Author: Jesse Landry

$17.1M says 1 thing loud and clear. Wallets are not just for your credit cards anymore. Badge just secured $13.8M in Series A funding led by TTV Capital, with Stripe, Synchrony Ventures, and Infinity Ventures stepping in. That stacks on top of a previously unannounced $3.3M seed round led by QED Investors, bringing total funding to $17.1M. Lynne Laube of TTV Capital, co-founder and former CEO of Cardlytics, is joining the board. When operators who built performance marketing machines place a bet, they are not buying vibes. They are buying conviction. Congratulations to Eric Senn, Founder and CEO of Badge,…

March 2023. While most of the world was arguing with chatbots, Elon Musk was building one. xAI was born with a thesis that felt less like a pitch deck and more like a bar bet with the universe: build artificial intelligence that actually seeks truth. Not optimized for vibes. Not tuned for applause. Truth. Fast forward and xAI is no longer a scrappy lab with ambition. It is a SpaceX subsidiary, the parent company of X, and the engine behind the Grok family of AI models. That escalated quickly. Then 02/18/2026. Riyadh. HUMAIN, the Public Investment Fund owned AI company,…

The lungs are quiet until they are not. Ask anyone living with COPD or asthma what a “common cold” feels like. It is not common. It is a spiral. A rhinovirus shows up uninvited, and suddenly oxygen feels like a luxury item. That is the problem Altesa BioSciences decided to chase down, not with sympathy, but with science. Altesa BioSciences closed an oversubscribed $75M Series B to push its antiviral agenda forward. Forbion led the round, with Sanofi stepping in and existing investors Medicxi, Pitango, and Atlantic Partners doubling down. When that caliber of capital crowds into a clinical stage…

Some startups raise capital. Others jump levels. Jump just pulled in $80M in Series B funding, led by Insight Partners, with F-Prime, Allianz Life Ventures, TIAA Ventures, and Peterson Partners stepping into the ring, and Battery Ventures, Sorenson Capital, Pelion Venture Partners, and Citi Ventures running it back. Total raised now sits at $105M. Not a typo. Not a flex. Just velocity. Congratulations to Parker Ence, Co-Founder and CEO, and to Co-Founders Tim Chaves and Adam Kirk for building something advisors did not know they needed until they could not imagine working without it. Founded in 2022 and launched publicly…

Some companies build features. Adronite builds sight. On 19 February 2026, Adronite secured $5M in Series A funding led by Gatemore Capital Management, and if you read it like just another headline, you miss the tension humming underneath it. Software systems are not getting smaller. They are metastasizing. Enterprises are stacking code on code until no one can see the whole machine anymore. That is not innovation. That is organized chaos with a login. Edward Rothschild, CEO and Co-Founder of Adronite, is not pitching another dashboard. He is talking about full-system, AI-powered codebase intelligence. The kind that does not just…

There is something poetic about a company named Ascent raising $45M in a Series C while the ground beneath higher education keeps shifting. When federal caps tighten and tuition does not blink, the climb gets steeper. Some companies freeze. Others ascend. Congratulations to Ken Ruggiero, Founder and CEO of Ascent Funding, and the entire San Diego team of 120+ operators who just proved that disciplined growth still attracts serious capital. A global asset manager led the round, which tells you this is not tourist money. This is long term conviction in a category most people only talk about when the…

There is a quiet kind of power in Idaho Falls, Idaho. Not the loud, grid-strained kind. The kind you can hold in your hand, ship by road, and let run for decades. NuCube Energy just raised $13M to prove that nuclear does not have to be massive to matter. Sometimes the future fits in a DeccaCell. Congratulations to Cristian Rabiti, Ph.D., MBA, CEO and Co-Founder, and Bill Gross, Co-Founder and Founder and CEO of Idealab Studio. Arizona Nuclear Ventures led the round, joined by Emission Reduction Corporation, Rob Walton, and Jordan Rose Walton. Smart capital backing serious atoms. That combination…

Ten63 Therapeutics just crossed the $45M mark, and if you understand the math behind molecules, you know that number is more than capital. It is conviction. Conviction that AI is not a buzzword in biotech. It is a weapon. Let’s start where it matters. Marcel Frenkel, PhD, Co Founder and CEO, built this with Mark Hallen, PhD, and Bruce Donald, PhD. 3 Duke minds who decided the phrase “undruggable” sounded more like a dare than a diagnosis. Bruce Donald now chairs the Scientific Advisory Board, but make no mistake, the intellectual backbone runs through that original trio. Back in May…

Adverum Biotechnologies is not a lab experiment chasing headlines. It is a clinical-stage gene therapy company that has spent years tightening its thesis around a single, high-stakes conviction: 1 injection could replace a lifetime of retinal shots. Based in Redwood City, California, and built on the earlier platform of Avalanche Biotechnologies, Adverum has evolved into a focused ophthalmology player aiming to establish gene therapy as a new standard of care for highly prevalent eye diseases. If you follow serious startup news, this is the kind of company you watch quietly before the broader market catches up. At the center is…

In 2004, Jean-François Clavier planted a flag in Silicon Valley with a clear premise: the earliest checks, written with conviction, create asymmetric outcomes. He called the firm SoftTech VC. By 2017, the name evolved to Uncork Capital, but the strategy did not. The mandate was simple and hard to execute: lead at seed, earn meaningful ownership, and stay close enough to the builder to matter when things break or bend. In a noisy market, that consistency became signal. In May 2025, Uncork closed $300M across Uncork VIII and Uncork Plus IV. $225M targets seed-stage companies. $75M fuels follow-on rounds for…