Climate tech funds show positive trajectory despite fundraising headwinds

SAN FRANCISCO, April 21, 2025 — The climate tech sector is seeing signs of recovery as venture capital (VC) is flowing into energy, manufacturing, and carbon tech, according to the latest report from Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a division of First Citizens Bank. Additionally, Climate tech funds are outperforming overall VC, reaching a 9% higher internal rate of return (IRR) in the 2020-2024 fund vintage.

“With continued investor interest, the Climate tech sector is showing reasons for optimism this year,” said Dan Baldi, National Head of SVB’s Climate Technology and Sustainability practice. “Clean fuels, dispatchable renewables and carbon tech are taking the spotlight, sparked by a shift toward electrification and ongoing goals to reduce emissions.”

Leveraging SVB’s proprietary data and insights, the Future of Climate Tech 2025 Report reveals the current fundraising landscape, sector trends, and explores how the industry is evolving to address challenges across the innovation economy.

SVB’s Future of Climate Tech report analyzes key themes shaping the future of climate technology, including:

• Raising Equity is Tough, But Signs of Growth Persist: 57% of US VC-backed climate tech companies need to raise in the next twelve months even as more than half of companies are reducing burn YoY. Yet there are encouraging signs of growth – trailing 12-month venture investment is increasing, company formation remains strong, and early-stage activity is still vibrant.
• Early-Stage Resiliency: Early-stage investment has remained more resilient than later-stage activity over the last three years, showing a healthy pipeline of companies fueling future growth of the industry.
• Electrification Continues, Demand Accelerates: By 2030, half of electricity generation will come from renewable resources. Climate tech solutions from storage to demand response and improved transmission are poised to transform the energy and power sector.

Key findings from the Future of Climate Tech Report include:

• Valuations and Rounds on the Rise: After valuations bottomed out in 2023, they are on the rise again with climate tech valuations overtaking VC investment at the later-stage. Aside from seed, where median deal sizes have held steady, rounds are getting bigger. Series B and C+ rounds reached decade highs of $30M and $60M, respectively in 2024.
• Extinguishing Burn, Improving Margins: Margins improved, but revenue growth rates fell. Climate tech hardware companies saw growth rates fall from a median of 58% at the end of 2021 to just 19% by the end of 2023. While growth rates have since marginally improved, climate tech software companies are seeing higher profit margins than hardware companies. The median climate tech software company with over $50M in revenue saw a 30% higher profit margin in 2024.
• All-Time High for Clean Power Deals: Bolstered by incentives within the IRA and Chips and Science Act that improve profit margins for many renewable energy producers, clean energy and power companies closed 382 deals and surpassed $7B investment in 2024, up 15% YoY and a more than 3x increase over pre-COVID levels.
• M&A Back to 2020 Levels: Between mid-2023 and early 2024 deals coming from financial buyers jumped from 15% of transactions to 40% of transactions, signaling that financial buyers may be stepping in as VC investment remains low.

Learn More
To read the complete 2025 Future of Climate Tech report, click here: The Future of Climate Tech 2025

SVB is a leader in providing market insights on sectors across the innovation economy. For the complete library of SVB’s signature reports, please visit Market Research Industry Trends & Insights | Silicon Valley Bank (svb.com) 

About Silicon Valley Bank
Silicon Valley Bank (SVB), a division of First Citizens Bank, is the bank of some of the world’s most innovative companies and investors. SVB provides commercial banking to companies in the technology, life science and healthcare, private equity, and venture capital industries. SVB operates in centers of innovation throughout the United States, serving the unique needs of its dynamic clients with deep sector expertise, insights, and connections. SVB’s parent company, First Citizens BancShares, Inc. (NASDAQ: FCNCA), is a top 20 U.S. financial institution with over $200 billion in assets. First Citizens Bank, Member FDIC. Learn more at svb.com

SOURCE Silicon Valley Bank

NewCo’s Launch Delivers Same-Day Funding Access to Businesses Across Canada, Including Quebec

MIAMI, April 21, 2025 — NewCo Capital Group, a leading provider of innovative business financing, has expanded into Canada, marking a key milestone in its global growth strategy. With nationwide service now available across every Canadian province and territory, NewCo brings accessible, non-bank funding solutions to small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs).

