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The AlleyWatch Startup Daily Funding Report: 6/16/2026

AlleyWatch — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 17:27:06 +0000

The latest venture capital, seed, pre-seed, and angel deals for NYC startups for 6/16/2026 featuring funding details for Copia Automation, Kimba, and much more. This page will be updated throughout the day to reflect any new fundings.

Copia Automation – $26M

ENTERPRISECYBERSECURITY

Copia Automation, an industrial code management platform that provides OT source control, automated backup, and recovery tools for operational technology teams in manufacturing and critical infrastructure, has raised $26M in Venture funding from investors that include AE Ventures and Squadra Ventures, which co-led the round, with participation from KAS Venture Partners, Construct Capital, Lux Capital, Ironspring Ventures, and Renegade Partners. Founded by Adam Gluck in 2020, Copia Automation has built the category-defining platform for industrial code lifecycle management, helping OT teams manage, secure, and recover the automation code running manufacturing plants, data centers, and critical infrastructure. The company, which counts Rockwell Automation environments among its supported platforms, has now raised a total of $55M including a combination of equity financing and venture debt.

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Kimba – $6.5M

HEALTHTECH

Kimba, a sleep technology company that delivers personalized, AI-powered scent therapy through a nightstand device that monitors biometric signals and delivers precisely timed scent cues to improve sleep depth and recovery, has raised $6.5M in Seed funding from investors that include Selva Ventures, which led the round, with participation from Able Partners and Resolute Ventures. Founded by Ben Fuxbruner and Gabi Beck in 2023, Kimba was founded by Ben Fuxbruner, a former special forces commander, after a near-death injury led to PTSD and chronic insomnia. The company’s device sits on nightstands, monitors sleep through built-in sensors and wearable integrations, and delivers proprietary water-based and plant-derived scent formulations through the olfactory pathway — the only sensory channel capable of influencing the brain during sleep without wakefulness. Kimba’s approach has been clinically validated in a study of 50 participants conducted with olfactory neuroscience expert Dr. Anat Arzi.

HeyMilo – $3.65M

HeyMilo, an AI recruiting platform that automates candidate screening, interviewing, and evaluation through voice, video, and SMS agents for staffing agencies and high-volume hiring organizations, has raised $3.65M in additional funding from investors that include Category Ventures, which led the round, with participation from Canaan Partners, Alumni Ventures, and Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator. Founded by Sabashan Ragavan and Ramie Raufdeen in 2023, HeyMilo has now raised a total of $6M in reported equity funding. The company, which has screened more than one million candidates through its platform, counts Randstad, Coca-Cola, Bridgestone, and Neo Financial among its enterprise customers and reports 4x revenue growth in the last six months.

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The AlleyWatch May 2026 US Venture Capital Funding Report

AlleyWatch — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 13:27:16 +0000

US venture capital reached $67.03 billion across 409 companies in May 2026 — a month that will be remembered as much for a single transaction as for the remarkable activity beneath it. Anthropic’s $50 billion Series H, one of the largest venture capital rounds ever recorded, accounted for 74.6% of all capital deployed nationally and effectively redefined what a venture round can be. Excluding Anthropic, the underlying US market produced $17.03 billion across 408 companies — itself a strong month, anchored by Anduril Industries’ $5 billion defense technology raise, Cognition’s $1 billion AI coding round, and an extraordinary $700 million Series A for Hark, the largest Series A recorded in this dataset. The month’s deal volume fell 7.5% from April’s 442 transactions, but the concentration of capital in a small number of high-conviction bets tells a more important story: institutional investors are writing larger checks, with greater confidence, into fewer but more consequential companies.

