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.

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.

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.

When Pascal de Mul helped build Spotify, he accidentally killed the live bootleg. On The Angel Nest, learn how his company Setmixer is bringing it back in studio quality, paying artists 70%, and turning every grassroots venue into a record label.

Don Mathis watched drones reshape modern warfare and saw an opportunity to bring that power home. In this New York Angels edition of The Angel Nest, you’ll learn how SkyFire is using Level 2 drones and AI to strengthen national defense, transform business logistics, and help public safety officials save lives.

How are investors going to get ROI, from AI? We hear a lot about theinvestment in artificial intelligence. But the New York Angels areworking hard to find investible companies where artificial intelligencewill 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.

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.

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.

On this special New York Angels edition of the Angel Nest, board chair Cindy Cook joins us to interview the founder of the New York Angels, David S. Rose. He’s updated his famous book, “Angel Investing: The Gust Guide to Making Money and Having Fun in Startups.” We’ll learn what’s new and how angel investing has changed since he came to be known as the father of angel investing in New York.Rose and Cook are, respectively, the original and current leader of the New York Angels, the member organization of angel investors (including host David Hemenway) that fund and mentor great young companies. We’ll discuss how the New York Angels has grown in size and scope and has evolved along with angel investing since the 1990s.Learn more about The New York Angels here. David S. Rose is now Founder & Executive Chairman at Gust, a global SaaS platform for founding, operating, and investing in scalable, high-growth companies. You can learn more about Gust at gust.com. And visit theangelnest.com to catch up on dozens of past interviews with great founders and leaders.

We hear a lot about AI these days and how it makes work efficient, but what does that actually mean in practice?In this special episode of the Angel Nest podcast, we hear from people who are actually making it happen in finance and accounting. Host David Hemenway welcomes Johnnie Walker from Rooled Outsourced CFO and Accounting and Parker Gilbert, CEO of Numeric. Rooled are the startup finance experts and often collaborate with Numeric, which is using AI to help companies make smarter decisions and close their books faster. We’ll discuss real use cases where AI is changing the game for finance teams with better transaction monitoring, account reconciliation, robust reporting, and month-end closing. Visit rooled.com to learn more about Rooled’s services.Get more information on Numeric at numeric.io. And, check out our archives for more great episodes at theangelnest.com.