The Name Behind the Send

Dolce Glow

A retailer can give a beauty brand shelf space. It cannot keep the hero SKU in stock, turn a first purchase into a second one, or make product planning less expensive when demand moves faster than the forecast.

That is the operating handoff inside Dolce Glow by Isabel Alysa’s $11M Series A.

Isabel Alysa built Dolce Glow from the professional spray-tanning work that made her a sought-after artist into a consumer brand selling skincare-led, UV-free self-tanning products. The at-home line arrived in 2021. Ulta Beauty followed in 2024. Earlier this year, Dolce Glow reached Sephora online and roughly 300 stores.

CAVU Consumer Partners led the round, with more than 10 celebrity and creator investors participating. Miley Cyrus had already invested in the business in 2023.

Celebrity participation makes the headline easy to distribute. CAVU makes the operating question more interesting.

The investor’s model reaches into strategy, operations, e-commerce, sales, marketing, partnerships, and influencer work. Those are the systems a founder-led brand needs when cultural attention has opened the door but the next stage depends on retail execution.

Dolce Glow says the financing will support product innovation, domestic and international retail expansion, and company scale. Its careers page adds texture: the brand is hiring across demand planning, influencer marketing and events, financial planning, and CFO leadership.

Those openings do not tell us exactly where each dollar will go. They show the machinery becoming more serious.

Self-tanning carries an unusual tension. The outcome is visible and emotional, while the product experience has to overcome old associations with streaks, scent, orange color, and sun exposure. Dolce Glow treats tanning more like skincare, using elevated formats and a broader beauty ritual instead of selling color alone.

That reframe helped a service professional turn technique into products, then products into prestige retail distribution. Scale now pressures the parts customers never photograph: inventory, forecasting, channel economics, repeat purchase, and consistency across more doors and markets.

Isabel Alysa turned a founder’s hands-on craft into a brand customers can buy without booking her calendar. CAVU is stepping in after the shelves arrived, when every forecast, launch, reorder, and second purchase starts deciding how far that translation can travel across the retail counter now.

Lambda

A GPU order can leave the factory years before the debt used to buy it is fully repaid. The customer contract behind that machine has to make the timing believable.

Lambda closed a $926M senior secured term loan B to fund GPU infrastructure for a committed deployment with an investment-grade customer. The facility was priced at SOFR + 3.00%, issued at 99.5% of principal, and fully amortizes through December 31, 2030.

The source card said $962M. The primary record and independent reporting all say $926M.

The structure is more interesting. Lambda placed the GPU servers, related infrastructure, and contracted cash flows inside its first large-scale private-cloud GPU asset-backed financing vehicle. Moody's assigned Baa2. Lambda says this is the first broadly syndicated, investment-grade-rated term loan B completed by a private neocloud.

Morgan Stanley served as lead left arranger, bookrunner, and administrative agent. MUFG was joint bookrunner.

The company is giving lenders a physical answer to a modern question: what supports nearly $1B of private AI-cloud debt?

It is equipment, a committed customer deployment, cash flows tied to that infrastructure, and a repayment schedule intended to finish inside the disclosed useful-life window.

CEO Michel Combes runs the buildout. Co-founder Stephen Balaban moved into the CTO role in May, while co-founder Michael Balaban remains CPO. Capital formation, technology, and product now sit in separate seats as Lambda borrows like an infrastructure operator.

This is Lambda's second major debt financing of 2026. The company closed a $1B syndicated senior secured credit facility in May. It also raised more than $1.5B in Series E equity last November and announced a multibillion-dollar Microsoft agreement involving tens of thousands of NVIDIA GPUs.

Those figures do not belong in one giant funding total. Debt, equity, and customer contracts do different jobs. Their relationship is the story.

AI cloud providers secure chips, power, networking, cooling, and data-center capacity before customers consume the resulting compute. Equity can absorb early uncertainty. Asset-backed debt becomes useful once a contract and a fleet can be underwritten together.

Lambda has brought that handoff into an investment-grade term-loan market. The customer remains undisclosed. What the public record shows is a GPU deployment financed as contracted infrastructure rather than a venture bet with a server rack attached.

