Charlottesville-based med-tech company accelerates innovation and commercialization in orthopedic technology
CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., June 17, 2026 — Icarus Medical, a Charlottesville-based med-tech company focused on advancing orthopedic bracing technology, today announced the successful close of its Series A financing round. Originally targeting $5 million, the round closed oversubscribed at $7.2 million, reflecting strong investor confidence in the company’s technology platform, market momentum, and long-term vision.
The Ascender Knee Brace is designed for patients with patellofemoral and multicompartment knee osteoarthritis, utilizing adjustable unloading and extension assist technology.
The Adonis Joint Distraction Knee Brace utilizes dynamic joint distraction technology to help reduce pressure within the knee joint for patients with unicompartmental osteoarthritis.
Proceeds from the financing will support accelerated commercialization across the US, continued product development, manufacturing expansion, clinical validation of current devices, and personnel development as the company continues increasing its national presence.
Major investors participating in the round include Riptide Ventures, OSF Ventures, CU Healthcare Innovation Fund, Highpoint Ventures, MedTech Connect, Neovate Capital Partners, and BLU Venture Investors. In addition to capital, these partners bring strategic healthcare, commercialization, operational expertise, and industry relationships that will help support Icarus Medical’s next stage of development.
“This financing represents a major milestone for Icarus Medical and validates both the clinical impact of our technology and the strength of the team we have built,” said Dave Johnson, Founder and CEO of Icarus Medical. “We are excited to partner with investors who not only believe in our mission, but who also bring strategic insight and relationships that can help accelerate our trajectory.”
Founded in Charlottesville, Icarus Medical is developing a new class of orthopedic bracing technologies that combine biomechanics, additive manufacturing, and patient-focused design to help people stay active and mobile while reducing pain and improving function. The company’s technologies include the Ascender Knee Brace for patellofemoral and multicompartment osteoarthritis, along with solutions for post-operative recovery, neurological conditions, and complex lower extremity mobility challenges.
“Our health system’s mission is to serve all persons with the greatest care and love. As we evaluated Icarus Medical, we needed to be confident that its solutions could meaningfully improve the lives of the patients we serve, said Ben Spektor, director of Venture Investments at OSF Ventures. “Through engagement with our clinicians, we quickly validated that conviction and received strong feedback regarding both the significant unmet need and the value of Icarus’ innovative bracing technology. Spektor added, “Icarus is at the forefront of bracing innovation, and we are proud to support the company’s growth while helping expand access to its products across our Ministry.”
Icarus Medical designs and manufactures its products in Charlottesville, Virginia, while continuing to advance its manufacturing capabilities and create new local jobs. Over the past year, Icarus Medical was named to the Inc. 5000 list of America’s fastest-growing private companies after achieving 1,283% three-year growth. The company was also recently recognized with the 2026 CBIC Startup of the Year Award by the Charlottesville Business Innovation Council.
“Healthcare innovation requires more than just great technology. It requires strong clinical alignment, operational execution, and the ability to scale,” said Dave Johnson. “We believe this group of investors positions us extremely well for the next phase of the company.”
About Icarus Medical
Icarus Medical is a Charlottesville, Virginia-based medical technology company focused on developing innovative orthopedic bracing solutions that help patients stay active, improve mobility, and reduce pain. The company combines biomechanics, software, and additive manufacturing to create advanced orthopedic technologies for osteoarthritis, post-operative recovery, neurological conditions, and lower extremity mobility challenges.
KLIPY is the enterprise-grade expression API layer, helping developers integrate GIFs, memes, stickers, clips, and AI for real-time expression, while giving creators, brands, and rights holders tools to distribute, manage, and control expressive media across digital communication platforms.
SAN FRANCISCO, June 17, 2026 — KLIPY today announced a $3.8 million fundraising round, and that it has joined Google’s AI Futures Fund, to scale its expression API layer for memes, stickers, clips, and AI for real-time expression. KLIPY helps developers integrate expressive media and AI APIs into social and creative platforms like BeReal, Baidu, Canva, Figma, and Microsoft SwiftKey, while giving creators, brands, and rights holders tools to distribute, manage, and control content.
KLIPY’s “expression layer” is built for the AI era, and nearly 10,000 developers and 40,000 creators already use KLIPY’s API, which processes billions of requests weekly. In addition to content search and creation, KLIPY is building monetization infrastructure for expressive media. Its contextual ad tools help partner apps create new revenue streams while maintaining control over content and offering a privacy-conscious user experience.
The funding will allow the company to grow its product, engineering, and go-to-market teams, expand to even more platforms, and build new monetization and creative tools for creators and content studios. KLIPY is founded by serial entrepreneurs Givi Beridze, Frank Nawabi, and Waska Chaduneli. Between them, they’ve founded seven companies, including Nawabi’s GIF-sharing platform Tenor which was acquired by Google in 2018 and scaled to over a billion users across the globe.
