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WovenEarth Ventures Closes $155M Cleantech Fund II

WovenEarth Ventures closed WovenEarth Fund II at $155M, and the interesting part is not another climate fund showing up with a respectable number. It is the architecture behind the number.

The Palo Alto investment firm is not trying to pick one heroic company and pray the term sheet ages well. Fund II is designed to give investors exposure to 250+ early-stage cleantech companies through fund commitments and direct co-investments. Roughly one-third of investable capital is reserved for co-investments.

That is portfolio construction for a market that refuses to fit inside one neat category. Energy demand is climbing. Domestic supply chains are being rebuilt. Extreme weather is turning resilience into an operating cost. The companies attacking those problems span geothermal, battery storage, critical minerals, robotics, and orchestration software. One check cannot cover that terrain. A deliberate network can.

As of the announcement, Fund II had committed to seven funds and completed 20 co-investments. The close happened May 29, 2026, and WovenEarth announced it on August 12. The firm now reports more than $330M in total AUM.

Returning investors include The Pennsylvania State University, Glenmede, Mortenson Family Foundation, and M.A. Mortenson Companies. J.M. Huber Corporation joined Fund II alongside additional foundations and family offices. That is patient capital choosing a structure built to spread technical risk without abandoning early-stage upside.

Jane Woodward built WovenEarth around a useful contradiction: cleantech is broad enough to touch the global economy, yet specialized enough to punish lazy diligence. Denise Miller, Trina Van Pelt, Alicia Virtue, Mauricia Geissler, and Natasha Skok add experience across investing and operations.

Fund II follows a $152M first fund. That vehicle had committed to 13 U.S. early-stage climate-tech managers and sought exposure to 300+ companies. The sequel tightens the model around seven fund relationships, 20 direct positions, and a clearer split between diversification and conviction.

The broader signal is bigger than a climate label. Investors are looking for businesses tied to power availability, industrial productivity, domestic capacity, and physical resilience. Those are not side quests for the economy. They are the infrastructure beneath it.

The fund close is the headline, but the sharper story for Jane Woodward and the WovenEarth Ventures team is what the structure says: when the opportunity set gets complicated, disciplined access becomes a product of its own.

XiFin Invests in Notable Systems for AI RCM Alliance

Notable Systems just turned a customer relationship into something heavier: capital, product alignment, and a multi-year mandate to build.

XiFin has made a strategic investment in Notable Systems as part of Notable's Series B financing. The amount was not disclosed. The investment arrives alongside a multi-year alliance to develop purpose-built AI capabilities across the XiFin Empower AI revenue cycle management ecosystem.

That distinction matters. Notable's $12M Series B was reported in 2025 and led by Harbert Growth Partners and Grotech Ventures. XiFin was already a customer. This week's news moves XiFin from buyer to investor and product partner without pretending every strategic check needs a giant ceremonial number.

The logic is cleaner than most alliance announcements. Notable turns requisitions, prescriptions, medical records, and payor correspondence into structured information software can act on. XiFin brings encounter, financial, and payor data, plus the workflow orchestration needed to move that information through real revenue cycle operations.

Put those pieces together and the ambition is not another AI assistant politely summarizing a document while a human still does the work. It is a system that can understand what arrived, determine what should happen next, and move the case forward where mistakes become denials, delays, and trapped cash.

XiFin Executive Chair and CEO Lâle White framed the alliance as an expansion of the specialized capabilities available through Empower AI. Notable Systems CEO Steve Johnson called XiFin's participation a vote of confidence in the team and technology. CTO Kevin Brandon now has the kind of mandate technical leaders want: deeper engineering investment tied to real distribution and live operational problems.

Healthcare RCM is full of software that can identify a problem. The harder job is connecting messy source material to the next governed action without losing context, compliance, or accountability. That is the gap Notable and XiFin are trying to close.

