2025 Wrap Up - Community Update

New PortCos, Select Portfolio News, Onward

Dear Friends of Avalanche,

I hope this finds you well - and is the last substantive email you receive in 2025!

This year has been an incredible in terms of growth and partnership for us, and we are grateful for all our founders, limited partners, and co-investors.

We’ve continued our focus on companies that are taking advantage of an 'avalanche’ (massive market inflection point) and founders building their life’s work. This is our formula. We want nothing less than to change the world with our founders and help them leave a mark on the world.

In 2025, we added 10 new companies in our core fund, and 8+ existing companies across funds received follow-on financings at higher valuations. Even more companies dramatically improved with more capital efficient operational performance.

We also opportunistically explored new avalanches and offered investments to new partners via SPVs.

There’s always more to say and share but in the meantime, thank you, as always, for being a partner, supporter, and friend.

Katelyn

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Avalanche Momentum: New additions and financings in 2025 across key thesis areas

Here are updates for various portfolio companies across themes:

Improving public sector procurement and navigability

CivicMarketplace works with public agencies to help procurement leaders reduce delays, simplify sourcing, and find trusted vendors faster.

USLege is an AI-powered legislative tracking platform that automates the most time-consuming parts of state, local, and federal policy work, across all 50 states. See here for the USLege press release for its seed round led by Reformation.

Starbridge builds AI software that empowers companies to sell to governments and schools and partner together to build for public good. See here for the Starbridge $42M Series A led by Craft Ventures press release.

Increasing ownership of assets

Sava is building the future of trust.

➤ If you are a trusts & estates attorney, RIA, fintech, or family office interested in Sava, reach out to them at founders@savahq.com

Franzy one-stop shop for researching, connecting with, and buying franchises effortlessly. The team built AI-powered tools, a personalized Franzy Fit Score, and detailed profiles for over 3,600 brands. They make franchise discovery feel more like Zillow and less like calling a broker. See here for the Franzy raise press release.

➤ Follow co-founder and CEO Alex Smereczniak for the latest on franchising opportunities.

Owm is a platform that matches brands with creators in exchange for equity.

“We’re on a mission to make ownership accessible to all, and we’re starting with the people who can influence culture because they can change the conversation. When you own it, you treat it differently, and pride of ownership is something we believe will be the next great economic driver of this country.” - Founder, Jeff Frommer

See here for the Own raise Press Release.

➤ Subscribe to Owners Only, the owners manual at the intersection of influence, entrepreneurship, and culture.

Improving accessibility and access

Science works to restore quality of life to those with debilitating conditions for which there are no treatment options, creating devices aimed at restoring vision, cognition, and mobility to patients who have lost it.

See here for the news when Science raised $104M led by Khosla Ventures.

➤ If you or someone you know has been diagnosed with age-related macular degeneration, retinitis pigmentosa, or Stargardt disease, please consider joining their patient registry for retinal diseases.

➤ Read: After Neuralink, Max Hodak is building something even wilder

Akido Labs are creating an AI-native healthcare system designed with providers and for patients. ScopeAI has transformed our clinical experience, expanding access to visits by orders of magnitude.

See here for the release from when Akido raised $60M Series B led by Oak HC/FT.

Workback provides ands-off accessibility compliance for your product.

Accessibility has different phases: auditing, remediation, certification. Each stage has different vendors and is mostly manual. Coordinating between consultancies takes quarters. That slog makes it nearly impossible for champions to move the needle.

We believe that lowering the barrier empowers these champions to drive change. With Workback.ai, teams can go from audit to certification in weeks instead of quarters.

Increased efficacious edutainment

Codédex is the most fun way to level up tech skills. This year, they had 1,186,244 new registered learners and launched new courses and countless new features.

Goblins provides schools and districts with one-on-one math support. It lets students draw on any device and get high-quality, instant feedback and makes it easy for teachers to gauge and ensure student mastery.

CyberNut is a security awareness training solution built exclusively for schools. They are training over 400,000+ teachers, administrators, and students across 350+ US school districts to help identify and report phishing emails within a safe and engaging environment.

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SPV: Avalanche of Nuclear & Aalo Atomics

Earlier this year, our team shared our perspective on the power needs for the AI revolution. As we wrote in The AI Revolution Needs Nuclear Power Now, a persistent worldwide power shortage is the most significant impediment to the growth of the global data center market. Power sourcing remains a top priority for operators in all regions. The limited power grid has created opportunities for new technology and alternative power sources like fuel cells or on-site generation systems to help ease the market’s supply shortage.

We believe that nuclear is the obvious solution for the future and were excited to make an investment in Aalo Atomics, a fast-moving company making modular nuclear reactors for data centers, with our partner Hypernova Capital.

In 2025, Aalo:

✅ Launched a pilot manufacturing factory in Austin, Texas
✅ Were selected for the DOE Reactor Pilot Program to achieve criticality by July 4, 2026
✅ Completed major DOE milestones for the Pilot Program (OTA, NSDA, CDR, PDR, PDSA)
✅ Pivoted fuel to UO2 fuel and secured commercial Uranium for Aalo-X
✅ Revealed commercial product, The Aalo Pod, to power data centers (and beyond)
✅ Built the modules for Aalo-0, our full-scale, non-nuclear reactor prototype
✅ Began construction on Aalo-X and the Critical Assembly Facility (CAF) at Idaho National Lab (INL)
✅ Brought together with >100 partners and suppliers at Aaloverse to show real factory output
✅ Closed a $100M Series B, bringing total capital raised to $136M
✅ Scaled the team by 5X, while holding ourselves to a high bar for rigor and ownership

Founders Matt & Yasir in front of the first nuclear modules out of the Austin Factory

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Select Portfolio News

🌟Odyssey now powers the school choice infrastructure in Texas, Louisiana, and Utah. Odyssey was selected as the certified educational assistance organization in administering Texas’ $1 billion ESA roll out program.

🌟At TetherEd, 2025 was a year of practical implementation, guided by data, research, and collaboration with educational communities.

From deploying digital enrollment and guidance systems across Latin America, the United States, and Europe, to supporting schools, districts, and public institutions in improving access and transparency, this year focused on turning evidence into concrete solutions. 🔗 Explore the recap.

🌟Prof Jim has rebranded to Creatium and raised a seed round. The new name, Creatium, captures what the platform has become: a comprehensive platform to build learning that engages minds across all demographics.

They had a breakout 2025:

→ 2 of the top 4 consulting firms signed on
→ 11,315 interactive learning videos have been created
→ 60,692 minutes were logged with AI coaches
→ Achieved 2.5x revenue growth in 2025

🌟 attention labs launched Selective Auditory Attention (SAA) -- on-device AI that isolates a single voice in a crowd with sub-100 ms latency and up to 97% accuracy, all while keeping your data private. Catch them in early January at CES.

🌟 Broward County Schools launched Prisms in every middle school bringing immersive, hands-on learning to thousands of students. 🎥 Watch the story here.

🌟 Humanly raised $7M to fuel growth and innovation. Humanly’s AI screens and schedules over 250,000 new candidates every month, with more than 5 million interviews conducted to date. They’ve helped enterprise and mid-market customers reduce time-to-hire from 44 days to just 5, while maintaining a 4.8/5 candidate experience score.

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Thank you and look forward to 2026!

Please always be in touch. 

Rush (co-founder of Sava YCF25) and Katelyn at YC HQ in SF