Author: Jesse Landry

If you thought stone carving was a lost art, think again. Monumental Labs just raised an $8 million seed round to prove that tradition doesn’t have to die, it just needs a robotic arm and a CEO with something to say. Founded in 2022 by Micah Springut, a former internet entrepreneur who traded algorithms for a chisel, Monumental Labs is fusing classical stone sculpture with AI-driven robotics. Imagine a seven-axis robot carving a marble bust with 0.5 mm precision while a human sculptor finishes it with the same care that once touched the walls of Florence. This isn’t nostalgia. It’s…

When RJ Scaringe greenlit a stealth side hustle inside Rivian back in 2022, it wasn’t to dabble in scooters. It was to test how far Rivian’s powertrain and software tech could scale down without losing its soul. Fast-forward to March 26, 2025, Also, Inc. officially steps out of the shadows, hits the ignition, and doesn’t just ride, it roars into the micromobility market with $105M in seed funding and a roadmap that reads like a masterclass in precision and patience. Led by President and Co-Founder Chris Yu, who brought product muscle to Tesla, Specialized, and Rivian, the team scaled from…

Let’s talk about Portola, because someone finally had the guts to build an AI companion that doesn’t try to trick you into thinking it’s your best friend, your therapist, and your soulmate, all rolled into one slightly-too-smooth chatbot. That’s not the game here. Portola’s building Tolan, a 3D, voice-native AI companion app that encourages users to get off their phones and back into real life. Imagine that: tech designed to make you less addicted to tech. Sounds like science fiction. Feels like the future. Founded in 2023 and launched publicly this past February, Portola is the brainchild of Quinten Farmer…

If you’ve ever crossed time zones and landed with a dead SIM, no signal, and a $47 roaming surprise waiting like a love letter from your telecom overlord, you’ve met the problem Airalo just raised $220 million to vaporize. Founded in 2019 by Ahmet Bahadır Özdemir and Abraham Burak, two entrepreneurs with zero patience for legacy telecom red tape, Airalo has turned connectivity into something that actually works like it should: fast, borderless, and 100% digital. No airport kiosks. No plastic. Just data when and where you need it, across 200+ countries. Your phone catches a signal before your passport…

When you name your company Zero Hash, you better bring something more than blockchain bumper stickers. You’re not allowed to half-step when your whole brand is about abstracting chaos into clean, compliant, composable infrastructure. Thankfully, Edward Woodford and team didn’t just show up, they showed out. Founded in 2017 with a philosophy degree, a finance pedigree, and a résumé that includes launching a CFTC-registered derivatives venue, Edward Woodford didn’t set out to sell shovels in the gold rush. He built the digital jackhammer. And now, after closing a $100 million Series E led by Interactive Brokers (NASDAQ: IBKR), with returning…

Sometimes it starts in a university lab. Other times, in a garage. SuperAnnotate? It started in the friction between theory and reality, a pair of PhD candidates who saw the bottleneck in AI, said “enough,” and made the jump from academia to enterprise. What Vahan Petrosyan and Tigran Petrosyan built wasn’t just a startup. AI isn’t starving for models. It’s starving for good data and the infrastructure to scale it. Fast forward to July 15, 2025, and the signal just got a hell of a lot louder. SuperAnnotate has secured a $13.5 million Series B extension led by Dell Technologies…

Datavations just raised $17 million in Series A, and if you think this is just another AI-for-retail play, you’re not paying attention. This is hedge fund DNA meets home improvement grit, and the results are getting loud across the $615 billion U.S. home improvement market. Let’s rewind. In 2020, Philip Odelfelt was building predictive analytics on Raspberry Pis in a basement, while most startups were polishing pitch decks, he was hitting sub-1% forecasting error. That’s not marketing spin, that’s quant-level accuracy on hardware barely strong enough to run a Spotify playlist. Joined by Jacob Lucas, who writes ingestion pipelines like…

The browser was supposed to be the window to the web. But somewhere between cat memes and cloud dashboards, it became a broken lock on the enterprise front door. Every tab a risk. Every session a liability. And most IT teams? Playing defense with a hope and a prayer. Then Island showed up. Not a vacation. Not an escape. But a battleground built for enterprise control, security, and productivity. The Enterprise Browser wasn’t born in a lab of idealism; it was forged in frustration by two guys who’d been deep in the trenches. Mike Fey, the former President & COO…

You want to talk edge? Let’s talk silicon. While everyone else was busy chasing ChatGPT integrations like it was Pokémon Go for enterprise, Groq Inc. built the AI version of a hypercar engine, then slipped it into the cloud and hit the gas. Founded by Jonathan Ross, the engineer who kickstarted Google’s TPU project before leaving Google X with more ambition than budget, Groq is now raising up to $500 million at a $6 billion valuation, and doing it on the back of a $1.5 billion infrastructure deal with Saudi Arabia. That’s not hype. That’s geopolitical-grade validation. But let’s not…

The insurance world is a slow beast. Built on legacy systems, paper trails, and processes that still smell like fax toner. And then comes Quandri, quietly storming the gates with a Renewal Intelligence Platform that’s not here to play nice. It’s here to automate the grind out of personal-lines insurance servicing. Jackson Fregeau and Jamieson Fregeau didn’t stumble into this. They engineered it. From the early days of automation consulting to the hard pivot into insurance brokerages, this wasn’t some “vision quest”; it was pattern recognition. Repetition. Waste. Latency. The same manual workflows breaking agencies across North America. So, they…