The latest venture capital, seed, pre-seed, and angel deals for New York City startups for June 15, 2026 featuring funding details for Interchecks, Hypha AI, Podium Automation, Chptr, and much more. This page will be updated throughout the day to reflect any new fundings.

With so much going on in the city’s thriving ecosystem, it is easy to miss some of the happenings in the space. We keep you abreast of the things that you may have missed in NYC Tech News for the week ending 6/13/26 including the NYC startup fundings, NYC startup exits, and NYC startup events featuring news for Digital Asset, Standard Bots, and Rylo, and much, much more.

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EDGE Markets – $29.2M

Fintech

EDGE Markets, a financial services company that builds banking and payment infrastructure for gaming and prediction market participants, has raised $29.2M in Series A funding led by CoinFund with participation from Indicator Ventures, MANTIS Venture Capital, StepStone Group, and Bullpen Capital. Founded by Seni Thomas in 2020, EDGE Markets has now raised a total of $46.4M in reported equity funding.

AlleyWatch broke the news on this round exclusively – EDGE Markets Raises $29.2M to Solve the Capital Constraint Blocking Institutional Traders in the Prediction Markets

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F2 AI – $14M

Fintech AI Enterprise

F2 AI, an AI platform that automates deal underwriting and portfolio monitoring for private markets investors, has raised $14M in Seed funding led by Highland Capital Partners with participation from Left Lane Capital, NFX, Y Combinator, and Torch Capital. Founded by Don Muir and Emre Kazdagli in 2025, F2 AI has now raised a total of $24M in reported equity funding.

AlleyWatch broke the news on this round exclusively – F2 Raises $14M to Eliminate the Manual Bottleneck Slowing Private Credit Deal Teams

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BeatpulseLabs – $1.8M

Lewes-based BeatpulseLabs provides licensed multimodal AI training datasets, including speech, video, music, and radar data that are structured, annotated, and cleared for enterprise AI use. Founded by Jason Rieff in 2024, BeatpulseLabs has now raised a total of $2.4M in total equity funding and is backed by Alumni Ventures, ArAya Ventures, Avalancha Ventures, and Lighthouse Ventures.

Kestrel Labs – $2.2M

Denver-based Kestrel Labs develops building code compliance software that runs inside BIM workflows and checks Revit models against jurisdiction-specific requirements during design. Founded by Austin Pulford, AIA, NCARB, and Marian Pulford in 2025, Kestrel Labs has now raised a total of $2.7M in total equity funding and is backed by Avesta Fund, Denver Ventures, FirstMile Ventures, and New Stack Ventures.

Chptr – $5.5M

New York-based Chptr provides a media technology platform that helps broadcasters and publishers manage obituary, memorial, and community announcement content across television, radio, and digital channels. Founded by Rehan Choudhry in 2021, Chptr has now raised a total of $9.4M in total equity funding and is backed by CityRock Venture Partners, iHeartMedia, and Tribute Technology.

SWARM – $10.0M

Irvine-based SWARM develops AI-powered optimization software that automates complex operational decisions across supply chain, workforce, production, logistics, agrifood, and manufacturing environments. Founded by Anthony Howcroft, Matt Oberdorfer, and Stuart Frost in 2016, SWARM has now raised a total of $13.2M in total equity funding and is backed by AgRogue Growth, Grit Road Partners, Middleland Capital, Open Prairie, Radicle Growth, S2G Investments, Serra Ventures, and Trailhead Capital.

Plot – $10.0M

New York-based Plot provides AI-powered social listening software that helps brands and marketers analyze video-driven consumer trends. Founded by Megan Duong and Phuoc Phan in 2022, Plot has now raised a total of $13M in total equity funding and is backed by ACME Capital, Mischief, Seven Seven Six, and XYZ Venture Capital.
AlleyWatch’s exclusive coverage of this round: Plot Raises $10M to Help Brands Decode Video-Driven Consumer Trends with AI

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F2 AI – $14.0M

New York-based F2 AI develops an AI platform for private markets investors that turns unstructured deal materials into structured, audit-ready analysis for credit, banking, and private equity workflows. Founded by Don Muir in 2025, F2 AI has now raised a total of $24M in total equity funding and is backed by Highland Capital Partners, Left Lane Capital, NFX, Torch Capital, and Y Combinator.
AlleyWatch’s exclusive coverage of this round: F2 AI Raises $14M to Bring AI-Powered Underwriting to Private Credit Markets

Golden Analytics – $14.0M

Seattle-based Golden Analytics develops an AI-native business intelligence workspace that helps teams turn data into dashboards, analysis, forecasts, and presentation-ready outputs. Founded by Francois Ajenstat in 2026, Golden Analytics has now raised a total of $21M in total equity funding and is backed by Insight Partners, Madrona, and New Enterprise Associates.