Key Insights — US May 2026

US venture capital reached $67.03B across 409 companies in May 2026, a 222.3% increase in capital from April — driven entirely by Anthropic’s $50B Series H, the largest venture round in recorded history.
Excluding Anthropic, the underlying US market totaled $17.03B across 408 companies — a healthy baseline that still represents a strong month by historical standards.
AI companies captured 94% of all US capital deployed in May, with 193 of 409 funded companies identified as AI-focused — though nearly all of that concentration traces back to Anthropic alone.
Hark’s $700M Series A was the largest Series A in the dataset, underscoring a market willing to write institutional-scale checks at earlier stages for high-conviction AI bets.
Anduril Industries raised $5B in a late-stage defense technology round, the second-largest deal of the month and a signal of deepening venture conviction in dual-use and national security technology.
Year-over-year, US capital surged 560.4% from May 2025’s $10.15B, while deal count declined 10.7% from 458 companies.

$67.03B

Total Capital

+222.3% MoM | +560.4% YoY

409

Companies Funded

-7.5% MoM | -10.7% YoY

$163.9M

Avg Deal Size

Median: $6.5M

$63.21B

AI Capital

94% of total | 193 deals

US Venture Capital Activity by Stage — May 2026

Stage	Deals	Total Capital	% of Total	Avg Deal	Median Deal
Early-Stage	236	$1.07B	1.6%	$4.5M	$2.5M
Series A	92	$2.71B	4.0%	$29.4M	$14.0M
Series B	40	$2.52B	3.8%	$63.0M	$30.5M
Late-Stage	41	$60.74B	90.6%	$1.48B	$70.0M
Total	409	$67.03B	100%	$163.9M	$6.5M

Top 10 US Venture Capital Deals — May 2026

#	Company	Amount	Stage	Location	Industry
1	Anthropic	$50B	Late-Stage	San Francisco, CA	Foundational AI, Generative AI
2	Anduril Industries	$5B	Late-Stage	Costa Mesa, CA	Defense, Aerospace, Autonomous Systems
3	Cognition	$1B	Late-Stage	San Francisco, CA	Artificial Intelligence, Software Engineering
4	Sierra	$950M	Late-Stage	San Francisco, CA	AI Agents, Enterprise Software, SaaS
5	Hark	$700M	Series A	San Jose, CA	AI-Native Hardware, Personal Intelligence, Agentic AI
6	Mind Robotics	$400M	Late-Stage	Palo Alto, CA	AI, Robotics, Manufacturing
7	Modal Labs	$355M	Late-Stage	New York, NY	AI Infrastructure, Cloud Computing
8	Cowboy Space	$305M	Series B	San Carlos, CA	Aerospace, AI Infrastructure, Energy
9	Decart	$300M	Late-Stage	San Francisco, CA	AI Infrastructure, Generative AI, Gaming
10	Astranis	$300M	Late-Stage	San Francisco, CA	Aerospace, Satellite Communication

Anthropic’s $50B Round Rewrites the Record Books

Anthropic’s $50 billion Series H is unlike anything venture capital has seen before. The San Francisco-based AI safety and research company, which develops Claude and a suite of enterprise AI products, raised a round that exceeds the total annual venture capital deployed in many countries. The $50B figure represents the new equity component of a $65 billion financing structure; the remainder consists of $15 billion in previously announced hyperscaler commitments. At 74.6% of all US capital deployed in May, the raise is not just one of the largest venture rounds ever recorded — it is a structural event that makes any meaningful month-over-month or year-over-year comparison of US totals essentially impossible without accounting for it explicitly.

Excluding Anthropic, the US market produced $17.03 billion across 408 companies in May — a figure that, on its own, would represent the second-highest monthly total of 2026 and a healthy reading of underlying market conditions. That $17.03B baseline is the more analytically useful number for understanding where venture capital is actually flowing.

Anduril and the Defense Technology Moment

The second-largest deal of the month was Anduril Industries’ $5 billion late-stage raise — a number that would headline any month not dominated by Anthropic. The Costa Mesa-based defense technology company develops autonomous systems, AI-powered surveillance platforms, and next-generation weapons systems for the US and allied militaries. Anduril’s raise reflects a sustained and accelerating shift in venture capital toward dual-use and national security technology. The company now sits alongside a cohort of well-funded defense-adjacent startups — including drone manufacturers, satellite operators, and autonomous systems companies — that have collectively attracted tens of billions in venture capital over the past 24 months.

