The Class of 2022: How Five Emerging Startup Studios Fared, Four Years On

Plenty can change in four years. Back then, em dashes didn’t scream “AI”, Will Smith had just slapped Chris Rock, and “goblin mode” was Oxford Dictionary’s Word of the Year. And the startup studio had just entered its golden age. 

As media attention poured into startup studios, we dove into emerging ones propelled by the post-pandemic boom. Risk was cheap, and uninvested cash was burning holes in pockets. The studio market addressed both. 

The best startup studios have a secret sauce, whose ingredients range from regional advantages to specific human capital choices to powerful sector specializations. 

This month, we are sampling each one to see whether they aged gracefully. 

‍

757 Startup Studios: A Masterclass in Triple Dipping

The darling of our 2022 report, 757 Startup Studios, has not disappointed. 

Like the intertwined roots of an Aspen grove, 757 thrives on a closely connected network of organizations, clustered together on their Assembly innovation campus in Norfolk, Virginia. 757 Collab is the coordinating body, consisting of a carefully calibrated mixture of models:

‍

Stage 1: The Ideas

757 Startup Studios: the front door, giving founders rent-free space, mentorship, and the essential structures that would claim months of trial and error otherwise. 

Stage 2: The Mentorship

757 Accelerate: closer to a typical accelerator, a 9-12 week program to polish everything before investor scrutiny.

‍Stage 3: The Money

757 Angels: a capital investment arm, featuring a ready-made angel investor network.

‍

This approach of triple-dipping between company-building models has worked wonders. While they haven’t reached the fabled number in their namesake, it has supported over 180 startups since 2021, announcing 17 new startups in early 2025. 

Mastering the regional economy has been its strongest point of leverage. Norfolk is a massive military hub, and 757 has assembled a pipeline directly into the Navy via NavalX. This local savvy also extends to federal and state grants, including an EDA award, money it didn’t need to pay back or sacrifice equity for. When startup funding began to wane after 2022, this cushion was a major factor in keeping them competitive. 

Consistency is the name of the game. 757 may not have minted a huge company, but it wasn’t designed to. Its unique model and regional mastery have scaled it to a core institution in the region’s innovation ecosystem.  We’re backing it to stand the test of time. 

‍

Impact .51: Writing the Book in Navigating Geopolitical Challenges

Weeks old when we first covered it, Jerusalem-based FemTech studio Impact .51 grew from NOGAFem, an existing women’s health community. Michal Lebenthal-Andreson, co-founder, noted early on that only 4% of tech investment went to FemTech worldwide. In fact, the uneven global population split between men and women inspired its name.

“We have to educate the market that 51% of the population is not a niche. Most VCs and angel investors are dominated by men who have no familiarity with the needs and market size of women,” said Michal Lebenthal-Andreson, Co-founder.  

Rightly so, because the market is massive. By 2030, over 1.2 billion women will be experiencing menopause, a space Impact .51’s founders observed was crying out for investment. 

In 2022, these were their founding theses, and Impact .51 has since expanded its scope as the geopolitical landscape has changed. In the wake of the 2 1⁄2 year war that embroiled the region, Impact .51 launched Mission Resilience, designed to lead innovation in trauma, PTSD, and anxiety in women. It has pulled in major names, including major regional hospitals and prominent tech firms such as EY, Citi, and Google for Startups. The place-based play draws directly on sectors in which Israel is so radically successful, including trauma therapy and cybersecurity. 

While lacking any major spinouts since our 2022 coverage, Impact .51 has shown remarkable ingenuity in turning a geography that looked like a liability into the source of a differentiated, hard-to-copy focus that no studio outside Israel could credibly run. 

‍

Kiwaw and Alive Ventures: Going Too Wide or Too Niche Leads to the Same Place

Alive Ventures and Kiwaw are unique cases that find themselves at the same point today, with very different paths carved to get there. 

Alive was spun out from a nonprofit focused on the well-being of older adults, designed to serve as an incubator for a wide range of focuses for those 65 and up. This studio was the brainchild of serial entrepreneur and philanthropist John Zapolski, who had built several mission-based companies. 

Kiwaw took a completely different approach, spinning out from a Geneva-based digital agency called Freshmilk to build self-funded startups. Founders Ary Jmor and Gilles Dos Santos targeted a small group of local businesses, ranging from local caterers to web tools, but never stuck to a key thesis. 

The complexion is vastly different today. Jmor and Dos Santos refocused on their Freshmilk agency, and Kiwaw sits idle. Alive has also been shifted to the back burner, but it’s likely due to a slow, patient-capital market, one Zapolski will be keen to re-engage with when the timing is right. 

Neither failed, but growth has leveled out. Kiwaw took a wide-ranging sector strategy without focusing on a specific studio leverage point, and Alive dove into a market where capital was slow. Two separate friction points, same result. 

‍

Ascertain: Partnering Early to Build a Test Market

The lovechild of Aegis Ventures, a larger startup studio, and Northwell Holdings, part of New York’s largest health system, Ascertain was built on a razor-sharp thesis: to build healthcare AI companies. Ascertain’s key mission is to close health equity gaps by improving access to and quality of care.

This novel, targeted approach worked wonders. The marriage of expertise between the parent companies allowed them to raise a $10M Series A in 2025. They used this capital to expand access to Ascertain’s AI-powered case management solution, which automates administrative tasks such as documentation, prior authorization, and compliance. It claims to reduce user clicks by 80% and submission times by 67%. Since going live in September 2025, Ascertain has freed hundreds of staff hours per week and predicts savings of around $2M in operating expenses for 2026 across 100+ clinics.

Deerfield Management, which manages over $15B in assets across 200+ healthcare investments, invited Ascertain to relocate to its NYC headquarters. Ascertain’s CEO, Mark Michalski, also got a badge upgrade, becoming CIO at Deerfield, while maintaining his role at the startup studio.

Now bona fide masters of efficiency, the 2022 Northwell partnership, which gave Ascertain access to 23 hospitals and 830 outpatient facilities, created the ideal testing ground for experimenting and perfecting its solution. Clearly, the past 4 years have treated Ascertain well, all thanks to smart partnerships and mastery of its niche. 

‍

The Four-Year Debrief

Closing in on the end of a tumultuous period in the startup space, what separated those who just survived from those who thrived?

Incredibly talented entrepreneurs with proven track records launched every studio on this list, but some leveraged structural advantages more than others, centering on specific theses, including capital matching the market tempo and a captive test market. The ones that stalled had one or none. 

Kiwaw and Alive hit the same outcome from opposite directions. Kiwaw had breadth but lacked a leverage point, while Alive had a sharp thesis in a slow-moving, patient-capital market. As far as we can tell, both are still around but haven’t yet lived up to their potential. 

Impact .51 mastered local geography by adapting to sectors that surrounding conditions created, a valuable pivot in a difficult business environment. Savvy fundraising, including 757’s non-dilutive grants and Ascertain’s backing from Deerfield and Northwell, gave them the cushion they needed to weather slow markets. Access to other companies in 757’s portfolio and Northwell’s hospitals gave each a place to learn and fail in a lower-stakes environment, allowing them to build pressure-tested solutions. 

The winners built advantages that solo founders couldn’t recreate on their own. Talent can get any studio off the ground, but these structures give a studio the platform to build into the beyond.

View the best and brightest startup studios in our comprehensive directory here: https://www.startupstudios.com/startup-studio-directory. 

‍