AlleyWatch sat down with Alex Manavi, Cofounder and CEO of Speakeasy, to learn more about the business, its future plans, recent funding round, and much, much more…

Who were your investors and how much did you raise?

We raised an oversubscribed $8.8M round led by Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s Positive Sum, with participation from Yamaha Music Innovations Fund and founders and executives from companies including Seamless, TigerConnect, Genius, D.C. United, Swansea City FC, and Tegus. This is our first institutional fundraise. We nearly bootstrapped the business to profitability before raising, proving both the model and market demand before taking outside investment.   

Tell us about the product or service that Speakeasy offers.

Speakeasy is the all-in-one operations and intelligence platform powering live experiences. We combine truly best in class, data-driven ticketing, reservations and table management, premium booking experiences, payments, POS integrations, CRM, marketing, and analytics into a single platform for operators across nightlife, sports and entertainment, festivals, membership clubs, and live events.

What inspired the start of Speakeasy?

We built Speakeasy because live experience operators have historically relied on fragmented, outdated software that wasn’t designed to work together and, in many cases, did not work at all. We set out to build the infrastructure and operating system powering the live experience, entertainment, and hospitality industry. We initially founded the company at the University of Chicago. As founders, we had experience on each of the operator, investing and engineering sides. We also all come from technical backgrounds.

How is Speakeasy different?

Most companies in our industry sell point solutions. We replaced the entire technology stack with a unified platform that aligns our incentives with those of our clients and optimizes for customer data and truly functional products. When our clients generate more revenue, operate more efficiently, and create better guest experiences, we succeed alongside them.

Our platform captures significantly more guest data, which is only enabled by powering the entire live experience lifecycle, from discovery and e-commerce to pre-purchase interactions, purchase, arrival, in-event engagement, and post-event analytics, marketing, retargeting, and brand sponsorship opportunities. By combining data from every touchpoint, we’ve built best-in-class solutions that are powerful on their own, but even more valuable when working together. The result is deeper insights, more effective enterprise initiatives, and a better way to operate and grow a live experience business.

We’ve also built a world-class client support machine and maintained a rigorous, product-first approach in an industry that has struggled to innovate for quite some time.

What market does Speakeasy target and how big is it?

We’re building for the IRL economy, one of the fastest-growing categories in a post-AI world. That includes nightlife, sports and entertainment venues, event organizers, festivals, experience creators, and membership clubs. Consumers are spending more on in-person experiences than ever before, while the software infrastructure powering the industry remains significantly underserved. Allied Market Research estimates that the global live-events industry was already a $652.6 billion market in 2022 and is projected to reach $1.18 trillion by 2032.

What’s your business model?

Both a subscription based and reoccurring processing fee revenue model. This depends on the solution.

How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?

We nearly bootstrapped the business to profitability before raising outside capital. Operating efficiently has been part of our DNA since day one, and we continue to build the company with long-term discipline regardless of market conditions.

What was the funding process like?

The round was oversubscribed and included founders, operators, and investors who understand both business building and the live experience industry. We were highly selective about who we brought onto the cap table, and while we did not initially intend to raise venture capital, we saw an opportunity to accelerate in partnership with our investors.

What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?

Fundraising while operating through such a high-growth phase of the business.

What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?

“When we first met Speakeasy, the metrics and revenue growth were impressive, but the thing that stood out was the team’s sheer force of will. They see a problem and run straight at it,” said Patrick O’Shaughnessy, CEO and Partner at Positive Sum. “Live events happen outside normal business hours and Speakeasy has built a 24/7 machine to support their clients. Talking to customers we heard the same thing over and over again: they continuously deliver and do it fast.” – Patrick O’Shaughnessy, CEO, Partner, Positive Sum

“I’ve largely steered clear of investing in live events and its ecosystem, which is probably weird considering that so much of my career prior to venture capital revolved around them.
During my time at Live Nation and Ticketmaster, I saw so many venture-backed ticketing companies and event discovery apps come through our doors that never got to scale. For every SeatGeek and Fever, there were countless failures.

And so of course I brought that helpful baggage into our first meeting with Alex Manavi, Tamas An, and Paul S. from Speakeasy.

