New funding led by Kleiner Perkins accelerates Poetic’s mission to automate complex, high-stakes business processes at super-human quality and reliability as compared to traditional AI agents

SAN FRANCISCO, June 10, 2026 — Today, Poetic (formerly known as Forge), the company building a new class of software that learns like AI but runs like code, announced that it has raised a $50M Series A at a $500M valuation led by Kleiner Perkins. Founders Fund, First Harmonic and OpenAI also participated in the round.

The industries that power our lives, from healthcare to banking to insurance, still run on decades-old processes and manual work. The underlying software that permeates them has helped, but regular software has been unable to automate the real complexities of these industries with their dynamic nature and unstructured problem spaces. For years, generative AI has promised to solve these problems, yet its impact has remained largely superficial, with arms-length integrations via LLMs that aren’t built to handle mission-critical tasks.

Poetic takes a fundamentally different approach. The company built a new kind of system for the work nothing else could handle — multi-hour processes that run thousands of times a day, demand near-perfect accuracy, and depend on thousands of rules no one ever wrote down. Rather than relying on autonomous “agents” that can be difficult to control, Poetic’s purpose-built programming language lets operators define complex workflows in natural language, then encodes that expertise into deterministic, near-tokenless execution. The result: 99% accuracy on processes companies have failed to automate for decades, at a fraction of the cost of traditional AI agents.

“Right now in AI, there’s too much attention on quick demos and shiny objects, and not enough on outcomes,” said Markie Wagner, CEO and Founder of Poetic. “We built a new kind of software that learns like AI but runs like code, so the hardest work in your business finally gets done reliably, allowing your business to evolve faster and operate at a scale that was previously impossible.”

Poetic is already deployed at some of the world’s largest financial services organizations, having driven double-digit millions in savings for Fortune 500 companies automating their most difficult, high-stakes processes like transaction monitoring and disputes investigations. The company reached an eight-figure run rate in 2025 with just four employees.

At SoFi, the public US bank, Poetic reached 99%+ quality executing fraud investigations end-to-end in just five weeks. At AIG, one of the largest insurance companies, Poetic similarly reached 99%+ accuracy on a complex, multi-hour process that previously required significant manual effort.

According to SoFi CEO Anthony Noto, “In just weeks, Poetic was able to execute many of our fraud processes end-to-end, all while improving quality metrics and the member experience. With auto-decisioning, members get access restored right away, instead of days. As we’ve scaled across the business, we’ve seen 100% process adherence, even in our most complex compliance investigations.”

“Markie is one of the most prescient founders I’ve encountered on AI, and I’ve had a front row seat since the beginning,” said Leigh Marie Braswell, Partner at Kleiner Perkins who led the Series A. “What Poetic has built is genuinely different – a platform that can execute the complex, high-stakes processes that large enterprises actually run, with accuracy that exceeds what human teams can deliver. The fact that they were able to automate at the largest companies with the highest requirements is a reflection of how deeply the product works. And they’ve done so with one of the strongest teams – leaders from Palantir, UiPath, Ramp, Scale, Retool, and many more.”

With this new funding, Poetic will scale its forward-deployed team, expand into new complex industries, and bring its platform to more of the world’s largest enterprises.

“The enterprise AI landscape is littered with pilots that never made it to production,” said Wagner. “For us, we’ve had a 100% pilot to production conversion rate. Our technology works, and we hire the best of the best – because we’re not here to run pilots. We’re here to transform businesses.”

SOURCE Poetic

Calibrate Ventures leads investment in code-first engineering intelligence; deepens analysis and expands capabilities connecting code changes to quality, security, and technical debt

BOSTON, June 10, 2026 — Flux, the code–first engineering intelligence platform, today announced $5 million in new funding led by Calibrate Ventures, with participation from existing investors True Ventures and Glasswing Ventures. The capital will accelerate product development and go-to-market efforts, helping engineering leaders stay ahead as AI reshapes software development.

Engineering leaders are losing visibility into the work actually happening across their organizations, turning engineering into a black box at the moment clarity matters most. Traditional platforms, built for a human-paced world and reliant on manually updated ticketing systems, weren’t designed to keep up. Flux gives engineering leaders ground–truth visibility into codebases by analyzing code changes and surfacing risk, technical debt, and team dynamics, enabling them to ship faster without losing control.

“Flux insights are based on the source of truth, the code, so leaders can lean into AI without flying blind,” said Ted Julian, CEO and Founder, Flux. “Every other major business function has a system of record. Engineering needs one that’s ready for the Age of AI. We’re building that system around the code itself, so leaders can easily and confidently answer the questions that matter most: Are we really getting value from AI? Where could we be doing better? Is our AI transformation creating risk we can’t see?”

One example is Cobalt, the pioneer of penetration testing as a service (PTaaS) and a leading provider of human-led, AI-powered offensive security, where AI-assisted development has become central to engineering culture and reshaped output. Flux’s work–type charts turned a year of intuition into hard data, revealing a clear shift from maintenance to feature delivery that Finance used to pursue increased R&D tax credit eligibility.