“People are expressing themselves through memes, GIFs, and short-form content more than ever, especially Gen Z and Gen Alpha,” said KLIPY co-founder and CEO Givi Beridze. “This explosion in visual communication is only accelerating now that AI makes expression so quick and easy.”
“While internet culture moves at lightning speed, memes, for example, possess surprising staying power,” Beridze continued. “They take on cultural meaning, and brands are realizing that they are an authentic way to join the conversation and keep their franchises relevant.”
“At Tenor, we created the largest GIF-sharing platform and pioneered the very first sponsored GIF,” said KLIPY co-founder and board member Frank Nawabi. “Now, KLIPY is building a next-generation ‘expression layer’ for the AI era that combines search, AI, and monetization into a unified API platform, with tools for content rights holders and creators to distribute and manage short-form media at scale.”
“BeReal is all about authentic expression, and KLIPY helps our users express themselves in fun, engaging, and creative ways,” said Jérémie Colin, BeReal. “Their platform is purpose-built for the next generation of social connection, and the migration was quick and easy.”
“The way people communicate online is changing rapidly, driven by AI,” said Jonathan Silber, co-founder and director of Google’s AI Futures Fund. “Increasingly, people want to be active co-creators of content, not passive consumers. KLIPY is building the intelligent, trusted expression layer that the next generation of apps will rely on, and we’re thrilled to back a team that deeply understands this space at scale.”
Participants in the round included Google’s AI Futures Fund, I2BF, Silvercircle VC, Sturgeon Capital, Red Swan Ventures, Intuition Ventures, Yash Patel of Capra Ventures, and former Golden State Warriors basketball player and two-time NBA champion Zaza Pachulia.
About KLIPY KLIPY is an API platform for expressive media, enabling apps to integrate GIFs, stickers, clips, and AI APIs into their products. The company provides developer infrastructure, creator tools, and monetization solutions designed for the next generation of digital communication.
Venture Capital was supposed to fund the future. Instead, too often it traps founders, employees, and early backers inside a system that can take a decade or more to return a dollar. Rafe Furst, Chief Strategy Officer of The Crypto Company, argues that the deepest flaw in VC is a structure built around delayed liquidity, misaligned incentives, and early-stage bets.
TAMPA BAY, Fla., June 17, 2026 — Venture capital is not slowing down, it is concentrating. The number of active U.S. VC firms fell from 8,315 in 2021 to 6,175 in 2024, while more than half of the $71 billion raised by U.S. venture firms last year went to just nine players. On this episode of Disruption Interruption, host Karla Jo Helms (KJ) speaks with Rafe Furst, World Series poker champion, five-time founder, bestselling venture-capital author, and Chief Strategy Officer of The Crypto Company, about why the traditional 10-year lockup model is breaking early-stage investing, why VC incentives have drifted away from true company building, and why blockchain may finally offer founders and investors a path to liquidity. As Furst puts it, “The biggest structural problem with VC is there’s no liquidity.”
DI: Episode 234
Why Venture Capital Keeps Missing Furst’s core argument is that Venture Capital no longer behaves like true Venture Capital should. Too many firms now approach early-stage investing less as a genuine commitment to founders and more as a strategic placeholder. They view it as a low-cost way to preserve the option to invest bigger once the risk has already been reduced. “They’re looking to buy a lottery ticket to be able to deploy capital much later on”, Furst says. The result is a market where the earliest builders still absorb the most uncertainty, but do not always receive the deepest alignment or support.
That misalignment gets worse because the asset class is unforgiving. Nine out of ten early-stage companies will still fail, while the winners can take 10 years or more to generate liquidity. According to the Wall Street Journal, that delay is not theoretical: more than 90% of 2021 venture funds had produced zero distributions as of mid-2024, underscoring how long capital can stay trapped in the system. In his words, “It’s just a lifetime. It’s just untenable. It doesn’t work.”
This is where incentives begin to warp. Instead of committing to one clear strategy, either deep hands-on conviction at the earliest stage or broad high-volume early-stage allocation, many firms try to split the difference. Furst says that this middle ground creates the wrong behavior: less patience, weaker founder alignment, more pressure to control outcomes, and lower returns than the asset class should be capable of producing. His critique is not of VC in principle, but of a version that no longer matches the realities of early-stage risk or the founders it claims to support.
