ACCESS
EXPERIENCE
INTEGRITY

AI-native and AI-empowered software startups
in the US and Israel at Pre-Seed & Seed

Society is experiencing dramatic disruptions in many markets and geographies. Talented entrepreneurs are nimbler and better suited than incumbents to take advantage of rapidly changing market conditions.

Our founders target emerging opportunities and design their ventures with the rules of new paradigms in mind.

1/2

ABOUT

TEAM

Team

JOHN HARTHORNE

Founder & Managing Director

As the Founder and decade-long CEO of MassChallenge, John is obsessed with entrepreneurship and has worked with thousands of startups since 2010. MassChallenge is the most-startup-friendly and largest startup accelerator on the planet and has graduated over 3,000 startups which have cumulatively generated billions of dollars of revenue and have created over 200,000 jobs.

While launching and running MassChallenge, John generated a vast network of new and established founders, corporate partners, investors, and innovation talent. Furthermore, John gained unrivaled experience working to support startups as an advisor and connector, learning which teams, models, and partners create sustainable success most consistently. John left MassChallenge in 2019 to launch Two Lanterns in 2020.

John holds a BA from Bowdoin College, an MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management, an Honorary Doctorate from Suffolk University, and certificates for Leadership and Innovation from Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.

767112_d45d83f83722499b8dfc84f7fa45a002~

767112_63e964c0b65544dc93afc20fb4b8c8b6~

Partner

MICHAL GILON-YANAI

Michal Gilon-Yanai has been the founder and director of multiple entrepreneurship programs in the US and in Israel. She founded the MBA Innovation & Entrepreneurship track at IDC, directed two programs at MIT’s entrepreneurship center and, most recently, founded and led the Biomedical Entrepreneurship Program at the NYU school of medicine. Through this work, she developed a keen understanding of technology and science commercialization and supported dozens of innovators and entrepreneurs over the course of two decades. Michal began her career at a healthcare IT startup where she filled several roles and served as a member of the company’s management team.

Michal also played a critical role in launching the MassChallenge Israel program, joining its advisory board for several years. She has outstanding access to deal flow, and contributes deep startup experience to Two Lanterns. Michal served in the IDF Intelligence corps, received computer science and law degrees from Tel Aviv University, and earned her MBA from the MIT Sloan School of Management in 2007. She joined Two Lanterns Venture Capital in 2020.

LILY TOTO

Associate

Lily Toto is an Associate on the Two Lanterns team. She brings a wealth of experience from her time at L.E.K. Consulting, where she worked on due diligence, strategy, and M&A projects within the firm's private equity group.

In addition to her time in consulting, Lily has worked at several early-stage software startups, including leading business development at Veriphix, spearheading strategic operations at Wellist, and launching marketing efforts at Resultid, an artificial intelligence startup that went through Techstars in 2020. Her combined background in consulting and startups enables her to conduct diligence on potential investments, as well as navigate business challenges and identify growth opportunities for portfolio companies at Two Lanterns.

Lily studied Economics and Government at Georgetown University, where she also served as CEO of Georgetown Collegiate Investors (GCI), one of the largest student-run and student-owned equity investment funds in the country. She joined Two Lanterns Venture Capital in 2023.

Advisors

DESH DESHPANDE

Founder Cascade Communications, Sycamore Networks, etc
Serial mentor, investor, philanthropist
Life-member of the MIT Corporation
Founding Board Member, MassChallenge
PhD Queens University
B.Tech. IIT Madras

2020-11-13%20Photo%20of%20Zohar%20Gilon_

ZOHAR GILON

Israeli Super Angel with extensive experience as an investor (over 200 investments) and investment advisor
Transaction manager for some of Israel’s most recognized exits, managing each from inception to exit
Pivotal advisor for creation of MassChallenge Israel
MBA Tel Aviv University
BS EE/CS Technion University

PETER PARKER

Managing General Partner at Mission BioCapital
Founder and Director, LabCentral
Life Sciences Champion, MassChallenge
President and CEO, Cequent Pharmaceuticals
General Partner Ampersand Capital Partners
BS, MS Columbia University

