Author: Jesse Landry

Seattle just watched compliance get a little more certified. Certivo pulled in $4M in seed funding, led by Suffolk Technologies, with Pioneer Square Ventures back in the mix. That is capital with calloused hands. The kind that knows what it is building and who it is building for. This follows earlier backing from Pioneer Square Ventures, Fortive, and the AI Studio Fund when Certivo spun out of PSL. Translation: smart money doubled down. Congratulations to Kunal Chopra, CEO and Co-Founder, and Chetan Desh, CTO. Building in regulated markets is not for the faint of heart. It is chess in a…

Rockets do not care about hype. They care about physics, cash flow, and whether your math survives gravity. Stoke Space just raised another $510M in Series D funding, later extended to $860M, and suddenly the conversation shifts from ambition to inevitability. Andy Lapsa, Co Founder and CEO of Stoke Space, is not pitching sci fi. He is building Nova, a 100% reusable medium lift rocket designed to make space access routine instead of ceremonial. That word reusable gets thrown around a lot in this industry. Stoke Space is chasing full reuse, including the upper stage. That is the hard part.…

Some companies chase savings. Daffodil Health decided to ask who is getting paid for the chase. In a system where healthcare eats up 22% of the U.S. economy and more than $1T a year disappears into administration, a lot of middlemen have built very comfortable lives on percent of savings math. The bigger the problem, the bigger their cut. CEO Navin Nagiah looked at that equation and did not see innovation. He saw inertia with a commission plan. So Daffodil Health built an AI powered pricing and claims platform that lets health plans and TPAs bring repricing in house. Configurable…

FancyAI just secured a strategic investment from The Shipyard, and if you think this is another polite press release about “AI transformation,” you have not been paying attention to where discovery is actually going. Let’s start with the facts. The Shipyard announced a strategic investment in FancyAI to lead what they call the next era of brand discovery. Translation for the boardroom and the barbershop alike: when consumers stop Googling and start asking, the brands that get recommended win. This is not theory. This is distribution power shifting in real time. Congratulations to Tom Howell, Co-Founder & CEO of FancyAI,…

Auctane is not a single product story. It is the quiet architecture behind modern ecommerce shipping, a multi-brand platform powering merchants who would rather focus on selling than wrestling with carrier contracts and label logic. Formerly Stamps.com, the company went private in 2021 after a $6.6B acquisition by Thoma Bravo and reemerged under the Auctane name, signaling a shift from legacy postage provider to diversified global shipping technology platform. That rebrand was not cosmetic. It marked the consolidation of a portfolio built through decades of operational muscle and strategic acquisition. Today, Auctane operates a suite that includes ShipStation, Stamps.com, Metapack,…

S32 is what happens when Bill Maris decides curiosity is not a hobby but infrastructure. In 2017, after building Google Ventures into a capital engine inside Alphabet, Bill Maris founded Section 32 with a thesis rooted in consequence. Back the founders operating where technology and healthcare collide, where the science is dense, the markets are unforgiving, and the upside reshapes industries. The name references a section of the tax code tied to qualified small business stock, but the mandate is bigger than tax efficiency. It is about accelerating breakthroughs that matter. By 2021, S32 closed its fourth fund at approximately…

There is a strange new confidence in boardrooms right now. Companies are wiring AI into operations, compliance, customer workflows, and internal tools at a velocity that would have felt reckless 18 months ago. Product teams are shipping. Legal teams are recalibrating. Somewhere between deployment and discovery, a new layer of exposure is forming. On February 24, 2026, an event titled “AI created new legal risks for companies, but also opens new possibilities” steps directly into that tension. Not as spectacle. As signal. Hosted by Lawrence Krubner through the Respectful Leadership community, the format is disciplined: 6 speakers, 7-minute lightning talks,…

On the eastern edge of Canada, where the Atlantic tests steel and stamina daily, CoLab Software is building something designed to outlast both. From St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, Adam Keating and co-founder Jeremy launched the company in 2017 with a sharp observation: engineering decisions move quietly but carry billion-dollar consequences. So they built EngineeringOS, an AI-powered platform where human engineers and machine intelligence review designs together, capturing millions of annotations across 2D and 3D files and converting institutional knowledge into a living system. The market did not hesitate. In November 2025, CoLab closed a $72M Series C led by…

In 2017, while most teenagers were figuring out prom dates and WiFi passwords, Ethan Baehrend was building a manufacturing company in Chicago, not a garage hobby but a real company. Fast forward to Feb 15, 2026 and Creative 3D Technologies locked in a verified $5M seed round to scale something audacious: factory scale manufacturing condensed into a modular system called EVO. Factory in a Box is 3 words that sound cute until you realize what they imply, a single cell that can replace rows of specialized machines and a unit that fits through a standard door but thinks like a…

Ignium did not show up quietly. It walked in with $300M in fresh equity, a 1,700-person footprint, 3.6M sq ft of production capacity, and a thesis that reads like it was written in a SCIF instead of a boardroom. This is Albion River taking years of defense muscle and condensing it into a merchant provider built for the U.S. and allied weapons ecosystem. Software. Power. Energetics and Pyrotechnics. Not flashy platform primes chasing headlines. The subsystems. The parts inside the parts. The components that make the difference between a concept on PowerPoint and something that actually moves, signals, trains, fuels,…