The City Doesn’t Wait
Your Monday VC Breakfast Rundown
Tech Week in New York isn’t a checklist of events. It’s a living system. An organism. An ecosystem with a pulse. And if you’ve ever stepped into one of those packed rooms, rooftop or basement, WeWork or wine bar, you know that something real happens when ambition gets proximity.
This wasn’t about lead gen. It was about alignment. The moments where someone finishes your sentence. Or challenges it. Or takes a half-baked idea and shows you the version that actually lands.
The companies that stood out this week didn’t just attend, they connected. Deeply. Authentically. Repeatedly. They were the ones listening hard, pitching clean, and walking away with more clarity than they walked in with. The ones who knew the difference between noise and signal. Between presence and performance.
This is what NYC gives you: friction and fuel. You rub shoulders with people who are sprinting in the same direction but solving entirely different problems. You find out what’s next, not because you heard it on stage, but because someone whispered it to you while waiting for cold brew.
The builders on this list didn’t just go to Tech Week. They tapped into it. And now, they’re running faster. Because in this city, momentum is everywhere.
You just have to plug in.
Swap Robotics secured $3M from Silicon Ranch Corporation to scale its solar farm bots. Tim Lichti, Mohamed H. Mostafa, Spencer Kschesinski, and Adonis Mansour are designing 100% electric, swappable robots for solar vegetation and beyond. $11M in signed contracts, 600% projected YoY growth. This is clean tech automation with real teeth. Their bots run 24/7, swap blades in minutes, and are already deployed on 50,000+ acres of solar. Margins, labor, emissions, Swap cuts them all.
Fever raised $100M (L Catterton, Point72 Private Investments) and acquired DICE to dominate live entertainment. Ignacio Bachiller Ströhlein, Alexandre Perez Casares, and Francisco Hein are scaling a 300M-user platform with vertical precision, real-time demand mapping, and cultural curation built for global cities. 20x revenue since the pandemic. This isn’t hype, it’s infrastructure for the experience economy. With 100+ cities in its network and events spanning from Candlelight Concerts to immersive art, Fever owns the last-mile of IRL discovery. DICE gives them ticketing muscle, now they control both vibe and conversion.
Pyx Health x FarmboxRx locked $47.5M (S2G Investments, TT Capital Partners) to build an empathy engine for Medicaid and SDOH. Cindy Jordan, Anne Jordan, and Ashley Tyrner - Dolce are combining AI-driven loneliness mitigation with nutrition-as-care that actually shifts biometric outcomes. 48% cost drops. 72% loneliness reduction. This is whole-person healthcare, scaled. With 5M+ covered lives and state partnerships ramping, they’re making food and feelings clinical-grade interventions. The real flex? Outcomes tracked in real time with CMS-grade rigor.
Tropion Sports Partners raised $25M (Blue Owl Capital, PSALM Capital) to turn sports investing into a precision asset class. Joseph Greco, Nick Sprague, and Michael Golden are using data and deal flow to back global NBA franchise growth. From premium seating to streaming wars, this is culture-capital arbitrage in motion. They’ve already staked minority positions across European football, NCAA collectives, and next-gen fan platforms. Sports isn’t entertainment, it’s the new institutional frontier, and Tropion is writing the playbook.
Trucordia secured $1.3B (Carlyle) at a $5.7B valuation to rebuild insurance as an API-powered platform. Felix Morgan, Peter C. Foy, Brandon Gray, and Michael Moran are scaling 200+ offices and 415K clients with M&A playbooks designed for cyberliability, healthcare, and embedded broker stacks. They’re not digitizing forms, they’re replatforming the full carrier-to-consumer flow. Every acquired broker gets rolled into Trucordia’s shared stack, one-click quotes, real-time underwriting, and portfolio-level analytics.
Obvio raised $22M (Bain Capital Ventures, Khosla) to cut traffic safety deaths with AI enforcement tools. Dhruv Maheshwari and Ali Rehan are building solar-powered, privacy-respecting smart cams that slash violations and save lives, no dragnet, just impact. Think city-scale monitoring without surveillance creep. Already in talks with 40+ municipalities, they’ve reduced crashes by 35% in pilot zones.
PopID raised equity (Verifone, Visa, PayPal) to scale biometrics as infrastructure. John Miller and Kourosh Gohar are embedding decentralized identity and quantum-resistant tech across 45M terminals. Palm or face, this is secure checkout with no friction, no compromise. PopID isn’t a startup anymore, it’s the next-gen payments layer with Fortune 500 DNA. With zeroKYC payment loops and offline verification built-in, they're turning identity into a business moat.
Vivrelle closed $62M Series C (Protagonist) to scale luxury rental like an operating system. Blake Geffen, Wayne Geffen, Jeff Neil, and Rachel Nimaroff are taking Hermès-as-a-service mainstream. Profitable. AI-powered. With blockchain-backed authenticity on deck. Now expanding into jewelry, watches, and men’s fashion, they’re becoming the LVMH of recurring revenue. The waitlist tells the story, luxury now moves at subscription speed.
Circle raised $1.1B in IPO proceeds, then surged 168% on day one. Jeremy Allaire and team have $25T in on-chain volume behind them and full MiCA compliance ahead. Circle didn’t just go public, they rewrote the playbook for stablecoins with $65M in Q1 net income. USDC is now the cleanest cap-table stablecoin on the market, regulatory-sound, deeply liquid, and protocol-agnostic. This is Wall Street meets web3 with receipts, not vapor.
heyLibby secured $4.5M (Aglaé Ventures, Vertical Venture Partners) to dominate fitness and wellness CRM with AI that closes leads before sunrise. Tony Small, Anna Rodriguez, and Spencer Rascoff are automating 70% of comms and hitting $110K ARR per partner. White-label SaaS with predictive churn detection built-in. No fluff, just conversions. Partners report 6x faster onboarding and 40% retention gains within 90 days. Libby doesn’t replace your sales team, it supercharges them on autopilot.
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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