Inside Startup Investing with Chris Lustrino

Nathalya Mamane is the co-founder and CEO of Anywhere DX, and she's building the thing every parent has wished for at 9 p.m. on a Friday: an at-home strep test. Not a throat swab — the FDA won't allow one at home — but a saliva-based, single-use device that runs a lab-grade molecular test and shows a result in about 20 minutes, for under $25 with telehealth and a prescription built in. Nathalya joins Chris Lustrino to tell the story behind it: a mother of four, mid-MBA at Babson during COVID, watching a nurse in a hazmat suit swab her daughter through a car window and thinking, "Why can't we just do this at home?" What started as a strep test has become a platform the company plans to extend to UTIs, STIs and other infections with the same unmet need. She walks through what's already been de-risked on the bench — saliva cleanup and concentration, the LAMP amplification process, an internal heater, a readout you see with your own eyes — and the engineering challenge of fitting all of it into one disposable device at a sub-$5 cost. Her co-founder, Dr. Michael Mina, worked closely with the FDA on diagnostics during the pandemic, and the company is building to a 510(k) path it expects to clear with a few hundred samples in a single cold-and-flu season. In this episode:●      Why the rapid antigen test in your pediatrician's office misses so many early strep cases●      PCR vs. antigen tests, explained in plain English●      The $5 build cost and the $25 retail target — and why doctors' offices may want it too●      510(k) vs. de novo: what each FDA route means and why Anywhere DX is on the easier one●      The ~$1.5–1.7M clinical and submission budget, and what the Wefunder round funds first●      Market size: roughly 50 million US strep tests a year, and only 12–14% come back positive●      Why she expects to commercialize through white-label and licensing partners●      Lessons from "the ugly duckling of life sciences" Guest: Nathalya Mamane, Co-founder & CEO, Anywhere DXHost: Chris Lustrino, Founder & CEO, Kingscrowd Anywhere DX is raising now. Kingscrowd rates Anywhere DX a 2.7 out of 5. To see the full analyst breakdown and discover how you can invest, visit kingscrowd.com. Inside Startup Investing is the only podcast where you can invest in every guest. Subscribe so you never miss a founder interview. Disclosure: This episode is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy any security. Investing in early-stage companies is risky and illiquid, and you may lose your entire investment.

Amar Goel founded PubMatic in 2006, grew it to about $300 million in revenue and took it public on the Nasdaq in 2020. Now he and his PubMatic co-founder are building Bito: a context layer for AI coding agents that maps how a company's code actually works, so the agent writes production-ready code on the first pass and burns far fewer tokens doing it. Amar joins Chris Lustrino to explain why coding agents that shine on a brand-new tic-tac-toe game struggle with 20-year-old enterprise codebases — "a toy house versus a skyscraper" — and why the real pain for big companies has shifted from code quality to cost. Developers who used to spend $100 a month on AI are now running agents that cost $2,000 to $3,000 a month each. One CTO with 350 developers told Amar he's budgeting $1.2 million a year on tokens. Bito's two products, AI Architect and Governor, give the agent the "cliff notes" up front and route each task to the cheapest model that can handle it. "Do I need a Ferrari to go pick up my groceries?" Amar asks. Bito charges a percentage of the customer's new, lower spend, so it only gets paid when the savings are real. In this episode:●      The pivot: why Bito walked away from an IDE chatbot competing with GitHub Copilot●      What a "knowledge graph" of a codebase actually contains — code, tickets, docs, observability data●      Who's buying: mid-market and up, 250–1,000 developer teams, and a second-stage pilot at one of the largest US banks●      Security and the sales cycle: "no code can leave our four walls"●      Chris's take: AI labs are paid by the token, so they'll never build this themselves●      A usage-based model that replaced per-seat pricing●      Use of funds: engineering and an enterprise sales team●      Amar's view of the next five to ten years of corporate token spend Guest: Amar Goel, Co-founder & CEO, BitoHost: Chris Lustrino, Founder & CEO, Kingscrowd Bito is raising now. Kingscrowd rates Bito a 4.7 out of 5. To see the full analyst breakdown and discover how you can invest, visit kingscrowd.com. Inside Startup Investing is the only podcast where you can invest in every guest. Subscribe so you never miss a founder interview. Disclosure: This episode is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy any security. Investing in early-stage companies is risky and illiquid, and you may lose your entire investment.

Sascha Deri, founder and CEO of bluShift Aerospace, builds hybrid rocket engines that aren't explosive, can throttle, and can sit on a shelf ready to go. He joins Chris Lustrino from his test cell at a former Naval Air Station in Brunswick, Maine. Before bluShift, Sascha spent 25 years building a solar e-commerce company to nearly $40 million in revenue. He explains what a hybrid rocket actually is, and why both the solid-rocket and liquid-rocket camps ignore it. He also explains how safety turns into a business advantage: lower R&D cost, no explosive safety radius around the factory, and motors you can store like ordinary inventory. Two and a half years ago, an astronaut advisor told Sascha the solid rocket motor crisis was real, and bluShift pivoted to it. Today it's working with a hypersonics company that needs a booster it can test quickly. Sascha says bluShift comes in at about a quarter of the cost of the solid motor that customer was planning to buy. In this episode:●      From solar e-commerce to rocket propulsion●      Hybrid rockets explained: solid fuel, liquid oxidizer●      Why solid and liquid rocket engineers both ignore hybrids●      The solid rocket motor shortage and bluShift's pivot to defense●      Suborbital research with four to eight minutes of microgravity●      Seven-figure, milestone-based contracts with a hypersonics customer●      Why bluShift is building a smaller 15-inch motor to move faster●      Doing a lot with a little: concrete blocks, steel chambers and creative engineering Guest: Sascha Deri, Founder & CEO, bluShift AerospaceHost: Chris Lustrino, Founder & CEO, Kingscrowd bluShift Aerospace is raising on Wefunder: https://wefunder.com/blushift.aerospaceKingscrowd rates bluShift 4.5 out of 5, and it's a Kingscrowd Top Deal. Kingscrowd Edge members can read the full analysis at kingscrowd.com. Inside Startup Investing is the only podcast where you can invest in every guest. Subscribe so you never miss a founder interview. Disclosure: This episode is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy any security. Investing in early-stage companies is risky and illiquid, and you may lose your entire investment.

