Author: Jesse Landry

Most teams write code like it’s still 2015, then slap on some AI and call it “next-gen.” But in Atlanta, PlayerZero just showed us what building for the AI era actually looks like. Forget the patchwork. This is predictive software quality that learns, fixes, and heals before your customers ever know something’s off. Founded in 2020 by Animesh Koratana, yes, the same guy who studied under Matei Zaharia and Peter Bailis at Stanford DAWN Lab while the rest of us were just trying to get a clean deploy, PlayerZero just broke cover with a $20M round. That’s $5M in seed…

What happens when a Harvard mathematician who sold his last company for half a billion builds a machine to outthink your doctor? You get OpenEvidence, the AI engine that just locked in a $210 million Series B and is putting the “clinical” in clinically obsessed with scale. This round was co-led by Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins, with Sequoia Capital returning from the Series A like Jordan back in ’95. Coatue, Conviction, Thrive, and Greycroft rounded out the syndicate, and if you’re counting dollars and decimal points, OpenEvidence is now sitting pretty at a $3.5 billion valuation. Daniel Nadler (Founder…

Let’s get one thing straight: Ambience Healthcare didn’t just raise $243 million, they cemented themselves as the AI backbone of modern medicine. And they did it with the kind of operational clarity and technical depth that most startups only dream of and most health systems desperately need. Founded by Michael Ng and Nikhil Buduma, two founders who lived through medical blind spots and turned that pain into product, Ambience has become the AI operating system that’s pulling clinical care out of the admin swamp and into the 21st century. While most startups are out here playing dress-up with generative AI,…

Quick Custom Intelligence didn’t just raise a round; they made a move that could reshape how intelligence flows through the $250B global gaming and hospitality industry. In a sector where most vendors still think Excel macros are cutting-edge, QCI just locked in its first institutional funding, an eight-figure minority growth investment from San Francisco-based Curve Partners. This isn’t spray-and-pray capital. This is Curve Partners’ signature play: finding battle-tested, bootstrapped tech machines and lighting the fuse at the exact right inflection point. Founded in 2020 by two industry assassins, Dr. Ralph Thomas (CEO) and Andrew Cardno (CTO), QCI built something the…

Quince didn’t just raise $120 million, they made it look effortless. While most D2C startups are still lost somewhere between a viral TikTok and a delayed container ship, Sid Gupta and his team built something rare: a brand with taste, tech, and timing. And now, with their Series C backed by Notable Capital and Wellington Management, they’re not playing the fashion game, they’re reshaping the supply chain that powers it. Let’s be clear. Quince isn’t slapping a label on the same white-label goods and hoping for a collab. They went upstream, deep into the manufacturing jungle, and came out with…

The walls of every SOC are screaming. Not metaphorically, literally, in alert fatigue, false positives, and the dull hum of overworked analysts chasing ghosts across screens. Enter Prophet Security. No, not the tarot-card kind, though what they’re doing feels clairvoyant. This team is bringing agentic AI into the war room, not as a glorified intern, but as a full-blown operator that doesn’t just respond, it acts, hunts, and explains. Founded in 2024 by Kamal Shah, Vibhav Sreekanti, and Grant Oviatt, Prophet didn’t just look at the broken state of security operations, they stared it down and built an AI that…

Somewhere between a courtroom cold call and a call center meltdown, Caseflood.ai decided enough was enough. The legal world’s intake problem wasn’t a staffing issue, it was an intelligence gap. One that couldn’t be solved by a louder receptionist or a shinier CRM. So three high school prodigies from Indiana built an AI voice agent that could do what every firm thought they needed ten paralegals for. And then they went and closed $3.2 million to take that chaos and flood it with structure. This round was led by ACQ Ventures, the firm built by Alex Hormozi and Leila Hormozi,…

There’s a $345 billion elephant in the ER, and its name is care inconsistency. Walk into any hospital and you’ll find brilliant clinicians handcuffed by fragmented knowledge, outdated PDFs, and protocols buried deeper than your grandma’s casserole recipe. Enter C8 Health, the startup turning institutional memory into institutional muscle, and it just locked in a $12M Series A to prove it’s not playing small ball. The round was led by Team8, with returning believers Vertex Ventures Israel and 10D Ventures re-upping like they knew this track would break charts. Founded in 2022 (with roots all the way back in 2019…

Oxide Computer Company isn’t selling you some abstract “cloud journey.” They’re delivering the full weather system, rack-scale, purpose-built, and engineered for velocity. When Steve Tuck, Bryan Cantrill, and Jessie Frazelle teamed up in 2019, they weren’t looking to retrofit the past. They started from first principles and burned the blueprint. What came out of that fire? A new category of infrastructure: the Cloud Computer. Let’s be clear. This isn’t your CEO’s legacy rack, strung together like old stereo components and hoping to feel modern. Oxide reimagined everything, hardware, firmware, control plane, all fused into a single API-driven machine that lands…

There’s a moment when signal becomes story. Not the metaphorical kind, but the raw, pulsing data that surrounds every space we move through, Wi-Fi pings, Bluetooth whispers, LiDAR sweeps, all those invisible threads we never think about. AIRIA doesn’t just listen to those signals, it turns them into operational clarity. Spatial intelligence that shows who’s where, what’s working, what’s not, and how to move smarter. And now, the noise just got louder, in the best way. AIRIA just announced a fresh seed round, with investment led by Counterview Capital and Fulcrum Venture Group. Also returning to the mix are early…