Astranis, which develops small communications satellites for geostationary orbit, closed a $300M late-stage round in May, adding a space infrastructure layer to the defense and national security theme. Cowboy Space’s $305M Series B, for solar-powered orbital data centers designed to support AI computing, extended the theme further into the intersection of space and AI infrastructure.

Hark’s $700M Series A Sets a New Benchmark

Hark’s $700 million Series A was the most structurally unusual deal of the month. The San Jose-based AI lab, founded in late 2025 by serial entrepreneur Brett Adcock (also founder of robotics company Figure AI and electric aircraft maker Archer), raised at a scale that has historically been the territory of Series C or late-stage companies. A $700M Series A implies either an extraordinary valuation mark or a deliberate strategy to capitalize the company at a level that forecloses competitive fundraising — or both. Hark is building an agentic AI system designed to serve as a universal human-machine interface, combining proprietary models with AI-native hardware — a thesis backed by NVIDIA, AMD Ventures, Intel Capital, Qualcomm Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and ARK Invest among others. Whatever the rationale, the round signals that a subset of investors has abandoned stage-based pricing discipline entirely in favor of conviction-weighted bets on AI companies they believe will be category-defining.

AI Infrastructure Emerges as the Dominant Investment Theme

Beyond the headline rounds, May’s deal activity revealed a consistent thread: capital is flowing aggressively toward the infrastructure that makes AI possible, not just the models themselves. Cognition ($1B) builds Devin, an autonomous AI software engineer that handles coding, testing, and debugging with minimal human oversight. Sierra ($950M) deploys AI agents to handle enterprise customer experience workflows — from mortgage processing to insurance claims to e-commerce. Mind Robotics ($400M) applies AI to industrial environments. Modal Labs ($355M, NYC) provides the serverless cloud layer for ML workloads. Decart ($300M) builds real-time generative AI models for immersive environments. Cowboy Space ($305M) is constructing orbital data centers for AI compute.

Taken together, these rounds describe a venture market that has moved past debating whether AI is transformative and is now focused entirely on which infrastructure layers will be most defensible. The $2.71 billion deployed across 92 Series A rounds — averaging $29.4 million per deal — suggests the conviction extends well beyond the mega-rounds into the mid-market, where a significant pipeline of AI infrastructure companies is being built out at scale.

NYC vs. US National Venture Capital Activity — May 2026

Stage	NYC Capital	NYC Deals	US Capital	US Deals	NYC % Capital	NYC % Deals
Early-Stage	$158.7M	36	$1.07B	236	14.9%	15.3%
Series A	$277.6M	18	$2.71B	92	10.3%	19.6%
Series B	$454.9M	9	$2.52B	40	18.1%	22.5%
Late-Stage	$1.11B	12	$60.74B	41	1.8%	29.3%
Total	$2.01B	75	$67.03B	409	3.0%	18.3%

New York City accounted for 3.0% of US venture capital by dollars in May 2026 and 18.3% of national deal count. The capital share is heavily distorted by Anthropic’s $50B round; on an ex-Anthropic basis, NYC represented approximately 11.8% of the underlying $17.03B US market. NYC’s strongest showing was at Series B, where it captured 18.1% of national capital and 22.5% of deals — a consistent indicator of the city’s mid-stage depth. At the late-stage level, NYC held 29.3% of national deal count despite only 1.8% of capital, reflecting how concentrated the national late-stage dollar total is in a handful of Bay Area mega-rounds.

