Loyalty Has to Move Both Ways

InfiniG

InfiniG just raised $5.2M in Seed funding, co-led by J2 Ventures and Stormbreaker Ventures, to scale Mobile Coverage as a Service across more enterprise buildings and campuses. The round is small enough to miss the megadeal parade and important enough to expose a market failure hiding in plain sight: your phone can cross a continent, then lose the plot in an elevator.

Indoor cellular has spent years trapped between expensive DAS projects, carrier-funded deployments reserved for the biggest venues, and Wi-Fi calling that asks users to solve an infrastructure problem. InfiniG is building around a different premise. Enterprises fund one managed neutral-host network, operators share the infrastructure, and people keep the phones, SIMs, plans, and habits they already have.

The model came from experience. CEO Joel Lindholm and CTO Fuad Abdelaziz worked together at Meta, helping deploy shared-spectrum indoor cellular across large campuses. They saw technology that worked inside a deployment model that could not scale across the thousands of properties where coverage still disappears behind glass, steel, and concrete.

InfiniG turned that lesson into MCaaS: a cloud-based service coordinating operator onboarding, integration, emergency calling, monitoring, analytics, and operations. The company says its systems cover more than 10M square feet across the United States. That metric is company-reported, but the logic is clear. Buildings became software-defined everywhere except the signal bars.

The investor pairing fits the job. J2 Ventures backs infrastructure for commercial and government markets. Stormbreaker Ventures focuses on private networks, Open RAN, edge systems, and the physical layer beneath modern software. Both are underwriting the same bet: connectivity is becoming enterprise-controlled infrastructure, not a carrier favor.

The value extends beyond fixing dropped calls. Multi-operator cellular supports emergency communications, operations, connected devices, private networks, automation, and the physical-AI applications arriving behind them. InfiniG offers a managed foundation that can move from LTE toward 5G and private networking without rebuilding the property every time the roadmap changes.

Joel Lindholm, Fuad Abdelaziz, and the InfiniG team are taking on a problem everybody recognizes but few enterprises want to solve themselves. J2 Ventures and Stormbreaker Ventures are backing the hard work of making that infrastructure repeatable. Intelligent buildings still need one ancient promise honored first: the phone should work inside.

Sonic Fire Tech

Sonic Fire Tech just raised $15M to prove that fighting fire with sound can become more than a great demonstration video. The round was led by The O.H.I.O. Fund, with Khosla Ventures participating. It follows the Cleveland company’s $3.5M seed announced in October 2025.

Water works. Chemicals work. They can also turn a contained incident into months of cleanup, damaged equipment, and a restoration bill that arrives after the flames are gone. Sonic Fire Tech is building an acoustic suppression system designed to interrupt early-stage combustion with low-frequency sound, moving air around a flame without dumping water or suppressant across the room. That sounds simple right up until you remember that fire codes are written in evidence, not applause.

The $15M will fund hiring and the testing needed to move from controlled demonstrations into regulated buildings. That is the real story. Sonic Fire Tech is not raising money to make the science look cooler. It is raising money to make the results repeatable enough for building officials, insurers, installers, and fire-safety professionals to trust.

CEO Geoffrey “Geoff” Bruder brings a NASA Glenn background in thermoacoustics. Michael Thomas found Bruder through his patents and helped turn the idea into a company. Remington Bixby Hotchkis, identified as COO, is helping drive the commercial path.

There is still work between an extinguished lab flame and a code-accepted building system. Independent specialists have asked for broader evidence across fuels, layouts, obstructions, ventilation conditions, and reignition risks. Sonic Fire Tech has also been clear that early lithium-ion testing focuses on containing flames and limiting spread, not extinguishing the underlying battery reaction. That distinction matters. Fire protection is a market where ambition gets the meeting, but proof gets the permit.

The O.H.I.O. Fund leading keeps the next phase tied to Ohio’s aerospace talent, manufacturing base, and machine-shop muscle. Khosla Ventures returning adds continuity while the company works through the expensive middle ground between invention and infrastructure.