“There is so much enthusiasm now. We’ve brought playfulness back into building software, and it’s paying off,” said Mike Garon, VP of Engineering, Cobalt. “Engineers are exploring ideas freely, then turning the best ones into production-ready capabilities that move the needle for customers.”

“Engineering leaders don’t need more dashboards. They need a direct line into how their code is evolving day to day,” said Jason Schoettler, Co–Founder and Managing Partner, Calibrate Ventures. “Flux’s code–first approach gives them exactly that, tying code changes to quality, security, and business impact. We’re excited to back Ted and the Flux team.”

Flux will use the new capital to:

• Deepen its AI–powered analysis of complex codebases.
• Expand capabilities linking AI transformation to cost, quality, security, and technical debt.
• Grow its go–to–market and engineering teams.

To learn more about Flux, visit www.askflux.ai.

About Flux
Flux is a code-first engineering intelligence platform that helps engineering leaders make better decisions with ground-truth visibility into the work actually happening across today’s complex, AI-accelerated codebases. Instead of relying on tickets, Flux reveals the work teams are doing, surfaces risk and technical debt, and connects engineering activity to business outcomes. With this visibility, leaders can distinguish innovation from maintenance, spot emerging issues before they become incidents, and understand collaboration patterns to build healthier, higher-performing teams across their engineering organization. Learn more at www.askflux.ai, explore the resource library, and follow Flux on LinkedIn.

About Calibrate Ventures
Calibrate Ventures is a seed-stage venture capital firm investing in deep tech at the forefront of autonomous systems, machine learning, and robotics. The firm backs technical founders applying breakthroughs to transform trillion-dollar industrial and enterprise markets, including manufacturing, logistics, transportation, healthcare, and services.

Media Contact:
Haidee LeClair
978-235-2256
[email protected]

SOURCE Flux

DermiSphere^™, the first of its kind hydrogel Dermal Regeneration Template, attracts world-class financial and strategic investors as clinical momentum accelerates

NEW YORK, June 10, 2026 — FesariusTherapeutics, a commercial-stage medical technology company reimagining dermal repair, today announced the close of an oversubscribed $20 million Series A financing round. The round was anchored by Jefferson Life Sciences (JLS) and joined by Johnson & Johnson (through its corporate venture capital organization, Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC, Inc.), Empire State Development’s NY Ventures, and the American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), marking its inaugural institutional investment. The company’s flagship product, DermiSphere^™, which is the first of its kind hydrogel Dermal Regeneration Template (hDRT) on the U.S. market, was cleared by FDA in 2025 for managing various wound types¹.

The financing marks a significant milestone for Fesarius, validating its technology in the clinic, building commercial momentum across U.S. hospital systems, and positioning the company for its next phase of growth. With this capital, Fesarius will build on its existing commercial presence across multiple U.S. hospital systems by accelerating its commercial infrastructure, including additional direct field representatives to broaden national market coverage, pursue Breakthrough Device Designation with expanded reimbursement pathways and advance the clinical trial for its OneStep procedure – the placement of DermiSphere^™ and a skin graft in a single surgery, which is the subject of a future application for label expansion. This use of the device has the potential to eliminate the second surgery currently required by the current standard of care, which could reduce patient recovery time, pain, and total cost of care.

The $1.6 billion U.S. market for dermal regeneration has seen virtually no innovation over the last 30 years. As the first of its kind hDRT, DermiSphere’s^™ novel dual-density collagen microarchitecture is designed to drive faster cellular infiltration and vascularization to support the body’s natural wound healing process.

“We are excited to support Fesarius’ vision to revolutionize deep wound care and help improve outcomes for millions of patients that require skin grafts. DermiSphere^™ is already making a difference for patients. We believe Fesarius is positioned to redefine the category.” – Laura Lande-Diner, Managing Partner, Jefferson Life Sciences

“New York is building one of the nation’s most dynamic life sciences ecosystems, and companies like Fesarius are exactly why. DermiSphere^™ is the kind of innovation we want developed and scaled here, with the potential to dramatically improve outcomes for patients while creating high-quality jobs and economic opportunity across the state. Through NY Ventures, we’re proud to invest in New York innovators defining the future of medicine.” – Jennifer Tegan, Managing Director, New York Ventures, Empire State Development

“This inaugural investment in Fesarius marks a new chapter for ASPS Ventures, one where we move from advocates to active partners in advancing technologies developed by our members. We are proud to play a role in helping to bring this technology to the patients who need it most.” – Michael Costelloe, Executive Vice President of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and CEO of ASPS Ventures, LLC

“DermiSphere^™ is creating a new frontier in dermal repair by fundamentally changing how surgeons treat seriously destructive skin loss. Patients are experiencing promising outcomes already and this financing accelerates our clinical programs, expands our commercial reach, and ensures that every patient can access the truly remarkable outcomes we are seeing with DermiSphere^™hDRT.” – Tom Roueche, President and CEO, FesariusTherapeutics

About FesariusTherapeutics
FesariusTherapeutics is a commercial-stage medical technology company reimagining dermal repair. Its flagship product, DermiSphere^™ is the first of its kind hydrogel Dermal Regeneration Template (hDRT), with a patented, dual-density collagen microarchitecture that is designed to facilitate cellular integration and vascularization to support wound healing. The device is 510(k)-cleared by FDA for wound management and commercially active across multiple U.S. hospital systems. The company is headquartered in New York and is advancing toward a pivotal clinical trial to support a planned future label expansion and Breakthrough Device Designation. For more information, visit fesariustherapeutics.com.