The move strengthens NewCo’s international footprint as part of its broader global initiative in conjunction with Bizcap, a leading provider of business loans in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, and Singapore. The Canadian launch began in January 2025 and now includes full service in Quebec, an area historically underserved by specialty financing providers.

“The uptick in demand we’ve seen across Canada since our initial rollout has been both strong and consistent,” said Omer Navon, Director of Operations for NewCo Canada. “We’ve built the infrastructure to scale efficiently across all provinces and territories, including Quebec, ensuring businesses receive timely access to capital with the same level of speed, service, and reliability that defines NewCo’s model.”

Canada’s SME sector forms a significant part of its economy, yet many entrepreneurs still face barriers to securing fast and flexible financing. NewCo Canada’s entry brings a proven, performance-based model to the Canadian market—one that prioritizes speed, transparency, and simplicity.

Key features of NewCo’s financing solutions include:

• Funding amounts from CAD 10,000 to CAD 2,000,000
• Approvals in as little as three hours
• Funds disbursed within 12 hours
• Evaluation based on business performance, not just credit score

“Expanding into Canada is a defining step in our global roadmap, and one that reflects our commitment to building a truly unified funding ecosystem for SMEs worldwide,” said Albert Gahfi, Co-Founder and CEO of NewCo Capital Group and Capytal.com, and a founding executive across Bizcap’s international entities. “Canada is one of several strategic markets we’re activating as we scale our global footprint and bring smarter capital solutions to SMEs around the world,” Gahfi added.

This strategic expansion comes as part of NewCo’s partnership with Bizcap and reflects the company’s long-term vision to make fast, flexible funding accessible to businesses across international markets. To date, the companies have deployed over $2 billion in financing to more than 45,000 businesses globally.

For more information about NewCo’s expansion into Canada and how to partner, visit www.NewCoCapitalGroup.CA.

About NewCo Capital Group
Founded in 2020, NewCo Capital Group provides fast, flexible, and accessible funding solutions to SMEs in the U.S. and now Canada. With a mission to break down financial barriers for growing businesses, NewCo has earned a 4.8/5 Trustpilot rating and continues to set the standard in alternative finance.

Media Contact:
NewCo Capital Group
Media Department
[email protected]
www.NewCoCapitalGroup.CA

SOURCE NewCo Capital Group

“We are delighted to welcome Jay and Prysm to the Electra family,” said Electra Board Chair John Langford. “They’ve already become an indispensable partner and advisor as we transition from prototype to product with the EL9.”

By integrating blown lift technology with hybrid-electric propulsion, Electra’s 9-passenger EL9 Ultra Short offers a range of transformative dual-use capabilities. It operates with the landing and takeoff versatility of a helicopter, the quiet of an electric vehicle, and the cost advantage and safety of a fixed-wing, fixed-propeller aircraft. With the EL9, commercial operators can connect communities that lack traditional aviation infrastructure, fly into airports with strict noise restrictions, create new opportunities and business models for cargo services, and save travelers significant time.

For defense operators, the EL9 introduces novel logistics and troop transport capabilities, including the ability to take off and land with a low signature in helicopter-sized spaces in remote, austere areas and providing mobile power capabilities while building on the safety, cost, and range advantages of a fixed-wing aircraft.

Electra has secured more than 2,200 pre-orders valued at over $10 billion for the EL9 – marking one of the largest provisional order pipelines in the commercial Advanced Air Mobility sector. Additionally, Electra has won over 20 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) contracts from the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Army, U.S. Navy, and NASA, and is currently performing on a Strategic Funding Increase contract with the U.S. Air Force to develop the EL9 for military use cases.

“At Electra, we are on a mission to deliver a new era of aviation, a leap forward in advanced air mobility that is both transformational and practical,” said Marc Allen, CEO of Electra. “The EL9 Ultra Short opens the door to opportunities to establish new commercial routes, connect communities currently lacking aviation infrastructure, and enable entirely novel logistics capabilities for warfighters. We look forward to working with our partners at Prysm to continue the development of this aircraft and chart a new course for aviation.”

