Author: Jesse Landry

Confident Security didn’t just ask why AI privacy was broken, they built a cryptographically verifiable answer that actually stands up in court, audits, and a room full of zero-trust CISOs. No tape, no decoys. Just engineering that whispers provable privacy into the ears of banks, browsers, and sovereign AI agencies trying not to wake the beast of non-compliance. Founded in 2024 by Jonathan Mortensen, PhD, a Stanford-trained informaticist with a resume that reads like a secure data pipeline, Confident Security just stepped out of stealth with $4.2 million in seed funding. The round was led by Decibel with backing from…

July 16, 2025: BiomEdit, the animal health biotech spun out of Elanco Animal Health in 2022, just locked in an $18.4M Series B round. Led by ag-bio heavyweight Anterra Capital and backed by Nutreco, AgriZeroNZ, Elevate Ventures, and Betagro Ventures, this round isn’t just another check. It’s a strategic push toward launching BE-101 (Optavant™), the first engineered probiotic biologic to prevent necrotic enteritis in broiler chickens. And that’s not niche, it’s a $6B pain point in a sector that produces over 9.5B birds annually in the U.S. alone. Let that sink in: BiomEdit is dropping living therapeutics into a $6B…

There’s a fine line between paranoia and preparation, and StrongestLayer isn’t dancing on it. They’re rewriting it with LLMs, code, and something a little scarier than your inbox at 8 a.m. on a Monday. Straight out of stealth and already cracking into six-figure revenue, StrongestLayer just secured $5.2M in seed funding led by Sorenson Capital, with Recall Capital riding shotgun. It’s not just capital, it’s conviction in a future where AI threats don’t knock politely. They hijack your trust and leave your SOC team wondering if they’ve been catfished by a toaster. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in San Francisco’s…

In a space where most startups are still talking about reducing carbon footprints like it’s 2006, WattCarbon isn’t just talking, they’re measuring it, monetizing it, and putting it on-chain. While the rest of the industry argues over frameworks, McGee Young and Aaron Gubin built Aristotle, an AI-powered M&V platform that time-stamps and verifies carbon savings by the watt-hour and the gram. Real-time. Granular. Auditable. If your climate data isn’t this tight, it’s just storytelling. And now they’ve got more fuel for the fire. WattCarbon just closed a Seed Extension round led by Cerulean Ventures, City Light Capital, and Tom O’Keefe.…

There are startups. There are defense contractors. And then there’s Hadrian, a company that walks into a CNC machine shop, drops a line of Python and TypeScript, and walks out with a production line that hums at 3 a.m. without needing a sandwich break or a union negotiation. On July 17, Chris Power and the Hadrian crew dropped a $260 million Series C on the manufacturing world, and it wasn’t for vanity metrics or startup cosplay. This is about laying steel in the ground and rebooting American industry with a vengeance. The round was led by Founders Fund and Lux…

In a world where short-term rentals are dominated by mom-and-pop ops, patchy tech stacks, and a “hope-it-goes-well” guest experience, someone had to step in and stitch this fragmented luxury game together. That someone is StayTerra, and they’re not tiptoeing in. They’re moving in like they own the block. Born in 2024 out of a vision by Garnett Station Partners co-founders Matt Perelman and Alex Sloane, StayTerra was designed as a high-end hospitality roll-up with teeth. This isn’t just another aggregator grabbing listings and playing middleman. It’s an operating platform with real local muscle and centralized tech firepower. Think boutique meets…

There’s a certain ring to solving real problems in the places most startups overlook. EPR Fireworks didn’t show up trying to impress VC panels with flash. They entered the U.S. fire and EMS market back in 2016 because they saw a system failing the people who run toward danger when the rest of us are running the other way. While the tech world fumbled with simple solutions and support tickets that felt like sending a message in a bottle, EPR Fireworks quietly went to work. Nine years later, nearly 500 departments across 35 states are running on their platform, not…

Thirty years ago, a young Ph.D. student named Dr. Geoff Smart was grinding through his dissertation, deep in the data trenches with one of private equity’s heaviest hitters, KKR. Fast-forward to July 16, 2025, and the loop just closed. KKR’s Ascendant Fund has made a significant minority investment in ghSMART, the very firm that Dr. Geoff Smart built from that original research. That’s not just full circle. That’s legacy looping back like a masterstroke. ghSMART isn’t your average advisory shop. This Chicago-based firm has been quietly advising the loudest boardrooms for three decades. No hype, no noise, just 30,000 leadership…

Sometimes the smartest people in the room aren’t making the loudest noise, they’re building something real in silence, until suddenly, the silence gets funded. Hootology just secured $1.1M in Pre-Seed funding, and if you don’t know what that means for the $83B global market research industry, grab a chair and listen closely. This isn’t just another “AI-powered” anything. Stefanie Francis, Founder and CEO of Hootology, isn’t chasing trends, she’s been quietly at work since 2016, shaping a smarter, more honest approach to research. After co-founding Navigate Research and spending nine years helping blue-chip brands measure sponsorship ROI, Francis knew the…

Some startups chase headlines. Firestorm Labs just raised $47 million and didn’t blink. No big marketing blitz, no flashy photo ops, just an unapologetic move from prototype to production with the kind of composure that makes venture firms lean in, not look twice. Founded in 2022, Firestorm Labs is turning expeditionary manufacturing into a full-contact sport. Picture this: standard shipping containers reimagined as rapid-response 3D print shops that churn out unmanned aircraft systems (UAS) on-site, on-demand, and under pressure. This isn’t defense innovation with a capital D, it’s hardware that hits the tarmac ready. And behind this machine is a…