The funding will fast-track EDGX’s mission to deliver the world’s fastest AI-powered edge computers for satellite constellations, enabling fast and efficient data processing from space

GHENT, Belgium, Aug. 11, 2025 — Belgian spacetech startup EDGX has closed a €2.3 million seed funding round to accelerate commercialisation of EDGX Sterna, the next generation edge AI computer for satellites.

The startup has also closed a multi-unit deal with a satellite operator worth €1.1 million and can already announce plans of an in-orbit demonstration on a SpaceX Falcon 9 mission in February 2026.

The funding round was co-led by the imec.istart future fund and, with participation from the Flanders Future Tech Fund, managed by the Flemish investment company PMV. EDGX has also attracted further funding from existing investor imec.istart, Europe’s top-ranked university-affiliated accelerator.

The EDGX Sterna Computer is a high-performance data processing unit (DPU) powered by NVIDIA technology. It provides the computational performance and AI acceleration needed to run complex algorithms directly in orbit. This capability eliminates the traditional bottleneck of sending massive raw datasets to Earth for processing, enabling satellite operators to deliver faster, more efficient, and data-driven services.

EDGX’s Sterna computer is powered by its SpaceFeather software stack, built for autonomous, resilient, and upgradeable satellite operations. It includes a space-hardened Linux OS with full traceability, a dedicated supervisory system for autonomous health monitoring, radiation fault detection and recovery, and an in-orbit application framework for deploying new capabilities post-launch.

Commenting on the news, Nick Destrycker, founder and CEO said: “Customers aren’t waiting for flight validation, they’re signing now. With a full launch manifest, secured commercial contracts, and our first mission set for Falcon 9, this funding enables us to scale to meet demand for real-time intelligence from space.”

Kris Vandenberk, managing partner at imec.istart future fund said: “EDGX represents exactly the kind of transformative infrastructure play we look for. The space industry is hitting a fundamental bottleneck; we’re generating massive amounts of data in orbit but still using outdated ‘store and forward’ architectures. EDGX is solving this by bringing AI-powered edge computing directly into space, enabling satellites to analyse and act on data in real-time rather than waiting for ground processing.”

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SOURCE EDGX

NEW YORK, Aug. 20, 2025 — Vendelux, the global leader in event intelligence, has launched a delegate marketing platform to empower event organizers to grow their audiences with unmatched precision and speed.

Through its free Delegate Marketing Platform, Vendelux offers conference organizers direct access to data-driven tools, AI agents and workflows and a network of event marketers controlling more than $50 billion in event sponsorship budgets, reaching over 10 million event-attending professionals.

With Vendelux’s new delegate marketing platform, conference organizers can:

• Pinpoint and connect with high-value potential delegates and sponsors by using AI agents
• Access targeted attendee recommendations tailored to each organizer’s unique event audience segments
• Leverage insights from 250,000+ B2B events and tradeshows to identify and attract the right audience faster than ever

Proven Delegate Growth

Organizers using Vendelux’s agentic platform have already seen measurable gains:

• Stablecon, a new event from This Week In FinTech, sourced 23% of attendees from Vendelux’s Delegate Marketing Platform. “The platform was instrumental in helping us fill the room with the right people,” said Nik Milanovic, Founder of This Week In FinTech.
• HLTH credited Vendelux for a 6% boost of executive-level attendees at its Vive event. “It’s my secret weapon,” said Barry Edelman, Global Head of Marketing at HLTH.

A No-Cost AI-Powered Growth Engine

“The Delegate Marketing Platform empowers event organizers to fill their events with the best and most relevant attendees,” said Alex Reynolds, Co-Founder & CEO of Vendelux. “Event organizers can now leverage AI agents and insights to reach the audiences and budgets that will take their events to the next level – faster, smarter, and at zero cost.”

Event organizers can get started with the Delegate Marketing Platform to start growing their delegate base today at vendelux.com/event-organizers. Vendelux will also be represented at the Society of Independent Show Organizers (SISO) Leadership Summit in Indianapolis from August 19-21, 2025.

