Bayou Rebirth : Jazz Fest Week Two
Your Thursday VC Breakfast Rundown
Thursday doesn’t start with an alarm, it starts with a rumble from deep in the bayou, where brass bleeds into bass and the gumbo stirs itself awake. Week two of Jazz Fest isn’t an encore, it’s the reveal. This is the moment where Galactic locks eyes with Lettuce, where Dumpstaphunk channels Zeppelin through a sousaphone, and founders feel it in their bones.
Innovation here doesn’t follow roadmaps, it riffs. It builds in the margins, in the crawfish line, over biscuits slick with hot sauce and sweat-slicked handshakes that turn side-stage convos into cap table moves. This city doesn’t incubate. It collaborates. Backstage and breakfast blur into the same sacred space, where culture births companies, and no one builds alone.
If you came for a plan, good luck. The groove’s already moving. Catch up or get left behind. Let’s jam.
Canopy raised $70M Series C (Viking Global, Ten Coves, Pelion, Tenaya). CEO Davis Bell and founder Kurt Avarell are turning accounting chaos into a firm-wide operating OS trusted by 4,000+ clients. It’s not just compliance, it’s automation with swagger.
TeamOhana closed $7.5M Seed (Lerer Hippeau, Collide Capital, Sierra Ventures). Tushar Makhija and BG Ghose are turning headcount chaos into strategic clarity. AI-powered workforce planning across $6B in comp, this is the cockpit for CFOs and recruiters alike.
VOC.AI locked $15M (Shanda Grab, Northern Light, Unique Capital). Hunter Guo built Solvea to do multilingual, cross-border eComm CX better than your best agent, pay-for-performance AI, real traction, global reach.
ChiroHD pulled in $26M growth (Mainsail Partners). Gabriel and Luke Doty are healing chiropractic software one SOAP note at a time. Cloud-native, HIPAA locked, Marine-built. Chiropractors finally have tech that adjusts to them.
Faye raised $2.5M Pre-Seed (Unusual Ventures, Springbank). Emily King and Kip Kaehler are giving households Family Advisors instead of burnout. Think Chief of Staff meets PTA ninja, real help, not another to-do list.
Swivel raised $5.8M Series A (Tribeca, Ardent, Motley Fool). Joe Hirsch, Matt Dearborn, and Rich Lin are automating ad ops hell with no-code AI. LG Ad saved 25,000+ hours. No more Whac-a-Mole. Just scale.
Persona secured $200M Series D (Founders Fund, Ribbit, BOND). Rick Song and Charles Yeh turned identity into infrastructure. Serving 3,000+ clients like OpenAI and Robinhood. Verified identity for an AI-native world.
Plenful raised $50M Series B (Arena Holdings, Mitchell Rales). Joy Liu is rebuilding the backbone of healthcare ops, AI-first admin automation that shreds 97% of manual work across 60+ hospitals and payors.
Structify landed $4.1M Seed (Bain, 8VC, Integral). Alex Reichenbach and Ronak Gandhi are structuring the internet’s chaos. Unstructured docs become revenue-ready datasets, 10x faster, 16x cheaper.
Nuvo locked $45M Series A (Sequoia, Spark, Founders Fund). Sid Malladi and Rameez Remsudeen are vaporizing B2B trade friction. 50,000+ businesses onboarded, embedded credit, verified trust, goodbye faxes.
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.
Let’s connect on LinkedIn and keep the conversation going.