Alitheon®, the advanced optical-AI pioneer, today announced the closing of the round led by Emerald Technology Ventures, with significant participation from eBay Ventures and continued support from existing investors.
BELLEVUE, Wash., June 2, 2026 — The capital accelerates global deployment of Alitheon’s FeaturePrint® technology—a category-defining solution backed by 55+ issued patents.
Alitheon’s Bellevue-Based Machine Vision Team Pioneered Optical AI for No-Touch Serialization, Fraud Prevention, and Traceability: With over 55 issued patents, FeaturePrint is the Biometric for Things.
From industrial gears to healthcare products to luxury goods, Alitheon’s FeaturePrint® provides an unbreakable link between physical objects and digital traceability. Our Optical AI identifies the unique “fingerprint” of any item—no tags, labels, or stickers required. Ensure absolute authenticity and end-to-end provenance across your global supply chain with a simple scan.
The industry has long relied on barcodes, tags, and stickers, but these external proxy markers can be damaged, detached, or counterfeited. Standard machine learning only identifies objects at a class level, recognizing a generic part rather than a specific asset. Alitheon renders these obsolete by capturing the inherent surface details of an object to create a unique, unforgeable identity—true 1-to-1 serialization without adding anything to the product.
The result is biometrics for things: a Zero Trust framework where no item is assumed authentic until its digital fingerprint is verified via a standard camera. With nothing added, there is no marker for bad actors to spoof, ensuring an unbreakable link between the physical object and its digital record.
“Securing support from such powerhouses proves the world is ready for digital-first serialization, provenance, and traceability,” said Roei Ganzarski, CEO of Alitheon. “We aren’t just identifying goods; we are powering the trust layer of the global economy, providing a level of security that additives and standard AI simply cannot match.”
“At Emerald, we look for technologies that solve fundamental industrial challenges at scale,” said Gina Domanig, Managing Partner at Emerald Technology Ventures. “Alitheon’s ability to provide 1-to-1 serialization without the need for labels or tags is a game-changer for global supply chains. By establishing a ‘Zero Trust’ framework for physical goods, Alitheon is providing the essential data integrity required for the future of automated manufacturing and logistics.”
“As recommerce continues to grow, trust and provenance are becoming increasingly important across high-value categories,” added Henri Jaanimägi, Global Head of eBay Ventures. ” Alitheon’s ‘biometrics for things’ represents an important step forward in the broader trust infrastructure needed to support more transparent and confident buying and selling experience.”
This round positions Alitheon as the definitive leader in “Physical-to-Digital” identity, offering the essential technology to secure global trade.
Learn more about the companies by visiting the websites at:
New monthly Zoom series where founders and operators across the Bonfire portfolio share what’s actually working in AI, and stay a step ahead, together
SAN DIEGO and LOS ANGELES, June 2, 2026 — Wildfire Systems, a financial technology platform powering loyalty and reward programs, and Bonfire Ventures, a seed-stage venture capital firm backing AI-native, B2B technology companies, today announced the launch of AI Club: A Bonfire x Wildfire Show-and-Tell, a monthly series bringing together innovators, entrepreneurs, and curious minds to share what they are building, testing, and learning with artificial intelligence. The series starts June 5, 2026, 10:00 – 11:15am PT, via Zoom, and sessions will be held on the first Friday of each month.
AI Club is designed as a low-pressure, high-value gathering where participants share real work projects, personal experiments, workflow hacks, favorite tools, demos, or simply their curiosity. Open to leaders and employees across all Bonfire portfolio companies and friends of the Bonfire and Wildfire communities, the series is built on a simple premise: think book club, but for AI.
The series reflects a shared conviction between Wildfire and Bonfire that the most meaningful AI progress often happens in informal, peer-to-peer settings where practitioners compare notes, share failures alongside wins, and build on each other’s ideas. By connecting two communities at the forefront of fintech, commerce, and venture-backed software, AI Club aims to accelerate practical AI adoption across the startup ecosystem.
