Author: Jesse Landry

Every restaurant owner knows the feeling. It is 4:47 p.m., the dinner rush is warming up, 2 people call out, 1 never confirmed, and the POS is blinking like it is trying to send smoke signals. Labor is your biggest line item and somehow the least predictable. Welcome to the hourly economy, where spreadsheets pray and managers improvise in real time. Now enter Ando, out of San Francisco, building AI infrastructure for the global hourly workforce. Not another scheduling app with prettier colors, but true infrastructure, the pipes under the building and the grid behind the grid. Ando just secured…

Some founders build software. Some founders build software because they have been the one holding the flashlight at 2 a.m., staring at a broken system and thinking, there has to be a better way. Jason Veiock has been that guy. Now Jason, Founder and CEO of Bearing, just closed a $4.5M oversubscribed seed round to bring physical security operations into the modern era. AZ-VC led the round, with High Alpha, PHX Ventures, and Lightbank backing the vision. Scottsdale, Arizona just got a little louder in the enterprise tech conversation. Let’s talk about the name for a second. Bearing. In security,…

Concrete does not care about hype. It cares about ratios, pressure, timing. Get it wrong and it cracks. Get it right and it outlives you. Erie Strayer has been getting it right since 1912, when G.H. Strayer started a steel shop in Erie, Pennsylvania with 9 people and a welding torch. By World War II, the company built more than 100 overhead electric traveling cranes and thousands of clamshell and dragline buckets for the U.S. Army and Navy. By 1950, the focus shifted fully to concrete batching. Today, from 1851 Rudolph Ave on 21 acres and 175,000 square feet of…

Prostate cancer diagnostics has lived in a strange middle ground for years. MRI if you can get it. Blind biopsy if you cannot. Expensive machines in hospital basements. Guesswork in exam rooms. Then along comes a company called Exact Imaging and decides maybe “exact” should mean something. Exact Imaging just secured a $10M financing led by iGan Partners, the firm that has backed the company since inception and remains its largest shareholder. That kind of loyalty in venture is not sentimental. It is conviction earned the hard way. Credit to Randy AuCoin, President & CEO, who has been building this…

Talkiatry just secured $130M in Series D funding, and if you think this is just another telehealth headline drifting through your feed, slow down for a second. This is mental health infrastructure getting capitalized like it matters. Andreessen Horowitz and Perceptive Advisors led the round, with support from Left Lane Capital and blisce, plus debt financing from Banc of California. That is not tourist money. That is long-term conviction capital backing a model that is built to last. Respect where it is due. Congratulations to Robert Krayn, Co-Founder and CEO, and Georgia Gaveras, DO, Co-Founder and CMO. Building a national…

Nuclear is having its quiet comeback moment. Not the Hollywood kind with sirens and slow motion. The disciplined, sleeves rolled up kind. The kind where math wins. Alva Energy just stepped out of stealth with $33M in Series A capital, led by Playground Global, with Segra Capital, NGP, Mercator Partners, and Alumni Ventures joining the round. Returning backers 8VC, Logos, Simon Holmes à Court, Isabelle Boemeke, Gigascale Capital, Safar Partners, Collaborative Fund, Activate Global, and Michael Anders doubled down. Pat Gelsinger is joining the board. When capital this sharp converges on one cap table, it is not a social call.…

Cydelphi just stepped out of stealth with $3M in seed capital, and if you read between the breach reports, this one hits different. In 2025 alone, 4,701 ransomware incidents. Up 46% year over year. Median dwell time cut from 9 days to 5 because attackers now bring artificial intelligence to a knife fight and turn it into a drone strike. Average ransom payment? $1.13M. 76% of organizations admit they cannot match the speed of AI powered attacks. That is not a gap. That is a canyon. Congratulations to Ron Newman, Co Founder and CEO, Lee Patenaude, Co Founder and CTO,…

Opaque just raised $24M in Series B funding at a $300M valuation, and if you work anywhere near sensitive data, you should probably sit up a little straighter. This is not another artificial intelligence company promising magic dust and hockey sticks. This is Opaque Systems, built out of UC Berkeley’s RISELab, where Ion Stoica, Raluca Ada Popa, Rishabh Poddar, Wenting Zheng, and Chester Leung turned academic muscle into enterprise armor. These are not tourists in security. They wrote the textbooks, then decided to commercialize the footnotes. Walden Catalyst Ventures led the round again, with Intel Capital, Race Capital, Storm Ventures,…

Manufact just put the “fact” back in manufacture, and this one did not roll off an assembly line. It was built in the open, commit by commit, repo by repo, until the market had no choice but to pay attention. Manufact, formerly known as mcp-use, has secured $6.3M in seed funding led by Peak XV, with Liquid 2 Ventures, Ritual Capital, Pioneer Fund, and Y Combinator in the round, plus an angel who happens to be the co-founder and COO of Supabase. That is not tourist capital. That is infrastructure money. The kind that shows up when the rails of…

There are companies that tiptoe into the public markets, and then there is Aktis Oncology walking in like it knows exactly why it is there. January 2026 opens with Aktis becoming the first biotech IPO of the year, raising $318M gross on an upsized offering priced at the top of the range, with the greenshoe pushing total proceeds to roughly $365M. Boston-built, Durham-powered, and incubated inside MPM BioImpact, this is the kind of entrance that forces anyone tracking startup news to stop scrolling and recalibrate. Aktis Oncology is not chasing novelty. It is chasing a stubborn truth in oncology. Solid…