Author: Jesse Landry

There is a quiet moment before every land grab when the smart money stops talking about vision and starts talking about plumbing. Real estate has been running on analog pipes for decades, and Propy decided to stop admiring the house and crawl under it. Miami-based Propy just secured a $100 million credit facility from Metropolitan Partners Group, not to chase headlines, but to buy the slow, cash flowing machinery of title and escrow and wire it into something faster, cleaner, and harder to defraud. Propy was incorporated in 2015 and launched its platform in 2016, long before blockchain became cocktail…

Northslope did not arrive with a demo deck and a dream. It arrived with revenue, customers, and engineers already sitting inside the building. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Denver, Colorado, Northslope came out of the Palantir bloodstream with a simple idea that most companies overcomplicate until it collapses. If artificial intelligence is going to matter, it has to ship into production, touch real operators, and survive contact with reality. Bill Ward built Northslope the way he learned to build software as a Palantir Forward Deployed Engineer. Start with the mission, embed with the people who own it, and write…

Tulsa and San Antonio are not supposed to be the punchline to the future of energy tech. They are supposed to be the footnote. XALTER decided to rewrite that geography quietly, without asking permission, by turning frontline work into something you can step inside instead of memorize. This week, that decision got backed with capital when XALTER announced a seed round led by EIC Rose Rock, the Tulsa-based energy innovation fund that knows the difference between hype and hard problems. XALTER is the product of a deliberate collision. Steelehouse Productions, founded in 1999 by Kevin Anderson, spent decades building immersive…

Talos did not start as a crypto company chasing noise. In October 2018, Anton Katz and Ethan Feldman sat down to build a hedge fund and tripped over a bigger problem hiding in plain sight. The pipes were wrong. Digital assets were running on retail-grade plumbing, fragmented liquidity, no shared standards, and execution that would make any serious trader flinch. So they scrapped the fund idea, incorporated in December 2018, and aimed higher. Build the institutional control layer first, then let the market grow into it. Anton Katz brought scars from AQR Capital Management, where trading technology was not a…

In July 2022, in Washington, D.C., Ressio Software did not arrive with a grand manifesto. It arrived with a renovation hangover. Ryan Yu Liu was standing in Jersey City in 2021, staring at a residential remodel that had blown past budget and schedule, the kind of slow bleed every builder and homeowner knows too well. Spreadsheets everywhere. Emails nowhere useful. Software that promised control but delivered friction. That frustration turned into a conversation with Mitchell Kasselman, fresh off operational and business development work at ServiceChannel before its $1.2 billion acquisition by Fortive. The problem was obvious. The solution had to…

Charidy does not sell hope. It sells math, timing, and human behavior, wrapped in software and delivered with a Brooklyn accent that understands how money actually moves when meaning is involved. Founded in 2013 in Brooklyn, New York by Yehuda Gurwitz with Ari Schapiro, Charidy built a B2B SaaS platform for nonprofits that treats fundraising less like a donate button and more like a live negotiation between urgency, pride, community, and proof. This month, that discipline earned Charidy growth debt financing from Flashpoint Growth Debt Fund II, part of a $67 million vehicle closed in November 2025. Non dilutive. No…

Checkbox did not start as a pitch deck fantasy. It started as friction. In 2016, Evan Wong was scaling Hero Education and drowning in legal and compliance complexity that moved slower than the business it was supposed to protect. Forms everywhere. Requests scattered across inboxes, Slack threads, half remembered hallway conversations. Law was reactive, not operational. Evan Wong, James Han, and Paul Wenck saw the same thing from different angles and decided the problem was not legal talent. It was the absence of a real front door. Fast forward to January 28, 2026, and Checkbox just closed a $23 million…

January 2026 quietly delivered one of those infrastructure moments now surfacing across tech news, the kind that only looks boring if you do not understand where power actually lives. AMD’s ROCm stack is now a first class platform inside the vLLM ecosystem, and that phrasing is not marketing fluff. It is a line in the sand for inference, for hardware pluralism, and for anyone tired of pretending CUDA gravity is a law of physics instead of a habit. vLLM did not start as a company or a hype vehicle. It started at UC Berkeley with Woosuk Kwon, Zhuohan Li, and…

There is a quiet stress fracture running through engineering leadership right now. Not the loud kind that trends on timelines, the kind you feel at 11:47 p.m. when velocity dashboards look fine but morale does not. Teams are shipping, managers are tired, and AI is sitting in the room like an intern everyone hired too fast and handed real work before giving it context. Forty percent of teams report declining motivation. Twenty two percent of leaders are burned down to the studs. That is not a vibe shift. That is a systems problem surfacing inside the startup ecosystem as companies…

Charidy does not sell hope. It sells math, timing, and human behavior, wrapped in software and delivered with a Brooklyn accent that understands how money actually moves when meaning is involved. Founded in 2013 in Brooklyn, New York by Yehuda Gurwitz with Ari Schapiro, Charidy built a B2B SaaS platform for nonprofits that treats fundraising less like a donate button and more like a live negotiation between urgency, pride, community, and proof. This month, that discipline earned Charidy growth debt financing from Flashpoint Growth Debt Fund II, part of a $67 million vehicle closed in November 2025. Non dilutive. No…