🏢🛰️ Issue #131: How Claremont Founders Are Impacting The Commercial Real Estate Industry & Radar Technology
This week Sammy Greenwall and Henry AI secured a $4M seed round to help automate commercial real estate transactions and Kapta Space exits stealth with their space-based electronically-steered radars.
💬 Welcome to issue #131 of StoryHouse Review
Good morning & happy Thursday. Automation is here, and those who embrace it are pulling ahead.
This week, Sammy Greenwall and his startup, Henry AI, raised a $4.3M seed round to start automating the CRE workflow and solve inefficiency problems in the commercial real estate industry. Kapta Space also emerged from stealth with $5M in seed funding to bring their metasurface antenna technology for space-based radar to market. It’s a Claremont world out there. 👇
~ Josh, Miles, Matthew, Pat
👤 Community Spotlight: Sammy Greenwall & Henry AI
Sammy Greenwall (PO) began his career in Capital Markets at Toll Brothers, where he played a key role in securing the company’s revolving credit, term loans, and bond issuances while also underwriting acquisitions for the firm’s growing real estate portfolio. After his time at Toll Brothers, Sammy co-founded Lev, a commercial real estate financing platform, where he scaled the company from zero to Series B and a $10M+ run rate as Chief Revenue Officer.
Now, Sammy is the co-founder and CEO of Henry AI, a first-of-its-kind AI analyst for the commercial real estate (CRE) sector. Henry’s AI copilot integrates internal and external data to quickly generate deal decks for CRE brokers. Several national brokerages, including five of the top ten in the country, are already leveraging Henry AI. The company recently secured a $4.3M seed round co-led by Susa Ventures and 1Sharpe Ventures, with participation from top firms, including StoryHouse Ventures, Pioneer Fund, and others.
Henry AI is Transforming Commercial Real Estate
Commercial real estate (CRE) is a $20 trillion industry, yet many of its daily operations are stuck in a time loop of manual, repetitive tasks. From market analysis and financial projections to compiling data and designing marketing decks, CRE professionals have long spent hours—if not days—on this time-consuming and repetitive work, all while juggling the complexities of deals and client relationships. This inefficiency has been an industry-wide challenge, until now.
Henry AI, an artificial intelligence company focused on automating commercial real estate transactions, has just raised $4 million in seed funding to tackle this very problem. With this investment, led by Susa Ventures and 1Sharpe Ventures, Henry AI is significantly cutting down the time required for tasks like research, financial modeling, and even generating professional-grade marketing decks—all while freeing up valuable time for relationship-building and closing more deals.
Henry AI’s Groundbreaking Automation
By using artificial intelligence to automate the most tedious parts of the CRE transaction process, Henry AI allows professionals to focus on what truly matters: building relationships and closing deals.
One of the standout features of Henry AI is its ability to quickly generate professional marketing decks—something that typically requires hours or even days of manual work. Whether you need property presentations, investment summaries, or full financial analyses, Henry AI can produce high-quality marketing materials in just minutes. This means that CRE teams can go from initial data collection to polished client-facing presentations almost instantly.
In addition to marketing decks, Henry AI consolidates messy, unstructured CRE data into actionable insights, providing comprehensive market research and financial projections with a click of a button. This combination of speed and accuracy allows for a more streamlined transaction process, ultimately leading to more deals closed in less time.
Henry AI has already made a significant impact, with several leading brokerages—including from 5 of the top 10 in the U.S.—leveraging the platform to enhance their teams' productivity. Before implementing Henry AI, analysts at these firms were spending up to 50% of their time on repetitive research tasks. By automating these processes, Henry AI is helping them reclaim valuable hours that can now be spent on high-impact work, such as client interactions and deal-making.
Analysts have reported significant reductions in the time required to generate market insights, complete financial projections, and compile property data. Instead of spending weeks on data collection, they’re now able to produce marketing materials and analyses in mere minutes.