Blockchain Can Bring Liquidity Back to Innovation Furst believes the unlock is liquidity. That is why he sees blockchain not as a side bet, but as the logical next evolution of venture finance itself. His view lands at a moment when even top-tier firms have been rethinking the traditional venture structure and its long lockup periods, according to Sequoia Capitals. Early public markets can be compared to a form of equity crowdfunding that originally allowed capital formation and liquid ownership to coexist before regulation, and market abuse changed the landscape. “Blockchain now offers a new version of that missing bridge,” Furst says. “The future of venture capital is through decentralized technologies, Web3, crypto, and blockchain.”
That thesis is now shaping The Crypto Company’s next move. The company has acquired the technology behind a new layer-one blockchain and cryptocurrency called Frame, which Furst describes as a unifying liquidity and interoperability layer across fragmented crypto ecosystems. His analogy is the interstate highway system: local economies can thrive on their own, but real commerce accelerates when movement between them becomes seamless. In that sense, Frame is meant to help separate blockchain economies interoperate, transact, and share liquidity more effectively.
For Furst, the opportunity is only growing as AI and blockchain converge. He says AI agents are already transacting on-chain because they cannot use the traditional banking system the way humans do, and he believes that trend will accelerate. His advice to founders is not to wait for certainty, but to position themselves early. “The way to not get swept away is to get in front of the wave.”
Links
Disrupting Venture Capital: Why the 10-Year Lockup Is Dead with Rafe Furst
Disruption Interruption is the podcast where you will hear from today’s biggest Industry Disruptors. Learn what motivated them to bring about innovation and how they overcame opposition to adoption.
About Disruption InterruptionTM Disruption is happening on an unprecedented scale, impacting all manner of industries — MedTech, Finance, IT, eCommerce, shipping, logistics, and more — and COVID has moved their timelines up a full decade or more. But WHO are these disruptors and when did they say, “THAT’S IT! I’VE HAD IT!”? Time to Disrupt and Interrupt with host Karla Jo “KJ” Helms, veteran communications disruptor. KJ interviews badasses who are disrupting their industries and altering economic networks that have become antiquated with an establishment resistant to progress. She delves into uncovering secrets from industry rebels and quiet revolutionaries that uncover common traits — and not-so-common — that are changing our economic markets… and lives. Visit the world’s key pioneers that persist to success, despite arrows in their backs at www.disruption-interruption.com.
About Rafe Furst Rafe Furst is Chief Strategy Officer of The Crypto Company, a five-time founder, investor, and longtime builder at the intersection of early-stage finance, emerging technology, and market design. In the episode, he traces his path from advanced study in artificial intelligence at Stanford and early web entrepreneurship in Silicon Valley to angel investing, poker, and blockchain-based venture infrastructure. Publicly, he is also known as a World Series of Poker champion and as the author of a bestselling book on venture capital. Today, his work is focused on solving what he sees as venture capital’s deepest structural flaw: the absence of liquidity for founders, employees, and early backers, and the role blockchain can play in fixing it.
About Karla Jo Helms Karla Jo Helms is the Chief Evangelist and Anti-PR® Strategist for JOTO PR Disruptors™. Karla Jo learned firsthand how unforgiving business can be when millions of dollars are on the line — and how the control of public opinion often determines whether one company is happily chosen, or another is brutally rejected. Being an alumnus of crisis management, Karla Jo has worked with litigation attorneys, private investigators, and the media to help restore companies of goodwill into the good graces of public opinion — Karla Jo operates on the ethic of getting it right the first time, not relying on second chances and doing what it takes to excel. Helms speaks globally on public relations, how the PR industry itself has lost its way, and how, in the right hands, corporations can harness the power of Anti-PR to drive markets and impact market perception.
References
Primack, D. (2021, October 26). Scoop: Sequoia Capital just blew up the VC fund model. Axios. axios.com/2021/10/26/sequoia-capital-fund-venture-capital-model
Chernova, Y. (2024, August 16). More than 90% of 2021 venture funds have had zero distributions thus far, report shows. The Wall Street Journal. wsj.com/articles/more-than-90-of-2021-venture-funds-have-had-zero-distributions-thus-far-report-shows-32b0348f
Financial Times. (2025, January 1). Number of US venture capital firms falls as cash flows to tech’s top investors. ft.com/content/7a787423-9466-4e55-8c0e-8811cfe44dd3
Media Inquiries: Karla Jo Helms JOTO PR™ 727-777-4629
ATLANTA, June 17, 2026 — OffPlan, a healthcare platform reimagining how employers and employees access primary care, today announced the successful completion of a $2.5 million seed funding round. The capital will support the company’s launch and expansion across multiple states over the next two years as it builds a new model for membership-based healthcare delivery focused on affordability, physician accessibility, and reduced dependence on traditional insurance structures.
OffPlan was founded to address what its leadership sees as a fundamental structural problem in healthcare: the use of insurance for routine and predictable care. The company’s model combines direct primary care memberships, transparent specialty pricing, and catastrophic coverage strategies designed to simplify healthcare access while lowering costs for employers and employees alike.