“AI is moving fast enough that the most valuable thing any of us can do to drive innovation is compare notes in real time,” said Tristan Barnum, Chief Marketing Officer and Head of AI Innovation at Wildfire Systems. “AI Club is that space. We are building it for the same reason we got into AI ourselves: because sharing what you know makes everyone better, and so often the best ideas come from unexpected places.”
“The Bonfire community is full of founders and operators who are quietly building some of the most interesting AI applications we have seen,” said Deb Goldstein, Head of Marketing and Platform at Bonfire Ventures. “AI Club gives them a recurring forum to surface that work, learn from peers across industries, and stay connected to what is actually working on the ground. We are thrilled to build this alongside the Wildfire team.”
About Wildfire Systems Wildfire, founded in 2017 in San Diego, powers white-label shopping rewards, retail media, and loyalty programs for financial services and technology partners. Its platform rewards consumers with cashback, coupons, and other benefits, driving sales for 50,000+ merchant programs in over 50 countries. Wildfire’s AI platform, RevenueEngine, monetizes product and brand mentions within content. Ranked among the top fastest-growing companies in the Inc. 5000 in 2023 and 2024, and 2025. Learn more at wildfire-corp.com.
About Bonfire Ventures Bonfire Ventures is a leading seed-stage venture capital firm backing AI-native B2B technology companies. With more than $1B in assets under management and deep experience helping founders navigate major technology shifts, Bonfire leads seed rounds and partners closely with a small number of companies each year, supporting founders from the earliest stages through scale. The firm’s focused model gives founders access to senior, hands-on partners who bring pattern recognition, operating experience, and trusted support when the path forward is not obvious.
Funding Comes on the Heels of Novellia Powering Research for the World’s Largest Drugmakers, Signing Several Seven-Figure Contracts, and the Launch of Its Patient-Facing Mobile App
NEW YORK, June 2, 2026 — Novellia, the only real-world data company built entirely on information patients choose to contribute to medical research, today announced an $18 million Series A led by Spark Capital with participation from Khosla Ventures, Acrew Capital, Bling Capital, and TMV, bringing Novellia’s total funding to $28 million. Building on this momentum, Novellia is also launching its patient-facing mobile app, an extension of its award-winning online platform that allows individuals to securely access their complete health history.
Novellia Raises $18M Series A Funding Round, Bringing Total Funds Raised to $28M
Researchers have long depended on real-world data to understand how treatments perform outside clinical trials. But today’s data ecosystem is dominated by third-party brokers stitching together partial datasets from insurance claims and hospital records. The result is a system that costs over $50 billion annually and still leaves out the most important source of truth: the patient.
“Behind every patient is a fragmented, incomplete record of their life,” said Shashi Shankar, Co-Founder and CEO of Novellia. “I watched this up close: first through my grandfather’s cancer journey, and then professionally in pharma, where we were developing therapies without ever seeing the full picture. The system failed patients and researchers at the same time. Novellia changes the course for this whole industry by putting the patient at the center.”
The funding will be utilized to scale Novellia’s AI-powered technology, designed to give patients a free tool to access and organize their complete health history across providers, alongside the opportunity to share it with scientists to advance medical discoveries. Novellia puts this deidentified, anonymized data in the hands of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies to fuel new cures and treatments, fundamentally changing the course of research and development. Its customers include several of the top 10 pharmaceutical companies and early-stage diagnostics companies.
“I’ve known major pharma companies had data that was too old, too slow, and too disconnected from patients,” said Alex Finkelstein, General Partner at Spark Capital. “For a long time, I looked for a company like Novellia. Shashi understood the problem firsthand and built the solution that benefits patients and research. Since Spark led the Series A, Novellia has signed some of the largest companies in the world to seven-figure, multi-year contracts. This is dramatically changing how medicines are developed.”
“Nearly 70% of patients are open to contributing data for medical breakthroughs, but they expect control, transparency, and privacy safeguards,” said Emma Silverman, Partner at TMV. “That gap between willingness and infrastructure is exactly what Novellia solves by creating a new category of patient-consented data that is both more complete and more actionable for research.”
