Wednesday, December 10, 2025
In today’s digest, flu season is back with a vengeance, a guide to SNL tix, and learnings from our NYC AI Demos series (so far). 🤖
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Flu season has arrived with a wallop. 🤧 New York saw more than 14,500 flu cases in the last week of November — an 80% jump from the week prior. Nearly 800 New Yorkers were hospitalized, up 93% week-over-week. 😷 (Gothamist)
State officials are urging New Yorkers to get vaccinated for the flu, COVID, and RSV ahead of holiday gatherings.
So far, 3.4 million New Yorkers have received their flu shot this season, slightly below last year’s pace.
If you haven’t gotten your flu shot yet, find a flu vaccination site here.
MoMA PS1 will be free for everyone starting in January. 🎨 The Long Island City contemporary art museum — long known for elevating rising talent — is dropping admission fees for the next three years, thanks to a $900,000 gift from creative entrepreneur and art collector Sonya Yu. (New York Times)
Admission has already been free for New Yorkers since 2015, but the new policy opens the doors to all visitors.
Kindergarten application season is officially underway! Applications for fall 2026 opened Tuesday, and families have until January 23 to submit their choices. 🍎 (Chalkbeat)
All children born in 2021 are eligible to apply, and families can rank as many schools as they’d like.
Last year, of 46,373 applicants, 83% got their first choice and 95% landed one of their top three.
Applications can be submitted here, where families can also find info on transportation, parent satisfaction, early dropoff, and after-school options.
In other reading:
Want ‘Saturday Night Live’ tickets? Get in line (Gothamist)
The 43 best restaurants in New York (Grub Street)
New York Fashion Week is officially banning fur (Hypebeast)
What We’ve Learned Running NYC’s Busiest AI Demo Night
A riddle for you: What happens when you give NYC’s AI builders a stage and a waterfront view of Manhattan?
You get NYC AI Demos, a live, no-spin event for AI builders to showcase what they’re shipping. 🤖
After five NYC AI Demos nights, 40+ companies on stage, and a monthly room of 200+ people with a 1,000+ person waitlist, a few things are very clear from the organizer side.
✋ A step back: What is NYC AI Demos? Hosted by Tech:NYC with Pensar and The Refinery at Domino in Williamsburg, each event features 6-8 live demos from both early-stage startups (like Slingshot AI, Superblocks, and Modal Labs) and enterprise teams (like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, IBM, QuantumBlack AI by McKinsey, Waymo, and more) building the future of AI.
Not to toot our own horn, but it’s now the largest monthly AI demo series on the East Coast.
⏪ Back to the learnings: There’s a huge appetite for real AI, not AI “vibes.”
We launched the series with a simple goal: live, unfiltered demos from builders actually shipping AI in New York.
The response has been overwhelming and consistent: people want to see products in motion, not decks.
Demand keeps growing, which tells us NYC’s AI community is hungry for hands-on, vendor-agnostic spaces to stress-test ideas in public.
NYC’s advantage is applied AI across every sector:
Curating the lineups has shown us just how broad the city’s AI footprint really is.
The room maps the full stack of AI in NYC — from frontier research to hospital ops, financial systems, marketplaces, and creative tools — running in the wild in one of the world’s most complex cities.
🫂 Community density is NYC’s “platform feature”: The audience skews technical (staff engineers, ML researchers, founders, product teams, investors) asking sharp, unscripted questions.
Builders describe NYC as a place where your customers, critics, and collaborators are all on the same subway car (obviously).
The series has also been a great place for talented technical job seekers to meet the fastest growing AI startups in the city looking for top talent.
The NYC AI ecosystem is only getting bigger: With new AI teams arriving in the city every month and established companies expanding their NYC presence, the density of innovation here is accelerating.
“If [founders] are able to make it here, I think that says a lot for the longevity of the company,” said Kerem Proulx, co-founder of Pensar AI.
🗓️ Save the date: NYC AI Demos returns on January 29, 2026.
In other reading:
A new role every startup is desperate to fill: “Head of IRL” (X/Andrew Yeung)
The five AI tensions leaders need to navigate (HBR)
The neuroscience of why you’re always feeling behind at work (Fast Company)
Aradigm, an NYC-based benefits platform for cell and gene therapies, raised $20 million in Series A funding. Frist Cressey Ventures led the round and was joined by Andreessen Horowitz and Morgan Health.
Fierce Foundry’s Investment Readiness Bootcamp for Female Founders, a six-week program designed to help female founders prepare for their first institutional raise in the next 6-18 months. Apply by December 15 for 10% off here.
New York City Economic Development Corporation is re-launching the Greenlight Innovation Fund, a Request for Proposals to provide City capital funding for the development of facilities in New York City that support the Green Economy, Life Sciences, Advanced Technology and Creative Industries. Submit your proposals by December 19 here.
New York City Economic Development Corporation’s Founder Fellowship, an accelerator program designed to improve access to capital and networks for underrepresented founders across all tech-enabled sectors. Apply by December 31 here.
New York City Economic Development Corporation has launched a Request for Applications for the NYC Catalyst Fund II, an investment fund aiming to create social and environmental impact, fuel economic growth and development in New York City, and generate income for NYCEDC. Applications will be reviewed on a rolling basis across several submission deadlines, beginning on January 30, 2026 here.
The New York Fashion Tech Lab has announced its 2026 Collective, for women-led, B2B, retail tech startups. Apply here.
HubSpot’s How You Hustle, where you and your business could be featured and receive free press exposure to their 1.5 million subscribers. Apply here.
Company Ventures’ Grand Central Tech Residency’s spring 2026 cohort, a 12-month residency program for founders and teams looking to build in-person in NYC. Apply here.
Company Ventures is hosting AI Review events, a year-long conversation series on the current and future state of AI. Submit your AI-related event for consideration here.
Union Square Ventures’ “usvwork” — a casual coworking day once a month for founders and builders in NYC. Apply here.
Zero Irving — the Union Square tech hub home to Civic Hall — is relaunching its Workforce Development Project Fund, which awards $200,000 annually for programs that expand tech access and economic mobility for underrepresented New Yorkers, especially those in Manhattan Community District 3 (Lower East Side, East Village, Chinatown). Submit your proposal here.
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