About Vendelux

Vendelux is the AI platform for events that helps conference organizers, event marketers, and attendees connect with the right people at the right events. With insights from over 250,000 global business conferences and trade shows, Vendelux enables smarter audience targeting, better networking, and data-driven event success. Vendelux is backed by leading investors such as FirstMark Capital and top event organizers including the founders of HLTH, ShopTalk, Money20/20, Manifest, HR Transform, InsureTech Connect, Blueprint, SaaStock and FTLive.

Learn more at Vendelux.com.

MEDIA CONTACT:
Tanya Peress
Head of Marketing
[email protected]

Related links: vendelux.com/event-organizers

BOSTON, Aug. 20, 2025 — Somite.ai, a company pioneering foundation models for human stem cells, today announced a strategic investment from AMD Ventures, following Somite’s $47M Series A closing led by Khosla Ventures in May. The collaboration pairs Somite’s capsule-based data generation platform with industry-leading AMD Instinct™ GPUs, significantly boosting compute power to accelerate training of Somite’s foundation models.

Somite is transforming cell therapy by building large-scale foundation models to rapidly accelerate the development of novel cell therapies, significantly compressing timelines and potentially benefiting millions of patients. The company’s proprietary capsule technology generates differentiation data at approximately one-thousandth the cost of traditional methods, unlocking unprecedented scale and precision for training powerful predictive models.

“We are on the cusp of a true breakthrough in data generation for cell-state transitions. Our capsule-based platform provides dense, causal datasets essential for training transformative foundation models. AMD is uniquely positioned to help us deliver on our promise,” said Dr. Micha Breakstone, Co-Founder and CEO of Somite.ai.

“Biology is experiencing a computational revolution similar to language and vision. Somite is clearly leading the way, and AMD Instinct GPUs are built for the demands of their ambitious models,” said Sagi Paz, Head of AMD Ventures. “We are excited to collaborate with a company converting cutting-edge compute capabilities into meaningful therapies.”

The collaboration will explore optimization of software tools for biological data and joint efforts to develop solutions tailored for next-generation foundation models.

About Somite.ai

Somite.ai is developing AI foundation models for human stem cells to drive novel cell therapies at scale. Somite takes a full-stack approach—generating data at 1,000x lower cost, training large-scale models with unmatched predictive power, and using these models to discover, refine, and optimize high-impact applications in cell therapy. The founding team includes repeat AI entrepreneur Dr. Micha Breakstone (Chorus.ai, acquired for $575M), the Head of the Fundamental AI Group at MIT (pioneered foundational research on scaling laws), and three National Academy of Science members. Based in Boston and launching operations in January 2024, Somite has raised approximately $60M to date.

Media Contacts
[email protected]

SOURCE Somite Therapeutics

NEW YORK, Aug. 20, 2025 — Garage, the online marketplace revolutionizing the way America’s most essential equipment is bought and sold, today announced a $13.5 million Series A funding round led by Infinity Ventures with participation from Y Combinator, Initialized Capital, Benchstrength, Wayfinder Ventures, and FJ Labs. This round brings Garage’s total capital raised to $18 million and marks a major step forward in the company’s mission to serve America’s backbone industries more efficiently.

Founded by Martin Hunt and Alaz Sengul, Garage was born out of firsthand experience in the fire service. Hunt began serving as a volunteer firefighter in Delaware at the age of 15, and saw the challenges that funding constraints and rising equipment costs had on America’s local governments and first responders. Frustrated by the inefficiencies he witnessed, he set out to develop a more efficient and innovative approach to fleet management and surplus asset disposition.

Garage simplifies the complex process of buying and selling specialized equipment, including emergency vehicles and government surplus. “Local government and public safety is the backbone of America’s communities, yet the process for buying and selling their most critical equipment is just as fragmented and inefficient as it was decades ago– leaving one of the largest opportunities for innovation today” said Hunt. By connecting buyers and sellers nationwide, Garage allows municipalities to sell underutilized equipment to recover funds for their increasingly tight budgets, and buy equipment that would traditionally fall outside of their price range.

