The Story Has to Survive You

Blaze.tech Raises Additional $5M, Bringing Pre-Seed Funding to $8.5M

Blaze.tech raised an additional $5M in pre-seed funding from Friale, bringing the company's total pre-seed financing to $8.5M. The number matters, but the more useful question is what the capital is being asked to do.

Blaze.tech is building an AI app platform purpose-built for healthcare, where moving faster only works if the resulting software can handle patient data, integrations, auditability, deployment controls, and the operational requirements of regulated workflows.

That is where Blaze.tech has found its harder, more valuable problem. The platform allows healthcare organizations to design, build, and deploy custom, HIPAA-compliant software without traditional development. It generates multi-portal applications, structured relational databases, and end-to-end workflows in minutes, combining AI generation with deterministic, auditable workflows, guardrails, and separate development, staging, and production environments.

Blaze.tech maintains SOC 2 Type II and HITRUST e1 certifications while supporting native e-prescribing and integrations with EHRs and clearinghouses. Those details turn AI app building from a convenience story into an operating decision for regulated teams.

The additional capital will support that direction. Blaze.tech plans to expand its healthcare-specific product capabilities, deepen integrations with healthcare systems and clearinghouses, and grow its team to support continued customer demand.

Co-founders Nanxi Liu and Tina Wojcik, both co-CEOs, are building around a practical premise: healthcare operators often understand exactly what an application needs to accomplish, but traditional development can make turning that knowledge into production software slow and expensive.

The $8.5M in total pre-seed financing gives Blaze.tech more resources to narrow that gap. AI can accelerate application creation, but healthcare software still has to survive contact with permissions, sensitive data, clinical systems, and production environments. Speed without those controls simply creates a faster route to another problem.

In a crowded software category, “easier” is rarely enough. The stronger position is easier inside a market where hard requirements are understood, productized, and impossible to ignore. Blaze.tech now has another $5M to prove that AI-assisted development can move quickly without asking healthcare organizations to trade control for speed.

Remedium Bio Opens Planned $10M Series A for Gene Therapy

Remedium Bio announced the initial close of a planned $10M Series A, led by LifeSpan Vision Ventures with participation from Eli Lilly and Company and HKX Capital. The wording matters. The full $10M has not been disclosed as closed. This is a preclinical biotech putting conviction behind a platform as it moves toward human development.

Remedium is working on a problem chronic medicine has normalized for too long. Many biologics ask patients to accept repeat injections, concentration spikes, concentration troughs, and a schedule that becomes part of daily life. Remedium's answer is a subcutaneous genetic-medicine platform designed to turn adipocytes into a local source of therapeutic proteins, with expression intended to be durable and adjustable.

That is a sharp technical proposition, but the useful word is intended. Remedium remains preclinical. It has published peer-reviewed work on its lipid-nanoparticle DNA delivery approach in obese diabetic mice and has a 2025 multi-target R&D collaboration with Eli Lilly and Company focused on obesity and type 2 diabetes. This financing is about converting evidence into development readiness, not pretending clinical risk has disappeared.

The investor structure tells its own story. LifeSpan Vision Ventures is leading, Harry Robb is joining Remedium's board, and Eli Lilly and Company is participating after the companies established a research relationship. HKX Capital is also participating. Capital, partnership, and governance now point toward one question: can Remedium make durable protein expression controllable enough for the clinic?

CEO and co-founder Frank Luppino says the proceeds will advance lead programs, expand the platform, and prepare for first-in-human studies. CTO Alex Goraltchouk and the technical team inherit the part no announcement can solve. In biotech, the distance between an elegant platform and a clinical product is measured in manufacturing, toxicology, regulatory discipline, dose control, and data that survives contact with patients.

Frank Luppino, Alex Goraltchouk, and the Remedium Bio team now have additional capital behind the next stage. The business lesson is clean: platform companies earn leverage when scientific evidence, strategic validation, and financing reinforce one another. The market lesson is harder. Durable genetic medicine will be judged on control as much as duration.

If Remedium can make both hold in humans, it could change what patients and drug developers expect a chronic therapy to ask of them. That is the bet. Now comes the proof, with clinical translation as the next milestone.