Minerva – $20.0M

New York-based Minerva develops agentic AI systems for marketers that use consumer context to understand audiences, build campaigns, and measure results. Founded by Jackson Engles and Mathew Joseph in 2023, Minerva has now raised a total of $35.3M in total equity funding and is backed by 8VC, Lingotto, NBA Investments, The General Partnership, and topology.

Vinyl Equity – $20.0M

Chicago-based Vinyl Equity provides modern transfer agency infrastructure for publicly traded companies, including share registry, dividend plan management, proxy voting, and compliance services. Founded by Poornaprajna Udupi, Rob Schoder, and Jr in 2022, Vinyl Equity has now raised a total of $31.5M in total equity funding and is backed by Cambrian Ventures, Index Ventures, Infinity Ventures, Jump Capital, and MUFG Innovation Partners.

Infinity Constellation – $24.0M

Las Vegas-based Infinity Constellation builds and operates AI-native service companies from inception, providing founder-operators with shared technology, capital, customers, and operating infrastructure. Founded by Brennan Pothetes and Francis Pedraza in 2023, Infinity Constellation has now raised a total of $36M in total equity funding and is backed by BACKED VC, BY Venture Partners, Freestyle Capital, Gaingels, and Isomer Capital.

Jedify – $24.0M

Brooklyn-based Jedify develops a context graph platform for enterprise AI that fuses business logic, structured data, unstructured knowledge, and governance into an AI-ready semantic layer. Founded by Adi Elimelech, Assaf Henkin, and Erik Shani in 2023, Jedify has now raised a total of $32.5M in total equity funding and is backed by Cerca Partners, Norwest, Oceans, S Capital VC, and Snowflake Ventures.

Stars + Honey – $24.0M

Grosse Pointe Park-based Stars + Honey produces collagen-based protein bars made with natural sweeteners and simple ingredients, offering high-protein snacks without sugar alcohols, gluten, dairy, soy, or seed oils. Founded by Daniel Rainey in 2023, Stars + Honey has now raised a total of $24M in total equity funding and is backed by VMG Partners.

SignalRank – $26.5M

Palo Alto-based SignalRank is a systematic private market investing platform that uses algorithms to identify and index high-performing venture-backed companies as they reach the Series B stage. Founded by Jonathan Gottehrer, Kayvan Baroumand, Keith Teare, Matt Melkonian, Rob Hodgkinson, and Shawn Purcell in 2021, SignalRank has now raised a total of $31.6M in total equity funding and is backed by Candou Ventures, Ray Lane, Sanjay Jha, Tim Draper, and Vinton Cerf.

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EDGE Markets – $29.2M

New York-based EDGE Markets provides banking and payment infrastructure for gaming, prediction markets, and alternative financial markets, helping operators and users move and manage funds. Founded by Seni Thomas in 2020, EDGE Markets has now raised a total of $55.6M in total equity funding and is backed by Bullpen Capital, CoinFund, Indicator Ventures, MANTIS Venture Capital, and StepStone Group.
AlleyWatch’s exclusive coverage of this round: EDGE Markets Raises $29.2M to Build the Banking Layer for Prediction Markets

Coram AI – $35.0M

Sunnyvale-based Coram AI develops an AI video security platform that connects existing cameras to cloud software for searchable footage, real-time alerts, analytics, and operational dashboards. Founded by Ashesh Jain and Peter Ondrka in 2021, Coram AI has now raised a total of $65.3M in total equity funding and is backed by 8VC, Ansa Capital, Battery Ventures, Mosaic Ventures, and UP Partners.

Turnout – $35.0M

Del Mar-based Turnout provides an AI-powered consumer advocacy platform that helps people navigate Social Security Disability, veterans benefits, education, healthcare, and government systems. Founded by Itai Hirsch in 2024, Turnout has now raised a total of $66.4M in total equity funding and is backed by HighPost Capital, Honeystone Ventures, LGVP, Mangusta Capital, and Shine Capital.

Endurance Energy – $54.0M

Seattle-based Endurance Energy develops offshore geothermal power systems designed to generate baseload renewable electricity from deep-sea hydrothermal resources. Founded by Andrew Redd in 2008, Endurance Energy has now raised a total of $79M in total equity funding and is backed by Ascend, Construct Capital, Felicis, First Round Capital, and Founders Fund.

Stepful – $55.0M

New York-based Stepful provides flexible online training programs that help students earn healthcare certifications and prepare for roles such as medical assistant, pharmacy technician, and dental assistant. Founded by Carl Madi, Edoardo Serra, and Tressia Hobeika in 2021, Stepful has now raised a total of $111M in total equity funding and is backed by Citi Impact Fund, Education Impact Fund, Foresite Capital, Hearst Ventures, and Intermountain Health.

PointFive – $60.0M

New York-based PointFive develops an AI efficiency operating system that detects cloud and AI infrastructure waste and converts findings into auditable, engineering-ready remediation. Founded by Alon Arvatz, Amir Hozez, and Gal Ben David in 2023, PointFive has now raised a total of $96M in total equity funding and is backed by Accel, Entree Capital, Index Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Sheva Capital.

