New onchain credit platform backed by an extensive network of investors will initially provide structured credit to crypto trading firms, with plans to expand into other emerging tech markets.

NEW YORK, Oct. 28, 2026 — Ibis, an onchain credit platform built to expand institutional access to credit across frontier markets, today announced its emergence from stealth, highlighted by a $250 million Credit Facility with FalconX. The company also unveiled the closing of its pre-seed round, led by FalconX and other notable investors and industry executives across digital assets, institutional credit, capital markets, and financial infrastructure. Anchorage Digital Bank, N.A., will serve as a custody, banking, and design partner, while Innovating Capital will provide additional expertise in credit, transaction structuring, and strategic development.

Ibis originates, tokenizes, risk-manages, and services structured credit facilities, connecting institutional capital providers with companies looking to access new sources of scalable credit. The company was founded to address a structural gap in frontier-market credit, as traditional lending infrastructure often isn’t designed for emerging industries with complex risk profiles and rapidly evolving collateral. Ibis is building the infrastructure to underwrite, structure, and manage these opportunities at institutional scale, starting with digital asset markets.

“Frontier markets are developing faster than the financial infrastructure built to support them. Today, many high-quality businesses with strong fundamentals are underserved, not because they lack creditworthiness, but because traditional underwriters refuse to innovate,” said Cooper Emmons, Founder and CEO of Ibis. “Our goal is to build a credit platform that can evolve alongside these markets, bringing a more sophisticated approach to how emerging businesses are evaluated, financed, and managed as they scale, and offering those opportunities to a broader audience. We identified the need across institutions within the crypto & prediction markets vertical as our starting point, but the underlying need extends well beyond digital assets.”

“Access to reliable, institutional-grade credit is an important part of the continued maturation of digital assets,” said Joshua Lim, Co-Head of Global Markets at FalconX. “Ibis is building infrastructure to help bridge the gap between institutional capital allocators and a new generation of onchain market participants. As the digital asset market and other onchain asset classes continue to evolve, scalable credit infrastructure will be increasingly important to supporting sustainable growth.”

Ibis’ pre-seed round includes FalconX, Anchorage Digital, and Innovating Capital, and executives from Erebor, Revolut, Injective Foundation, Agora, Selini, Superstate, Flowdesk, Blockchain.com, DV Chain, Pyth, Colter Lewis, and GenCap Management, among others.

The initial focus on firms within crypto capital markets represents Ibis’ entry point into a significantly broader opportunity. As frontier industries mature, Ibis plans to extend its infrastructure to additional asset managers across emerging market segments, including GPUs, robotics, and venture capital, while expanding its network of institutional lenders and capital providers.

Investor Quotes

Nathan McCauley, CEO and Co-Founder, Anchorage Digital
“Credit is one of the last pieces of institutional infrastructure that digital asset markets are still building. Ibis is taking a disciplined approach: structured facilities, real underwriting, and collateral held in regulated custody at Anchorage Digital Bank. That combination is what lets institutional capital participate with confidence, and it’s why we’re backing the team as both a partner and an investor.”

Roshun Patel, Head of Credit, Alternatives at Erebor
“Frontier markets need access to credit, and the gap has been wide for far too long. In lending, structure matters, and Ibis has built one designed to scale. I’m excited to support their vision.”

Jordi Alexander, CEO, Selini
“Digital asset trading firms have long been underserved by traditional lenders, not for lack of performance, but for lack of infrastructure. We are looking forward to Ibis bringing institutional-grade credit to the businesses powering digital asset markets and opening new opportunities for investors.”

Shiliang Tang, Managing Partner, Monarq Asset Management 
“The businesses driving frontier markets, like digital asset trading firms, are real, highly profitable, and maturing fast, but the credit markets haven’t caught up to them. Ibis is closing that gap with a platform built to underwrite these companies on their fundamentals, and I’m excited to back them as they do.”

Anthony Georgiades, General Partner, Innovating Capital
“Working with Ibis, we saw an opportunity to bring the discipline of private credit to businesses that traditional lenders have struggled to serve. That means understanding each borrower’s business, structuring facilities around its risks, and giving capital providers the downside protections and transparency they expect. We’re excited to bring our experience in credit and transaction structuring to Ibis as it builds the infrastructure to deliver that approach at scale.”