Solaris Invests in Deployable Energy’s Nuclear Future

Solaris Energy Infrastructure just put equity behind Deployable Energy. The interesting part is not a disclosed check size. There isn’t one. It is what happens when a public power-infrastructure operator decides a 1 MWe nuclear battery belongs in its future toolbox.

Solaris disclosed the investment in its August 5 results and said the two companies will collaborate on commercialization. The amount, ownership stake, valuation, and formal round name were not disclosed. The strategic signal has to do the talking.

Founded in 2025 in Houston’s Energy Corridor, Deployable Energy is led by co-founder and CEO Bobby Gallagher. Its Unity Nuclear Battery is a compact, transportable microreactor designed around standard low-enriched uranium fuel. The thesis is manufacturing over megaprojects: repeatable power for remote, industrial, maritime, defense, and behind-the-meter applications.

That thesis moved beyond a slide deck on June 30, when Unity completed a zero-power fueled criticality demonstration at Idaho National Laboratory through a U.S. Department of Energy initiative. Criticality validates core reactor physics under controlled conditions. It does not mean Unity generated electricity, secured commercial licensing, or solved deployment economics. Milestones matter. Honest boundaries do too.

Solaris brings a different kind of credibility. It operates generation and distribution infrastructure for data centers, energy customers, and industrial markets. Chairman and co-CEO Bill Zartler called the investment early exposure to nuclear technology that could eventually complement Solaris’s existing generation capabilities.

Frontier technology rarely dies from a shortage of ambition. It dies in the gap between a successful experiment and a repeatable commercial system. Manufacturing, siting, operations, customers, and financing all arrive after the technical milestone carrying clipboards and invoices.

Deployable Energy still has to cross that gap. NRC pre-application work is underway, and Unity’s test was limited to zero-power operation. Solaris is not proof that commercial deployment is finished. It is evidence that an experienced infrastructure operator sees enough potential to invest and collaborate before the finish line is visible.

Bobby Gallagher and the Deployable Energy team have earned serious industrial attention. Now the market gets to watch whether nuclear can be packaged with product discipline, integrated with real power infrastructure, and deployed without turning every project into a generational construction saga.

Ambrook Raises $30M Series B for Real-Economy Finance

Ambrook raised a $30M Series B led by Lachy Groom, and the interesting part is not Ambrook discovering vertical SaaS. It is that the company spent six years learning the financial language of businesses most technology companies ignore.

Ambrook started in agriculture, where the books are complicated because the businesses are complicated. A farm can run cattle, crops, trucking, retail, and land operations under one roof. Inventory can be born, grow, or die. Cash flow follows seasons, equipment is expensive, and generic accounting software asks the operator to translate reality into a system never designed for it.

Mackenzie Burnett, Dan Schlosser, and Jeff Anders did the opposite. They built around the operator. Bookkeeping, invoicing, bill pay, cards, cash management, and reporting sit in one platform, with transactions organized by enterprise, project, route, or location.

Ambrook says more than 8,000 businesses use the platform, up from 2,500 a year ago. More than 1,000 are trucking businesses, with hundreds more in construction and property management. At least half are adopting business software for the first time rather than replacing QuickBooks. That is evidence that a large part of the American economy has been operating with serious complexity and little purpose-built software.

The Series B brings in Thomson Reuters Ventures, Thrive Capital, Field Ventures, Cameron Ventures, and angel investors connected to Gusto, Notion, and Vercel. It follows Ambrook's $26.1M Series A and brings disclosed funding to at least $59M. The capital will support expansion into larger agricultural businesses and adjacent industries.

There is a lesson in how Ambrook earned this round. The team traveled to farms, onboarded businesses by hand, watched where accounting systems failed, and built from the operating details outward. The result is software with enough domain knowledge to earn trust, backed by service that recognizes a customer cannot stop running the business to become an implementation specialist.

The next test is difficult. Construction, trucking, and property management each have their own workflows and language. Ambrook's advantage came from being specific where incumbents were broad. Growth will depend on carrying that depth into new markets without sanding the product into another generic finance suite.

Still, 8,000 businesses and a $30M Series B show the wedge is holding. Mackenzie Burnett, Dan Schlosser, Jeff Anders, and the Ambrook team now have more capital behind a bigger bet: accounting software for the people who grow, build, move, and maintain the physical economy.