SATISH TADIKONDA

Executive Fellow in Entrepreneurship at
the Rock Center, Harvard Business School
Executive Partner of Blue Cloud Ventures,
a growth equity fund based in NYC
Entrepreneur in life science and healthcare
Active early-stage investor; member of
TiE Angels, TBD Angels, and Sky Ventures
PhD in Electrical and Computer Engineering with a focus on medical imaging

PORTFOLIO

Portfolio

Akooda offers an AI based enterprise search and insights platform, providing a complete Ops Intelligence solution. Using military grade security, they help stakeholders answer questions around People, R&D, and GTM, without storing raw data and with no configuration or human input needed. Akooda partners with large organizations across verticals, from fintech to beverages, website hosting, real estate, pharma, healthcare, and more, providing hard ROI in measurable metrics around sales, onboarding, and cross-collaboration.

Akooda is backed by top investors including NFX, Founder Collective, and Village Global, as well as leaders from Meta, Pinecone, and Google.

Array Insights is a next-generation software and data analytics company. They support patient advocacy organizations, researcher organizations, and pharmaceutical companies by leveraging cutting-edge analytics tools and methodologies to extract actionable insights from patient data. Their innovative platform, Tallulah, employs advanced analytics, ML, and genAI to transform unstructured patient narratives into a centralized hub to efficiently gather, organize, and analyze patient and caregiver stories.

Core team and advisors hail from the MIT Media Lab, MIT CSAIL, MIT IDSS, and the Broad Institute.

Axiom Health is a healthcare enterprise SaaS company providing an AI-powered, verticalized SaaS platform giving MedTech companies real-time data and insights to drive rapid business decisions. Axiom is solving a massive problem: utilizing accurate data for real-time intelligence requires connecting dozens of siloed, disparate, and often unstructured datasets. Axiom’s first two products are Market Intelligence for business development and marketing departments, and Sales Targeting for sales teams. They are powered by the world’s largest med-tech specific data lake.

Co-investors include First Trust Capital, Valiant Ventures, KVG, GCI Partners and several medtech executives of Fortune 500 Companies.

basys.ai uses an AI-based platform to automate the process of prior authorization and utilization management, improving costs for health plans/payers. By automating the process of encoding/digitizing payer policies using machine learning, they reduce piloting timelines by up to 9 months.

Core team hails from Harvard University. Co-investors include Nina Capital, Lilly Ventures, Asset Management Ventures, and Chaac Ventures Fund.

Because Marketing helps bridge off-site data into a personalized on-site experience for the $1.3T e-commerce industry. Through an intelligent data engine, user-defined automation, and A/B testing, they're helping growing Shopify businesses to optimize conversion of site visitors at scale. Founder won Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award in 2015.

Co-Investors include Shopify Angels, Harlem Capital, and Stage 2 Capital.

Botika stands as the AI Creative Director for over 5 million small apparel businesses, powered by proprietary simulative AI models. With Botika at the helm, business owners can devote their attention to the heart of their operations while the platform adeptly oversees every aspect of visual content creation, deployment, and ongoing optimization - resulting in significant revenue increases across key business channels.

The core team members each have 10+ years of experience in Gen AI and vast expertise in researching cutting-edge AI models from scratch.

As the solution for navigating mortality, Cake uses data to match consumers with the right products for their end-of-life needs. Cake is the first stop for consumers and is the largest in the industry, on track to dominate an overlooked trillion-dollar industry. Founders are graduates of MIT and Harvard and have deep experience in healthcare and digital marketing. The CMO was an early employee at TripAdvisor.

Co-Investors include Pillar and Launch Capital.

Ceres enables businesses to forecast multi-tier supply chain risks for delays and disruptions months in advance. Utilizing AI Ceres analyzes a vast amount of data, including geopolitical factors, macro & microeconomic indicators, raw material prices, financial information, and 25,000+ additional datasets to identify and pinpoint which purchase orders, products, and suppliers are at risk of delays.

Co-investors include Deftly, Everywhere Ventures, Hustle Fund, and Refashiond.

Rooted in interoperability and AI, Connective Health's goal is to help healthcare providers save time and drive revenue by highlighting key clinical insights in their workflow from outside data. These insights save time by ensuring that PCPs and virtual providers have immediate access to the most relevant clinical data from outside their clinic. Connective, in parallel, enables providers to optimize risk-adjustment based revenues, and to increase both the volume of digital visits and care quality. Connective serves customers across the primary care and virtual first markets, including some of the most innovative companies in the space.

