Author: Jesse Landry

C1 Fund Inc. does not spray capital. It places it. Quietly. Precisely. Like a fund built by people who have already watched cycles eat loud operators for breakfast. Palo Alto address. Maryland incorporation. NYSE ticker CFND. Public in August 2025 with $60 million raised and a mandate that reads like infrastructure or nothing, a posture that stands out in today’s startup ecosystem. Dr. Najamul Hasan Kidwai and Michael Lempres did not build a vibe fund. They built a wiring diagram for where digital finance actually clears. By October, the money started moving. Not all at once. In sequence. Figment first.…

ABC Fitness does not need an origin myth. It has a balance sheet, a backbone, and a billing engine that has been quietly keeping the fitness industry upright since Reagan was in office, a reality often overlooked in tech news dominated by newer SaaS narratives. This is not a scrappy SaaS darling chasing relevance. This is infrastructure. Born in 1981 in Little Rock, Arkansas, when Jim Butin built billing software for his own gyms because nothing else worked, ABC Fitness grew the way real businesses do. One payment, one member, one club at a time, until the software became the…

Spark Capital has never needed to shout. Boston taught it restraint, a sensibility that has shaped its role inside the startup ecosystem for nearly two decades. Two decades in, the signal is clear without the noise. Founded in 2005 by Todd Dagres, Santo Politi, Paul Conway, Bijan Sabet, and Alex Finkelstein, Spark did not show up chasing heat. It showed up asking better questions, the kind that linger after the room clears. That posture carried from Kendall Square to San Francisco to New York, quietly stitching itself into the backbone of modern tech and the connective tissue of the startup…

March 2 through March 4, 2026, the Arizona Biltmore becomes less a resort and more a pressure chamber. Olo Beyond4 is not showing up for vibes. It is landing in Phoenix while restaurant traffic is shrinking, pricing has nowhere left to hide, and discount culture has burned through its last match. This industry is not tired. It is done pretending the old math still works, a shift increasingly reflected in tech news across commerce and SaaS platforms. What makes this one hit different is timing and ownership. Olo walks into Beyond4 as a private company, freshly taken off the public…

Software stocks are getting dragged through the street like a bad theory, and in today’s tech news Orlando Bravo is standing in Davos calmly checking prices. January 2026, World Economic Forum. Financial Times puts the mic in front of the Founder and Managing Partner of Thoma Bravo, and instead of panic, he sees clearance racks. AI headlines are screaming replacement. Bravo is talking about timing, discipline, and memory. He has seen this movie before, and the ending usually favors the patient buyer who understands what actually keeps the lights on. Thoma Bravo is not a vibe investor. Chicago headquartered, born…

Davos opened this year without its ghost, a moment now rippling through global tech news. Klaus Schwab built the mountain and then stepped off it, leaving the World Economic Forum to face itself in the cold. Into that silence walked Laurence D. Fink, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of BlackRock Inc., now Interim Co-Chair of the World Economic Forum, delivering opening remarks that did not flatter the room. He named the tension instead. Elites in an age of populism. Institutions in an era of distrust. A gathering that knows its relevance is no longer assumed, a backdrop increasingly shaping tech…

LiveOak Ventures has always treated talent like oxygen, not ornamentation, a mindset shaped by years operating inside the startup ecosystem rather than around it. Founded in Austin, Texas in January 2012 by Krishna Srinivasan and Venu Shamapant, the firm built its reputation by staying close to the work and closer to the people doing it. Early stage investing, Texas focused, enterprise heavy, and allergic to noise, LiveOak has spent more than a decade proving that durable companies are grown patiently and staffed deliberately. This week the firm turned that philosophy outward with a portfolio wide hiring signal that feels less…

On January 27, 2026, Vention out of Montreal just raised a $110M USD Series D, or $150M CAD, and it reads less like a funding round and more like a factory floor power-up. Investissement Québec led it with $55M USD, the biggest venture check it has written, with NVentures joining as a new name on the cap table, plus new money from Desjardins Capital and returning participation from Fidelity Investments Canada ULC. When a government-backed investor and NVIDIA’s venture arm both show up, it is not charity and it is not a hobby. It is a signal. Vention was founded…

There is a quiet moment happening at the edge of the grid, and it is not quiet because nothing is happening. It is quiet because the signal finally got clean. Sense, the Cambridge, Massachusetts grid edge intelligence company founded in 2013 by Mike Phillips, Ryan Houlette, and Christopher Micali, has spent more than a decade teaching electricity to talk back. Not marketing talk. Electrical truth. Waveforms. Signatures. The kind of data that does not blink. On January 27, 2026, Analog Devices made a strategic investment in Sense. Amount undisclosed. Intent unmistakable. Analog Devices does not chase novelty. It backs infrastructure…

In January 2014, in Watertown, Massachusetts, a company quietly took shape around a simple biological truth. Platelets do more than clot. They signal. They heal. They orchestrate repair. Stellular Bio, originally founded as Platelet BioGenesis, licensed its core science from Harvard Medical School hematology research and decided to stay narrow, technical, and patient. No noise. Just biology that works when the body cannot. The founding team mattered. Jonathan Thon, Ph.D., brought the lab rigor, coming out of years under Joseph Italiano, Ph.D., at Harvard Medical School and Boston Children’s Hospital. Joseph Italiano brought the platelet science itself, decades deep in…