About Ibis
Ibis is an onchain credit platform that originates, tokenizes, risk-manages, and services structured credit facilities for frontier markets that lack access to institutional capital. Ibis launched with a $250 million Credit Facility from FalconX, providing institutional credit capacity for eligible crypto trading firms. Starting with crypto trading firms, Ibis is building infrastructure to connect institutional lenders with borrowers across emerging categories of the global economy.

Media Contacts
M Group Strategic Communications
[email protected]

SOURCE Ibis

Plato gives AI developers a repeatable way to train and test models on the tools, decisions, and constraints that shape real work

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 28, 2026 — Plato, a company building simulated workplaces where AI can learn to do real jobs, today announced a $16 million Series A funding round led by Nava Ventures, with participation from Gradient Ventures, Transpose Platform, and Microsoft AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman. Freddie Martignetti, founder of Nava Ventures, joins the board. The round brings Plato’s total funding to $19 million, following a seed round led by Gradient Ventures.

As AI moves from answering questions to taking action, it needs practice using software, responding to changing circumstances, and completing multistep tasks. Plato gives AI labs realistic, repeatable environments where models can learn from feedback before operating in live systems.

“Mastering real complex work comes from experience doing those tasks,” said Robert Farlow, co-founder and CEO of Plato. “We’re building simulations that capture the tools, decisions, and unexpected situations those tasks involve, so AI models can gain experience in safe, contained environments before developers put them to work.”

For AI labs, training models directly in live software can carry real consequences: A model learning to place an order could spend actual money, while one practicing an administrative task could alter real records. Plato recreates these workflows in simulations that can be reset and reused, giving labs a place to train and test models without affecting live operations.

Plato works with domain experts to recreate the tools, situations, and expectations that shape jobs in customer support, people operations, finance, accounting, and healthcare administration. AI labs use these environments for reinforcement learning, a process in which models attempt tasks and receive feedback that helps them improve. Plato is developing richer simulations involving longer sequences of work and interactions with simulated people.

Plato evaluates both the outcome and how a model reaches it. Completing a purchase, for example, should not count as success if the model exceeds the budget. Its evaluations also examine whether models exploit weaknesses in a simulation to earn a high score.

“The feedback a model receives shapes what it learns,” said Pranav Putta, co-founder and CTO of Plato. “We build evaluations that reflect what the job actually requires, so developers can distinguish a high score from work done correctly. That means checking whether a model followed instructions, respected constraints, and completed the task.”

Farlow and Putta bring firsthand experience building systems for AI training. Farlow built an annotation platform at Yutori to support training computer-use models. Putta’s background includes research in computer vision, robotics, and reinforcement learning, as well as work training computer-use models at MultiOn.

“Robert and Pranav are deeply talented researchers and developers from Waterloo and Georgia Tech. They have developed a unique way to create high fidelity environments at scale, which is what initially drew us to the company,” said Freddie Martignetti, Founder of Nava Ventures. “However, we quickly learned that Plato is really a data lab, working on the frontier of the field to support the world’s best model development. We believe the work that Plato is doing is critical to unlocking the potential of AI at the enterprise level”

Plato will use the funding to expand its library of real-world work experience, paying professionals to recreate their jobs in simulated environments and deploying AI agents on real tasks to collect additional experience.

For more information, visit plato.so.

About Plato
Plato builds working simulations of real jobs and tasks for AI training and evaluation. Its environments combine realistic tools, situations, and task requirements so AI labs can train models on complex work and assess their performance in contained settings. Founded by Robert Farlow and Pranav Putta, Plato brings firsthand model-training experience and domain expertise to the challenge of making AI useful in the real world.

Founded in 2025 and based in San Francisco, Plato has raised $19 million in total funding. Investors include Nava Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Transpose Platform, and Microsoft AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman.

Dacyl Armendariz
[email protected] 

SOURCE Plato Technologies, Inc.

Amity Ventures led the seed round for the advanced materials platform, with participation by Human Capital, Anti Fund, and Powerset

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Oct. 28, 2026 — American Advanced Materials (AAM) today announced $12.5 million in seed funding led by Amity Ventures, with participation by Human Capital, Anti Fund, and Powerset. The company is developing an AI-native manufacturing platform for the advanced materials that underpin AI, energy, and defense, starting with titanium sponge. AAM will use the funding to grow its team and advance the front-end engineering and design of its manufacturing projects. The company plans to raise project financing to build and operate the integrated commercial facility. AAM’s founding team members have previously designed, built, and operated the world’s largest and most advanced titanium sponge and zirconium plants, both in the United States and abroad. They are joined by veterans of Tesla, ATI, TIMET, and Westinghouse.