For Notable, the alliance offers a route deeper into major healthcare platforms and providers. For XiFin, it adds document intelligence to an AI ecosystem built around the financial machinery of care. For operators, the lesson is direct: the strongest AI partnerships form where proprietary capability meets proprietary workflow.

For Steve Johnson, Kevin Brandon, Lâle White, and the teams at Notable Systems and XiFin, the check matters. The multi-year commitment to make the technology work inside the mess matters more.

Databricks Closes $5B Round at $190B Valuation

Databricks just closed a $5B strategic round at a $190B valuation, and the more interesting number may be the $7B revenue run-rate sitting beside it.

Coatue led the round with Blackstone, MGX, T. Rowe Price-advised accounts, and new investor Sixth Street Growth. BOND, Clearlake Capital, Point72, Premji Invest, and TPG also joined as new investors. Private capital can be patient, but it is rarely sentimental at this scale.

Databricks says Q2 revenue grew more than 80% year over year. Lakehouse passed a $1.5B revenue run-rate, while Lakebase, its serverless Postgres database for AI agents, crossed $100M. More than 1,000 customers consume above a $1M annualized rate, and more than 100 exceed $10M.

That separates this raise from the usual valuation theater. Databricks is showing consumption across warehousing, databases, analytics, governance, and agents, then putting another $5B behind the idea that those workloads belong on one operating layer.

The product bet is unusually clear. Lakebase gives agents operational memory. Genie turns governed business data into answers and actions. Unity AI Gateway handles model choice, governance, routing, and cost controls. Enterprises do not need another chatbot wandering through sensitive data with the keys taped to its shirt. They need context, permissioning, and a finance team that does not discover the token bill by accident.

Databricks was co-founded by CEO Ali Ghodsi, CTO Matei Zaharia, Andy Konwinski, Ion Stoica, Patrick Wendell, Reynold Xin, and Arsalan Tavakoli-Shiraji. Together, they helped turn an open-source engine into infrastructure used by more than 20,000 organizations, including 70% of the Fortune 500. Apache Spark's UC Berkeley roots still show: make hard data systems usable, then keep moving.

The valuation moved from a $188B term sheet in July to a $190B close in August. Earlier this year, Databricks completed about $5B of equity financing at a $134B valuation and added about $2B of debt capacity. The sharper question is what it does with private-market room to spend aggressively.

If Databricks can make Lakebase, Genie, and Unity AI Gateway the default path from enterprise data to production agents, the round will look less like late-stage excess and more like a land grab for the control plane of enterprise AI. If customers split those layers across specialists, $190B becomes a much louder benchmark to defend. Which architecture wins when AI budgets stop rewarding demos and start demanding systems that work?

Princeton Critical Minerals Secures Nearly $16M

Princeton Critical Minerals just put nearly $16M behind an industrial question: what if lithium producers could get more mineral from the brine assets they already have without waiting years for another pond or processing plant?

The number needs precision. Public records support $11M in Series A capital, with SOSV investing $7M and the New Jersey Innovation Evergreen Fund approving up to $4M alongside it. Add a $3.1M ARPA-E project and a $1.555M NSF Fast-Track award, and the total lands at $15.655M, or roughly $16M across equity and grants.

Venture dollars are underwriting commercial scale. Federal grants are underwriting technical risk. Princeton Critical Minerals, formerly PureLi, needs both because it is attacking the lithium problem from two directions.

Lilypad sits on existing evaporation ponds and converts more sunlight into useful heat. Princeton University reported field pilots with SQM in northern Chile that increased evaporation rates by 40% to 122%, depending on the brine. SmartPond adds real-time sensing and forecasting. E-LiTE goes after lower-concentration brines and produced water, where the chemistry gets rude and conventional economics often leave the room.

That is sharper than promising to reinvent mining. PCM is improving the installed base while developing a path into resources that have been difficult to process economically. Faster evaporation can raise throughput. Better recovery can reduce what gets stranded. Selective extraction can turn produced water into a domestic mineral source.

