PEAK6, the Austin-based fintech operating company, announces the launch of PEAK6 Trials, a one-year founder residency program based at PEAK6’s headquarters inclusive of a $100,000 salary, with direct access to PEAK6 internal resources and network of potential customers.

AUSTIN, Texas, March 12, 2026 — PEAK6, the Austin-based fintech operating company behind multiple billion-dollar businesses, is opening up their sandbox to the next generation of entrepreneurs. PEAK6 Trials is the latest concept from co-founders Jenny Just and Matt Hulsizer and a first-of-its-kind founder residency at the PEAK6 Austin, TX headquarters for the future leaders of fintech to create new businesses.

After growing and scaling more than 15 companies, including multiple billion-dollar companies, Apex Fintech Solutions and PEAK6 Capital Management, and eight other businesses, including FOCUS, WeInsure, and Zogo, the PEAK6 team has created an ecosystem that successfully challenges the one-size-fits-all approach of traditional capital investment. Each PEAK6 Trials Resident will have access to the full breadth of PEAK6 resources including the best devs, lawyers, and compliance experts in the business. PEAK6 Trials is the pathway for founders to validate their ideas and develop their concepts into reality.

“Unlike an incubator, we’re focused on creating real functioning companies. Ideas are great, but to become a fully functioning concept they require real-world trial, advising, and more. This residency provides the tools for this process. We’re removing the pain points, offering a $100,000 salary, and creating direct lines of communication and access to our teams for these founders to put their ideas into motion. We also are opening this program up to anyone, regardless of fintech experience, because of the expertise we have internally,” says Jenny Just, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of PEAK6. 

As top AI investors, PEAK6 knows the only moats left are capital, distribution and velocity. PEAK6 Trials exists to give founders direct access to build within those moats. Committed to the idea of founders owning more than their investors do, PEAK6 Trials provides favorable equity terms and a salary while the Residents iterate until the concept proves successful. There will not be cohorts, demo days or conferences; this is a 12-month commitment to building real businesses with real revenue and real customers. It will look different for every founder. There is no need to be technical; PEAK6 Trials has AI engineers in house who will help build out initial prototypes with the option to spin out with them as your CTOs.

“AI has made it easier than ever to build. We are seeing what used to take years and a full engineering organization be prototyped in weeks. The harder part is knowing what to build and having the distribution to execute faster than your competition. More people are becoming founders than ever, so the same customers are getting inundated by ‘insert new AI startup’ as a result. Within the Trials program, entrepreneurs will get built-in design partners and early customers to test, validate and scale their ideas,” notes Riyanka Ganguly, PEAK6 Head of AI Strategies.

Applications are reviewed by the team at PEAK6 with an anticipated acceptance rate of about 1%. A maximum of 12 participants will be accepted into the residency. Founders are invited to apply starting today via PEAK6Trials.com.

About PEAK6
PEAK6 was started in 1997 by Jenny Just and Matt Hulsizer as an options trading firm. They’ve since taken gains to start, invest in, and turn around more than 15 businesses. Today, the PEAK6 portfolio of founded companies includes multiple multi-billion dollar companies. PEAK6’s core brands include PEAK6 Capital Management, PEAK6 Strategic Capital, Apex Fintech Solutions, We Insure, FOCUS, Zogo, Evil Geniuses, Bruce Markets, and Poker Power.

We’re founder-led and operated to this day. So we know all too well the grit and resilience it takes to win, and that access to the right networks and distribution can better your odds. PEAK6 Trials filters for that grit and resilience, and provides founders with direct access to that network and distribution.

About Jenny Just & Matt Hulsizer
Jenny Just and Matt Hulsizer are the Co-founders and Managing Partners of PEAK6, a financial services company proudly based in Austin, Texas. They co-founded PEAK6 in 1997 with $1.5M in seed capital as a proprietary options trading firm. Since then, they have grown it into a multibillion-dollar fintech empire.

Jenny’s passion specifically lies in helping women take big swings. She currently serves as a Champion for JOURNEY to Lead and on the Women and Public Policy Board at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her success has earned her a number of accolades; most recently, she was selected as a 2025 CNBC Changemaker. Matt’s passion lies in discovering underfunded opportunities and coaching up-and-coming talent. Over the past two decades, Matt and Jenny have created, turned around, or invested in more than 200 companies.