Their metrics and client base made them hard to overlook. Their willpower, professionalism, and technical talent set against their age and experience moved us closer. Their customer references put us (way) over the edge.” – Andrew Kahn, Managing Partner at Yamaha Music Innovation Fund

We also believe that we benefited from two increasingly common sentiments within the venture and startup communities:

1. The systems that stand the test of time will be those that solve real problems, are deeply integrated into their end user’s critical workflows, and are backed by highly committed, human support systems.
2. As digital media and software continue to commoditize and the world changes before our eyes, IRL and live experiences become increasingly scarce and valuable. We are building the infrastructure and intelligence layer powering live experiences.

What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?

We’re doubling down and investing further in our core solutions, where we’re seeing ample market demand and there is still much left to build. We’re also continuing to invest heavily in predictive intelligence, expanding into new markets and adjacent product verticals, and strengthening the direct relationship between consumers and the live experiences powered by our enterprise partners. We plan to grow revenue even faster over the next six months than we have over the last.

We’re doubling down and investing further in our core solutions, where we’re seeing ample market demand and there is still much left to build. We’re also continuing to invest heavily in predictive intelligence, expanding into new markets and adjacent product verticals, and strengthening the direct relationship between consumers and the live experiences powered by our enterprise partners. We plan to grow revenue even faster over the next six months than we have over the last.

What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?

Build as if the capital is never coming, maximize proximity to two important variables, your product and your customers, and focus on solving the actually important and difficult problems.

Where do you see the company going now over the near term?

We have a mandate to become the undisputed, go-to platform for the global live experiences industry and broader IRL economy. We’re still at the very beginning of that journey.

What’s your favorite summer destination in and around the city?

Our Flatiron office!

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AlleyWatch sat down with SONATA cofounder and CEO Sagan Schultz to learn more about the business, its future plans, and the recent $7M seed round that brings the company out of stealth and into launch in New York, San Francisco, and Los Angeles.

Who were your investors and how much did you raise?

We raised $7M in seed funding from Lux Capital, BoxGroup, Sunflower Capital, and founders and operators from companies including Ramp and Linear. We’re announcing it alongside our launch. We wanted partners who want preventive, personalized healthcare to exist in the world, and who understand the complexity of building it.

Tell us about the product or service that SONATA offers.

SONATA is a doctor-led healthcare membership focused on preventing disease before it starts. Board-certified physicians go deep into your whole biology, your genome, your biomarkers, how you’re actually aging, and stay with you over time. Behind them, clinical AI we built in-house connects the dots across your genetics, labs, medical history, and daily life, surfacing patterns that would otherwise go unseen. People have more health data than ever, but almost none of it turns into actual care. That’s the gap we built SONATA to close.

What inspired the start of SONATA?

My cofounder David and I kept coming back to the same observation. People have access to more health information than ever, from wearables and advanced testing to studies and AI tools, but more data alone hasn’t made us healthier. As a country, we spend nearly $5 trillion a year on healthcare, more than any nation on earth, and our outcomes trail nearly every peer country. We’re not well, and most of what’s making us unwell is preventable. What’s missing is the layer that turns all that information into actionable, ongoing care. People are left to carry that complexity on their own. We built SONATA so they don’t have to.

For me, it’s also personal. I spent nearly a decade working in NYC restaurants through college, med school, and business school. Hospitality is built on anticipating what someone needs before they ask. Then I’d walk into the hospital and watch medicine do the opposite, wait for disease, react to crisis, move on. I could never reconcile the two worlds. SONATA is the version of care I couldn’t find.

How is SONATA different?

A lot of what’s called preventive health today is really a wellness product, testing packaged with content, and it’s judged on engagement. We built SONATA as healthcare, and healthcare is judged on outcomes. The depth is different. We run a clinical-grade whole genome sequencing pipeline, we measure biological age through DNA methylation, the same method used in aging research, and our physicians read all of it against your medical history, biomarkers, wearables, and records to build one contextualized view of your health. Then they stay with you, guiding what happens next. Our clinical AI, built in-house, is embedded in how they practice, surfacing patterns across all of it while every clinical decision stays with the doctor. That’s the difference between a report and a relationship. Care that compounds. 

What market does SONATA target and how big is it?

Our early members tend to be people in their 30s and 40s who are thinking differently about their health. They’re starting families, their own knees are starting to hurt after a run, they’re watching their parents deal with chronic disease, and they’re realizing a lot of those risks can be caught and addressed decades earlier. They’re already spending on their health, wearables, testing, training, and supplements, but none of it is coordinated by anyone with clinical depth.