Empowering CRE Professionals of the Future
With the $4 million in new funding, Henry AI is set to accelerate its mission to automate even more aspects of the CRE transaction process. The team plans to expand its capabilities, refine its AI models, and deepen its integrations with other platforms, all with the goal of further streamlining workflows and providing CRE professionals with even more powerful tools.
Looking ahead, Henry AI envisions a future where commercial real estate transactions are no longer hindered by time-consuming administrative tasks. By continuing to harness the power of AI, Henry AI will empower brokers, analysts, and other professionals to focus on strategic, value-driven activities rather than getting bogged down in data collection and number-crunching.
Read the full article to learn more about the other enhanced features Henry AI plans to launch soon.👇
Visit the link below to schedule a demo with the team. 👇
🚨Claremonster Call-Out: Milton Perque, Tom Driscoll & Kapta Space
Milton Perque, former Chief Engineer of Echodyne, and Adam Bily are the co-founders of Kapta Space. Both were engineering leaders at radar platform company Echodyne, founded by serial Claremont entrepreneur Tom Driscoll (HMC ‘01). Before starting Kapta, Milton also worked as a senior engineer at Intellectual Ventures and as the Chief Engineer at Metacept. Adam worked as an antenna engineer at Astranis Space Technologies and Apple. The company aims to solve one of the defense sector’s most elusive challenges: continuous tracking of moving targets from orbit.
Kapta is adapting metasurface technology, currently used in electronically-steered antennas in the wireless communications industry, for space-based imaging and tracking applications. The company envisions its metasurface arrays being used in synthetic aperture radar (SAR) for geospatial imaging and military applications such as tracking ground-based targets.
They recently emerged from stealth with a $5M seed round led by MetaVC, a Bill Gates-backed metamaterials venture fund, along with Entrada Ventures and Blue Collective. StoryHouse is proud to be an investor as well, supporting them on this journey since their pre-seed. 👇
📣 Claremont Announcements: Summer Interns from the Claremont Colleges
The Hive at the Claremont Colleges is a design and innovation center that connects skilled undergraduate students with valuable internships at Claremont-founded companies. These Claremont undergraduate student interns can offer skills ranging within STEM, finance, user research, the humanities, and critical, analytical, or creative thinking.
Internship Details
Internships should last at least 8 weeks between May 15 and August 15 and are ideally in person.
Salary subsidies may be available through the Hive and the students’ home colleges.
All internships must be confirmed between the applicant and the employer by April 1.
If you’re interested in hiring Claremont summer interns for your company, please fill out the form below with the job description attached, and the Hive will reach out to help connect you with qualified intern candidates. 👇
💼 Who’s Hiring?: Starbridge & Terra AI
Serial Claremont entrepreneur Justin Wenig (PO) is the founder and CEO of StoryHouse portfolio company Starbridge.ai, the first GTM intelligence platform designed to help businesses selling to government and education win more contracts with less manual effort. Justin is also a Forbes 30 Under 30 member and the co-founder and previous CEO of the academic operating platform Coursedog, which closed a $90M strategic investment from JMI last year. Starbridge recently raised a $10M seed round, and they’re hiring for several open roles:
Founding Customer Success Manager (On-site/NY): preferably with 3+ years in Customer Success, Account Management, or a related role in B2B SaaS.
Sr. AI Engineer (On-site/NY): experience building scalable applications with LLMs, using frameworks such as LangChain, LlamaIndex, Hugging Face, etc.
StoryHouse portfolio company Terra AI is building an AI platform for critical minerals and clean energy development. They're leveraging AI modeling, reasoning, and optimization to enhance the performance, predictability, and safety of reservoir, wind, and mineral development projects. Claremont grad Anthony Corso (HMC '14) and John Mern (who previously worked for KoBold Metals, founded by CMC grad Kurt House) are the co-founders of Terra, and they are looking to hire an experienced ML engineer to lead the development of critical parts of their platform. If you’re interested in applying your engineering skills to solve some of the most critical problems in energy, check out the openings below or reach out to us:
AI/ML Infrastructure Engineer (Hybrid): preferably 3+ years of experience working with cloud services and cloud compute
AI/ML Engineer (Hybrid): demonstrated proof of building deep learning models from scratch
Check out the other 2,000+ open jobs at 290+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 390+ remote jobs, 150+ internships, or 600+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention, Claremonsters!