Geoff Bruder, Michael Thomas, Remington Bixby Hotchkis, and the Sonic Fire Tech team now have $15M to push that work forward. If the testing holds up, the company will not just have built a cleaner way to suppress fire. It will have shown how deep-tech founders can turn unusual physics into something cautious institutions can adopt.

Smack Technologies

Smack Technologies just raised a $61M Series B to move military AI from the command center toward the tactical edge. Costanoa Ventures and First In led the round, with new and existing investors also participating.

The headline is capital. The story is compressing the distance between sensing a problem, understanding it, and making a useful decision while the network is under stress.

Smack calls that next layer Intelligent Autonomy. Its Alpha platform is designed for edge-level decision making, pairing a lightweight model called Diet Cage 1.0 with proprietary hardware that can support operations where bandwidth, compute, and time are all scarce.

The company is not starting from a blank screen. Earlier this year, Smack announced $32M across Seed and Series A funding for Omega, its command-level planning platform. Smack now says Omega is moving into production across multiple branches of the U.S. military, while the Series B brings total funding to more than $90M.

That progression matters. Plenty of AI companies can make a demo look clever under perfect conditions. National-security systems have to reason across messy multimodal data, survive degraded communications, respect human command, and remain useful when the stakes have stopped being theoretical.

The new capital will fund hardware development for Alpha, broaden Smack's models across domains and warfighting functions, and recruit AI researchers and engineers. The goal is not another dashboard with better adjectives. It is a software and hardware stack that can help distributed forces coordinate toward a mission when centralized control is too slow or unavailable.

Smack was founded in 2024 by MARSOC veterans Andy Markoff, Clint Alanis, and Dan Gould. Markoff serves as CEO, Alanis as COO, and Gould as head of strategy. The operating thesis comes from people who have lived the decision problem, then recruited scientists and engineers to attack it from the model layer through deployment.

For Costanoa Ventures and First In, the bet is that the next defense AI platform will need more than software. It will need models rooted in the physics and constraints of real operations, hardware built for the edge, and a team that understands why a technically elegant answer can still be operationally useless.

Andy Markoff, Clint Alanis, Dan Gould, the Smack team, Costanoa Ventures, First In, and everyone backing the build are now taking that thesis deeper into the field. The real test is whether Alpha can carry intelligence to the edge without losing the human judgment that gives it purpose.

Hopscotch Primary Care

Hopscotch Primary Care just raised a $53M Series D to tackle a problem healthcare keeps dodging: how do you build durable, high-touch primary care in towns where distance, staffing, and thin margins punish shortcuts?

8VC and Town Hall Ventures led the round. Existing investors aMoon Fund, Citi Impact Fund, Alumni Ventures, and K2 HealthVentures returned, joined by Autism Impact Fund, John Doerr, Dr. Richard Merkin, and Leon Levine Foundation.

Hopscotch is not selling another dashboard to rural clinics and calling the job finished. It operates the clinics, recruits the clinicians, builds the care teams, and uses technology to reduce administrative drag while keeping the relationship between patient and provider intact.

Kristin Myers Peng founded Hopscotch in 2021. The company now reports more than 15,000 patients across 12 clinical locations in the Southeastern United States, centered in Western North Carolina. Tim Gronniger became CEO in November 2024, and Dr. Aditi Mallick serves as CMO.

The company says its model offers same-day visits, 24/7 access to a care team, proactive outreach, and support that extends beyond the exam room. Hopscotch also reports an NPS of 89, patient retention above 90%, and medical-loss-ratio improvement of more than 25 percentage points over a patient's first two years. Those company-reported figures define the test this capital must carry into new markets.

Hopscotch will use the financing to deepen access in its existing region, expand into additional rural markets, and scale its technology-powered operations. That sounds straightforward until you remember the business underneath it: physical clinics, hard-to-fill clinical roles, dispersed patients, and value-based contracts that reward better long-term outcomes instead of more daily billing.