Unlike traditional auctions and brokers with local reach, Garage’s nationwide platform connects buyers and sellers from across the US while facilitating the entire lifecycle of selling surplus assets. The marketplace provides instant freight quotes, integrated payment solutions, and an AI appraisal tool, creating a seamless end-to-end experience. The company is already used by local governments, fire departments, and small businesses in all 50 states and equipment bought on the marketplace serves millions of Americans every day.

“Garage addresses a critical need in an underserved market with remarkable effectiveness” said Mario Ruiz, a General Partner at Infinity Ventures. “Martin and his team have the deep industry expertise and technical know-how to build AI-enabled solutions that will transform the way America’s critical assets are bought and sold.”

The $13.5M Series A funding will support Garage in expanding its engineering and go-to-market teams, scaling the marketplace’s capabilities, and continuing to grow its footprint across the United States. Garage also plans to scale its product, enhance its AI-driven services, and accelerate customer onboarding and success.

“Garage was born out of the deep respect and understanding of the challenges faced by the men and women working to keep Americans safe,” said Hunt. This funding enables us to grow our platform and deepen our support of the civil servants who protect and serve our communities.”

For more information about Garage or to explore its marketplace, visit www.shopgarage.com.

About Garage

Garage is the modern marketplace for buying and selling specialized equipment– powering the industries that keep America moving. Garage was founded by Martin Hunt and Alaz Sengul and is headquartered in New York, NY.

SOURCE Garage Technologies, Inc.

AUSTIN, Texas, Aug. 20, 2025 — Overhaul, the global leader of in-transit supply chain risk management, has secured $105 million in Series C equity funding led by Springcoast Partners with participation from Edison Partners. In addition to the Series C financing, the company also closed on a new debt facility with MidCap Financial.

As global supply chains face increasing complexity and disruption, companies require active risk management solutions that can prevent problems before they occur. Overhaul addresses this critical need through its comprehensive platform that combines real-time monitoring, predictive intelligence, and immediate response capabilities to protect high-value cargo from theft, damage, and delays. The company will use the investment to accelerate platform innovation, advance AI-driven capabilities, and continue building powerful, complete, enterprise-level solutions for the world’s largest brands while also pursuing strategic acquisitions.

“Expanding our relationships with Springcoast and Edison allows us to build on the momentum we’ve already created and deliver the solutions our customers are asking for,” said Barry Conlon, CEO of Overhaul. “The truth is, visibility is a data stream – not a standalone solution or app – and how we harness that stream is what truly sets us apart. Our engineering and development efforts are focused on solving real-world problems, and this investment helps us accelerate that mission.”

The investment also positions Overhaul to capitalize on consolidation opportunities in the supply chain technology sector, where the company expects to see continued market shifts as companies focus on profitability and growth fundamentals. The company’s recent acquisition of FreightVerify, which adds item-level tracking and inventory intelligence to its platform, demonstrates this consolidation strategy in action.

“Overhaul is building the system of record for global, high-value supply chains. The company’s proprietary data assets, operational depth, and commitment to solving real-world logistics challenges set it apart in a consolidating market,” said Holger Staude, Managing Partner of Springcoast Partners. “We’re proud to deepen our partnership with Barry and the Overhaul team as they complement their market-leading cargo security capabilities with powerful new inventory optimization tools,” added Chris Dederick, Principal at Springcoast Partners. 

“Edison Partners are excited to continue to support Overhaul in its mission to deliver high impact solutions to real supply chain problems for the world’s biggest brands. It’s a winning strategy with huge potential and this latest acquisition accelerates the vision we saw and backed in 2020,” added Ryan Ziegler, Managing Partner at Edison Partners.

