VC Breakfast Rundown - April 11, 2025
This isn’t your average continental breakfast; this is Sanctuary Cap Cana, where the coffee’s bold, the buffet’s endless, and the hustle? Even richer than the French toast. While tourists are deciding between omelets or mimosas, these founders already chose: raise big, scale fast, and rewrite the game before noon. Grab your plate, pull up a chair, this Friday spread is serving up nothing but velocity.
DIAMO lands a $4M seed round (Thayer Ventures, Inovia Capital, Avalon Capital Group) to bring revenue firepower to independent hotels. Led by James Kay, spun out of Life House, the platform is already boosting sub-150-room hotels by 35% with real-time pricing, booking engines, metasearch, and soon, a virtual AI revenue manager named ANDI. Legacy RMS, take notes.
Luzern Risk secures $12M Series A (Caffeinated Capital) to simplify captive insurance for the midmarket. Gabriel Weiss (Safekeep, Point72 Private Investments) and Jonathan York (Uber, Waymo) are making risk ownership radically fast, compliant, and AI-native, with four patents, 30+ jurisdictions, and SOC 2 Type II muscle already live. Time to make captives mainstream.
Octane raises $6.75M seed (Archetype, Winklevoss Capital, Gemini, Circle, Balaji Srinivasan) to become the AI co-pilot for Web3 security. Giovanni Vignone built a 24/7 smart contract scanner that runs 80K threat models/sec, already integrated with Circle, Redstone, and Trust Wallet. If your stack isn’t scanning in real time, you’re just asking to get drained.
SigIQ.ai closes $9.5M seed (The House Fund, GSV Ventures, Duolingo, Peak XV Partners, General Catalyst India) to rewrite the rules of AI-powered tutoring. Founded by Dr. Karttikeya Mangalam, Ph.D and Prof. Kurt Keutzer, their UPSC bot scored 175/200 in 7 mins; EverTutor boosts GRE scores 18% in a month. 200K+ users. 12 languages. Solving Bloom’s Two Sigma problem like it’s light work.
Blackbird Labs takes flight with $50M Series B (Spark Capital, a16z speedrun, Union Square Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Amex Ventures). Ben Leventhal (Eater, Resy) is turning restaurants into token-powered loyalty ecosystems via $FLY rewards and programmable onchain incentives. Over 1,000 restaurants in the network. Real compliance, real POS integrations. Loyalty just got a new playbook.
Vaxess Technologies secures $9M (RA Capital, Engine Ventures) to scale MIMIX, its dissolvable microneedle patch that holds mRNA at 37°C for 14 days. Rachel Sha and team are moving GLP-1 programs into clinic, ramping GMP production, and lining up partners like AstraZeneca. Forget injections, this is programmable pharmacology in patch form.
Nuro hauls in $106M Series E (T. Rowe Price, Fidelity Investments, Tiger Global, Greylock, XN) at a $6B valuation to license its autonomous Nuro Driver™ platform. Jiajun Zhu and Dave Ferguson (ex-Waymo) have pivoted hard from hardware to software, locking in with Uber Eats, Domino's, and Toyota Motor Corporation. Autonomy isn’t theoretical here, it’s on the road.
Ottometric nails $10M Series A (Schooner Capital, Rally Ventures, Proeza Ventures, PS27 Ventures, Somersault) to automate ADAS validation with its AI-powered platform. Joseph Burke’s crew is already slashing validation costs 75%, used by two top-10 Tier 1s, and ramping toward real-time simulation. When safety depends on finding edge cases, Ottometric is the scalpel.
Synucure Therapeutics lands $2.8M USD seed (Investissement Québec, private angels) to take its disease-modifying Parkinson’s treatment to clinic. Sylvain Chrétien and Dr. Francesca Cicchetti are targeting progression itself—armed with cysteamine and blood-based biomarkers to stratify patients. Canada’s PD market just got a serious upgrade.
Springtail locks in $2.5M pre-seed (@Gradient Ventures, Octave Ventures LLC) to scale Postgres reads without lifting a line of code. Founded by Craig Soules and Garth Goodson, the platform slashes latency and costs by sharding read workloads with zero infra duct tape. First-time Postgres scaling that doesn’t break what already works.
Pax AI raises $4.5M seed (Initialized Capital, Sancus Capital Partners, Soma Capital, Basis Set, General Catalyst) to automate duty drawback refunds with AI muscle. Led by Penny Chen, PaxAI is already integrating with brokers and IRS workflows, reducing months of refund work to minutes. Global trade just got a back-end upgrade.
The Institute for Corporate Productivity (i4cp) gets a strategic growth investment from M.C. Partners and brings on new CEO Terry Waters (ex-Yankee Group, Gartner) to scale its enterprise workforce research engine. Kevin Oakes stays on to lead thought leadership, while the platform expands peer boards, AI capabilities, and hybrid work strategy at Nike, Mastercard, and IBM levels.
Merida Biosciences roars out of stealth with a $121M Series A (Bain Capital, BVF PARTNERS, L.P, Third Rock Ventures, GV (Google Ventures), Perceptive Advisors) to target antibody-driven autoimmunity without broad suppression. Adam Townsend (Apellis), Dario Gutierrez, and team are starting with Graves’ disease and building a platform that neutralizes and eliminates, with quarterly dosing as the goal.
Global Gaming League (GGL) secures $10M SAFE (Solyco Capital) to build the entertainment empire esports forgot. Led by Clinton Sparks, Jeff Hoffman, and T-Pain, GGL is part arena, part talent incubator, part streaming colossus with 250K+ sign-ups, a Vegas HQ, and a culture-forward model built for Gen Z.
Rondah AI raises $1.8M pre-seed (2048 Ventures, Twelve Below) to clean up the frontdesk chaos in dental practices. Burhan Syed, Mohammed Mian, and Allan Svirsky are automating call handling, appointment booking, and recall workflows, saving staff three hours/day and scaling like wildfire across North America.
Let’s 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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