The timing is sharp. CMS is distributing $50B through states from 2026 to 2030 for rural access, workforce, infrastructure, technology, and new care models. Hopscotch's round is private capital, not a federal award, but both pools of money are chasing the same stubborn truth: rural healthcare does not get fixed by shrinking an urban model and moving it down the highway.

The Series D follows a $50M Series C announced in June 2024. Together, those two rounds put at least $103M behind Hopscotch since then, without pretending that capital alone solves recruitment, trust, or care coordination.

Kristin Myers Peng, Tim Gronniger, Dr. Aditi Mallick, and the Hopscotch team now have a larger test ahead. The next move is not merely opening more doors. It is proving the model can cross state lines without leaving the patient relationship behind.

CAMO Hospitality

CAMO Hospitality has completed a $4.077M equity financing. The Form D filed with the SEC on July 27 shows the entire offering sold to 21 investors, with the first sale recorded on July 14.

One detail matters before the funding confetti gets airborne: the filing does not call this Seed and does not name investors. The accurate story is $4.077M in equity financing. Precision earns trust.

The company is building something hotels have needed for years but rarely owned: a hotel-native room-service system that lets the property keep its brand, customer relationship, transaction data, and a share of the economics.

Guests scan a QR code, order through a hotel-branded experience, and CAMO coordinates ordering, kitchen operations, payment, delivery, and support. The hotel does not need to build a kitchen or delivery department, and the guest relationship stays inside the hotel brand.

That last piece is the bigger signal. Hotels spend fortunes learning what guests do before booking but know far less about what happens after check-in. Delivery platforms see the order, timing, basket, and behavior. The hotel often sees a driver in the lobby and a guest asking where the forks went.

Founder and CEO Kevin Rohani said CAMO had surpassed 60 hotel partners, expanded into six U.S. markets, and posted more than 200% year-over-year revenue growth as of May 2026. CAMO also said it had facilitated more than $10M in hotel-branded room-service revenue, with average orders above $45.

Those are company-reported figures, not audited results, but they show the bet. CAMO is not another restaurant marketplace. It helps hotels own the in-stay commerce layer while outsourcing the burden that made room service unprofitable or unavailable.

The model runs on revenue share, with no upfront capital expenditure or added hotel headcount, according to CAMO. That matters where guests still want food but operators rarely want the payroll and kitchen complexity of traditional room service.

The financing lands after CAMO's Portland expansion and follows the company's stated plan to support broader national growth. The SEC filing does not specify use of proceeds, so expansion is strategic context, not a promise stapled to every dollar.

Kevin Rohani and the CAMO team are building into an awkward corner of hospitality that giant delivery apps made convenient but never made hotel-native. The question now is whether hotels see room service as an amenity to outsource or a data-rich revenue channel worth reclaiming.

Lucrative AI

Lucrative AI's $500K story is less venture confetti and more operating discipline.

The headline sounds like a fresh outside round. In July 2020, Mountainise pledged more than $500K to increase operations around Lucrative AI, the revenue intelligence product it had built for sales and marketing teams. No valuation was disclosed. No ownership terms were published. No outside lead investor was named for that commitment.

At the time, Mountainise said Lucrative AI had been developed after 16 months of analysis across 100 clients. The product was positioned around helping businesses turn messy marketing and sales data into decisions, with historical use cases across health, technology, retail, entertainment, and e-commerce. Google and Segment.io had also provided grants, though the amounts were not disclosed.

The current product has moved with the market. Lucrative AI now describes itself as a revenue operations intelligence layer for CRM and marketing automation, covering data hygiene, lifecycle validation, workflow optimization, pipeline governance, and revenue leakage. The language changed because the buyer's problem changed. Dashboards were never the finish line. The real money sits in keeping the system clean enough to make a decision and disciplined enough to execute it.