Titanium sponge is the metal used by melters and alloy makers to manufacture America’s most important aerospace and defense programs. The United States is home to some of the world’s largest titanium melting operations, yet has produced no sponge since 2020. Meanwhile, titanium sponge imports hit a record 44,000 metric tons in 2025, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Industry experts project domestic demand to reach 60,000 metric tons over the coming 18 months, leaving America’s industrial base fully exposed to foreign supply chains that are fragile, unreliable, and capacity constrained. AAM is supporting the most strategic interests of America and allies by restoring the critical midstream process manufacturing layer that sits between upstream mineral mining and downstream end-product fabrication.

“America has the feedstock, energy, and expertise to lead in manufacturing these materials again,” said Alex Liegl, co-founder and CEO of AAM. “We aspire to build a next-generation DuPont, with globally competitive quality and cost as the starting point. Our goal is to make advanced materials abundant again so that their supply no longer limits what we can build.”

AAM’s first facility is designed with a vertically-integrated approach around the commercially proven Kroll process, drawing on the team’s direct experience building and operating large-scale titanium sponge plants. It is the first step toward an integrated manufacturing platform for titanium group materials that can add related materials using shared feedstock, infrastructure, and process expertise.

In addition, AAM is developing zirconium oxychloride (ZOC), the key precursor for all zirconium and hafnium materials used in nuclear fuel, gas turbines, rockets, and AI chips. Today, America fully relies on Chinese imports of ZOC. Over time, AAM intends to extend this model to offer America and its allies an advanced materials platform that manufactures the building blocks for all of their most important strategic interests.

AAM has signed offtake letters of intent for its future production of titanium sponge and zirconium oxychloride materials worth over $1 billion. Its prospective customers include domestic melters and alloy makers that supply the aerospace, AI infrastructure, defense, and energy sectors.

“We’re combining decades of process knowledge with modern engineering, AI, and robotics automation,” said Diego Represas, co-founder, President, and Chief Technology Officer of AAM. “America doesn’t need to wait for new technologies to lead the world in production cost, quality, and volume. What it needs is to build quickly. For AAM, the factory is the product. We design the plant, its software, and its operations as one system to carry what we learn into every future facility we build.”

“The opportunity in advanced materials isn’t simply to invent a new process. It’s to rebuild the industrial capacity that America has lost,” said Patrick Yang, Co-Founder and General Partner at Amity Ventures, which manages more than $2 billion in assets. “Alex and Diego have brought together the rare team, technical ambition, and urgency required to do that, starting with titanium sponge. We believe AAM has the potential to become a cornerstone of the next generation of American reindustrialization.”

Liegl and Represas founded AAM in 2025 after years of considering solutions to the same problem: demand for AI, energy, and defense kept climbing, while the supply of the advanced materials required by America and its allies stayed flat or entirely vanished. Liegl previously founded Tenet Energy, a nationwide fintech platform for electric vehicles and home electrification backed by Human Capital, and Layer1, a renewable-energy bitcoin mining company backed by Peter Thiel. Represas, an officer in the U.S. Army Reserve, previously founded Able AI, an AI data platform backed by Human Capital and Canapi Ventures, that was acquired by Moody’s Corp. The two met as freshmen at Stanford University.

About American Advanced Materials

American Advanced Materials (AAM) is an AI-native advanced materials platform that manufactures the building blocks for AI, energy, and defense Our mission is to restore American leadership in the materials that underpin our most important strategic interests. Founded in 2025 and based in Mountain View, California and New York City, New York, AAM brings together America’s top industry experts, industrial engineers, and AI talent to enable globally competitive production in the United States. Titanium sponge is its first commercial project, followed by zirconium oxychloride. Learn more at www.americanadvanced.com.

Media contact
Garrett Marquis | Throughline Global Advisors
[email protected]

SOURCE American Advanced Materials

Edwards brings a decade of experience in technology policy, competition, and AI infrastructure to help early-stage founders navigate critical decisions as they build and scale.

NEW YORK, Oct. 28, 2026 — Spice Capital, the early-stage venture capital firm founded by Maya Bakhai, today announced the appointment of Jamal Edwards, former Chief of Staff to Microsoft’s General Counsel for Infrastructure Legal Affairs, as a strategic advisor to the firm and its founder network.