About Riyanka Ganguly
Riyanka Ganguly is the Head of AI Strategies at PEAK6, a financial services company proudly based in Austin, Texas. Riyanka began her career in Beijing at ByteDance (parent company of TikTok) in M&A while earning a Masters in Global Affairs from Tsinghua University through the Schwarzman Scholars program. She then went on to invest in private equity and alternative assets at Blackstone Tactical Opportunities before joining the founding team of Kim Kardashian’s SKKY Partners. Riyanka is a graduate of Harvard Business School and founded a company building AI solutions for FP&A teams before joining PEAK6 in 2025.

SOURCE PEAK6

Today’s high-performing businesses require agility, speed and scale in core operations, but current processes and procurement tools are falling short. Rigid, disconnected and hard to use, these systems frustrate employees and fail to address the realities of today’s supply chains. The ORO platform orchestrates the end-to-end experience across people, processes, systems and intelligent agents to automate workflows, speed compliance and provide a much-needed velocity and value advantage.

“Demand for orchestration has skyrocketed because procurement teams are under tremendous pressure to move faster, to save more, and to make employee and supplier experiences easier,” said Sudhir Bhojwani, Co-Founder and CEO of ORO Labs. “Procurement is shifting to a new AI-driven operating model. ORO is powering this change — helping our customers reimagine how procurement delivers impact for the business.”

Many of the top enterprises in the world — including The Coca-Cola Company, Siemens Energy and Novartis — rely on ORO to orchestrate procurement workflows across intake, approvals, sourcing, supplier management, risk and compliance. The ORO platform is deployed across 100+ countries, serving Fortune 500 organizations in life sciences, financial services, consumer products, manufacturing, energy and telecommunications.

The capital investment will be used to accelerate ORO’s expansion, further its product leadership, and scale customer success and deployment worldwide.

“ORO is pioneering the modernization of procurement, leveraging next-gen AI to deliver intelligent automation and tangible ROI while preserving the context, controls, and standards that large global enterprises depend on,” said Clare Greenan, Vice President with Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives. “We believe ORO’s co-founders, Sudhir, Lalitha, and Yuan, as well as the rest of the ORO team, are uniquely positioned to lead this shift, bringing unmatched domain expertise and strategic innovation to legacy operations.”

Mike Gregoire, Partner at Brighton Park Capital, and Rik Patel, Principal at Brighton Park Capital, commented: “We are thrilled to partner with ORO Labs as they pioneer the future of procurement. ORO is moving the world’s largest enterprises beyond legacy systems, orchestrating intelligent automation and seamless workflows to operations that desperately need them. ORO’s team exemplifies the kind of visionary innovation we back at Brighton Park Capital — leveraging next-generation AI to solve massive, longstanding business challenges. We look forward to supporting their continued hyper-growth.”

To support this next chapter, Mike Gregoire of Brighton Park Capital and Clare Greenan of Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives will join ORO’s Board of Directors.

For more information, visit orolabs.ai.

About ORO Labs

ORO Labs is a procurement orchestration company on a mission to humanize the procurement experience by coordinating teams, systems, and processes so employees get what they need without frustration. ORO’s AI-powered no-code platform is purpose-built to deliver effortless user experiences that enable businesses to reduce cycle times, decrease risk through end-to-end process visibility, and increase agility in response to change. ORO is trusted by Fortune 500 companies and fast-growing global organizations to automate processes, improve cross-team collaboration, and scale procurement operations. To learn more, visit orolabs.ai.

About Brighton Park Capital

Brighton Park Capital is a New York-based investment firm focused on entrepreneur-led, growth-stage software, healthcare and tech-enabled services companies. The firm invests in companies that provide highly innovative solutions in partnership with great management teams. Brighton Park brings purpose-built, value-add capabilities that match the unique requirements of each of its companies. For more information about Brighton Park Capital, please visit www.bpc.com.

About Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives

Goldman Sachs (NYSE: GS) is one of the leading investors in alternatives globally, with over $625 billion in assets and more than 30 years of experience. The business invests in the full spectrum of alternatives including private equity, growth equity, venture capital, private credit, real estate, infrastructure, sustainability, and hedge funds. Clients access these solutions through direct strategies, customized partnerships, and open-architecture programs.

The alternative investments platform is part of Goldman Sachs Asset Management, which delivers investment and advisory services across public and private markets for the world’s leading institutions, financial advisors and individuals. Goldman Sachs has approximately $3.6 trillion in assets under supervision globally as of December 31, 2025.

