Author: Jesse Landry

Twenty-three years ago, in January 2003, two brothers saw something broken hiding in plain sight. H.H. Spooner Phillips IV, CSSC and Cory Phillips, CSSC were not chasing hype or headlines. They were watching families walk out of courtrooms with life-changing settlements and no real continuity to protect what came next. Structured settlements here. Trusts over there. Wealth managers somewhere else. Law firms stuck stitching it together while families absorbed the risk. The Forge Companies was built in Atlanta, Georgia to fix that fracture, not with slogans, but with structure. What started as Forge Consulting, a national insurance agency focused on…

Eddyfi Technologies has always sounded like motion, like signal, like something moving through steel and coming back with the truth. Founded in November 2009 and operational by April 2010, the company grew up inside the hard physics of inspection, where guesses get people hurt and accuracy keeps the lights on. Martin Thériault built it that way from the start, not as a science project but as a business that respected what inspectors actually face at three in the morning with a deadline and a shutdown clock ticking. That foundation matters now because Eddyfi Technologies is no longer just a clever…

BizTrip AI just checked in with a $1.5 million pre seed close announced February 2, 2026, the third slice of capital that brings total funding to $2.5 million. San Francisco based, planted at 995 Market Street in the Frontier Tower, this is not a travel startup chasing wanderlust. This is corporate travel with a memory, a brain, and a point of view. Business trips are expensive because the system forgot who you are every single time. BizTrip AI remembers. The company was founded in August 2024 by Tom Romary, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, a name that already echoes through…

Zettabyte showed up to the AI infrastructure conversation the way a clean bassline walks into a dark room. No noise, no panic, just control. Founded in 2023 and headquartered in Taipei with deep operating muscle in Palo Alto and Singapore, the company was born weeks after ChatGPT cracked the door open and everyone realized compute was about to become the new oil. Zettabyte did not chase the hype. It went straight for the pipes, the power, the GPUs, and the software that decides whether any of this actually works. This company exists at the exact intersection where Taiwan’s manufacturing gravity…

GrubMarket has always sounded like a place you shop. Today it reads like a balance sheet that learned how to hunt. The San Francisco based food tech operator announced a $50 million Series H, pricing the company at a $4.5 billion pre money valuation. Same name. Bigger appetite. Sharper knives. The story still starts with Mike Xu, Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and President, standing in a Northern California cherry field in 2014, realizing the math between the dirt and the dinner table was broken. He sold those cherries online at half the Whole Foods price and still made money. That…

CesiumAstro was never built for quiet rooms. Founded in 2017 in Austin, Texas by Shey Sabripour, this company came out of the kind of aerospace background where mistakes cost satellites, careers, and sometimes national patience. After more than two decades designing spacecraft at Lockheed Martin and running billion-dollar programs, Shey Sabripour did not start CesiumAstro to chase hype. He started it to industrialize communications in space, to make signals behave when gravity, latency, and geopolitics are all working against you. That context matters today because on February 1, 2026, CesiumAstro closed a $470 million Series C, and the structure tells…

Santa Monica has seen plenty of car stories, but this one hums instead of growls. Plug is not trying to romance nostalgia or chrome. It is staring straight at the uncomfortable math of electric vehicles after the honeymoon phase, when leases expire, inventory stacks up, and nobody agrees on what the thing is actually worth. That tension is where Jimmy Douglas decided to build. After running Tesla’s used car operation across North America, the largest EV resale engine on the planet, Jimmy Douglas walked away in March 2023 with a sharper question than most founders start with. Why are electric…

Prenosis did not wake up one morning and decide to chase sepsis. Sepsis chased them first. Chicago-based, founded in June 2014, Prenosis came out of a collision between the University of Illinois lab bench and the ICU floor. Bobby Reddy Jr., PhD watched his father move through a system built on averages and protocols instead of biology. Rashid Bashir, PhD was building microfluidic and bioanalytical technology inside the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. One saw the human cost. The other saw the molecular truth. Prenosis became the place where those two realities were finally forced to shake hands. Prenosis…

Government tech does not move fast. It moves carefully, under fluorescent lights, buried in folders with names like Final Final V7. That is the terrain MCCi chose back in 2003, long before digital transformation was a conference theme. From Tallahassee, Florida, Donny Barstow built a company for agencies drowning in paper, risk, and legacy systems that never quite talked to each other. MCCi did not chase speed. It chased trust, compliance, and the unglamorous work of making government function without friction. That patience compounded. Over 23 years, MCCi became the world’s largest Laserfiche solution provider, a title held since 2008…

Poetiq did not come out of stealth quietly. It walked onto the floor in January 2026, Mountain View address on the label, $45.8 million in Seed capital on the table, and a very specific message humming under the noise. The models are not broken. The way we ask them to think is. Founded in June 2025 by Shumeet Baluja, PhD and Ian Fischer, both alumni of Google DeepMind, Poetiq was built on a simple refusal to accept that reasoning should cost weeks of retraining and millions in compute just to get a straight answer. The story starts at DeepMind, where…