Author: Jesse Landry

Blockchains were pitched as borderless systems. In reality, they splintered into separate economies. Ethereum here. Solana there. Liquidity fenced in by protocol walls. LayerZero Labs entered that fragmentation in 2021 with a networking thesis, not a token pitch. Founded by Bryan Pellegrino, Co-Founder and CEO, Ryan Zarick, Co-Founder and CTO, and Caleb Banister, Co-Founder, the company grew out of the University of New Hampshire InterOperability Lab. Three engineers studying network systems decided crypto’s core bottleneck was not user growth. It was cross chain communication. LayerZero Labs built a general purpose messaging protocol that allows decentralized applications to send data and…

Dragonfly does not breathe fire. It studies it. Founded in 2018 with a $100M inaugural fund, Dragonfly was built to bridge East and West in crypto, pairing Alexander Pack and Bo Feng’s early conviction with a thesis that digital assets would not respect borders, only code and adoption curves. By 2022, the firm closed a $650M third venture fund, oversubscribed and unapologetically focused on crypto infrastructure, DeFi, smart contract scaling, and consumer crypto products. In a market addicted to hype cycles, Dragonfly positioned itself as a long-term allocator of attention and capital inside the global startup ecosystem. Today, Managing Partners…

Miami just printed another headline, and this one came with a mic in hand and a camera rolling. Street Poller Media has quietly crossed $500K per month in revenue, bootstrapped, no safety net, just signal and sweat. Let that sit for a second. In a market where everyone is pitching decks about attention, Shane Ginsberg built a machine that actually owns it. Founder, operator, ringmaster of the sidewalk stage. And he did it the old-fashioned way. By getting strangers to talk and the internet to care. Street Poller Media is not your polished conference room agency. It is 25+ certified…

Whop just secured a $200M strategic investment from Tether, landing at a $1.6B valuation, and if you understand the creator economy, you understand this is not just a capital event. It is infrastructure meeting inevitability. Congratulations to Steven Schwartz, Founder and CEO, Cameron Zoub, Co Founder and CGO, and Jack Sharkey, Co Founder and CTO. Building since 2020, operating since 2021, and now stepping into a different weight class. Whop is simple in concept and ruthless in execution. A marketplace where digital entrepreneurs sell access. Software. Communities. Courses. Signals. If it can be paywalled, it can live on Whop. Over…

Some industries whisper disruption. Insurance never bothered. It just buried people in PDFs and hold music and called it underwriting. Then Harper walked in and decided the policy should not require a séance. Harper, YC W25, just secured $47M in combined Seed and Series A funding. Emergence Capital led the round, with participation from Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners, Antler, 10x Founders, Fellows Fund, Outset Capital, Lobster Capital, Optimist Ventures, Pioneer Fund, and Untapped Ventures. That is not a cap table. That is a conviction table. Congratulations to Dakotah Rice, CEO and Co-founder, and Tushar Nair, Co-founder and CTO. 2…

Redwood City is not where most glaucoma stories begin. They usually start in exam rooms, in half whispers, in the slow realization that vision is slipping and time is not patient. But in 2017, a different kind of story started at the University of Pennsylvania, when Rui Jing Jiang, Brandon Kao, and Adarsh Battu looked at nanotechnology and saw more than a lab experiment. They saw a way to relieve pressure, literally and figuratively. Fast forward. Avisi Technologies just secured $10.7M in Series A financing led by MedVenture Partners, with Sherpa Healthcare Partners, SNBL-Gemseki, SBI US Gateway Fund, Golden Seeds,…

Joan Rodríguez just raised $8.3M in a seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, and if you understand what that actually means, you know this is not just a line item on a cap table. This is signal. This is Silicon Valley looking at vector graphics, squinting, and saying, “There’s infrastructure here.” QuiverAI. Even the name moves with intention. A quiver holds arrows. Precise. Repeatable. Built to launch. And that is exactly what QuiverAI is doing with SVGs, turning visuals into ammunition for product, brand, and marketing teams who are tired of wrestling pixels when they should be shipping code. Andreessen…

Stripe just reminded the market that gravity is optional when you own the rails. At a $159B valuation in its latest employee and shareholder tender, Stripe is not chasing headlines. Stripe is buying time, loyalty, and leverage. This is a secondary transaction, not a cash grab. Liquidity for employees. Control for the company. Thrive Capital, Coatue, and Andreessen Horowitz stepped in on the buy side while Stripe itself repurchased shares. That is conviction with a calculator in hand. Patrick Collison and John Collison built this thing in 2010 with a simple premise: make moving money as programmable as sending data.…

Prophet Security just pulled in strategic capital from Amex Ventures and Citi Ventures, and if you live anywhere near a SOC, you can feel why that matters. This is not vanity funding. This is fuel for a fire that has been burning in every security operations center that is tired of drowning in alerts while the clock keeps ticking. First, respect where it is due. Congratulations to Kamal Shah, Co-founder and CEO, and Vibhav Sreekanti, Co-founder and CTO. Two operators who have seen the movie before. Kamal Shah helped build StackRox into something Red Hat wanted badly enough to buy.…

Some companies sell software. Some sell artificial intelligence. Guidde sells clarity. And in an era where enterprise tools multiply like rabbits on espresso, clarity is the real currency. Guidde just locked in $50M in Series B funding, led by PSG Equity, with strategic firepower from monday.com and continued conviction from Norwest Venture Partners, Entrée Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, and Inkberry Ventures. That is not a cap table. That is a vote of confidence from operators who understand that artificial intelligence without adoption is just expensive wallpaper. Congratulations to Yoav Einav, Co-Founder and CEO, and Dan Sahar, Co-Founder and CTO, for building…