Since 2003, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives has invested over $13 billion in companies led by visionary founders and CEOs. The team focuses on investments in growth stage and technology-driven companies spanning multiple industries, including enterprise technology, financial technology, consumer and healthcare. Follow us on LinkedIn.

SOURCE ORO Labs Inc.

SAN FRANCISCO, March 12, 2026 —  Qurrent, the pioneer of autonomous digital workforces, today announced the close of a $15 million Series A funding round led by Cervin Ventures with participation by Streamlined Ventures. The round comes on the heels of explosive customer momentum: the company has executed over 6 million operational tasks in production – a number that has nearly tripled since November 2025 – driven by rapid expansion among existing customers and new enterprise adoption across finance, supply chain, legal, and property management.

While the prevailing AI narrative focuses on copilots and assistants that wait for human instruction, Qurrent is building something categorically different: autonomous digital workers that own complex back-office functions end to end. If a business has a documented standard operating procedure for invoice collection, supply chain reconciliation, vendor payments, or any other operational function, for instance, Qurrent can onboard a digital workforce to own it, fully managed, with performance guarantees written directly into the contract.

The results in production are striking. A major ad tech platform processes over $100 million in monthly partner payments in under 30 minutes, down from 25 days. A leading law firm has eliminated manual invoice collection entirely. A property investment firm saved over 18,000 hours of reconciliation work and reduced operational costs by more than $800,000 in a single year using Qurrent’s digital workers handling lease renewals, move-out requests, and property management at scale.

“We were very deliberate in choosing the right investor to help us scale. We chose Cervin Ventures because they share our vision for how AI will evolve the nature of work — not with narrow point solutions, but with digital workers custom-built to tackle complex operations.”
— Colin Wiel, Co-founder and CEO, Qurrent

“Qurrent is harnessing the power of AI models and delivering measurable margin improvement to enterprises. With every model improvement, their service becomes better, faster, and cheaper, enabling their customers to outpace their competition.”
— Neeraj Gupta, Co-founder and General Partner, Cervin Ventures

“We’ve evolved our operating model and driven greater operational efficiency by embedding AI and automation across Yahoo. Qurrent has helped us deploy a trusted digital workforce that scales with our business, empowering our teams to focus on the work that drives the greatest impact.”
—  Matt Sanchez,Chief Operating Officer, Yahoo

The funding will be used to accelerate enterprise expansion and deepen Qurrent’s platform capabilities. For more information, visit qurrent.com and follow us on LinkedIn.

ABOUT QURRENT

Qurrent provides fully managed, autonomous digital workforces that execute complex back-office operations across finance, supply chain, procurement, and more. Unlike AI tools that require customers to build and maintain their own automations, Qurrent owns the deployment, management, and ongoing performance of the digital workers — and contractually guarantees outcomes via SLAs. The company is headquartered in San Francisco and poised for growth. Learn more at qurrent.com.

SOURCE Qurrent

SAN FRANCISCO, March 12, 2026 — Taya today announced it has raised a $5 million seed round led by MaC Venture Capital and Female Founders Fund, with participation from a16z speedrun. Founded by Stanford-trained product designer and mechanical engineer Elena Wagenmans, previously at Apple, Taya is an AI necklace built to honor the social contract: intentional, single-player voice capture, not ambient recording of the room. 

While many recent AI hardware products have leaned toward always-on environmental awareness, Taya is taking a different approach. Instead of continuous environmental recording, the device focuses on short, intentional captures, helping people preserve fleeting thoughts without turning everyday life into a stream of surveillance.

Taya’s system is designed around directional microphones and voice-prioritization signal processing to focus on the wearer rather than the surrounding environment.

“People want intelligence, but they don’t want to wear something that makes everyone around them uncomfortable,” said Elena Wagenmans, Founder & CEO of Taya. “We’re building jewelry-first AI for private reflection – something you choose to wear, and choose when to activate.”

Following 3 million organic views across platforms and a sold-out initial pre-order batch, Taya has spent the past several months in direct conversation with early customers to refine both hardware and software around daily usability, privacy, and long-term retention.

Rather than positioning itself as a meeting notetaker or always-on recorder, Taya is focused on brief, frequent voice captures throughout the day: moments of insight, reminders, and creative thoughts that would otherwise disappear.

