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Insights from CMO Dinner — 2019
Talks about Startup, Marketing and Venture Capital
RD
Ryan Darnell
Managing Partner at Max Ventures
New York, New York
Overview
Ryan Darnell is the Managing Partner at Max Ventures in New York, with a strong background in quantitative analysis, sales process optimization, and strategic planning. His career highlights include co-founding The Post and Elion, as well as serving as a seed investor in various successful companies like UnityAI and Vori Health.
Work Experience
Managing Partner
2017 - Current
Early stage investor - currently investing out of our 3rd fund Invested in 75+ early stage companies and Co-founded 7 venture backed companies across 3 funds. Investors at Day Zero
Max Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm that invests in consumer tech and health-tech companies.
Co-Founder & Board Member
2021
The Post is building the largest private membership club of former professional and college athletes that are excelling in business. The company is led by Christian Ponder and Jason LaRose and backed by world class VCs including Will Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Maveron, FJ Labs, Pareto, and several others.
Co-Founder & Investor
2022
Elion is the leading independent and authoritative digital health solutions marketplace. We're the trusted source for healthcare builders to discover, evaluate and select the software and services they need to run their businesses. Elion is backed by NEA, 8VC, AlleyCorp, Floating Point, Charge and Max Ventures
Co-Founder & Board Member
2020
Tertulia is building a better way to discover books. By pulling in conversations from across social media, podcasts, and the web, Tertulia delivers superior book recommendations from vetted voices and incorporates seamless purchasing. Tertulia is run by veteran Co-founders Sebastian Cwilich, Lynda Hammes, and Robert Lenne. The company has raised over $6M from AlleyCorp, Max Ventures, Ingram FJ Labs, Addition, Canvas, and several others.
Tertulia is an app that serves book recommendations and book talks from across social media, podcasts, and the web.
Seed Investor
2015
Founded in 2014, GrubMarket has become the largest private food tech company in the U.S. by revenue. The company is on a multi-billion dollar revenue run rate and currently valued at $3.5 Billion.
GrubMarket is an AI-powered prominent B2B eCommerce business operating in the American food supply chain industry.
Raised $499,100,000.00 from Liberty Street Funds, The K Fund, ROC VENTURE GROUP, Grosvenor Food & AgTech, Celtic House Asia Partners, Apeira Capital, Squarepoint Capital, Tiger Global Management, Disruptive Ventures and Walleye Capital.
Seed Investor
2023
Etched recently launched Sohu, the world’s first specialized chip (ASIC) for transformers. With over 500,000 tokens per second running Llama 70B, Sohu lets you build products that are impossible on GPUs.
Etched.ai is an AI chip startup that develops Sohu, a chip designed specifically for running transformer models.
Raised $125,360,000.00 from Dolik Ventures, Lightscape Partners, Mei Z., Oceans, Fundomo, Fontinalis Partners, Hummingbird Ventures, Amjad Masad, Thomas Dohmke and Peter Thiel.
Seed Investor & Board Member
2024
Unity AI is building software that automates throughput within care delivery settings.
Seed Investor
2016
K Health is using artificial intelligence to increase access to care while delivering the care at a lower cost.
K Health is a data-driven digital primary care system that uses AI to deliver personalized primary care services.
Raised $418,701,397.00 from Mangrove Capital Partners, Claure Group, Valor Equity Partners, Atreides Management, Pablo Legoretta, Max Ventures, PICO Venture Partners, BoxGroup, Marcy Venture Partners and Cedars Sinai.
Seed Investor
2018
Sana is one of the fastest growing AI companies in Europe
Seed Investor & Board Observer
2020
Vori Health was founded by a veteran health care team that deeply understands the inefficiencies in treating musculoskeletal issues. Vori is building a non-operative fully integrated solution that drastically improves results for patients and lowers the cost of delivering care (with less surgeries).
Vori Health offers a nationwide, all-inclusive medical practice that is uniquely positioned to address back, neck, and other joint issues.
Raised $56,250,000.00 from Ascension Ventures, AlleyCorp, Echo Health Ventures, New Enterprise Associates, Max Ventures, Intermountain Healthcare, New Enterprise Associates, Max Ventures and AlleyCorp.