Plantible Foods’ $30M Series B Meets Its FDA Moment

Plantible closed a $30M Series B to do something food-tech founders eventually have to do: stop proving the science in a controlled setting and start proving the operation at industrial scale.

Piva Capital and Siddhi Capital co-led the round, joined by Betagro Ventures, Cultivate Next, Nourish Ventures, and returning investor Astanor Ventures. That syndicate combines industrial, foodservice, ingredient, and climate capital around one stubborn problem: food manufacturers need better function without labels that read like lab inventory.

Plantible's answer is Rubi Protein, a functional protein extracted from Lemna, the small aquatic plant most people know as duckweed. The pitch is not another burger pretending to be beef. Rubi is built to work inside other products, helping with emulsifying, gelling, binding, foaming, texture, and nutrition across baking, beverages, bars, and meat and dairy alternatives.

Co-founders Tony Martens and Maurits van de Ven have spent years moving this from idea to infrastructure. The $30M round was aimed at expanding Ranchito, Plantible's 100-acre commercial facility in West Texas, and supporting commercial commitments. By August 2025, the company said the facility was fully operational, with upgraded filtration, higher throughput, and a higher-yield Lemna strain.

Then came the regulatory checkpoint. In February 2026, FDA issued a no-questions letter concerning Plantible's conclusion that its lemna leaf protein is GRAS for specified food uses and levels. That is not a decorative badge. It clears a major adoption hurdle for manufacturers that cannot build product roadmaps around regulatory ambiguity.

The sequence tells the story: finance the plant, make the plant work, establish the regulatory path, then give customers a reason to reformulate. Food tech has seen enough dazzling demos that wilt under procurement, unit economics, or scale. Plantible is trying to win where the category gets painfully real.

There is still plenty to prove. Plantible has not published audited revenue, customer counts, or economics showing Rubi can compete across every intended application. But investors and operators can now evaluate a disclosed round, an operating facility, strategic food-industry backers, and a completed FDA review.

Tony Martens, Maurits van de Ven, and the Plantible team are not asking consumers to fall in love with duckweed. They are asking food manufacturers to care about performance, resilience, and cleaner formulation. That is a harder sales pitch, and potentially a bigger business.

Marex Backs Digital Prime Technologies and Tokenet

Digital Prime Technologies just turned one of financial infrastructure's strongest signals into a financing event: the customer became an investor.

Marex Group Limited has made a strategic investment in the Jersey City fintech, deepening a relationship that already had Marex participating on Tokenet, Digital Prime Technologies' institutional marketplace for digital and tokenized-asset lending. The amount was not disclosed. The logic was.

Institutions have never lacked curiosity about digital assets. They have lacked patience for operational theater. Banks and asset managers do not abandon collateral controls, governance, and lifecycle management because a new asset class has better branding.

Tokenet is built around that reality. Developed with EquiLend, it brings familiar securities-lending workflows to digital assets, including multi-custodian collateral management, rerates, recalls, returns, mark-to-market functionality, and loan lifecycle controls. It went live in May 2026 with Galaxy Digital among the initial participants.

Then the cap table started looking like the operating model. EquiLend invested in December 2025. Galaxy Digital invested in June 2026. Now Marex has followed the path from strategic participant to investor. That is the hard part of market infrastructure, and the part capital cannot fake.

The sequence carries more weight than a vanity valuation. A participant sees the workflows under real conditions. When the same institution also invests, the endorsement carries operational weight, not just press-release perfume.

James Runnels, co-founder and CEO of Digital Prime Technologies, has built around a plain but stubborn idea: traditional finance will enter digital markets through infrastructure it can govern. Marex already understands clearing, liquidity, and risk at institutional scale.

The new capital will accelerate Tokenet product development, expand institutional connectivity, and strengthen the platform for global digital and tokenized-asset lending. No amount was announced, and none needs to be invented to make the point.

This is not a bet that institutions became reckless. It is a bet that digital-asset lending gets larger when the operating model becomes less exotic. The bridge from traditional finance to digital markets will be built from controls, integrations, and counterparties willing to use the system.