“Privacy isn’t a feature, it’s an architectural decision,” Wagenmans added. “If this becomes part of your daily life, it has to align with how people actually want to live.”

Taya is currently in active development and expects to begin fulfilling its initial pre-order batch later this year, with broader availability to follow.

To join the waitlist, visit tayanecklace.com.

Press Kit

To contact Taya Necklace, please email at [email protected]

About Taya

Most wearable tech ends up in a drawer. Taya is changing that by designing AI-powered jewelry that people want to put on every day. Founded in San Francisco by Elena Wagenmans, a Stanford-trained engineer and former Apple hardware designer, Taya combines private, on-demand voice intelligence with jewelry-grade craft. Learn more at tayanecklace.com.

Media Contact:
Jim Redner for Taya 
323.217.4314
[email protected]

SOURCE Taya

Winget named to Inc.’s 2026 Female Founders 500 and recognized as a 2026 Woman to KNOW in Texas

DALLAS, March 12, 2026 — Alternative Wealth Partners (AWP), a Dallas-based private equity firm founded by capital strategist and fund manager Kelly Ann Winget, today announced the next phase of the firm’s growth marked by a strategic evolution of its platform and a comprehensive visual rebrand.

Originally launched in 2020 as a private equity firm focused on expanding access to alternative investments, Alternative Wealth Partners is evolving into a more integrated platform designed to support founders, family offices, and next-generation investors navigating complex financial decisions, while seeking more bespoke, investor-aligned solutions.

The evolution reflects a broader shift within private markets toward coordinated strategies that integrate investment opportunities, tax considerations, estate planning, and long-term capital stewardship. “Private wealth has historically been built behind closed doors and managed through siloed advisory relationships,” said Winget. “Our goal is to create a more integrated framework that helps investors think more holistically about how their capital is structured, deployed, and preserved over time.”

The firm’s strategic evolution comes alongside a comprehensive visual rebrand, including the launch of a new logo, redesigned website, and refreshed brand identity, reflecting AWP’s expanding role within the private wealth ecosystem.

Winget founded Alternative Wealth Partners after more than a decade raising capital across alternative assets. Over the course of her career, she has helped raise nearly $1 billion in private capital across sectors including energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, and emerging industries.

AWP focuses on building diversified portfolios of non-correlated assets across sectors such as energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, and supply chain businesses – areas that traditional funds often overlook but that offer strong long-term growth potential.

The firm’s diversified private equity funds are designed to provide individual investors with access to opportunities historically reserved for institutional investors while leveraging creative deal structuring and tax-efficient strategies to enhance long-term outcomes.

As Alternative Wealth Partners enters this next phase, Winget’s leadership has also received national and regional recognition.

She was named to Inc.’s 2026 Female Founders 500, an annual list recognizing the most innovative and impactful women entrepreneurs in the United States. According to Inc., companies represented on the 2026 list collectively generated approximately $12.3 billion in revenue in 2025.

Winget was also honored as a 2026 Woman to KNOW in Texas, part of the KNOW Women global community that celebrates accomplished female leaders driving impact across business, leadership, and community engagement.

A nationally recognized speaker and author of Pitch the Bitch: Grab Your Financial Future by the Bags, Winget is a frequent voice in discussions around private markets, financial education, and access to investment opportunities. She currently serves as an Advisor to the Executive Boards of 360 Venture Collective, Stella Foundation and Fierce Foundry, and has been featured in major media outlets including Worth, Forbes, Kiplinger, Crain Currency, Novogradac, and Business Insider, among others. Her work and leadership have earned her recognition as one of the 100 Women to KNOW in America (2025), a two-time D CEO 500 honoree (2024 and 2025), and a recipient of the Dallas Business Journal Leadership in Diversity Award (2024).

“As investors accumulate wealth earlier in their careers, particularly founders and entrepreneurs, the questions they face become more complex than simply where to invest,” Winget added. “It becomes about how to structure capital in a way that supports long-term goals, generational wealth, and meaningful legacy.”

About Alternative Wealth Partners

Alternative Wealth Partners (AWP) is a Dallas-based private equity firm focused on building diversified portfolios of alternative assets for investors seeking opportunities beyond traditional public markets. Founded in 2020 by capital strategist Kelly Ann Winget, the firm provides access to institutional-grade private investments across sectors including energy, infrastructure, manufacturing, and emerging industries. AWP works with investors, advisors, and family offices to structure long-term strategies through actively managed funds designed to generate durable returns while expanding access to private markets.

