Author: Jesse Landry

Space doesn’t wait, and neither does Cascade Space. While the rest of the industry files RF link budgets in spreadsheets like it’s still the Shuttle era, these guys are pulling 1 Mbps telemetry from a probe 58 million miles out. Not metaphorically. Literally. NASA’s STEREO-A. Real signal. Real-time. Jacob Portukalian and Arlen Abraham didn’t just read the brief. They wrote the operating manual. After high-impact stints at SpaceX, Astra, and SPAN, they launched Cascade in April 2025, fresh off Y Combinator’s X25 batch, to take on the bottlenecks holding back lunar and deep-space communications. Their thesis was brutally simple: if…

New York just got a little louder, and no, it’s not another overpriced cocktail bar in Williamsburg with “vibes.” It’s Queen One, and they just raised over $5.5 million in a Friends and Family round that feels less like a warm hug and more like a calculated opening move on a digital chessboard. This isn’t your usual bootstrap-meets-blind-optimism story. This is Ryan Urban, yes, the same Ryan Urban who turned Wunderkind (formerly BounceX) into a unicorn, signed the lease at One World Trade, and had Gucci, Dior, and Samsung all speaking fluent personalization, teaming back up with growth and marketing…

The edges aren’t just where things end. They’re where they get real. Where networks cut out, infrastructure collapses, and tech tourists head back to the comfort of their fiber-fed headquarters. But that’s exactly where Armada lives, by design, by conviction, and now, by $131 million in new strategic capital. Founded in 2022, Armada wasn’t built for climate-controlled conference rooms or cushy keynote stages. It was built for oil fields, combat zones, and blackout zones, places where cloud computing taps out and only edge infrastructure with teeth can survive. Led by Dan Wright (ex-CEO of DataRobot, ex-COO of AppDynamics), Jonathan Runyan…

There’s a quiet crisis in enterprise tech: mission-critical systems built on open-source frameworks that hit end-of-life like an expired carton of milk in a billion-dollar fridge. The vendors dip. The patches stop. Compliance teams sweat. Engineers stare down migration roadmaps like they’re opening Jumanji. That’s when HeroDevs steps in, not with a cape, but with code that keeps the whole operation breathing. Founded by Aaron Frost in 2018, an open-source OG and Google Developer Expert, HeroDevs isn’t here to play superhero, they’re here to keep your legacy software from becoming legacy liabilities. This week, they locked in a $125 million…

There’s a moment every founder hits when they realize the tools they’re using were built for a world that doesn’t exist anymore. For Courtne Marland, that moment came somewhere between the 173rd pitch deck and the 963rd sales call, watching revenue reps grind through yet another screen-share hostage situation, waiting on CRM updates like it’s 2006 and Slack didn’t exist. That’s where Lyra was born, not as a plugin, not as a patch, but as a ground-up reimagination of the meeting itself. One where the call is the workspace. The canvas. The pitch. The proof. Today, Lyra is stepping out…

The American dream used to come with a picket fence and a 30-year mortgage. Now? It comes with equity you can’t touch unless you’re rich, retired, or willing to sell a kidney. Enter Unlock Technologies, based in Tempe, built for the moment, and unapologetically here to cash out the un-cashable. Founded in 2019 by Jim Riccitelli, a CFA-holding ex-Unison exec who knows more about home equity than most lenders know about ethics, Unlock is reshaping what liquidity means for U.S. homeowners. No debt. No interest. No monthly payments. Just a clean trade: a slice of future appreciation in exchange for…

Radiologists are drowning. Imaging backlogs are piling up like email in your spam folder, and hospitals are hemorrhaging time and money trying to keep up. Meanwhile, Aidoc isn’t just tossing them a life vest, it’s building a battleship. Founded in 2016 by three Talpiot alums who cut their teeth decoding airborne imaging data in Israel’s military intelligence scene, Aidoc has since evolved into the most FDA-cleared clinical AI company on the planet. And as of July 23, it just locked in a $150 million growth round, $110 million in equity, $40 million in revolving credit, from General Catalyst and Square…

When most people hear “crypto mining,” their brain jumps to flashing rigs, sky-high energy bills, and enough carbon output to make Greta scream into a pillow. But Bitzero Blockchain Inc. isn’t most people, and their latest $25 million raise just flipped the power narrative. Quietly. Precisely. Like a sniper with an ESG playbook and a P&L to match. Founded in 2021 by Akbar Shamji, Bitzero was never built to ride the Bitcoin hype. It was engineered, Cambridge-style, to rewire how infrastructure powers the blockchain economy, starting with renewable energy and ending with actual accountability. Not the carbon-offset theater or “greenwashed”…

38 Degrees North, the Sausalito-based renewable infrastructure crew just closed a $230M growth equity round, led by Climate Adaptive Infrastructure and Kimmeridge Energy Management Company, with returning investor S2G Investments doubling down like they’ve seen the deck. The funding, announced July 17, 2025, isn’t just a flex. It’s a calculated leap into the next phase of distributed generation: smarter projects, faster builds, and infrastructure that actually fits the world we’re living in. Now before anyone slaps the “solar developer” label on them and scrolls on, pause. This team isn’t chasing utility-scale pipe dreams or burning cash in the name of…

Retirement planning isn’t just broken; it was never built for the 70% of Americans who worked 40 years, did what they were supposed to, and still got ghosted by the financial system. Enter Retirable, a New York-based fintech with a simple, quietly radical idea: what if everyone, not just the ultra-wealthy, deserved fiduciary advice, a real income plan, and a monthly retirement paycheck they could actually live on? On July 16, Retirable locked in a $10 million Series A, led by IA Capital Group, with strategic checks from Nationwide Ventures, Western & Southern Financial Group, Clocktower Ventures, and returning believers…