About Jefferson Life Sciences
Jefferson Life Sciences, part of Jefferson River Capital, is an investment firm committed to advancing transformative innovations in medicine. The firm brings versatile investment structures and a long-term view to support companies across their full lifecycle—from early development through commercialization, in both private and public settings. By combining intelligent financing with deep operational expertise, we help turn bold scientific ideas into meaningful therapeutic solutions for patients in need.

About Empire State Development
Empire State Development is New York’s chief economic development agency, and promotes business growth, job creation, and greater economic opportunity throughout the state. With offices in each of the state’s 10 regions, ESD oversees the Regional Economic Development Councils, supports broadband equity through the ConnectALL office, and is growing the workforce of tomorrow through the Office of Strategic Workforce Development. The agency engages with emerging and next generation industries like clean energy and semiconductor manufacturing looking to grow in New York State, operates a network of assistance centers to help small businesses grow and succeed, and promotes the state’s world class tourism destinations through I LOVE NY. For more information, please visit esd.ny.gov, and connect with ESD on LinkedIn, Facebook, and X.

About Empire State Development’s New York Ventures
New York Ventures, a division of Empire State Development, strategically invests in high-growth companies that leverage technology to solve critical challenges across New York State. Through targeted investments and partnerships, the division expands access to venture capital for underserved regions and traditionally underrepresented entrepreneurs, including women and minority founders and fund managers. By bridging public and private sector resources, NY Ventures is building a dynamic, inclusive startup ecosystem that drives innovation throughout the state.

About the American Society of Plastic Surgeons and ASPS Ventures, LLC
The American Society of Plastic Surgeons (ASPS), founded in 1931, is the largest organization of board-certified plastic surgeons in the world. Representing more than 11,000 physician members globally, the society is recognized as a leading authority and information source on cosmetic and reconstructive plastic surgery. ASPS Ventures, LLC, is the strategic investment arm of the American Society of Plastic Surgeons. The organization invests in emerging technologies across medtech, regenerative medicine, robotics and diagnostics that have the potential to improve patient outcomes and advance the future of plastic and reconstructive surgery. The ASPS Ventures leadership team includes some of the most influential surgeons and innovators in the specialty who focused on supporting companies developing innovative solutions for unmet clinical needs.

Media Contact

Jennifer Hanley
Communications, FesariusTherapeutics
347-819-0402

¹ DermiSphere^™ received FDA 510(k) clearance (K241904) in January 2025. Full indications for use are available in the public 510(k) summary at: https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/cdrh_docs/pdf24/K241904.pdf

SOURCE FesariusTherapeutics, Inc

Funding led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from a16z speedrun, Designer Fund, and Essence VC, will expand Fearn’s AI-native patent platform built for a first-to-file world

SAN FRANCISCO, June 10, 2026 — Fearn, the AI-native patent platform, today announced a $5.5 million seed round led by Kindred Ventures, with participation from a16z speedrun, Designer Fund and Essence VC. The funding will expand Fearn’s purpose-built patent models and product capabilities — including automated labeled figure generation — that let any inventor, from a solo researcher to an enterprise R&D team, draft a Big Law quality patent. By cutting patent drafting from 50+ hours to just 20 minutes and reducing costs by up to 96%, Fearn lets any inventor file faster than even the best-resourced IP organizations today.

Every patent system in the world is now first-to-file, and the priority filing date is what matters — not who invented first, but who filed first. This has produced a quiet two-tier system. Inventors with access to elite in-house IP teams can file in 48 hours, while everyone else waits weeks. Those weeks make the difference between saying yes to a speaking invitation and turning it down, between publishing and staying silent, between closing a deal and watching it slip. Those weeks are, very often, the difference between winning and losing.

“Patents are how inventors turn ideas into lasting value, but in a first-to-file system, the priority date is everything, and access to fast priority dates has been gated by cost, complexity, and institutional connections for far too long,” said Han Kim, co-founder and CEO of Fearn. “I spent years in Big Law drafting patents the traditional way before building Fearn, and experienced firsthand what the gap looks like. Innovation moves at one speed and protection moves at another, and that mismatch is where inventors lose ground. We built Fearn so protection moves at the speed of the work itself — leveling the playing field for a solo researcher and an enterprise R&D team alike.”

Fearn’s co-founders bring a rare combination of patent law experience and original technical research. Han Kim previously drafted and prosecuted patent applications across software, life sciences, and mechanical arts as a scientific analyst at Morrison Foerster and conducted bio-inspired neural algorithms research as a PhD student at Caltech. Co-founder and CTO Angela Gao completed her PhD at Caltech under Professor Katie Bouman — where she and Han first met — with peer-reviewed work on physics-aligned generative models published at NeurIPS, CVPR, and TMLR. She also developed proprietary AI models at Google Research and now leads Fearn’s technical work.

