Author: Jesse Landry

There is a certain kind of audacity that leaves Google’s TPU team, walks out of Mountain View with scar tissue and conviction, and says we can build a better engine for intelligence itself. In November 2022, Reiner Pope and Mike Gunter did exactly that. Not to chase noise. To chase throughput. To chase latency. To chase a belief that large language models deserved silicon designed for them and nothing else. Fast forward to February 23, 2026. MatX announces a $500M Series B. Bloomberg covers it the next day. The valuation sits in the several billions. Total funding now stands a…

Croissant just pulled $28M into the oven, and this batch is rising with purpose. Founder and CEO John Howard, alongside Co-Founder and CTO John Klose, has built something that makes traditional ecommerce look a little… stale. New York and Nashville based. $14M in funded proceeds, $14M in incremental debt capacity. Total capital raised now $52M. Over $50M in GMV. More than 100,000 users. That is not noise. That is signal. Portage, Third Prime, and George Roberts led the equity in this round. Let that sit for a second. When capital that disciplined leans forward, it is not for vibes. It…

Somewhere between a city council meeting and a 200-page PDF that nobody asked for, trillions of dollars are hiding in plain sight. Most companies selling into government treat it like a treasure hunt with no map. They hire reps, cross their fingers, wait for an RFP to magically appear like a comet. And then they act surprised when the deal was decided 6 months before the PDF hit the portal. NationGraph just raised $18M in Series A funding to make that chaos predictable. The round was led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Perplexity’s Fund, XYZ Venture Capital, Reach Capital,…

Signal cuts through noise. Always has. The difference now is the noise fights back. TBD just locked in $3M in seed capital to build something most of the internet forgot how to measure: real human sentiment. Not bot farms. Not AI-generated consensus. Not vibes dressed up as data. Real people, verified as real, casting real votes. Corey Miller, Co-Founder and CEO, and Taehoon Lee, Co-Founder, both alumni of dYdX, saw the same problem the rest of us pretend is manageable. If the inputs are synthetic, the outputs are fantasy. So they built a market where humanity is the moat. CMT…

In 2018, while most security teams were still obsessing over endpoints and perimeter defenses, Brendan O’Connor and Brian Soby were focused on a blind spot hiding in plain sight: SaaS. The enterprise had already shifted its crown jewels into cloud applications, yet visibility inside those environments was fragmented at best. From San Mateo, they founded AppOmni with a conviction shaped by experience. Brendan O’Connor had served as Security CTO at ServiceNow and previously led security at Salesforce. Brian Soby had led product security at Salesforce. They understood how modern applications behave under real enterprise pressure, and they built the platform…

Polychain Capital does not knock. It materializes. Founded in 2016 by Olaf Carlson-Wee, Coinbase’s first employee and former Head of Risk, the firm emerged before institutional crypto was fashionable. While most investors were still debating whether Bitcoin deserved oxygen, Olaf Carlson-Wee was underwriting a new asset class built on cryptographic scarcity. His Vassar thesis on Bitcoin was not academic curiosity. It was early pattern recognition. Polychain Capital became the vehicle for that conviction. Regulatory filings show roughly $5.6B in assets under management across 19 pooled vehicles, all managed on a fully discretionary basis. That scale places Polychain Capital among the…

The snow was coming down sideways in New York while Dylan Zhang dialed in from a San Francisco hotel room he had not yet decided to call home. I was staring out my right shoulder at white chaos wrapping around buildings like it had a personal vendetta, and on my screen was a founder who had just raised $7.5 million and was talking about it like he had signed up for jury duty. That contrast set the tone. This was Tavern Community’s first fully virtual event. Benji Schwartz opened with that. Applications for the AI cohort were rolling in from…

Tel Aviv builds companies that think in threat models. In 2022, Oligo Security entered the arena with 3 former elite IDF cyber officers who had watched a single open source flaw ripple across production systems and stain global brands. Nadav Czerninski, Co-founder and CEO. Gal Elbaz, Co founder and CTO. Avshalom Hilu, Co-founder and CPO. They did not set out to scan code. They set out to interrogate what actually runs. By February 2023, Oligo Security emerged from stealth with $28M across Seed and Series A, backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Ballistic Ventures, TLV Partners, and operators including Shlomo Kramer,…

There’s smart money. Then there’s disciplined money. And then there’s the kind of money that doesn’t chase noise, it funds signal. Updata Partners just closed Updata Partners VIII at $875M. Oversubscribed. Hard cap. 6 months. In a market where capital has been picky and LPs read every footnote twice. That’s not luck. That’s reputation compounding. Carter Griffin and Jon Seeber, both General Partners, aren’t tourists in this game. Alongside General Partner Braden Snyder, they’ve built a firm that understands something most funds forget when the market gets frothy. Software is not about flash. It is about durability. Recurring revenue. Capital…

Mexico moves about $5B–$7B a day in local currency bond trading, and more than 98% of it still happens the old way. Phones. Relationship capital. “Call me back.” In a world that trades equities and crypto at light speed, that stat just sits there like a rotary dial in a fiber optic era. Cicada, a U.S. regulated electronic trading platform, just raised $13.5M in Series A funding to modernize local currency Latin American bond trading. The round was led by Citi through its Markets Strategic Investments unit, with B3 investing via its independent venture arm L4, alongside Kaszek, Dila, and…