“Healthcare has become increasingly unaffordable because the system treats everyday care like a catastrophic insurance event,” said Greg Rable, Co-Founder and CEO of OffPlan. “We built OffPlan to create a more rational structure — one where primary care is accessible, transparent, and centered around the physician-patient relationship rather than claims processing and administrative friction.”
The seed financing will be used to accelerate platform development, expand physician partnerships, support go-to-market operations, and launch OffPlan’s services in additional states following initial market rollouts.
OffPlan is led by veteran operators with deep experience across technology, healthcare, payments, and operational scaling.
Co-Founder and CEO Greg Rable is a three-time founder and executive with multiple successful exits, including Derivion, acquired by FIS; FactorTrust, acquired by TransUnion; and QuidMarket, acquired by Propel Holdings. Across nearly three decades building and scaling companies, Rable experienced firsthand the escalating burden healthcare costs place on employers and employees.
Co-Founder and Chief Commercial Officer Omar Fernandez brings more than 25 years of healthcare industry experience, including leadership roles in specialty pharmacy and physician practice support. Prior to founding OffPlan, Fernandez founded Sabio Health, a company focused on supporting independent primary care practices.
“Our goal is not simply to improve the current insurance system,” said Omar Fernandez. “It’s to build a fundamentally better operating model for everyday healthcare — one that restores physician autonomy, improves patient access, and gives employers a sustainable alternative to annual double-digit cost increases.”
OffPlan’s model emphasizes physician-owned practices, same-day or next-day appointments, longer patient visits, virtual care access, chronic disease management, and transparent pricing structures without traditional primary care claims administration.
The company believes that approximately 80% of healthcare utilization consists of routine, predictable care that can be managed more effectively outside traditional insurance frameworks. By separating everyday healthcare needs from catastrophic coverage, OffPlan aims to deliver lower costs and better patient outcomes while reducing administrative complexity for physicians and employers.
The company plans to expand its physician network, employer partnerships, and advisor relationships as it scales nationally.
About OffPlan
OffPlan is a healthcare platform designed to provide membership-based primary care and simplified healthcare access for employers, employees, physicians, and benefits advisors. The company combines direct primary care, transparent specialty pricing, and catastrophic coverage strategies to create a more efficient and patient-centered healthcare model. OffPlan partners with independent physician-owned practices and is initially launching in Florida and Virginia, with additional market expansion planned nationwide.
SAN FRANCISCO, June 17, 2026 — Flagright, the AI operating system for financial crime compliance, is announcing it has raised a $12.5M Series A, led by Infinity Ventures, with participation from Sella Direct Ventures and continued backing from existing investors including Frontline and Y Combinator.
The round will accelerate Flagright’s position as the enterprise standard for financial crime compliance by expanding explainable AI use cases across compliance operations and aggressively increasing its US market presence.
Financial crime compliance is entering a platform shift. Across banking, payments, lending, brokerage, credit unions, and other regulated sectors, institutions are being asked to move faster, manage higher volumes, meet rising regulatory expectations, and respond to increasingly sophisticated financial crime. At the same time, AI is moving from experimentation into operational reality.
The problem is that much of the compliance stack was not built for this environment.
Many institutions are still forced to choose between rigid legacy systems that are difficult to adapt and fragmented point solutions that create more operational complexity than they remove.
Flagright is the AI operating system for financial crime compliance, built to end that tradeoff.
Flagright brings transaction monitoring, watchlist screening, risk scoring, case management, AI forensics, and governance workflows into a unified AI operating system for financial crime compliance. The platform combines best-in-class compliance modules, enterprise grade workflows, and explainable AI capabilities that help fincrime teams improve recommendations, system optimization, alert investigations, and decision support while keeping control, transparency, and human oversight at the center.
Baran Ozkan, co-founder and CEO of Flagright, said: “The financial crime compliance stack is being rebuilt, and Flagright is the company to define the operating system layer for this category. Regulated financial institutions need a system that gives them speed, control, explainability, and auditability in one place. This round helps us accelerate our position as the enterprise standard for financial crime compliance by expanding explainable AI use cases across compliance operations and increasing our US market presence, while we continue serving sophisticated clients with the reliability and depth they expect from a mission critical software.”
The round will accelerate Flagright’s position as the enterprise standard for financial crime compliance by expanding explainable AI use cases across compliance operations and increasing its US market presence.
This includes expanding AI across investigations, alert intelligence, rule optimization, decision support, and audit-ready workflows, while growing Flagright’s enterprise go-to-market presence around banks, fintechs, credit unions, and regulated financial institutions looking to replace fragmented or legacy compliance infrastructure.