Trusted by Fortune 100 companies, Overhaul serves industries including pharmaceuticals, healthcare, technology, logistics, automotive, consumer, and food and beverage. The company maintains a strong, direct partnership with law enforcement agencies, ensuring rapid recovery and intervention in the event of theft. Overhaul safeguards over $1.4 trillion in cargo trade at any given moment, achieving a 99.9% shipment protection rate.

Learn more about how Overhaul mitigates supply chain risk.

About Overhaul
Overhaul is the leading in-transit supply chain risk management platform for the world’s most trusted brands. Purpose-built to manage in-transit inventory and protect high-value, time-sensitive, and temperature-controlled shipments, Overhaul combines real-time data, contextual intelligence, and actionable alerts to prevent disruption or loss. With a device-agnostic approach and deep expertise in cargo security, compliance, and logistics, Overhaul empowers shippers, carriers, and logistics providers to move goods smarter, safer, and with greater control. Customers include Microsoft, Bristol Myers Squibb, CEVA Logistics, and Arvato. With the recent acquisition of FreightVerify, Overhaul now adds six of the top ten automotive manufacturers to its roster. For more information, visit over-haul.com, and follow on LinkedIn, X, and Facebook.

About Springcoast Partners
Established in 2023, Springcoast is a New York-based growth equity firm focused on partnering with market leading software and technology companies. To learn more about Springcoast, please visit www.springcoast.com.

About Edison Partners
Edison Partners is a leading growth equity firm providing the financial and intellectual capital that CEOs and their executive teams need to grow and scale their companies. Named as a Top Growth Investment Firm by GrowthCap for two years running, Edison’s active portfolio has created aggregated market value exceeding $10 billion. Edison Partners manages over $2.2 billion in assets. For more information on Edison Partners, please visit edisonpartners.com and follow on LinkedIn.

SOURCE Overhaul

NEA and Salesforce Ventures lead round to help enterprise marketers gain visibility and influence over brand performance across the AI internet

NEW YORK, Aug. 20, 2025 — Bluefish, the leading AI marketing platform for the Fortune 500, announced a $20M Series A funding round led by NEA, with participation from Salesforce Ventures. Additional investors include Crane Venture Partners, Swift Ventures, and Bloomberg Beta, bringing total Bluefish funding to $24M within 12 months of launch. Bluefish also unveiled its new Custom AI Audiences feature, which enables brands to manage their AI performance with unprecedented granularity and precision. 

As AI becomes the first stop for product discovery and purchasing decisions, Bluefish helps enterprise marketers gain visibility and influence over AI-generated responses. Over the last six months, Bluefish has grown revenue 10x and now counts Adidas, Tishman Speyer, and Omnicom among its enterprise customers. This new financing will enable product expansion and help scale engineering and customer-facing teams. 

“Over the past year, the way consumers find and buy new products has radically changed, migrating from conventional search to AI,” said Bluefish CEO Alex Sherman. “Search marketers were the first to recognize this shift in consumer behavior, but it is increasingly clear that the entire enterprise marketing stack will need to be reimagined for AI. Successful marketers will need a suite of AI-native tools to track, measure, and optimize for this new channel. These tools will be critical to winning customers who are now spending more time in AI than on the open web. That’s what we are building at Bluefish.”

Rebuilding the enterprise marketing stack for AI
Bluefish analyzes millions of prompt responses for the world’s largest brands, delivering robust insights into how large language models (LLMs) respond to consumers and present brand narratives. The Bluefish platform enables marketers to shape their AI presence with targeted optimizations that boost brand visibility, favorability, and message consistency across all major AI channels, including OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Meta AI, and Google AI. 

The Bluefish platform was designed to support the entire marketing organization, including search, content, brand, and communications teams. AI Monitoring, AI Optimization (AIO), and AIO Measurement are key offerings that enable brands to:        

• Track – Monitor AI positioning and performance with real-time tracking of AI responses
• Optimize – Tune content strategies to address key opportunities surfaced by Bluefish data
• Measure – Track the impact of optimizations against custom AI segments and KPIs

Platform brings enterprise-grade sophistication to AI marketing
Bluefish has emerged as the enterprise choice for AI marketing. It delivers the level of control large brands expect, with full transparency into every prompt, response, and cited source. Unlike one-size-fits-all tools that lean on generic prompts or recycled data, Bluefish lets each customer build custom prompt methodologies—so insights and actions mirror their business, not someone else’s.