Within 30 seconds, Novellia helps patients with serious and complex conditions find and unify up to 20 years of medical data from disparate hospital systems, doctors’ offices, and labs across the U.S. The sickest patients carry the greatest administrative burden, spending hours tracking down records and repeating their histories to new providers. Novellia eliminates that overhead with its proprietary, AI-powered platform that pulls the data together into a single, user-friendly source to give patients a free, comprehensive record of their health, something most have never had access to. Novellia then analyzes those records using proprietary NLP models that extract signals from unstructured clinical text, including physician notes, lab narratives, and diagnostic reports. This is often the richest and most overlooked layer of the medical record, where clinicians document their reasoning and researchers finally see why decisions were made, turning raw patient data into anonymized, harmonized datasets ready for research.
About Novellia Novellia, Inc. is a patient data company that helps people find and unify over 20 years of health data in seconds so they can get better care, while accelerating medical breakthroughs. Named one of Digital Health New York’s 10 startups to watch, a 2026 Fierce Outsourcing Award recipient for Innovation in Drug Development, and a 2026 MedTech Breakthrough Award winner for Best Healthcare Data Repository Solution, Novellia is the only real-world data company built entirely on information patients choose to share with research. Novellia is backed by peer-reviewed research presented at medical congresses, including ASCO and SABCS-AACR. To learn more, visit www.novellia.com.
HUNTINGTON BEACH, Calif., June 2, 2026 — Mach Industries, a leading defense manufacturer building advanced unmanned systems for modern defense, today announced it has raised $300 million in Series C funding. The new capital will accelerate execution of existing government contracts, talent acquisition, product development, and the expansion of Forge, the company’s flexible manufacturing network.
Mach Industries exists to build next-generation defense systems that preserve an allied American technological edge. As drone warfare accelerates and adversaries field autonomous systems at scale, superiority will belong to those who can develop, manufacture, and deploy faster. Mach Industries is scaling to meet that moment.
“Today’s Series C funding is a powerful accelerator for our mission,” said Founder and CEO Ethan Thornton. “We’re delivering advanced unmanned systems at the pace the threat environment demands, and we’re grateful to our investors for believing in our ability to strengthen American and allied superiority on the battlefield.”
The capital will expand Forge and Mach Propulsion, advance second-generation systems, and deepen partnerships with U.S. Department of War customers, including the Army, Air Force, and SOCOM, as well as allied governments.
“Mach will be vital to the safety and future of free societies” said Nathan Doctor, Founder of Infinite Capital. “As an outlier in defense innovation, Mach has proven with unprecedented speed to flight, production trajectory, and contract success that rebuilding America’s industrial base is of prime importance. The team’s mission-first ethos drives this strategy with urgency and operational discipline.”
Most recently, Mach Industries acquired Exquadrum, now rebranded as Mach Energetics, integrating its energetics systems, engineering team, manufacturing infrastructure, and test facilities to further vertically integrated production and accelerate system delivery. This acquisition enhances testing throughput and enables faster iteration across all platforms, advancing the company’s long-term strategy to build a more independent, resilient, and vertically integrated manufacturing, development, and test base.
“At Ribbit, we partner with teams disrupting the status quo, who see the cracks before anyone else and have the conviction to build something better,” said Micky Malka, Founder of Ribbit Capital. “Ethan and the Mach team are building with urgency, increasingly controlling their supply chain, and refusing to wait for incumbents to catch up. They combine technical depth, execution speed, and a strong sense of duty to country. We’re proud to co-lead this Series C as they build a defining company.”
Over the past twelve months, Mach Industries has scaled across every dimension of the business. The company now operates five active vehicle programs: Viper, a jet-powered vertical take-off, one way vehicle; Glide, a high-altitude strike glider; Stratos, an airborne surveillance platform; Dart, a low-cost counter-drone interceptor; and Pike, a long-range strike munition built for large-scale deployment, with production expected to begin on at least three systems this year.
To support this next phase of growth, Mach has strengthened its executive team with senior technical, operational, and government engagement leaders who will help drive system development, manufacturing scale, and long-term strategic initiatives. Together, these milestones mark Mach’s transition from rapid development to scaled production and deployment.