The EL9 delivers up to 3,000 pounds of payload and a range of up to 1,100 nautical miles, with in-flight battery recharging that eliminates the need for ground charging stations. The ability to operate from compact spaces and unimproved surfaces such as grass fields, parking lots, and repurposed heliports opens new routes and economic opportunities, making regional air mobility for passengers and cargo more affordable and accessible than ever before.

“Electra’s EL9 Ultra Short is a game-changing aircraft that unlocks important new capabilities for commercial and defense users,” said Jay Park. “The EL9 is the flagship of Electra’s future family of aircraft that will transform aviation with hybrid-electric technology. We are excited to partner with Marc, John and the team in their commitment to innovating and expanding air mobility solutions.”

Lockheed Martin Ventures, Honeywell, and Safran are among Electra’s strategic investors along with Prysm Capital, Statkraft Ventures, the Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC), and other private investors. 

Electra has grown to roughly 80 employees and established its position as the first mover and category creator in Ultra Short aviation.

About Electra
Electra.aero, Inc. (Electra) is an advanced aerospace company building hybrid-electric Ultra Short aircraft that achieve never-before performance advantages to fly people and cargo seamlessly without airports, emissions, or noise. With the Ultra Short, Electra is pioneering Direct Aviation, the next level of connectivity that brings air travel closer to where we live, work, and play. Electra’s Ultra Short technology delivers 2.5X the payload and 10X longer range with 70% lower operating costs than helicopters and eVTOLs with significantly greater safety and far less certification risk.

Electra’s team includes some of the most respected and successful entrepreneurs and engineers in novel aircraft design, with over 40 prior aircraft successfully developed and/or certified. Electra’s contracted customers include NASA, the U.S. Air Force, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Navy, along with over 2,200 aircraft under Letters of Intent from 50+ commercial customers, including both airlines and helicopter operators.

About Prysm Capital
Prysm Capital is a growth equity firm focused on partnering with founders and management teams who are disrupting industries and building category-leading companies. With offices in New York, Princeton and San Francisco, Prysm acts as a flexible source of growth capital for companies in the technology and consumer sectors. For more information, please visit www.prysmcapital.com.

Investors
[email protected]

Media
[email protected]

SOURCE Electra.aero

Founded by ex-US military and builders behind Lacework, CrowdStrike and Datadog, Kenzo introduces the first true Agentic AI Security Operations Platform—built to support every facet of modern security operations

SAN FRANCISCO, April 21, 2025 — Today, Kenzo Security emerges from stealth after 18 months with $4.5 million in funding from The General Partnership and Michael Coates (former CISO of Mozilla and Twitter). Its Agentic AI Security Operations Platform is purpose-built to help CISOs and security teams do more with less while actually reducing risk.

Kenzo was founded by Harish Singh and Partha Naidu. Harish is a repeat founder and founding engineer behind successful security startups like Lacework and E8 Security, and one of the original minds behind the patented Polygraph technology that redefined cloud security. Partha, a former U.S. Air Force cyber operations leader, later led security product development at Datadog and CrowdStrike, helping shape the next generation of cloud security solutions. Together, they saw the need for a data-driven approach to security operations, going beyond alert triage and addressing real challenges security teams face daily.

“Every security team is trying to figure out how to leverage AI, but most tools simply wrap LLMs around Tier 1 alert handling,” said Harish Singh, CEO and Co-Founder of Kenzo. “Kenzo takes a fundamentally different approach. We’ve built a true platform—not a chatbot— powered by a swarm of specialized agents working together to investigate threats, deploy and tune detections, hunt proactively, and prioritize response in real time.”

At its core, the Kenzo platform deploys a network of domain-specific AI agents trained to handle key functions of the security operations lifecycle. These agents collaborate autonomously on a proprietary data mesh that enables fast, deep, and contextual analysis across an organization’s entire environment with minimal human input.

While many startups are racing to wrap generic AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, or Gemini around basic alert triage, these tools are not optimized for the depth and nuance required in security operations. Autonomous SOCs built on open-source models often become commodities capable of closing alerts, but not reducing risk.