Fearn is not a wrapper on a general-purpose model. The company’s architecture composes dozens of small models — some LLM-based, some built entirely from scratch — engineered to resist hallucination and to produce drafts with formally verified guarantees against the failure modes that matter most in patent prosecution, including written-description sufficiency under 35 U.S.C. § 112(a) and the figure-labeling requirements of 37 C.F.R. § 1.84(p)(5) and MPEP § 608.01(g). Several of Fearn’s models are built on a deliberate inversion of standard technical practice: rather than training on large, noisy corpora, they are designed to extract maximum signal from small, hand-corrected, expert-labeled datasets — the regime that truly matches what patent prosecution requires.

“Our world is accelerating due to speedups in technology and science, due to human ingenuity and AI model advancements. Intellectual property is the record-of-truth for technology, the design, engineering, and science carta for the world’s industries, and the law and economics code by which we operate as innovators and capital markets,” said Steve Jang, Founder and Managing Partner at Kindred Ventures. “To modernize this critical cortex of our innovation economy, Fearn is developing custom IP-specific models for deeptech, biotech, and hardware companies to quicken and accelerate their drafting and enforceability, and also a multi-model agent harness and patent drafting agent that orchestrates at the speed of GPU compute these once-antiquated and slow workflows.”

“The massive wave of attention on our ambient robotics thesis and inaugural product, the Lume, meant we needed to move incredibly fast to protect our technology,” said Aaron Tan, CEO and Co-Founder of Syncere. “Traditional patent drafting takes months of man-hours — and lots of precious capital — that a pre-seed startup just can’t spare. Fearn changed the game for us, turning our engineering explanations into high-quality drafts in minutes and a fraction of the usual cost, allowing us to lock down our IP overnight and ensure it was fully protected.”

Fearn makes zero external API calls to outside AI models. The company self-hosts every model in its stack, eliminating the indemnification and public-disclosure risks that have made enterprise IP teams wary of generative AI. Enterprise customers can choose customer-hosted VPC, single-tenant VPC, or multi-tenant VPC deployment; all customer data is held under AES-256 encryption, with SOC 2, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, and GDPR compliance.

Fearn is already trusted by engineers and scientists at companies including Unity, Dandelion Energy, Serova Bio, Capsule, Syncere, Sans Strings, Taya, and Cainex.

To learn more or start drafting for a flat $2,000 per patent, visit https://fearn.ai/.

About Fearn
Fearn is the AI-native patent platform built for a first-to-file world. Founded in 2025 and headquartered in San Francisco, Fearn pairs purpose-built, hallucination-resistant models with automated labeled-figure generation to take inventions from disclosure to filing-ready draft in minutes, at a flat $2,000 per patent. Inventors take the finished draft to the counsel of their choice. Fearn is trusted by engineers and scientists at leading startups and public companies. Learn more at https://fearn.ai/.

SOURCE Fearn

LONDON, June 10, 2026 — Mindflair plc, the AIM-quoted company focused on investing in Artificial Intelligence (“AI”) related technology, is pleased to announce that MySafeDrive Limited (“CameraMatics”), a portfolio company in Sure Valley Ventures’ (“SVV”) first fund (“SVV1”), in which Mindflair holds an interest, has raised up to €49 million in new funding for expansion from  a consortium led by Blume Equity, Ireland Strategic Investment Fund and Goodbody Capital Partners.

As part of this transaction, a portion of SVV1’s investment in CameraMatics will be repaid to SVV1 investors which will equate to €280,000 in cash being received by Mindflair. The amount repaid effectively returns the initial investment made by SVV1 in CameraMatics, whilst still enabling a shareholding in the company to be retained by SVV1.  Furthermore, in July 2025, Mindflair, along with a small consortium of investors, provided CameraMatics with a working capital facility to help fund the company whilst it sought a significant tranche of longer-term funding.  This facility is also being repaid which will result in a further cash return of €320,000 to Mindflair, representing a 78% cash return on this additional investment made. 

Mindflair therefore expects to receive a cash inflow, in aggregate, of €600,000 whilst still retaining an interest in CameraMatics via SVV1, thereby being well positioned to make further returns from this investment as the company, with the necessary funds in place, implements its expansion strategy. 

Furthermore, Sure Ventures plc, the London listed venture capital fund, in which Mindflair has a 24.4% shareholding, is also expected to receive cash proceeds from this transaction, amounting to an aggregate figure of €880,000.

CameraMatics has an AI platform enabling transport fleet managers to reduce risk, increase driver safety and comply with growing industry governance and compliance.  Since it was founded, CameraMatics has made significant progress in both the UK and US in terms of winning new contracts.

CameraMatics has built one of the leading connected fleet intelligence platforms in the market, combining AI-driven video intelligence, advanced driver assistance systems and real-time operational analytics to help commercial fleet operators improve safety, reduce operational risk and lower carbon emissions.

CameraMatics’ mission is to reduce driving and work-related accidents to zero by transforming driver behaviour, improving fleet visibility and raising driving standards globally through advanced AI-powered technology. The company continues to invest heavily in innovation, machine learning, predictive safety technologies and connected fleet intelligence solutions designed to reshape commercial driving standards worldwide.