Rylo – $85.0M

New York-based Rylo develops AI-powered communication tools designed to help Deaf and hard-of-hearing people communicate more easily across everyday interactions. Founded by Alon Ezer and Tomer Aharoni in 2021, Rylo has now raised a total of $101.3M in total equity funding and is backed by Canaan Partners, Cardumen Capital, Contour Venture Partners, General Catalyst, and K5 Global.

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GT Medical Technologies – $100.0M

Tempe-based GT Medical Technologies develops GammaTile, an implantable radiation therapy technology designed to deliver immediate, targeted radiation after brain tumor surgery. Founded by David Brachman, Emad Youssef, Heyoung McBride, Peter Nakaji, and Theresa Thomas in 2017, GT Medical Technologies has now raised a total of $227.5M in total equity funding and is backed by Evidity Health Capital, FemHealth Ventures, Gilde Healthcare, MedTech Venture Partners, and MVM Life Science Partners.

MainFunc – $100.0M

Palo Alto-based MainFunc develops Genspark, an AI workspace that automates routine work across applications with agents, workflows, voice dictation, and productivity tools. Founded by Eric Jing and Kaihua Zhu in 2023, MainFunc has now raised a total of $654.3M in total equity funding and is backed by Mirae Asset, Sozo Ventures, and UpHonest Capital.

Standard Bots – $200.0M

New York-based Standard Bots develops AI-powered industrial robot arms that integrate into manufacturing environments to automate repetitive and complex physical tasks. Founded by David Golden, Evan Beard, and James Cordle in 2015, Standard Bots has now raised a total of $263M in total equity funding and is backed by General Catalyst and RoboStrategy.

TensorWave – $350.0M

Las Vegas-based TensorWave provides AI cloud infrastructure powered by AMD Instinct GPUs, helping teams run training, fine-tuning, inference, and high-performance computing workloads at scale. Founded by Darrick Horton, Jeff Tatarchuk, and Piotr Tomasik in 2023, TensorWave has now raised a total of $496.7M in total equity funding and is backed by AMD Ventures, Magnetar Capital, Maverick Silicon, Nexus Venture Partners, and Western Frontier.

Digital Asset – $355.0M

New York-based Digital Asset builds blockchain and smart contract infrastructure for institutional finance, enabling tokenization, issuance, privacy-enabled settlement, and interoperable financial workflows. Founded by Don Wilson, Eric Saraniecki, Shaul Kfir, Sunil Hirani, and Yuval Rooz in 2014, Digital Asset has now raised a total of $847.2M in total equity funding and is backed by 7RIDGE, a16z crypto, ABN AMRO Fund, Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, and Apollo Funds.

NinjaOne – $400.0M

Austin-based NinjaOne provides a unified IT operations platform for endpoint management, monitoring, patching, remote access, backup, documentation, and automation. Founded by Christopher Matarese, Eric Herrera, and Sal Sferlazza in 2013, NinjaOne has now raised a total of $1.2B in total equity funding and is backed by BDT & MSD Partners, CapitalG, Hedosophia, ICONIQ Capital, and New Enterprise Associates.

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AlleyWatch sat down with Seni Thomas, Founder and CEO of EDGE Markets, to learn more about the business, its future plans, recent funding round that brings the company’s total funding to $50.3M, and much, much more…

Who were your investors and how much did you raise?

EDGE Markets recently closed a $29.2 million Series A funding round led by CoinFund, with participation from Indicator Ventures, Mantis VC, StepStone Group, and Bullpen Capital.

Tell us about the product or service that EDGE Markets offers.

EDGE Markets builds financial infrastructure for gaming, prediction markets, and digital assets that is revolutionizing payment fragmentation. Our three products are EDGE Boost, EDGE Connect and EDGE Pro. EDGE Boost is a purpose-built banking account for high-volume traders and gaming participants. EDGE Connect is a purpose-built payment rail for gaming and prediction market operators, which enables users to push up to $10 million a day in real time directly from their bank into a prediction market account. EDGE Pro is the institutional product, built specifically to solve the capital constraint and settlement problem for market makers trading across multiple exchanges.

What inspired the start of EDGE Markets?

cWe saw a massive disconnect between the growth of gaming, prediction markets, and digital assets, and the outdated financial infrastructure supporting them. These industries are growing rapidly, but traders doing the actual volume, especially on the institutional side, keep running into the same wall. There are 24-hour markets now, but participants are still waiting on wire transfers. EDGE Markets was founded because the gap between what this industry needs and what currently exists is enormous, and it only gets wider as the exchange landscape becomes more fragmented.

How is EDGE Markets different?

Most of the conversation in this space has been about exchanges and regulation. Very little attention has been paid to what traders actually need to scale their operations. EDGE Markets is coming at this from that angle, not as another exchange, not as a data terminal, but as the infrastructure layer solving capital constraints and payment friction. EDGE Boost is also the first and only limited-use checking account ever launched, purpose-built so funds can only move to regulated gaming and CFTC-regulated accounts. That specificity creates a very clean compliance profile that a traditional checking account simply cannot offer.