Spice Capital is known for backing entrepreneurs before their ideas gain widespread recognition. As its founders build businesses in artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies, they face decisions that extend well beyond product development and fundraising: how to manage the cost of computing infrastructure, enter markets dominated by established competitors, and build products that large organizations can adopt and trust. Edwards will work with Bakhai and founders across the firm’s network, bringing experience from some of the technology industry’s most consequential business and regulatory matters.

“Being the first to believe in a founder means more than writing the first check,” said Maya Bakhai, founder and general partner of Spice Capital. “It means understanding what they’re trying to build and helping them get there. Jamal has spent his career working through complex questions about how technology companies compete, grow, and operate at scale. That experience will be valuable to founders making decisions today that could shape their companies for years to come.”

“The decisions that determine whether a company succeeds aren’t always the most obvious ones,” said Edwards. “A founder can build an extraordinary product and still struggle with the cost of bringing it to market, the power of established competitors, or the demands of customers operating in highly regulated industries. I want to help founders think through those questions early, when they still have the greatest freedom to shape what comes next.”

Edwards joins Spice Capital following a decade at Microsoft, where he held leadership roles spanning competition policy, regulatory strategy, and corporate affairs. Most recently, he served as Chief of Staff to the General Counsel for Infrastructure Legal Affairs, supporting the legal function underpinning Microsoft’s global cloud and AI infrastructure expansion. Previously, as Director of Competition Policy and Market Regulation, he helped lead advocacy strategy across 17 jurisdictions in connection with Microsoft’s $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard.

That transaction also marked the beginning of his relationship with Spice Capital. In 2023, the firm joined six other venture investors in filing an amicus brief supporting Microsoft’s position during the Federal Trade Commission’s appeal, arguing that mergers and acquisitions play an important role in sustaining competition and creating opportunities for entrepreneurs and investors.

For founders in Spice’s network, the relevance of Edwards’ experience is immediate. At OpenAssistant, decisions about computing infrastructure and the economics of operating AI products are central to the company’s growth.

“At OpenAssistant, scaling an AI product means making decisions about infrastructure, compute, and gross margins much earlier than early-stage founders once had to,” said Paul Canetti, co-founder of OpenAssistant. “Jamal understands how those choices play out at global scale. Giving Spice founders access to that perspective creates a practical edge most venture firms cannot offer: the ability to anticipate how infrastructure decisions and the surrounding policy environment will shape a company before early choices become expensive to reverse.”

For Resolvd, which develops digital workers deployed within hospital systems, the challenge is different: building software capable of performing meaningful work within complex organizations while meeting demanding requirements for reliability, oversight, and accountability.

“At Resolvd, we deploy digital workers inside hospital systems, where software has to complete real operational work across legacy systems while meeting strict standards for control and auditability,” said Ananth Manivannan, founder and CEO of Resolvd. “That experience makes clear that technical architecture and institutional trust are inseparable at scale. Jamal understands what it takes for technology to earn adoption inside complex organizations. His perspective gives Spice founders an uncommon advantage as they build products that consequential institutions can rely on.”

Bakhai also serves on Resolvd’s board of directors.

The appointment builds on Spice Capital’s approach to early-stage investing, pairing conviction in founders with access to the relationships and experience that can help turn promising ideas into enduring businesses.

About Spice Capital

Founded in 2021 by Maya Bakhai, Spice Capital is an early-stage venture capital firm backing founders before consensus forms around emerging markets and technologies. Its high-conviction, research-driven investment strategy spans artificial intelligence, the creator economy, financial technology, and vertical software, with investments including Beehiiv, HYPE, and GIRL BEER. Learn more at spicecapital.vc

For media inquiries contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Spice Capital

The grant funds the next chapter for Caravel’s full-stack platform—built to create value for all proteins—while scaling machine learning datasets and real-world pilots for existing customers. Michał Jastrzębski also joins as CTO to lead the company’s AI-driven protein engineering work.

PORTLAND, Ore., Oct. 28, 2026 — Caravel Bio, the company creating new high-performance systems for discovering, engineering, and manufacturing biomolecules, has been awarded a $1,246,984 Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF). The award, secured by fewer than 5% of applicants over the last decade, will support development of a system for creating and scaling proteins with new-to-nature chemistries. The Caravel platform massively parallelizes biological experimentation, enabling the building and testing of millions of protein designs at once. That scale generates the data AI needs to engineer proteins nature never built, accelerating development from the lab to products that can strengthen the economy, reduce pollution, and improve human health. The company has also welcomed Michał Jastrzębski, formerly of Ginkgo Bioworks, Proxima, and Intel, as Chief Technology Officer to lead the company’s work in training advanced AI models for biomolecular design.

