Author: Jesse Landry

Some companies chase gold. Phoenix Tailings chases what everyone else left behind and turns it into something the world cannot run without. Out of Exeter, New Hampshire, with operational muscle in Burlington and Woburn, Massachusetts, Phoenix Tailings just secured $40.2M in a Series B-3 amplification round. $30.2M in equity. $10M in venture debt from Nomura. That brings total Series B funding to $116.6M. Not a vanity number. A signal. The round was offered exclusively to existing investors and select strategic partners, which tells you this was not a roadshow circus. This was insiders leaning in. Olive Tree Capital led the…

Some companies chase headlines. Others build backbone. Axis Medical just secured an investment from Spur Ridge Capital, with Capitala Group providing debt financing and an equity investment alongside Spur Ridge and its limited partners. No flashy valuation parade. No chest pounding about unicorn status. Just capital aligned with conviction. Nick Iaderosa, Founder and CEO of Axis Medical, did not wake up in 2014 and decide to “try” distribution. Illinois State University in 1998. 2 weeks later he is in the operating room with US Surgical, now part of Covidien. 27 years in medical device sales. 20 of those deep in…

There are moments in aviation when the engines are quiet, but the signal is loud. This is one of them. LanzaJet just pulled in $47M in the first close of a $135M equity round, landing at a $650M pre-money valuation. Not theory. Not lab coats and pitch decks. Real capital behind real fuel. The round was co-led by International Airlines Group and Shell, with Groupe ADP, LanzaTech, and Mitsui & Co. doubling down as returning investors. When airlines, energy majors, airport operators, and global industrial players all lean in at the same table, that is not a coincidence. That is…

In 2006, in Yorkshire, England, Michael Gould, Guy Haddleton, and Sue Haddleton studied the enterprise and saw something fragile. Finance lived in one spreadsheet. Sales in another. Supply chain guessing in the margins. They did not launch a feature. They built Anaplan, a system designed to connect decisions before they fractured. In the early innings of modern SaaS, that was a sharp bet: the future would belong to platforms that could model the whole business, not just a department. The architecture mattered. Hyperblock technology, an in memory calculation engine, allowed multi dimensional models to recalculate in real time. Not overnight.…

In 2022, when crypto felt like a heavyweight fight in the late rounds, Kathryn “Katie” Haun stepped forward with $1.5B and a thesis that did not blink. $500M for early stage. $1B for acceleration. 2 funds, calibrated for builders at different altitudes. Not a spray of checks. A capital stack designed to compound conviction. Fortune framed it as 1 of the largest debut raises led by a solo female venture capitalist. Markets saw size. Operators saw signal. Haun Ventures was not assembled out of hype. Kathryn Haun built it after serving as a federal prosecutor focused on cybercrime, then as…

On Feb 18, 2026, from San Francisco, Circle Internet Services, Inc., known to the market as CircleCI, released its 7th annual State of Software Delivery report, and the signal is not subtle. Built on nearly 28M workflows executed across more than 22,000 organizations in 149 countries during the first 28 days of Sept 2025, the dataset shows a 59% YoY surge in average daily workflow throughput. That is the largest increase since 2019. In the world of SaaS, that kind of acceleration is not cosmetic. It is operational pressure measured in commits, tests, and deployments. The top 5% of teams…

OpenAI just stepped into the EVM and brought a benchmark with teeth. From San Francisco, the AI lab founded in 2015 by Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever, Wojciech Zaremba and others introduced EVMbench, an open framework designed to test whether AI agents can actually perform in smart contract security or simply narrate competence. In a cycle crowded with model demos and leaderboard theater, this is the kind of tech news that separates claims from capability. EVMbench was developed in collaboration with Paradigm, the San Francisco based crypto investment firm founded in 2018 by Matt Huang and Fred…

Koi did not ease into the market. It surfaced with proof. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Washington, D.C., with deep engineering roots in Tel Aviv, Koi was built by Amit Assaraf, Idan Dardikman, and Itay Kruk after a controlled white hat experiment exposed a vulnerability most endpoint vendors ignored. In 30 minutes they built a fake VSCode theme called Darcula Official, embedded exfiltration code, and within 1 week more than 300 organizations were infected, including multibillion dollar enterprises. The message was clear. The software perimeter had expanded beyond binaries, and nobody was watching closely enough. Amit Assaraf, former co…

Some companies raise capital. Others raise the bar. Qumis just raised $4.3M in an oversubscribed seed round led by MTech Capital, with strategic backing from American Family Ventures, bringing total funding to $6.75M. Chicago born. Commercial insurance focused. Attorney trained AI with something to prove. Dan Schuleman, Esq., Co founder and CEO of Qumis, is not chasing noise. He is chasing precision. The kind of precision that reads a commercial policy the way a seasoned coverage attorney does. Every exclusion. Every carve back. Every endorsement that quietly changes the game at 2 a.m. when a claim hits the desk and…

Ownwell just reminded the real estate world that sometimes the biggest opportunity is hiding in plain sight, right there on your tax bill. In a market where homeowners feel like they need a second job just to keep the first house, Austin based Ownwell secured $50M in Series B funding. $30M in equity led by Alpha Edison and Mercato Partners, with participation from Intuit Ventures, Left Lane Capital, First Round Capital, Long Journey Ventures, PROOF, and Wonder Ventures. $20M in debt from Western Alliance Bank to add some fuel to the engine. $74M raised to date. Not hype. Capital with…