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Looking Ahead

May 2026 will serve as a reference point for years — the month venture capital crossed a threshold that seemed theoretical until it happened. But the more important signal for June and beyond is what the underlying $17.03B market is doing. Deal count is contracting modestly, which is consistent with a market that is concentrating capital rather than expanding it. The Series A cohort’s $29.4M average suggests that companies reaching that milestone are doing so with more traction and at higher prices than a year ago. Defense technology, space infrastructure, and AI agents are three themes that produced multiple large rounds in May and show no signs of cooling. Whether the Anthropic round catalyzes a new wave of foundational model investment or remains an outlier will depend largely on how Anthropic’s enterprise revenue trajectory develops over the next two quarters.

Methodology

Data for this report is sourced from AlleyWatch proprietary funding data (funding.alleywatch.com) and covers venture capital rounds announced or closed in May 2026 by US-headquartered startups. Deals are classified into four stages: Early-Stage (pre-seed, seed, angel, accelerator, and incubator rounds); Series A; Series B; and Late-Stage (Series C and beyond). AI company classification is based on the presence of relevant keywords across company description and industry fields. NYC figures in the comparison table reflect the NYC-specific dataset. Anthropic’s $50B figure reflects the new equity component of its $65B financing structure. All figures are in USD.

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Payoneer Sells to Nuvei for $2.75B in Bet on Unified Global Payments Infrastructure

Reza Chowdhury — Tue, 16 Jun 2026 00:31:36 +0000

Nuvei, the global payment technology company, has agreed to acquire Payoneer (Nasdaq: PAYO) for $7.40 per share in cash, valuing the cross-border payments platform at approximately $2.75 billion. The deal, which is expected to close in mid-2027 pending shareholder and regulatory approvals, brings together Nuvei’s payment acceptance infrastructure with Payoneer’s cross-border payout network spanning 190+ countries. “The acquisition of Payoneer marks a defining step in Nuvei’s evolution into a global financial infrastructure leader,” remarked Phil Fayer, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of Nuvei. “By combining complementary capabilities, we can offer businesses a more complete platform to accept payments, send funds, issue cards, manage treasury and FX needs, and access embedded financial services – at scale.”

The acquisition of Payoneer marks a defining step in Nuvei’s evolution into a global financial infrastructure leader. By combining complementary capabilities, we can offer businesses a more complete platform to accept payments, send funds, issue cards, manage treasury and FX needs, and access embedded financial services – at scale. – Phil Fayer

Founded by Yuval Tal, Ben Yaniv Chechik, and Kai Stalmann in 2005, Payoneer went public on Nasdaq in 2021 via a SPAC merger with FTAC Olympus Acquisition Corp. and had raised a total of $570M in equity funding, backed by investors that include Greylock, Fidelity, TCV, T. Rowe Price, New York Angels, Wellington Management, Viola Ventures, Franklin Templeton, 83North, Nyca Partners, Dragoneer Investment Group, Vintage Investment Partners, CBC Capital, Susquehanna Growth Equity, and Loeb.nyc. Payoneer has built a global financial platform empowering millions of businesses to transact across borders, with cross-border payouts, multi-currency accounts, and same-day settlement in more than 150 markets. Together, the combined company is expected to generate approximately $3 billion in annual revenue and process more than $500 billion in annual payment volume for more than 2.4 million customers across 190+ countries.

“For two decades, Payoneer has earned the trust of millions of businesses in markets where trust takes years to build,” remarked John Caplan, Chief Executive Officer of Payoneer. “We have transformed our business with extraordinary results, and our combination with Nuvei will extend what we can offer customers. Together, we will reach more businesses, in more markets, with a more complete platform.”

