Author: Jesse Landry

Kognitos just pulled off the kind of move that makes enterprise software vendors sweat through their Patagonia vests. $25 million in fresh Series B funding, led by Prosperity7 Ventures, with backers like Khosla Ventures, Wipro Ventures, Engineering Capital, Dentsu Ventures, and Alumni Ventures all showing up to the table like they know something the rest of the automation world doesn’t. And they do. This isn’t just a funding round. This is Binny Gill, CEO, founder, and low-key automation revolutionary, doubling down on a vision that’s equal parts sci-fi and surgical precision. Gill’s bet? That the future of automation doesn’t live…

Somewhere between a Citi spreadsheet and an analyst’s third coffee-fueled breakdown, a deal dies in the data. Not because the math’s wrong, but because the intelligence is buried in a 92-page document that reads like it was ghostwritten by Kafka and a lawyer on Ambien. That’s where Claira comes in, and this week, the machine just got seven million reasons louder. Claira, the AI-powered deal intelligence platform built specifically for capital markets, just locked in a $7M seed round. Barclays, Citi, and Reimagine Tech Ventures co-led the raise, with extra firepower from Activant Capital, KDX, and OPCO Ventures. This isn’t…

In a world where billion-dollar defense budgets still get tracked in Excel and PDFs are passed around like state secrets, someone had to step up and say, “Enough.” That someone is Obviant, and they just locked in $7.1 million in seed funding to make chaos in the defense market a solvable equation. Founded in 2021 and run with precision by Brendan Karp (CEO) and Dylan Taylor (Co-founder), Obviant is the data intelligence platform built to decode the $1T+ U.S. defense machine. This isn’t your garden-variety SaaS tool wrapped in patriotic hype. The platform doesn’t just show you the map, it…

Let’s talk alchemy, Houston-style. Not the medieval kind with wizards and cauldrons, this is 2025, and the team at Elemental Advanced Materials is out here turning trash into treasure with tech that actually delivers. We’re talking plastic bags and gas by-products reborn as carbon nanomaterials and clean hydrogen. Not “clean-ish.” Not “net-neutral if you squint.” Real clean. Commercial scale. Proven patents. And now? $20 million in fresh fuel to scale it up. Props to Founder and CTO Ron Presswood and Co-Founder and Director of Strategy Ian Bishop, who’ve been chasing this vision since the early 2000s, before climate tech had…

There’s something about watching engineering teams scramble egg tests together at 3 a.m. just to ship a “minor” update. And by poetic, I mean the kind of tragic haiku that ends with prod going sideways and Slack going nuclear. Skyramp didn’t just see that pain, they lived it. And instead of churning out another “AI wrapper for testing,” they built a rocket. Headquartered in San Francisco and born in the crucible of flaky pipelines and test suite chaos, Skyramp just dropped the kind of announcement that should have every DevOps leader paying attention. $10 million in seed funding, led by…

If you’ve ever watched a biotech startup walk a tightrope between scientific ambition and clinical execution, then Neuron23 just did a full-on backflip, mid-air, blindfolded, and stuck the landing with $96.5 million in fresh Series D fuel. That’s not your average extension cord. That’s a warp-speed cable plugged straight into the next frontier of precision medicine. The round, closed June 24, 2025, was led by an undisclosed heavyweight in healthcare and joined by a murderers’ row of deep-pocket conviction: Westlake Village BioPartners, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Redmile Group, Blue Owl, Kleiner Perkins, HBM Healthcare Investments, and Acorn Bioventures. That kind…

There’s something quietly savage about building a $766 million company in an industry most of tech still side-eyes like it’s wearing a flip phone and a Members Only jacket. Ledgebrook didn’t show up to be cute, they showed up to dominate. And if you’re not watching what Gage Caligaris and his crew are doing in E&S, you’re asleep at the terminal. Less than three years ago, Caligaris walked out of Liberty Mutual after turning a niche portfolio into $450M+ in Gross Written Premiums and became that guy who bet his actuarial mind and Harvard math brain on wholesalers, the most…

Imagine cloning your brain, not some clunky chatbot knockoff, but a full-stack digital extension of you. Your expertise, your tone, your weirdly specific hot takes on quarterly OKRs and oat milk lattes, preserved, fluent in multiple languages, and available on-demand via text, voice, or video. Welcome to Delphi, the San Francisco AI company turning personal knowledge into programmable presence. And they’re not whispering into the void. They just raised $16 million in Series A led by Sequoia Capital, with heat from Menlo Ventures, Anthropic’s Anthology Fund, Proximity Ventures, Crossbeam, Parable, Abstract Ventures, 49Palms, MVP Ventures, and an angel list that…

Recruiting’s never been broken, it’s just been gatekept, overpriced, and wrapped in enough red tape to make the DMV look like a SaaS unicorn. But when tech layoffs hit and headhunters got ghosted, John Kim and Jeffrey Li didn’t just sit on the sidelines watching resumes rot. They built Paraform, a high-octane recruiter marketplace straight out of San Francisco’s wild-type DNA, designed to bring the best recruiters off the bench and back into the game, this time with AI in their corner and real skin in the bounty. Let’s talk facts. Founded in 2022, Paraform isn’t some résumé upload site…

There’s something about watching engineering teams scramble egg tests together at 3 a.m. just to ship a “minor” update. And by poetic, I mean the kind of tragic haiku that ends with prod going sideways and Slack going nuclear. Skyramp didn’t just see that pain, they lived it. And instead of churning out another “AI wrapper for testing,” they built a rocket. Headquartered in San Francisco and born in the crucible of flaky pipelines and test suite chaos, Skyramp just dropped the kind of announcement that should have every DevOps leader paying attention. $10 million in seed funding, led by…