🥦 Issue 114: Rethinking Health & Humanity's Relationship With Food
Victor Penev talks about his legacy of building and selling Bulgaria’s largest internet company, NetInfo, and his new longevity project, Edamam.
💬 Welcome to issue #114 of Between the Lines
Good morning & happy Thursday. Selling your business is often one of the biggest milestones in your life as an entrepreneur, especially if it’s a company you built from scratch.
This week, serial Claremont entrepreneur Victor Penev talks about the legacy of Bulgaria’s first digital media companies, the bittersweet experience of selling his first company, defining success beyond financial metrics, and a new longevity project he’s working on. It’s a Claremont world out there. 👇
~ Josh, Miles, Pat
👤 Community Spotlight: Victor Penev & Edamam
Claremont grad Victor Penev (PO ‘96) is a serial entrepreneur and the founder and CEO of Edamam – a food database and nutrition data provider. Edamam provides nutrition solutions to businesses in the food, health, and wellness sectors, leveraging its proprietary cloud-based, structured-data semantic technology platform. He is also a mentor and investor in food tech startups and an advisor to early-stage entrepreneurs. Before founding Edamam, Victor had an extensive background in investment banking, digital media and marketing, and e-commerce. He previously co-founded and sold Bulgaria’s largest internet company, NetInfo.
In a recent interview with The Recursive, Victor talked about the legacy of one of Bulgaria’s first digital media companies and the early days of the Bulgarian internet. He also shared his thoughts on the bittersweet experience of selling your company as an entrepreneur, building a business at the intersection of food and technology without traditional fundraising, and his new longevity project—redefining health and food in Bulgaria.
Food, Tech, and Longevity: Rethinking Health with Victor Penev from Edamam
“If you’re passionate and patient, you can succeed. I had an idea: I wanted to start a business. I wasn’t like, “Oh, I need a co-founder.” Maybe I needed an engineer but not a co-founder. I wasn’t thinking about it. When you have an idea you want to materialize, it’s not the first thing. There is no playbook for starting a business. You just start it.” - Victor Penev
Do you have to be competitive to be a good entrepreneur?
Well, we have to define what a successful entrepreneur is. If you define a successful entrepreneur as somebody who makes a lot of money in a very short amount of time, then being competitive is an asset but only to an extent. Because this is also one of the more destructive things that you can be… being competitive. There are good examples and bad examples. Instagram got started and within a year they got sold for a billion dollars. But if you look at the stories of companies across the board and not just the successful ones, you would see that 99 times out of 100, people who are overly competitive actually fail. Because you do have to have a cooperative spirit and the long-term impact vision.
Going back to the days of NetInfo, we were all building the Internet. Even though we were competing with each other, we helped each other because we were all building the Internet. We had an association. We talked through things together. And I think that’s very useful when you have that kind of competitive attitude and are not focused on how much money you’re going to make next year, what’s the profit of the company, but more on what is your impact. How do we measure Edamam? We measure it by number of people that use our data, and because we have deals with Microsoft, Amazon, and the like, we reach over a billion people. For me, that’s a real impact.
Check out Victor’s interview on The Recursive to hear his thoughts about entrepreneurship, life, and more. 👇
💼 Who’s Hiring?: Tandem & Terra AI
Tandem aims to bring human connection back to work by making the hybrid office a reality. Founded in early 2023, they are a venture-backed startup spun out of Stanford that matches like-minded companies to share office space. Tandem facilitates co-tenancy agreements by getting data on a company's preferred in-office schedule, employee preferences, and productivity goals.
They pair companies with compatible hybrid schedules and facilitate introductions. Claremont grad Brendan Suh (CMC ‘19) is the co-founder and Head of Product & Marketing for Tandem. They are currently looking for a Founding Engineer to join their team. Check out the opening below for more details. And, if you are looking to lease or sub-lease prime office space in the Bay Area, get in touch with Brendan.
StoryHouse portfolio company Terra AI is on a mission to provide the premier AI platform for the development of critical natural resources. They're leveraging AI modeling, reasoning, and optimization to enhance the performance, predictability, and safety of reservoir, wind, and mineral development projects. Claremont grad Anthony Corso (HMC '14) and John Mern (who previously worked for KoBold Metals, founded by CMC grad Kurt House) are the co-founders of Terra, and they are looking for a talented Senior Software Engineer to lead the development of their core web application product. If you're interested in learning more, shoot us a message.
Senior AI/ML Engineer (Hybrid) - Ideally, someone with a background in building image-generation models such as Dall-E, Adobe Firefly, etc.