For two decades, Payoneer has earned the trust of millions of businesses in markets where trust takes years to build. We have transformed our business with extraordinary results, and our combination with Nuvei will extend what we can offer customers. Together, we will reach more businesses, in more markets, with a more complete platform. – John Caplan

The acquisition comes as businesses face growing complexity across local and cross-border markets, requiring infrastructure that can support the full transaction lifecycle. The combined entity will bring together Nuvei’s payment acceptance capabilities and Payoneer’s established regulatory footprint — including licensing for online payment services in mainland China and authorization in principle as a cross-border payment aggregator in India — positioning the pair to serve major digital commerce platforms including Amazon, eBay, Walmart, Airbnb, Fiverr, Upwork, Etsy, ByteDance, Shopify, and WooCommerce. The transaction also strengthens capabilities in emerging financial models, including agentic commerce and stablecoin payments.

The AlleyWatch Startup Daily Funding Report: 6/15/2026

AlleyWatch — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 17:27:03 +0000

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.

Interchecks Raises $50M Series C

FINTECH

Interchecks, a fintech platform that provides instant payments infrastructure for sportsbooks, fintechs, and financial institutions, has raised $50M in Series C funding led by Bettor Capital, Commerce Ventures, Decades Holdings, and Thayer Street Partners. Founded by Dylan Massey, Brandon White, and Robert Chevlin in 2016, Interchecks has now raised a total of $66.3M in reported equity funding.

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Hypha AI Raises $50M Seed Round

Hypha AI, an AI-native asset intelligence platform that transforms fragmented investment workflows into structured, actionable insights across the asset lifecycle, has raised $50M in Seed funding led by TriEdge Investments with participation from Bankwell, Cammeby’s, CFG Bank, Crescent Heights, Dwight Capital, Monticello, and Yakar Partners. Hypha AI was founded by Peter Wang and Simcha Hyman in 2025.

Podium Automation Raises $18M Series A

ENTERPRISE

Podium Automation, a manufacturing company that designs and builds industrial control panels using a software-enabled process that reduces lead times and errors, has raised $18M in Series A funding led by Construct Capital with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Transition Ventures, Sunflower Capital, and Banter Capital. Founded by Jamie Serota and Jacob Buser in 2024, Podium Automation has now raised a total of $23M in reported equity funding.

Chptr Raises $5.5M Series A

ENTERPRISE

Chptr, a media technology company that distributes hyperlocal, time-sensitive community stories across TV, radio, and digital platforms, has raised $5.5M in Series A funding led by CityRock Venture Partners with participation from Tribute Technology. Chptr was founded by Rehan Choudhry in 2020.

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#NYCtech Week in Review: 6/8/26 – 6/13/26

AlleyWatch — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 13:27:52 +0000

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.

Digital Asset – $355M

Fintech

Digital Asset, a blockchain infrastructure platform that enables financial institutions to tokenize and settle assets on a shared, privacy-preserving network, has raised $355M in Venture funding led by a16z crypto with participation from 7RIDGE, ABN Amro, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Alumni Ventures, Apollo Funds, BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Greenwulf Asset Management, Hanwha Investment & Securities, HSBC, iCapital, Liberty City Ventures, Optiver, Polychain, R136 Ventures, S&P Global, SBI Group, Smash Capital, SoFi, Tradeweb, and William Blair. Digital Asset was founded by Don Wilson, Eric Saraniecki, Shaul Kfir, Sunil Hirani, and Yuval Rooz in 2014.

Standard Bots – $200M

AI Enterprise

Standard Bots, a robotics company that manufactures AI-native industrial robot arms for factory automation, has raised $200M in Series C funding led by RoboStrategy and General Catalyst. Founded by Evan Beard and David Golden in 2011, Standard Bots has now raised a total of $287M in reported equity funding.

Rylo – $85M

Rylo, an AI platform that provides real-time communication tools for the deaf and hard-of-hearing community, has raised $85M in Venture funding led by General Catalyst and Canaan Partners with participation from Vertex Ventures Israel and Contour Venture Partners. Founded by Alon Ezer and Tomer Aharoni in 2020, Rylo has now raised a total of $101M in reported equity funding.

