As many of you saw yesterday, AlphaLab’s trusted advisor (and often “Advisor-in-Residence) Sean Ammirati announced he will be leading Birchmere Labs, a new seed fund for Birchmere Ventures.

I wanted to take a moment and offer our congratulations to Sean on his new venture and express our gratitude for everything he does for AlphaLab and the Pittsburgh tech community.

Although many of you don’t know this, Sean was one of the first people who got us thinking about new investment and entrepreneurship models. Early on, he recognized the key trends behind capital efficiency and the ability to demonstrate customer traction on small amounts of capital. These discussions along with Sean’s guidance and support influenced our program model and motivated us to launch AlphaLab in 2008.

Since then, Sean has been one of our most active advisors, participating in every step of the process. He helps us review our applicants, interview teams selected to come in and pitch, and actively mentors companies that have entered our program. In addition to that, through the i6 program, Sean leads workshops on agile development techniques, motivating teams to release early and often and pushing them to “Demo or Die.”
From an AlphaLab standpoint, we are excited about the launch of Birchmere Labs and we are confident that Sean and the team at Birchmere will hit it out of the park. For the Pittsburgh region, this new fund is a great thing as well. In addition to having another seed fund be a potential sour

ce of funding for high-quality startups, I expect that Birchmere Labs will push the envelope on innovative methods to invest and grow “community-driven co

mmerce” startups. And while the fund will invest across the country, I believe its presence here will motivate and energize our local startups to compete on a national level.
If you haven’t already, please take a moment to congratulate Sean and learn about his new venture, Birchmere Labs.

Jim Jen
Director, AlphaLab
Innovation Works