Madhu Nadig, co-founder and CTO of Flagright, said: “AI in compliance only matters if it is explainable, governable, and useful in real operations. The market does not need another black box tool. It needs an operating system that brings monitoring, screening, investigations, governance, and explainable AI together in one place. We are building the system of choice for sophisticated institutions that need AI they can trust, audit, and operationalize at scale.”
Jeremy Jonker, co-founder and managing partner at Infinity Ventures, said: “At Infinity Ventures, we back founders building best-in-class modern financial infrastructure. Flagright stood out because sophisticated financial institutions are increasingly choosing the platform for its combination of enterprise readiness, explainable AI, operational flexibility, and product maturity. We believe Flagright is defining the AI operating system layer for financial crime compliance, and we expect the company to become the market leader in this category over the next five years.”
This round is an acceleration point for Flagright, and with the market moving toward a more unified, intelligent, and enterprise-grade approach to financial crime compliance, the company intends to define that future.
About Flagright
Flagright is the AI operating system for financial crime compliance, trusted by more than 100 fintechs and banks across 30+ countries. Our unified, risk-based platform centralizes transaction monitoring, watchlist screening, investigations, and governance so financial institutions can run modern compliance programs on a single audit-ready system, deploying in as little as two weeks.
With Flagright, fincrime compliance teams design and continuously refine controls without code using a powerful scenario builder, sub-second APIs, dynamic risk profiling, and simulation tools that reduce false positives and improve decision accuracy. Auditable AI agents support investigations inside governed workflows, keeping human oversight central while ensuring decisions remain transparent and defensible across jurisdictions.
Organizations replacing fragmented tools with Flagright report up to 93% fewer false positives and 80% lower compliance costs, setting the modern standard for financial crime compliance.
Led by Accel, this monumental round cements Twenty as the definitive offensive cyber company industrializing capabilities for the United States and its allies.
ARLINGTON, Va., June 17, 2026 — Twenty, America’s first VC-backed cyber warfare startup, today announced a $100 million Series B round at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by Accel, with participation from Friends & Family Capital, Point72 Ventures, and Caffeinated Capital, bringing Twenty’s total funding to $138 million.
Founded in 2024, Twenty is industrializing offensive cyber warfare for the United States and its allies. The company builds AI-enabled, end-to-end systems for the U.S. military and Intelligence Community, giving warfighters the speed and scale required to deter and defeat adversaries in cyberspace. Twenty’s systems are designed to keep human judgment at the center, pairing advanced AI and automation with rigorous evaluation, controlled deployment, and mission alignment.
This round follows unprecedented demand for offensive cyber capabilities built at commercial speed. The White House has brought renewed leadership to offensive cyber, calling for the United States to use the full suite of offensive cyber operations to disrupt adversary networks and raise the costs of aggression on those who attack American interests.
“America is under sustained cyber attack, and our adversaries have learned—correctly—that those attacks rarely carry consequences,” said Joe Lin, Co-founder and CEO of Twenty. “Twenty exists to change that. We are building the industrial base for American cyber power: the AI-enabled capabilities our warfighters need to disrupt threats at their origin. This round is extraordinary validation from some of the world’s foremost investors, and we are pouring this funding directly into research and engineering.”
“As a country, we need to invest more into cyber capabilities to protect our national security. We have under invested over an extended period,” said Jonathan Turner, Partner at Accel. “Investing into the best cyber capabilities will create one of the strongest and most cost effective deterrents we can build. Accel is proud to lead this round and help set the standard for investing in the capabilities the country needs most. Twenty is the clear leader in this market: the team is unmatched, the mission is urgent and timely, and the company has reached operational relevance at a pace rarely seen in defense technology.”
“For fifteen years we have backed founders who challenge the limits of what is possible. Twenty’s speed from founding to operational relevance is in a class of its own,” said Colin Anderson, Founding Partner at Friends & Family Capital and former CFO at Palantir. “The company has moved with commercial urgency in one of the government’s most sensitive and consequential mission areas, which is extraordinarily difficult to do. Having first backed Joe and team nearly a decade ago, we are proud to partner with them once again as Twenty builds capabilities that are critical to America’s security.”
Twenty’s Series B follows prior rounds led by Caffeinated Capital and Tim Junio, Co-founder and CEO of Expanse (acquired by Palo Alto Networks for $1.25B in 2020), with early backing from investors including General Catalyst and In-Q-Tel.
About Twenty
Twenty is America’s first VC-backed cyber warfare startup. Founded in 2024, Twenty is industrializing offensive cyber warfare for the United States and its allies. The company builds AI-enabled, end-to-end systems for the U.S. military and Intelligence Community, giving warfighters the speed and scale required to impose costs on adversaries in cyberspace. Twenty’s systems are designed to keep human judgment at the center, pairing advanced AI and automation with rigorous evaluation, controlled deployment, and mission alignment.