What market does EDGE Markets target and how big is it?

Our focus is on the traders, operators, and market makers moving real money through gaming, prediction markets, and digital assets. Right now, prediction markets are still largely a single-marketplace world, with Kalshi doing the majority of volume. By the end of this year, there will probably be five to seven fully live exchanges, with more than 20 DCM applications in the pipeline. That fragmentation is going to make the capital problem significantly worse. Each new exchange is another pool requiring pre-funded accounts. Without infrastructure to solve that, institutional players won’t seriously enter this space. That’s the market EDGE is building for.

What’s your business model?

EDGE Boost and EDGE Connect are transaction-based businesses generating revenue on money movement and payment volume. EDGE Pro will generate commission revenue tied to institutional trading activity once the introducing broker and FCM licenses are in place. The FCM in particular is what allows EDGE to custody and clear funds on behalf of institutional clients, which is what enables post-execution settlement across multiple exchanges. That’s where we will scale.

How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?

EDGE Markets is building infrastructure, not a discretionary product. The capital constraint problem doesn’t go away in a downturn. The business is also not dependent on any single exchange or market. As more exchanges come online and the multi-pool landscape develops, the need for this infrastructure actually increases regardless of the broader environment.

What was the funding process like?

The conversations that resonated most were with investors who understood the infrastructure angle. There has been significant investment in exchanges and data terminals, but those products don’t solve the underlying capital constraint. Once investors understood that EDGE is specifically focused on the money movement and settlement layer, and that the company already has the banking infrastructure and regulatory licenses most fintechs can’t replicate, the thesis became clear.

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

One of the biggest challenges was helping investors understand that we are not simply another fintech company. EDGE Markets sits at the intersection of financial services, gaming, prediction markets, and digital assets. While these sectors are growing rapidly, they are still relatively new categories for many investors. Demonstrating the scale of the opportunity and the importance of specialized infrastructure required significant education and market context.

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

EDGE Boost was the proof point. Over $2B in volume demonstrated real demand for a purpose-built product in this space. Beyond that, investors recognized that EDGE has a combination of banking access, regulatory licenses, and infrastructure that most startups can’t replicate. This was built from the ground up specifically for this market, and that head start is meaningful.

EDGE Boost was the proof point. Over $2B in volume demonstrated real demand for a purpose-built product in this space. Beyond that, investors recognized that EDGE has a combination of banking access, regulatory licenses, and infrastructure that most startups can’t replicate. This was built from the ground up specifically for this market, and that head start is meaningful.What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?

Our primary focus is launching and scaling EDGE Connect and EDGE Pro. For Connect, that means onboarding operators and expanding adoption of our private payment rail. We are looking to get EDGE Connect live across the major exchanges before the next NFL season. For EDGE Pro, we are advancing our regulatory registrations, onboarding early institutional customers, and preparing for commercial launch.

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

Find the problem that isn’t getting enough attention and go solve it. There has been a lot of focus on exchanges and regulation in this space, but the actual traders, the people doing the majority of the volume, have not had much of a voice. Identify something real that is broken, build traction around fixing it, and the capital follows.

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

The goal is for EDGE to be the infrastructure that everyone builds on top of. Whether it’s a consumer moving money into a regulated platform, an operator who needs a payment rail, or an institutional trader managing capital across multiple exchanges, EDGE can be the layer underneath all of it. The more fragmented the exchange landscape becomes, the more critical EDGE’s unique infrastructure becomes.

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

I love spending time on Governors Island and enjoying the views.

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AlleyWatch sat down with Plot Co-founder and CEO Megan Duong 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 $10M in a seed round co-led by XYZ Venture Capital and Mischief Ventures, with participation from Seven Seven Six, Alexis Ohanian’s fund,  and Acme Capital. This brings our total raised to $14M. What made this round special to me is the caliber of operators and marketers around the table. Camille Ricketts, who co-led from XYZ, was previously Head of Marketing at Notion and First Round Capital. She told us this was her first investment at XYZ. She wasn’t just writing a check, she felt the pain we’re solving firsthand. Dustin Moring at Mischief Ventures brings a rare combination of product instinct (Cash App, Square) and operator experience. The Mischief team includes founders and operators who have built some of the defining companies of the last decade, and that’s exactly the kind of backing we wanted.