Mark Wattles opened the first Hollywood Video in 1988 and grew it to 2,000 company-owned stores. Now he's running the same playbook with drive-thru coffee. He joins Chris Lustrino to talk about 151 Coffee, the chain he founded in 2017, and his plan to take it from 15 stores to 1,000. 151 Coffee's stores in Dallas-Fort Worth and Kansas City average about $1.5 million a year, with around $350,000 in store-level profit. Mark explains why drive-thru coffee has exploded without hurting Starbucks. He also covers why sweet, customised drinks are what customers actually buy, and why a coffee shop doesn't need you every day of the week. Mark also compares opening video stores with opening coffee shops ("you're really managing people, not a business"). He covers his years as an activist investor and why he came back to building. And he explains why he refuses to franchise when 7 Brew has shown how well franchising can work. In this episode:●      Why drive-thru coffee took off, and the "elasticity of the consumer" nobody accounted for●      151 Coffee vs. Dutch Bros and 7 Brew: high volume, sweet drinks, fast, fun, friendly●      Hollywood Video: one store in 1988, a 1993 IPO at 15 stores, 1,000 stores six years later●      Store economics, 15–20% same-store sales growth, and a food rollout adding ~$150K per store●      Doubling to 30 stores in 24 months with a former Hollywood Video real estate VP●      Why the exit plan is an IPO, and why every store stays corporate-owned●      Boba, matcha, and building a kitchen that can survive a fad Guest: Mark Wattles, Founder, 151 CoffeeHost: Chris Lustrino, Founder & CEO, Kingscrowd 151 Coffee is not raising right now. It plans a new Reg CF offering and has a waitlist at 151coffee.com/waitlist. Research 151 Coffee and other startup investment opportunities at kingscrowd.com. Inside Startup Investing is the only podcast where you can invest in every guest. Subscribe so you never miss a founder interview. 151 Coffee has not yet filed a Form C with the SEC for its planned Regulation Crowdfunding offering. No money or other consideration is being solicited, and if sent in response, will not be accepted. No offer to buy securities can be accepted and no part of the purchase price can be received until the offering statement is filed, and only through an intermediary's platform. An indication of interest involves no obligation or commitment of any kind. Disclosure: This episode is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice or a recommendation to buy any security. Investing in early-stage companies is risky and illiquid, and you may lose your entire investment.

AutoCamp founder and CEO Neil Dipaola joins Chris Lustrino to explain how a design-forward glamping brand became the "Marriott of outdoor hospitality" — nine locations, a Hilton partnership, and a plan to reach 100 properties without owning the real estate. AutoCamp started in 2011 as a Santa Barbara mobile home park where Neil wanted to house teachers and nurses in Airstreams. Guests kept asking to stay overnight instead, and the pivot that followed produced a hotel room with St. Regis-level comfort inside an Airstream, a cabin or a tent, a short bike ride from Yosemite, Zion, Sequoia, Joshua Tree, the Catskills, Cape Cod and now Asheville. The part investors should pay attention to is the structure. The land, the utilities, the clubhouses and the tens of millions of dollars each location costs to build sit in a separate PropCo. What's raising on DealMaker is the Brand Co. — seven or eight employees, the intellectual property, the Hilton, Rivian and REI partnerships, and a percentage of every property's top-line revenue under long-term license contracts. Neil walks through why that is the same model Marriott and Hilton use, and why it scales faster than owning campgrounds. In this episode:●      Why AutoCamp is "anything but a camping trip" — and who it's really for (the indoorsy spouse)●      Site selection by data science: the top 40 metros and what's within a three-hour drive in every direction●      Occupancy in the 65–75% range, and running near 100% during the pandemic●      The Hilton partnership: 200 million Hilton Honors members, and the first time a major hotel company backed outdoor lodging●      Field Station, the $150-a-night sister brand built from renovated roadside hotels●      The path to 100 properties: organic growth plus M&A of other glamping platforms●      Guests who invest, guests who get married on property, and a loyalty program funded by this raise Guest: Neil Dipaola, Founder & CEO, AutoCampHost: Chris Lustrino, Founder & CEO, Kingscrowd AutoCamp is raising on DealMaker with a $1,001 minimum, open to accredited and non-accredited investors until October 31, 2026. Research AutoCamp and other startup investment opportunities at kingscrowd.com. Inside Startup Investing is the only podcast where you can invest in every guest. Subscribe so you never miss a founder interview. Disclosure: This episode is for informational purposes only and is not investment advice. Investing in early-stage companies is risky and illiquid, and you may lose your entire investment.