The machines will age. The contract will pay. The schedule now depends on whether those 2 clocks keep time together.

AusperBio

AusperBio finished enrolling 577 people in a Phase 3 trial before raising the round meant to carry AHB-137 toward commercialization.

Early biotech capital buys experiments. Late-stage capital pays for a more crowded handoff: complete the registrational work, prepare manufacturing and commercial operations, keep a second program moving, and wait for data and regulators to decide what the science earned.

AusperBio has closed a $120M Series C led by an unnamed strategic investor. RA Capital Management joined as a new investor, while HanKang Capital, Sherpa Capital, InnoPinnacle Fund, Qiming Venture Partners, YuanBio Venture Capital, and CDH Investments returned.

Guofeng Cheng, co-founder and CEO and co-founder and CSO Chris Yang built the company around oligonucleotide therapies for chronic hepatitis B. AHB-137 is an investigational antisense oligonucleotide designed to suppress hepatitis B surface antigen production, inhibit viral DNA replication, and promote immune reactivation.

The AUSHINE Phase 3 study is active and no longer recruiting across 28 sites in China. ClinicalTrials.gov lists 577 participants and estimates primary completion in December 2026. This financing keeps the organization ready for the evidence that comes out.

AusperBio is also advancing AHB-171, a hepatocyte-targeted siRNA candidate that entered patient dosing this year. The Series C will support both programs, next-generation combination approaches, and a broader targeted-oligonucleotide pipeline.

WHO estimates 254M people were living with hepatitis B in 2022, with 1.1M deaths that year, mainly from cirrhosis and liver cancer. Existing treatments can suppress viral replication, while functional cure remains uncommon.

AusperBio says the round brings capital raised since 2024 to $360M. The named public rounds reviewed add to $343M, and the company did not explain the $17M difference. It also did not disclose a valuation or identify the strategic lead.

None of that changes the work now sitting in front of Guofeng Cheng and Chris Yang. AHB-137 remains investigational. Phase 3 must produce the evidence. Regulators must review it. Commercial readiness has to develop without pretending approval already arrived.

The $120M gives AusperBio room to keep those jobs moving together. The next chapter lives inside a 577-person dataset, a second RNA program, and an organization preparing for an answer that biology still gets to deliver.

Advisar

A supplier can spend 7 figures on retail media, receive a polished ROAS report, and still be unable to answer the question finance actually asked: which dollars created sales the business would not have captured anyway?

The awkward part is who keeps score. The network selling the inventory also reports the performance, while the supplier tries to reconcile campaign attribution with POS movement, promotions, margin, and the budget conversation happening down the hall.

That gap is where Christina Johnson put Advisar. After a decade inside Walmart, including service as Chief of Staff at Walmart Connect, Johnson crossed to the supplier side and built an independent AI-enabled decisioning layer for the people buying the media.

Advisar has raised a $750K Pre-Seed led by Clutch VC. Venture Center Arkansas Fund, The Validation Fund at Winrock International, Rekall Capital, White River Capital Advisors, Michael Paladino, and Jeff Amerine also participated.

The capital is going into product development and go-to-market work. The company was in beta when the round was announced on August 27, with general availability planned for fall 2026.

Advisar begins with Walmart suppliers. It pulls Walmart Connect campaign data, Walmart POS data, and promotion data into one performance model, then returns a ranked set of actions: what worked, where credit may be overstated, where dollars are leaking, and where the next dollar belongs.

That distinction matters because another dashboard can make a messy decision look cleaner without making it better. A media team needs reporting, but a supplier's leadership team has to decide whether the spend produced incremental growth, protected share, supported a launch, or simply collected credit for demand already in motion.

The broader category is already moving toward this argument. IAB guidance for commerce media emphasizes credible counterfactuals, bias control, consistent measurement, and separation of signal from noise because closed-loop data only becomes useful when advertisers can trust what the loop is counting.

Clutch VC is backing Johnson as retail media becomes too large for suppliers to accept a platform score at face value. Advisar still has to turn a live beta into repeatable customer decisions, and the company has not disclosed revenue, named customers, previous funding, total funding, or valuation.