Princeton Critical Minerals was founded by CEO Sean Zheng, Chief Scientist Z. Jason Ren, and Senior Advisor Richard Blue. Zheng has taken PCM from Princeton research into commercial deployments, while Ren brings the resource-recovery science. COO Angela Fasnacht adds the operating depth required when a lab result has to survive heat, logistics, scale, and a customer site.

For operators, the lesson is not that every legacy process needs demolition. Sometimes the better business makes an existing asset produce more, recover more, and waste less. For investors, the signal is practical: critical-minerals startups look more credible when their technology can enter through today's infrastructure while building tomorrow's supply chain.

For Sean Zheng, Z. Jason Ren, Richard Blue, Angela Fasnacht, and the Princeton Critical Minerals team, nearly $16M creates a larger test of that thesis. They are not selling magic dirt. They are building a disciplined way to get strategic materials out of difficult water, with private and public capital behind the effort to see how far it can scale.

Khartis Therapeutics Raises $50M Series B

Khartis Therapeutics just emerged from stealth with a $50M Series B and a precise target: make thyroid eye disease treatment oral, selective, and easier on patients. Forge Life Science Partners led the round, with Longwood Fund and Alexandria Venture Investments joining existing backers Foresite Capital, Lilly Asia Ventures, and Nextech Invest. Total capital raised is now $95M.

The number matters, but the real signal sits in the lead program. Khartis is developing what it describes as the first oral, selective IGF-1R inhibitor designed specifically for thyroid eye disease, an autoimmune condition that can cause inflammation around the eyes, bulging, double vision, pain, and vision complications.

IGF-1R is already a validated target. The approved treatment Tepezza inhibits the same receptor, but it is delivered through eight intravenous infusions, and its prescribing information highlights risks including hyperglycemia, hearing impairment, and infusion reactions. Khartis is betting that a selective small molecule could offer a more patient-friendly route without abandoning the biology that put the target on the map.

The $50M will advance that program toward the clinic and support a broader pipeline of oral small molecules aimed at clinically validated immunology pathways. Khartis is pairing known disease biology with a drug format that could change how treatment fits into a patient's life.

The team has receipts. Khartis was founded by CEO and Head of Drug Discovery Robert Hoffman, CSO Craig Murphy, and Executive Chairman Chris LeMasters. Many members of the scientific team previously worked together at XinThera, the San Diego biotech acquired by Gilead Sciences in 2023. The returning investors add something useful: people who had seen the team work chose to fund it again.

That shared history matters in biotech, where molecules ignore résumés and timelines charge interest. This group has already moved from discovery to an exit together. Now it has new and returning capital to prove the next chapter is more than a reunion tour.

Khartis still has the difficult part ahead: moving toward the clinic and showing that the oral thesis survives development. But it has chosen a meaningful wedge, combining a serious disease, a validated target, and a delivery problem patients understand immediately.

For Robert Hoffman, Craig Murphy, Chris LeMasters, and the Khartis Therapeutics team, the Series B is permission to test whether better drug design can make a proven mechanism work better for the people who have to live with it.

Boulevard Bio Launches With $65M for Autoimmune Pipeline

Boulevard Bio just emerged from stealth with approximately $65M in aggregate financing from founding investor Deerfield Management and affiliates. That is equity capital and convertible notes behind a clinical-stage precision immunology company built to attack B cell-driven autoimmune disease at its source.

This is not a biotech launch assembled from a logo and a heroic PowerPoint. Boulevard Bio was incubated inside Deerfield Discovery and Development, where molecules and company formation grew under the same roof.

The lead program, BLVD101, is a dual BAFF/APRIL-targeting bispecific antibody in an ongoing Phase 1 study in healthy volunteers. Boulevard Bio says interim data support dosing once every 12 weeks, a meaningful design goal in IgA nephropathy, where "chronic" too often means building life around treatment.