The company has delivered consistently strong revenue growth since it was founded, expanding its customer base across international and domestic markets and securing leading blue-chip customers, accelerating enterprise adoption. Now serving nearly 1,000 fleet customers, CameraMatics supports operations across thousands of commercial vehicles throughout the UK, Ireland, mainland Europe and the US. The company employs more than 150 people across offices in Dublin, Waterford, Darlington, London, Amsterdam, Barcelona and the United States.

Recent enterprise contract wins include major organisations such as Royal Mail, Calor Gas, Wolseley, XPO and DFDS, while in the US, the company has expanded significantly through deployments with NASDAQ-listed Installed Building Products, which operates across more than 250 depots nationwide.

Over the past two years, CameraMatics has experienced particularly strong momentum in the enterprise fleet segment, where demand for AI-powered safety, compliance and operational efficiency solutions continues to accelerate across logistics, distribution, utilities and infrastructure sectors.

The investment will be used to accelerate CameraMatics’ go-to-market expansion, strengthen its enterprise sales and customer success capabilities, further invest in AI and sustainability-focused product innovation, and support the company’s continued growth across North America and mainland Europe.

This realisation represents a significant cash inflow for Mindflair compared to the Company’s current market capitalisation of £2.6 million.  Furthermore, this is the sixth cash realisation achieved to date by SVV1 and follows on closely from the substantial return and cash proceeds of €2.6 million generated from the sale of Getvisibility in April 2025, thereby further demonstrating the current attractiveness and future potential of the Company’s investment portfolio.

Nicholas Lee, Director of Mindflair plc, commented:

“This is another excellent result for Mindflair which enables the Company to achieve a further significant cash realisation whilst still retaining an investment in an exciting company on a growth trajectory with new funding of up to €49 million.  This also highlights the potential value within Mindflair’s portfolio and the potential for further substantial returns from our underlying investments.”

The Directors of the Company are responsible for the release of this announcement. The person who arranged for the release of this information is Nicholas Lee, a director of the Company.

Enquiries:

Notes to Editors

Mindflair plc (AIM: MFAI) is an investment company providing investors with access to a portfolio of next generation technology businesses focused on AI with significant growth potential. The Company is building an investment portfolio of high-tech businesses focused on Artificial Intelligence, across such areas as Internet of Things, Cyber Security, Machine Learning, Immersive Technologies and Big Data, which the Board believes demonstrate evidence of traction and the potential for exponential growth, due to increasing global demand for development in these sectors. For further information, visit: http://www.mindflair.tech/.

Cameramatics has an AI  platform enabling transport fleet managers to reduce risk, increase driver safety and comply with growing industry governance and compliance.  It has made significant progress in both the UK and US in terms of winning new contracts.

SOURCE Mindflair Plc

NEW YORK, June 9, 2026 — Pogo today launched the world’s first AI researcher that puts brands in direct conversation with thousands of purchase-verified buyers of any product. All in a matter of hours, at a scale never before possible.

The company also announced that it has raised $32 million in funding to date from leading investors, founders and creators, including Josh Buckley (Buckley Ventures), Mantis (The Chainsmokers), 20VC (Harry Stebbings), Village Global, Lenny Rachitsky, the founders of Honey, and more.

Founded in 2020, Pogo operates a consumer app with 3 million opted-in U.S. users, with visibility into 1 in every 150 U.S. shopping trips – across $470+ billion in transaction value. Brands tap this network to reach and understand real customers through AI-moderated interviews, quantitative surveys, and always-on behavioral intelligence.

The Pogo app has been rated the #1 loyalty app in the U.S. by Newsweek two years running, because it helps everyday people earn money from their own data. Millions of Americans are able to earn and save hundreds of dollars a year by sharing their data, including card transactions, digital and physical receipts, app usage, and location visits – with transparent controls over which data use cases they participate in. Pogo users also save automatically via fee refunds, class action settlements, insurance savings, and more.

Traditional consumer research has long been plagued by issues with fraud, overrun by survey bots and people lying to qualify for interviews. Brands making billion dollar decisions based on data that they can’t trust. And consumers haven’t fared much better – sitting through endless screener questions, only to get disqualified before the study begins. It’s a broken experience on both sides. Pogo was built to fix that.

Pogo gives brands the ability to talk to real, purchase-verified respondents based on observed SKU-level transaction data, at a level of granularity that’s never existed before: buyers of a product that just launched in stores last week, or a high-value customer who just churned to a competitor.

In the Pogo Platform, brands simply type the audience they want to reach. Pogo’s AI finds the right people in the Pogo network, generates a discussion guide, launches thousands of AI-moderated video interviews simultaneously, and delivers transcripts, highlight reels, and actionable insights in hours. Brands can also run quantitative surveys against the same audiences. Always-on triggers can automatically engage consumers the moment behaviors change, capturing feedback while decisions are still fresh.

Dozens of the world’s largest consumer brands, consulting firms, and investment funds already use Pogo to drive measurable impact.