“We invested in Kenzo because they’re solving a real pain point with real technical depth,” said Dan Portillo, co-founder and managing partner at The General Partnership. “The AI SOC Analyst is becoming a commodity. Kenzo’s data-driven, multi-agent approach is what security teams actually need to reduce risk at scale.”

Kenzo’s platform uses a swarm of purpose-built AI agents trained for specific security functions and deployed on a proprietary data mesh architecture. This enables deep collaboration across agents, more consistent and accurate outcomes, and ultimately delivers what security teams need most: meaningful risk reduction at scale.

This approach allows Kenzo to:

• Drive down risk by surfacing only the threats that truly matter while keeping teams focused on high-impact work
• Eliminates alert fatigue and manual busywork by offloading investigations and decisions to AI
• Scales security outcomes without increasing headcount, delivering greater impact while controlling costs

“Kenzo Security’s Agentic AI Architecture helps detection and response teams act faster and smarter, focusing on critical threats and delivering real security outcomes—essential for teams aiming to scale intelligently,” said Michael Coates, Founding Partner at Seven Hill Ventures & former 3x CISO.

The funding will be used to grow Kenzo’s engineering and sales teams to meet early customer demand and to expand the platform’s capabilities while preserving the depth and precision of each specialized security function.

Kenzo currently employs 14 people and plans to grow to 20 by the end of the year.

To learn more, visit kenzo.security.

SOURCE Kenzo Security

ST. PETERSBURG, Fla., April 18, 2025 — Debuting in the venture capital podcasting space, the Emerging Managers Podcast breaks ground covering an in-depth exploration of the often-overlooked landscape of first fund venture capital firms. Hosted by seasoned investor Scott Kelly of Black Dog Venture Partners and Podetize Founder, Tracy Hazzard, this series aims to shed light on the 1,800+ emerging fund managers who are driving innovation and delivering exceptional returns, yet often remain hidden from mainstream attention.

In a venture capital ecosystem where 70-80% of capital flows to a select few established funds, the “Emerging Managers Podcast” seeks to recalibrate the narrative. The podcast dives deep into the unique stories, investment theses, and operational strategies of these emerging fund managers, providing valuable insights for Limited Partners (LPs), angel investors, and entrepreneurs alike.

“We’ve identified a critical disparity in the VC landscape,” states Scott Kelly. “While the lion’s share of capital is concentrated in a small number of mega-funds, our research and conversations reveal that emerging managers are frequently outperforming these giants in terms of alpha and innovation. These are the funds driving the future, and they deserve a larger platform and greater LP engagement.”

Tracy Hazzard adds, “This podcast is about more than just investments; it’s about building trust and fostering connections. By sharing the personal journeys and strategic visions of these fund managers, we aim to demystify the “fund one” experience and create a more equitable playing field. We believe that transparency and dialogue are crucial for the industry’s growth and evolution.”

The “Emerging Managers Podcast” will feature interviews with a diverse array of fund managers from across the globe, covering various sectors and investment strategies and topics such as:

• Origin Stories: How these emerging managers transitioned from entrepreneurs or angel investors to launching their own funds.
• Investment Theses: The specific sectors and technologies these funds are targeting, and why they are outperforming their competition.
• Operational Challenges: The hurdles faced by emerging managers in fundraising, deal flow, and portfolio management and getting beyond that first fund.
• LP Engagement: Strategies for building relationships with LPs and securing more credibility and capital.
• Market Trends: How emerging managers are navigating the current VC landscape and adapting to changing market conditions.

“Our goal is to provide a comprehensive and unbiased look at the emerging manager space,” Kelly explains. “We’ll be asking the tough questions and getting to the heart of what makes these funds tick. We want to be a resource for anyone looking to understand and engage with this vital segment of the venture capital industry.”

The “Emerging Managers Podcast” is available on Apple, Spotify, and all major podcast platforms, including YouTube.

About Scott Kelly & Black Dog Venture Partners:

With over three decades of experience working with both entrepreneurs and investors, Scott Kelly is the CEO of business accelerator Black Dog Venture Partners and founder of VC Fast Pitch. He leverages his innovative skills, extensive experience training thousands of salespeople, and vast network of investors to help founders and investors sustain and scale innovation. Kelly is well known for organizing and hosting monthly investor-founder matchmaking events.