Keep the science honest, though. These are early, company-reported healthy-volunteer findings, not proof of efficacy in patients. They suggest Boulevard Bio may have paired established B cell biology with a dosing profile designed for the long haul.

The rest of the pipeline makes the ambition clear. BLVD201 is a trispecific CD19/BCMA/CD3 T cell engager in IND-enabling studies. BLVD301, nominated as a development candidate in June, adds another bispecific program around an undisclosed target combination.

CEO Mahesh Karande and CMO Neil Solomons, MD, carry the operating side. Scientific co-founders Georg Schett, MD, and Frank Nestle, MD, bring the B cell foundation, while founding advisor Jonathan Barratt, PhD, FRCP, adds IgA nephropathy expertise. Deerfield Managing Director Brian Chow, PhD, chairs the board.

The investor logic is sharper than "autoimmune is hot." BAFF and APRIL sit upstream in the biology that sustains pathogenic IgA production. The opportunity is to test whether better target combinations and better dosing can change what durable disease control looks like.

The $65M is only part of the story. The real asset is the sequence: experienced founders, a company-building engine, early clinical evidence, and three programs aimed at different layers of B cell disease. Now the burden shifts to execution because biology does not care how clean the launch deck looks. That is a serious operating test.

For Boulevard Bio, Mahesh Karande, Georg Schett, Frank Nestle, Neil Solomons, Jonathan Barratt, Brian Chow, and the Deerfield Management team, the launch is public. The next proof points will decide whether this boulevard leads to a new standard or just another crowded intersection.

Pathway Reaches $30M in Seed Funding at $500M Valuation

Pathway just added capital at a $500M valuation, bringing total seed funding to $30M. The precise wording matters. This is not a disclosed $30M check. It is a new financing that takes the seed total to $30M, and that difference is where disciplined reporting earns its keep.

The investor group includes Id4 Ventures, TQ Ventures, Red Bridge Ventures, Kadmos Capital, WS Investment Co., and Databricks Chief AI Scientist Jonathan Frankle as an angel. Pathway says most of the capital will expand compute capacity, including NVIDIA GB300 systems. The more interesting bet is what those machines must prove.

Pathway is building BDH, or Dragon Hatchling, a post-Transformer architecture designed to place reasoning, memory, and adaptation inside the model rather than stacking another external memory system onto yesterday's assumptions. The company is arguing that the AI industry's scaling problem is partly architectural. Bigger clusters can buy more capability, but they cannot make a frozen design learn continuously by sheer force of invoice.

That thesis now has a measurable test. Pathway reports that its 150M-parameter BDH-CQ model reached 29.5% pass@2 on the 400-task public ARC-AGI-1 evaluation set at a calculated inference cost of roughly $0.0007 per task. It is a specialized benchmark, not a victory lap over every production workload. Still, cost per useful unit of reasoning is exactly the kind of number enterprise buyers will care about once AI agents graduate from occasional demos to persistent operations.

Co-founder and CEO Zuzanna Stamirowska is joined by co-founders Claire Nouet, Jan Chorowski, and Adrian Kosowski across operations, technology, and science. Adam Kurzrok has also joined as Chief Product Officer after serving as a Group Product Manager for Gemini at Google DeepMind. That hire puts a product operator between an ambitious architecture and the unforgiving question every research company eventually hears: who can use it reliably, at scale?

The business lesson is not that Transformers are finished. It is that dominant architectures create blind spots, especially when every limitation gets answered with more parameters, more tokens, and more compute. Pathway is raising capital to test whether persistent state and latent reasoning can produce a different cost curve.

For the Pathway team and its backers, the $500M valuation prices conviction today. The next proof is whether BDH can carry its benchmark efficiency into financial services, healthcare, and technology workflows where stale context and expensive reasoning have real operating consequences.

River Markets Raises $8.5M for Prediction Market Trading

River Markets just raised $8.5M in seed funding in 2026 to build the part of prediction markets everybody ignores while staring at the odds: the machinery professional traders need when real money meets fragmented infrastructure.