Muhammad Jalil, the reported founder of Lucrative AI and Mountainise and the current CEO of Mountainise, was early to that idea. In 2020, a lot of companies were still treating AI as a forecasting ornament. Lucrative AI was aimed at the less glamorous work of prioritization, automation, and making existing business data useful. That is where software either becomes infrastructure or becomes another tab nobody opens.

The $500K-plus commitment was meant to increase operations, with Wisconsin and Islamabad expansion plans discussed at the time. The bigger takeaway is not that half a million dollars can manufacture a market. It cannot. Capital can buy time, talent, and iteration. It cannot rescue a product with no operational job to do.

Important details remain undisclosed. Current revenue, customer count, valuation, and total funding are not available. There is no evidence here of a new 2026 round, and calling the 2020 commitment a fresh venture raise would make the story louder and less accurate.

What remains is more interesting: a parent-backed bet on revenue infrastructure that evolved with the shift to agentic operations. Muhammad Jalil and the Lucrative AI and Mountainise teams are still working the same fundamental problem: making intelligence useful inside the CRM.

CAEPlus

CAEPlus received a strategic investment from Molex, and the interesting part is not a number. No amount was disclosed. The signal sits in the engineering problem both companies are choosing to attack: AI infrastructure is getting hotter, denser, and far less forgiving.

The industry talks about GPUs like the chips arrive with their own laws of physics. They do not. More compute means more heat, and the rack, power system, coolant loop, and cold plate have to behave like one coordinated machine. Otherwise, expensive silicon becomes a sophisticated space heater.

Chicago-based CAEPlus is developing BoundaryCool, an active direct-to-chip, single-phase liquid-cooling platform for high-density AI and HPC processors. Conventional cold plates depend on passive coolant flow. CAEPlus says its architecture adds a proprietary active method that improves fluid-surface interaction at the microscale, paired with a Thermal Control Node that monitors processor telemetry and adjusts cooling parameters.

That technical claim is moving through prototype integration, benchmarking, pilot deployment, and qualification. Early-stage infrastructure companies do not earn trust by pretending the lab is already a hyperscale production floor. They earn it by showing the physics work, the system can be serviced, and deployment does not require operators to rebuild everything around a clever component.

Molex brings strategic context. The company operates across data-center connectivity, power delivery, optical systems, cold plates, and liquid-cooling infrastructure. Its thermal-management work treats heat as a system-design issue, not an accessory bolted onto a rack after the real engineering is done.

That makes this more useful than a generic logo swap. BoundaryCool sits at the processor interface while Molex works across the surrounding infrastructure. If validation holds, the relationship could shorten the distance between a promising cooling architecture and the brutal requirements of real data centers.

CAEPlus says it was founded in 2024 after research began in 2021. The investment terms, manufacturing arrangements, customer commitments, and production timeline remain undisclosed. Strategic money can mean many things, and the next proof point will come from qualification and integration, not the announcement itself.

The CAEPlus team now has Molex behind an important technical question: whether active cooling can become a standard layer in the AI rack, and whether this partnership can turn a sharp thermal idea into infrastructure operators can trust.

Flexential

Flexential just secured $800M, and this capital has a very literal job: turn development plans into more than 130 MW of usable data-center capacity.

The company established a dedicated credit facility backed by an 11-bank syndicate. It began with a $500M target, arrived oversubscribed, and was upsized 60%. That is capital-market shorthand for a financing need the lenders expect will not stay theoretical for long.

The buildout spans five projects across four site markets. Flexential has 36 MW under construction in Atlanta-Douglasville, 36 MW in Portland-Hillsboro, and 22.5 MW in Denver-Parker. Another 36 MW in Portland-Hillsboro and a 4.5 MW Atlanta-Norcross expansion are planned. The disclosed pipeline totals 135 MW.