“Prior to Pogo, the platform we were using had a couple of limitations. We really didn’t have confidence in the output of those surveys because people could tell you whatever they wanted in order to qualify,” said Shannon Clayton, Head of Private Label Marketing at OFI, a $20B private label food manufacturer. “With Pogo’s receipt verification, we felt so much more confident in the data. We presented the information internally and immediately made a business decision. That doesn’t usually happen. Ultimately, that’s going to lead to a multi-million dollar business impact for us.”

Client applications span every category where consumer behavior matters:

• A leading CPG interviewed buyers of a newly launched product, uncovered packaging flaws, and quickly adjusted its supply chain before broader rollout
• A top tech company interviewed robotaxi users to understand why some ride again – and why others churn after their first ride
• A Fortune 500 food manufacturer built a data-backed multi-year view of how GLP-1s are changing what people buy
• A leading investor used Pogo to identify paying Gen Z subscribers of an AI tool as part of investment due diligence

As AI exhausts public data, the real competitive advantage for brands will be high-fidelity consumer feedback.

“If we do our job right, Pogo becomes the world’s most trusted source of human truth. The facts of what people bought, when, and how often, but also the story behind it: the emotion, the context, what drove them,” said co-founder and CEO Dom Wong. “The result is a better system for all sides: smarter decisions for businesses, better products and services for consumers, and a new way for people to earn by sharing their lived experiences.”

About Pogo

Pogo is an AI research platform powered by purchase-verified consumer data. Through its consumer app, more than 3 million opted-in Americans earn money from their own data by sharing transactions, receipts, app usage, and location visits. Brands use Pogo to reach verified buyers through AI-moderated interviews, quantitative surveys, and always-on behavioral intelligence. With visibility into 1 in every 150 U.S. shopping trips, Pogo helps companies understand the people behind every purchase. Pogo has raised $32 million in funding and was founded in 2020 by Oskar Melking, Shikhar Mohan, and Dom Wong. Learn more at joinpogo.com.

SOURCE Pogo Technologies

Supports newly public companies like Neptune Insurance Holdings Inc. following its NYSE listing

CHICAGO, June 9, 2026 — Vinyl Equity, a financial technology infrastructure company for capital markets and corporate transactions and SEC-registered transfer agent, today announced a $20 million Series A led by Jump Capital, with strategic participation from MUFG Innovation Partners (MUIP, the corporate venture capital arm of Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group) and continued backing from Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Infinity Ventures, and Cambrian Fintech.

The funding comes at a time of rapid innovation across the capital markets, as companies look to improve how they connect to and operate within them. As ownership models evolve, legacy infrastructure is increasingly being replaced, exposing the limitations of disconnected systems and manual processes and creating operational risk for issuers.

“The frustration we hear from issuers is consistent,” said Rob Schoder, CEO and Co-Founder of Vinyl Equity. “The systems they use to interact with the capital markets were built for a different era, and the workarounds that held things together no longer scale. We’re delivering adaptable infrastructure that solves immediate needs for issuers and their shareholders to ensure they’re prepared now and for the next evolution.”

Replacing Legacy Capital Markets Infrastructure
Vinyl replaces legacy workflows with modern systems that deliver real-time accuracy, auditability, and control across the full lifecycle of capital markets and corporate transactions in private and public markets, including shareholder recordkeeping, equity operations, paying agency, and transaction workflows.

Vinyl’s payments solutions offer compliant, secure distributions through a single integrated workflow, enabling issuers to execute distributions at scale without introducing additional intermediaries or manual reconciliation. Built with integrated document collection, KYC/KYB controls, tax filing, audit trails, and fraud prevention at the workflow layer, the platform replaces paper-based processes with a streamlined digital experience designed for the regulatory requirements of modern capital markets.

Vinyl is also deepening its capabilities through integrations with leading equity plan administrators. By connecting transfer agency and equity plan administration through APIs, vested and exercised shares are issued and reconciled in real time, eliminating manual data entry and settlement delays that have historically defined the category and, in some cases, led to costly delays for plan participants.

Vinyl’s infrastructure is designed not just for the issuer, but for every participant in the capital markets ecosystem including equity plan administrators, corporate counsel, brokers, and shareholders.

“We made deliberate architectural choices to ensure Vinyl could operate reliably in regulated, high-stakes market environments,” said Poornaprajna Udupi, CTO and Co-Founder of Vinyl Equity. “That meant prioritizing consistency, auditability, and system integrity across the entire issuer lifecycle from the start so that core workflows function predictably under real market conditions—and the foundation is already in place for what comes next.”

Issuers Seeking Technology Forward User Experience
Vinyl is already supporting a growing roster of publicly traded and private companies across capital markets and corporate transactions. Among them is Neptune Insurance Holdings Inc., for which Vinyl served as transfer agent following its listing on the New York Stock Exchange, managing shareholder onboarding, recordkeeping, and transaction processing.

“Vinyl’s technology-forward approach gave us confidence we had a partner built for where capital markets are going, not where they’ve been,” said Jim Steiner, Chief Operating and Chief Financial Officer of Neptune Insurance Holdings Inc. “As we entered the public markets, we needed a partner that could handle complexity without introducing operational risk, and that’s exactly what Vinyl delivered.”