Haun Ventures led the round, which closed in July. Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures, and Qube Research Technologies participated. The valuation was not disclosed. The capital will support more engineers, faster and more secure systems, and expanded sales and operations.

River Markets is not another venue asking traders to open one more tab. It is building prime brokerage and execution infrastructure across prediction markets. Its terminal combines orders, positions, and P&L across venues, while its routing matches equivalent contracts and seeks better execution.

That distinction matters because a market can attract attention long before it earns professional infrastructure. Consumer interfaces make a trade easy. Institutional systems make thousands of decisions, controls, and reconciliations boring. Boring is not an insult in finance.

River Markets was founded by CEO Oscar Levy and CTO Antonin Parrot, who came to the problem from quantitative trading. They met at UC Berkeley and began building prediction-market software on nights and weekends in 2023. Their trading exposed the gap: similar contracts lived on separate venues, liquidity was fragmented, and managing one view across them required more operational work than the trade deserved.

The company says more than $50M has traded through its platform, with 200% week-over-week growth since early April and adoption by three of the top 10 traders on both Kalshi and Polymarket. Those are company-reported figures, but they frame the bet. River Markets is building for the moment curiosity turns into volume, risk limits, execution quality, and clean audit trails.

Kalshi, Polymarket, and Polymarket US are live integrations. Novig and Crypto.com are still being integrated. The platform offers smart routing, advanced order types, subaccounts, portfolio views, and a unified API. That is less glamorous than launching another market about who wins an election or a championship. It may also be more durable.

For Oscar Levy, Antonin Parrot, and the River Markets team, the test now is whether they can make trading across prediction markets ordinary enough for serious desks to stay. Haun Ventures, Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures, and Qube Research Technologies are backing execution over spectacle, along with the unglamorous systems that let a young market grow without tripping over its own cables.

PointsKash Announces Up to $100M Capital Commitment

PointsKash just put a serious number next to an equally serious execution test. The fintech company announced an expanded strategic capital commitment of up to $100M from Hawk Capital Advisors, built around milestones rather than a ceremonial check and a victory lap.

That distinction matters. This is not $100M already sitting in the bank. The structure contemplates up to $35M through October 30, 2026, for near-term commercialization, followed by up to another $65M from February through April 30, 2027. The second phase depends on agreed operating, commercial, and deployment milestones, along with customary closing conditions. That puts the discipline of the deal ahead of the spectacle of the number.

PointsKash says the initial capital would help refurbish and deploy approximately 2,100 company-owned kiosks, support technology integrations, expand merchant activation, advance PK Pay, strengthen working capital, and prepare the infrastructure for a broader national rollout. The physical footprint matters because this business is trying to connect cash services, payments, loyalty value, digital assets, and mobile financial tools without pretending every consumer lives inside a perfect app funnel.

The company has also reported a BitCorp relationship involving assignments representing approximately 18,500 merchant locations and a prospective pipeline above 100,000 locations. Those are opportunity figures, not completed deployments. Hardware, integrations, merchant onboarding, and consumer activation have to move together, or the map becomes a collection of pins with no operating system behind it.

CEO and President Michael Herron is now carrying that execution burden. Founder and Chairman Steve Janjic built the original thesis, while CFO Jason Brown and Chief Compliance Officer Thomas Lorenz are part of the leadership team tasked with converting an ambitious financial-commerce architecture into something repeatable at street level.

Hawk Capital Advisors is not underwriting a tidy software story. It is backing machines, merchant distribution, regulated workflows, and mobile infrastructure. Michael Frantz described the staged approach as a way to align capital with progress, which is the sentence to remember when the headline number starts doing cartwheels.

For PointsKash, Michael Herron, Steve Janjic, and Hawk Capital Advisors, the deployment logic is now in public view. The real milestone is proving that kiosks, software, merchants, and consumers can operate as one system at national scale, leaving the most interesting part of this deal ahead of the company.