The Trust Is in the Exposure

Your Thursday VC Breakfast Rundown

There’s a moment every founder hits, and it’s not on a stage, or in a room full of investors. It’s usually quieter. More personal. It happens when the deck’s been sent, the product’s live, the team’s watching, and suddenly… you don’t know what to say next.

Do you pretend? Or do you get real?

Getting Naked asks that question with blunt honesty. And for founders, it’s not theoretical, it’s daily. The fear of looking like you don’t have it all figured out is real. But the greater fear, the one that lingers longer, is building something on a foundation of performance instead of truth.

The best founders don’t lead by posture. They lead by exposure. They admit when the feature’s late. They tell investors when a number dipped. They’re not trying to impress their way to trust. They’re earning it, through clarity, vulnerability, and the willingness to stay in the room, even when their voice shakes.

Today’s companies reflect that kind of leadership. These aren’t brand stories, they’re human ones. They’ve been through the silence, the rejections, the awkward feedback loops. And instead of hiding, they leaned in.

Because real leadership isn’t knowing everything. It’s being willing to be seen anyway. Let’s get into it.

Ekho locks in $17.3M Seed + Series A (Activant Capital, J.P. Morgan, Winnebago Industries) and more to reinvent the way vehicles are sold online. Stanford University alums Rowan Mockler and Chris Howard built Ekho to be the Tesla-style checkout engine for everyone, from motorcycles to RVs, with 20+ OEMs already plugged in. This isn’t a SaaS feature, it’s a modular commerce platform that turns dealer chaos into API clarity.

Kuru Labs grabs $11.6M Series A (Paradigm, Electric Capital) to bring real-time trading to Monad Foundation’s blockchain with a CLOB-AMM hybrid that could outscale anything on Ethereum Foundation. Vaibhav Prakash is leading the charge with infrastructure so sharp it could be a Formula 1 backend. With 10,000 TPS and one-second finality, this isn’t another DeFi dream, it’s a liquidity engine built for war.

LNC Partners raises a $325M fund (Fund III) to keep scaling quiet middle-market dominance across B2B, healthcare, and insurance. Founders Matthew Kelty, Mark Raterman, and Robert Monk have managed over $1B across six vehicles with sniper-level execution, 30 platforms, 122 add-ons, 13 exits. This is private equity with Midwest muscle and boardroom precision.

Sweetwater Private Equity y opens the floodgates with $650M Fund IV focused on buyer-led secondaries. Founder James Gamett, with Brent Granado and Gregg Parise, built this firm on liquidity where others saw lockups. Zero buzzwords, zero auctions, just clean secondary market wins with LP alignment and operator IQ.

boldstart ventures hits $250M for Fund VII to keep its inception-stage streak alive. Ed Sim and Eliot Durbin have been early to every enterprise wave since before “pre-seed” was a word. Now they’re going bigger, writing $15M checks into AIinfra, dev tools, and autonomous enterprise stacks. When it comes to early conviction in enterprise tech, Boldstart doesn’t follow. They are the playbook.

ego death capital pulls in $100M for Fund II to lead Series A rounds in Bitcoin-native, revenue-generating startups. Founders Jeff Booth, Nico Lechuga, and Andi Pitt are putting capital into real Lightning-based businesses, not tokens, not hype. This is Bitcoin infrastructure done with adult supervision and serious receipts.

Centivax raises $45M Series A ( Future Ventures, NFX, BOLD Capital Partners) to engineer universal immunity that hits harder than seasonal vaccines ever could. Led by Dr. Jacob Glanville and backed by The National Institutes of Health, CEPI (Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness Innovations), Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA), and the Gates Foundation, their epitope-targeting platform is already preclinical across 20+ strains. The Centivax team aren’t chasing biotech trends, they’re building a global health tech OS.

ServiceUp lands $55M Series B (PeakSpan Capital, Hearst Ventures) to bring full-stack repair logistics to the $150B vehicle maintenance industry. Brett Carlson, Jaclyn Imani, Brett Dashe, and Javier Muniz didn’t just digitize autoshops, they overhauled fleet repair workflows, slashed cycle times, and built a 35-market network that gets claims closed and shops paid in 48 hours. Operational logistics OS? More like repair revolution.

Polimorphic closes $18.6M Series A (General Catalyst, M13, Shine Capital) to digitize city services with AI for the people. Massachusetts Institute of Technology founders Parth Shah and Daniel Smith are running 75-language AI front desks, async CRM, and search that actually answers. Already serving 36M Americans and saving over 55,000 hours of municipal labor, this is what GovTech looks like when it moves.

MaintainX goes big with a $150M Series D (Bessemer Venture Partners, Bain Capital Ventures, The D. E. Shaw Group) to supercharge its frontline-first CMMS platform. Chris Turlica, Hugo Dozois-Caouette, Mathieu Marengère-Gosselin, and Nick Haase are powering asset management across 11,000+ businesses and 370,000+ safety workflows. With $2.5B valuation and 12x growth since 2020, this is industrial SaaS that moves metal.

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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