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Current – $80M

Fintech

Current, a consumer fintech platform that provides banking, payments, and credit products to everyday Americans, has raised $80M in Series E funding led by Springcoast Partners with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global Management, Avenir Growth Capital, Foundation Capital, Wellington Management, Sapphire Ventures, General Catalyst, Cross River, and QED Investors. Founded by Stuart Sopp and Trevor Marshall in 2015, Current has now raised a total of $682M in reported equity funding.

Stepful – $55M

Healthtech Edtech

Stepful, a training platform that provides AI-powered healthcare workforce education and certification programs, has raised $55M in Series C funding led by Oak HC/FT with participation from Foresite Capital, Hearst Ventures, Citi Impact Fund, SemperVirens, Y Combinator, Intermountain Health, and ECMC Education Impact Fund. Founded by Carl Madi, Tressia Hobeika, and Edoardo Serra in 2021, Stepful has now raised a total of $105M in reported equity funding.

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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OpenReserve Holdings – $24,005,501

Fintech

OpenReserve Holdings, a financial technology company that is building a national bank integrating blockchain infrastructure into traditional banking products and services, has raised $24,005,501 in funding according to a recent SEC filing. The filing indicates that the total offering is for $25,000,000 and there were eleven investors in this close. The company was founded by Diwakar Choubey and Richard Correia in 2025.

Jedify – $24M

AI Enterprise

Jedify, an enterprise AI platform that builds autonomous context graphs to give AI agents accurate, business-ready operational knowledge, has raised $24M in Series A funding led by Norwest with participation from Snowflake Ventures, S Capital VC, Cerca Partners, and Oceans Ventures. Founded by Assaf Henkin, Adi Elimelech, and Erik Shani in 2023, Jedify has now raised a total of $33M in reported equity funding.

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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

Corca – $7.8M

Corca, a collaborative mathematics workspace that combines AI-powered assistance with real-time computation and equation editing, has raised $7.8M in Venture funding led by NEA with participation from Bloomberg Beta, Daft Capital, and NVentures. Corca was founded by Anton Gladkoborodov and Oleg Shevlyagin in 2023.

Niteshift – $7M

AI Enterprise

Niteshift, a cloud infrastructure platform that provides coding agents with runtime environments to autonomously run, test, and verify software before deployment, has raised $7M in Seed funding led by Greylock with participation from Amplify Partners, BoxGroup, and SV Angel. Niteshift was founded by Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan.

Concentrate AI – $5.1M

AI Enterprise

Concentrate AI, an AI gateway that provides LLM access, routing, and spend management for enterprise teams, has raised $5.1M in Pre-Seed funding co-led by True Ventures and RRE Ventures. The company was founded by Ari Jacoby and Todd Lieberman in 2025.

Titan – $3M

Fintech AI

Titan, an AI platform that provides banking-native intelligence and compliance tools for financial institutions, has raised $3M in Venture funding led by Entropy Ventures. Founded by Arjun Sirrah in 2025, Titan has now raised a total of $4M in reported equity funding.

The Weekly Notable Startup Funding Report: 6/15/26

AlleyWatch — Mon, 15 Jun 2026 12:27:46 +0000

The Weekly Notable Startup Funding Report takes us on a trip across various ecosystems in the US, highlighting some of the notable funding activity in the various markets that we track. The notable startup funding rounds for the week ending 6/13/26 featuring funding details for NinjaOne, Coram AI, Stars + Honey, and twenty-two other deals representing $2B in new funding that you need to know about.

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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

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.

