Author: Jesse Landry

$450M just walked into the restaurant industry without asking for a table. On February 17, 2026, inKind announced it closed $450M in equity and debt to fund up to 10,000 additional U.S. restaurants in the next year. Not a seed check. Not a cute extension. $450M aimed straight at one of the most capital-starved corners of hospitality. Johann Moonesinghe, CEO and Co-Founder, is not pitching vibes. He is deploying scale. And the origin story matters. inKind was built by operators who understood the math behind a full dining room and an empty bank account. The model is simple enough to…

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99 Kids Holdings Co. just secured $5M in a Series A, and this one feels less like a funding round and more like a cultural sequel the market has been waiting for. Exponential Ventures stepped up to lead the round, placing a confident bet on a franchise that already proved it could travel across borders and belief systems without losing its pulse. Congratulations to Chairman James Drage and the team at 99 Kids Holdings Co. for getting this across the line. When a Partner at Exponential Ventures doubles down as Chairman, that is not casual capital. That is conviction. And…

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Circuit just pulled $30M into Austin like it was clocking in for a night shift, and the timing feels less like luck and more like muscle memory. Manufacturing floors do not care about hype cycles. They care about whether the quote is right, the configuration fits, and the tech in the field is not guessing. That is where Circuit steps in, and that is why this round matters. Circuit secured a $30M angel round to bring purpose built AI into manufacturing and service operations. Let that phrase breathe. Purpose built. Not generic chatbot wallpaper slapped onto a workflow that already…

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Simile just raised $100M in a Series A led by Index Ventures, with Bain Capital Ventures, A*, and Hanabi Capital stepping in like they saw the future and decided to front-run it. That is not a casual check. That is conviction. That is belief that modeling human behavior is about to become enterprise oxygen. Congratulations to Joon Sung Park, Co-founder and CEO, Percy Liang, Co-founder and Chief Scientist, Michael Bernstein, Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, and Elaina Yallen, Chief Customer Officer, for building something that feels less like software and more like a crystal ball with a Stanford PhD. When…

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Money is emotional. Infrastructure is not. And that is exactly why Vestwell just secured $385M in Series E funding and made it look clinical. On 2.18.2026, Vestwell announced a $385M raise led by Blue Owl Capital and Sixth Street Growth, pushing total capital raised to $660M and doubling its valuation since the 2023 Series D. No theatrics. Just math. The kind of math that makes institutional investors lean forward instead of scroll past. Congratulations to Aaron Schumm, Founder and CEO of Vestwell, who saw something most people missed. Retirement is not a product. It is plumbing. Savings is not a…

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Selector just raised $32M and doubled its valuation to $375M. That is not a vanity headline. That is a signal flare in a market drowning in dashboards and still starving for answers. Santa Clara stays busy. But this one hums a little different. Selector, founded by Juniper Networks veterans Kannan Kothandaraman and Nitin Kumar, is building AI powered observability that does not just watch the network burn. It tells you why it is smoking in the first place. Causal AI. Large language models. Knowledge graphs. The kind of stack that does not blink when the infrastructure does. Congratulations to Kannan…

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There is crowded, and then there is courageous. Alzheimer’s is both. Into that arena walks Korsana Biosciences with $175M in venture backing and a point of view sharp enough to cut through plaque and polite skepticism. Founded in 2024 with a $25M seed investment from Fairmount and Venrock Healthcare Capital Partners, Korsana Biosciences did not stumble out of a lab looking for attention. It was built with intent. The Series A followed in September 2025, a $150M private round co-led by Wellington Management and TCGX, with J.P. Morgan Life Sciences Private Capital, Janus Henderson Investors, Sanofi Ventures, Foresite Capital and…

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There is a moment in every tech cycle when the bottleneck is not software, not talent, not capital. It is power. Raw, stubborn, grid-level power. And while everyone else is arguing about GPUs like they are rare sneakers, DG Matrix quietly walked into the room and said, cool story… but what is feeding them? $60M in Series A says a lot without raising its voice. Engine Ventures led the round, with Helios Climate Ventures, Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, Fine Structure Ventures, MCJ, and Sabanci Climate Ventures stepping in. Every existing investor doubled down, including ABB. That is not polite applause. That…

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Security used to be a math problem. Bigger primes. Harder puzzles. Hope nobody had a faster calculator. Aliro just raised $15M to say that hope is not a strategy. Boston-based Aliro is building a software-driven entanglement platform that anchors network security in the laws of physics. Not probability. Not assumptions. Physics. The kind that does not negotiate. The kind that catches an eavesdropper the way gravity catches a dropped mic. Gutbrain Ventures led the oversubscribed round, with Cisco Investments, Argon Ventures, and Wonderstone joining the table. Bob Davoli, Chairman of Aliro and Founder of Gutbrain Ventures, is not placing small…

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There’s a storm forming in healthcare, and this one isn’t about chaos. It’s about clarity. Rainfall Health just closed a $15M Series A, led by Two Bear Capital, to help hospitals navigate the CMS TEAM model without bleeding revenue in the process. When policy shifts, most organizations flinch. Rainfall Health leans in. Big congratulations to Ahmed “Eddie” Qureshi, Founder and CEO of Rainfall Health, for building a company that understands something most vendors miss: compliance is not a checkbox, it’s a revenue strategy. Under the CMS Transforming Episode Accountability Model, 742 health systems are now playing a 5-year game where…

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