Nearly every industrial enzyme, therapeutic protein, and biomaterial on the market today has been built from the same 20 canonical amino acids found in nature. Beyond those 20 exist hundreds of additional amino acids that could enable amazing new products—for example, the blockbuster drug Ozempic improves stability using one non-canonical amino acid—but, as a field, biotechnology has generally lacked reliable methods to discover proteins and manufacture products at scale using these new chemistries. And while AI is generating promising protein designs faster than ever, labs can test only a fraction of them. Compounding the problem, protein engineers don’t have effective feedback loops for turning laboratory experiments into scalable products without enormous expense and risk.

Caravel is building systems to close these gaps simultaneously through its novel design-build-test-learn cycle.

“I was really exhausted by the inability of the work I and my peers were doing, all with the best intentions, to actually improve the world without spending hundreds of millions of dollars to get a product across the finish line,” says Trevor Nicks, PhD., Founder & CEO of Caravel. “So when we set out to build Caravel, we started completely from scratch, re-designing the entire process of biomolecular engineering to lower costs while increasing speed, volume, and the real-world relevance of generated data.”

Caravel’s platform combines a suite of new lab techniques that unlock the broader amino acid palette for both discovery and manufacturing of new proteins. This data-rich workflow incorporates machine learning that converts each round of experiments into sharper predictions for the next. Notably, the data generated not only identifies what should be made, but also lays the foundation for manufacturing it at scale.

“When an experiment costs a fraction of a cent instead of tens of dollars, you stop asking which handful of ideas might work and instead start testing all of them,” says Emily Bowman, PhD., CSO of Caravel. “The systems we have built unlock massive data sets with very low costs. AlphaFold’s success in protein design illustrates the potential of large datasets. But importantly, those datasets were made possible by billions of dollars in publicly funded research. We are thankful that the NSF recognizes the value in decreasing those costs and is supporting our work in the massive parallelization of experimentation.”

One Year In: Partnerships, Funding, and Performance Gains
Since completing its Phase I grant in 2024, Caravel has translated its lab-stage platform into industrial partnerships, funding, and measurable performance gains. The company:

• Formally launched in October 2025 alongside a $7.8 million award from the NSF Directorate for Technology, Innovation and Partnerships
• Joined the Shell GameChanger program to create new ultra-stable enzymes for low-cost carbon capture and surpassed a key technical milestone within six months by increasing enzyme stability under industrially relevant conditions 12-fold
• Built a network of scientific and strategic partners, including Avery Bio, Caltech, Rutgers University, Oregon State University, Southern Connecticut State University, Rubi Laboratories, and the vHive Animal Health Incubator

Under Phase II, Caravel aims to extend its platform to additional enzyme classes for existing customers, and eventually scale those products for pilot deployment to innovate new, real-world protein products across DNA writing, carbon capture, rare earth separations, and more.

Deepening Leadership: Caravel’s New CTO
The company also announced the addition of Michał Jastrzębski as Chief Technology Officer. As Caravel builds the infrastructure poised to define the next era of protein design, Jastrzębski will lead Caravel’s artificial intelligence initiatives while helping advance its product roadmap and market strategy. Jastrzębski began his extensive career in technology at Intel Corporation and has since held roles at GitHub, bytewax, and Promixa. More recently, Jastrzębski worked at Ginkgo Bioworks, where he co-authored a collaboration with OpenAI exploring the use of a GPT-5-driven autonomous laboratory to optimize cell-free protein synthesis.

“I’ve seen firsthand how much AI in biology is still held back by a lack of the right data, not a lack of ambition,” said Jastrzębski. “Caravel is solving that problem at the source. Joining as Chief Technology Officer means helping build the system that finally gives protein design the scale of data it needs.”

ABOUT CARAVEL BIO
Caravel Bio has built a new data engine for biomolecular engineering, dramatically increasing the scale and speed of generating data. The platform tests millions of protein designs in parallel at a fraction of a cent per experiment, versus tens of dollars with conventional methods, providing the data AI-driven biology has been missing. The company’s Artificial Evolution™ technology combines cell-free protein synthesis, microfluidic droplets, and bacterial spore display to supercharge biomolecular engineering, so labs can generate the data AI needs to design proteins nature never built. Caravel was selected to lead a $7.8M NSF Technology, Innovation and Partnerships award and a $1.2M NSF SBIR Phase II grant. Caravel is on a mission to expand the role of biology as a transformative force for societal good. Learn more at www.caravel.bio.