About Mach Industries Founded in 2023, Mach Industries is a defense manufacturing company headquartered in Huntington Beach, California. The company develops advanced unmanned systems and the manufacturing infrastructure to scale their production. By vertically integrating weapons, propulsion, and manufacturing, Mach delivers the speed, adaptability, and resilience required to preserve the allied edge in an increasingly contested world. For more information, please visit us at machindustries.com and follow us on LinkedIn and X.
The targeted proteomic platform company marks its first anniversary in Carlsbad with four commercial partnerships, seven products, BSL-2 equipped lab, and growing adoption across human and animal health markets globally
CARLSBAD, Calif., June 2, 2026 — As laboratories increasingly seek faster, more cost-efficient alternatives to legacy single-analyte testing, demand for scalable multi-analyte proteomic workflows is growing across pharma, reference laboratory, and animal health markets. Today marks one year since Pictor Holdings Inc., a global targeted proteomic platform company founded in New Zealand, opened its U.S. headquarters in Carlsbad, California.
Pictor isn’t just growing. It’s defining the future of how the world detects disease across humans, animals, and the environment. With seven commercial products, four strategic partnerships, a purpose-built laboratory, and an experienced, enhanced U.S. leadership team, the company heads into year two with a growing pipeline and a platform built to become the backbone of multi-analyte workflows in labs around the world.
Year One: Commercial and Operational Highlights
Expanded its menu to seven commercial off-the-shelf products and secured four strategic partnerships, including a collaboration with a top 20 global pharmaceutical company (name held confidential) and a formalized commercial collaboration with Disease Research Limited (DRL) in New Zealand for the validation and launch of PictVet® MAP assay across NZ’s dairy and beef sectors
Built a pipeline of five active partner agreements spanning oncology, animal health, ELISA consolidation, and wellness markets, and published three peer-reviewed studies in Tuberculosis and Frontiers in Veterinary Science.
Expanded the Carlsbad facility with a purpose-built lab facility, broadening on-site research and development capabilities, and adding expertise across the scientific, commercial, and operational functions.
Completed a $5M pre-Series A convertible note, supported by long-term shareholders and a significant new U.S. investor
Welcomed Terry Kelly, PhD, as Chief Operating Officer — bringing 20+ years in assay development, oncology, and neuroscience, a PhD from UCLA, and authorship on 30+ peer-reviewed publications
Welcomed Tim Shannon as Chief Financial Officer — a 20+ year biotech finance veteran who previously co-led the strategic partnership and follow-on acquisition of Inivata alongside Jamie Platt
“A year ago, we joined the innovative Carlsbad biotech community. We believe the market is eager for accessible targeted proteomic workflows. What the past twelve months have shown us is that the demand is real, the partnerships are real, and the platform performs. Our second year is about scale — more partners, more markets, and more of the science that makes this platform genuinely differentiated.” — Jamie Platt, PhD, CEO and Co-founder, Pictor Holdings Inc.
“What drew me to Pictor is the gap between what targeted proteomic technology can do and what most labs currently need it to do. Pictor’s platform is built on tried-and-true diagnostic technology but built in a way that allows labs to ask more questions in a single workflow and in a cost-effective way. Building workflows, systems, and partner relationships that can enable labs to expand their current capabilities and make the science accessible at scale. That’s the work I’m here to do.” — Terry Kelly, PhD, Chief Operating Officer, Pictor Holdings Inc.
“The companies that define the next era of laboratory science will be the ones that solve both the science and the economics simultaneously. Pictor’s platform does that — and the commercial model means that as adoption scales, the business scales with it. That’s a compelling foundation to build on.” — Tim Shannon, Chief Financial Officer, Pictor Holdings Inc.
To support the next phase of growth, Pictor is targeting a U.S. Series A of up to $30 million. Proceeds will be deployed to scale assay development and manufacturing capabilities, expand the team and patent portfolio, while advancing large-scale translational studies across priority therapeutic areas with a goal of entering licensing stages with multiple partners within the next 12 to 18 months.