Check out the other ~5,000 open jobs at 400+ Claremont-affiliated companies here on our Storyboard. Plus, create a profile and enter your preferences to get alerted to new job postings relevant to you, be they the 1,000+ remote jobs, 100+ internships, or 40+ part-time positions available. We’ve published research that shows that Claremont-founded companies that disproportionately hire Claremont talent outperform — so pay attention, Claremonsters!
If any of these roles catch your eye 👀 , apply and mention Between the Lines. Or, if you are an employer looking to hire tip-top Claremont talent, fill out this form to have your jobs featured.
🗣️ Conversations on the Interwebz:
This week’s top read 🔥
Rime Labs CEO and Founder Lily Clifford (PI ‘14) shared her insights on conversational turn-taking, the importance of latency, and how Rime Labs is bringing conversational AI products much closer to responding as quickly as humans would. Rime Labs is an all-in-one solution for enterprise-level speech tasks and ultra-customizable speech synthesis.
This week’s must-watch 📺
Claremont grad and co-founder Gordon Stott (PO ‘96) was on Dave Cooper LIVE, sharing Connect Homes’ founding story and their product-based approach to manufacturing different tiers of housing solutions by combining modular efficiency with architectural design. Based in Los Angeles, Connect Homes is an industry leader in modern, factory-built, premium modular, semi-custom single-family homes.
This week’s Claremont financing 💸
Claremont-founded startups have collectively raised over $1B in venture capital dollars in 2024.
Avail Medsystems, co-founded by previous CEO Paul Schultz (KGI), was acquired by Mendaera. Avail is a telehealth platform for the operating room that raised $150M+ in funding and had over 1,000 deployments in several medtech companies. With the addition of Avail’s commercially available technology, Mendaera will accelerate its vision to utilize robotics and AI to unlock new care delivery models.
Congratulations to Claremont grad Bobby Tzekin (PO ‘00) and Wisetack on their recent $20M Series C round led by Quadrille Capital. They are the leading Pay Over Time platform for in-person services. Wisetack partners with top SaaS service companies to embed payment options directly into its software through simple API integrations. Bobby is the co-founder and CEO of the company.
AirMyne recently raised a $6.9M Seed round, backed by Y Combinator, Alumni Ventures, Liquid 2 Ventures, EMLES, Impact Science Ventures, Another Brain, Soma Capital, and Wayfinder. AirMyne, founded by Claremont grad and COO Mark Cyffka (HMC ‘10), is a next-generation Direct Air Capture company building a technology that removes CO2 from the air. In 2026, the company plans to deploy its carbon capture technology to a sequestration site in San Joaquin County, California, where it will be injected underground.
Cultivated meat technology company Orbillion Bio, co-founded by Claremont alum and COO Samet Yildirim (KGI ‘13), raised new capital, bringing its cumulative funding to $15M. The Venture Collective and At One Ventures co-led the recent round, which included participation from Y Combinator, Metaplanet, and global food investors, including university endowments and strategic investors.
This week’s top listen 🎧
Claremont alum and leading international space solar power expert John Mankins (HMC ‘78) sat down with Beth Mund on the Casual Space podcast to make his case for affordable space solar power to become part of our not-so-distant future. John previously worked at NASA for 25 years, where he led studies of space solar power and managed R&D projects for exploration and development. He is also the founder of Deep Space Industries and Mankins Space Technology.
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🍽️ BTL Snacks:
📰 AI For Government Transparency….. Serial Claremont entrepreneur Sunil Rajaraman (CMC ‘01) and his AI startup Hamlet were recently featured in The Mercury News for their yearlong contract with the City of Saratoga. Hamlet’s AI model translates the content of city documents and meeting recordings into articles that are linked to Saratoga’s newsletter, helping the city in its effort to better connect with its residents. Sunil also shares their plans to expand Hamlet’s operations to offer the same services to other Bay Area cities.
🤑 The Ultimate Money-Saving App….. Upside, a money-saving app previously developed by Claremont grad and co-founder Tom Vaughan (HMC ‘99), was recently featured in an article from Slash Gear. The article explains how users earn cashback with Upside from selected grocery stores, gas stations, restaurants, and well-known brands like Uber. Slash Gear also dives deeper into how Upside earns a profit and what makes it stand out from the competition.
🤖 The Real Meaning Of Automation….. When we hear “automation,” many immediately think of robot assembly lines in massive factories churning out products at a lightning pace. But there’s more to automation than just robots and physical production. Claremont grad Rob Harrington (HMC ‘11) shared his article exploring software automation and its benefits to businesses. Rob is the founder of Carrington Manufacturing Solutions, providing consulting services to help shops craft digital strategies and implement processes they need to become more data-driven.
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