Nine 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. Our branding has evolved over time, as has our scale and resources, but this has always been our north star. We combine space, programming, expertise, and capital in unique fashion to accelerate success for exceptional founders and startups. Since 2014, we’ve graduated 299 founders across 162 companies who have collectively gone on to raise $3.3B in funding from the world’s top venture firms.

Before they join, founders tell us about the new businesses that they’ve poured themselves into developing, iterating, and researching — it can be a vulnerable thing to share, especially as their pitches often include personal stories that sparked the inspiration for their startup. These founders open up themselves to encouragement and feedback, and we don’t take that lightly.

Last week we welcomed our newest cohort to the Grand Central Tech family, and now, we’re excited to introduce to you the spring 2023 GCT cohort:

Altir is building a financial OS for four-wall businesses, focused on franchises as their go-to-market. The product seeks to enable a range of financial products, functioning as a marketplace for lenders to serve business owners based on capital needs and incorporating real-time financial metrics of the business to assess credit worthiness and risk.

Digraph is a developer-first cloud compliance platform that lets engineering teams detect and resolve non-compliant code changes and infrastructure configurations before they're deployed to production. The flexible API, CLI, and policy engine allows teams to govern the entire software development life cycle regardless of tech stack.

Distro AI is the AI-powered transactional platform purpose-built for wholesale distributors, a massive & historically underserved market. Distro AI leverages the latest in AI/ML to empower distributors to shorten sales cycles, increase margins, and improve customer retention.

Flychain is building the financial operating system for SMEs in healthcare. By offering upfront payment on insurance claims (instead of waiting weeks or months) and rolling out additional products (corporate cards, payment services, & healthcare-specific banking services), Flychain can establish a full financial picture of a business to provide extremely relevant, value-add FinTech solutions.

Noetica is an AI software platform that uses ML and NLP to analyze and benchmark complex transactional documentation. Noetica has developed a proprietary database of documentation data that aids users in determining what’s market for certain transactions and helps advisors and principals quickly and easily benchmark new deals against internal and external precedent transactions. 

Pharmesol is a virtual medication assistant that automates high quality personalized care for patients. With scalable patient education & follow-up, Pharmesol ensures that patients and providers have insights necessary to achieve optimal health outcomes with medications.

Pom Health is building the infrastructure layer for food-as-medicine, starting with payments. As patients with nutritionally-linked diseases struggle to navigate a higher grocery bill, confusing nutritional advice, and scattered benefits, Pom is building a platform that unlocks their available healthcare dollars to pay for healthy foods. 

Prosper is a generative AI copilot for insurance advisors. Prosper helps advisors perform their most common time-consuming tasks like deciphering complex 50+ pages insurance policies, extracting information from documents and manually inputting data into agency management systems. With over 1M agents in the US operating within the $700 billion P&C insurance industry, Prosper aims to be the operating layer for the Insurance industry.

Supercharge is a web3 platform that is building the Proof of Teamwork (POTW) professional networking protocol where young professionals can prove who they are and get rewarded for what they do. We use blockchain, crypto and AI concepts to give the modern professional networker superpowers, allowing them to hop between communities, contributing their experiences and earning a meaningful portion of the value they create for their networks.

SymetryML converts raw patient data to a proprietary shareable format, "DEM", that allows healthcare and pharma companies to compliantly collaborate. This privacy-preserving methodology increases data access within the health ecosystem, improves research & analytics capabilities, and ultimately improves outcomes.

Tabs is the first way for connected hardware companies to manage all their Finance & Revenue – billing, payments, contracts, software entitlements, and more – in one unified commercial operations platform. By connecting every finance and revenue operations system to hardware events data to create a single source of truth, connected hardware companies can automate all of the manual work they normally need to do to power their revenue models. 

Wand is a collaborative, AI-powered creative tool that gives artists the hands-on control and personalization they need in order to bring their specific ideas to life. Unlike most creative AI tools which emphasize text prompting, Wand emphasizes a combination of visual illustration and fine-tuning to guide models like Stable Diffusion.