI-first product that gets work done for you

Fall 2023 Cohort 

Basic Capital is building an alternative to the 401k. Via a novel investment mechanism similar to a mortgage, Basic Capital enables American workers to invest on a much higher basis - fueling the power of compounding sooner in their earning years and building a more meaningful sum of money for retirement.

Cake AI is building bundled, open-sourced AI infrastructure for small to medium-sized enterprises. Cake provides customized AI infrastructure builds cheaper and faster than it would take a company to build it themselves. 

Casap is building an operating system for fintech businesses and banks to navigate and investigate the payment dispute process. The product cuts a significant amount of cost for users by giving investigators a holistic view of a case, actionable insights, and seamless collaboration between all parties involved.

Efficiently is a holding company for AI development projects.   

Kubera Health is a 360-degree contract management platform between healthcare payers and providers. Kubera helps payers and providers manage their complex performance agreements at scale, including spend tracking, performance/ROI measurement, and account management.

Markups.AI is a software platform that utilizes generative AI to automatically review common contracts (NDAs, Vendor Agreements, Lease Agreements, etc.). The solution is built for SMBs who otherwise are forced to ration access to outside counsel and/or don’t have a large enough in-house legal team.

OpenAds is building a next-generation ad platform for the next generation of the internet, congruous with generative AI and the changing search infrastructure. Open Ads creates ads on dynamically generated AI content by converting context and AI prompts to targeting data, enabling existing ads to better integrate into user conversations & lead to better conversion.

Pika is building software solutions to decarbonize the built world by enabling renewable, energy-efficient solutions to reach businesses and consumers. Pika is starting with an AI-enabled sales platform for residential services.

SnapCalorie is building a nutritional platform that improves plan adherence through AI-driven photo recognition tracking & personalized diet suggestions. By leveraging a combination of generative AI, mobile-device depth sensors, and human experts to identify meal ingredients and nutritional values, SnapCalorie is eliminating the burdensome and error-prone hurdles to healthy eating.

Sublayer is building a software development platform that uses generative AI to build and test functional code while keeping project owners in command.