The opportunity sits inside the next budget review. When a supplier asks which campaign deserves another dollar, Advisar wants the answer to come from the supplier's economics, with the media network serving as an input instead of the judge.

CivilGrid

The infrastructure budget arrives with a ribbon-cutting photo. The utility map arrives as a PDF, if it arrives at all.

That gap sits inside roads, substations, water systems, housing, broadband, and data centers. Capital can be approved years before designers share one reliable view of pipes, easements, soil, agency rules, and other work occupying the site.

CivilGrid has raised a $26M Series A to make that invisible planning layer easier to see. Spark Capital led the round, with Energy Impact Partners, Afore Capital, A*, Ford Street Ventures, and SNR Ventures participating.

CEO and co-founder Josh Mackanic spent a decade at PG&E before building CivilGrid with Head of Data & Ops and co-founder Brandon Cohen. Their platform consolidates utility, environmental, geotechnical, land, municipal, and regulatory data for utilities, engineers, municipalities, and infrastructure owners.

The customer is not buying a prettier map. The customer is buying fewer expensive decisions made from incomplete site knowledge.

CivilGrid says PG&E has used the platform to eliminate more than $60M in paving conflicts, reduce field research and survey activity by 40%, and move project scoping, planning, and design as much as four months faster. Those are company-reported outcomes, but they point at the economics: one conflict found before design can protect far more capital than another dashboard viewed after the crews mobilize.

The Series A will support national expansion and deeper product capabilities. That expansion runs directly into an institutional problem software cannot wave away. Utilities, municipalities, engineering firms, contractors, and regulators own different records, answer to different rules, and carry different consequences when the ground disagrees with the drawing.

CivilGrid's opportunity is to make those parties work from the same location-specific truth early enough to change the plan. It must keep the data current, preserve chain of custody, and earn trust from teams whose mistakes can interrupt service, close roads, rupture lines, or reopen a public budget.

ASCE estimates a $3.7T gap between planned U.S. infrastructure investment and a state of good repair. More money can narrow it. Better information decides how much survives contact with the site.

The next stretch for CivilGrid runs through procurement rooms, agency records, engineering reviews, and every handoff where a hidden constraint can still become visible while the project is cheap enough to change.

Yardstik

A background check can be completely accurate on Monday and quietly incomplete by Friday. The person did not become somebody else. The record around that person kept moving.

That time gap is where Yardstik is putting a $30M Series B. Harbert Management Corporation led the round, with Rally Ventures, MissionOG, Crosslink Capital, Grotech Ventures, and Great North Ventures returning. Yardstik says the financing brings total capital raised to $65M.

CEO Andrew Johnson is pushing the Minneapolis company past the old hiring-industry ritual: run a screen, save the result, and act as if trust came with a permanent timestamp. Founder and board member Matt Meents built the company from that point of hire, while CTO Josh Cutler carries the technology work.

Employment risk is annoyingly alive. A driver's record can change. A professional license can expire. An OIG exclusion can appear. An identity or credential that looked credible during onboarding can surface new fraud signals later. A year is a very long time to be surprised.

Yardstik's Human Trust Platform combines fraud prevention, identity verification, background screening, credential verification, and continuous monitoring. Fraud Insights gives employers an aggregate view of workforce signals. Continuous Monitoring enrolls screened workers after hire. The next product push includes motor vehicle reports, OIG exclusion monitoring, and alerts when licenses, insurance, or certifications expire.

Yardstik can operate through ATS integrations or be embedded and white-labeled through APIs. Screening stops being an isolated purchase and becomes infrastructure that keeps producing relevant information.

The company reports 149% year-over-year revenue growth, 99.4% customer satisfaction, and 98% account retention across the past 3 years. Those are Yardstik's figures, not audited results, but they explain why Harbert is underwriting the next layer. Gopuff, Liveops, Taskrabbit, HUNGRY, and H&R Block give the strategy a real operating surface.

The wager behind this round is that workforce trust will behave less like a certificate and more like a living record. That changes who owns the surprise when a worker's record moves: the employer gets a chance to act while the signal is still useful. If Yardstik makes that record useful without turning every worker into a compliance project, the background check becomes the first frame, not the whole film.

