Baseball Is the Greatest Game Ever Invented
Your Friday VC Breakfast Rundown
Baseball doesn’t hand you momentum. It makes you earn it. One hundred and sixty-two games, every day another test of will. You ride the highs, survive the lows, carry the weight of failure on your back and still lace up tomorrow. To me, baseball is the greatest game ever invented because it mirrors life at its rawest. The thrill and agony, the grind, the belief that even when the odds tilt, one swing can still change everything.
That’s why the Yankees reaching the ALCS matters. It isn’t just the wins. It’s the discipline to survive the marathon, to stare down the same rival you tied with for first place, to keep grinding when exhaustion and doubt press hardest. October baseball is the crucible. It doesn’t reward talent alone. It rewards teams that endure.
Founders live this same season. Startups are long, grueling games where setbacks outnumber triumphs, where doubt gnaws louder than applause, where failure is part of the box score. But like baseball, what matters isn’t perfection, it’s perseverance. It’s the ability to grind through the slumps, to lean on your team when belief runs thin, to keep showing up until the moment breaks your way.
Today’s startups reflect that October truth. They aren’t built on highlight reels. They’re built on grit, trust, and relentless endurance. They’re here because they’ve survived the innings that should’ve ended them, and that survival is what earns them the right to advance.
Here are the ones proving it.
Scorability raised $40M in funding (Bluestone Equity Partners, Luther King Capital Management, Silverton Partners). Brian Cruver, Brett Andrew, Catherine Avera, and Kelsey Ozar are building an AI-powered evaluation platform that helps 1M+ athletes connect with 28K college programs by cutting through the noise of the recruiting process. The new funding fuels expansion into additional sports, sharper AI tools, and targeted acquisitions to cement Scorability as the recruiting standard.
Axiom Math raised a $64M seed round (B Capital, Greycroft, Menlo Ventures) at a $300M pre-product valuation. Carina Letong Hong, François Charton, Aram Markosyan, and Hugh Leather are building AI mathematicians capable of proving theorems and powering industries from finance to chip design. The bet is simple: if AI can master mathematics, it unlocks entirely new scientific frontiers.
Mesta raised a $5.5M seed round (Village Global, Circle Ventures, Paxos). Sandeep Pyapali, Kiran Polavarapu, and Nitin Shrivastava have already processed $140M in payments by blending fiat rails with stablecoins, reducing costs by 50% and settling cross-border transfers in minutes across 100+ countries. The growth curve suggests Mesta is on track to process $300M+ in annual volume by the end of 2025.
Longeye raised $5M in seed funding (Andreessen Horowitz, Seven Stars Capital). Guillaume Delepine is scaling an AI-powered evidence platform already in use by law enforcement to surface digital evidence in minutes for prosecutors and public defenders. The platform has already cracked live cases, showing the potential to transform how justice systems handle mountains of digital files.
Rival raised $2.8M in funding (league executives, team owners) alongside its acquisition of Shake. Matt Virtue, Shawn Murnan, Jack Kingsley, Spencer Lichtenberg, and Heather Brooks Karatz are powering fan engagement through white-labeled gaming competitions for clients including the New York Giants, Detroit Pistons, Aston Villa, New Balance, and Coca-Cola. With Shake, Rival now owns both long-form tournaments and rapid-fire contests, covering the full fan engagement spectrum.
MAI raised a $25M seed round (Kleiner Perkins, Gaorong Ventures, UpHonest Capital). Yuchen Wu and Jian Wang are building AI agents that autonomously manage performance marketing campaigns, already lifting sales by up to 40% for D2C brands like Dreo, Patpat, and Vivaia. As ad spend tops $230B in 2025, MAI is positioning automation as the only path to survival in performance marketing.
Vercel raised a $300M Series F (Accel, GIC, BlackRock) at a $9.3B valuation. Guillermo Rauch, Jeanne DeWitt Grosser, Keith Messick, Aparna Sinha, Werner Schwock, and Talha Tariq are powering over 4M websites with Next.js and v0, generating ~$200M ARR and serving clients like Netflix, Walmart, Apple, Nike, OpenAI, and Anthropic. With v0 and AI-native tools, Vercel is redefining how enterprises build and deploy at scale.
DataJoint raised a $4.9M seed round (Nina Capital, Inoca Capital Partners, Capital Factory). Jim Olson, Dimitri Yatsenko, and Monty Kosma are scaling a computational database and AI platform already adopted by 100+ labs at Johns Hopkins, Harvard, UCSF, and UCL to make life sciences research reproducible and enterprise-ready. By harmonizing multimodal data, DataJoint is bringing pharma-grade rigor to academic science.
Summer Robotics announced the first close of its Series A (Applied Ventures, Solasta Ventures, NAVER D2SF). Schuyler Cullen, Brian Paden, Rick Van Valkenburg, and John Wei developed Kortx, a machine vision platform with sub-5 millisecond latency and 100-micron precision, already trusted by automotive OEMs for production-grade robotics. The company is pushing machine vision from “robots that see” to “robots that react.”
Empower Semiconductor raised a $140M Series D (Fidelity Management & Research Company, CapitalG, Walden Catalyst Ventures). Tim Phillips, Trey Roessig, and Kurt Redfield are scaling a chip portfolio that delivers 10x smaller integrated voltage regulators and high-efficiency architectures that save gigawatts across AI data centers. Empower is proving the future of AI depends as much on efficient watts as on smarter algorithms.
Modular raised a $250M Series C (US Innovative Technology Fund, DFJ Growth, GV) at a $1.6B valuation. Chris Lattner and Tim Davis are scaling Mojo, a Python-compatible language, and MAX, a deployment engine, already powering workloads for 175K developers and 50K organizations. Modular’s neutrality across CPUs, GPUs, and ASICs positions it as the infrastructure layer that unifies fragmented AI compute.
Auterion raised a $130M Series B (Bessemer Venture Partners, Lakestar, Mosaic Ventures) alongside $25M in non-dilutive DoD funding. Lorenz Meier, Robert Rainhart, Thomas Gubler, and Richie Pérez are delivering open-source autonomy software for defense systems across NATO and the U.S. military. Auterion’s approach proves open standards can define the future of national security.
Modal Labs raised an $87M Series B (Lux Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Amplify Partners) at a $1.1B valuation. Erik Bernhardsson and Akshat Bubna have built a serverless AI cloud powering compute for Meta, Substack, Suno, and Scale AI with sub-second container launches and GPU scaling. Modal has become the default compute layer for developers building AI apps without compromise.
Dash0 raised a $35M Series A (Accel, Cherry Ventures). Mirko Novakovic, Ben Blackmore, Miel Donkers, Marcel Birkner, and Michele Mancioppi are scaling an AI-native observability platform that reduces noise and improves root cause analysis, already adopted by Porsche Digital, Starling Bank, and 270+ customers in under nine months. Dash0 is making observability efficient instead of expensive in a $50B market.
Let’s connect and keep the momentum going across the tech ecosystem. Whether you’re a founder shaping the future, a leader driving change, a VC backing bold ideas, or an investor spotting the next big thing—together, we’re pushing boundaries. Proud to be building the future with you.
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