Portfolio Spotlight: Auxa Health

We’re thrilled to share our newest investment in Auxa Health, which announced its $5.2 million seed financing round today. We are excited to co-invest alongside lead investor Zeal Capital, AlleyCorp, K50 Ventures (thank you, Adriel, for the connection!), and Chaac Ventures.

Auxa Health is an AI-powered health benefit navigation technology solution partnering with payers and providers to enable more efficient and effective care. Auxa supports value based care providers and enablement organizations and expects rapid growth in the provider and payer space this next year. With this new funding, Auxa can further develop its technology, expand benefit coverage, and grow the team. You can read Auxa’s announcement full announcement here.

As investors, we constantly harp on how important strong founders are to any company, particularly at the seed stage. This team is no exception. Auxa is co-founded by three experts with deep domain expertise and alignment with the mission of improvement health outcomes and the patient experience:

• Monica Chopra, Co-founder and CEO, is a seasoned healthcare leader with 24+ years of experience at Oscar, athenahealth, Greater New York Hospital Association, and New York Presbyterian Hospital

• Samantha Adelberg, Co-founder and SVP of Operations, brings over decade of operations expertise through Unite Us, NYC Opportunity, and others

• Dr. Jeffrey De Flavio, Co-founder and Executive Chairman, is a physician an entrepreneur, with an intensive track record including as Co-Founder of Pearl Health, Groups Recover Together, Diana Health, and more

Benefit navigation is an acute problem, with nearly $100 billion in health and social care benefits remaining unused each year despite 70% of Americans reporting at least one unmet need. Auxa addresses this head-on by offering an end-to-end solution that demystifies benefit and drug coverage details, surfaces eligibility and prior authorization requirements, and efficiently enrolls patients into high-value public benefits. 

Our investment in Auxa is a continuation of our focus on sub-sectors of healthtech such as value-based care and the caretaker economy, with our existing investments including Yuvo Health and Tender. We understand the urgent need for solutions that increase accessibility to care in equitable ways, and we are excited to support the teams driving these developments forward.

For now, please join us in congratulating the Auxa team on this milestone, and visit www.auxahealth.com to explore opportunities to partner with Auxa and discover how you can join their dynamic and growing team.

Announcing Our Newest Team Member: Mirit Lugassi

Laconia’s team has always been small but mighty. Whether we’re in the biggest bull market in history or a painful correction, we’ve always been laser-focused on finding b2b software companies transforming how business is done.

As we head into what is sure to be a very busy Q4, we are excited to announce that Mirit Lugassi has joined our investment team. Mirit is a startup operator with more than a decade of global experience (US, UK, Israel & Europe) building early-stage companies in the b2b software space. Mirit has transformed companies and teams taking on positions such as Head of Growth & Customer Success at DueDil (Acquired by Artesian) and VP of Customer Operations at a high-growth early-stage Edtech startup. She’s driven results like increasing ARRs by 10x, accelerating customer acquisition by 5x per month, and closing Series A investment rounds.

Before joining Laconia’s investment team Mirit helped build two cutting-edge operations: 51 Unicorns, an investment club aimed at female retail investors, and SeedImpact, an alternative investment firm orchestrating investment opportunities between mission-driven angel investors and underrepresented founders. Mirit is also an alumna of Included VC, a venture fellowship for leaders on a mission to diversify and change the face of the VC industry.

Mirit’s operational background bolsters Laconia’s support for founders. As we’ve gotten to know Mirit, we’ve been impressed not only by her deep expertise but also by her ability to learn quickly, intuition for exciting business opportunities, and instinct for potential in founders. At the same time, Mirit brings a critical eye to the structural challenges facing the VC industry and a genuine interest in driving change.

If you bump into her at any NY Tech events or at our office for TechScape during a quick break, please give her a warm welcome! You can reach her directly at mirit at laconiacapitalgroup dot com.

Launching No Filter for Founders

Since 2017, we have hosted weekly open office hours sessions with 1,000+ founders to answer questions about fundraising, business operations, VC market conditions, and more. These 1x1 meetings have allowed us to provide candid, situation-specific feedback, without requiring a personal connection or introduction.

While every founder’s situation is different, we’ve found many similarities in their questions and concerns. To make these sessions richer and more accessible, we are adapting the format to a group office hours series: No Filter.

