Author: Jesse Landry

Some research labs just push AI forward. Fundamental Research Labs just kicked the door in, rewired the hinges, and walked out with $33 million in fresh Series A fuel from Prosus Ventures. Not bad for a company that started life as “Altera” in December 2023 and now sits in the Bay Area quietly turning “what if” into “when.” The brain trust is pure technical artillery. Dr. Guangyu Robert Yang, a computational neuroscientist who once taught at MIT and was named a Searle Scholar, is running point as CEO. CTO Shuying Luo brought eight years of Google muscle, including AI features…

In semiconductor manufacturing, the margin for error is smaller than the font on your phone’s terms and conditions. You miss a defect, you’re not just tossing a chip, you’re throwing away yield, profit, and months of engineering sanity. SixSense saw that gap years before most chipmakers admitted it existed, and now they’ve got the funding to widen it, in the right direction. Founded in 2018 by Akanksha Jagwani (Chief Executive Officer) and Avni Agarwal (Chief Technology Officer), SixSense isn’t playing in the shallow end of artificial intelligence. They’ve built a platform that doesn’t just spot defects, it predicts them, classifies…

Some companies ride the renewable energy wave. Wattch is busy controlling the tide and the Atlanta-based provider of cloud-native monitoring, intelligence, and control solutions for commercial and distribution-scale solar and battery storage just banked a $6 million Seed round to put even more volts behind its vision. Led by Spero Ventures with key backing from cybersecurity pioneer Christopher Klaus, ex-GE Power CEO Steve Bolze, and Helioscope founder Paul Grana, this isn’t just capital, it’s a signal flare. Heavy hitters don’t write checks for a maybe. Credit where it’s due: Co-founder and CEO Alex Nussey didn’t stumble into this. From engineering…

In supply chain, the gap between “good enough” and “game-changing” is measured in weeks, not years. The companies that win are the ones that can see trouble coming, adapt before it hits, and make those calls with precision. That’s the game ketteQ has been playing since 2018, and now they just raised the stakes with a $20 million Series B led by Vocap Partners, with continued backing from Circadian Ventures. Founded by Mike Landry and Chris Amet, ketteQ isn’t another “legacy system, now with AI” story. Landry brings two decades of running supply chain transformations at Genpact and Barkawi. Amet…

There’s “tax season”… and then there’s living in a year-round chess match with the IRS. Most people play checkers. OLarry plays the board, the clock, and the opponent. This week, the AI-powered tax advisory firm out of Marin, California just banked $10 million in Series A funding led by TTV Capital, with Walkabout Ventures and Marin Sonoma Impact Ventures stacking in. This pushes total funding to $14.5 million, serious capital for a business built to make high-net-worth tax headaches someone else’s problem. The name? A tribute to founder Eric Rachmel’s late father, Larry, who ran a CPA shop the old-school…

When you look at supply chains today, they’re not chains, they’re tangled headphone cords from 2007. Everyone swears they’ll fix them “next week,” but next week turns into “never,” and the world keeps running on brittle systems and caffeine. That’s where Lyric steps in. Not to write songs about the problem, but to orchestrate a composable AI-powered platform that lets Fortune 500 turn chaos into choreography. The company isn’t tinkering at the edges; it’s letting enterprises design, simulate, and deploy supply chain intelligence without needing a PhD in both logistics and computer science. Founded in 2022 by Ganesh Ramakrishna, who…

There is a certain something in watching a company take on a trillion-dollar problem with the swagger of a garage-born startup and the execution of a public-market veteran. Human Interest was founded in 2015 by Roger Lee and Paul Sawaya with one mission: make retirement plans something every small and medium-sized business can actually afford, understand, and offer without losing their minds in paperwork. It sounds simple until you remember the old 401(k) world was basically a toll booth manned by legacy providers who billed like it was 1987. Fast forward a decade. The San Francisco-based fintech has grown into…

In banking, most players talk about innovation like it’s a seasonal trend. Grasshopper Bank treats it like oxygen. Founded in 2016 by Judith Erwin, the bank hit the ground in 2019 serving the business and innovation economy, not with marble lobbies and velvet ropes, but with a digital platform designed to actually work for small businesses, startups, VCs, and fintechs. When Mike Butler stepped in as President and CEO in 2021, after a 13-year run transforming Radius Bank into one of the most tech-forward institutions in the country, the mandate was simple: build a bank that moves only forward, just…

Glassbox has always been in the business of seeing what others miss. Not in the vague, “we know our customers” sense, but in the forensic, frame-by-frame, every-click-matters way. For over a decade, their AI-powered digital experience analytics platform has been quietly watching the world’s most complex customer journeys, then translating that chaos into actionable truth. Today, they’re getting even sharper. Poalim Equity, the investment arm of Bank Hapoalim, Israel’s largest financial group, has taken a strategic stake in the company. No dollar figure disclosed, which is fine, because the real currency here is access, credibility, and a straight shot into…

San Francisco just birthed something interesting, and it did not crawl out of a venture capitalist’s pitch deck cliché. Joinable Labs isn’t here to talk about artificial intelligence, they are here to make it actually usable, faster than the market thinks is possible. Founded in December 2024 by Brian Shin, the company has emerged from stealth with $2 million in seed funding from Accomplice Blockchain, Tess Ventures, and VitalStage Ventures, plus a lineup of AI and Web3 unicorn founders who clearly saw a chance to get in early on the infrastructure no one else is building. The premise is deceptively…