“Our customers represent some of the most sophisticated marketers in the world,” said Bluefish COO Jing Feng. “They need customized solutions that enable differentiation in order to stay ahead. Generic one-size-fits-all platforms will inevitably fall short.”

This focus on enterprise is working. Bluefish has seen enormous customer demand since launch, with more than 80% of its customers coming from the Fortune 500, including category leaders across financial services, auto, CPG, and beauty brands. The two-year-old company already operates globally, supporting major customers across international markets and languages.

“We’re living through a paradigm shift as AI transforms how consumers discover, evaluate, and buy—the stakes for global brands have never been higher. Bluefish was built from the ground up to support the needs of enterprises, and is led by a proven team that has guided CMOs and marketing teams through the last major transitions of the internet. We believe Bluefish is defining the enterprise category for AI marketing,” said Ann Bordetsky, Partner at NEA.

Bluefish is led by a founding team of industry veterans with a 20-year track record building marketing technology for the world’s largest brands. CEO Alex Sherman previously co-founded PromoteIQ, a major retail media platform acquired by Microsoft in 2019. CTO Andrei Dunca previously co-founded LiveRail, a leading video advertising platform acquired by Facebook in 2014. COO Jing Feng previously held senior leadership roles at Microsoft, PromoteIQ, and LiveRail. 

“We have learned a lot about what it takes to deliver at Fortune 500 scale,” said Jason Spinell, Partner at Salesforce Ventures. “Bluefish is one of the few AI marketing platforms we’ve seen that is purpose-built for enterprise complexity. For brands who are looking for a partner that actually understands enterprise, Bluefish stands out.”

Introducing Bluefish Custom AI Audiences
Bluefish also unveiled the commercial release of its Custom AI Audiences capability, which allows enterprise marketers to define unique profiles and access tailored insights by customer segment. This feature enables brands to integrate their own proprietary approaches into the platform, creating significant competitive advantage.

Marketers can now better assess AI discoverability, citation influence, and content narrative shifts by audience to drive smarter AI optimizations.

About Bluefish
Bluefish is the AI marketing platform for enterprise brands. As product discovery transitions to AI platforms like ChatGPT and Google AI, Fortune 500 brands use Bluefish to gain visibility and influence over this critical new channel. Bluefish is led by the team behind PromoteIQ (acquired by Microsoft) and LiveRail (acquired by Facebook) and is headquartered in New York City. 

Learn more at bluefishai.com.

SOURCE Bluefish

New funding led by Sienna Venture Capital to fuel AI innovation and international growth

PALO ALTO, Calif., Aug. 20, 2025 — Seemplicity, the exposure action platform that delivers faster fixes and stronger security, today announced a $50 million Series B funding round. The latest financing was led by Sienna Venture Capital, with participation from Essentia Venture Capital and existing investors Glilot Capital Partners, NTTVC and S Capital. Seemplicity plans to leverage this funding to increase its investment in AI capabilities and support a rapid expansion of the company’s go-to-market strategy.

Following robust Fortune 500 adoption, Seemplicity is on a mission to better protect today’s enterprise and give all security teams more time back for what matters. This is achieved by removing manual, tedious work and automating the aggregation, prioritization and remediation workflows of exposure management. Seemplicity delivers instant and continuous value to customers, reducing exposure noise by 95%, prioritizing the 5% that matters, and automatically creating remediation tasks that allow companies to save significant time and resources.

AI Companions for Actionable Exposure Management
The funding will be used to accelerate the development and deployment of Seemplicity’s AI Agents to deliver personalized risk insights and proactive, actionable guidance. These upcoming AI agents will serve as companions for more actionable exposure management, combining each organization’s business logic with external threat intelligence to simplify workflows and empower teams to fix the real issues behind vulnerabilities.