James Runnels and the Digital Prime Technologies team now have another institutional participant putting capital behind the infrastructure it uses. Marex has moved from participant to investor. The interesting question is which institutions follow the workflow before they follow the asset class.

Sonablate, Eleven Ventures Form Up to $200M Alliance

Sonablate just signed the kind of healthcare deal that gets flattened into a funding headline, even though the structure is the real story. The Charlotte medical technology company formed a strategic alliance with Saudi investment platform Eleven Ventures, which committed to facilitate up to $200M in equity financing from regional sovereign wealth funds and private institutions, subject to customary processes and approvals.

Sonablate did not announce that $200M had landed in its bank account, and this is not a conventional round with a disclosed valuation or investor syndicate. It is a capital-formation and expansion framework connecting a U.S. therapeutic ultrasound platform with Middle Eastern capital, manufacturing ambition, policy relationships, and market access.

Sonablate's commercial foundation is its image-guided HIFU system for prostate tissue ablation. Focused ultrasound energy targets tissue without an incision, and the device is FDA-cleared in the United States for prostate tissue ablation. Sonablate says its technology is authorized in more than 50 countries and has treated more than 30,000 patients worldwide.

The plan includes potential MENA commercialization, evaluation of assembly and manufacturing in Saudi Arabia, a GCC regional headquarters, clinical research, regulatory engagement, and possible joint ventures. Sonablate says overseas equipment deployment could begin as early as Q4 2026. That target matters only when approvals and execution catch up with the announcement.

CEO Richard Yang is leading the expansion alongside CFO Brian Murrell, CTO Dr. Ralf Seip, and Chief Scientific Officer Narendra Sanghvi. His Royal Highness Prince Abdulaziz bin Turki Al Saud, identified by Sonablate as founder of the relevant Eleven Ventures platform, will provide strategic leadership around government engagement, capital formation, and international partnerships.

There is history underneath the headline. Sonablate Corp was formed in 2021 when SonaCare Medical merged into the new company, alongside a combined seed investment and committed distribution agreement exceeding $70M. A July 2026 Imperial-led study followed 3,477 focal-therapy patients across 14 UK hospitals.

The operator lesson is simple: capital helps, but distribution, regulation, evidence, manufacturing, and government alignment decide whether medical technology travels. The alliance is signed. Now the meaningful milestones are capital actually closed, equipment actually deployed, approvals actually earned, and patients actually reached.

VSS Backs Cordoba in Minority Growth Investment

Cordoba put fresh capital behind a competitive advantage America keeps relearning: knowing how to get difficult infrastructure built without turning every public project into civic group therapy.

VSS Capital Partners completed a significant minority growth investment in Cordoba, LLC., the Los Angeles engineering, program management, and construction management firm founded in 1983 by George L. Pla. Financial terms were not disclosed, so focus on the thesis, not the cap table.

Cordoba works across education and facilities, energy, transportation, and water for public and institutional customers along the Pacific Coast. The company says it manages more than $125B in capital improvement programs and has participated in client programs exceeding $250B. Cordoba employs more than 400 professionals.

This is not a software story wearing a hard hat. It is a people-and-process business where engineering judgment, local relationships, procurement discipline, and institutional memory decide whether a plan becomes a project or an expensive PDF.

Founder and CEO George L. Pla has built Cordoba over 43 years. The minority structure matters because the goal is acceleration without identity replacement. Cordoba wanted capital that reinforces its values. VSS wanted a founder-led platform with technical depth, multidisciplinary services, and durable infrastructure markets.

VSS Managing Partner Jeffrey Stevenson pointed to Cordoba’s record on complex programs. Principal Sai Parepally emphasized its technical talent, service quality, and ability to win work. Investor language, yes, but it identifies the asset: a deep bench that understands how public infrastructure gets delivered.

The timing is not subtle. The American Society of Civil Engineers estimates a $3.7T U.S. infrastructure investment gap over 10 years at current funding levels. Money is only part of it. Projects also need planning, controls, engineers, construction managers, and teams that can translate public ambition into work that survives budgets, regulations, politics, and weather.

