Author: Jesse Landry

Joby Aviation has always sounded like motion, like something that refuses to stay parked. Santa-Cruz-born, mountain-tested, and built from the bones of electric obsession, Joby Aviation, the company that Joe Ben Bevirt started on a ranch called The Barn, just dropped a very loud, very deliberate signal. Joby closed an upsized $1.2 billion capital raise, and the number matters less than the intent. This was not survival money. This was timing money. The structure tells the story. $600M in 0.75 percent convertible senior notes due 2032, paired with six hundred million dollars from the sale of 52,863,437 shares at $11.35.…

San Francisco just watched a research lab walk onto the tarmac and ask a quiet question that rattled the control tower. What if the industry obsession with bigger engines missed the reason flight worked in the first place? Flapping Airplanes emerged from stealth in January 2026 with a name that reads like a joke until you understand the math. The Wright brothers stopped copying birds and learned aerodynamics. This team is doing the same for artificial intelligence, stepping away from brute force and toward understanding. Flapping Airplanes is a foundational AI research lab, not a product company, not a demo…

January 28, 2026 landed with the kind of quiet force that only real manufacturing news carries. No confetti. No slogans. Just AON3D in Montreal doing what it has done since April 14, 2015, turning heat, pressure, and discipline into leverage. This week’s undisclosed growth round led by Cycle Capital, with Desjardins Capital stepping in and SineWave Ventures, IronGate Capital Advisors, Starship Ventures, and EDC Capital returning, reads less like a surprise and more like a confirmation that the floor has been paying attention. AON3D was never born in a boardroom. Kevin Han built the first machine because his 2014 service…

Power has become the new superstition in AI. Touch it and every conversation gets loud, crowded, and oddly vague. This week, in a moment that cut through the broader tech news noise, The Information featured Raul K. Martynek, Chief Executive Officer of DataBank, questioning the prevailing narrative. His line landed because it was measured, not theatrical. Power, he said, is a constraint, not the constraint. In an industry addicted to absolutism, that distinction matters. DataBank speaks from the floor, not the whiteboard. Headquartered in Dallas and founded in 2005, the company now operates more than 65 data centers across 25…

By May 2022, Pickle re-emerged as a peer-to-peer fashion rental marketplace based in New York City, rebuilt in three weeks with no romance about the process. Brian McMahon and Julia O’Mara carried clothes on the subway. They hand-delivered more than four thousand orders. They photographed closets in apartments. They learned that inventory moves faster when it already lives next door. Pickle became less about fashion statements and more about asset velocity. Closets stopped sitting still, a shift now visible across the recommerce and sharing economy landscape. That momentum compounds. By March 2025, Pickle closed a twelve million dollar Series A…

Google does not buy noise. It buys leverage, a pattern that has quietly defined major moments in tech news. On January 23, 2026, quietly and without a victory lap, Google DeepMind acquired Common Sense Machines, a Cambridge, Massachusetts company that spent five years teaching machines something humans learn before language: how the world actually fits together. No press conference. No hype cycle. Just a confirmation to The Information and a team of roughly twelve people walking into DeepMind with something most AI labs still fake, real spatial intuition. Common Sense Machines was founded in August 2020 by Tejas Kulkarni, Max…

Datalinx AI quietly turned on the lights in a room most enterprises pretend is clean. New York City and Austin based, founded in March 2025, the company just raised a $4.2 million seed round to deal with the part of AI no one likes to talk about. The data before the demo. The data before the promise. The data before the slide deck lies start to sweat. Joe Luchs, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, has lived inside this problem at scale. Amazon. Oracle. Beeswax. Billions in contract value moving between AWS and Amazon Ads. When you spend that long watching…

In Waco, Texas, long before growth equity decks and AI demos, AxisCare started as a quiet rebellion by non-medical home care agency operators who were tired of software that looked good in theory and fell apart at 6 a.m. on a missed shift. From 2011 to 2013, they built the platform for themselves, ran it inside their own agencies, broke it, fixed it, and learned what real care logistics feel like when payroll, compliance, and human lives all collide at once. That DNA still shows. AxisCare was not imagined in a boardroom. It was field-tested in the mess. When Todd…

Decagon did not wake up one morning and decide to raise a $250 million Series D at a $4.5 billion valuation. This was a slow, deliberate build that started in August 2023 when Jesse Zhang and Ashwin Sreenivas met at an Andreessen Horowitz retreat in Utah, two founders with exits behind them and zero patience for small ideas. They kept hearing the same thing from operators across travel, fintech, healthcare, retail, and telecom. Customer support was breaking under its own weight, and nobody trusted AI to touch it without guardrails. Decagon was born inside that tension, not outside it. Fast…

October 2025. Seattle. Three operators step out of the Remitly building for the last time, not with nostalgia but with a clock ticking in their heads. They had spent nearly a decade wiring money across borders at scale, learning what happens when systems buckle under pressure. Professional sports, it turns out, live in that pressure full time. Fixed schedules. No rewinds. One bad decision echoes across a season. That tension became Arkero. Arkero is an AI native operating system for professional soccer organizations, built in Seattle with a second foothold in Los Angeles. The idea is simple and unforgiving. Sports…