Pictor’s Carlsbad laboratory is designed to grow with its partners. As adoption of targeted proteomic workflows expands across human and animal health, Pictor expects to deepen existing partnerships and establish new ones across pharma, reference laboratories, and veterinary markets globally. For partnership inquiries, contact [email protected] or visit www.pictorproteomics.com.
About Pictor Holdings Inc. Pictor Holdings Inc. is a global targeted proteomic platform company founded in New Zealand and headquartered in Carlsbad, California, with operations in New Zealand, Australia, and India. The company develops multi-analyte proteomic assay solutions for human and animal health research environments, enabling laboratories and biopharma partners to run more analytes, faster, at lower cost. Pictor’s IP portfolio includes 16 patents, five pending, and seven registered trademarks. For more information, visit www.pictorproteomics.com.
Led by Dogwood Ventures, the financing will accelerate Stratusphere, StratusGrid’s platform for identifying, approving, executing, and verifying cloud infrastructure optimizations.
CHATTANOOGA, Tenn., June 2, 2026 — StratusGrid, a cloud infrastructure optimization company helping enterprises move from cloud visibility to verified outcomes, today announced it has raised $3 million in seed financing, the company’s first outside capital round.
The round was led by Dogwood Ventures, based in Atlanta, with participation from Market Square Ventures, LaunchTN, VentureSouth, Service Provider Capital, and several strategic angel investors.
Stratusphere helps teams identify, approve, execute, and verify optimizations.
StratusGrid helps companies address a growing challenge in modern cloud environments: infrastructure sprawl. As cloud environments become more complex and AI workloads increase infrastructure demands, many organizations struggle to identify, prioritize, approve, and safely execute the changes required to continuously optimize for efficiency and performance.
Traditional cloud optimization tools often stop at visibility. StratusGrid is building an AI-driven platform that closes the loop: identifying environment-specific opportunities, planning work, routing approvals, supporting execution of customer-approved changes, and verifying the results. This approach has helped customers save millions of dollars across large-scale AWS and Azure environments through infrastructure changes that improve value and performance while allowing their teams to focus on feature delivery.
This infrastructure-level execution is particularly important for private equity-backed software companies, where StratusGrid turns cloud optimization from an analysis exercise into an executable value-creation motion that reduces cloud costs without long-term financial commitments.
“We are thrilled to partner with Chris and the StratusGrid team as they solve a massive and growing challenge facing technology companies: infrastructure sprawl,” said Aaron Hurst, founding partner at Dogwood Ventures. “StratusGrid’s approach does more than identify cloud optimization opportunities. It helps customers safely execute approved changes and realize measurable benefits. As AI deployments make infrastructure environments even more complex, StratusGrid is well positioned to become a critical partner for companies operating at scale.”
StratusGrid bootstrapped the business prior to raising outside capital, building the company around customer demand and deep experience operating in complex cloud environments. The new financing positions StratusGrid to accelerate development of Stratusphere, expand product and engineering capacity, and scale go-to-market efforts with private equity-backed software companies and enterprises managing large and growing AWS and Azure environments.
“We bootstrapped StratusGrid by staying close to customers and solving painful infrastructure problems with a team that knows how to execute,” said Chris Hurst, CEO of StratusGrid. “This round reflects the trust our customers have placed in us and the work our team has done to turn complex cloud challenges into measurable outcomes. With this financing, we are ready to accelerate Stratusphere, our AI-native services platform for cloud infrastructure optimization, and deliver world-class optimization expertise at software scale to customers managing growing cloud environments.”
“Visibility is important, but visibility alone is not enough. The harder challenge is turning insights into safe, approved, measurable action without pulling engineers away from higher-priority work,” said Jeremy Scardino, CPO of StratusGrid. “With Stratusphere, we are building the execution layer for cloud optimization, bringing intelligence, context, workflow, and execution together so optimization becomes an operational capability teams can trust and scale.”