The bank list matters less as a logo wall than as proof of financing depth. Flexential is creating committed capital to move projects from planning through delivery, alongside sponsor equity from GI Partners and Morgan Stanley Infrastructure Partners.

Flexential already operates 40 data centers across 18 U.S. markets on a 100+ Gbps private network backbone. FlexAnywhere combines colocation, cloud, interconnection, data protection, and professional services. The new facility is designed to add the physical capacity that enterprise and AI customers increasingly have to reserve years before deployment.

The market is not being subtle. JLL estimates nearly 100 GW of new data-center supply and roughly $3T of investment will be needed globally through 2030. The IEA projects data-center electricity use to roughly double from 485 TWh in 2025 to 950 TWh in 2030.

Software can scale after a product launch. Data centers negotiate with land, power, transformers, cooling, construction crews, and calendars. Every megawatt arrives after a long argument with physics and finance.

CEO Ryan Mallory framed the facility around investing ahead of customer demand. That is the strategic bet: build capacity where customers are already planning to grow, then give them confidence that density, connectivity, and infrastructure will exist when workloads are ready.

For operators, the lesson is clean. In AI infrastructure, capital strategy is delivery strategy. An oversubscribed $800M facility does not guarantee flawless execution, but it removes one of the hardest constraints between a site plan and a powered hall.

Flexential, Ryan Mallory, and the teams building this capacity now have $800M committed to the next phase. The AI economy loves models. Somebody still has to fund the concrete, cooling, connectivity, and uptime beneath them.

Emergent 3

Emergent 3 just added Arthur Ventures to its cap table, and the interesting part is not the undisclosed check. It is what the investment says about the software layer schools are being forced to take seriously.

A siren can announce danger. It cannot tell a principal which classrooms checked in, show a responder where a threat was reported, or reconcile who is safe against a current roster. That gap between notification and coordinated action is where Emergent 3 built E3.

The Logan, Utah company connects alerts, real-time check-ins, Smart Maps, chat, reunification, and after-action reporting in one emergency-response platform. Its school information system integration helps districts work from current rosters instead of turning the worst minutes of the year into a scavenger hunt across paper lists, radio traffic, and disconnected apps.

Arthur Ventures now lists Emergent 3 Holdings among the investments made by vehicles it manages. The firm focuses on early-growth B2B software, which makes the pairing worth watching. Public safety software is not a casual workflow. Buyers need trust, integrations, training, and a product that still makes sense when the room gets loud and the clock gets cruel.

Financial terms, round structure, valuation, and use of proceeds were not disclosed.

The U.S. Department of Justice made up to $73M available through the FY2026 School Violence Prevention Program. Eligible categories include emergency alerts, communication systems, maps, tracking systems, and faster law-enforcement notification. That does not guarantee Emergent 3 a sale. It does show the problem has budget, policy attention, and a procurement path.

Founder Preston “PK” Keller and CEO Dalton Mickelsen built through the pressure usually edited out of startup mythology. The company survived an early legal fight, stretched limited cash, kept selling, and continued rebuilding. Now it has an investor whose portfolio logic lives in durable B2B software outside the usual coastal echo chamber.

The larger lesson is simple: emergency technology cannot stop at making noise. The system has to create shared context while people are moving and operating with incomplete information. Alerts start the response. Accountability, mapping, and coordination determine whether that response holds together.

Arthur Ventures is backing Emergent 3 as school safety shifts from isolated hardware and notification tools toward connected operational software. Preston “PK” Keller, Dalton Mickelsen, and the Emergent 3 team are building for the moments after an alert, when reducing uncertainty becomes the job.

Abcuro

Abcuro just closed a $66M Series D, and the most interesting part is not the size of the check. It is what the check is being asked to prove.

The Newton, Massachusetts biotech is developing ulviprubart, an investigational monoclonal antibody designed to target KLRG1-positive cytotoxic T cells in inclusion body myositis, or IBM. The disease steadily takes away grip, mobility, and independence, with no approved pharmacologic treatment available.

