Work-Bench is a NYC-based $160M enterprise software Seed stage VC fund. If you are or know anyone thinking about founding an applied AI or infrastructure startup—we’d love to meet! Please reach out to chat.
Dear Friends of Work-Bench,
What a sprint the first half of 2026 has been 🏃
We’re very excited to partner with several exceptional new Seed companies—more on those soon. In the meantime, we’re thrilled to celebrate two meaningful fundraising milestones from the portfolio:
🩺 Courier Health raises $50M Series B led by Oak HC/FT
After leading their Seed, we’re thrilled to continue backing Courier Health through its $50M Series B. Courier Health is building the operating system for patient services across biopharma, helping life sciences companies coordinate the complex journey from prescription to treatment. Up to 70% of specialty patients abandon treatment within a year—Courier helps close that gap, driving 15%+ increases in patient starts while building biopharma’s system of record for patient engagement.
🏛️ GovWell raises $25M Series A led by Insight
After leading their Seed, we’re excited to continue backing GovWell through its $25M Series A. GovWell is modernizing the software that powers local government, replacing decades-old systems with an AI-native platform that helps municipalities process permits, licenses, planning, and code enforcement dramatically faster. Today, GovWell helps municipalities across 35+ states complete processes like permitting up to 95% faster, delivering a better experience for both public servants and residents.
We’ve also spent the first half of the year doing what we love most: bringing together founders, operators, customers, and future builders across NYC.
Continued our Best of NYC series, bringing together top operators across engineering, product, GTM, AI, and more
Hosted Future Founder Dinners with builders we believe will create the next generation of enterprise companies
Hosted four Customer Dinners for our portfolio companies, helping generate more than $1M in qualified pipeline
Convened Fortune 500 leaders around topics including AI Infrastructure and AI Agents in Financial Services
As always, we so appreciate your support in sending us great b2b founders in NYC and beyond. We love meeting founders as early as possible to back their pre-seed and Seed—please keep sending them our way!
We often get asked what we’re seeing in the market; here are a few observations from the past quarter.
Is this a venture-scale business?
AI has dramatically lowered the cost of building software. More companies are getting started than at any point we can remember, and many are reaching meaningful early revenue with fewer people and less capital than ever before.
But the question we find ourselves asking founders more than ever is surprisingly simple: is this a venture-scale business?
As AI continues to commoditize software creation, we’re spending even more time underwriting durable moats. Does the customer gain a meaningful competitive advantage from buying this product? Is there proprietary data, workflow ownership, distribution, or execution that compounds over time?
The next generation of founders feels more intentional
One of the most encouraging trends we’ve noticed has come through our Future Founder Dinners.
Rather than chasing the latest AI capability, we’re meeting more founders who are spending time developing unique insights before writing a single line of code. They’re choosing problems they want to dedicate the next decade to—not simply the next fundraising cycle.
We think that’s incredibly healthy for the ecosystem—and one of the reasons we’re investing even more in building relationships long before companies are formed.
In an AI-first world, GTM may be the only moat
The biggest shift we continue to see is that AI is compressing the value of software while making go-to-market execution even more important.
This quarter we launched our Founder Sales Cohort, bringing together a small group of NYC Seed founders for an intensive working session led by David Politis, our CEO-in-Residence and former Founder & CEO of BetterCloud.
As products converge faster and categories become increasingly crowded, the founders who consistently win aren’t simply building better products—they’re building stronger brands, tighter customer communities, and more repeatable sales motions.
Founder brand, customer community, curated events, customer references, and thought leadership are increasingly becoming competitive advantages—not simply marketing tactics.
For Work-Bench, that reinforces what we’ve believed since day one: our job isn’t simply to write checks—it’s to help founders build category-defining companies.
📚 Recent Writing
🧠 H1’26 AI Snapshot — We rounded up the biggest AI developments from the first half of the year. Here’s what stood out: (1) code authorship has shifted from human to machine, with “software factories” now merging thousands of AI-written PRs each week; (2) as models commoditize, the “harness” around them is becoming the real moat; (3) tokenmaxxing is pushing the ecosystem toward a FinOps-style reckoning on AI spend; (4) OpenClaw’s breakout made agents outside the chatbox mainstream while exposing a new security attack surface; and (5) SaaS itself is being rebuilt for a world where the primary “user” may be an agent rather than a human.
⚙️ Not All Software Is Created Equal — AI is turning code into a commodity, but that doesn’t mean all software is equal. The winners won’t be the companies that ship the most code—they’ll be the ones creating the most irreplaceable business transformation with it.
🏦 The Real AI Opportunity in Financial Services — Banks spend more than $600B annually on technology, yet 43% still run on COBOL. AI is one of the hardest technologies to deploy in financial services—and one of the most valuable once it lands.
🏥 The Real AI Opportunity in Healthcare — The U.S. spends $5.3T on healthcare each year, yet nearly a quarter of every dollar goes toward administration instead of patient care. AI may finally be the force that changes that equation.
📰 Catch Us in the Wild
Wall Street Journal — Jon shared his perspective on the NYC vs. SF debate and why he believes the NYC enterprise ecosystem has never been stronger—from increasingly technical founders to deeper operator talent and unmatched access to enterprise customers.
Not Another CEO Podcast — Jess joined David Politis for an unfiltered conversation about how investors actually build conviction, why many investment decisions are made within the first five minutes, and what it really takes to earn a Series A in today’s market.
Tokenmaxxing is splitting the world into haves and have nots — Danny shared his perspective on how the companies spending most aggressively on R&D tokens are growing revenue much faster than those throttling it (more R&D spend → better products → more sales), and why enterprises that just speed-ran a decade of cost management and FinOps still aren't sure how to respond.
The hardest part of formal verification is knowing what to prove - Kelley shared his perspective on formal verification, drawing on conversations with practitioners across quant funds, banks, and fintechs—the exact environments where it could have the biggest impact.
Bold predictions: Ramp Labs is to Ramp what AWS is to Amazon — Proby shared his prediction that Ramp Labs will either generate more profit for Ramp than its core business within a decade or spin out entirely, pointing to AWS as a case study. AWS took just over a decade to become more profitable than Amazon's core retail business.
👋 Come Hang With Us
🎉 Cofounders.nyc — Join our curated, in-person community for NYC builders looking to meet future co-founders and early teammates.
🌱 Future Founder Dinner — Thinking about starting a company in NYC? We’d love to meet you. We host a quarterly dinner bringing together top builders to swap notes and share ideas. Reach out to Danny to learn more about joining a future dinner.