About StratusGrid StratusGrid is a cloud infrastructure optimization company helping enterprises move from cloud visibility to verified outcomes. Its Stratusphere platform combines AI-driven opportunity discovery, planning, approval workflows, execution of approved changes, monitoring, and savings verification to help teams improve efficiency and performance in complex AWS and Azure environments. https://stratusgrid.com/
About Dogwood Ventures Dogwood Ventures is an Atlanta-based venture capital firm investing in high-growth technology companies across the Southeast and beyond. The firm partners with ambitious founders building durable businesses in large markets.
Co-hosted by the AgeTech Collaborative™ from AARP, the conference features a business plan competition, certification in AI and Longevity, and a thorough examination of transformative issues and investing opportunities in the $8.3 trillion longevity market
LAFAYETTE, Calif., June 2, 2026 — The most anticipated gathering for leaders in the longevity economy, the annual What’s Next Longevity Venture Summit, is coming to Berkeley, Calif., June 16-18. Now in its 23rd year, it attracts more than 200 investors, entrepreneurs, and thought leaders driving the $8.3 trillion longevity ecosystem. It features the $10,000 Business Plan Competition and recognizes the finalists for the John Hopper Impact Award.
“This continues to be the most trusted event for learning and discovery from research, experts, and use cases, plus defining trends and best practices in the longevity ecosystem,” says Mary Furlong, who produces the event, co-hosted by AgeTech Collaborative™ from AARP. “We’re known for bringing together distribution partners, investors, thought leaders, analysts, innovators, and partners in senior housing, home care, and media to foster deal flow in longevity.”
This year Mary Furlong & Associates is partnering with CITRIS Health and the Banatao Institute at UC Berkeley. Together they will offer programming and a certificate in AI and Longevity at the summit.
Nathan Price, PhD, will deliver the keynote address. As a professor and co-director of the Center for Human Healthspan at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging, he will share his vision for optimizing our health in ways previously unimaginable, using systems biology, big data, and AI.
The $10,000 Business Plan Competition will spotlight five innovative startups that support and improve the quality of life for older adults. Named in honor of a visionary and innovator, The John Hopper Impact Award recognizes an exceptional entrepreneur who has introduced an innovative solution or technology focused on improving the independence, quality, and cost of care for the aging population.
Featured speakers include Nathan Price, PhD, Professor and Co-Director, Center for Human Healthspan, Buck Institute for Research on Aging; Dan Hermann, President and CEO, and Head of Investment Banking for Ziegler; Sean Kelly, CEO, FrontPorch, Mark Mahaney, Senior Managing Director, Evercore; Tiffany Yu, Principal, 7wire Ventures; Kaushik Roy, CEO, Vivalon; Todd Haim, Director, Office of Strategic Extramural Programs, National Institute on Aging; Courtney Baldridge, Corporate Strategist, USAging, and Richard Lui, Fintech Founder and News Anchor CNN/NBCU News Group.
Principal sponsors include Centre For Aging + Brain Health Innovation; Samsung Health, PainChek; CITRIS and the Banatao Institute, Solid Health.ai; GoGo Grandparent; KuboCare, PositScience; Social Discovery Group; Childfree Trust, TCARE; High Performing Grandparents, and Ouiltt.
Returning this year are opportunities to meet with fellow attendees during AgeTech One-on-Ones, sponsored by AgeTech Collaborative™ from AARP. Also returning are Boot Camp sessions—master classes on topics including A Beginner’s Guide to AI, How to Work with the AgeTech Collaborative from AARP, How to Use AI to Turbo Charge Your Business, How to Integrate Across Platforms, How to Use PR for Success, How to Work With NIA, How to Go to Market in Florida, How to Build Your Brand, and more.
CHICAGO, June 2, 2026 — Kosmos, an operational intelligence company focused on ending escalation chaos, today announced its commercial launch alongside a $5 million seed round led by Norwest. The funding will accelerate product development and market education as Kosmos brings correlated root-cause intelligence to support and engineering teams across the enterprise.
The Hidden Cost of Every Incident Despite widespread adoption of observability and ITSM tools, enterprise support and engineering teams still spend hours on “investigation costs” – the hours spent manually reconstructing what happened when a service issue occurs. Gartner’s research has found that downtime costs average $500,000 to $1 million per hour for Fortune 500 companies, with high-stakes sectors like finance and healthcare exceeding $5 million. Customer cases, code changes, and service incidents remain fragmented across myriad tools that do not share context. The result is slow mean time to resolution (MTTR), recurring incidents, and engineering teams pulled out of deep work to chase signals that should already be connected.