Metriport

A patient arrived at Sollis Health with upper abdominal pain and one uncertain memory: an endoscopy years earlier, somewhere, with findings they could not recall.

The record existed. The care team still had to find it before that missing context turned into another scan, another delay, or another decision made with half the history.

Metriport has raised a $26M Series A for that gap between accessible healthcare data and usable clinical context. Matrix led the round through general partner TJ Parker, with ARTIS and Y Combinator participating, bringing Metriport's company-reported total funding to $28.4M.

CEO and co-founder Dima Goncharov and COO and co-founder Colin Elsinga built Metriport as open-source healthcare data infrastructure. The platform connects to health information exchanges, ADT networks, pharmacies, labs, and EHRs, then turns fragmented records into a unified model.

That model can reach a care team through one API, a data warehouse, or an application inside the EHR. It can also alert providers as patients move through the healthcare system and surface intelligence such as medical-record summaries, suspected conditions, and care gaps.

Metriport says its network reaches data for 340M+ individuals, connects with 750K+ providers, processes 4.2B requests each month, and returns a first structured record in under 15 seconds.

Those are company-reported operating figures, but the investment logic is easier to see inside the clinical handoff. Interoperability can make records available. A clinician still needs the relevant history in a form that can be searched, trusted, and used while the patient is in front of them.

The Series A will support platform scale and expanded AI/ML and agentic capabilities. That creates a responsibility alongside the opportunity. When software begins summarizing longitudinal records or supplying context to an agent, the matching, transformation, provenance, and access rules underneath the answer matter as much as the model reading it.

Metriport's open-source approach makes that layer more inspectable at a moment when healthcare is being asked to trust more automation with more sensitive information. The company says it recently achieved HITRUST r2 certification and already vets organizations before granting access to healthcare exchange networks.

The patient at Sollis did not need another pile of data. The care team needed the old report to become present-tense context while there was still time for it to change the decision.

Bevel

Adam Freed did not enter insurance through a market map. His parents' home burned in the Palisades Fire, and the recovery turned a question into an impossible one: can you list everything you owned after the evidence is gone?

Adam Freed, Aravindh Dorai, and the early bevel team built free tools to help survivors reconstruct household inventories for claims. Bevel says more than 25% of Palisades and Eaton fire survivors used them. The work kept pointing backward, toward decisions made before the disaster.

A family can own several homes, multiple vehicles, valuable collections, and enough policies to fill a folder while still lacking a coherent view of its risk. More paper does not automatically create better protection.

Bevel has raised a $6M Seed from Shakti VC, Resolute, and Bessemer to build a personal-lines brokerage. The round also includes Sheryl Sandberg, Deborah Quazzo, and Claire Johnson. Bevel did not identify a lead investor or disclose a valuation.

The company wants to become the downside counterpart to a wealth manager. Instead of treating home, auto, umbrella liability, and other exposures as separate transactions, Bevel pairs clients with a dedicated risk advisor responsible for understanding the whole portfolio.

That sounds obvious until you look at the machinery underneath it. Adam Freed told The Insurer that complex placements can generate as many as 70 emails, while client proposals often arrive as static documents people struggle to use. The relationship may be personal. The workflow supporting it often is not.

Bevel is putting engineers beside agents, clients, and carriers to rebuild that workflow. Its software is intended to automate back-office work, improve carrier data, and give clients a portal they can explore without asking a PDF to explain itself. Adam Freed says the relationship itself must remain human.

That boundary matters. Software can notice a missing exposure. An advisor still has to earn trust, explain the tradeoff, and remain present when analysis becomes a claim.

Bevel says 70% of the highest-value homes may be underinsured. That is a management estimate, and the company has not published bound-client counts or brokerage economics.

The $6M gives Bevel room to recruit producers, expand carrier relationships, and keep developing the systems around the advisory work. It also leaves a demanding question inside the model: can a high-touch relationship scale without turning into the fragmented service it was built to replace?