Tell us about the product or service that Plot offers.
Plot is a social video intelligence platform for enterprise brands. In plain terms: we analyze social video data so brands can see and understand what’s actually happening in video without any tagging required.
Here’s the problem we’re solving. Roughly 80% of brand mentions in social video are untagged. Someone shows your product, speaks your brand name, holds your packaging and none of it gets picked up by traditional social listening tools because those tools were built for text, hashtags, and captions. Plot was built to see inside video. We use multimodal AI to analyze audio, visuals, and on-screen text simultaneously, so if a creator is making dinner and your product is sitting on their counter, we catch it, even if they never mention you by name.
From there, brands use Plot for four core things: tracking earned media (tagged and untagged), sourcing and vetting creators for campaigns, running consumer research in minutes instead of weeks, and measuring the impact of their community engagement efforts. On average, brands discover 2–8x more content featuring their products than they were capturing before.
Toto Haba, SVP, Global Marketing and Communications at Benefit Cosmetics, put it well: “Since using Plot, I’ve been seeing a 30 percent to 50 percent lift in user-generated content that features our products but does not tag us. This is a big deal because brands like us rely on engaging with our advocates directly. I’m buzzing with the possibilities for engaging in conversations that are ‘hidden’ to us today. Things like ‘benefit brow services experiences’ aren’t something that gets tagged. Plot lets you break out of your For You Page (FYP).” That’s the unlock, not just seeing more data, but acting on it before the moment passes.

What inspired the start of Plot?
My entire career has been in social media and branding. I’m what I call a first-generation social media marketer. I came up learning how to write great copy, built the social team at Apple, and understood the text-based world deeply.
When I left Apple in 2020 and started a social media agency, two things happened simultaneously: the pandemic hit, and TikTok took over. Overnight, everything I knew about content shifted from text-first to video-first. I was creating video content for brands and trying to pull insights from it and I quickly realized no tools existed to make sense of what was happening inside video at scale.
I was watching creators talk about products, hold them up, mention them in passing, and brands had no idea. The data was right there, but invisible. I saw a massive untapped market, met my co-founder and CTO Ethan, who led product engineering at Formation Bio from Series A to C, previously at Microsoft, through a YC co-founder matching program, and we started building Plot in 2022. The technical timing was also right. Multimodal AI had finally matured to the point where analyzing video at scale was both possible and affordable. Eighteen months ago this was technically out of reach for most startups. Today it’s in production for Fortune 500 brands.

How is Plot different?
The differentiation starts with what we can actually see. Sprinklr and Brandwatch were designed for a text-first era. They require tagging, hashtags, or captions to surface a mention, and were really built around customer service use cases. Plot analyzes the full context of video: visuals, audio, objects, actions, on-screen text. We built a rich video intelligence layer and leverage that data to supercharge agentic workflows across community, influencer, and research. If someone holds up a Goldfish cracker while making dinner and talks for two minutes without ever mentioning the brand, we find it. No other tool in the market does that today.
Plot’s video intelligence layer lets you see real signals, and our agents let you act on them. Creator Sourcing lets marketing teams find creators with a prompt: “Find me 100 skateboarders in Brooklyn who’ve used our product in the last three months.” We surface real matches from video data, not bio keywords. Deep Research compresses weeks of consumer research into minutes. And our community tools help brands identify and engage their superfans at scale. People who love the product but have never been tagged, never been reached.
It’s also worth noting: for brands that already have Sprinklr or Meltwater for text coverage, Plot is additive. We’re not asking anyone to rip and replace. We fill the video gap those tools literally cannot see.

What market does Plot target and how big is it?
We serve enterprise consumer brands with a strong presence on TikTok and Instagram. Our core buyers sit in social media, community, consumer insights, and influencer marketing. Our customer base spans beauty, CPG, food and beverage, fashion, financial services, sports, and entertainment, and includes brands like Visa, Mastercard, PepsiCo, Fenty Beauty, Benefit Cosmetics, CAVA, Canva, Lululemon, and Warby Parker.
What’s surprised us is how many “non-obvious” verticals need this. We’re working with insurance companies, fintech brands, and even QSR chains because any brand trying to reach a younger generation is trying to understand what’s happening in video. That expands the market considerably.
In terms of size: social intelligence and market research services represent a $100B market, and influencer platforms and services are another $35B on top of that. As we build deeper intelligence on both brands and creators, we’re positioned to expand across both. The total addressable market we’re going after is $135B and we’re starting with the intelligence layer that makes the whole thing work.

What’s your business model?
SaaS. Enterprise brands pay annual subscriptions to access the Plot platform, and contracts expand as teams find more use cases: social, community, insights, influencer, research. Our 132% net revenue retention rate tells that story: customers stay and grow.
Historically, most of our growth has been almost entirely inbound. We haven’t had an outbound sales team. Brands find us because they’re hitting the wall of what legacy tools can do, and someone on the team hears about Plot through a customer, a conference, or a press story and comes to us. We think that will continue, and the funding is helping us build the team and product to support that demand at scale.
For example, when Benefit Cosmetics’ SVP of Global Marketing saw her own data for the first time featuring Benefit products that had never been tagged, entire categories of UGC her team didn’t know existed, she said, “Plot lets you break out of your For You Page.” That moment of recognition started repeating across customer after customer, and within months Fortune 500 brands like Visa and Mastercard were finding us through word of mouth — brand teams telling other brand teams, “you have to see this.”