For operators, the lesson is clean. Expertise compounds when attached to trust, repeatable delivery, and markets that cannot postpone maintenance forever. Capital can widen the aperture, but it cannot manufacture 43 years of credibility after the wire clears.

George L. Pla and the Cordoba team now have VSS Capital Partners, Jeffrey Stevenson, and Sai Parepally behind the next stage. The investment gives Cordoba room to grow. The sharper question is how much capacity that adds to Pacific Coast projects waiting for competent hands.

WashWise Raises $1.2M to Build the “Between-Wear” Market

The washing machine has received decades of attention. WashWise looked at the other 99% of a garment’s life and asked a better question: what happens when clothes are not dirty enough to wash, but definitely not innocent enough to wear again? That question just attracted $1.2M in pre-seed funding.

New York-based WashWise raised the SAFE round, co-led by FJ Labs and Singh Capital, as Founder and CEO Maria Cabral Menezes launched Reset Spray on August 10, 2026. No CTO or additional executive has been publicly identified. Maria Cabral Menezes came to clothing care after trading at J.P. Morgan and Citadel and graduating from the University of Pennsylvania. Gym clothes, travel, laundry piles, and dry-cleaning bills exposed a gap between “wear it again” and “wash the damn thing.”

Reset Spray is essentially dry shampoo for clothes. It refreshes, de-wrinkles, deodorizes, and lightly cleans garments using ethyl lauroyl arginate, chitosan, and cyclodextrin. Bag-on-valve packaging delivers a fine mist without aerosol propellant. Cotton Cooldown and Verde Rise come in full-size and travel formats, with the 6 oz bottle priced at $29. WashWise says one 6 oz bottle can save up to $300 in dry-cleaning costs, six hours of laundry time, 110 gallons of water, and 16 kWh of electricity. Those are company-provided figures, but the proposition is clear: sell people back time, money, and another wear.

Alongside FJ Labs and Singh Capital are Alex Jekowsky, Jack Abraham, Brian Tate, Gigi Howard, Nina Farran, Mia Tonelli, Taylor James, and Brown Girl Angels, plus operators and executives from Pickle, The Business of Fashion, Dior, SoulCycle, Soho House, Apple, and J.P. Morgan. Alex Jekowsky is an investor here, not WashWise leadership, and is associated with Cents. Jack Abraham joins from Atomic.

The business lesson sits underneath the fresh scent. Maria Cabral Menezes identified an awkward moment incumbents largely built around, called it “between-wear,” created a product for it, then put that product where the behavior already lives. Summer activations reached Crow’s Nest, SoulCycle, and KZ Pilates in East Hampton, alongside a Montauk event. Fitness, travel, fashion, convenience. The context tells the story.

Now the $1.2M goes toward product development, strategic partnerships, team growth, and brand awareness, with Reset Spray positioned as the opening product rather than the whole wardrobe. Congratulations to Maria Cabral Menezes, WashWise, FJ Labs, Singh Capital, and everyone backing the round. Laundry may be inevitable. How often we do it looks increasingly negotiable, and that is where this gets interesting.

Discovered Materials Raises $9M Seed for AI Chip Materials

AI chips keep getting faster. Heat keeps collecting the bill. That makes materials science impossible for the technology industry to ignore. Discovered Materials just raised a $9M seed round to attack that problem at the atomic level. Lightspeed India Partners led the round through partner Hemant Mohapatra, joined by Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners, Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram, and Thariq Shihipar. For a company founded in 2026 with two confirmed employees, that is serious backing for the idea that the next semiconductor breakthrough may begin with materials.

Co-founder and CEO Advaith Sridhar and co-founder Akash Ramdas bring complementary résumés to the problem. Akash Ramdas studied semiconductor materials at Stanford, earning an MS and PhD and completing a postdoc. Advaith Sridhar earned a Master's in AI from Carnegie Mellon, was a founding applied scientist at Persona AI, and later a research engineer at Luma Labs. The two IIT Madras alumni have known each other for 11 years. Their thesis is beautifully inconvenient: AI chips demand more power, produce more heat, and keep asking existing materials for increasingly difficult favors.

