Game 5 Grit: Where the Fight Finds You First
Your Thursday VC Breakfast Rundown
You never really know what you’re made of until you’re down 3-1.
Not metaphorically. Not spiritually. I mean down. Staring at elimination, all the tape dissected, all the critics locked and loaded. Your legs are jelly, your lungs are glass, and you still gotta find a way to run the floor.
That’s where the Knicks are right now. Not just a team, an emotional Rorschach test for anyone who's ever dared to believe when belief looked stupid. This isn’t about basketball. It’s about survival. Momentum lost. Bodies bruised. But heart? Heart is undefeated.
And in the startup world, that’s where we live. Not on the podium, on the ropes. Every founder worth their salt knows this feeling. The investor pullout. The runway vanishing. The launch that flopped. You either break… or you breakthrough.
Today’s rundown isn’t a list of winners. It’s a lineup of fighters. Of teams that found rhythm in chaos and courage in collapse. The Knicks may be down, but the story’s still being written. And so is yours.
Portal Access slices through legacy inefficiency with a $7M Series A, 80% of it from U.S. oncologists and surgeons. Founder Dr. Michael Tal built the Flexi-Port™ SLF-TANL™, a subcutaneous port that self-tunnels, no OR, no delays. EVP Angela Dotson calls it “virtually unprecedented”, and when your investors are also your users, you’ve already won.
Spott raises $3.2M seed (Base10, YC, Fortino) to unify ATS, CRM, and AI into one native platform for recruiters. Lander Degrève, Manu Vanderveeren, and Samuel Smeys left Bain, McKinsey, and BCG to build what they wished they had, an AI system that kills admin work and doubles recruiter-candidate time.
Besample pulls in $1.1M pre-seed (Gutter Capital, Womankind Ventures, Dr. Ekaterina Damer) to drag behavioral science out of its Western bubble. Dr. Elena Brandt, Tamila Feldman, and Rina Chernov are powering global research across 42 countries, with Fortune 500s, Harvard, and MIT already on board. The data gap just got a fix.
Cerby scores $40M Series B (DTCP, Okta Ventures, Salesforce Ventures) to automate identity security across apps that don’t speak SAML or SCIM. Belsasar Lepe, Vidal González, and Jyri Virkki built Cerby to tackle the shadow stack, and now they’re managing access for L’Oréal, Fox, and Allstate without writing a line of custom code.
CloudZero locks in $56M Series C (BlueCrest, Innovius, MongoDB) to turn cloud cost chaos into surgical efficiency. Phil Pergola, Erik Peterson, and Matt Manger turned $5M into $50M+ ARR. Their CostFormation® tech isn’t just reactive, it’s predictive. 14B in cloud spend now flows through CloudZero.
Grin Therapeutics raises a game-changing $140M Series D (Angelini Pharma, Blackstone Life Sciences) to bring radiprodil into pivotal Phase 3 trials. Dr. Bruce Leuchter, Dr. Michael Panzara, and Jacopo Andreose are targeting pediatric GRIN mutations with 86% median seizure reduction and global commercial firepower already locked in.
Context secures $11M seed (Lux, Qualcomm Ventures, General Catalyst) at a $70M valuation for its AI-native office suite. Founded by Joseph Semrai, this team isn’t retrofitting Docs, they’re building workflows where LLMs don’t assist, they co-work. 60,000 professionals are queued up pre-launch.
ProteinQure grabs $11M Series A (Heron Rock, Golden Ventures, Kensington) to bring the first AI-designed peptide drug into clinical trials. Lucas Siow, Tomas Babej, and Mark Fingerhuth are running the playbook from physics to pharma, PQ203 is already showing 70–90% tumor regression in models resistant to standard care.
Creatify closes $15.5M Series A (WndrCo, Kindred Ventures) to automate UGC-style ad creation. Yinan Na, Ledell Wu, and Xin Zhou built the backend for Meta’s feed before flipping it into a SaaS engine spitting out enterprise-grade video at scale. 10,000 teams. $9M ARR. 700 AI avatars. Katzenberg just joined the board.
Zeal Capital Partners raises $82M for Fund II, pushing AUM to $186M. Nasir Qadree and Stefanie Thomas-Martin are doubling down on Inclusive Investing™, putting capital into fintech, health, and learning startups that reflect, and serve, the real world. 80% of Fund I LPs re-upped. That’s conviction.
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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