About the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Programs
America’s Seed Fund powered by NSF awards $200 million annually to startups and small businesses, transforming scientific discovery into products and services with commercial and societal impact. Startups working across almost all areas of science and technology can receive up to $2 million to support research and development (R&D), helping de-risk technology for commercial success. America’s Seed Fund is congressionally mandated through the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The NSF is an independent federal agency with a budget of about $8.5 billion that supports fundamental research and education across all fields of science and engineering.

MEDIA CONTACT
Tess Pawlisch
608-333-9788
[email protected]

SOURCE Caravel Bio

Slauson & Co. leads round, joined by InvestTN and Baukunst, to scale the discovery-driven marketplace helping brands turn excess inventory into revenue.

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 28, 2026 — Offe Market, the online marketplace giving excess inventory from beloved brands a new life, today announced a $3 million seed round, bringing its total funding to $4.3 million. Slauson & Co. led the round, with participation from InvestTN and Baukunst, which led the company’s pre-seed round. Additional investors include commerce angels Jill Fisher Bowen, Stephanie Kleinjan, and Ruffin Mitchener, creator and founder of Brydge Club. The funding will advance Offe Market’s commerce intelligence platform, focusing on AI-powered pricing, personalized discovery, and live commerce.

Founded by retail veteran Rachel Gannon, Offe Market offers a curated, ever-changing assortment of fashion, beauty, and lifestyle brands at 30–80% off retail prices. The company has grown 2.5x year over year in revenue, shopper count, and order volume. Offe has worked with more than 200 brands, including consumer favorites Harper Wilde, OBEY, Rachel Antonoff, Wrangler, and Dolce Vita. Offe has also expanded into home and beauty, offering rugs, furniture, candles, and skincare from brands like Nopalera, P.F. Candle Co., Papier, Chillhouse Nails, and Wildflower Cases.

“The satisfaction of a great deal never gets old. What’s changed is how we shop and whose recommendations we trust,” said Rachel Gannon, founder and CEO of Offe Market. “We do the handpicking for you and let you in on the best finds. I love watching our customers share their hauls and discover new brands. Knowing those purchases help keep products out of landfills makes it even better.”

Gannon developed the concept for Offe Market after a decade in buying and merchandising. After joining Rue La La at the height of the flash-sale era, she managed a $120 million business at Macy’s. She later became ban.do’s first buyer, building its third-party buying channel into a multimillion-dollar business. In these roles, she saw firsthand the limitations of traditional off-price channels, including low payouts, complicated logistics, limited sales data, and little control over how products were presented and sold.

Offe Market gives brands a flexible way to sell excess merchandise without diluting brand value and image. Its commerce intelligence platform connects directly to brands’ inventory systems, syncing product information, pricing, and availability in real time while automating fulfillment routing from its distribution center. Offe gives brands control over pricing and merchandising along with sell-through data to inform inventory decisions. For shoppers, personalized recommendations make it easier to discover new brands and products.

“Off-price is a multibillion-dollar industry, yet some of its biggest players still generate less than 2% of sales online,” said Waverly Middleton, an investor at Slauson & Co. “With Offe Market, we see an incredible opportunity to reach a new generation of shoppers while giving brands a trusted channel to move excess inventory. Rachel understands both sides of the business, and we believe she has the potential to reshape the category.”

The company recently unveiled a refreshed brand identity and interface designed to spotlight curated product drops. Its Echo Park store in Los Angeles also serves as a gathering space and content studio producing organic social and live commerce content. The location hosts sample sales and events, including a Galentine’s Day celebration that drew more than 400 attendees.

About Offe Market
Offe Market is a next-generation off-price and marketplace connecting shoppers with cult-favorite fashion and lifestyle brands at 30–80% off retail. By pairing discovery-driven shopping with a circular commerce model, Offe Market gives unsold inventory a new life while making premium products more accessible and sustainable. Learn more at https://offemarket.com.

Media Contact
WDRD PR
Hannah Woodard
[email protected]

SOURCE Offe Market

NEW YORK, Oct. 28, 2026 — Sava, the next-generation trust company, today emerged from stealth with $10 million in funding led by Gradient Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, SV Angel, Instacart co-founder Max Mullen, Orange Collective, and SurgePoint Capital. The company provides administrative trustee services through its subsidiary, Sava Trust Company, an independent corporate fiduciary chartered in Nevada.