Twice a month, we will host virtual sessions with small groups of founders, focused on specific topics. After we set the stage with some context, founders can ask questions about their challenges, swap insights with each other, and consult guest experts. We plan to cover navigating VC market conditions, building teams on shoestring budgets, price testing, creating a capital strategy, finding product-market fit, and more.

We hope that this format will allow us to maintain the curation of our 1x1 sessions while simultaneously expanding the resource pool for founders. 

You can apply to join the first session on September 14th (12pm ET) on VC market conditions here. We look forward to meeting you!

Launching the First-time Fundraising Series

“How do I find investors who are a fit for what we’re building?”

“How long do you think it will take me to raise this round?”

“What feedback do you have on my deck?”

“How do I convince an investor to lead our round?” (spoiler: a trick question!)

In our open office hour meetings, founders often have tactical questions about running their first VC fundraising process. Because every situation is different, broadly relevant advice is scarce. That said, there are certain facets of investor psychology and fundraising mechanics that are nearly universal. While many of them are obvious to investors, they are invisible to founders who are new to raising venture capital.

This blog series will not discuss data rooms, term sheet negotiations, Board meetings, or investor relations; there is a wealth of content on these topics already. Instead, we will focus on how to go from considering fundraising to having a term sheet in hand. Hopefully this series will shed some light on how VCs think and how founders can navigate the information asymmetry.

This series has three parts: 

1. Deciding to raise: When and why is venture capital a good fit for a company? What are the trade-offs of raising? Are all VC firms the same? If venture capital is not right for a company, what are the alternatives?

2. Running a competitive process: How do you minimize fundraising pain and maximize the odds of successfully raising? How do you find, approach, and impress investors?

3. Building a compelling deck: What is the goal of a pitch deck? What are investors looking for? How do investors decide to take a meeting? How should a deck be structured? 

If you have any questions, feedback, or ideas for future posts, please let us know via twitter!

Landing a Meeting with a VC

In an office hours session last year, Alex Kennedy (Founder & CEO of Purposely.ai) asked me a question I’d never gotten before: “If a founder reaches out to you about investing in their startup, what do you look at online to decide if you want to take the meeting?”. This is a seemingly mundane question, but this first impression is critical to nail.  Here’s what I shared with him.

The goal of initial outreach in fundraising is to get a quick and accurate response from the investor: 

• If it’s not a fit, find out fast

• If it may be a fit, get a meeting ASAP

As an investor, to give such a response, I need succinct and accurate information to qualify the opportunity.

The first thing I need to know is whether the company is within our investment strategy at all. For Laconia, we’re specifically looking for pre-seed and seed stage b2b software companies, ideally in the US and Canada. If the company doesn’t line up with those factors, it’s a pass.

The second thing I need to understand sounds very simple but is rarely clear: What does this company do? This is critical for two reasons:

1. To verify that we don’t have any competitive investments in the current portfolio (if we do, it’s a pass to avoid conflicts of interest)

2. To decide if I’m intrigued enough to learn more

What does this company do should include the following:

• What the product is (A web app? An API? A Chrome plug-in?)

• Who the customers are (Insurance carriers? F500 CMOs?)

• Why it is valuable & differentiated (Unique data set? Unique insight into the customer’s pain point?

The best scenario is when this information is contained in the initial outreach (e.g.: text/attachments of email or form submission). Ideally, I won’t have to look anywhere else. If it’s not in the initial outreach, then I’ll take 1-2 minutes to look at the company’s website, Crunchbase, and/or LinkedIn. If it is still unclear, then it’s usually a pass.

A few important notes:

• The company’s information should be consistent in email outreach, website, and Crunchbase/LinkedIn profiles. While investor-facing positioning may be different from customer-facing messaging for good reason, there should still be consistency in the core product/value prop. Otherwise, it’s harder for me as an investor to determine what I’m considering. 

• It should be clear who the founder and/or CEO is. If that is hard to figure out, or if someone other than the founder and/or CEO is doing the initial outreach, that’s a red flag.

• I recommend including a pitch deck in your initial outreach. (Here is some context on how to put together a compelling deck.)

If you have any thoughts or questions, feel free to reach out to me via email at geri [at] laconia [dot] vc or on Twitter (@geri_kirilova). And, of course, if you are raising a pre-seed or seed round for a b2b software company, we are all ears via our pitch submission form 🙏