What if the most effective therapy for stress, burnout, and anxiety didn’t come from a pill or a practitioner, but from a room full of puppies? Francesca Albo is betting on it, and the market agrees. Today on The Angel Nest, Francesca joins David to talk about Puppy Sphere, North America’s leading puppy wellness company, which is on track to top $6 million in revenue this year across 13 profitable locations in the U.S. and Canada, all bootstrapped without outside investment.

Francesca and her co-founder Leia met in a dog park. Both were escaping corporate burnout, both wanted to build something in the pet space, and both had tried and failed at earlier pet startups before landing on puppy yoga. What made Puppy Sphere different wasn’t the concept — puppy yoga already existed — but the execution. Francesca describes their working relationship as a clean split: she brings the big vision and the bold bets, Leia builds the systems and protocols that make scale possible. The result is $14 million in all-time revenue across locations that are profitable, not just open.

The episode gets into the operational realities of running a business around live animals. Puppy Sphere doesn’t keep dogs on site. It partners with local shelters and breeders who bring puppies in for each class and take them home after. Staff are certified in pet first aid and trained through a proprietary Puppy First program. Every guest signs a waiver. There are escalation protocols for anxious animals. The liability question comes up, and Francesca handles it directly.

Now the founders are ready to scale and looking at what that actually requires. The business runs on two tracks: public classes, memberships, and class packs make up about 80 percent of revenue, while corporate wellness events, bringing puppies to offices at companies like Google, TikTok, and Amazon, account for the other 20. That corporate side generates millions with no outbound marketing spend at all, entirely on inbound demand. Francesca walks through the investment thesis, the unit economics across markets, and what she plans to do with capital as the company moves beyond its bootstrapped roots.

You can find contact information for Francesca Albo and learn more about Puppy Sphere at theangelnest.com, where you can also reach David with suggestions, story ideas, or questions about the show.

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.

Elementary schools are no longer exclusively about academics. Now, educators also share responsibility for building students' character, as well as their social and emotional health. Today on The Angel Nest, we meet Maria Howard, founder of Heroes Made, a character education platform for grades one through six that personalizes lessons to every student through storytelling, eliminating prep time for overburdened teachers while giving every child the experience of being the hero of their own learning journey. Joining Maria is Dr. Maurice Elias of Rutgers University, a pioneer in social-emotional learning who is not affiliated with Heroes Made but believes so deeply in what they are doing that he is helping them get the message out. Together they discuss why character cannot be taught from the outside but must be caught from the people and environments surrounding a child, how Heroes Made analyzed why good programs collect dust on shelves and built something specifically designed not to, the circle of control lesson that teaches students to separate what they can manage from what they cannot, the role of technology in personalizing education without isolating children behind screens, and how the platform turns students into published authors whose stories are read by peers across every participating school. The mental health crisis reaches down to primary school age, and Heroes Made is one of the rare programs designed not just to respond to it but to get ahead of it. Learn more about Heroes Made at heroesmade.com and reach us with comments or questions at theangelnest.com.

Angel investing in medical technology can be tough. The science is complex, the timelines are long, and the risks are hard to judge without the right expertise in the room. At the New York Angels, that has changed. In this New York Angels edition of The Angel Nest, we meet NYA members and medical experts Vijay Aggarwal, PhD and John Younger, and learn how they evaluate life science opportunities. Joining them is Greg Fischer, founder and CEO of AIM Medical Robotics, one of the standout companies the New York Angels chose to fund. AIM is bringing a compact surgical robot to neurosurgery that works inside an MRI scanner in real time. The core problem it solves has haunted neurosurgeons for decades: the brain moves during surgery. Targets the size of a grain of rice can shift millimeters to centimeters mid-procedure, making preoperative maps unreliable exactly when precision matters most. AIM's robot continuously updates its guidance using live MRI imaging for conditions including Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, and brain cancer. Greg, Vijay, and John discuss what it takes to evaluate a medtech company before there is revenue, why AIM's FDA path is unusually clean, how existing reimbursement codes remove one of the biggest commercialization headaches in medical devices, and what the next wave of medtech investment looks like. Learn more about AIM Medical Robotics and find out who the New York Angels are partnering with at newyorkangels.com. Reach us with comments and listen to past episodes at theangelnest.com.

When Pascal de Mul was part of a young Spotify team revolutionizing music distribution, he unintentionally killed something he loved: the live bootleg. Now he is bringing it back, legally and in studio quality. Today on The Angel Nest, we meet Pascal de Mul, founder of Setmixer, the UK-based music technology company that permanently installs recording equipment directly into venue mixing desks, capturing every live performance in full multitrack studio quality and delivering it to fans almost instantly. Artists keep 70% of every sale and remain in full control of their recordings. Joining Pascal is Daryl Clarke, incoming chairman and serial entrepreneur with a history of building and profitably exiting businesses. Daryl discovered Setmixer the way great opportunities often arrive, on a random double date, and has not stopped thinking about it since. He is joining to leverage his business relationships and open doors to major music and entertainment companies and artist management firms. Together they discuss how Setmixer is already operating across 75 UK venues, a weekly showcase newsletter that connects grassroots artists directly to major labels and promoters, plans to integrate fan-shot video with studio-quality audio, a festival download model that could let you leave with the full day’s sets in your pocket, and the untapped archive of legendary performances that are sitting in mixing engineer hard drives around the world waiting to be released. The US launch is coming, the opportunity is colossal, and the answer to why nobody has done this yet may simply be: nobody thought of it until now.

Learn more about Setmixer at setmixer.com and reach us with comments or questions at theangelnest.com.

Drones have been consumer products for years, but entrepreneurs are now finding their commercial potential. New ideas are coming fast, and few are as ambitious as SkyFire. In this New York Angels edition of The Angel Nest, we meet Don Mathis, a former Navy flight officer who watched drones change the course of modern warfare in Ukraine and decided it was time to build something bigger at home. SkyFire is a platform that deploys sophisticated Level 2 drones to enhance public safety, streamline business logistics, support national defense, and even deliver medicine to patients who need it most. Joining Don are Bob Peck and Alyssa Tam, New York Angels members who co-led SkyFire’s seed investment round. They’ll share what drew them to the company out of a crowded drone market, how the NYA Sidecar Fund helped amplify the investment, and why SkyFire has more levers to pull than most startups they see. We’ll also talk AI, international ambitions, and what the next year holds for one of the most versatile companies in the portfolio. Learn more about SkyFire and see who the New York Angels are partnering with at newyorkangels.com.

And, listen to more great interviews from our series with the New York Angels at https://theangelnest.com.