Positioned for Market Evolution
As capital markets continue to evolve, infrastructure must be able to adapt to new models of ownership and participation without requiring fundamental redesign. That shift is already underway, with emerging models such as tokenization beginning to reshape how ownership is recorded and transferred across markets.

“Core infrastructure in capital markets has remained largely unchanged for decades, even as the demands on those systems have grown significantly,” said Yelena Shkolnik, Partner at Jump Capital. “The tokenization of securities is not a future scenario, it is an active development that most of the existing infrastructure is unprepared for. Vinyl’s platform is already operating in today’s markets while positioned to support how capital markets will continue to evolve.”

Vinyl will use the Series A to expand its engineering, compliance, and go-to-market teams, accelerating infrastructure development across capital markets and corporate transactions, deepening support for issuers across private and public markets, and building the systems that will underpin compliant operations as regulatory frameworks develop.

To learn more about Vinyl Equity, visit www.vinylequity.com.

ABOUT VINYL EQUITY
Vinyl Equity is building modern infrastructure for capital markets and corporate transactions. The company supports public and private companies in IPOs, mergers and acquisitions, equity plan administration, and ongoing issuer operations as an SEC-registered Transfer Agent. Vinyl is backed by Jump Capital, MUFG Innovation Partners , Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Infinity Ventures, and Cambrian Fintech.

SOURCE Vinyl Equity

Backed by Precursor Ventures, Acumen Americas, and Bloomerang founder Jay Love, the newly relaunched platform serves more than 200,000+ beneficiaries across 36 partner organizations nationwide – boasting 100% retention rate

OAKLAND, Calif., June 9, 2026 — Campground, the purpose-built operations platform for social impact programs, today announced that it has raised over $2.2 million to date from Precursor Ventures, Acumen Americas, Underdog Labs, Access Georgia Foundation, Bloomerang founder Jay Love and angel investors.

Workforce development, human services, and community-based programs deliver vital services across the country, but the tools they rely on weren’t designed for their work. Generic CRMs, disconnected spreadsheets, and costly custom-built systems drain staff capacity, fragment critical data, and make it nearly impossible to demonstrate outcomes to funders and policymakers. At a time of deeper funding cuts and increasing demand, staff are spending hours wrangling data instead of focusing on the people they serve.

Campground replaces that patchwork with a single, purpose-built platform that handles participant tracking, employer engagement, task management, and real-time reporting – now enhanced with AI tools designed to help staff work faster without replacing the human judgment their programs depend on – at a fraction of the cost of legacy alternatives.

“As a former nonprofit program leader and board member, I’ve seen frontline staff delivering extraordinary results every day, but they’re wrestling with tools that were never built for them,” said Sruti Bharat, Founder and CEO of Campground. “In this time of budget cuts, staff don’t have the capacity to spend hours entering and cleaning data; they should be out in their communities providing services. With this funding and a new product foundation for responsible AI usage, Campground is making it possible for organizations to scale their work, report on outcomes, and raise more money – without spending six figures and years on tech projects.”

In East Oakland, the Career Exploration Experience (CEE) – a collaboration between Rise East and the East Oakland Youth Development Center – turned to Campground to replace paper-based workflows, spreadsheet overload, and duplicated data that were straining a rapidly growing program. With Campground, CEE consolidated its application and participant tracking into a single platform with automated workflows, supporting 958 students with work-based learning and coaching, saving $100,000, and achieving a 99% participant satisfaction rate.

“Before Campground, we were managing a growing program with tools that couldn’t keep up,” said Selena Wilson, CEO, East Oakland Youth Development Center. “Now our data is organized, our workflows are more sustainable, and our participants have an interface that is really easy to use. That means we can spend more of our time providing services and less time figuring out logistics.”

In Missouri, the Missouri Works Initiative – in partnership with the Associated General Contractors of Missouri (AGC-MO) – turned to Campground to help address the state’s skilled construction labor shortage. The partnership supports graduates of the Apprenticeship Ready Construction (ARC) program, whose connection to hiring contractors had depended almost entirely on quarterly in-person hiring events. With Campground, contractors now have year-round access to vetted graduate profiles, trade interests, and certifications, while program staff track engagement and outcomes in one platform. Today, 166 ARC graduates and 36 contractors are actively using the system to connect across Missouri.

“When Campground showed up, we knew this is exactly what we were looking for to connect contractors with young people looking for construction jobs,” said Len Toenjes, President, AGC of Missouri.

Campground serves as the digital hub for the initiative: helping employers identify qualified candidates while giving program administrators a centralized platform to manage participant engagement, employer relationships, and workforce outcomes.

Since its founding, Campground has served more than 200,000 beneficiaries across 36 partner organizations, including statewide service corps programs, regional workforce initiatives, and community-based youth development organizations. The platform has delivered over $20 million in technology savings to its partners, boasts 100% enterprise retention, and has helped support 1,400 job placements nationwide. Every organization that has invested in Campground remains a partner today, a testament to Campground’s ability to deliver value to clients.