Media Contact:
Laura Henson
917-539-7812
[email protected]

SOURCE Alternative Wealth Partners

The firm chose the name to reflect its long-term mission of building enduring partnerships and contributing to the development of the region’s real economy, with a particular focus on supporting local founders, families and institutions

DUBAI, UAE, March 12, 2026 — Nahda Capital Partners, a newly established private equity platform headquartered in ADGM, has filed for the registration of its inaugural private equity fund this week as it prepares to launch investment activities across the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC).

“Nahda” in Arabic refers to a renaissance a renewal and resurgence. The firm chose the name to reflect its long-term mission of building enduring partnerships and contributing to the development of the region’s real economy, with a particular focus on supporting local founders, families and institutions.

Nahda Capital Partners is led by Iñigo de Luna, Founder and Managing Partner, and is building a control-oriented mid-market private equity strategy focused primarily on the UAE, Saudi Arabia and wider GCC. The firm will target resilient founder-led and family-owned businesses benefiting from structural regional growth and increasing institutionalisation, particularly companies undergoing generational transition or seeking institutional capital and operational support to accelerate their next phase of expansion across the GCC.

The founding partners bring significant international experience across private equity and investment banking, with a historical track record generating approximately 36% gross IRR across multiple economic cycles.

Key highlights of the strategy include a majority-investment approach in partnership with founders and family shareholders, and an operational value-creation model focused on professionalisation, operational improvement, governance strengthening, and selective buy-and-build expansion.

Nahda expects to focus on sectors including food production and distribution, healthcare, education, and industrial technology. The firm’s investment approach is guided by principles aligned with Sharia-compliant investing, including a focus on real-economy assets, prudent use of leverage, and disciplined governance.

“Nahda Capital Partners was established to partner with high-quality mid-market businesses across the GCC that can benefit from long-term capital and hands-on operational support,” said Iñigo de Luna. “These are difficult days and the priority is safety and de-escalation. At the same time, we view this as a severe but temporary shock rather than a change in the long-term trajectory of the UAE and the region. Our conviction has not changed: the GCC is structurally strengthening as a place to build businesses and allocate long-term capital.”

Subject to regulatory approval, the firm expects to commence fundraising in the coming weeks, targeting approximately $300 million for its inaugural fund to be managed from ADGM.

About Nahda Capital Partners:
Nahda Capital Partners is an Abu Dhabi-based private equity platform headquartered in ADGM, focused on control investments in mid-market businesses across the GCC. The firm partners with founders and family shareholders to support generational transition, professionalisation and regional expansion through hands-on operational value creation. Nahda targets resilient, real-economy sectors including food production and distribution, healthcare, education and industrial technology. The firm’s approach emphasises disciplined governance and investment principles aligned with Sharia-compliant investing. Subject to regulatory approval, Nahda is preparing to launch its inaugural fund from ADGM.

SOURCE Nahda Capital Partners

Albuquerque-based startup is removing the fundamental energy constraint limiting satellites — unlocking the next era of orbital infrastructure, compute, and revenue generation.

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M., March 12, 2026 — Mantis Space, a space and advanced energy startup, today announced it has emerged from stealth with an oversubscribed seed round of more than $10 million to develop orbital energy infrastructure designed to eliminate one of the oldest constraints in space operations: Earth’s shadow.

The company is building a constellation of spacecraft that remain almost continuously in sunlight and transmit power to satellites operating in eclipse. This infrastructure allows satellites, space stations, and orbital compute platforms to receive power through their solar arrays in real time, regardless of their position relative to the sun.

The round was led by Rule 1 Ventures alongside Montauk Capital, which incubated Mantis Space through its venture studio platform. The funding will be used to hire and grow out its go-to-market operations from its new headquarters in Albuquerque, New Mexico. 

The orbital economy now exceeds $600 billion and is projected to approach $1 trillion by 2040. The modern world increasingly depends on satellites to provide essential services including GPS navigation, broadband connectivity, national intelligence capabilities, climate monitoring, and global communications.

Every satellite today operates under the same fundamental constraint: power generation depends entirely on direct sunlight. On average, satellites spend nearly one-third of their life in Earth’s shadow. During these periods, energy production stops, systems rely on battery reserves, and operational performance declines, limiting return on investment for every satellite.