The market is enormous and mostly unconverted. Americans spend roughly half a trillion dollars a year out of pocket on healthcare, and concierge medicine has proven that people will pay for relationship-based care, but at $25K+ a year, it stayed a luxury product. We think the real market is everyone who’s been priced out of that model but is already spending more than our membership costs on fragmented alternatives.

What’s your business model?

SONATA is an annual membership, $2,500 for founding members. It includes in-home blood draws, whole genome sequencing, DNA methylation testing, 140+ biomarkers tracked over time, wearable and health record integration, and unlimited access to your physician-led care team throughout the year. No insurance, no per-visit billing. Membership is paid directly, and members can put HSA or FSA funds toward it. The model is simple on purpose. One relationship, one price, and care that compounds over time.

How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?

We’re built for it in a few ways. We raised from investors who underwrite long time horizons, and we run lean by design. Our model is physician-led care supported by technology, not a clinic buildout in every market, so growth doesn’t drag overhead with it. Our product and engineering team is small and stays that way on purpose; we care about craft and quality over headcount, something I took directly from my time at Linear. On the demand side, health is one of the last things people cut. Our members aren’t making a one-time curiosity purchase; they’re buying the thing that keeps them ahead of problems that are far more expensive later. If anything, a slowdown sharpens the case for prevention. The most expensive healthcare is the kind you didn’t see coming.

What was the funding process like?

The process moved quickly because we weren’t pitching a trend, we were pitching a gap everyone in the room had personally felt. Nearly every investor we talked to was already doing some version of this themselves, tracking biomarkers, wearing a device, piecing together their own labs, and paying out of pocket for testing the system doesn’t offer. We didn’t have to convince anyone that the problem was real. The conversation was about whether we were the team to fix it. Between David and me, we cover medicine, product, and engineering, and we’ve built at places known for strong product and engineering orgs. We know what good looks like, and investors could see we knew what it takes to build it in healthcare. The ones who leaned in, Lux, BoxGroup, Sunflower, and founders from Ramp and Linear, understood both halves.

What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?

The consumer health space is incredibly noisy right now. There are a lot of companies making big claims about building the future of healthcare that are, underneath, marketing companies, some not even HIPAA compliant. They’ve been loud, and our model has no real precedent, so we spent a lot of the raise explaining how we’re different from things that sound superficially similar. The other challenge was the wedge obsession. Investors are trained to look for a narrow, cheap wedge product that expands later. We made a deliberate choice not to build one, because we want to compete on product and quality of experience, and you can’t do that by selling something cheap on social media and upselling from there, especially in a category where trust is already scarce. People can tell when they’re a funnel. We raised from investors willing to underwrite the full model from day one, real clinical depth and an ongoing physician relationship, because that’s the product we actually wanted to exist.

What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?

Three things. Timing, LLMs, and a founder bet. Timing, because the demand is finally here. People always cared about their health, but the spend never followed like it does now. Millennials watched our parents’ generation deal with chronic disease and decided not to accept the same path, and an ecosystem from Huberman to Bryan Johnson made health optimization mainstream. Meanwhile, the traditional system is heading toward a reckoning, $5 trillion a year and climbing, with outcomes getting worse. LLMs, because contextualizing complex personal health data at this depth wasn’t possible five years ago, and because a small team can now build product experiences that used to take a hundred people. And the founder bet, that healthcare is finally a product problem. The clinical knowledge exists. What’s been missing is anyone building the experience with craft. The founders of Linear and Ramp are on our cap table because they won on exactly that, and they saw the same opening in healthcare.

What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?

The next six months are about proving you can move fast and care deeply at the same time. We ship product improvements daily, and the pace won’t slow. But velocity only matters if the experience is exceptional, and that’s the real work. Staying close enough to our members to understand what’s actually hard for them, building against that instead of a roadmap written in a vacuum, and treating every detail of their experience like it matters, because it does. This is healthcare, and our bar is hospitality-grade, anticipating what members need before they ask. We’re growing our physician-led care team ahead of demand, and expansion to new cities comes as we earn it.

What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?