“Over the decade plus we’ve been investing, we’ve observed the social impact sector underserved by technology for too long,” said Yichen Feng, Investment Director, Acumen Americas. “Sruti and her team understand this market deeply because they’ve lived it. Campground isn’t adapting a tool built for the private sector, it’s purpose-built for the way these programs actually operate. That’s why their partners stay and that’s why we’ve invested in them.”

“Campground is solving a problem with real economic gravity. As nonprofits and government agencies face tightening budgets, proving impact with data is existential, not optional,” said Charles Hudson, Managing Partner and Founder, Precursor Ventures. “Campground is helping create an entirely new class of software buyer in a historically underserved market, and that’s why we invested in the company.”

“I’ve spent my career building technology for the social sector, and I know how rare it is to find a founder who truly understands both the mission and the operational reality,” said Jay Love, Founder of Bloomerang. “Campground is solving one of the biggest infrastructure gaps in this space, and they’re doing it at a price point that makes it accessible to the programs that need it most.”

About Campground
Campground is an operating system for running real-world social impact programs that turns everyday operations — like tracking attendance, engagement, milestones, and outcomes — into clear, credible insight. Built by and for program managers, it brings participants, workflows, and outcomes together in one place so that frontline teams can stop managing tools and start running programs with confidence. What once lived across spreadsheets, inboxes, and drives becomes a structured, searchable, shared system for record. To date, Campground has served more than 200,000 beneficiaries across 36 partner organizations with zero enterprise churn. Learn more at getcampground.com

SOURCE Campground Systems

Insight Partners joins NEA and Madrona as Golden Analytics launches public beta following significant early demand

BELLEVUE, Wash., June 9, 2026 — Golden Analytics, the AI-native analytics platform built to make everyone extraordinary with data, today announced a $14 million seed extension led by Insight Partners, bringing total seed funding to $21 million. The round follows significant early demand for the Bellevue-based company since its April launch from stealth, backed by NEA and Madrona, and coincides with its public beta launch.

Nearly 1,000 companies have requested early access to Golden Analytics in the weeks since launch, reflecting the demand for a new generation of analytics built for the AI era. Golden’s offerings instantly surface insight, patterns, and visualizations the moment users connect their data.

“Our early design partners tell us Golden is faster, more flexible, and more empowering than anything they’ve used,” said Francois Ajenstat, Founder and CEO, Golden Analytics. “We’re hearing from companies of every size and across every industry who are ready for a new generation of analytics built for the AI age, from the ground up.”

Companies already working with Golden are beginning to see the impact of an AI-native approach to analytics.

“At Carta, we analyze a proprietary data set of more than $1.2T in investments to deliver insights to the private markets. As AI reshapes how people access data, we evaluated our legacy stack against AI-native tools looking for faster, deeper analysis without compromising the integrity of our customers’ data,” said Ashley Neville, Director of Insights, Carta. “Golden gave us the confidence to move on from legacy contracts. I can’t wait for our audience to see the new interactive capabilities we’re adding to the Data Desk.”

Insight Partners has backed category-defining data companies for over two decades. Their decision to lead this extension reflects a view that the market is headed toward an inflection point, and that Golden’s architecture is well-positioned to lead it.

“Business intelligence is one of the most critical and entrenched categories in enterprise software, yet BI tools have followed the same playbook for decades,” said Ganesh Bell, Managing Director, Insight Partners. “Rather than retrofit AI onto a legacy product, Golden Analytics is rethinking the blueprint entirely, starting from first principles. Francois and his team combine category expertise with the willingness to start from scratch. We look forward to partnering with them as they scale this next chapter, set to redefine a category ripe for transformation.”

Golden Analytics is an AI-native analytics workspace where AI works directly on the data itself, rather than as a feature added to an older architecture. It connects to existing data sources – cloud warehouses such as Snowflake, Databricks, Google BigQuery, and Amazon Redshift, alongside files like Google Sheets and CSVs – surfaces patterns and insights automatically, and gives every user, whatever their technical background, a path from raw data to a finished analysis in one session.

Golden Analytics is now available in public beta. Sign-up for early access at www.goldenanalytics.com.  

About Golden Analytics
Golden Analytics is an AI-native analytics platform that instantly surfaces insights, patterns, and visualizations the moment you connect your data — eliminating the blank-screen frustration of traditional tools. Built around a unique “slider of autonomy,” it lets users choose exactly how much AI assistance they want, from fully manual exploration to fully automated dashboard creation, while always staying in control. Golden is backed by NEA, Madrona, and Insight Partners. Learn more at www.goldenanalytics.com.

About Insight Partners
Insight Partners is a global software investor partnering with high-growth technology, software, and Internet startup and ScaleUp companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. As of December 31, 2025, the firm has over $90B in regulatory assets under management. Insight Partners has invested in more than 900 companies worldwide and has seen over 55 portfolio companies achieve an IPO. Headquartered in New York City, Insight has a global presence with leadership in London, Tel Aviv, and the Bay Area. Insight’s mission is to find, fund, and work successfully with visionary executives, providing them with tailored, hands-on software expertise along their growth journey, from their first investment to IPO. For more information on Insight and all its investments, visit insightpartners.com or follow us on X @insightpartners.

SOURCE Golden Analytics