Preterm birth affects one in ten babies in the United States, and for the smallest and most fragile among them, what they are fed in those first critical weeks can determine whether they survive and how well they thrive. The science has long pointed to mother’s own milk as the gold standard. The problem has been concentration: preterm infants need more nutrients than full-term milk provides at standard volume, and the current solution, adding formula fortifiers, introduces the very risks it is meant to solve. On this New York Angels edition of The Angel Nest, we meet Beth Schinkel, a neonatal intensive care nurse and nutritionist who spent years watching babies get sick from formula fortifiers and decided to build a better answer. Her company, Mother’s Milk is Best, has developed a passive osmotic device that concentrates a mother’s own milk without adding anything foreign to it. The FDA has granted breakthrough technology designation. Clinical trials are underway. And the New York Angels, co-led by member Ray Farrell, have backed her seed round. Ray’s involvement is personal in a way that does not happen often in angel investing. He and his wife raised 26-week-old quadruplets in the NICU, born between a pound and a half and two pounds, navigating the exact risks that Beth’s device is designed to prevent. He heard her pitch and recognized the problem from the inside. Together Beth and Ray discuss how a passive osmotic device works and why its simplicity is a feature rather than a limitation, how Beth secured millions in non-dilutive NIH and SBIR funding before approaching angels and why the angel capital was still essential to unlocking it, what a billion-dollar total addressable market looks like when your initial customer is a NICU, and what early-stage investors actually contribute beyond the check. Staying with us after the main conversation is Peter Bodenheimer, the new Executive Director of the New York Angels, who brings a rare perspective to the role: he has been a founder, an investor, and an accelerator partner. He shares where he is focusing first, why he believes angel groups get a bad reputation for wasting founders’ time, and what he thinks it takes to make an investor-founder relationship genuinely useful after the money is wired.

Learn more about Mother’s Milk is Best and about joining or applying to the New York Angels at newyorkangels.com. Reach us with comments or questions at theangelnest.com.

Higher education is under pressure. Budgets are strained, research funding is being cut, and the gap between what business schools teach and what industry actually needs grows wider every year. Executive education is the one corner of the university that has always had to face the market directly. Now it is also becoming the place where AI may finally close that gap for good. Today on The Angel Nest, we meet Volute, an AI-powered platform that is reimagining how business schools deliver executive education by creating live, real-time communities that connect industry leaders with faculty, alumni, and peers to solve the challenges they are facing right now, not six months from now in a classroom. We speak with Michael Croft, Volute's founder, Jean Hammond, one of his lead investors and a partner at LearnLaunch, one of the few venture firms in the country exclusively focused on edtech, and Elmer Almachar, Managing Director of the Kellogg Global Network and Executive MBA Program at Northwestern University, who is not only an early adopter of Volute but one of the pioneers helping to prove what this model can do. Together they explore why executive education is what Jean calls an island of profitability in a sea of challenged higher ed, how Volute's community-based AI differs fundamentally from content-based AI platforms, why business schools are both the most resistant and the fastest-following institutions when it comes to adopting new technology, and what it means to extend the learning beyond the classroom into the real moments when leaders most need answers. What makes this conversation particularly compelling is that Elmer joins not as a commercial partner but as a believer. Northwestern's Kellogg School is launching with Volute this fall, and what Elmer describes is not just a technology adoption but a rethinking of what a business school is actually for. Learn more about Volute at volute.education. Reach us with comments or questions at theangelnest.com. There, you can also catch up on dozens of past episodes.

AI is reshaping every industry, but few are as ripe for reinvention as advertising, a business built on a slow and expensive mix of creativity and manpower. In this New York Angels edition of The Angel Nest, host David Hemenway sits down with New York Angels member Mike Jacobs and Anna Stepura, founder of Adlyse, an AI-driven performance marketing platform built for direct response advertisers. Anna is a repeat founder building her third company, with nine years of experience as a performance marketer herself before she set out to fix the problems she lived inside. Mike has spent his career scaling growth systems and now invests in the founders building what comes next. Together they unpack what performance marketing actually measures, why relying on advertising platform algorithms alone leaves money on the table, and how agentic AI is moving the work from recommendation to execution. Anna explains why she built Adlyse to work on behalf of the advertiser rather than the platform, Mike describes what convinced him to back Anna specifically rather than just the idea, and both push back on the assumption that AI removes the need for human judgment in marketing. Brand positioning, differentiation, and knowing what a company actually stands for, they argue, are the parts no algorithm can do for you. The conversation also turns candid on leadership, what investors really look for when backing a repeat founder, and whether the industry's new precision is actually as precise as it looks. Learn more about Adlyse and about joining the New York Angels at newyorkangels.com. Reach us with questions or comments and listen to past episodes at theangelnest.com.