I left Linear to start SONATA with a much smaller pre-seed, and the truth is you don’t need much capital to get started. Build something that solves a real problem, and figure out what that is by talking to real people. If customers aren’t pulling it out of your hands, keep listening. Growth you have to manufacture is usually a sign the problem isn’t real yet.

But be honest with yourself about why raising is hard, because eventually you’ll have to, and the underlying issue won’t fix itself. At the earliest stages, most bets are founder bets, and investors are really asking why you’re the right person for this problem. If that answer isn’t strong yet, one of the best moves is spending a few years at a fast-growing startup you admire, working for founders who’ve earned that conviction. The reps are priceless. You learn what good looks like, and you build the thing that matters most: your reputation. I can’t stress that enough.

Where do you see the company going now over the near term?

Near term, everything feeds one goal, proving the model with our founding members. Every member who stays ahead of a risk they didn’t know they had is the proof that this works. As that compounds, you’ll see us in more cities, and you’ll see the product get deeper. That means new offerings, and going especially deep on women’s health, which remains under-researched and underserved by the traditional system, we intend to be part of changing that. Because our care is physician-led and virtual-first rather than built around clinics, we can bring this to new markets at a pace traditional healthcare can’t. But the sequence matters. Exceptional care first, then scale.

What’s your favorite summer destination in and around the city?

Honestly, a leisurely night out in the Village, dinner somewhere good, maybe the Comedy Cellar, but nothing locked in. The best New York nights are the ones you don’t plan. And when I can swing it, out east during the week, when it’s calm.

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Since the early days of Whatnot, data and applied ML have been at our core, from the earliest collaborative filters to our latest real-time inference and recommendation systems. Shaped has been living at this intersection for years, shipping production ready ML & AI for marketplaces like ours. We are excited to welcome the team and incorporate their tech to accelerate our learnings and capabilities to deliver on our mission of building the best social commerce platform possible. – Emmanuel Fuentes

Founded in 2021 by Murrell, Daniel Camilleri, and Shai Bruhis, Shaped had raised a total of $10M in equity funding and is backed by Madrona, Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, Uncommon Capital, and Tribe Capital. Shaped built a real-time AI personalization platform that delivers sub-50ms relevance across text, user, and session data, serving as ranking infrastructure for hundreds of marketplaces and content brands. “We are thrilled to integrate Shaped’s product into Whatnot and be part of one of the fastest growing marketplaces ever,” said Murrell. “In a live ecosystem, the standard recommendation playbook just doesn’t apply. You have to balance immediate buyer relevance with the long-term health of the marketplace. Building an AI engine that can manage those multi-sided dynamics at enormous scale is a massive technical challenge, and we’re excited to push the frontier of what’s possible.”

We are thrilled to integrate Shaped’s product into Whatnot and be part of one of the fastest growing marketplaces ever. In a live ecosystem, the standard recommendation playbook just doesn’t apply. You have to balance immediate buyer relevance with the long-term health of the marketplace. Building an AI engine that can manage those multi-sided dynamics at enormous scale is a massive technical challenge, and we’re excited to push the frontier of what’s possible. – Tullie Murrell

The acquisition addresses one of the most technically demanding challenges in live commerce: building AI that can surface the right products to buyers in an inventory environment that shifts by the minute. Whatnot says cross-category buying on its platform has grown 170% year-over-year, and the company has launched over 45 new product categories in just the first half of 2026. Shaped’s infrastructure, which was built specifically for real-time marketplace dynamics, is intended to sharpen those discovery systems as Whatnot scales.

AlleyWatch sat down with Pearl Health Chief Business Officer Steven Duque to learn more about the business, its future plans, recent funding round, and much, much more…

Who were your investors and how much did you raise?

Pearl recently raised a $50 million Series C equity round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Viking Global Investors, AlleyCorp, and Ulysses Capital, plus a $60 million debt facility led by Trinity Capital.

Tell us about the product or service that Pearl Health offers.

Pearl Health helps healthcare organizations succeed in value-based care by giving them the technology to improve clinical outcomes while managing the total cost of care. This means rewarding providers for keeping patients healthy, rather than for the volume of services delivered.

Our platform combines deep healthcare data with AI-powered workflows to help providers identify which patients could benefit most from proactive attention, understand why, and coordinate the right interventions at the right time.