Notable strategic operators joined Sava’s round, including Tomer London (co-founder of Gusto) and Eleonora Sharef (former Head of Private Wealth at McKinsey). Sava was founded by technologist and serial entrepreneur Nimit Maru, founder of Fullstack Academy (acquired in 2019) and Bloomspot (acquired in 2012 by JPMorgan Chase Bank), and Rush Sadiwala, a repeat founder of VC-backed startups and accomplished private investor.

Sava is building modern, agentic software infrastructure to make the creation, funding, and administration of trusts quicker and simpler for families, advisors, estate attorneys, tax professionals, and trust officers operating in the $6.5+ trillion U.S. trust and estate industry. Sava Trust Company acts as administrative trustee to handle ongoing compliance, reporting, and disbursements over the life of a trust without compromising the attorney-client or advisor relationship.

The team combines deep expertise in AI, software engineering, product design, and institutional trust & estate administration, including Head of Trusts Jordan Wolff, who brings 20+ years of experience in the industry. Wolff held leadership roles at state- and national-level trust companies, most recently serving as Head of Trust & Estate Administration at Hightower Advisors ($340B+ AUM). By combining a regulated fiduciary with domain expertise and agentic software infrastructure, Sava delivers a faster and more transparent experience for onboarding, funding, and administering trusts, at a more accessible price point to expand access to estate planning tools traditionally reserved for high-net-worth individuals.

Every year, thousands of founders, early employees, and professionals come into real wealth for the first time, through a sale, an IPO, or a secondary. A trust is often the best way to protect that money, pass it on, or give it away. But setting one up still means weeks of back-and-forth among an attorney, a financial advisor, a CPA, and a trust officer, run through a “black box” of email, PDFs, and phone calls. The client rarely knows where things stand, and the cost and friction keep many people who would benefit from ever starting. Sava was built for that person and the professionals who serve these individuals.

Rather than layering technology onto broken legacy systems, Sava is rebuilding the underlying infrastructure of trust administration from the ground up. As a Nevada-chartered trust company, Sava combines the regulatory foundation and fiduciary oversight of a traditional institution with modern technology. AI agents orchestrated by human trust officers compress the time to complete administrative workflows, including onboarding, document extraction, KYC/compliance checks, custodian data synchronization, P&I accounting, and distributions, eliminating errors caused by past manual-only processes. Experienced human trust officers review and approve the work, and remain liable for fiduciary decisions executed according to clients’ trust documentation.

“Trusts are powerful tools for protecting and transferring wealth, and we see an enormous opportunity to make them more accessible,” said Nimit Maru, co-founder and CEO. “Raising our seed funding and launching a Nevada-chartered trust company is a major milestone in our vision to create a better experience for families, attorneys, and advisors. With this funding, we’re investing in our technology and infrastructure to deliver a world-class experience while bringing down costs and making these instruments available to far more people.”

Sava is designed to make trust administration faster, more transparent, and significantly less expensive. The company is targeting onboarding in days, rather than weeks or months. Sava’s platform gives clients, their attorneys, and financial advisors centralized, real-time visibility into their trust formation, funding, and administration. Clients pay a transparent, flat annual fee per trust, so families and their advisors know the cost from day one.

“Forming and managing trusts is unnecessarily complex and messy. When we first met the team at Sava, they already had a clear vision for how to automate the legal and financial components of this multi-trillion-dollar industry,” said Darian Shirazi, general partner at Gradient. “With Nimit’s experience selling a prior company to JPMorgan Chase, we also had confidence that the team would be able to build an AI agentic trust solution that met the expectations of financial regulators globally. We’re proud to partner with Sava and lead their seed round as they bring AI to an industry we believe desperately needs innovation.”

Sava Trust Company’s Nevada charter allows clients nationwide to establish trusts in one of the most advantageous jurisdictions in the country while retaining their existing advisor and attorney relationships (or accessing one of Sava’s vetted attorney partners). The company is developing API infrastructure to allow fintechs and financial platforms to embed trust capabilities directly into their products, creating further opportunities to make trusts more accessible beyond traditional high-net-worth estate planning.

About Sava

Sava is building the next-generation trust company. Founded by Nimit Maru and Rush Sadiwala, Sava develops the software and AI behind modern trust administration. Sava is headquartered in New York City and backed by Gradient, Y Combinator, SV Angel, Instacart co-founder Max Mullen, Orange Collective, and SurgePoint Capital.