About Tracy Hazzard & Podetize:

Tracy Hazzard is a leading authority in podcasting and media with experience as a speaker, podcaster, and Inc. Innovation columnist, as well as a successful female AI tech founder. As Co-Founder and Director of Applied AI for Podetize, the largest podcast post-production company for independent podcasters and networks, Hazzard provides insights into the intersection of technology, marketing, and media.

Contact:
Scott Kelly
[email protected]

Photo(s):
https://www.prlog.org/13072262

Press release distributed by PRLog

SOURCE Black Dog Venture Partners

Investment to elevate AI, as company continues to accelerate growth strategy of empowering insurance brokers to bind more policies in less time for businesses

NEW YORK, April 17, 2025 — 1Fort, the AI platform for business insurance, today announced it has raised $7.5 million in an oversubscribed funding round led by Bonfire Ventures. The round also included Draper Associates (Tim Draper); Karim Atiyeh, the founder of Ramp; and participation from all existing VCs: Village Global, Operator Partners, 8-Bit Capital, Character VC and Company Ventures. This latest round brings the 1Fort total funding to $10 million.

Insurance brokers and agents face manual, time-consuming processes when serving businesses. Yet 70% of businesses still rely on them for coverage, according to the Hiscox. Despite this reliance, 75% remain underinsured—leaving nearly 24 million businesses exposed as risks grow in severity and frequency with advancing technologies, such as cyber attacks and supply chain disruptions.

1Fort solves these challenges by empowering brokers to bind more top-tier insurance policies for businesses faster using AI. The platform leverages AI to automate various broker workflows, including autofilling insurance applications, retrieving quotes from carriers; comparing coverages; and integrating payment and financing options. Brokers who use 1Fort save on average up to two hours per submission and increase their bind rate by up to 20 percent. Brokers also better retain clients with 1Fort’s complementary risk management software, which businesses manage their policies and proactively prevent claims or losses.

1Fort grew revenue nearly 200% month-over-month in 2024, and has already partnered with over a dozen leading brokerages and A-rated carriers, including Arch, Tokio Marine HCC and Markel. The funding will allow 1Fort to continue to improve the broker experience through AI innovations and talent acquisition and further expand partnerships with carriers and brokers.

“Our mission is to help every business obtain the financial protection they need to keep up with today’s fast-moving risks, and empowering insurance brokers with AI to automate their antiquated workflows is the way to achieving it,” said Anthony Marshi, 1Fort Co-Founder and CEO. “This investment will allow us to grow even faster by doubling down on our AI features and strengthening our broker and carrier partnerships. We’re grateful for our investors who share our vision in transforming business insurance.”

“1Fort has been a great resource for our team, allowing us to move even faster and deliver great products for our clients,” said Travis Hedge, Co-Founder of Vouch, a leading VC-backed broker for startups from idea to IPO.

“Building AI-powered, service-as-software solutions to modernize legacy workflows in the insurance vertical is one of today’s most exciting opportunities,” said Jim Andelman, Bonfire Ventures Co-Founder and Managing Director. “1Fort has already built impressive momentum and is poised to revolutionize this trillion-dollar market.”

Brokers can quote directly for their appointed markets or receive wholesale access to Cyber, Tech E&O, Professional and Management liability insurance. 1Fort is licensed in all 50 states and has partnered with more than a dozen A-rated carriers.

About 1Fort 
1Fort is a leading VC-backed insurtech leveraging cutting-edge AI technology to automate business insurance for brokers. Hundreds of leading independent insurance brokers use 1Fort to save time and earn more on placing business insurance. With a dedicated team and strong backing, 1Fort is on a mission to build the AI platform for the future of business insurance.

SOURCE 1Fort

Funding from Menlo Ventures powers Goodfire’s mission to decode the neurons of AI models, reshaping how they’re understood and designed

SAN FRANCISCO, April 17, 2025 — Today, Goodfire, the leading AI interpretability research company, announced a $50 million Series A funding round led by Menlo Ventures with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Anthropic, B Capital, Work-Bench, Wing, South Park Commons, and other notable investors. This funding, which comes less than one year after its founding, will support the expansion of Goodfire’s research initiatives and the development of the company’s flagship interpretability platform, Ember, in partnership with customers.