Kosmos Operational Intelligence platform is an AI-native solution built to reduce investigation costs by correlating signals across Jira, Salesforce, GitHub, ServiceNow, and observability platforms including Datadog, Grafana, and Splunk to surface structured root cause faster. Every correlation is proposed by machine, confirmed by humans, and learned by the system, creating a continuous intelligence loop that gets smarter with each incident. By linking customer cases, code changes, and service incidents in a single correlated view, Kosmos gives teams the evidence they need to resolve faster and stop the same incidents from repeating.
“Most escalations are not random. They are signals that were disconnected or missed,” said Sanjay Gidwani, Founder and CEO of Kosmos. “Kosmos correlates those signals automatically so teams can resolve faster, with evidence they can trust, instead of piecing together what happened manually across four different tools.”
A Problem the Founder Lived Gidwani didn’t stumble upon this problem through research; he lived it, repeatedly, across two decades in enterprise delivery operations. At organization after organization, he watched the same scene play out: something breaks at a major customer, and leadership’s response is to tap their best people for a quick resolution. Senior engineers and support leaders — the employees hardest to replace and most expensive to deploy — are dispatched to manually stitch together what went wrong across a tangle of disconnected systems. Investigations can consume days, derailing product roadmaps, delaying customer initiatives and forcing teams into reactive mode. Because the root cause is often never fully understood, the same incident often surfaces again weeks later.
“It’s always the top players, the people you can least afford to pull away from everything else,” Gidwani said. “And yet they’re stuck chasing down information across disconnected systems because no one can clearly see what actually happened. That always struck me as a solvable problem.”
Kosmos is his answer — a platform that identifies and surfaces root cause with the unified context required to prevent outages rather than chase them.
What Customers and Partners Are Saying “The slowest part of fixing anything in production is finding where the problem actually lives. The hunt eats hours, wears the team down, and never shows up on any report. Kosmos compresses that part, so our engineers spend more of their week building product,” said Jon Flaherty, CEO, PSIgnite.
“As an AI-native company, we’re always looking at what slows us down – and it usually isn’t the technology. The real drag is interruptions: pulling someone out of deep work to determine what happened across different platforms and stitch it together for engineering. That’s not just time lost; it’s momentum lost,” said Cesar Sanchez, Chief Operating Officer at Tribble. “What made Kosmos different is that they never asked us to reshape how we operate. They met us where we are, and that flexibility made it clear this is a team we can actually grow with.”
“Salesforce customers generate enormous amounts of data across cases, changes, and incidents — and the teams supporting them deserve tools that make sense of it in real time,” said Dan Darcy, Chief Customer Officer at Qualified from Salesforce. “Kosmos connects that data in a way that gives support and engineering teams the context they need to move faster and protect the customer experience. We’re excited to welcome them to the Salesforce partner ecosystem.”
Investor Perspective Investors point to the company’s ability to deliver quick customer wins and the vast market opportunity as key drivers for their investments.
“Enterprise support teams have long been stuck navigating fragmented signals and recurring incidents,” said Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest. “With decades of experience facing these challenges, Sanjay recognized early that modern AI could finally make sense of those signals in a practical, operational way. Kosmos has the potential to redefine how organizations detect and resolve these operational issues.”
About Kosmos Kosmos provides operational intelligence for enterprise support and engineering teams. Its AI-native Operational Intelligence platform connects customer cases, code changes, and service incidents across GitHub, Jira, Salesforce, and ServiceNow into a single correlated view. With Kosmos, organizations can eliminate investigation costs by surfacing the likely root cause in seconds, helping teams resolve incidents faster and prevent repeat disruptions. Headquartered in Chicago, Kosmos was founded by CEO Sanjay Gidwani, who brings two decades of experience in enterprise delivery operations and the Salesforce ecosystem. Learn more atkosmoslabs.ai.
