Author: Jesse Landry

If you’re still treating machines like background actors in your security stack, Corsha just made your old script obsolete. Founded by Anusha Iyer, a mind forged at Galois and sharpened by the Naval Research Lab, Corsha isn’t just riding the machine-to-machine (M2M) wave; it built the surfboard. And with a fresh strategic investment from Booz Allen Ventures, plus returning heat from SineWave Ventures, Razor’s Edge Ventures, and Ten Eleven Ventures, they’re doubling down on what the rest of the cybersecurity world is still trying to spell: non-human identity. This isn’t identity access management repackaged for bots. This is a patented…

CisLunar Industries didn’t wait for the space economy to heat up, they lit the fuse themselves. Tucked between Loveland and Denver, this crew of orbital blacksmiths just locked in a $1 million seed round, led by Colorado ONE Fund, and if you’re wondering why government and defense orgs are lining up to work with them, here’s a hint: they’re not selling vaporware. They’re engineering the backbone of the next-generation space economy, literally. At the center of it all is Gary Calnan, CFA, CEO and co-founder with a space finance brain and a defense industry edge, and Joe Pawelski, MEng, CTO…

In a world where cloud cost optimization usually means a dashboard full of yellow alerts, half-baked recommendations, and a PDF from finance nobody reads, Datafy just closed a $20 million seed round to prove one thing: real optimization doesn’t need a babysitter. Born from the brains behind E8 Storage and AWS’s own storage stack, Datafy is what happens when three veterans walk away from Big Cloud with the receipts. Zivan Ori, former co-founder and CEO of E8 Storage (acquired by AWS in 2019) and former Director of Software Development for EBS at AWS, knows this terrain like a war map.…

Vellum, the New York-based upstart with enterprise muscle and MIT-grade IQ, just closed a $20M Series A led by Leaders Fund, with backing from Socii Capital and returning believers Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Pioneer Fund, and Eastlink Capital. That’s $25M total fueling a company that isn’t playing the “scale fast, break stuff” game. They’re writing test-driven workflows for AI the way software should have been built, secure, observable, and actually usable by teams that don’t speak in tensors. Shoutout to co-founders Akash Sharma (CEO), Sidd Seethepalli (CTO), and Noa Flaherty (COO), the kind of trio that could turn a whiteboard…

If you’ve ever tried to get FedRAMP authorization, you know it’s like being asked to pass Navy SEAL training just to sell your SaaS to Uncle Sam. Six-figure consultants. 18-month timelines. A paper trail longer than War and Peace, and half as entertaining. Enter Knox, the New York-based federal managed cloud startup that just closed a $6.5M seed round led by Felicis Ventures, with Ridgeline Partners (returning) and Firsthand VC joining the mission. This isn’t just a raise, it’s a high-speed entrance ramp to a $15B federal cloud market that’s been stuck in second gear for too long. At the…

Earth has always been big data. The question has never been whether the planet’s telling a story. It’s whether anyone’s listening in a language AI can understand. LGND AI, Inc. just dropped the Rosetta Stone for Earth. $9 million in seed capital. Led by Javelin Venture Partners. With heavyweight backing from AENU, Space Capital, Overture, Ridgeline, MCJ, Coalition Operators, Clocktower Ventures, and angels like John Hanke (yeah, the Google Earth guy), Karim Atiyeh (Ramp CTO), and Salesforce’s own Suzanne DiBianca. If that lineup doesn’t get your eyebrows up, your signal-to-noise ratio might be busted. Let’s not skim past this. LGND…

In 2023, three engineers walked out of the AWS halls in Tel Aviv and into a problem no one else was brave, or crazy, enough to fix: cloud storage waste. You know the kind. You’re running EBS volumes on AWS, watching your cloud bill light up like a pinball machine, and no matter how many dashboards you stare at, the costs never scale down. Zivan Ori, Ziv Serlin, and Yoav Ilovich didn’t just see the bloat, they lived it. These guys didn’t pivot into cloud. They built it. Ori and Serlin co-founded E8 Storage, sold it to AWS, then led…

Foundation EGI just locked in a $23 million Series A, and if you think this is just another MIT spinout chasing hype, sit down, breathe through your nose, and listen closely. This is the moment AI stops hallucinating and starts engineering. Born out of MIT CSAIL, Foundation EGI isn’t riding the LLM train. They built the tracks. This crew, Dr. Mok Oh (CEO), Prof. Wojciech Matusik (Chief Science Officer), and Michael Foshey (Head of Research), aren’t trying to replace engineers. They’re giving them something better than caffeine and legacy software: a domain-specific AI platform that doesn’t just parse your messy…

Most CPAs didn’t go to school to become part-time data-entry clerks. But that’s exactly where the industry landed, chained to scanned PDFs, K-1s that read like legal riddles, and “AI-powered” tools that require more onboarding than a 747. Enter Abacus AI Inc., the Sugarman brothers’ full-send answer to the profession’s silent crisis. The backstory? Classic Silicon Valley irony. Cody Sugarman and Brandon Sugarman, Stanford alums turned builders at Stripe, Airtable, Google, and DocuSign, got slapped with a 7216 consent form from their own accountant. Translation: your tax data’s going overseas, good luck. Most people shrug. These two launched a company.…

Let’s talk about gravity. In physics, it keeps planets in orbit. In finance, it keeps advisors locked into legacy platforms, slow, clunky systems choking on their own inefficiencies. But every once in a while, a company shows up and breaks that gravitational pull. And right now, that company is iCapital. Founded in 2013 by Lawrence Calcano, Dan Vene, and Nick Veronis, three guys who knew the alternative investment space so well, they practically invented the category, iCapital has turned complexity into clarity for financial advisors and wealth managers. It’s not just a marketplace; it’s the tech infrastructure behind how modern…