The Shortlist New York is a monthly event series and newsletter connecting exceptional talent with breakout founders in NYC.

Every week, we send you a curated newsletter featuring under-the-radar opportunities at companies that are actually moving.

Every month, we host a founder showcase where founders take the stage and tell YOU why you should grab a seat on their rocketship.

How to get involved:

This one is different. For the first time, a venture firm is co-hosting the Shortlist — and not just any firm.

Oak HC/FT is the venture and growth equity firm behind some of the most important companies in healthcare and fintech. Every founder on stage on November 10 is one they've backed. Which means every founder on stage has already been through one of the most rigorous diligence processes in the industry, and come out the other side with a term sheet.

Between them, the five companies presenting have raised $235M+ in 2026 alone — a $55M Series C, a $45M Series A, a $40M Series B, a $35M Series A. Headcount is almost always the biggest line item in a post-raise plan, which means every one of these teams is hiring right now, and most of those roles will be filled by people the founders already met.

On November 10, that's you.

Same format you know: each founder shares what they're building, why it matters, and the roles they're hiring for. Then we open it up for the mixer. Attendance is intentionally limited and application only. Apply for your spot here.

Carl Madi spent a decade at Uber and Handy convincing people to join the gig economy. Then he wondered whether he could help those same people become medical assistants instead. Stepful is the answer: an AI-powered training platform that gets people into healthcare jobs in weeks, not years — medical assistant, pharmacy tech, surgical tech, patient care — and now RN and imaging programs on the way. Named the #1 EdTech company in the U.S. by TIME, with an 87% certification pass rate and 8,000+ clinical training partners. In June, Stepful closed a $55M Series C led by Oak HC/FT (their second time leading, after the Series B), with Foresite Capital, Hearst Ventures, Citi Impact Fund, Y Combinator and Intermountain Health in the round. $105M raised to date.

Hiring: engineering, product, and ops roles across the NYC team. Details here.

Aditya Pandyaram and CEO Niren Gandra were both executives at Cedar before founding Thesis (formerly Trovo Health) in 2024. Thesis Care is an AI-powered clinical platform that extends a care team's capacity — intelligent automation with oversight from experienced clinicians, so tasks like care management and clinical operations get handled at scale inside existing workflows. After two years of design partnerships, Thesis is already deployed across thousands of providers, including US Heart & Vascular, Essen Health Care, Springfield Clinic, and Allied Digestive Health. In March they announced a $45M Series A led by Oak HC/FT, with CRV and Black Opal Ventures, bringing total funding to $60M.

Hiring: full stack engineer, staff software engineer (AI developer experience), lead security engineer, implementation lead, clinical operations nurse, talent & people lead. Details here.

Oban MacTavish and Tess Bloch are fixing a problem every bank and fintech has and almost none have solved: the transaction string on your statement is garbage. Spade turns it into something useful — real-time transaction enrichment that maps raw payments data to verified merchants, with category, location, and identity, powering everything from fraud decisions to rewards to personalization. Stripe, Bilt, and Mercury run on it. The numbers are absurd: 470% year-over-year revenue growth, up to 1.9 billion transactions processed a day. YC W22 alums, and in March they closed a $40M Series B led by Oak HC/FT, with a16z, Flourish, Gradient, and Y Combinator. $63M+ raised to date.

Hiring: backend engineers (mid-level, NYC, $170–200K) and more. Details here.

If Akash Kapoor looks familiar, it's because he pitched at our July showcase as ChartR Health. He's back with a much bigger swing. Alterra Labs (formerly ChartR Health) is the safety and alignment company for AI in healthcare and the life sciences. While everyone else builds the models, Alterra builds the rigorous evaluations, simulation environments, and reinforcement learning signals that tell you how those models will actually behave with a patient in front of them — where they fail, why, and how to fix it. The team is 60+ clinicians, scientists, ML researchers, and engineers with roots across Anthropic, Google DeepMind, Scale AI, Stanford, and Columbia, and they recently brought on Dr. Morgan Jeffries (ex-Geisinger) as Chief Clinical Officer. Partners include frontier AI labs, health systems, and governments.

Hiring: engineering, AI/ML, applied research, clinicians (full and part time), med students, operations — NYC, SF, London, and remote.

Cyril Mathew led payments and stablecoin work at Uber, Coinbase, and Stripe, then ran Zero Hash as President and COO. Now he's building the thing he kept wishing existed. Latitude is global payments infrastructure that uses stablecoins as the engine and local currency as the destination — so a payroll platform, marketplace, or fintech can pay someone in 50+ countries instantly, at a fraction of what banks charge, without anyone needing to understand stablecoins. Co-founded in 2025 with Brian Wrightson (early Facebook engineer, ex-Stripe) and Vivek Morzaria. They raised an $8M seed led by NEA in March, then a $35M Series A led by Oak HC/FT in September, with NEA, Coinbase Ventures, and Lightspeed Faction. That's $43M in six months.

Hiring: no public job board yet, and that's exactly the point — Latitude just raised $35M, and the team is small. Reach out before the job post exists.

Do your homework. Click through above. The best conversations at the Shortlist come from people who already know what a founder is building before they walk up.

This week. Our flagship event for entrepreneurs, creators, and ambitious builders.

A curated dinner with 24 Seed–Series B founders in NYC.

This is a monthly curated, application-only evening connecting early-stage founders with exceptional operators across New York. This time, we’re partnering with OAK HC/FT.

A curated dinner where we discuss the future of marketing and storytelling.

This is a monthly curated, application-only evening connecting early-stage founders with exceptional operators across New York.

A curated dinner with 24 Seed–Series B founders in NYC.

A venture firm's portfolio is the most curated list of companies in tech. Partners see thousands of pitches a year and write a handful of checks. When Oak HC/FT leads a $40M round, it's because they believe that company becomes a category leader. And category leaders don't just hire — they hire fast, and they hire early, before the roles are written up and posted.

That's what makes November 10 unusual. You're not scanning a job board hoping to catch a listing before 400 other applicants. You're in a room with five founders who have already been vetted by one of the best investors in their category, who are already spending on headcount, and who want to meet you before they open a req.

One rule we won't bend: founder intros close at 9:30pm sharp on event night. If you want to be introduced to any of the founders, you opt in that evening. We don't reopen it after, no matter how nicely you ask.

Be early, be in the room, be memorable. November 10. See you there.

Know a founder who should be featured? Reply to this email.

Looking for a role we didn't list? Tell us what you're looking for.

Are you a founder wanting to collaborate on a private event with top talent? Reach out to [email protected]

Want to grab coffee? We're always around.

Sangavi, Ivor, Andrew & the Shortlist NYC team