— Series C supported by premier syndicate including co-leads Ascenta Capital and Janus Henderson Investors with significant participation from Deep Track plus existing investors —
— Evan Rachlin, M.D., Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Ascenta Capital, joins the Board of Directors —
WATERTOWN, Mass., June 17, 2026 — Triveni Bio Inc., a clinical-stage biotechnology company advancing novel antibody treatments for immunological and inflammatory (I&I) disorders, today announced a $65 million Series C financing round to support pipeline expansion and continued corporate growth. The round was co-led by new investors Ascenta Capital and Janus Henderson Investors, with significant participation from Deep Track Capital, alongside additional existing investors.
Proceeds from this financing will allow the company to extend the scope and rigor of clinical development of TRIV-573, including an atopic dermatitis Phase 2 clinical proof-of-concept study expected to initiate later this year. TRIV-573 is a half-life extended, next-generation bispecific engineered to address the underlying cause of atopic dermatitis by simultaneously inhibiting KLK5/7—validated as central drivers of skin barrier dysfunction—and the Th2 cytokine IL-13.
“This financing enables us to disrupt the status quo in atopic dermatitis, addressing not just inflammation, but the underlying dysfunction of the skin barrier, positioning Triveni to bring a long-overdue option to a population of patients still in need of relief,” said Vishal Patel, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Triveni Bio. “We have built a highly differentiated pipeline that combines novel biology with established anti-inflammatory mechanisms. In addition to a thorough investigation of TRIV-573 in atopic dermatitis, this funding allows us to explore kallikrein 5/7 biology in other related barrier disorders.”
The raise comes weeks after the initiation of first-in-human clinical studies with TRIV-573. In conjunction with the financing, industry veteran Evan Rachlin, M.D., Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Ascenta Capital, has joined the Triveni Bio Board of Directors.
“Triveni Bio has rapidly and efficiently advanced novel programs to address significant gaps in the existing standard-of-care,” said Evan Rachlin, M.D. “The speed with which the team has progressed two assets into the clinic—less than one year apart—is a testament to their operational execution. I am thrilled to join the Board of Directors at this exciting inflection point for the company.”
This momentum comes alongside recognition for Triveni’s leadership with Chief Executive Officer Vishal Patel, Ph.D., recently named a Finalist for the Ernst & Young (EY) Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2026 award. The nomination highlights Vishal’s leadership and excellence in driving programs from concept to clinical trial with speed and rigor.
About TRIV-509 Triveni’s lead program, TRIV-509 (anti-kallikreins 5 & 7), is a half-life extended monoclonal antibody positioned for the treatment of moderate-to-severe atopic dermatitis (AD). Through its mechanism of protease inhibition, TRIV-509 has demonstrated the ability to directly impact each key pillar of AD – barrier dysfunction, inflammation, and itch. TRIV-509 is the subject of an ongoing Phase 2 proof-of-concept trial with data expected end of 2026.
About TRIV-573 TRIV-573 is a half-life extended, second-generation bispecific antibody that combines KLK5/7 inhibition with a highly potent anti-IL-13 mechanism. Triveni plans to initiate a proof-of-concept trial in AD later this year.
About Triveni Bio Triveni Bio is a biotechnology company at the forefront of novel antibody-based therapies for immunological and inflammatory disorders. Using a genetics-informed, precision medicine approach, the company seeks to establish proof-of-concept early in the drug development process by leveraging deep insights into genetic and mechanistic biology. To learn more, visit www.triveni.bio.
Funding accelerates NeuralTrust’s platform for identifying, securing, and scaling the AI agents running across the enterprise.
NEW YORK, June 17, 2026 — NeuralTrust, the platform to secure AI agents, today announced a $20 million seed round, the largest cybersecurity seed financing raised by an EU company to date. The round will fund engineering, deepening the integration across NeuralTrust’s products, and expansion across the European market, as enterprises move autonomous AI systems into production.
NeuralTrust Founders: Víctor García (CTO), Joan Vendrell (CEO) and Alejandro Domingo (COO)
The round was led by Alstin Capital, with participation from VentureFriends, Seaya, Kibo Ventures, Banc Sabadell, EA Ventures Plug and Play Fund, and Finaves, the venture capital fund of IESE Business School. NeuralTrust is also backed by public funding from the European Innovation Council and Spain’s State Research Agency (AEI).
The investment arrives as AI agents move from experimentation to core enterprise infrastructure, with governance failing to keep pace. Gartner predicts that by 2027, 40% of enterprises will demote or decommission autonomous AI agents due to governance gaps identified only after production incidents occur. The risk scales fast: Fortune 500 companies are projected to operate more than 150,000 agents each by 2028, yet only 13% of firms feel prepared to manage them.
