Author: devcuration

In a world where every dev shop and enterprise is chasing AI integration like it’s the last cocktail shrimp at a VC gala, one startup decided to stop chasing and start routing. And just like that, OpenRouter came online. Founded in 2023 by Alex Atallah (yeah, that Alex, the OpenSea co-founder who turned Web3 into a dinner table topic) and Louis Vichy (former founding engineer at Ponder and co-founder of Plasmo), OpenRouter is betting that AI’s model madness needs one clear lane. Not five APIs. Not three dashboards. Just one interface to rule them all, and make switching models less…

In the heart of Traverse City, a place better known for cherries than kilowatts, Takanock is quietly orchestrating one of the most audacious moves in modern infrastructure. And when I say quietly, I mean the kind of stealth that doesn’t need headlines because it’s already three steps ahead. Today, that silence just got $500 million louder. Let’s break it down. Founded in 2023 by Kenneth Davies, the architect of Google Energy and the person who rewired Microsoft’s renewable energy strategy, Takanock isn’t just building infrastructure. It’s building urgency solutions for a market addicted to digital growth and allergic to waiting…

If you’ve ever tried filing a warranty claim and thought, “This feels like getting audited by a DMV with a vendetta,” you’re not alone. That post-purchase moment, the one where something breaks, confusion reigns, and customer support becomes a full-time job, has been ignored by tech for decades. But in true Midwestern fashion, a new player just rolled up with a clipboard, a Ph.D., and zero patience for inefficiency. Enter Mahalo, the Chicago-based startup serving small and midsize manufacturers what they’ve been starved for: a real post purchase experience (PPX) platform. Not a widget. Not a “portal.” An actual AI-powered,…

AI doesn’t run on magic, it runs on data. And if GenAI is the new arms race, Centific just locked in its war chest: $60 million in Series A funding led by Jenny Lee of Granite Asia. You don’t get a Midas List veteran to bet on your infrastructure unless your pipes are next-level, your roadmap has teeth, and your leadership team knows how to move markets, not just models. Centific isn’t selling GPUs or chasing benchmark flexes. They’re doing the work beneath the hype, building the AI data foundry that powers the systems the rest of the hype train…

You ever try building a rocket engine in a Google Doc? Yeah, neither have I. But hardware engineers have been forced to design the future with the same tools you use to draft your PTO request. That is, until AllSpice.io showed up and put some damn respect on hardware’s name. Founded in 2020 by Valentina Ratner (CEO) and Kyle Dumont (CTO), AllSpice.io is the GitHub for hardware teams, minus the noise, plus the intelligence. And today, the San Francisco-Boston crew just locked down a $15 million Series A led by Rethink Impact, with strong backup from L’ATTITUDE Ventures, GingerBread Capital,…

In a world obsessed with encryption algorithms and brute-force firewalls, Qunnect is playing a different game entirely, one rooted in the laws of physics, not the limits of math. And this week, the Brooklyn-based quantum networking pioneer just dialed things up with a fresh $10M Series A extension, led by Airbus Ventures, and backed again by Cisco Investments and Quantonation. For those paying attention, this wasn’t just another funding round, it was an oversubscribed mic drop from a team building the backbone of tomorrow’s secure internet, one entangled photon at a time. Qunnect didn’t start in a VC war room…

There’s a quiet myth that athletes only have one shot, on the field, under the lights, 40 yards at a time. The Pro Athlete Community just raised $7.6 million to remind you that myth belongs in the locker room trash. Founded in August 2022 by Chip Paucek and Kaleb Thornhill, PAC isn’t chasing headlines or highlight reels. It’s building a global platform where pro athletes don’t “transition,” they evolve. Chip is the ed-tech architect behind 2U, Inc., and Kaleb? Let’s just say when he talks player development, NFL front offices and the San Antonio Spurs listen. Together, they’ve created more…

There’s nothing sexy about filing freight claims or digging through inboxes to match a tracking number to a lost pallet, unless you’re into operational masochism. But if you’ve ever sat in the middle of a warehouse watching a logistics team copy-paste tracking info between WMS and ERP systems like it’s still 2005, then you already know the real villain in the supply chain isn’t volatility, it’s manual work. Enter BackOps AI, where logistics gets its own version of a command-line interface for the chaos. BackOps AI just locked in a $6 million seed round led by Construct Capital, with continued…

There’s AI, and then there’s Abridge. Let’s not confuse the two. One is chasing the hype cycle with unicorn headbands and “founder vibes.” The other is quietly eating clinical documentation for breakfast and billing workflows for lunch, while preparing to serve dinner to the $1.5 trillion U.S. healthcare admin monster that nobody else has had the guts, or tech, to tackle head-on. Abridge just secured a $300 million Series E led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Khosla Ventures jumping back into the mix. The new round lands just four months after their $250 million Series D. Yes, that’s $550 million in…

SuperDial just raised $25 million in a Series A, and if you’re still thinking of this as a glorified robocaller, you’re about five beats behind the drop. Led by SignalFire, marking one of the first investments from their shiny new $1B applied AI fund, this round brings in the deep bench of Slow Ventures, BoxGroup, and Scrub Capital, along with $3M in venture debt earmarked for go-to-market fuel and R&D fire. What started as SuperBill, a healthcare billing company pushing paper through a fax-addicted industry, has morphed into a full-stack voice AI juggernaut. Founders Sam Schwager and Harrison Caruthers, who…