How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?
We’re actually in a position where an economic slowdown tends to accelerate demand for what we build. When budgets tighten, brands need to prove the ROI of every dollar, which means they need better data. They need to know which creators are actually driving results, which campaigns are cutting through, and where authentic brand love lives. Plot answers all of those questions.
We’re also seeing brands shift away from expensive paid influencer deals toward community-led growth, engaging superfans who already love the product. That’s a meaningfully cheaper strategy, and it’s one Plot enables. When a brand realizes they can find and engage 10,000 authentic advocates who’ve never been tagged, at a fraction of the cost of one mega-influencer deal, that’s a budget conversation that writes itself.
And then there’s the agentic piece: the work that used to require a team of analysts, coordinators, and agency hours — sourcing creators, running research, tracking campaigns — Plot’s agents handle automatically. That’s real headcount and agency spend that brands can reallocate. In a tighter environment, that value proposition becomes more compelling, not less.
We’re a 12-person team in New York and deliberately lean. The business has scaled 3.8x year-over-year almost entirely on inbound demand. That foundation holds up well in uncertain environments.

What was the funding process like?
Honestly, we were selective about who we wanted in the room. The investors who understand this market deeply are operators and marketers who’ve felt the problem firsthand. That was the filter.
Camille Ricketts at XYZ had lived this as Head of Marketing at Notion. She understood immediately why brands were flying blind in video. Dustin Moring at Mischief has a deep read on where media and the creator economy are going. The Mischief team is built around product operators who have founded and scaled defining companies, including Zach Perret, the co-founder and CEO of Plaid. That perspective on what it takes to build foundational infrastructure was exactly what we wanted. And Alexis Ohanian — Co-founder and Executive Chair of Reddit and Founder of Seven Seven Six — has spent his career at the intersection of community and the internet. Everyone around the table came with genuine conviction about the category, not just the company.

What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
The biggest challenge was helping investors understand that this is a new category, not just a feature on top of existing social listening. Social listening is a well-known space, and there’s a temptation to pattern-match us to existing tools. We’re not that. We built the video intelligence layer. Once you own the layer, we enable agents to act on it and supercharge challenging marketing roles.
The education piece was real. We had to show, not just tell — demo the product, walk through how it finds untagged content, show what it unlocks that nothing else in the market can. Once investors saw it, the reaction was consistent: “Why doesn’t this exist already?” Getting there in a 30-minute pitch required building a clear through-line from the technical infrastructure to the business outcomes brands care about.

What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Three things. First, the problem is undeniable. Video is now 76% of all mobile data traffic and the IAB estimates U.S. companies are spending about $43.9 billion on influencer and creator marketing in 2025. This category is expanding rapidly, growing four times as fast as the overall traditional media advertising industry. Consumer conversation has moved entirely to video, and marketing measurement tools haven’t. That gap is massive and structural.
Second, the traction and the speed of it. 3.8x ARR growth year-over-year, 132% NRR, enterprise logos like Visa, Mastercard, and PepsiCo, and we had locked in all of these top-tier enterprise brands within our first year of being live, almost entirely inbound. That’s unheard of. GTM is my background; I spent a decade in social and brand marketing before starting Plot. Having a technical co-founder in Ethan and a GTM-focused founder in me meant we could build the product and sell it at the same time. A lot of great products stall because the team can’t go to market. That wasn’t our problem.
Third, timing. Eighteen months ago, analyzing social video at this scale and price point wasn’t technically feasible. Multimodal AI crossed a threshold that made it possible. We were positioned at exactly the right moment to build this, and we moved fast. The customer roster we’ve built in 18 months proved the market was waiting.

What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Building the agentic layer to action against these rich video signals we built.
We shipped AI Creator Sourcing. This is one I’m really excited about. Marketing teams can describe exactly the creator they want to find and let Plot surface real matches from video data. Not bio keywords. Actual video evidence of who they are, what they use, what they talk about. If you’re looking for curly hair creators, our AI looks at millions of videos to find the best fit creator by analyzing their videos.
Deep Research follows closely behind. We’re compressing what used to take consumer insights teams weeks, pulling themes, understanding sentiment, answering strategic questions, into something that takes minutes inside the platform.
We’re also expanding our data sources, including Reddit, which gives brands an even richer picture of where consumer conversation is happening. And we’ll continue to scale the enterprise customer base and expand inside the accounts we already have. The 132% NRR tells us there’s a lot of room to grow within existing customers as more teams inside the same company discover the platform.

What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Stay close to your customers and get clear on your GTM strategy. Our entire growth has been inbound, driven by customers who had a real problem and found that Plot solved it. That only happens when you’re solving something that actually matters. Not something you think should matter, but something people are actively struggling with. You can have a great product, but if you don’t know how to sell to your target market that’s the biggest hurdle.
And in New York especially: use the network. This city has an incredible density of marketers, operators, and founders. Every customer we’ve landed has come with some kind of warm introduction or word-of-mouth connection. Relationships compound here.

Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
We think of Plot as the social data layer for the next generation of marketing AI. The near-term is about shipping the full agentic OS on top of our video intelligence infrastructure, specialized agents for every marketing function, each powered by the same underlying data layer.
We have four agents in motion: the Community Agent, which identifies and activates superfans to drive repeat revenue and reduce CAC; the Campaign Agent, which gives teams instant campaign insights so they can reallocate budget to what’s actually working; the Research Agent, which surfaces product opportunities and whitespace from real consumer signals; and the Influencer Agent, which automates creator sourcing, vetting, and communicating  at scale.
Today, marketing teams are limited by human capacity, how many videos someone can watch, how many creators someone can vet, how many comments someone can leave. The near-term is about removing that ceiling. We’re building so that the work that used to require a team of analysts happens automatically, in real time, every day. That’s what we mean when we say agentic OS for video intelligence.

What’s your favorite spring destination in and around the city?
Central Park is my favorite during the spring in NYC. It’s a great change of pace from downtown where I live in SoHo.

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AlleyWatch sat down with F2 Founder and CEO Don Muir to learn more about the business, its future plans, and recent $14M seed round that brings total funding to $24M.

Who were your investors and how much did you raise?

F2 raised $24M in total equity capital, including a $14M seed round. The seed round was led by HighlandX, with participation from Left Lane Capital, NFX, Y Combinator, and Torch Capital.

Tell us about the product or service that F2 offers.

F2 is a compounding intelligence platform for private markets investors. It delivers end-to-end agentic workflow automation across:

• Screening
• Underwriting
• Portfolio monitoring

The platform transforms a firm’s deal history into a persistent, queryable knowledge asset and evaluates new opportunities using full contextual data (precedent deals, data rooms, market data). The platform is powered by an Excel-native financial analysis engine and includes tools like Adam (AI deal associate), Deal Intelligence, and Institutional Knowledge.

What inspired the start of F2?

F2 was founded to solve the needs of Arc’s lender customers as they reviewed and underwrote debt deals on the Arc capital markets platform.The system was initially an internal agentic underwriting tool, developed to address operational pain points firsthand. After proving effective, Don Muir presented it as a standalone commercial opportunity, leading to the creation of F2 with backing from prior investors.

In addition, private markets are at an inflection point, where firms embedding AI into sourcing, underwriting, and monitoring can build a structural competitive advantage over time.

How is F2 different?

F2 differentiates itself by: doing the following:

• Embedding directly into deal workflows used by investment teams.
• Delivering customized deployments for each enterprise.
• Using a multi-model, LLM-agnostic architecture (Opus, ChatGPT, Gemini, and proprietary tools).
• Achieving up to 60% better performance vs. generic agents and 5x token efficiency.
• Providing enterprise-grade data privacy (zero-day retention, no training on client data).

What market does F2 target and how big is it? 

F2 targets:

• Private credit funds
• Commercial banks
• More broadly, private markets investors

The company operates within the global private markets ecosystem, a roughly $15 trillion asset class, where much of the investment process remains manual and under-digitized. F2 is already deployed across 100+ funds and banks globally.

What’s your business model?

F2 is an enterprise AI platform for private markets investors (private credit, PE, commercial banking), providing workflow automation across the deal lifecycle. F2 sells an enterprise SaaS platform that helps investment teams move faster, standardize decision-making, and improve outcomes across the deal lifecycle.

• It provides end-to-end workflow automation across key investment processes – screening, underwriting, and portfolio monitoring.
• The platform embeds directly into firms’ existing deal workflows, rather than sitting as a standalone tool.
• It converts raw deal materials and historical transactions into structured analysis and a persistent “institutional knowledge” layer, which compounds value over time.

How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?

F2 customers need technology regardless of market direction.

When capital markets were hot, the speed to underwrite and time to term sheet were important levers to win deals in a competitive market. F2 allows our clients to move faster. When they inevitably slow down – risk mitigation, and proactive risk monitoring become key. In that case, F2 helps identify risk faster and more effectively.

What was the funding process like?

F2 had early backing from about 50 investors tied to Arc. It has then continued to raise capital, including a recent fundraise tied to strong market demand for vertical AI in finance.

Funding has been largely driven by our credibility and direct product-market fit within private credit workflows.

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

The biggest challenge is shifting investor thesis on the application layer in the era of AI.

Will frontier labs win, or will vertical AI software? It has become increasingly clear throughout our process that the market believes that in complexly regulated areas like finance and healthcare, where “last mile” accuracy matters, “good enough” generic horizontal LLMs aren’t enough. It has become obvious that expert vertical solutions, like F2,  are then necessary.

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

Craig Driscoll, who led the investment for HighlandX said, “Private markets are at an inflection point. The firms that build AI into the core of how they source, underwrite, and monitor will compound an advantage that becomes structural over time.” What sets F2 apart is its ability to embed directly into deal workflows and fit naturally into how serious investment teams operate.”