To compensate, many satellites are placed in orbits designed primarily to maximize exposure to sunlight rather than optimize mission productivity or revenue generation. The ever-popular Sun Synchronous orbits leave satellites outside of their revenue-generating and mission areas up to 70% of every day. Orbital power infrastructure changes that equation.

By enabling satellites to receive power wherever they operate, spacecraft can remain in their most productive orbital positions rather than spending much of their operational life chasing sunlight. This flexibility can significantly increase mission utilization, extend operational lifetimes, and improve the economic return of satellite systems by 2-3x.

As satellites become more compute-intensive and mission-critical, these energy constraints grow more costly. Until now, they have largely been treated as an unavoidable limitation of space operations.

“We are at the beginning of a space infrastructure supercycle,” said Eric Truitt, CEO of Mantis Space. “Launch has scaled. Manufacturing has scaled. But performance in orbit is still constrained by physics. Every asset going up whether it’s a defense sensor, a broadband satellite, or an orbital compute node has the same power problem. We’re building the grid that makes all of it work.”

The Mantis Space executive team brings together aerospace, defense, and precision engineering credentials that map directly to the problem.

The Founding team includes Truitt, who recently helped BlueHalo successfully exit to AeroVironment in a $4.5B transaction and previously co-founded PredaSAR and previously NYSE-listed Terran Orbital, which was acquired by Lockheed Martin. Chairman and Chief Strategy Officer Hugh Wyman Howard III served 32 years in Naval Special Warfare and joint special operations. His service also includes Director of Operations for the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and today, he sits on a number of corporate boards. COO Jeremy Scheerer has led defense and intelligence portfolios at MapLarge and Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) and managed a $1B+ U.S. Air Force program. All three Founders are U.S. military veterans.

Mantis Space has built a world-class team of experts with decades each of success in delivering products to market. Chief Engineer, John Sandusky, PhD, recently retired after more than 20 years of service leading Space, solar, and laser programs at Sandia National Laboratory. Director of Optical Engineering, Greg Brady, PhD, was a key designer of the optical systems inside Apple’s Face ID and multiple camera systems before becoming an integral leader on the team responsible for the Optical Telescope Element within the James Webb Space Telescope. Director of Electrical Engineering, Quentin Diduck, PhD, recently led electrical engineering efforts in developing the MicroLED technology at Google (Raxium) and was the former Director of R&D at Eridan Communications leading innovations in switch mode broadband transmitters.

The company is also supported by Admiral James A. Winnefeld Jr., the ninth Vice Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. “Power is foundational infrastructure,” said Admiral Winnefeld, General Partner at Rule 1 Ventures. “As the orbital economy matures, the limiting factor shifts from launch to performance. Mantis Space is addressing one of the last unbuilt layers of space infrastructure.”

The timing reflects a structural shift in the space economy. The first generation of commercialization centered on connectivity and Earth observation. The next generation includes orbital data centers, edge compute platforms, and persistent intelligence systems that require uninterrupted, high-density power.

“Enduring companies remove systemic constraints,” said Philip Krim, Co-Founder and CEO of Montauk Capital. “Shared energy in orbit is a prerequisite for the next phase of commercial and defense expansion in space. We funded Mantis Space to create that foundation.”

The next era of AI infrastructure will not be confined to Earth. And none of it scales without a reliable power layer beneath it.

About Mantis Space

Mantis Space is a private space technology company focused on developing advanced infrastructure solutions designed to support the next phase of commercial space activity. The company aims to enable more efficient deployment, operation, and scalability of space-based systems as the industry transitions from government-led initiatives to commercially driven expansion.

Learn more at mantis.space

SOURCE Mantis Space

Insight Partners leads the round as Wonderful scales its hyper-local operating model worldwide

AMSTERDAM, March 12, 2026 — Wonderful, the enterprise AI agent platform, today announced it has raised $150 million in a Series B funding round led by global software investor Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors Index Ventures, IVP, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Vine Ventures. The new capital will enable Wonderful to continue investing in its agentic platform and accelerate global expansion, scaling headcount from 350 to approximately 900 by year-end to serve more enterprises with locally embedded deployment teams.

In the eight months since emerging from stealth, Wonderful has rapidly expanded, scaling to more than 30 countries across Europe, the Middle East, Asia-Pacific, and Latin America and deploying production-grade agents for enterprises in telecom, financial services, manufacturing, and healthcare. This expansion is driven by the success of Wonderful’s thesis: enterprise AI will not scale through technology alone. It requires a state-of-the-art agentic platform paired with locally embedded teams that can deploy agents inside complex organizations.