Discovered Materials is building AI agents that use Anthropic models to generate candidate materials, paired with internally trained physics models for simulation and verification. Advaith Sridhar says the system can make thousands of AI-driven material “guesses” per day versus roughly 20 manual guesses per day during Akash Ramdas's PhD work. Speed is useful, but generating candidates is only half the fight. The expensive question is which candidates survive contact with physical reality.

That explains where the $9M goes next: expanding the team, scaling AI research agents, and building physical lab capacity to synthesize and validate candidates. Discovered Materials is also developing its open-source Material Discovery Bench after releasing hundreds of candidate materials discovered using frontier AI models.

The business lesson sits inside the gap between simulation and silicon. More AI-generated possibilities are not inherently the prize. Turning computational discoveries into materials semiconductor manufacturers can actually use is. Hemant Mohapatra has identified filtering and synthesis as the critical constraint, which makes the feedback loop between software and physical experimentation the piece worth watching.

If Discovered Materials can compress a materials discovery process traditionally measured in 10+ years into months, it is not merely selling AI-generated chemistry. It is selling time to an industry where compute keeps accelerating, heat keeps accumulating, and physics still refuses to accept venture-backed excuses.

VibeIQ Raises $22.5M for AI Retail Decision Platform

VibeIQ just raised $22.5M in growth financing, and the humble retail spreadsheet may have finally met a competitor with better career prospects.

The Boston-based AI-native product decision platform announced the round on August 10, led by Volition Capital with existing investor Venture Guides returning. Add the $6.3M Venture Guides round from June 2024, and VibeIQ has disclosed roughly $28.8M in funding. Roger Hurwitz and Volition Capital join Venture Guides Managing Partner Ben Nye, who saw enough the first time to come back for another fitting.

Founder and CEO Brian Lindauer knows the problem from inside the machinery. Before VibeIQ, Brian Lindauer was lead architect for PTC's FlexPLM and later CTO at Mavrck. The insight was simple: brands had sophisticated PLM systems, yet teams were still building product lines across decks, spreadsheets, and whiteboards, then manually re-entering the data. So VibeIQ went upstream.

Its platform gives merchandising, design, product development, and sales teams a shared visual view before development and sourcing decisions become expensive reality. Creative intent meets margin, regional adoption, development status, assortment gaps, duplication, and risk while teams can still act.

Generative AI can produce concepts at ridiculous speed. Fantastic. The world was apparently suffering from a shortage of options. The harder problem is deciding which products deserve money, development capacity, shelf space, and customer attention. VibeIQ's lane is not merely more creation. It is better product decisions.

Customers include New Balance, Vera Bradley, Converse, and Kizik. VibeIQ says customers have reduced planned SKU counts, surfaced decisions months earlier, and eliminated thousands of hours of manual work. The platform spans visual line planning, assortment building, retail visualization, concept generation, AI-driven scenarios, and integrations across PLM, ERP, and DAM systems.

The capital will fund deeper AI capabilities, integrations, product development, team growth, and expansion into more consumer categories and retail organizations. Brian Lindauer and co-founder Jack Schroeder built the foundation, alongside CRO Mark Rudolph, VP of Customer Success Quach Hai, Director of Finance Peter Bearse, Head of Product Dan Gentile, Head of Engineering Grant Hall, VP of Experience Management Bailey Heckel, and VP of GTM Mollie Panzner.

The business lesson is hiding between the seams. VibeIQ did not raise $22.5M because AI makes a prettier headline. It attacked the expensive space between imagination and commitment, where scattered information becomes bad decisions and bad decisions become inventory. Volition Capital and Venture Guides are betting that as AI makes creation nearly limitless, judgment becomes more valuable.

White Star Capital Closes $250M Fund IV for Global Growth

White Star Capital just closed Fund IV at $250M, and the interesting part is not the Roman numeral. It is the map behind the money.

Venture capital spent the last few years discovering that a passport stamp is not an operating strategy. Writing a check in New York and calling the portfolio “global” looks elegant in a deck. Helping a company hire in Paris, sell in Toronto, navigate Singapore, and keep its culture intact is where the expensive lessons live.

White Star Capital built for that mess. The firm operates across eight offices spanning North America, Europe, and Asia. Fund IV will focus on Series A and B technology companies with strong local roots and international ambition.

