996 is the insider community for operators, builders, and closers at New York’s fastest-growing startups. No noise. No networking events in bad hotels. Just the people doing real work.
996 is the community for people at top startups in New York City. The name says it: 9am to 9pm, 6 days a week. That’s not a complaint — that’s who we are.
We believe the best professional network isn’t a LinkedIn algorithm or a stuffy alumni dinner. It’s a curated room of people who get it — the chaos, the ambition, the particular madness of betting on a startup in New York.
We’re the Barstool + LinkedIn + Glassdoor + Wellfound that New York’s startup scene has always needed. Starting now.
The number represents a work ethic, a city, and a standard. New York’s startup scene doesn’t run on 9-to-5. It runs on people who are obsessed — not in a toxic way, in a I genuinely love what I’m building way.
We don’t want your resume. We want to know how you think, what you’re building, and whether the people around you trust you to deliver.
Membership is invite-only and reviewed by the team. No exceptions.
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IF YOU KNOW, YOU KNOW.
AI agents that automate accounting end-to-end. Not AI-assisted — the agent does the work. Founded 2023. Angels include Lloyd Blankfein, Jeff Dean, Kyle Vogt, Jack Altman, and Noam Brown. Absurd cap table for year two.
Google Ventures, Accel, Khosla, and that angel list in the same round means every major domain has signed off. Finance + AI convergence is the wave — Basis is at the center before most people know the category exists.
Peer-to-peer sports prediction markets via sweepstakes model — no federal licensing headache. Think Kalshi for sports. Founded 2021, $99.9M total. YC and Forerunner backed early. Now Multicoin and Pantera are in the cap table.
Prediction markets are having a serious moment and Novig is the NYC sports play. Multicoin and Pantera alongside Forerunner signals the team is thinking carefully about a crypto layer here. Still under the radar — not for long.
Giving computers a sense of smell. AI that digitizes and understands scent — fragrance, food safety, healthcare diagnostics. Founded 2022 by ex-Google Brain researcher Alex Wiltschko. $130M total. Patrick Collison personally invested.
Either the most interesting company in NYC or the hardest to explain at dinner. Probably both. When Collison invests personally and the Gates Foundation is in the cap table alongside Two Sigma — pay attention even if you can’t fully explain it yet.
AI search optimization — helps brands appear in ChatGPT, Perplexity, and LLM answer engines. Think SEO for the AI era. Founded 2024. $154M total raised in under 2 years. Sequoia, Lightspeed, and Kleiner Perkins all in the same cap table.
Series C in their first year of existence. The category didn’t exist 18 months ago. Every company that depends on search traffic has someone who needs to be paying attention to this — and most aren’t yet.
Virtual psychiatry that takes real insurance. Not a wellness app — actual licensed psychiatrists. Founded 2019, $452M total raised. a16z led prior rounds. Solving the hard access problem, not the chatbot version of it.
The mental health space is full of apps. Talkiatry went after the hard infrastructure — real psychiatrists, real billing, real outcomes. That’s why a16z and Perceptive keep writing checks here.
Uses claims data to connect employers and employees to high-performing doctors. Most people see average doctors when better ones are nearby — Garner fixes that. Founded 2019, $219M total. Thrive Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund all in.
Kaiser Permanente Ventures joining the Series D as a strategic means a major health system is validating this with their own balance sheet. Enterprise health benefits is massive and sticky. Garner is quietly building the rails.
Practice management for therapists — scheduling, billing, insurance all handled. The B2B infrastructure play in mental health, not the consumer app. Founded 2020, $298M total raised. TCV and Goldman Sachs co-led this round.
Goldman Sachs co-leading a Series D into mental health infrastructure is not a 2022 sentence. The institutional tide has turned. Grow Therapy is quietly one of the most important NYC companies right now — most people in tech still haven’t heard of it.
Modern retirement savings infrastructure — 401(k), 529s, HSAs — for small businesses legacy providers ignored. $623M total raised. Morgan Stanley, Franklin Templeton, and Silver Lake all in the cap table.
The biggest NYC round in February and barely anyone in the startup scene is talking about it. When Morgan Stanley and Neuberger Berman write checks at this stage, that’s institutional conviction. Quiet company, enormous moat.
Marketplace for digital products — communities, courses, SaaS. Think Shopify for the internet economy. Founded 2021 by founders who were 20 at the time. Now doing nine figures in GMV. $273M total raised.
If you haven’t heard of Whop, you’re not watching where the internet is going. The Gen Z commerce layer nobody in enterprise saw coming — and now Tether Ventures is betting hundreds of millions on it.
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If You Know, You Know.
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