Loud House, Empty Roads, and the Sound of Becoming
Your day VC Breakfast Rundown
The road from Long Island to Montreal is mostly trees, rest stops, and the low-frequency bass of whatever playlist can keep your spirit intact for 350 miles. But what it really is, is mental software, updating in real time. The steering wheel’s just a tether. The mind? Off-leash.
This trip wasn’t planned. But that’s kind of the point. Innovation doesn’t wait for the perfect route. It emerges in the detours, the misreads, the “pull over now” diners that weren’t on Google Maps. New Paltz’s eggs with thyme-smashed potatoes hit different when you didn’t know you were hungry for them.
In startups, as in solo drives, real momentum begins when we release control and chase the feeling. Today's companies didn’t come from a map, they came from moments like this. Let’s run them down.
Wander raised $50M Series B (QED Investors, Fifth Wall, Redpoint, Starwood Capital) as founder John Andrew Entwistle and CTO Nathan Potter turn luxury vacation homes into vertically integrated, software-driven stays. Their WanderOS runs 60% of ops autonomously across 1,000+ properties, no managers, no chaos, just high-end travel reengineered like code.
Empathy pulled in $72M Series C (Adams Street, Citi Impact, MetLife, Allianz) with Ron Gura and Yonatan Bergman scaling an AI-powered grief and legacy planning platform already embedded across 50M+ lives. From LifeVault to Care Plan, this is death tech that doesn’t numb, it navigates, automates, and supports when everything else shuts down.
Rillet secured $25M Series A (Sequoia Capital) to torch the ERP bloat and replace it with an AI-native ledger that closes books in hours, not weeks. Nicolas Kopp and Stelios Modes built a finance engine that automates 99.7% of entries and processes 100M+ transactions a day, with NetSuite replacement as a default use case.
Atomic Canyon raised $7M in seed (Energy Impact Partners, Plug and Play) as Trey Lauderdale and Kristian Kielhofner bring generative AI to nuclear energy’s paper-piled core. Their Neutron Enterprise system searches billions of pages with 98% accuracy and just made history with the first GenAI deployment at Diablo Canyon.
Cathay Innovation closed $1B Fund III to fuel vertical AI globally, led by Denis Barrier and Mingpo Cai, who’ve turned ESG-aligned venture into an international operating system. With 120 startups, 19 unicorns, and €235M already deployed, Cathay’s not chasing AI trends, they’re underwriting transformation continent by continent.
Gail announced $8.2M seed (HTwenty, Act One, Mangusta) with twins Matthew and Michael Vega-Sanz shipping AI purpose-built for finance, banking, and insurance. Already processing 5M+ calls per day across 200 institutions, Gail’s compliance-grade AI is rewriting ops from Coral Gables, not Mountain View.
Minset came out of stealth with a seed round (HealthX Ventures), led by Trey McMillian and Matt Scott, and launched Mia, a fully autonomous AI agent cleaning up healthcare’s billing chaos. Already deployed in 300+ orgs, Mia slashes denials by 50%, cleans 40% of coding errors, and returns 25% more revenue to providers.
BlockSpaces locked in $2M (Axiom, Leadout, Barefoot Mining) as Rosa Shores and Gabe Higgins scale Smart Channels™, Bitcoin-native contracts that settle margin in real-time, no sidechains, no synthetic assets. With 40x revenue and institutional trust, BlockSpaces is the quiet force making Bitcoin infrastructure business-ready.
Hex raised $70M Series C (Avra, a16z, Sequoia, Redpoint) to power its AI-native workspace for 1,500+ teams from Reddit to the NBA. Barry McCardel, Glen Takahashi, and Caitlin Colgrove built a tool that lets analysts collaborate in real-time across SQL, Python, and no-code, cranking query speeds 3x and fueling a 112% revenue pop.
Palla secured $14.5M Series A (Revolution Ventures) to make cross-border payments invisible and instant for banks. Founders Enrique Perezalonso, Andrew Mason, and Greg Piccolo aren’t building a remittance app, they’re embedding infrastructure across 30+ institutions in LatAm, moving like a fintech but built like a core processor.
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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