About Norwest Norwest is a global venture and growth equity investment firm managing more than $15.5 billion in capital. Since its inception, Norwest has invested in more than 700 companies and currently partners with more than 250 companies in its venture and growth equity portfolio. The firm invests in early- to late-stage businesses across key sectors with a focus on enterprise, healthcare, and consumer. The Norwest team offers a deep network of connections, extensive operating experience, and a wide range of impactful services to help CEOs and founders scale their businesses. Norwest has offices in Menlo Park and San Francisco, Calif.; Mumbai, India; and Tel Aviv, Israel. For more information, please visit www.norwest.com.
Commitment from Galvanize supports continued and growing deployment of electric school buses and infrastructure nationwide
BEVERLY, Mass., June 2, 2026 — Highland Electric Fleets today announced the closing of a $75 million preferred equity commitment from Galvanize and affiliates (“Galvanize”), bringing total preferred equity commitments to $150 million. The capital raise was structured in stages to align with Highland’s deployment timelines and continued national expansion of electric school bus fleets and charging infrastructure, alongside the prior preferred equity commitment from Aiga Capital Partners (“Aiga”).
Highland Electric Fleets
Highland’s Electrification-as-a-Service (EaaS) model simplifies the transition from diesel to electric fleets for municipalities, school districts, and fleet operators through its full-service and cost-effective offerings. Highland provides vehicles, charging infrastructure, software solutions, and ongoing operational support under long-term service agreements. These contracts align costs with traditional fuel options while creating stable, recurring revenue for the company. In addition, electrifying school buses reduces harmful tailpipe emissions, improving air quality, and delivering meaningful environmental and public health benefits for communities and children.
Highland will primarily use the capital to accelerate the deployment of electric school buses and charging infrastructure, expand operations in key markets, and broaden its capabilities across additional municipal fleet and energy applications. In addition to expanding the asset portfolio, the company will invest in advancing projects that integrate charging infrastructure with on-site energy resources for its customers. Highland will also manage transportation operations as the selected Official Electric School Bus Provider of the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games.
“This capital structure is designed to support long-term, asset-backed deployments at scale,” said Duncan McIntyre, CEO of Highland Electric Fleets. “From Florida to Michigan to California, we are seeing a clear shift toward solutions that can be deployed reliably across very different operating environments, from school districts to municipal and other fleet operators. Our focus is on execution: putting vehicles, infrastructure, and energy solutions into service in a way that works every day.”
“We believe Highland is well-positioned for growth with an experienced management team and a leading, differentiated platform backed by long-term contracts and a high-quality portfolio of electric school buses and energy infrastructure.” said Meghan Pasricha, a Partner at Galvanize’s Credit and Capital Solutions strategy. “We are excited to invest in Highland as they rapidly scale to modernize aging fleets and meet rising electrification demands.”
Pasricha’s team expects to deploy up to $1.8 billion within three years across sectors with growing demand and capital needs including power, manufacturing, energy efficiency, and resilience by providing flexible capital solutions.
Across its deployments, Highland’s electric school buses have traveled more than 10 million miles, demonstrating consistent performance and reinforcing the viability of large-scale fleet electrification.
About Highland Electric Fleets
Highland Electric Fleets is North America’s leading provider of Electrification-as-a-Service. Founded in 2019, Highland partners with school districts, municipalities, and fleet operators to make the transition to electric fleets simple and affordable. Highland proudly serves as the Official Electric School Bus Provider of the LA28 Olympic and Paralympic Games and Team USA. From pioneering vehicle-to-grid technology to managing some of the nation’s largest electric school bus fleets, Highland delivers reliable, cost-effective solutions that support local communities and drive the future of transportation. Learn more at www.highlandfleets.com.
About Galvanize
Galvanize is a global asset manager investing at the intersection of energy innovation, resilience, and intelligence. The firm deploys capital across seed, venture, growth, public equities, credit, and real estate, combining investment expertise with deep in-house capabilities in technology, policy, and markets. Galvanize is structured to rapidly identify and execute on investment opportunities created by the energy transition, across all sectors of the economy.
