Read the Room, Then Build the Bridge
Your Friday VC Breakfast Rundown
Every founder wants to lead with strength. But real strength doesn’t start with a pitch, it starts with presence. With understanding the room before you try to shift it. With asking questions that open doors, not close them. That’s the power of starting with situation.
Neil Rackham’s SPIN Selling isn’t just about closing deals, it’s about leading with empathy. Situation questions are how you learn the real landscape before you suggest a path. And the best founders know: the fastest way to lose trust is to offer solutions before earning context.
The companies featured today aren’t just building clever products, they’re building conversations. They’re not pushing features. They’re pulling insight. They listen before they design. They observe before they pitch. They solve from a place of earned clarity, not assumption.
This is how trust scales. Not from louder decks, but from better questions. Let’s meet the ones who ask first.
Amogy hauls in another $23M in equity ( Korea Development Bank, BonAngels Venture Partners, Pathway Investment Fund) to supercharge its ammonia to hydrogen platform. Seonghoon Woo and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology PhD founding squad are flipping NH₃ into clean energy for shipping, heavy industry, and grid power, because saving the planet shouldn't smell like a chemistry lab.
IntuigenceAI secures $10M seed (Innovation Endeavors, Recursive Ventures, Think + Ventures, LLP) to scale synthetic engineers for the trillion-dollar industrial brain drain. Moe Tanabian is deploying AI agents that pass engineering exams and troubleshoot infrastructure failures before your coffee cools.
Ultion Technologies locks in Series A funding (Torus, Battle Born Venture) to power the U.S. energy grid with IRA-compliant LFP battery cells. Dr. Johnnie Stoker and Taylor Stoker are vertically integrating everything from cathode materials to pack integration, no China, no vaporware, just raw delivery.
Dakota banks $12.5M Series A (CoinFund, 6MV, Kraken ’s Triton) to make global B2B banking instant, on-chain, and crypto-compatible. Ryan Bozarth and Gabe Grazier G'Sell built a compliance-forward platform that settles USD over stablecoins without the crypto cringe.
Heka Global lands $14M Series A (Windare Ventures, Barclays, Cornèr Banca SA) to deliver real-time, explainable web intelligence for fraud prevention. Idan Bar-Dov, Ishay Horowitz, and Rafael Berber heka built an analyst-in-a-box used by Fortune 500 banks that actually explains its decisions, no more black-box excuses.
Felt grabs $15M (Energize Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, Footwork) to rewire GIS for the cloud-native, AI-first era. Sam Hashemi and Can Duruk built the browser-native spatial platform processing terabytes daily and replacing legacy maps with real-time intelligence, fast enough for energy, government, and climate applications.
Crash Override crashes through with $28M seed (GV (Google Ventures), SYN Ventures, Blackstone) for its Engineering Relationship Management platform. Security legends John Viega and Mark Curphey built a pipeline provenance engine that maps code-to-cloud flow with surgical clarity. This isn’t DevOps visibility, it’s full-spectrum control.
Agora mints $50M Series A (Paradigms , Dragonfly, Galaxy Digital) to offer stablecoin infrastructure that institutions actually trust. Nick van Eck, Drake Evans, and Joseph McGrady are running $10B+ in flows and 50K wallets across 13 chains, because regulatory clarity is product-market fit.
Unify powers up with $40M Series B (Battery Ventures, OpenAI Fund, Thrive Capital) to build the AI-native GTM engine. Founders Austin Hughes and Connor Heggie are dropping autonomous sales agents that drive $1.7M in pipeline in 90 days. Not dreams, revenue.
xAI raises a jaw-dropping $10B ( Morgan Stanley, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital) at a $113B valuation to accelerate Grok and build the world’s most powerful AI infrastructure. ElonMusk runs point, with Igor Babuschkin and Jimmy Ba engineering a real-time, live-fed LLM that doesn’t hallucinate, it updates.
Groq is raising up to $500M at a $6B valuation, backed by a $1.5B infrastructure deal with Saudi Arabia to turn inference into international infrastructure. Founder Jonathan Ross (father of Google’s TPU) built the LPU, deterministic, real-time AI compute with 826 tokens/sec on Gemma and 108,000 units deploying globally.
SandboxAQ pulls in $95M via secondary (Rizvi Traverse Management, Forge, Ava Family Office), pushing toward $1B raised. Jack Hidary and Eric Schmidt are deploying quantum-resistant cryptography and AI-accelerated physics engines across enterprise, pharma, and defense. It’s not R&D. It’s runtime.
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 Twitter (X), and keep the conversation going.
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