The capital from this round enables us to supercharge our investments in two core capabilities: Performance Intelligence and Care Orchestration. Performance Intelligence will give care teams a real-time, natural language view of quality, utilization, and financial performance across their patient population. Care Orchestration applies AI to automate routine operational work like scheduling annual wellness visits, conducting post-discharge follow-ups, and managing outreach, so that clinicians can have more quality time with patients.

What inspired the start of Pearl Health?

While at Oscar Health, our CEO, Michael Kopko, became focused on the challenge of aligning providers with patient outcomes through incentives, insights, and technology. He saw firsthand how hard that is to do from the health plan side alone. As Medicare introduced new innovative payment models with richer claims data, he and his cofounders – Dr. Jeff De Flavio, Kevin Ryan, and Ankit Patel – saw an opportunity to combine technology, data, and provider partnerships into an operating system to make the shift to value actually work in practice. That was six years ago, and the mission hasn’t changed since.

How is Pearl Health different?

Most approaches to value-based care solve the need for greater care coordination by adding people: more care coordinators, more staff on the phone, more manual outreach. That model is expensive and hard to scale. You can’t cost-effectively hire your way to delivering consistently great care across an entire patient population.
Pearl takes a technology-first approach. We combine AI, automation, and clinical intelligence to help care teams focus their attention where it matters most, while doing the work that would otherwise require a larger workforce: flagging patients at risk of unnecessary ER admission, automating scheduling and follow-up outreach, and surfacing the highest-impact action for a care team to take next. That creates meaningful operating leverage for care organizations to improve patient outcomes without proportionally increasing administrative overhead.

What market does Pearl Health target and how big is it?

Pearl serves the U.S. Medicare market. More than 70 million Americans rely on Medicare today, with Medicare annual spending exceeding $1 trillion and climbing. As payment models continue shifting toward value-based care, we believe the need for intelligent care orchestration will only continue to grow and our technology will be adaptable to other payor contexts.

What’s your business model?

Pearl generates revenue through software subscriptions and performance-based shared savings. Organizations license our technology platform, and when they choose Pearl to help them manage financial risk, Pearl has skin in the game, participating alongside them in the financial outcomes we help create, aligning our incentives with theirs.

How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?

Pearl reached profitability in 2025 while still growing rapidly and tripling the number of patients we support. That combination of disciplined growth and profitability gives us the flexibility to continue investing through changing market conditions while remaining focused on long-term value creation.

What was the funding process like?

We entered this raise trending toward profitability and consistently strong growth. That allowed us to focus less on raising capital and more on finding the right partners who shared our long-term vision for transforming healthcare through technology. We’re thrilled to partner with leading investors such as Andreessen Horowitz, Viking Global Investors, AlleyCorp, Ulysses Capital, and Trinity Capital.

What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?

We’re fortunate that our business fundamentals, strong growth, profitability, and clear long-term vision resonated with investors, particularly our early investors, many of whom chose to re-invest. Rather than convincing investors the opportunity existed, most conversations centered on how large the opportunity could become.

What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?

We believe our investors recognize that value-based care has reached an important inflection point. Advances in AI, combined with years of platform investment and Pearl’s proven customer outcomes, create an opportunity for Pearl to support better clinical and financial performance across the Medicare ecosystem at scale.

We believe our investors recognize that value-based care has reached an important inflection point. Advances in AI, combined with years of platform investment and Pearl’s proven customer outcomes, create an opportunity for Pearl to support better clinical and financial performance across the Medicare ecosystem at scale.

What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?

For the rest of 2026, we’ll continue expanding our provider network, growing our Medicare Advantage capabilities, preparing customers for launch of the ACO LEAD Model in 2027, and investing in AI that helps care teams deliver better outcomes with less administrative effort.
Ultimately, every investment we’re making is aimed at helping healthcare organizations improve both the quality and economics of care, making our healthcare system more sustainable and healthcare more affordable for seniors and taxpayers.

What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?

As our CEO Michael Kopko often reminds us, capital doesn’t build great companies. Clarity and great people do.
Some of the best problem-solving I’ve seen, including our own, happens under constraint, because it forces you to figure out what actually matters to your customers rather than what’s nice to have. My advice is to earn real customer traction to drive real proof points with the resources you have now. Those proof points will become your strongest fundraising story later.

Where do you see the company going now over the near term?

