Author: Jesse Landry

The spreadsheets were quiet. Too quiet. Somewhere inside a mid-market finance team, another associate was manually tying out footnotes at 11:47 p.m., praying the cross-references behaved. And in San Francisco, Inscope decided that was a problem worth $14.5M. Inscope just closed a $14.5M Series A led by Norwest, with Storm Ventures participating and existing backers Better Tomorrow Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners doubling down. When firms like that lean in, they are not funding vibes. They are funding velocity. Congratulations to Mary Antony, CPA, Co-Founder & CEO, Kelsey Gootnick, CPA, Co-Founder & COO, Jared Tibshraeny, Cofounder & CTO, and Ankit…

Solid just locked in $20M in seed capital, and if you listen closely, you can hear the quiet part out loud. Enterprise AI has been loud for 3 years. Demos everywhere. Pilots stacked like unread emails. But production? That is where the music usually cuts out. Solid is here to make sure the beat actually drops. Congratulations to Yoni Leitersdorf, CEO and Co-Founder, and Tal Segalov, CTO and Co-Founder, for building a company that understands the difference between hype and infrastructure. Team8 and SignalFire led the round, and when firms like that lean in, it is not for vibes. It…

Yendo just secured a $200M warehouse facility from i80 Group. Let that breathe for a second. $200M to fuel a credit card business that does not pretend your FICO score is your personality. Jordan Miller, Co-Founder and CEO, saw something most lenders politely ignore. Americans are sitting on roughly $4T in vehicle equity, but traditional credit models act like that value is invisible. George Utkov, Co-Founder and CPO, and Daniel Ashy, Co-Founder and CTO, built the machine that turns that dormant metal into revolving credit, up to $10K, fixed rates, rewards included. A car is not just transportation. At Yendo,…

Yendo just secured a $200M warehouse facility from i80 Group. Let that breathe for a second. $200M to fuel a credit card business that does not pretend your FICO score is your personality. Jordan Miller, Co-Founder and CEO, saw something most lenders politely ignore. Americans are sitting on roughly $4T in vehicle equity, but traditional credit models act like that value is invisible. George Utkov, Co-Founder and CPO, and Daniel Ashy, Co-Founder and CTO, built the machine that turns that dormant metal into revolving credit, up to $10K, fixed rates, rewards included. A car is not just transportation. At Yendo,…

Applitools was founded in 2013 with a conviction that software quality could no longer rely on brittle scripts and pixel-by-pixel guesswork. Adam Carmi and Moshe Milman built the company around a sharper premise: testing should think. Gil Sever, serving as founding CEO, helped translate that premise into a company capable of scaling beyond a developer tool into infrastructure. The problem they identified early still defines the opportunity today. Applications evolve constantly. Interfaces shift. Devices multiply. Code moves faster than review cycles. In modern SaaS environments, that velocity turns small visual errors into brand-level liabilities. The leadership shift in October 2025…

Los Angeles builds dreams on soundstages. Bonfire Ventures builds them in server rooms. Founded in 2017 by Jim Andelman and Mark Mullen, Bonfire is a seed-stage fund with a narrow mandate and a long memory. 100% B2B software. 100% seed. In a market that drifts toward generalism, Bonfire chose concentration. And in SaaS, concentration compounds. Jim Andelman and Mark Mullen were early champions of Southern California technology when enterprise software did not headline cocktail conversations. Before launching Bonfire, they backed companies such as The Trade Desk and EdgeCast, proving that durable enterprise value can emerge far from Sand Hill Road.…

Quantum computing is done whispering from research labs. It is now pacing the data center floor, and Microsoft Corporation just put a date on the wall. On February 19, 2026, CNBC published a feature by April Roach and Tessa McCann that sharpened the conversation from abstract physics to infrastructure reality. Zulfi Alam, Corporate Vice President of Quantum at Microsoft Corporation, stated the company expects to have machines with commercial value operating inside its data centers by 2029. Not experiments. Not pilot curiosities. Systems capable of calculations that classical computers cannot perform. That level of specificity changes the tone of the…

Kraken just made a move that tightens its grip on the crypto capital stack. On Feb 18, 2026, Payward, Inc., the parent company behind Kraken, announced it acquired New York based token management platform Magna. The deal closed the prior Friday. Terms were not disclosed. This marks Kraken’s 6th acquisition in roughly 12 months, landing as the company reports $2.2B in adjusted 2025 revenue, carries a $20B valuation, and has already filed a confidential S-1. In a tightening startup ecosystem, that sequence is not random. It is orchestration. Magna was founded in early 2022 by Bruno Faviero and Arun Kirubarajan…

There are funding rounds that feel like paperwork. Then there are rounds that feel like a signal flare. Eagle Wireless just lit one. On Feb 19, 2026, Eagle Wireless announced a $30M Series B, bringing total capital raised to $44M. Asymmetric Capital Partners and The O.H.I.O. Fund stepped in as co-leads, backing a company that is not selling vibes or vapor. They are selling signal. Real modules. Real manufacturing. Real supply chain muscle built in the United States and extended across Germany, Serbia, and APAC. Start with the origin story. Eagle Electronics acquires Wireless Mobility in Dec 2025. Hardware meets…

Montreal builds quiet giants. The kind that do not chase headlines but change how an entire system breathes. In 2014, Adrian Schauer started AlayaCare Inc. with a clear thesis: if home and community care is the future, then the software behind it cannot look like it was built when flip phones were king. Fast forward and the cloud has a new landlord in care delivery. Now CIBC Innovation Banking steps in with a $50M growth capital facility. Not equity confetti. Not hype. Real growth capital. The kind that says, we have studied the balance sheet, the customers, the churn, the…