This pairing is intentional and has been demonstrating its value in-market. By building full-stack teams that are co-located and forward-deployed into customer environments, Wonderful can enable direct collaboration with enterprise stakeholders, accelerate system integration, and sustain post-deployment optimization long after go-live. As a result, agents can move from pilot to full production in days and weeks rather than months, even in highly regulated, operationally complex environments.

“In 2026, enterprises will be deciding who to partner with to operationalize AI across their organizations, and those decisions will hinge on who can deliver deep integrations across complex infrastructures and tailor solutions to each organization’s unique environment,” said Bar Winkler, CEO and Co-founder of Wonderful. “We built our platform and operating model around that reality, and the demand we’re seeing globally reflects it. This capital allows us to expand our ability to support enterprises to do what they want with AI.”

Wonderful’s platform-based approach underpins the operating model. The company is building a horizontal enterprise foundation that can be activated across multiple use cases and workflows, rather than delivering isolated point solutions. The architecture is model-agnostic by design, continuously benchmarking and selecting the best-performing models for each use case while remaining flexible as the model landscape evolves. It incorporates state-of-the-art engineering practices, including harness-based evaluation and self-healing system design, to ensure agents remain reliable in production. As enterprises activate additional use cases on the same underlying architecture, the value compounds over time. Organizations can partner with Wonderful to deploy at speed while retaining the ability to extend, build upon, and ultimately own their AI capabilities over the long term.

“Over 70% of enterprises that begin with a single use case expand into additional workflows within the first three months,” continued Winkler. “That expansion is possible because we built a shared foundation across core systems from day one. Once that architecture is in place, activating new use cases becomes faster, more predictable, and increasingly owned by the enterprise itself.”

Wonderful’s operating model is repeatable across industries. From telcos to financial services, healthcare, and manufacturing, enterprises are agentifying both customer-facing and internal workflows. Across deployments, agents have delivered measurable impact, reducing handling times by up to 60%, achieving containment rates above 80%, and enabling organizations to replace legacy automation vendors while unlocking multi-million-dollar annual efficiency gains.

“Wonderful is establishing trust and deep partnerships inside complex enterprises at a critical moment for the market,” said Jeff Horing, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “We believe that the team’s combination of platform strength and execution position Wonderful as a strong enterprise partner in today’s ecosystem.”

“At Wonderful, our goal is to push the frontier of enterprise AI,” said Roey Lalazar, CTO and Co-founder. “We’re deploying agents across every business function, while pioneering the next generation of application layers that will transform how organizations operate.”

About Wonderful

Wonderful combines a powerful AI platform with best-in-class local deployment to deliver enterprise-grade AI agents to every market and every language. The platform enables enterprises to build, monitor, and optimize AI agents that serve customers and streamline workflows across front and back office. Founded in 2025 by Bar Winkler (CEO) and Roey Lalazar (CTO), and backed by $286M from Insight Partners, Index Ventures, IVP, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Vine Ventures, Wonderful enables enterprises to run human-grade agents in some of the world’s most complex environments and use cases.
wonderful.ai

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 June 30, 2025, the firm has over $90B in regulatory assets under management. Insight Partners has invested in more than 875 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.

Media Contact:
[email protected]

SOURCE Wonderful

TEL AVIV, Israel, 12. März 2026 — StageOne Ventures gab heute den Abschluss seines fünften Fonds in Höhe von 165 Millionen US-Dollar, bekannt und feiert damit 25 Jahre Identifizierung und Unterstützung der ehrgeizigsten israelischen Unternehmensgründer in der Anfangsphase der Technologie.

Mit dem Abschluss von Fonds V übersteigt das von StageOne verwaltete Gesamtvermögen (AUM) die Marke von 650 Millionen US-Dollar. Dieser Meilenstein stärkt die Position des Unternehmens als führender institutioneller Partner für technische Gründer bei der Unternehmensgründung. Seit 2001 war StageOne bei jeder größeren Veränderung im Bereich der Unternehmensinformatik an vorderster Front dabei – von der Ära der Telekommunikation über den Aufstieg der Cybersicherheit bis hin zur Cloud-Migration. Heute nimmt der Fonds V die nächste Herausforderung ins Visier: die KI-Infrastrukturebene.