The $250M close lands in a market recovering unevenly. Venture fundraising rebounded in the first half of 2026, but capital remained concentrated among established managers. White Star Capital reports more than 100 portfolio companies, 22 exits, and a team of more than 50 people. Limited partners are writing checks again. They are simply asking harder questions about differentiation and whether a platform can do more than pose beside a founder on announcement day.

Fund IV deepens a strategy built around demographic shifts, enterprise digitization, infrastructure for moving and securing massive amounts of data, and climate or circular-economy innovation. Those themes reveal the bet: global problems will keep producing local founders who need a cross-border partner before the rest of the market learns their postal code.

Eric Martineau-Fortin and Jean-François Marcoux have led White Star Capital together since 2014. Their partnership predates the fund cycle, which matters when markets stop applauding every term sheet.

Together with its North American Seed Fund and several special-purpose vehicles, White Star Capital says it has raised more than $350M in fresh capital. That gives the platform coverage from seed through Series B while keeping Fund IV focused on early growth. It also gives founders another choice between a purely local investor and a mega-fund whose global network may amount to little more than a logo wall.

The next generation of category leaders will not all be born in the same five zip codes. Some will build in Montreal and sell in Munich. Others will start in Paris, expand through New York, and learn that product-market fit changes accents at every border. White Star Capital is putting $250M behind the idea that international scale should be designed early, supported locally, and earned market by market.

Atlas Motion Raises $11.5M for Defense Tech Motors

Six months ago, Atlas Motion Systems barely existed. Now it is shipping roughly 10,000 motors a month, aiming for 40,000 by December, with $11.5M in fresh capital. Hardware people know how ridiculous that sentence is.

Christian Mochen, Carlo Dela Rosa, and Tom Baron kept seeing the same problem inside robotics: critical motion components treated like interchangeable commodities, sourced through supply chains outside U.S. control, while drones, robots, and autonomous defense systems became more important by the minute. So Atlas Motion decided motion deserved more motion.

The Long Beach company designs brushless DC motors and high-power-density actuators, with engineering and prototyping in California and mass-scale manufacturing in Manila. Atlas Motion shipped its first motor within 60 days of incorporation. Apparently, “hardware moves slowly” is negotiable.

Then comes Vector. Atlas Motion's proprietary AI engineering and manufacturing orchestration system takes customer requirements, runs simulations, and generates manufacturing packages. Designs that traditionally could consume weeks or months can reportedly take 5–20 minutes, with about 99% claimed confidence between simulated outputs and physical hardware. New designs can reach scaled production in about six weeks.

Christian Mochen has even generated a custom motor design live during an initial customer call. That speed, manufacturing control, and customization helps explain why Greycroft and Also Capital co-led the $11.5M funding, joined by Sunflower Capital, Enea Capital, and Redbud VC, with Jai Malik of AMCA and Scott Sanders of Forterra participating as angels. Greycroft's Mike Annunziata was also credited by Carlo Dela Rosa as an early believer.

The business lesson is hiding in plain sight. Capital gets more interested when the pitch deck has to compete with actual production. Atlas Motion had product moving, manufacturing operating, and a path from roughly 10,000 motors per month toward 40,000 before asking investors to imagine scale.

Co-founder & CEO Christian Mochen, Co-founder & COO Carlo Dela Rosa, and Co-founder, Growth Tom Baron now have $11.5M behind the operation and a larger manufacturing challenge ahead. The capital goes toward scaling production and developing Vector, while Atlas Motion ultimately wants cost-competitive U.S. production alongside its Philippine manufacturing base.

The opening wedge is small drone motors, but the bigger question sits inside the machinery: if autonomous systems keep getting smarter, why should the components making them move remain stuck at yesterday's manufacturing speed? Atlas Motion raised $11.5M. What matters next is how fast the hardware can move with it.

Salus Scientific Raises $10.1M Series A for Medtech Safety

Medicine has spent decades building better ways to treat patients. Salus Scientific is asking an uncomfortable question from the other side of the table: what happens to the people doing the treating?

Salus Scientific just closed an oversubscribed $10.1M Series A, beating its original $8M target and closing ahead of schedule. Investors weren't disclosed. The signal is simpler: capital showed up for a problem hiding in plain sight inside interventional medicine.

