The Way We Mark the Miles
Your Tuesday VC Breakfast Rundown
Milestones don’t tap you on the shoulder and say, “You’ve arrived.” They hit you in the middle of the night when you realize you’re still working. They show up in the silence after launch, the pause before the next sprint. Yesterday, I launched a website that started as a side hobby. Tomorrow, I turn fifty. Two milestones, one digital, one deeply human. And neither came easy.
Because the road to any moment that matters is never linear. It bends, it breaks, it blindsides. It tests your will, your why, your wiring. And still, you show up. You build. You make something that lasts. Not for the milestone, but for the muscle you build getting there.
This week’s companies are full of that same energy. Not polished paths, but earned peaks. They’ve pivoted, stretched, survived. They’ve tasted the quiet moments of doubt and kept going anyway. That’s the real mark of momentum. Not what you hit, but what you held on through.
So yeah, it all moves fast. But when you finally look up, at a product that’s live, a mission that’s real, a birthday that carries weight, you realize it’s not about how straight the line was. It’s about the fact that you kept moving. That you made something from it.
And that you’re still here. Still building. Before breakfast.
Nominal scored $75M Series B (Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners). Cameron McCord, Bryce Strauss, and Jason Hoch built a real-time test stack that turns hardware chaos into clean data collaboration. Already in play with Anduril Industries and the United States Air Force, it's not just speeding up test cycles, it’s redefining how systems prove themselves before launch. They're turning telemetry, logs, and videos into decisions in minutes, not days. That’s how you turn test time into go time.
Sojo Industries secured $40M Series B (S2G Investments) to mobilize packaging at the speed of demand. Barak Bar-Cohen, Steve Rubin, and Josh Schwartz-Dodek are deploying modular robotics rigs that eliminate freight waste and bottlenecks across food, pet, and beauty CPGs. Eight Sojo Flight sites are already live, with a national rollout in motion. This isn’t co-manufacturing, it’s co-piloting logistics.
VectorWave Corporation surfaced with $2.5M seed (J2 Ventures, Coalition Ventures) and a chip on its shoulder. Founded by Dr. Ronald D. and Tom Hennessey, they’re pushing analog inference straight from raw RF, 120ns latency, 85% accuracy, no digitization needed. MAFT-ONN isn’t just a chip, it’s a paradigm shift. This is inference before input, intelligence before software.
Ellipsis Health raised $45M Series A (Salesforce, Khosla Ventures, CVS Health Ventures). Mainul Mondal and Dr. Michael Aratow built Sage, an emotionally intelligent AI voice agent that turns vocal biomarkers into clinical-grade insights. Already reducing admin tasks by 60%, Sage listens where other tools just hear noise. It’s care, decoded by voice and scaled by AI.
Cluely locked in $5.3M seed (Abstract Ventures, Susa Ventures). Chungin Lee and Neel Shanmugam flipped suspension into scale, building a stealth in browser AI assistant that delivers answers mid-Zoom without a trace. 70,000 users and $3M ARR before launch says it all. This is real-time intelligence for high-stakes screens.
Warp landed $10M Series A (UP.Partners, Blue Bear Capital) to take over the middle mile. Daniel Sokolovsky and Troy Lester built a logistics stack where AI meets pallet tracking, and 50+ stations move freight like it’s bandwidth. Their load orchestration system is redefining delivery speed and cost. Logistics isn’t slow, it’s just been unmanaged.
Slide raised $25M Series A (Base10 Partners) to give BCDR a new beat. Austin McChord and Michael Fass are back with MSP-first backup built from byte zero, real-time virtualization, NVMe storage, and no techs left on hold. This isn’t retrofitted disaster recovery, it’s slide-to-reboot velocity. From cloud replication to live restores, they’re making downtime obsolete.
WorkWhile grabbed $23M Series B (Rethink Impact, LP, Khosla Ventures). Jarah Euston and Amol Jain built an AI labor platform that predicts shift reliability and kills no-shows dead. They’re handling events from Comic-Con to TaylorSwift tours with under 5% no-show rates. Labor matching just got its playbook rewritten.
Juniper Square closed a $130M Series D (Ribbit Capital, Fifth Wall) at a $1.1B valuation. Alex Robinson, Adam Ginsburg, and Yonas Fisseha built the fund OS for private markets, now running $1T+ in equity with AI-native workflows that make Excel look like an abacus. JunieAI is more than branding, it’s a full-stack intelligence layer for LPs and GPs. They’re not raising capital, they’re rearchitecting how it flows.
Sedai raised $20M Series B (AVP, Norwest, SIERRA Ventures). Suresh Mathew and Benjamin Thomas are driving autonomous cloud ops with 25M+ production actions and 7x revenue growth. Sedai is self-healing, self-scaling, and self-optimizing, across Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and GCP. Ops isn’t reactive anymore, it’s predictive.
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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