Enterprise AI agents don’t run in one place. They span platforms and endpoints, creating security fragmentation that grows harder to manage with every new deployment. NeuralTrust delivers the enforcement layer that spans all of them.
Three products make this work. TrustGate, an agent gateway that brokers every LLM, MCP, and tool call, becoming the single enforcement point through which all agent traffic flows. TrustGuard, a runtime security engine, which detects and stops threats across every platform and endpoint where agents operate, regardless of how they were built or deployed. And TrustLens, a posture management layer, to identify every agent in the enterprise and tracks how it behaves inside and outside the security perimeter.
NeuralTrust’s customers include AirEuropa, Abanca, Iberia, and Banc Sabadell, alongside other global banks, airlines, energy companies, and government agencies. 92% report annual revenues above $1B, with 80% based in Europe and 20% international.
Independent analysts recognize NeuralTrust as a category leader across the emerging AI security landscape. Gartner has named the company a Representative Vendor in two Market Guides, KuppingerCole a Leader in its 2025 Leadership Compass for Generative AI Defense, and MarketsandMarkets a Leader in its 2026 Agentic AI Security Quadrant.
“AI agents are now part of enterprise operations, but the controls protecting them are still catching up,” said Joan Vendrell, Co-Founder and CEO of NeuralTrust. “This round allows us to keep building the infrastructure layer that makes AI adoption measurable, governable, and safe.”
About NeuralTrust
NeuralTrust is the leading platform for securing and scaling AI Agents. Recognized by Gartner, NeuralTrust helps enterprises identify, secure, and govern all the AI agents running in the enterprise. Learn more at neuraltrust.ai.
WARSAW, June 17, 2026 — The Digital Poland Foundation published the 5th edition of the Digital Champions CEE 2026 report. The ranking of the 100 most valuable technology companies in Central and Eastern Europe reveals a combined market capitalisation of USD 127.9 billion — a robust year-on-year growth of 9.36%. Yet the headline figure only tells part of the story: had all companies that have since relocated or been acquired remained in the ranking, the total value would likely exceed USD 170 billion. The fifth edition of the report maps not only how the region has grown, but also where its most valuable assets have gone — and why.
Digital Champions CEE Ranking
Top 100 tech companies valued at USD 127.9 billion — and the USD 170 billion reality behind them
At the end of 2025, the 100 largest technology companies in Central and Eastern Europe achieved a combined market capitalisation of USD 127.9 billion, narrowing the gap to the region’s 2021 peak and confirming the continued resilience of the regional digital economy. The strongest growth came from the region’s largest players — the so-called “Digital Phoenixes” valued above USD 1 billion — whose combined valuation increased by 14.58% year-on-year to USD 101.05 billion.
However, the report highlights that official data significantly understates the true scale of value created by the region’s innovators. Many leading firms originating from the CEE region — such as ElevenLabs, Grammarly, ICEYE, Rimac, and Avast — have relocated their headquarters to the United States or the United Kingdom to raise capital or have been acquired by multinational corporations, removing them from the ranking. According to the authors of the report, if these mature companies still met the geographic criteria of the index, the total value of the top 100 technology companies from the CEE region would already exceed USD 170 billion.
“When the inaugural Digital Champions CEE ranking was launched, the region was framed as a ‘Digital Phoenix’ — a symbol of ambitious transformation emerging from post-communist economies. Five editions later, the trajectory remains strong, but the narrative has evolved. Against a backdrop of intensified global headwinds, companies across Central and Eastern Europe have shifted from rapid acceleration to more disciplined, resilient growth. This maturation has sharpened strategic focus: for many organisations, it has unlocked new avenues for expansion and innovation; for others, it has introduced heightened competitive pressure and a more complex, unpredictable operating environment,” said Radzym Wójcik, Counsel at Baker McKenzie.
Poland leads while the Baltics dominate by intensity
Poland remains the region’s largest technology ecosystem in absolute terms, accounting for USD 47.39 billion — or 37.05% — of the total regional value, with 42 companies in the Top 100 ranking. It is also the only market showing strength across all company maturity levels, from emerging scaleups to multi-billion-dollar champions.
The Baltic states, however, continue to outperform the region when measured by capitalisation intensity per capita. Estonia achieved the highest score in the ranking, significantly ahead of all other countries, while Lithuania recorded a 123.97% increase in total capitalisation since 2021. Latvia emerged as the fastest climber by intensity growth over the five-year period.
Together, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, and Czechia now account for nearly 78% of the region’s total technology value. Croatia delivered the strongest long-term growth in percentage terms, with ecosystem value increasing by 170.7% since 2021, while Bulgaria nearly doubled its market capitalisation over the same period.