Our ambition is to become the leading technology platform for Medicare and a trusted partner of leading healthcare organizations. That means helping more providers and payers deliver better health outcomes at lower cost, while expanding the role intelligent software can play in day-to-day healthcare operations.

What’s your favorite summer destination in and around the city?

One of my favorite things about New York in the summer is how much of the city moves outdoors. SummerStage, Shakespeare in the Park, and Bryant Park’s performances are all fantastic.
I’m also looking forward to spending time with Mike and the team in our FiDi office overlooking the Statute of Liberty and the Staten Island Ferry.

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US venture capital activity reached $19.27 billion across 429 companies in June 2026, with AI infrastructure emerging as the dominant force in American startup funding. Baseten’s $1.5 billion Series F at a $13 billion valuation anchored the month, confirming that inference serving has become its own high-stakes capital category, and AppsFlyer’s $1 billion Series E underscored the durability of revenue-stage software at the growth end of the market. Forty-six companies raised $100 million or more, and AI-focused startups captured 59.8% of all capital deployed. California continued its structural dominance at 47.9% of national funding, though New York’s 24.4% share was the highest the city has recorded in at least a year.

US Funding by Stage: June 2026

Late-stage capital accounted for 58.8% of national venture deployment in June, with a $218M average that reflects a cohort of genuinely large companies raising at scale. Eight Series A rounds exceeded $100 million, inflating that stage’s average to $37.6M against a $20M median; the gap signals a bifurcated A market in which a handful of high-conviction bets sit alongside a larger volume of more conventional first institutional rounds. Early-stage activity was healthy in deal count at 248 rounds but modest in capital at $1.83B, consistent with a national market that has re-priced seed and pre-seed rounds downward while reserving outsized capital for proven late-stage platforms.

Top 10 US Venture Capital Deals: June 2026

Note: NinjaOne and Generalist AI also raised $400M in June, tying Suno and Ionic Digital for the ninth and tenth positions.

The Inference Layer Becomes Its Own Asset Class

The month’s defining investment thesis played out across multiple rounds, not just one. Baseten raised $1.5 billion on June 22, led by Altimeter Capital, Conviction, and Spark Capital, with the company’s platform processing more than 1 billion inference calls per day across 87 clusters on 18 clouds, and revenue growing 20x year over year. It was the company’s fourth fundraise in 18 months. Groq raised $650 million for its custom inference chip and serving platform in the same month. The simultaneity is not a coincidence: as enterprises move AI workloads from pilot to production and agentic systems multiply the number of model calls per task, inference capacity has become the critical bottleneck, and capital is racing to fund the companies that own that layer. The combined $2.15 billion raised by Baseten and Groq alone represented more than 11% of total US venture activity in June.

The theme extended into energy. Helion Energy’s $465 million Series G reflected the same underlying constraint from a different angle: AI data centers are creating power demand that existing infrastructure cannot meet, and fusion energy is attracting serious capital as a long-horizon answer to that problem. Impulse Space’s $500 million Series D, while not AI-driven, reflected parallel conviction in physical infrastructure at a moment when capital is increasingly willing to fund hard tech with long timelines. June’s top 10 spanned software, chips, developer tooling, space propulsion, and nuclear energy, suggesting that the current investment cycle is broader than any single category.

California vs. The Field

California’s 47.9% share of national capital was structurally typical but worth examining in context: the state’s four companies in the top 10 (Baseten, AppsFlyer, Supabase, and Groq) accounted for $3.65B of the $9.23B total, meaning more than half of California’s June funding flowed outside the top 10 into a deep bench of mid-sized rounds. New York’s 24.6% share was its highest in recent memory, with the state’s 84 deals averaging $56.6M. The rest of the country collected a combined $4.59B across 186 companies, a reminder that the two coasts continue to dominate venture geography even as the absolute dollar amounts raised outside them are growing.

Looking Ahead

The inference infrastructure story that defined June is unlikely to slow in July. Baseten’s fourth raise in 18 months and Groq’s continued expansion reflect a market in which the serving layer is being built out at extraordinary speed, and the companies that own that infrastructure are raising pre-emptively to lock in capacity advantages. The energy constraint is equally durable: Helion’s raise is one of several fusion and advanced nuclear bets that have closed in 2026, and the data center power problem will not resolve on a quarterly timeline. What bears watching nationally is whether the Series A bifurcation persists, with eight rounds above $100M sitting alongside a broader market clearing at $20M. If the high end of Series A reflects AI-native companies raising institutional rounds at scale, July should reveal whether that pattern belongs to a specific cohort of 2024-vintage companies or whether it is structural to the current market.

