Author: Jesse Landry

In cybersecurity, everyone talks about architecture until the building starts shaking. Then the conversation gets real, fast. Mesh Security, based in Palo Alto, California with deep engineering roots in Tel Aviv, Israel, was built for that moment when theory meets production and the floor starts moving under enterprise security teams who are buried under tools that do not talk to each other and alerts that do not slow down. Founded in early 2022 by Netanel Azoulay and Omri Hering, Mesh Security did not arrive with another shiny dashboard or a louder siren. It showed up with a question that made…

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…

Genspark did not tiptoe into this market. It sparked it. Palo Alto based, founded November 2023 under MainFunc Inc., the company started as an AI search experiment, shut it down, and came back heavier with an autonomous AI workspace that does not assist work, it finishes it. That distinction matters when the clock is running and payroll is real. This is not theory. This is execution at scale while most teams are still arguing about prompts. The moment just landed hard. Genspark closed over $300 million in Series B funding across two tranches, with $275 million closing in November 2025…

Toronto has seen big rounds before, but January 28, 2026 landed different. Waabi did not tiptoe into the news cycle, it drove straight through it with a $750 million Series C that was oversubscribed, loud, and precise. Add a $250 million milestone based commitment from Uber and the total announced capital hits $1 billion. Not vibes. Not hype. A physical number that now sits as the largest single technology raise in Canadian history, with gravity that can be felt from Bay Street to Sand Hill Road. Waabi exists because Raquel Urtasun has spent two decades refusing to separate theory from…

Brooklyn is not known for cybersecurity swagger, which is exactly why Outtake works. Founded in October 2023, headquartered at 1 N 4th Place in Williamsburg, Outtake comes from the kind of street where you learn fast or you get embarrassed. Alex Arjun Dhillon learned fast at Palantir, nearly five years deep in zero to one work where pattern recognition is not theory, it is survival. The pattern was obvious. AI made impersonation cheap, fast, and scalable. Enterprise defense stayed slow, manual, and fragmented. That gap is where Outtake was born. On January 28, 2026, Outtake announced a $40 million Series…

January 28, 2026. Austin, Texas. A $60 million launch round hits the wire and it is not another AI fairy tale hunting a problem. It is Gyde, an AI-native insurance brokerage platform built by people who have lived inside the grind and decided the grind was the problem. Will Johnson and Sam Wiener did not wake up one morning with a pitch deck and a buzzword. They came out of Oscar Health watching smart agencies drown in admin while clients waited on hold for answers that mattered to their lives. Gyde plants its flag where healthcare, insurance, and wealth advice…

Los Angeles has a way of minting wellness trends that sell candles before they solve problems. Origin came out different. Founded in 2020, built by Carine Carmy, Nona Farahnik Yadegar, and David Yadegar, this company did not start with branding. It started with pain. Real pain. Nearly a decade of it for Carine Carmy, postpartum dysfunction for Nona Farahnik Yadegar, and a shared realization that pelvic floor physical therapy works, but the system makes damn sure most women never reach it. That realization turned into a national build. Origin partnered early with the clinical team at Bebé Physical Therapy in…

The EV charging story has been loud for a decade, but the real tension lives in the silence between chargers that do not talk to each other. That gap is where Emobi decided to build. San Francisco based, born in May 2020 as AeonCharge, founded by Lin Sun Fa and Dwi Sutandar, this company did not chase attention. It chased friction. Four years later, that obsession with interoperability just pulled in a $3.4 million seed round announced January 28, 2026, led by Florida Funders, with every major backer coming back to the table. Emobi is not a charging network. It…

Los Angeles has a way of exposing the math. Rent climbs, mortgages drift out of reach, and employers keep offering meditation apps like calm will cover a housing bill. Oro Impact showed up because that gap stopped being theoretical. Founded in June 2023, headquartered on Avenue of the Stars, Oro was built by George Fatheree, III after a long career where the receipts mattered. Sixteen years in Big Law, partnerships at Skadden, Sidley Austin, and Munger, Tolles, then a moment of clarity. When George Fatheree, III relocated to Los Angeles, his employer offered down payment assistance. The benefit worked. It…

Cloud bills are the quietest scream in enterprise tech. They show up every month, perfectly formatted, emotionally vacant, and somehow larger than last time. Nobody remembers approving half of what is being paid for, but everyone is responsible for it. Finance stares at dashboards. Engineering stares at code. The money keeps leaking. That gap, the one between who writes the code and who eats the cost, is where Adaptive6 decided to set up shop. Adaptive6 is based in New York, with its engineering spine running through Tel Aviv, Hungary, and the United States, and it carries the DNA of founders…