Deeptech and defence-related innovation reshape the ecosystem
While e-commerce and marketplace platforms remain the region’s largest value category, accounting for more than 36% of total capitalisation, the report identifies a major structural shift toward deeptech, space technology, healthtech, and dual-use innovation.
The “other” category — which includes deeptech and space tech companies — recorded the strongest year-on-year growth in the entire ranking, surging 87.59%. New high-value entrants such as EnduroSat and Creotech Instruments reflect increasing investor appetite for companies addressing defence, logistics, infrastructure, and strategic resilience.
“The composition of the ranking is also evolving. E-commerce, SaaS and fintech remain the backbone of CEE’s digital economy, but the list now points to a broader and more strategic technology base: robotics, space and Earth observation, cybersecurity, AI-native software, digital health, sovereign cloud and other infrastructure-oriented businesses. This shift shows that CEE is moving beyond consumer platforms and software scale-ups toward technologies directly linked to Europe’s productivity, security, resilience and digital sovereignty,” said Wojciech Świercz, Partner at Arthur D. Little.
Record VC exits confirm ecosystem maturity
The report also documents record levels of venture capital-backed exits across the region. Following 82 exits in 2024 — the highest number ever recorded — the ecosystem sustained momentum with 81 exits in 2025.
This marks a dramatic increase compared with just 31 exits in 2015 and confirms that Central and Eastern Europe has evolved from an emerging startup market into a mature ecosystem capable of producing a consistent pipeline of acquisition-ready and IPO-ready companies.
Venture capital investment across the region reached EUR 2.71 billion in 2025. However, the report notes that this figure includes approximately EUR 730 million in funding rounds raised by companies that had already relocated their headquarters outside the region. Those excluded rounds included major transactions involving ElevenLabs, ICEYE, Tachyum, and MaintainX.
The relocation dilemma: nearly half of CEE value has left the region
One of the report’s central conclusions concerns the increasing relocation of the region’s most successful technology companies to the United States and the United Kingdom.
According to data cited in the report, 48% of CEE scaleups have moved their headquarters abroad, primarily to access larger pools of growth capital. The United States attracts 56% of relocating companies, while the United Kingdom alone accounts for nearly one-quarter of all relocations. The report warns that this trend presents a broader strategic challenge for Europe’s competitiveness.
“Europe is increasingly being reduced to a highly skilled research and development layer for the American technology sector. Ideas are incubated locally, products are built locally, but the companies are ultimately financed, scaled, and frequently acquired by US capital,” said Piotr Mieczkowski, Managing director at Digital Poland Foundation.
Ukraine represents the most acute example of this dynamic. While the number of Ukrainian companies formally included in the ranking has declined sharply since 2021, many continue to maintain engineering and R&D operations within Ukraine despite relocating corporate headquarters abroad to secure international financing and ensure business continuity.
A new generation of CEE champions emerging
The report also reveals accelerating generational change within the regional ecosystem. Companies founded between 2017 and 2021 recorded the fastest valuation growth of any cohort, increasing their collective value by 189.09% since the first edition of the ranking.
At the same time, a core group of 49 companies has remained in the Top 100 throughout all five editions of the report, demonstrating the growing stability and resilience of the region’s leading technology players.
“Innovation today is the foundation of competitiveness, resilience and technological sovereignty for Poland and Europe. This is why BGK actively engages in building the innovation financing ecosystem through the Innovate Poland initiative, including the Future Tech Poland fund, as well as through the BGK Vinci investment fund. We also invest directly in funds supporting modern technological infrastructure. The Digital Champions CEE 2026 report demonstrates that our region possesses the talent, ambition and entrepreneurial strength which — with the right support — can translate into the growth of future European and global technology leaders,” said Jarosław Dąbrowski, Member of the Management Board at Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego.
About the report
Digital Champions CEE 2026 is the fifth edition of the annual ranking of the 100 most valuable technology companies in Central and Eastern Europe. The report was first presented to the public at the Private Equity Insights Poland & CEE 2026 conference in Warsaw. The report covers both publicly listed and privately held companies across the broader CEE region, including the Baltic states and non-EU countries such as Serbia and Albania, while excluding Russia, Belarus, and Austria. The report is based on data from leading transaction monitoring platforms such as CB Insights, Crunchbase, Dealroom, PitchBook, Tracxn, PitchBook and Preqin, and is the result of collaboration with selected VC/PE funds and associations in the CEE region. The report is available to download free of charge from the Digital Poland foundation’s website. Arthur D. Little and Poland’s Bank Gospodarstwa Krajowego are strategic partners of the report; Baker McKenzie, MCI Capital and PFR Ventures are partners.
