25madison Research
Investment Thesis
25madison is a New York City-based venture platform, founded in 2018, that combines a startup studio, an early-stage venture fund, and a lower-middle-market buyout arm under one roof. The firm's public positioning is "Bringing Applied AI to Legacy Industries" — the belief that the biggest software opportunities left are in industries that have been slow to digitize (healthcare delivery, supply chain/logistics, insurance, compliance, and traditional B2B services), and that the fastest way to win those markets is to pair capital with hands-on operational build-out (product, engineering, and AI talent supplied directly by the firm). The platform invests both by co-founding companies from scratch (studio model), by writing early checks into founder-led startups (Ventures Fund), and by taking control positions in established businesses and modernizing them with AI (Propel).
Stage Focus
The Ventures Fund invests Pre-Seed through Series A, with the sweet spot at Pre-Seed and Seed. Propel, the buyout unit, targets already-established, revenue-generating lower-middle-market companies rather than early-stage startups — a distinct motion from the venture fund.
Check Size
Public deal trackers put typical venture checks in the $100K–$5M range, with a stated sweet spot around $1.5M. Recent rounds it has participated in ranged from $1.2M pre-seed (Ovasave) to $6.3M seed (Miravoice), consistent with a Pre-Seed/Seed-focused, mostly-participating (not always leading) check.
Lead Tendency
25madison both leads and follows. It has led several studio-incubated company raises directly, but in third-party rounds sourced from the broader market (Miravoice, Century Health, Ovasave) it has participated alongside a syndicate rather than leading.
Recent Activity
- April 2026: Participated in Miravoice's $6.3M seed round (led by Unusual Ventures), an AI voice-agent platform for quantitative phone surveys.
- May 2026: Participated in Century Health's $5M seed round (led by Origin Ventures), an AI platform for real-world-evidence clinical data abstraction.
- July 2025: Participated in Ovasave's $1.2M pre-seed round, an Abu Dhabi-based fertility and hormonal-health platform, alongside PlusVC and Annex Investments.
- June 2026: Investment activity noted in Ladder Health (early-childhood developmental-delay care), an enterprise-systems healthcare company, per third-party deal trackers.
The fund is actively deploying, with a steady cadence of new investments through mid-2026.
Portfolio Highlights
25madison's portfolio (spanning the studio, ventures, and health-vertical arms) is heavily concentrated in digital health and healthcare operations: April Health, Basalt Health, Canopy, Clear, Clearpol, Eon, Flourish, FlyteHealth, Gratia, Handspring Health, Keragon, Kouper Health, Kyra Health, Ladder, Lynd Clinical, M7 Health, Marit, Midi, Quantivly, Recourse, Swap Health, TCARE, Thrive Mobile, and Century Health. Outside health, notable companies include Truehold (home equity access), Pattern (consumer fintech robo-advisor), Paxton (AI regulatory compliance), Opsera (DevOps orchestration), Offload and Silkline (logistics/supply chain), Wilya (industrial workforce management), Ranger (manufacturer bid-response optimization), Vinesight (brand/reputation intelligence), Rebuild (AI insurance-claim estimation), Croissant (guaranteed resale value), Novacy (sales performance intelligence), Miravoice (AI voice survey agents), and Hut 8 (energy infrastructure). Justine Lee, a former 25madison Partner/COO, went on to become CEO of ClimateHaven.
Team
- Steven Price — Managing Partner, CEO
- Grant Silow — General Partner
- Merrill Anovick — General Partner
- Kirk Posmantur — Chief Partnership Officer, Board Member, Founder
- Matt Fremont-Smith — President
- Jamie Brown — Partner
- Jaja Liao — Partner, Ventures
- Dhruv Vasishtha — Operating Partner
- Fannie Chen — Chief Operating Officer
- Ryan Macy — Chief Technology Officer
- Sanford Spivey / Walt Winslow — Heads of Studio
- Lydia Cheuk — General Counsel, 25m Studio
Board members and advisors include John Daly (former Chairman of Global Equity Capital Markets, Goldman Sachs), Gary Ginsberg (former SVP Global Head of Communications, SoftBank), Michael Lynton (Chairman, Warner Music Group and Snap Inc.), Lance West (Chairman & CEO, Centerbridge Partners Europe), and Aaron Sobel (Partner, Apollo Private Equity).
Decision Process
25madison operates as a partnership across three business units (Studio, Ventures, Propel), each with its own investment leadership; the firm is backed by Apollo Global Management and other institutional LPs, which co-invest in some vehicles (25m Evolve, 25m Health). This suggests an investment-committee-style process for larger checks, particularly on the Propel buyout side, and a faster partnership-level process for venture checks.
Founder Preferences
25madison favors founders tackling large, historically under-digitized markets — healthcare operations, supply chain, industrial workflows, insurance, and compliance — where deep domain expertise and willingness to work with 25madison's in-house product/engineering/AI team can compress time-to-market. The firm's studio model in particular attracts first-time or non-technical domain-expert founders who need a technical co-building partner.
Geographic Focus
Headquartered in New York City; investments are concentrated in the US, with at least one Middle East exception (Ovasave, Abu Dhabi/Saudi expansion) sourced through syndicate participation rather than the firm's core deal flow.
Business Units
- Ventures: Pre-Seed to Series A checks into category-defining AI B2B software, supply chain/industrials, and healthcare startups.
- Studio: Co-founds and incubates companies from scratch, supplying product, engineering, and AI talent; includes health-specific studio verticals such as 25m Health (with LifePoint Health and Apollo) and 25m Evolve (enterprise software venture studio with Apollo).
- Propel: Control-stake buyouts of established lower-middle-market businesses, modernized with proprietary AI and software.
Note on F4-OS Record Scope
This firm was previously recorded in F4-OS narrowly as "25M Health" (the healthcare-focused studio joint venture with LifePoint Health and Apollo), because that vertical shares the parent domain 25madison.com/health. This research broadens the record to reflect the full 25madison platform (Ventures, Studio, and Propel), not just the health vertical. A human reviewer should confirm whether "25M Health" should remain the record's display name or be renamed to "25madison," and whether the health-specific JV should be split into its own linked firm record.