If any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention StoryHouse Review. Or, if you are an employer looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s top read 🔥
StoryHouse portfolio company Groundlight AI recently shared how its plug-and-play system uses computer vision and real-time alerts to help businesses detect fires faster than smoke detectors, reducing the need to rely on sprinkler systems altogether. Groundlight, founded by Claremont grads Leo Dirac (HMC ‘95) and Avi Geiger (HMC ‘99), is a computer vision platform that enables users to interpret images using simple English natural language and minimal code.
This week’s must-watch 📺
Prachie Banthia (PO) was on the Ignite podcast to talk about the biggest hiring challenges companies face today and how AI-powered interviews could be the solution. She also shared insights on launching a startup at a pivotal moment in AI’s evolution and the future of technical hiring. Prachie is the founder and CEO of Lightscreen AI, a YC-backed startup that is transforming technical hiring with an AI interviewer that helps companies identify and invest in genuinely skilled candidates.
This week’s Claremont financing 💸
QuSecure, a leader in post-quantum cryptography, just closed additional Series A funding led by Two Bear Capital and Accenture Ventures. This brings the company’s total Series A to $28M, fueling its product development, go-to-market expansion, and growth across government, financial, and critical infrastructure sectors. Claremont grad Skip Sanzeri (CMC ‘83) is the founder of QuSecure.
This week’s top listen 🎧
Claremont grad and StoryHouse portfolio founder Sagar Batchu (HMC ‘15) joined The Stack Overflow podcast to discuss the future of APIs. He shared his thoughts on the evolving API landscape, AI integration, the role of human technologists in an increasingly automated environment, and what people building APIs right now should keep in mind. Sagar is the co-founder and CEO of Speakeasy, an API platform designed to give developers the tools to build quality, reliable APIs.
Everything else you need to know💡
Claremont alum and StoryHouse portfolio founder Abasi Ene-Obong (KGI) spoke with CNN about the upcoming growth in Africa’s pharmaceutical sector. He emphasized that leveraging AI, local talent, and Africa’s unique genomic data could help the continent become a key player in drug discovery. Abasi is the CEO and co-founder of Syndicate Bio, a platform biotech startup driving genomics and precision medicine initiatives across the world’s most diverse regions.
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
⚡ Beaming Power Across Space….. Star Catcher, founded by Claremont grad and COO Bryan Lyandvert (CMC), is building the first space energy grid, the Star Catcher Network, to overcome power limitations in space. With their $12M seed round last year and a recent AFWERX SBIR Phase 1 grant, the company is advancing microwave-based power beaming for low-Earth orbit (LEO) spacecraft to enhance resilience and autonomy. This technology could extend satellite lifespans, reduce battery reliance, and enable continuous operation in shadowed orbits where solar power is unreliable.
♻️ Turning Waste Into Power….. Hydrogen is a key player in the future of clean energy, but sustainable production remains a challenge. Claremont entrepreneur Todd Thomas (CMC) is experimenting with how gasification can transform wood waste and other biomass into clean, renewable hydrogen—reducing landfill overflow and cutting carbon emissions in the process. Todd is the founder and CEO of Woodchuck.ai, an AI wood waste diversion and renewable clean energy platform.
🧬 Pioneering Real-Time DNA Detection….. Former KGI Professor Kiana Aran received the Sony Women in Technology Award for her pioneering work in bio-integrated electronics. She developed the CRISPR-Chip, the first transistor to use CRISPR for real-time DNA mutation detection without amplification, enabling rapid, on-site genetic testing. Kiana is the co-founder of CRISPR QC, a CRISPR analytics platform, and the co-founder and former CSO of Cardea Bio, which was acquired by Paragraf in 2023.
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