Co-investors include Nina Capital and Activate Venture Partners.

Cooklist is an all-in-one grocery app for consumers to manage the full cycle of buying and using groceries efficiently. It is the first and only service that connects directly to grocery store accounts so consumers can automatically track the food they buy, keep track of expirations, find recipes they can cook right now, create meal plans and shopping lists, and send orders to local stores for pickup or delivery. The app works with over 80% of the grocery stores in the US and millions of recipes.

Co-investors include Mercury Fund and RevTech Ventures.

Cupixel is an augmented reality platform aspiring to be the leading arts and crafts brand for creative experiences. Cupixel enables anyone to draw any photo in any style. Users can create experiences by drawing together (with or without expert guidance) and can share their finished work and time-lapse creation videos via other social media.

Cupixel Board Chair is Stan Rosenzweig, Executive Chairman of the Board at SVP Worldwide - Parent company of Singer, Pfaff & Husqvarna/Viking Sewing Machines.

dataplor uses AI/ML and human capital to offer the highest quality location data across the globe. Customers ranging from the Fortune 500 to international startups rely on dataplor's accurate location data to drive outcomes in the $200B+ geospatial market.

Co-Investors include Acronym Venture Capital, ffVC, Quest Venture Partners and Navigate Ventures.

The DriveU.auto Teleoperation Connectivity Platform enables safe teleoperation of robots and autonomous vehicles using cellular bonding and dynamic encoding. The platform is already deployed and in use on public roads, across multiple use cases, including delivery robots, autonomous trucks, shuttles, robotaxis and more.

Two Lanterns invested alongside renowned Israeli tech investors including Zohar Zisapel, Kaedan Capital and Yigal Jacoby, later joined by Proeza Ventures and Ascend Capital Partners

Fermata Discovery creates streamlined AI tools that accelerate the investigation processes of private and public sector agencies. Its flagship product, VIXN, is a multifunctional intelligence collaboration and visualization platform that can adapt to any type of case. Fermata's suite of proprietary and OSINT search tools automate investigators’ time-consuming processes to expose deep data insights.

Co-investors include New North Ventures, Bonfire Ventures and Good Growth Capital.

Gravity AI is a marketplace for enterprise-ready AI. Engineers can browse 3rd party AI technologies that are secure, vetted for compliance, and automatically standardized in a custom container for easy, low-code implementation, all through a single procurement process that vastly increases speed to market for product teams.

Gravity AI is a TechStars graduate and a participant in the 2021 MassChallenge Fintech program.

Jotit is leading the digital-paper revolution in schools. The company developed the world's first paper-tablet operating-system (OS) which seamlessly blends traditional and digital learning, offering the best of both worlds while keeping handwriting at its core.

The company was founded by a team of second time founders whose previous venture was acquired by Nike in 2018, and backed by Israel's tier-1 early-stage investors including Zohar Gilon, Guy Gamzu, Good Company Impact VC, MindCET Center of Education Technology and more.

Knox is the first automated wealth advisor and management company for property investors delivering superior investment outcomes end-to-end – from payments to banking, leasing to insurance, financing to tax, vacancy avoidance to maintenance. Knox is democratizing access to preferred rates of return via the $1.25T/yr residential investment property market. Founder sold prior real estate startup to Private Equity firm.

Co-Investors include G20, Pillar, TBD Angels, and Greycroft.

Koffie Insurance is a digital insurer purpose-built for the next generation of trucking and transportation and is the first insurtech to integrate safety technology into underwriting, pricing and loss control. Using real time data and machine learning models, Koffie delivers instant and tailored policies to modern truckers that invest in safety, rewarding them with lower premiums than traditional insurers.

Co-Investors include Anthemis, Lerer Hippeau, Plug and Play Tech Center, and Breakout Capital.

Lex is creating a securities marketplace for fractionalized commercial real estate investments. LEX sources investment opportunities in Core and Core+ assets, and structures and prices them for an offering using the RegA Tier 2 exemption. LEX then facilitates secondary trading on an Alternative Trading System using NASDAQ technology.

Co-Investors include Greycroft, Thor Equities, and Ric Clark (Chair of Brookfield Properties)