“This funding comes as we experience incredible growth and customer adoption, and is a clear signal that security teams need a more actionable approach to exposure management,” said Yoran Sirkis, CEO and Co-founder of Seemplicity. “Our AI-based platform proactively streams risk insights, generates the fixes, and assigns work automatically to give teams their most valuable resource back – time. We are now better-positioned to extend these benefits to a broader global market, working with new and existing go-to-market partners across the US, UK and Europe.”

Accelerated Customer Adoption
Founded in 2020 by cybersecurity veterans Yoran Sirkis, Ravid Circus, and Rotem Cohen Gadol, Seemplicity was built to automate and streamline the entire vulnerability management and remediation process. The funding follows a year of significant growth for Seemplicity, including an 800% increase in ARR since its Series A and a 3X growth in new customer acquisition. Today, Seemplicity processes more than 1.5 billion security findings daily across customers spanning all regions and industries.

In addition to making its capabilities more usable and accessible for organizations of all sizes, Seemplicity will also use the new funding to further scale its U.S. operations, expand its presence across the UK and Europe, and drive revenue growth through new sales channels.

Seemplicity continues to demonstrate its power as a platform purpose-built to give critical time back to security, development, and IT operations teams. With 67% of cybersecurity professionals reporting burnout and the industry facing a global shortage of 4 million cyber workers, technology must do more than surface findings; it must simplify action. Seemplicity helps cyber professionals overcome dashboard fatigue by eliminating the drag between identification and fixing vulnerabilities, accelerating risk reduction and making every minute count.

“I’ve been following Seemplicity closely for over a year and have been consistently impressed by the team’s execution, the pace of new customer adoption, and the strength of their growth,” said Thomas Visan, Partner at Sienna Venture Capital. “They are tackling one of the most critical and underserved areas in cybersecurity. Their ability to bring clarity, speed, and automation to exposure management is exactly what modern enterprises are looking for, and we’re proud to support them as they scale globally.”

“We believe Seemplicity’s AI-powered platform addresses a critical gap in the cybersecurity market and positions the company as a global leader in exposure management,” said Lior Litwak, Managing Partner at Glilot Capital Partners and Head of Glilot+, the firm’s early growth fund. “Since leading the Series A, we have witnessed firsthand how the Seemplicity platform addressed exactly what enterprise security teams need to dramatically reduce their workload while improving cyber posture. We’re proud to continue supporting their next phase of growth.”

The funding milestone follows Seemplicity’s recent industry recognition, including receiving the 2025 Intellyx Digital Innovator Award and multiple Global Infosec Awards, where the company was named Publisher’s Choice for Exposure Assessment and Market Innovator in Vulnerability Management.

To learn more about the Seemplicity platform please visit: https://seemplicity.io/

About Seemplicity

Seemplicity revolutionizes exposure management with its exposure action platform. By automating and streamlining remediation processes, Seemplicity consolidates findings, accelerates risk reduction, and delivers tailored remediation plans for security, IT, and DevOps teams. Trusted by Fortune 500 companies, the platform enables organizations to enhance operational resilience and build scalable security programs. For more information, visit www.seemplicity.io.

SOURCE Seemplicity

Series B bridge brings total funding to over $150M to scale Document Intelligence, drive adoption in regulated industries, and expand globally, with backing from KDB, Amazon, and AMD

SAN JOSE, Calif., Aug. 20, 2025 — Upstage, a key AI company specializing in enterprise-grade generative AI solutions, today announced a $45 million Series B bridge round backed by Korea Development Bank (KDB), Amazon, and AMD. The raise brings total capital to $157 million and will accelerate development of its next-generation Solar language model, advance document AI products, and go-to-market expansion in the U.S. and APAC.