Methodology

This report analyzes Crunchbase venture funding data for rounds announced by US-based companies in June 2026, excluding biotech, real estate, lending startups, and debt financings. Funding amounts are classified into four stages: Early-Stage (pre-seed, seed, angel), Series A, Series B, and Late-Stage (Series C and beyond). All figures represent disclosed funding amounts and may not capture undisclosed rounds.

Fraud in online gambling now includes bonus abuse, multi-accounting, account takeover, chargeback fraud, synthetic identities, collusion, payment fraud, and money laundering attempts. Industry reports show that fraudsters increasingly use automation and AI, making static security systems less effective.

Why iGaming Platforms Need Stronger Protection

iGaming platforms process fast deposits, withdrawals, bonuses, and high-volume gameplay, which makes them attractive to organized fraud groups. A single weak point can allow fake accounts, stolen payment details, abused promotions, or laundered funds to move through the system.

Regulators also expect gambling operators to keep anti-money laundering controls updated as risks change. The UK Gambling Commission states that emerging risk updates should trigger reviews of AML and terrorist-financing risk assessments, policies, procedures, and controls.

How AI Detects Fraud in Real Time

AI fraud systems detect risk by comparing current activity with trusted behavioral patterns. A normal player may log in from familiar devices, deposit within usual limits, and play consistently. A risky account may suddenly change device, location, payment method, betting rhythm, withdrawal behavior, or identity details.

Machine learning models can flag unusual patterns faster than manual reviews. Behavioral biometrics, device fingerprinting, transaction monitoring, document verification, liveness checks, and graph analysis can work together to detect linked accounts and coordinated abuse.

The Main Fraud Types AI Helps Stop

AI-driven fraud detection protects iGaming platforms from bonus abuse by identifying users who create multiple accounts to claim promotions unfairly. It can also reduce account takeover by spotting logins that do not match the player’s normal behavior.

Payment fraud is another major target. AI can detect stolen cards, card testing, suspicious deposits, refund abuse, chargeback risk, and unusual withdrawal patterns. In AML monitoring, AI helps find activity that may indicate layering, mule accounts, or suspicious fund movement.

AI, KYC, and AML Compliance

AI-powered KYC helps platforms verify that players are real, eligible, and not using manipulated documents. Identity verification remains central to iGaming fraud prevention because operators must balance compliance, risk control, and a smooth player experience.

Modern systems can review documents, selfie checks, device history, IP data, sanctions screening, and transaction behavior. When fraud indicators appear, the platform can request enhanced checks, pause withdrawals, escalate the case, or file the required reports.

Player Experience Still Matters

AI fraud detection should protect honest players without making registration or withdrawals frustrating. The best systems use risk-based checks, meaning low-risk users move quickly while higher-risk accounts receive deeper review.

This matters because players expect fast payments, fair bonuses, and secure accounts. Whether they enjoy live casino games, sports betting, or the most popular slots, trust depends on knowing the platform can block abuse without punishing legitimate users.

Why Human Oversight Is Still Needed

AI-driven fraud detection is powerful, but it should not operate without human review. Fraud teams need explainable alerts, clear case histories, audit trails, and the ability to override decisions when needed.

Human oversight is especially important for responsible gambling, AML investigations, affordability checks, and disputed account actions. AI can prioritize risk, but compliance teams must ensure decisions are fair, lawful, and properly documented.

The Future of AI Fraud Prevention in iGaming

AI-driven fraud detection will become more important as fraudsters use deepfakes, synthetic identities, automated bots, and fraud-as-a-service tools. Reports already show rising concern around AI-enabled scams, account takeovers, and industrialized fraud methods.

For operators, the future shield is layered protection: real-time monitoring, strong KYC, AML controls, behavioral analytics, payment intelligence, responsible gambling safeguards, and continuous model updates. Platforms such as wildz.com operate in an environment where security, compliance, and player trust are no longer optional extras; they are core parts of sustainable iGaming.