Bevel started by helping families remember what the fire took. The brokerage will be judged by whether it helps them understand what is exposed while there is still time to change it.

Owner.com

Running an independent restaurant now comes with a second job nobody put on the menu: managing the digital department.

The food can be excellent, the room can be full, and the owner can still spend the evening thinking about search rankings, delivery fees, abandoned carts, loyalty campaigns, customer reviews, phone orders, app updates, and whether the website makes dinner look harder than it should.

That invisible shift is the business underneath Owner.com's $240M Series D. Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Asset Management led the financing, with Meritech, Redpoint, Headline, and Jack Altman returning. The round values Owner at $2.3B, up from the $1B valuation attached to its $120M Series C in May 2025.

Adam Guild and Dean Bloembergen are not selling another dashboard for restaurant owners to learn between lunch and dinner service. Owner is building an opinionated system that handles the digital work: websites, direct ordering, mobile apps, marketing, loyalty, reviews, customer support, phone orders, and increasingly the decisions connecting those pieces.

The tradeoff is unusually honest for software. Restaurants surrender some customization so Owner can standardize what affects performance, test changes across the surfaces it controls, and carry successful improvements into the network. The customer is not buying infinite flexibility. The customer is buying fewer digital decisions and more profitable direct sales.

Owner says it has passed $100M in ARR. The company also says restaurants will drive more than $1B in sales through the platform this year and that more than 100M U.S. consumers have used its technology. Its reported customer outcomes include 40% average online-traffic growth within 30 days, more than 40% direct-online-revenue growth in year one, and 2x reorder frequency among branded-app users.

The capital also widens the assignment. Owner plans to reach more U.S. independent restaurants, expand internationally, and carry the system into salons, spas, independent grocers, and other local businesses. Based on disclosed rounds, the company has now raised $418.7M.

Restaurants gave Owner a hard proving ground because every digital mistake eventually reaches a real counter, a real kitchen, and a real margin. Moving into other local categories means preserving that operating intimacy while the software travels farther from the dining room. The $2.3B valuation now has to follow the owners into those different rooms and keep understanding which work they cannot afford to hire for.

Uplift Investors / Engage fi

A community bank can own the customer relationship and still rent nearly every system used to serve it.

Core banking, digital, payments, CRM, communications, and data arrive from different vendors with different incentives. The institution carries the operating risk when those systems collide. The vendor rarely inherits the meeting.

That decision layer is what Uplift Investors just acquired. The private equity firm bought Engage fi from Falfurrias Management Partners on August 18. Terms were not disclosed. The deal is Uplift's third platform investment from its $670M inaugural fund and its second professional-services platform after Orion Legal MSO.

Engage fi helps banks and credit unions evaluate technology, negotiate contracts, manage conversions, and move through core, digital, payments, CRM, data, AI, and M&A programs. It reports more than 2,700 successful engagements. Its work sits where a pricing concession can become leverage and a weak migration plan can become an operating event.

President and CEO Andres Pasantes is carrying that platform into its next ownership chapter. Co-founder Jennifer Addabbo moved to Executive Chair in October 2025. Two months later, Engage fi acquired Intellectual Dimensions, adding DataFusion for data automation and analytics alongside 360fi Workflow.

Uplift Managing Partners Brad Skaf and Will Hausberg are underwriting more than advisory hours. Engage fi has proprietary benchmarking data, repeatable implementation knowledge, trusted access to community financial institutions, and a growing software layer. Uplift plans to bring the work to more institutions while investing behind Engage fi's decade of data and delivery tools.

The tension is independence. Banks hire an adviser because vendors know more about the market, contract, and implementation than the institution buying the system. As Engage fi becomes more technology-enabled, it has to preserve the objectivity that made the advice valuable while turning accumulated judgment into software that can scale.

Uplift did not disclose purchase price, financing structure, ownership percentages, or integration targets. The transaction reveals strategy more clearly than economics: buy the firm that helps institutions decide which platforms deserve to become infrastructure.

Every recommendation eventually reaches a teller, an operations team, or a member trying to move money. That is where this acquisition keeps unfolding, long after the vendor shortlist becomes a signed contract.