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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EDGE Markets Raises $29.2M to Solve the Capital Constraint Blocking Institutional Traders in the Prediction Markets

AlleyWatch — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 15:27:42 +0000

Prediction markets have moved from a niche curiosity to a legitimate asset class almost overnight, with annualized revenue already above $3B and analysts projecting a path toward $10B by 2030. Yet the financial infrastructure supporting this growth still runs on infrastructure built for a different era. The gap shows up in the most basic friction points: traders pre-funding accounts at each individual exchange, settlements that pause on nights and weekends, and payment processors charging fees calibrated for consumer credit cards rather than high-frequency capital flows. As the U.S.-based exchange landscape fragments with five to seven fully live CFTC-regulated prediction market exchanges expected by year-end and more than 20 designated contract market applications in the pipeline, the capital fluidity compounds with every new platform that comes online. EDGE Markets builds the infrastructure layer underneath all of it, with three purpose-built products: EDGE Boost, a dedicated banking account for high-volume gaming and trading participants that has processed over $2B in transactions since launching in March 2025; EDGE Connect, a private payment rail for operators that back testing shows reduces payment processing costs by more than 70%; and the forthcoming EDGE Pro, the first high-throughput deposit account for institutional market makers that will enable post-execution settlement across multiple liquidity pools and eliminate the need to pre-fund accounts at every exchange.

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.

The AlleyWatch Startup Daily Funding Report: 6/11/2026

AlleyWatch — Thu, 11 Jun 2026 14:27:04 +0000

The latest venture capital, seed, pre-seed, and angel deals for NYC startups for 6/11/2026 featuring funding details for Digital Asset, Current, and much more. This page will be updated throughout the day to reflect any new fundings.

Digital Asset – $355M

FINTECH

Digital Asset, a blockchain infrastructure platform that enables financial institutions to tokenize and settle assets on a shared, privacy-preserving network, has raised $355M in Venture funding led by a16z crypto with participation from 7RIDGE, ABN Amro, the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, Alumni Ventures, Apollo Funds, BNP Paribas, Broadridge, Citadel Securities, CME Ventures, Coinbase Ventures, Greenwulf Asset Management, Hanwha Investment & Securities, HSBC, iCapital, Liberty City Ventures, Optiver, Polychain, R136 Ventures, S&P Global, SBI Group, Smash Capital, SoFi, Tradeweb, and William Blair. Digital Asset was founded by Don Wilson, Eric Saraniecki, Shaul Kfir, Sunil Hirani, and Yuval Rooz in 2014.

Current – $80M

FINTECH

Current, a consumer fintech platform that provides banking, payments, and credit products to everyday Americans, has raised $80M in Series E funding led by Springcoast Partners with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global Management, Avenir Growth Capital, Foundation Capital, Wellington Management, Sapphire Ventures, General Catalyst, Cross River, and QED Investors. Founded by Stuart Sopp and Trevor Marshall in 2015, Current has now raised a total of $682M in reported equity funding.

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Jedify – $24M

AI
ENTERPRISE

Jedify, an enterprise AI platform that builds autonomous context graphs to give AI agents accurate, business-ready operational knowledge, has raised $24M in Series A funding led by Norwest with participation from Snowflake Ventures, S Capital VC, Cerca Partners, and Oceans Ventures. Founded by Assaf Henkin, Adi Elimelech, and Erik Shani in 2023, Jedify has now raised a total of $33M in reported equity funding.

OpenReserve Holdings – $24,005,501

FINTECH

OpenReserve Holdings, a financial technology company that is building a national bank integrating blockchain infrastructure into traditional banking products and services, has raised $24,005,501 in funding according to a recent SEC filing. The filing indicates that the total offering is for $25,000,000 and there were eleven investors in this close. The company was founded by Diwakar Choubey, the co-founder of MoneyLion, and Richard Correia in 2025.

Corca – $7.8M

Corca, a collaborative mathematics workspace that combines AI-powered assistance with real-time computation and equation editing, has raised $7.8M in Venture funding led by NEA with participation from Bloomberg Beta, Daft Capital, and NVentures. Corca was founded by Anton Gladkoborodov and Oleg Shevlyagin in 2023.

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Niteshift – $7M

AI
ENTERPRISE

Niteshift, a cloud infrastructure platform that provides coding agents with runtime environments to autonomously run, test, and verify software before deployment, has raised $7M in Seed funding led by Greylock with participation from Amplify Partners, BoxGroup, and SV Angel. Niteshift was founded by Sajid Mehmood and Conor Branagan.