“AI models are notoriously nondeterministic black boxes,” said Deedy Das, investor at Menlo Ventures. “Goodfire’s world-class team—drawn from OpenAI and Google DeepMind—is cracking open that box to help enterprises truly understand, guide, and control their AI systems.”

Despite remarkable advances in AI, even leading researchers have little idea of how neural networks truly function. This knowledge gap makes neural networks difficult to engineer, prone to unpredictable failures, and increasingly risky to deploy as these powerful systems become harder to guide and understand.

“Nobody understands the mechanisms by which AI models fail, so no one knows how to fix them,” said Eric Ho, co-founder and CEO of Goodfire. “Our vision is to build tools to make neural networks easy to understand, design, and fix from the inside out. This technology is critical for building the next frontier of safe and powerful foundation models.”

To solve this critical problem, Goodfire is investing significantly in mechanistic interpretability research – the relatively nascent science of reverse engineering neural networks and translating those insights into a universal, model-agnostic platform. Known as Ember, Goodfire’s platform decodes the neurons inside of an AI model to give direct, programmable access to its internal thoughts. By moving beyond black-box inputs and outputs, Ember unlocks entirely new ways to apply, train, and align AI models — allowing users to discover new knowledge hidden in their model, precisely shape its behaviors, and improve its performance.

“As AI capabilities advance, our ability to understand these systems must keep pace. Our investment in Goodfire reflects our belief that mechanistic interpretability is among the best bets to help us transform black-box neural networks into understandable, steerable systems—a critical foundation for the responsible development of powerful AI,” said Dario Amodei, CEO and Co-Founder of Anthropic.

Looking ahead, Goodfire is accelerating its interpretability research through targeted initiatives with frontier model developers. By closely partnering with industry innovators, Goodfire will rapidly enhance and solidify the application of interpretability research. “Partnering with Goodfire has been instrumental in unlocking deeper insights from Evo 2, our DNA foundation model,” said Patrick Hsu, co-founder of Arc Institute – one of Goodfire’s earliest collaborators. “Their interpretability tools have enabled us to extract novel biological concepts that are accelerating our scientific discovery process.”

The company also plans to release additional research previews, highlighting state-of-the-art interpretability techniques across diverse fields such as image processing, advanced reasoning language models, and scientific modeling. These efforts promise to reveal new scientific insights and fundamentally reshape our understanding of how we can interact with and leverage AI models.

The Goodfire team unites top AI interpretability researchers and experienced startup operators from organizations like OpenAI and Google DeepMind. Goodfire’s researchers helped found the field of mechanistic interpretability, authoring three of the most-cited papers and pioneering advancements like Sparse Autoencoders (SAEs) for feature discovery, auto-interpretability frameworks, and revealing the hidden knowledge in AI models.

About Goodfire
Goodfire is an AI interpretability research company and public benefit corporation based in San Francisco, dedicated to understanding and intentionally designing advanced AI systems. Backed by Menlo Ventures, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Anthropic, B Capital, Work-Bench, Wing, South Park Commons, and others, Goodfire believes advances in interpretability will unlock the next frontier of safe and powerful foundation models. Learn more at goodfire.ai and x.com/goodfireAI.

About Menlo Ventures
Menlo Ventures is a leading early-stage venture capital firm investing at the forefront of AI. Our portfolio includes more than 80 public companies and over 165 exits through mergers and acquisitions since our founding nearly 50 years ago. Currently managing more than $6 billion in assets, we invest at every stage across Consumer, Enterprise, and Healthcare. Our portfolio companies include Abnormal Security, Anthropic, Benchling, Carta, Chime, Harness, Pinecone, Poshmark, Pillpack, Recursion, Roku, Rover, Siri, Typeface, Uber, and Warby Parker. We strive to have a positive impact on everything we do. When we’re in, we’re ALL IN.

SOURCE Goodfire

DENVER, April 17, 2025 — Equitage Ventures, an early-stage AgeTech venture capital firm investing in technology and technology-enabled services companies in senior care, has announced the final close of a new $47.3 million fund providing capital, distribution, and strategic guidance to entrepreneurs addressing the unmet physical, mental, spiritual, and social needs of older adults.

