The Wisdom in Bad News
Your Wednesday VC Breakfast Rundown
Disappointment Panda isn’t a villain, he’s the truth-teller every founder eventually meets. Mark Manson, in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fck*, writes that happiness is not about avoiding problems, but about choosing the ones worth your time, energy, and sacrifice. Founders don’t get to dodge pain. They decide which kind of pain they’re willing to live with.
That’s what makes today’s companies stand out. These teams didn’t waste themselves on the wrong battles. They didn’t chase features that looked shiny or customers who never cared. They chose harder problems, messier ones, but problems that actually mattered. And in choosing well, their setbacks became fuel, not failure.
Every pivot, every rejection, every false start is a conversation with Disappointment Panda. The companies in this list are the ones who learned to nod back, take the hit, and keep building. Not because they enjoy the pain, but because they knew the struggle was tied to something real, something that deserved to exist.
SpinLaunch locked $30M Series C (ATW Partners, Kongsberg Defence & Aerospace). Founder Jonathan Yaney lit the fuse in 2014, with CEO Massimiliano Ladovaz now steering orbital operations. Payloads are already hitting 1,600 km/h, Alaska’s 100-meter orbital launcher is next. This is space access reimagined, cheaper, cleaner, and fast-tracking toward orbital launches by 2027.
Sola raised $17.5M Series A (Andreessen Horowitz, Conviction). Founders Jessica Wu and Neil Deshmukh, both MIT-trained, are turning brittle bots into agentic AI that learns, adapts, and scales. Fortune 100s are already in production. The bet is that automation finally breaks free of checklists and takes on messy, high-value workflows.
Space Kinetic secured new funding (CerraCap Ventures) to advance its Longbow system, payload mobility in orbit without fuel. Co-founders Ryan Sullivan and Scott Ziegler are scaling from Albuquerque to El Segundo, stacking contracts with DARPA and the U.S. Space Force. Eliminating propellant isn’t just innovation, it’s asymmetric defense advantage.
Eight Sleep hit $100M Series D (HSG, Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund). Matteo Franceschetti, Massimo Andreasi Bassi, Andrea Ballarini, and Alexandra Zatarain have sold half a billion in Pods while turning biometric beds into medical-grade health systems. The company is positioning sleep as the next trillion-dollar health frontier.
ShiftUp came out of stealth with $3M Seed (Highway 12 Ventures). Founders Nick Valla, Ken Valla, and Ryan Adamson know the enterprise trenches, and built ShiftUp to torch inefficiency and surface hidden revenue. Native Salesforce integration gives them a distribution edge most AI sales tools can’t touch.
CorriXR Therapeutics landed $1M investment (State of Delaware) to advance oncology gene-editing. Founder & CEO Dr. Eric B. Kmiec and his lean leadership team are pushing CXR101, a therapy targeting NRF2 in solid tumors, toward first-in-human trials by 2026. It’s a precision oncology play with platform potential across 30+ cancers.
Three Space Lab raised $3M Seed (Arminius Verwaltung). Founder Scott Greenwald, PhD, an MIT Media Lab veteran, is building hyper-realistic VR simulations that let global buyers step into towers and villas before they exist. By collapsing the gap between imagination and conviction, they’re unlocking billions in cross-border real estate deals.
Nullspace secured $2.5M Seed (Fathom Fund). Founders Dr. Masha Petrova, Dr. Daniel Faircloth, and Dr. Jason Keen are turning decades of defense R&D into solvers 25x faster than legacy tools. Faster, more accurate EM simulations mean quantum, defense, and aerospace companies cut years off development timelines.
TensorZero banked $7.3M Seed (FirstMark, Bessemer Venture Partners, Bedrock). Founders Gabriel Bianconi and Viraj Mehta are scaling a Rust-based stack that already trends on GitHub with sub-ms latency at 10k+ QPS. Open-source roots plus enterprise-grade performance make it a contender to own LLM infrastructure.
Functionize closed $41M Series B (Mumford Investments, LHH Investments). Founder Tamas Cser and team have already run 1B+ tests for GE Healthcare, ServiceNow, and Equifax, cutting testing time from days to hours. In a $35B market doubling by 2030, they’re pushing agentic AI to make QA truly autonomous.
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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