This financing comes with real tension. Abcuro's 272-patient Phase 2/3 MUSCLE study missed its primary endpoint and key secondary endpoints in the overall population. That is not a footnote, and serious biotech investors do not get to treat it like one.

But the study also produced a prespecified signal in patients with less severe disease. Abcuro reported a trend toward slower progression in that subgroup, including roughly 50% slowing versus placebo across both dose groups. The result was not statistically significant, so this is not efficacy wearing a party hat. It is a hypothesis that earned another test.

New Leaf Venture Partners led the Series D, with Rock Springs Capital joining as a new investor and existing backers returning. That syndicate is funding a sharper clinical question: can ulviprubart work when IBM has done less irreversible damage?

The company expects to begin a new potentially registrational study in Q4 2026 and report top-line results in 2H 2028. If the study is positive, Abcuro plans to pursue a BLA. Every verb matters. Expects. Potentially. If. Biotech earns credibility by respecting conditional language before biology supplies a verdict.

CEO Alex Martin is steering that reset, while Chief Scientific Advisor and co-founder Steven A. Greenberg brings the disease biology that helped build the company. Lead investor Ron Hunt and New Leaf are not backing a clean victory lap. They are backing a disciplined patient-selection thesis after the broad trial showed where the question might be narrower.

The operator lesson sits inside the financing. A failed endpoint does not automatically kill a program, but subgroup data cannot become a rescue story through repetition. The next study must separate signal from statistical wishful thinking, and $66M buys Abcuro the chance to do exactly that.

Abcuro, Alex Martin, Steven A. Greenberg, and the investor syndicate are funding the harder version of the story. The next milestone is not another announcement. It is a trial capable of turning a provocative subgroup trend into evidence the IBM community can trust.

Ripple Ventures

Ripple Ventures has launched Fund IV after a first close earlier this year and a second close this summer. The vehicle is heading toward a final close before year-end, and the firm did not disclose its size, target, or hard cap. That missing number keeps the story focused on what Ripple is changing with the capital already committed.

Northleaf Capital Partners joined as a new anchor and significant LP alongside an unnamed large Canadian private conglomerate. RBC and RBCx returned as a co-anchor from Fund III. For an inception-stage firm, that mix can become customer access, institutional credibility, and a network that matters while portfolio companies are still explaining why their market should exist.

Founder and Managing Partner Matt Cohen and Partner Dominic Lau are taking Ripple Ventures beyond the enterprise software lane that shaped its earlier funds. Fund IV is backing rockets, air defence, uranium discovery, autonomous wet labs, plant engineering, AI infrastructure, AI-enabled services, and fusion diagnostics. Software now shares the table with hardware, science, national capability, and markets that move GDP rather than another departmental budget.

The strategy remains early by design. Ripple Ventures says it typically invests $250K-$1M USD, leads or co-leads, and gets involved at pre-incorporation, pre-product, or pre-traction stages across Canada and the US. Technical judgment has to arrive before consensus does.

Fund IV has already backed 10 companies, including Canada Rocket Company, North Vector Dynamics, Terranox AI, Valen, Green Abundance, uRun, Silmo, Blackletter, Asset, and Daedal Systems. The portfolio stretches from reusable launch systems and precision interception to uranium exploration, autonomous preclinical testing, embedded accounting, and fusion diagnostics.

Ripple Ventures reports that more than half of Fund IV investments had no other fund like Ripple on the cap table when it wrote the first check. Across its funds, the firm says nearly 70% of companies lacked another core peer fund at inception. Those are company-reported figures, not audited results, but they clarify the bet: differentiation begins with where a firm looks before the market supplies social proof.

Matt Cohen, Dominic Lau, and the Ripple Ventures team now have Fund IV in motion. The sharper question is whether inception-stage conviction can keep finding frontier companies before their markets become obvious, because by then the interesting price and the interesting advantage usually belong to somebody else.