Founder William P. Buchanan, MD, FACC, knew that problem personally. Years wearing heavy lead aprons left William P. Buchanan with chronic shoulder, neck, and back pain. Instead of accepting orthopedic punishment as a membership fee for practicing medicine, William P. Buchanan developed the concept behind GLiFT, then brought it to CEO and Co-founder Todd O. Flohr.

GLiFT is an endoskeleton support system designed to transfer lead-apron weight from the shoulders, neck, and back to the iliac crest. AeroShield addresses radiation exposure through modular room-level shielding. Add Salus Shield and PeRM radiation-monitoring tools, and Salus starts looking less like a single-device company and more like an occupational-wellness system for procedural medicine.

Salus cites SCAI survey data showing nearly two-thirds of interventional cardiologists develop major orthopedic issues during their careers. Medicine engineered extraordinary technology around physicians while somehow deciding their spines could take one for the team. Salus Scientific declined that arrangement.

The $10.1M will support commercial scale-up and expanded production and clinical infrastructure while Salus Scientific continues developing GLiFT, AeroShield, and its broader protection portfolio. The company has also launched international expansion, although specific markets haven't been disclosed.

The business lesson sits inside that oversubscribed round. Salus Scientific started with pain experienced by the customer, built around clinical workflow, protected intellectual property around GLiFT, assembled commercial and technical leadership, and pursued a problem physicians can literally feel.

Credit Todd O. Flohr, William P. Buchanan, President & CFO Keith Rosmarin, VP of Engineering Nicholas Tomczak, VP of Operations Ty Dawson, VP of Sales Michael Lankford, VP of Global Medical Affairs and Engagement Dan Lormon, General Counsel Jon A. Wallace, and the broader Salus Scientific team. Will Martin, Ryan Majoria, MD, and Ron Sancho bring board-level experience as commercialization moves forward.

Salus takes its name from the Roman goddess of safety, health, and well-being. 2,000 years later, the name has found a fitting assignment. Protecting the patient matters enormously. Salus Scientific is asking what medicine looks like when protecting the people standing over that table matters just as much...

Tortuga Backs Advanced eClinical Training's Growth

Advanced eClinical Training just added a strategic investor, and the interesting part is not the undisclosed check. It is the operating bet underneath it.

Tortuga Growth Partners invested through Tortuga Growth Partners Fund I. The deal, announced August 4, gives ACT a partner for its next growth phase while extending Tortuga’s healthcare platform. No amount, valuation, or ownership percentage was disclosed. This story does not need invented math.

ACT was founded in 2020 by Shay Safarzadeh and Shabnam Safarzadeh around a stubborn problem: healthcare needs more qualified clinical professionals, while traditional training can be slow and difficult to fit around work or school. ACT built an online path combining certification courses with simulations, interactive labs, externship support, mentorship, and career services.

The company says it has trained and certified more than 10,000 healthcare professionals and developed a network of more than 1,000 healthcare partners across urgent care, physician practices, outpatient clinics, laboratories, and health systems. Workforce education gets judged twice: by whether learners finish and whether employers trust what they learned.

The investment is meant to expand ACT’s programs, strengthen its technology platform, deepen employer relationships, and create more pathways into healthcare careers. That is a practical use-of-capital plan. The product is training infrastructure aimed at a labor constraint providers already feel.

Tortuga focuses on technology-enabled services in healthcare, information technology, and financial services, helping founder-led businesses build operational capacity. ACT also gains a board and observer group that includes Ashray Prasad, Michael O’Neil, Walt Vester, and Marty DeMonte. Michael O’Neil, founder of Get Well, will serve as Executive Chair.

The sharper market signal is that healthcare workforce development is becoming investable infrastructure. Education, credentialing, clinical readiness, and employer access used to look like separate problems. Platforms that connect them can shorten the distance between wanting a healthcare career and being prepared to do the job.

Shay Safarzadeh, Shabnam Safarzadeh, and the ACT team have built enough proof since 2020 to attract an investor with a healthcare operating bench. Now comes the less glamorous work: scaling access without sanding down quality, support, or outcomes. If ACT can do that, this investment will be measured less by the announcement and more by the people who enter healthcare ready to help.