Plot Raises $10M to Give Enterprise Brands Visibility into Untagged Social Video

AlleyWatch — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 15:27:29 +0000

Enterprise marketing teams have spent years investing in social listening tools built for a text-first internet, even as the platforms their customers actually use have moved almost entirely to video. The gap that creates is structural: roughly 80% of brand mentions on TikTok and Instagram happen without a tag, a hashtag, or a caption – meaning the vast majority of organic consumer conversation about a product is invisible to the tools brands rely on to track it. Plot was built to close that gap, using multimodal AI to analyze the audio, visuals, and on-screen text inside social video simultaneously, surfacing brand mentions whether or not a creator ever tags the brand. The platform gives enterprise marketing teams the ability to track earned media, source and vet creators, and run consumer research in minutes rather than weeks and early results show brands discovering 2 to 8 times more content featuring their products than they captured before. In 18 months since launch, Plot has grown ARR 3.8x year-over-year with a 132% net revenue retention rate, attracting enterprise customers including Visa, Mastercard, PepsiCo, Fenty Beauty, Benefit Cosmetics, and CAVA almost entirely through inbound demand.

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.

The AlleyWatch Startup Daily Funding Report: 6/10/2026

AlleyWatch — Wed, 10 Jun 2026 14:27:40 +0000

The latest venture capital, seed, pre-seed, and angel deals for New York City startups for June 10, 2026 featuring funding details for F2 AI, Concentrate AI, and much more. This page will be updated throughout the day to reflect any new fundings.

F2 AI – $14M Seed Round

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 in an exclusive covering the round and much more – F2 Raises $14M to Eliminate the Manual Bottleneck Slowing Private Credit Deal Teams

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Concentrate AI – $5.1M Pre-Seed Round

AI
ENTERPRISE

Concentrate AI, an AI gateway that provides LLM access, routing, and spend management for enterprise teams, has raised $5.1M in Pre-Seed funding co-led by True Ventures and RRE Ventures. The company was founded by Ari Jacoby and Todd Lieberman in 2025.

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Copia Automation – $26M

Kimba – $6.5M

HeyMilo – $3.65M

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Digital Asset – $355M

Standard Bots – $200M

Rylo – $85M

Current – $80M

Stepful – $55M

EDGE Markets – $29.2M

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OpenReserve Holdings – $24,005,501

Jedify – $24M

F2 AI – $14M

Corca – $7.8M

Niteshift – $7M

Concentrate AI – $5.1M

Titan – $3M

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BeatpulseLabs – $1.8M

Kestrel Labs – $2.2M

Chptr – $5.5M

SWARM – $10.0M

Plot – $10.0M

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F2 AI – $14.0M

Golden Analytics – $14.0M

Minerva – $20.0M

Vinyl Equity – $20.0M

Infinity Constellation – $24.0M

Jedify – $24.0M

Stars + Honey – $24.0M

SignalRank – $26.5M

EDGE Markets – $29.2M

Coram AI – $35.0M

Turnout – $35.0M

Endurance Energy – $54.0M

Stepful – $55.0M

PointFive – $60.0M

Rylo – $85.0M

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GT Medical Technologies – $100.0M

MainFunc – $100.0M

Standard Bots – $200.0M

TensorWave – $350.0M

Digital Asset – $355.0M

NinjaOne – $400.0M

EDGE Markets Raises $29.2M to Solve the Capital Constraint Blocking Institutional Traders in the Prediction Markets

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The AlleyWatch Startup Daily Funding Report: 6/11/2026

Digital Asset – $355M

Current – $80M

Jedify – $24M

OpenReserve Holdings – $24,005,501

Corca – $7.8M

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Niteshift – $7M

Plot Raises $10M to Give Enterprise Brands Visibility into Untagged Social Video

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