Michael Montero

We're dog people. Crazy dog people. BARK (that's us) launched in 2012 with BarkBox, our monthly themed subscription of all-natural treats and clever toys. Today we reach over 1.8 million dogs every month and we've expanded into oodles of new product categories and thousands of retail locations. We keep growing - and we've accumulated expertise to create our own products, experiences, and content. At BARK, we know that dogs aren't pets; they're family. Our people, crazy dog people, believe that their dogs deserve the best. The best treats, the best toys, the best seat on the couch. Together, we're driven to be the people our dogs think we are.

Year One Labs is an early stage seed accelerator based in Montreal. We believe in "co-creation" of startups -- working alongside entrepreneurs to build successful companies.

VYou allows people to broadcast video structured as conversations, offering the most personal form of social interaction on the web. VYou lets you get advice from experts, interact with your favorite celebrity or organization, or communicate with friends and family using a social presence that persists even when you're away. As a simple application it can be embedded and posted anywhere on the web giving you tremendous power and creative control.

With its AI-native system of record, Protocol Foods is transforming how food and beverage manufacturers manage their compliance programs. With a suite of agents embedded across its platform, Protocol Foods keeps its customers audit-ready every day and helps them avoids costly recalls that can costs millions.

Memori is agent-native memory infrastructure: an LLM-agnostic layer that transforms agent execution and conversation history into structured, persistent state for production systems. Unlike conversational memory wrappers or vector retrieval, Memori captures tool calls, decisions, traces, and user context as durable, queryable state that agents rely on across sessions, models, and workflows. Let Memori handle enterprise agent memory so your team can improve accuracy, cut inference costs, and accelerate agent development, instead of building and operating a memory system themselves. Memori is benchmarked on LoCoMo, an independent benchmark from Snap Research measuring how well systems remember and retrieve information. Memori delivers industry-leading results: 82% accuracy using only 1,294 tokens, roughly 5% of full-context cost, enabling enterprise teams to reduce inference spend by up to 95%. Built for the enterprise, Memori works with the data infrastructure you already run through partnerships with leading database providers, no rip-and-replace, and deploys across managed cloud, single-tenant cloud, VPC, and on-premises.

We are a venture studio focused on creating new tech businesses, bringing concepts from the idea stage through to Seed stage investment.

Washington Square Angels is an investing forum for NYU alumni, students, faculty, and parents. We encourage any entrepreneur to pitch, particularly those who are NYU affiliated (alum, student, faculty founded).

We aim to provide founder-first capital for innovative entrepreneurs who want to change the world. Specializing in Seed and pre-Seed B2B investments, we work with young founders who leverage information asymmetries to build core technology innovations with the power to transform industries. We promise to deliver more sweat equity per dollar invested than any other investor on your cap table.