Der Fonds V wird sich auf bahnbrechende Start-ups in den Bereichen KI-Infrastruktur, Cybersicherheit, physische KI, Agentic Orchestration und vertikale KI konzentrieren – Sektoren, in denen israelische Engineering-Talente weltweit einen entscheidenden Vorsprung haben.

„KI ist für uns mehr als nur eine vertikale Komponente. Sie ist die neue Architektur von Unternehmenssoftware”, betont Yuval Cohen, Gründer und Managing Partner bei StageOne Ventures. „Trotz globaler und lokaler Unsicherheiten bringt Israel weiterhin Ingenieurstalente von Weltklasse hervor. Mit unserem fünften Fonds verstärken wir unser Engagement, der erste und zuverlässigste Partner für Gründer zu sein, die kategorieprägende Unternehmen aufbauen.”

Beeindruckende Erfolgsbilanz bei der Skalierung von Innovationen

StageOne wird geleitet von Yuval Cohen (Gründer und Managing Partner), Tal Slobodkin (Managing Partner) und Netanel Meir (Partner).

Bis heute hat das Unternehmen in 69 Unternehmen investiert und unterstützt derzeit ein Portfolio von 29 aktiven Unternehmen. StageOne fungiert als „First-Check”-Investor, der eine praktische, langfristige Partnerschaft mit den Gründern pflegt und seine stärksten Unternehmen durch erhebliche Folgefinanzierungen weiter unterstützt.

„Unser Modell fußt auf tiefer Überzeugung und Engagement vom ersten Tag an”, ergänzt Tal Slobodkin, Managing Partner. „In einer Welt der automatisierten Investitionen bieten wir das Gegenteil: eine enge Partnerschaft. Wir stellen nicht nur Kapital zur Verfügung, sondern auch die strategische und operative Grundlage, die es technischen Gründern ermöglicht, sich zu globalen Marktführern zu entwickeln.”

Der neue Fonds wird von einer renommierten Gruppe wiederkehrender institutioneller und privater Investoren aus den USA, Europa und Israel unterstützt, was das langfristige Vertrauen in die Strategie von StageOne und die Widerstandsfähigkeit des israelischen Technologie-Ökosystems unterstreicht.

Strategische Ausstiege und Auswirkungen auf den Markt

StageOne hat 21 Investitionen erfolgreich abgeschlossen und dabei durchweg hohe Renditen erzielt. Zu den bemerkenswerten Exits und Portfolio-Highlights gehören:

• Coralogix und Silverfort: (Führend bei der nächsten Generation von Unternehmensüberwachung und Identitätsschutz).
• Qwak: Erworben von JFrog 
• Cyberint: Erworben von Check Point 
• Epsagon: Erworben von Cisco 
• Avanan: Erworben von Check Point 
• Apprente: Erworben von McDonald’s 
• Traffix: Erworben von F5 
• Guardium: Erworben von IBM 

„KI verändert die Wirtschaftlichkeit und Geschwindigkeit von Innovationen, doch die Grundlagen für betriebswirtschaftliche Zuverlässigkeit sind unverändert geblieben”, erklärt Netanel Meir. „Wir konzentrieren uns darauf, die Lücke zwischen einem brillanten technischen Proof-of-Concept und einem resilienten, globalen Unternehmen zu schließen, das die nächsten Wellen der KI-Evolution überstehen kann.”

Informationen zu StageOne Ventures

StageOne Ventures ist eine Venture-Capital-Gesellschaft, die sich darauf spezialisiert hat, herausragende israelische Gründer von Unternehmen im Technologiebereich von der Idee bis zum Exit zu unterstützen. StageOne verfügt über 25 Jahre Erfahrung und verwaltet mehr als 650 Millionen US-Dollar. Das Unternehmen ist spezialisiert auf Frühphaseninvestitionen in den Bereichen KI-Infrastruktur, Cybersicherheit und Frontier Enterprise Tech. Durch die Kombination von Kapital mit praktischer Unterstützung, umfassender operativer Expertise und einem globalen Netzwerk hilft StageOne Gründern beim Aufbau von Unternehmen, die in ihrer Kategorie führend sind.

Weitere Informationen finden Sie unter www.stageonevc.com.

Medienkontakt:
Yael Eckstein
VP Marketing
StageOne
[email protected]