F2 has been able to demonstrate real traction and a clear path to sustainable growth. In this environment, there’s a higher premium on capital efficiency and strong unit economics, and we built the business with that discipline from the start. Combined with a differentiated product and a focused team, that gave investors confidence in both our near-term execution and long-term upside.

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

In the next few months we hope to chive the following:

• Scaling deployments across credit funds and banks.
• Expanding the product suite.
• Growing our engineering and enterprise teams globally.

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

The rules of the game have changed in the last 12 months, and the bar on growth and revenue have increased as new AI native companies have shown that it’s possible to build big companies much faster. Growth and scale aren’t the only metrics though: durability and defensibility is critical. That means proving high usage, sticky customers, and deep workflow. Tomorrow’s companies aren’t just building products, they are delivering product augmented service. That means aligning and tailoring product to your end customer not just giving them a turnkey solution.

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

In the near term, F2 is focused on scaling adoption across leading lenders globally, while continuing to deepen its position within private credit and broader private markets. The company aims to become core infrastructure for investment teams, embedding AI directly into how firms source, underwrite, and manage deals. At the same time, F2 will continue expanding its platform capabilities and enterprise footprint, reinforcing its role in shaping the next generation of credit and investment workflows.

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

There is nothing quite like the Hamptons before Memorial Day!

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AlleyWatch sat down with Alex Wendland, Cofounder and Co-CEO of Adaptive Innovations, 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 a $50M Series A led by Felicis, along with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Optum Ventures, Sunflower Capital, BoxGroup, Dorm Room Fund, Constellation VC, SV Angel, and prominent angel investors across healthcare services and AI labs. We also raised a previously undisclosed $10M in seed funding led by Bain Capital Ventures, bringing our total funding to-date to $60M.

Tell us about the product or service that Adaptive Innovations offers.

Adaptive Innovations is an AI-native healthcare provider, starting in home health. We combine AI-native operations with clinicians-in-the-home to get every patient the care they need, including the 40% of patients legacy home health providers turn away.

What inspired the start of Adaptive Innovations?

There are many AI healthtech companies, but care can’t be delivered through a screen. Real care happens physically, between a clinician and a patient. And as a country, we don’t deliver enough of it. In post-acute care, the clinicians exist and patients exist, but 40% of patients are turned away due to the high admin burden and care coordination problem. Adaptive exists to solve this.

How is Adaptive Innovations different?

We’re not a software vendor. We’re the provider, and we’ve rebuilt the entire end-to-end operations that care runs on with AI at the core. This allows us to say yes to the patients that other providers turn away, and also get them better quality care – our rehospitalization rate is less than half the industry average.

What market does Adaptive Innovations target and how big is it?

We’re starting in home health, but targeting the entirety of post-acute care. Home health is a >$100B market and one of the fastest-growing outpatient sectors on pace to nearly double over the next 5-6 years.
We’re not stopping at skilled nursing visits. Home health is the coordination layer through which the rest of post-acute care flows including home infusion, dialysis, durable medical equipment deployment, hospice, and specialty pharmaceuticals. Today, these verticals are fragmented and disconnected, but as we build density, we are building the only platform capable of solving the full post-acute coordination problem.

What’s your business model?

Because our AI operating system removes most of the heavy administrative burden, we can serve the patient referrals that other agencies reject. Being able to expand care to patients drives physical network effects which in turn fuels durable growth.
More patients leads to more patient density, meaning clinicians drive less between visits, which raises their productivity and total take-home compensation. This also means that we build more trust with hospitals and referral sources, making them want to refer more patients to us. And finally, as we reach more patients, we’ll be able to thoughtfully partner with payers on innovative contracting models that align with our ability to shift outcomes at the population level.

How are you preparing for a potential economic slowdown?

People need care in any economy.
But also, when budgets tighten, health systems and payers get more cost-sensitive. Because AI removes most of our admin cost, we earn a far wider margin on every visit than a traditional agency does. That margin is a buffer: we can keep delivering care at reimbursement levels that would put a legacy agency underwater.

What was the funding process like?

Investors are looking for a new class of startup that benefits from AI but isn’t consumed by it. The SaaS companies of the past are no longer interesting, because AI lets anyone vibecode software. Investors saw that we’re an early player in this new wave of real businesses that gets better as AI gets better.

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

Investors are still learning how to think about this new era of AI-not-SaaS businesses. We found that the sharpest investors understood this paradigm shift quickly, while others are still figuring it out.

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

Adaptive is solving an important problem (caring for patients), at a massive scale (>$100B market), with a rare team combining the best engineers in tech and the best operators from healthcare.

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

This new funding accelerates our expansion to new states.

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

AI lets you do more with less. We’ve found that the best operators and engineers can do more than 2x what the next best can do simply because they know how to leverage AI more effectively.

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

We plan to continue expanding within Texas as well as new states.

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

The High Line, hands down. I love greenery & architecture, so I’m a big fan of the defunct rail infrastructure reimagined into something green and walkable.

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