Author: Jesse Landry

Novig just pulled in $75M in Series B capital, and if you understand what that actually means, you can hear the tension in every sportsbook executive suite from here to Vegas. A company named Novig. No vig. No house edge siphoning pennies until they turn into yachts. Just a commission free, peer to peer sports prediction market where traders face each other, not the house. That wordplay is not cute branding. It is the thesis. Pantera Capital led the round. Multicoin Capital, Makers Fund, and Edge Equity stepped in. Returning firepower from Forerunner, Perceptive Ventures, and NFX. When that lineup…

Some funding rounds whisper. This one hums like a power plant warming up. OpenAI is reportedly nearing a funding package north of $100B, with total capital in this latest raise potentially pushing past $126B. Pre money valuation around $730B. Post money flirting with $850B. Numbers so large they stop sounding like money and start sounding like GDP. Bloomberg says the first phase centers on strategic heavyweights. Amazon up to $50B. SoftBank as much as $30B. NVIDIA around $20B. Microsoft back in the mix as both partner and participant. Not a cap table. A Mount Rushmore of compute. Respect where it…

Some brands retire. Some brands reload. When Coca-Cola shelved Honest Tea in 2022, most people saw a sunset. Seth Goldman and Barry Nalebuff saw unfinished business. Add chef Spike Mendelsohn to the mix and what you get is not nostalgia. You get Just Ice Tea, launched under Eat the Change, brewed organic, Fair Trade, and ready to drink with a conscience. Just Ice Tea stepped back into a category the founders helped define, but this time with sharper edges. Organic leaves. Fair Trade certification. Real brewed tea in glass bottles and cans. Sweetened with agave and honey, never cane sugar.…

Some startups chase clicks. Others chase contracts. Vizzia chases something less glamorous and a lot more real: the trash nobody wants to talk about and the public safety everybody depends on. In September 2021, Katrin de Proyart and Alexandre Leboucher looked at Europe’s illegal dumping problem and saw more than garbage bags in the bushes. They saw blind spots. 2 HEC and Polytechnique grads with a background in image analysis do not usually wake up and say, let us build cameras for cleaner streets. But that is exactly what happened. Not for optics. For outcomes. Fast forward to February 2026.…

The quiet operators always fascinate me. Not the loud ones on stage promising to “disrupt” paperwork like it’s a bar fight. I’m talking about the companies that look at regulatory chaos, shrug, and build infrastructure so clean you barely notice it working. Harbor Compliance is that kind of company. The kind that turns red tape into runway. In February 2026, Harbor Compliance secured a majority growth investment from Bregal Sagemount. No valuation theater. No dollar-amount chest pounding. Just a serious capital partner stepping in because the fundamentals spoke loud enough. And when serious capital moves, it usually means something is…

On Feb 18, 2026, Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to acquire Momentum, and in a cycle crowded with noise, this is the kind of signal that defines startup news. Salesforce did not buy a dashboard. It bought ears. It bought the ability to hear what revenue teams actually say to customers and convert that conversation into structured intelligence inside the world’s largest AI CRM. Agentforce 360 and Slackbot are about to get fed by the raw voice of the market. Momentum was founded in 2020 by Santiago Suárez Ordoñez, Ashley Wilson, and Moiz Virani, born during the pandemic when revenue…

Handshake just made a calculated move that reframes how software engineers plug into the AI economy. On February 16, 2026, San Francisco based Handshake, legally Stryder Corp., announced it acquired Taro, the YC S22 community built in Redwood City by Rahul Pandey and Alex Chiou. No purchase price disclosed. No glossy media tour. Just synchronized posts from Garrett Lord, Rahul Pandey, Alex Chiou, and the Handshake account. Clean. Direct. Intentional. In a market addicted to noise, this is the kind of startup news that travels through operator circles first. Handshake was founded in 2014 after beginning at Michigan Technological University…

Immigration is paperwork until it is personal. Then it is oxygen. In October 2023, Alma Immigration entered the market with a thesis forged in lived experience. Aizada Marat, Harvard-educated lawyer and former McKinsey operator from Kyrgyzstan, had navigated the system herself and nearly paid for flawed legal guidance with her career. Delays separated her from family. Friction became fuel. Alongside Assel Tuleubayeva, former product manager at Step, and Shuo Chen, Uber alum who joined in March 2024, Aizada Marat built Alma from the inside out. Three immigrants. More than a dozen visas collectively. They understood the stakes were not theoretical.…

There are venture firms that follow momentum, and then there are venture firms that engineer it. Costanoa Ventures belongs to the second category. Founded in 2012 by Greg Sands, the firm was built with restraint and intent. Fewer investments. Deeper engagement. Higher signal. With more than $2B in assets under management and fresh capital from a $275M Fund V and a $119M Opportunity Fund III, Costanoa is doubling down on early-stage AI-enabled B2B companies where complexity is a feature, not a bug. Greg Sands structured the firm around discipline. Each partner makes just 1–2 new investments per year. That constraint…

Somewhere in a Midtown conference room, a bank exec finally admitted what everyone already knew. Their travel portal felt like it was built when flip phones were still cool. 10 tabs open. Clunky UX. Loyalty points moving at the speed of paperwork. Customers bouncing. Revenue leaking. All that brand equity… outsourced to mediocrity. Enter Odynn. New York born, AI wired, modular to the core. And now armed with $9.5M in Seed capital led by Bonfire Ventures and co-led by Fiat Ventures. That is not a vanity round. That is conviction capital. Congratulations to John Taylor Garner, Founder & CEO, Anuj…