This is the first fund for Equitage, led by an investment team with many decades of experience investing in and operating senior care businesses that includes Russell Hirsch, a co-founder of Generator Ventures; Adam Kaplan, CEO of Solera Senior Living; and Daniel Kaplan, an investor who also worked with Generator Ventures.

Equitage’s limited partner capital spans the care continuum, including senior living and skilled nursing operators, home health and hospice agencies, and home care leaders, as well as corporates from healthcare technology, healthcare real estate, and consumer products. The firm leverages this extensive network to connect portfolio companies with key customers, strategic partners, top-tier talent, and seasoned advisors, empowering them to scale rapidly and deliver their needed, impactful solutions to more older adults and families.

The firm is actively seeking to invest in companies that will truly transform healthcare and is deploying capital into themes where it sees urgent need, real opportunity or long-term transformation. This includes compliance infrastructure for senior housing and skilled nursing facilities, documentation automation for home and facility-based care, passive monitoring, oral health, dementia and behavioral health, care navigation, and family caregiving. This first fund will target early-stage tech and services companies, allowing Equitage to back best-in-class founders and executives operating in markets where the firm believes it can add the most value.

Equitage is eager to meet with companies building the next-generation senior care companies and encourages founders to proactively reach out at any stage to discuss funding opportunities. Please contact EquitageVC.com for more information regarding the firm and the Equitage I fund.

About Equitage
Equitage is an early-stage AgeTech venture capital firm investing in technology and technology-enabled services companies in senior care. The firm provides capital, distribution, and strategic guidance to entrepreneurs addressing the unmet physical, mental, spiritual, and social needs of older adults. For more information on Equitage, visit EquitageVC.com.

SOURCE Equitage Ventures

SEOUL, South Korea, April 17, 2025 — t’order, a leader in the Korean restaurant tech space, has officially launched its Series C fundraising round, targeting $50 million USD from both domestic and global investors. While the identities of participating institutions remain undisclosed, the round has attracted significant interest from a range of investors, including leading venture capital firms, private equity firms, and financial institutions. To guide the process, t’order has appointed Samil PwC (PricewaterhouseCoopers Korea), the nation’s largest accounting and advisory firm, as its exclusive financial advisor.

Founded in 2019, t’order has quickly become Korea’s leading table-ordering platform, transforming the dining experience with its cutting-edge, fully digital ordering and payment system. The company has installed over 260,000 tablets nationwide, driving a monthly GMV (gross merchandise volume) exceeding $317 million USD, positioning itself as a dominant force in Korea’s restaurant tech sector. With more than $7.4 billion USD in cumulative transaction volume processed to date, t’order is poised for continued growth and innovation.

Currently valued at approximately $220 million USD, t’order has evolved into a comprehensive digital operating system for restaurants, driving significant improvements in operational efficiency, unlocking new revenue streams, and enhancing the overall customer experience. t’order has successfully completed integrations with major POS providers Toast and Clover, paving the way for its U.S. market entry. These integrations provide a seamless experience for North American restaurant operators and chains, further strengthening t’order’s position in the global market.

A key growth driver for t’order is its in-tablet advertising business, which delivers over 3 billion ad impressions monthly across more than 25 million orders. This advertising channel is gaining significant attention as a powerful offline medium, engaging customers during the average 85-minute dwell time at restaurant tables. t’order is also collaborating with large enterprise advertisers to develop real-time, data-driven ad campaigns based on factors such as table size, product type, location, and demographic profiles, ushering in a new era of targeted in-venue marketing.

In 2024, t’order raised $23 million USD in its Series B round, backed by Korea Development Bank, LB Investment, No & Partners, and Eugene Investment & Securities. The funds were used to accelerate product innovation, develop advanced table-ordering devices, enhance R&D for AI-driven personalization and data analytics, and scale nationwide deployment.

With this Series C round, t’order aims to strengthen its leadership in Korea while expanding into new verticals and international markets. Leveraging its extensive dataset, the company plans to provide personalized insights and decision-support tools to restaurateurs, solidifying its position as a category-defining player in global foodservice tech.

SOURCE t’order