We’re honored to announce that Somak Chattopadhyay has been named to the Emerging Technology Advisory Board, a council of tech luminaries hand-picked by NY Governor Kathy Hochul to help chart the course of innovation in the region. The Advisory Board — which includes the CEOs of IBM, Micron, JetBlue, and Girls Who Code, among others — will be tasked with helping to “build a modern, inclusive economy, driven by artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and other fast-growing sectors, that will unlock opportunity for countless New Yorkers.” AI will be a primary focus area in the first six months, dovetailing on Hochul’s Empire AI initiative, which aims to transform New York into the national leader in responsible and civic-minded AI adoption. 

It was a travel-packed Spring for the Armory team. We hosted full-house happy hours in Rochester and Cleveland and attended conferences in cities like Pittsburgh, Oklahoma City, and Indianapolis. As ever, we remain laser-focused on underserved founders, old-line industries, and legacy cities; in our latest Roundtable, Somak dug into the nuances of building companies in these environments alongside Foundry VC co-founder Seth Levine and ASV’s Platform Advisor Elizabeth MacBride. The trio swapped takes on a bevy of topics, including underdogs-turned-unicorns, AI hype bubbles, and the psychological impacts of big companies sprouting in small cities. Seth and Elizabeth also teased their forthcoming book, Capital Evolution.

Members of the Armory team at recent events in Philly and Rochester (above) and our three panelists for last month’s Virtual Roundtable (below). 

Shortly thereafter, Elizabeth accompanied several members of the Armory team to Cleveland for the Ohio Tech Happy Hour we co-hosted alongside JumpStart Ventures. She came away impressed by the city’s entrepreneurial verve, as her latest feature in Forbes attests. In the post-Covid era, she writes, “the fastest pace of job growth is happening in the lowest-wage metro areas.” In Ohio, for example, the number of startups likely to become employers rose 42% from 2019 to 2023. Elizabeth previously toured cities like Buffalo, Rochester, and Kansas City as part of her Deep Dives on Secondary Markets series, following the trail of tech innovation in unsung locales. She’s one of a small cadre of tech writers wise to the pendulum’s swing away from the coasts and towards the heartland; word has otherwise been slow in spreading, due in part to the scrappy, bootstrap mentality that makes many founders reluctant to take VC money too early.

Our investment committee returned East equally energized by the host of impressive founders we met in Cleveland, while Pia Sawhney had a similarly invigorating experience in Pittsburgh at the Invest in Women event hosted by Chloe Capital. Later in May, Pia spoke at Bryn Mawr, a women’s college and her alma mater, on a panel titled, “How We Built This,” with two other executives from VC and tech. Data now reflects that 2023 indeed brought more investments in women, with 25 percent of venture funding going to women-led startups, a ten percent jump from the prior year. This is another pendulum we expect to continue swinging in 2024.

Company Updates 

Multiplayer CEO Steph Johnson recently appeared on the VentureFizz podcast hosted by Keith Cline, as did Somak in a subsequent interview. After launching its beta in Q1 of this year, Multiplayer is poised to dissolve the boundaries that make remote collaboration a headache for distributed engineering teams. 

Out in Indy, Qualifi recently launched the Hire Quality podcast, hosted by cofounder Devyn Mikell. The podcast has run 21 episodes so far and features deep dives on topics like high volume recruiting, DEI, and the impact of AI on the talent search process. 

Clement Cazalot of Machinery Partner sat down with ASV for an interview to discuss the state of built world innovation and the importance. Clem continues to make the rounds of worksites and industry conferences alike. In late March, he was a featured speaker at the National Stone, Sand & Gravel Association (NSSGA)'s AGG1 in Nashville, TN.

Armory Square Prize

We’re delighted to announce Sana R. Chaudhry as the winner of the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation, in recognition of her superb translation (from Urdu) of Pakistani writer Fahmida Riaz’s final novel, Qila-e-Faramoshi or Fortress of the Forgotten Ones.

Translator Dr. Sana R. Chaudhry (left) and late author Fahmida Riaz (right). 

Chaudhry’s translation of the novel will be published by Open Letter Books in the Fall of 2026. This year’s shortlist also included the following works: 

Mridula Garg (Hindi) Miljul Mann.
Translated by Aditya Vikram (Novel, 2009);

Mahua Sen Mukhopadhyay (Bengali) “The Well Wisher and other stories.” 
Translated by Sayari Debnath (Short story collection, 2024);

Abha Purbey (Angika) Gulabiya.
Translated by Shivangi and Tejaswi (Novel, 2008);

Anuradha Sarma Pujari (Assamese) “Ten Love Stories and a Novella of Despair.” Translated by Aruni Kashyap (Short story collection).