The new funding will also advance R&D efforts to enhance Solar’s capabilities and expand enterprise use cases, including document parsing, agentic task execution, and workflow automation. Recently, Upstage announced a strategic collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS), its preferred cloud provider, to advance its Solar language models and expand access to generative AI technology. Under the AWS collaboration, Upstage will use AWS for building and deploying foundation models, utilizing AWS’s machine learning infrastructure including SageMaker and AWS-designed silicon including AWS Trainium and Inferentia.

These enhanced AI capabilities are being strategically deployed to address significant inefficiencies in target industries, particularly insurance. A recent analysis of the U.S. insurance space found that claims adjudication costs reached $25.7 billion, with $18 billion tied to overturned denials and unnecessary review cycles – much of it driven by manual, paper-heavy operations and outdated, fragmented systems. Upstage is tackling this challenge head-on, with insurance as its first major global vertical, where resource-heavy areas like claims processing and broker submissions are especially ripe for automation.

At the center of the strategy is the Document Intelligence suite, which incorporates Document Parse — for transforming unstructured documents into structured, LLM-ready formats — and Information Extract, which pulls key data points from raw text. Whether processing policies, loss runs, financial statements, invoices, or emails, the platform processes high-variation document packets with over 95 percent accuracy, eliminating manual data entry, reducing processing time, and enabling faster, more automated decision-making.

Unlike traditional OCR tools that extract static fields without understanding context, Upstage’s Document Intelligence interprets documents holistically, understanding layout, meaning, and purpose to deliver structured outputs ready for real-world workflows.

“This is a pivotal moment not just for Upstage, but for the future of generative AI in the enterprise,” said Sung Kim, Co-Founder and CEO of Upstage. “The next phase of AI is about performance, precision, and readiness for real-world complexity. That is exactly what we’ve built with our suite. Our collaboration with AWS brings scale, credibility, and deep technical alignment — all critical as we deliver production-ready AI from day one in high-stakes sectors like commercial and public sector insurance.”

“Most enterprise teams are still buried in document chaos,” said Kasey Roh, U.S. CEO at Upstage. “We bring structure and speed to that mess, helping carriers and brokers move faster, reduce costs, and serve clients with confidence.”

Solar LLM, a family of Upstage’s proprietary small LLMs trained with Amazon SageMaker and available in Amazon Bedrock Marketplace, underpins Upstage’s broader GenAI stack. The company also offers its Universal Information Extractor — an AI agent for document-level understanding — through the AWS AI Agents and Tools Marketplace.

Upstage’s models are already being used by Fortune 500 companies, including Samsung, and are widely used by Korean insurance companies. It is also deployed across multiple public sector and government institutions, demonstrating Upstage’s ability to move from concept to production. Adoption is growing in the U.S. insurance and other highly structured industries.

The Series B bridge funding will support growth across sales and marketing hires and continued international expansion.

Upstage was recently named to the CB Insights AI 100 list, selected from thousands of global applicants — a milestone that reinforces Upstage’s traction in global markets. This bridge round builds on the company’s $72 million Series B announced in 2024, led by Korean investors including SK Networks and Shinhan Venture Investment.

To learn how Upstage can support your organization, contact our team to schedule a demo.

About Upstage
Upstage is building the future of enterprise AI through domain-specific language models and intelligent tools designed for high-impact business use. With deep expertise in LLM development, document AI, and agentic workflows, the company enables regulated industries and global enterprises to unlock the full potential of generative AI — securely, efficiently, and at scale.

For media inquiries:
Adalia Roberts
[email protected]
347-431-5801

SOURCE Upstage AI

Astro Mechanica’s engine design addresses biggest economic challenge associated with supersonic flight: fuel efficiency

Astro Mechanica’s technology is first being developed for military use and then commercial aircraft as technology matures – UAV is the venture capital arm of United Airlines

CHICAGO, Aug. 20, 2025 — United Airlines Ventures (UAV), the venture capital arm of United Airlines, today announced an investment in aerospace startup Astro Mechanica. Astro Mechanica’s adaptive propulsion concept and advanced airframe design has the potential to unlock supersonic aircraft with near-term applications for national defense, orbital launch, and long-range cargo delivery.

