AI is reshaping every industry, but few are as ripe for reinvention as advertising, a business built on a slow and expensive mix of creativity and manpower. In this New York Angels edition of The Angel Nest, host David Hemenway sits down with New York Angels member Mike Jacobs and Anna Stepura, founder of Adlyse, an AI-driven performance marketing platform built for direct response advertisers. Anna is a repeat founder building her third company, with nine years of experience as a performance marketer herself before she set out to fix the problems she lived inside. Mike has spent his career scaling growth systems and now invests in the founders building what comes next. Together they unpack what performance marketing actually measures, why relying on advertising platform algorithms alone leaves money on the table, and how agentic AI is moving the work from recommendation to execution. Anna explains why she built Adlyse to work on behalf of the advertiser rather than the platform, Mike describes what convinced him to back Anna specifically rather than just the idea, and both push back on the assumption that AI removes the need for human judgment in marketing. Brand positioning, differentiation, and knowing what a company actually stands for, they argue, are the parts no algorithm can do for you. The conversation also turns candid on leadership, what investors really look for when backing a repeat founder, and whether the industry's new precision is actually as precise as it looks. Learn more about Adlyse and about joining the New York Angels at newyorkangels.com. Reach us with questions or comments and listen to past episodes at theangelnest.com.

Elementary schools are no longer exclusively about academics. Now, educators also share responsibility for building students' character, as well as their social and emotional health. Today on The Angel Nest, we meet Maria Howard, founder of Heroes Made, a character education platform for grades one through six that personalizes lessons to every student through storytelling, eliminating prep time for overburdened teachers while giving every child the experience of being the hero of their own learning journey. Joining Maria is Dr. Maurice Elias of Rutgers University, a pioneer in social-emotional learning who is not affiliated with Heroes Made but believes so deeply in what they are doing that he is helping them get the message out. Together they discuss why character cannot be taught from the outside but must be caught from the people and environments surrounding a child, how Heroes Made analyzed why good programs collect dust on shelves and built something specifically designed not to, the circle of control lesson that teaches students to separate what they can manage from what they cannot, the role of technology in personalizing education without isolating children behind screens, and how the platform turns students into published authors whose stories are read by peers across every participating school. The mental health crisis reaches down to primary school age, and Heroes Made is one of the rare programs designed not just to respond to it but to get ahead of it. Learn more about Heroes Made at heroesmade.com and reach us with comments or questions at theangelnest.com.

Angel investing in medical technology can be tough. The science is complex, the timelines are long, and the risks are hard to judge without the right expertise in the room. At the New York Angels, that has changed. In this New York Angels edition of The Angel Nest, we meet NYA members and medical experts Vijay Aggarwal, PhD and John Younger, and learn how they evaluate life science opportunities. Joining them is Greg Fischer, founder and CEO of AIM Medical Robotics, one of the standout companies the New York Angels chose to fund. AIM is bringing a compact surgical robot to neurosurgery that works inside an MRI scanner in real time. The core problem it solves has haunted neurosurgeons for decades: the brain moves during surgery. Targets the size of a grain of rice can shift millimeters to centimeters mid-procedure, making preoperative maps unreliable exactly when precision matters most. AIM's robot continuously updates its guidance using live MRI imaging for conditions including Parkinson's disease, epilepsy, and brain cancer. Greg, Vijay, and John discuss what it takes to evaluate a medtech company before there is revenue, why AIM's FDA path is unusually clean, how existing reimbursement codes remove one of the biggest commercialization headaches in medical devices, and what the next wave of medtech investment looks like. Learn more about AIM Medical Robotics and find out who the New York Angels are partnering with at newyorkangels.com. Reach us with comments and listen to past episodes at theangelnest.com.