An Evening with Mercato Partners and Orange Collective
An Evening with Mercato Partners × Orange Collective
Hosted by Dave Boyce & Tannaz Mohammadi (Mercato Partners) with David Teten (Orange Collective). No formal agenda beyond building relationships. RSVP for approval and we’ll follow up with venue details. 6pm sharp: Appetizers. 7pm: main course.
Join us for an intimate dinner bringing together allocators, family offices, and a few of the founders building outside the usual coastal hubs.
Mercato Partners is a $1B AUM growth equity firm that has spent nearly 20 years backing category-defining companies in the markets the big coastal funds overlook. Our focus spans applied AI and AI infrastructure, defensible software, healthcare technology, digital infrastructure, and energy and industrial tech. Across four funds Mercato has delivered top-quartile net performance, and Fund IV was named by Bloomberg a Top 10 fund in two categories by IRR: all 2021-vintage funds and all growth funds. We are now raising our fifth fund. Minimum check size for retail investors: $1m.
A few stars from our portfolio:
Lambda — one of the largest independent AI cloud platforms, powering frontier-model training. On October 6, the WSJ reported Lambda is raising up to $4B at a ~$14.5B valuation ahead of a planned 2027 IPO, on the back of a reported $35B Anthropic deal.
Torus — clean energy pairing flywheels, batteries, and software to keep the grid stable as AI data centers strain capacity; on track for ~6 GW across its ecosystem this year, with a 3+ GW pipeline with PacifiCorp alone.
Artisight — an NVIDIA-backed smart-hospital platform, now deployed across 400+ hospitals following an oversubscribed $42M round.
Paytient — expanding access to healthcare payments, from 330,000 covered lives at our investment to more than 23 million today.
Attain — a fintech and consumer-data platform where consumers permission their spending data in exchange for rewards. Profitable.
Ownwell — makes property-tax appeals effortless for homeowners and commercial owners, only earning when it saves the customer money. Roughly 4-5x in revenue since we led the Series B last year.
Orange Collective is the AI-native Y Combinator alumni fund backed by 150+ Y Combinator alumni. We exclusively invest in YC founders building in AI infra and applied AI, typically before YC Demo Day. Unusually, Y Combinator itself has invested in our fund I. Our anchor investor is the emerging VC manager arm of Mubadala, the Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund. Our first LP was Garry Tan, YC CEO, followed by Josh Kushner (Thrive), Adam D’Angelo (OpenAI), Felicis, FirstMark, Initialized, Signalfire, and over 150+ YC grads.
A few stars from Orange Collective’s portfolio:
Halluminate (YC S25) — builds the RL environments and benchmarks that teach frontier AI agents to do real financial-services work; grew to a mid-eight-figure run rate in 10 months, profitably.
Mastra (YC W25) — leading open-source TypeScript framework for building AI agents; raised a $22M Series A led by Spark Capital.
Luel (YC W26) — a paid global contributor network turning everyday life into rights-cleared training data for AI labs; raised a $31.2M seed led by General Catalyst and Lightspeed.
Bolna (YC F25) — voice-AI orchestration automating multilingual calls for Indian businesses; raised a $6.3M seed led by General Catalyst.
Past performance is not indicative of future results. This invitation is for informational purposes only and is not an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security.