UAV was established in 2021 to invest in early-stage start-up companies focused on innovative technologies with the potential to shape the future of aviation and travel.

“Astro Mechanica is developing an adaptive engine concept for strategic military and commercial applications, addressing the challenging yet worthwhile pursuit of supersonic flight,” said Mukul Hariharan, Managing Partner at United Airlines Ventures. “UAV is excited to join Astro Mechanica’s renowned investment partners to support its exceptional management team as they advance their engine technology and progress towards their first aircraft prototype.”

Astro Mechanica’s engine, Duality^™, is being designed to utilize a hybrid electric architecture to optimize performance across a wide range of flight speeds and profiles, which would create an engine that would be efficient from takeoff to Mach 3+. With these changes, Astro Mechanica is developing the world’s first supersonic aircraft that has transpacific capability.

“We are excited to form this relationship with United Airlines Ventures (UAV),” said Ian Brooke, CEO and founder of Astro Mechanica. “This investment reflects strong conviction in Astro Mechanica from an experienced and credible industry leader, and we appreciated UAV’s deep technical grasp of our novel high-speed propulsion technologies. We look forward to working with them as an advisor and a collaborator as we move into flight testing for the next era of passenger travel.”

Duality^™ is designed to separate the propulsion units from the turboshaft engine by using electric motors. This allows it to behave like a turbofan at slower speeds, a turbojet at faster speeds just below supersonic, and switch to a ramjet at very high supersonic speeds.

About United Airlines Ventures

United Airlines Ventures (UAV) was established in 2021 to invest in early-stage start-up companies focused on innovative technologies with the potential to shape the future of aviation and travel. To date, UAV has made more than 30 investments in companies developing technologies across aerospace, technology, energy transition, and more. Learn more at unitedairlinesventures.com.

About Astro Mechanica

Astro Mechanica is a vertically integrated aerospace company building a faster, more connected future. Its mission is to democratize high-speed flight by making supersonic travel flexible, accessible, and sustainable. The company believes that rapid, on-demand, point-to-point global mobility will become the new standard for moving people and goods across the planet. To achieve this, Astro Mechanica is integrating its advanced airframe and engine technologies—which include Duality^™, its proprietary dual-use propulsion system—with a new flight operations model to make supersonic transport as efficient and economical as commercial air travel is today. In the near term, the company is developing adaptable, high-speed systems to close aircraft performance gaps for the United States government. Learn more at www.astromecha.co.

United Airlines Ventures Cautionary Statement Regarding Forward-Looking Statements and Other Important Information

UAV is a wholly owned subsidiary of United Airlines, Inc., whose parent company, United Airlines Holdings, Inc., is traded on the Nasdaq under the symbol “UAL”. This press release contains certain “forward-looking statements” within the meaning of the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995 relating to, among other things, plans and projections regarding the benefits of the investment. All statements that are not statements of historical facts are, or may be deemed to be, forward-looking statements. Such forward-looking statements are based on historical performance and current expectations, estimates, forecasts and projections, which involve inherent risks, assumptions and uncertainties that are difficult to predict, may be beyond our control and could cause our future financial results, plans, objectives, goals, targets, commitments, strategies, initiatives and intentions to differ materially from those expressed in, or implied by, the statements. These risks, assumptions, uncertainties and other factors include, among others, any failure to meet stated corporate citizenship goals, targets, commitments, strategies, initiatives and intentions in the time frame expected or at all as a result of many factors, including changing societal, market, competitive, regulatory or stakeholder expectations; any delay or inability of UAV to realize the expected benefits of the investment, including from a delay or failure of any project or technology to be fully developed or become operational or serve the purpose for which it was designed; and the other risks and uncertainties identified in United’s Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2024, as well as United’s other filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission.  United undertakes no obligation to update any statement included in this press release, except as otherwise required by applicable law or regulation.

Media Contact:
[email protected]

SOURCE United Airlines Ventures