About Sava Trust Company

Sava Trust Company, LLC is a Nevada-chartered trust company serving clients nationwide. Built with modern technology, it provides superior service to families, their attorneys, and financial advisors. Sava Trust Company is regulated by the Nevada Financial Institutions Division. Learn more at savatrustcompany.com/contact or reach out at [email protected].

Press Contact
[email protected]
+1 (607) 434-2065
[email protected]

SOURCE Sava Trust Company

Led by MaC Venture Capital and Toyota Ventures, the oversubscribed seed round advances a new approach to spacecraft design, enabling modular spacecraft to autonomously assemble, expand and reconfigure in orbit.

GOLDEN, Colo., Oct. 28, 2026 — Rendezvous Robotics, the company building spacecraft that assemble themselves in orbit, has raised $20 million in an oversubscribed seed round. MaC Venture Capital and Toyota Ventures led the financing, which comes as the company prepares for a first-of-its-kind mission in 2028, when seven independent spacecraft tiles will autonomously join to form a single spacecraft, separate and assemble again into a different configuration.

The financing marks Rendezvous’ first priced funding round and includes significant participation from the University of Michigan Endowment, new investment from Astera (co-founded by Jed McCaleb), Industrious Ventures, and continued support from existing investors Aurelia Foundry, ATX Venture Partners, and Mana Ventures, among others. The capital will support development of the company’s next-generation spacecraft, flight demonstrations and team expansion.

Most spacecraft are designed around what fits inside a rocket fairing. That constraint forces engineers to make tradeoffs in power generation, compute, antenna size and heat dissipation before launch, even as demand for all of these continues to grow. Rendezvous is rewriting the rules of how spacecraft are built. Its spacecraft launch as compact, independent modular tiles, that autonomously maneuver, align and connect in orbit. The modular design allows spacecraft to be assembled into larger structures and reconfigured after launch to adapt to new missions.

From an MIT Lab to Orbit

Rendezvous builds on nearly a decade of research that began with TESSERAE, a modular self-assembly technology invented by Dr. Ariel Ekblaw at MIT and further developed through the Aurelia Institute, which Ekblaw founded. Earlier generations have flown aboard Blue Origin’s New Shepard rocket and on two missions to the International Space Station (ISS), providing the foundational proof of the underlying technological concept in microgravity.

“The vision behind TESSERAE was never simply to connect tiles in space. It was to rethink how we build beyond Earth,” said Dr. Ariel Ekblaw, Co-Founder and Board Chair of Rendezvous Robotics. “For decades, the way we build spacecraft has been shaped by what we can fit inside a rocket. We’re challenging that constraint. What began as an experiment in self-assembly is now becoming a new way to build spacecraft in orbit.”

The company is now developing a new generation of larger, independently operating spacecraft tiles, with ground demonstrations underway to validate autonomous movement, alignment and assembly. A planned parabolic flight campaign in November 2026 will further test electromagnetic actuation and mobility in microgravity. These efforts are leading to Rendezvous’ low-earth demonstration, scheduled to launch aboard a reserved rideshare no earlier than April 2028. The mission will feature fully autonomous assembly and reconfiguration of independently deployed Rendezvous spacecraft tiles in free space, demonstrating how spacecraft can change their physical structure after launch without external robotic assistance.

“We’re changing what it means to build a spacecraft,” said Joe Landon, Co-Founder and CEO of Rendezvous Robotics. “Imagine spacecraft with megawatt-scale power generation, enormous communications and sensing apertures, and the ability to expand or reconfigure as mission needs change. Rendezvous is building spacecraft on an entirely different scale, with the ability to add capabilities after launch and take on missions that simply aren’t practical with the way we build spacecraft today. We’ve brought together a world-class engineering team with the experience, ingenuity and technical expertise to make that vision a reality.”

Separately, a final ISS demonstration of fifth-generation TESSERAE technology is scheduled for December 2026, when 32 tiles will autonomously assemble into a three-dimensional structure in a controlled microgravity environment. The experiment marks the culmination of the earlier TESSERAE research program as Rendezvous advances the larger, free-flying spacecraft architecture.

Investors Back a New Approach to Spacecraft Design

MaC Venture Capital

“The most interesting companies challenge assumptions that an entire industry has learned to work around,” said Michael Palank, Managing General Partner at MaC Venture Capital. “Rendezvous is doing exactly that. Instead of finding better ways to package a spacecraft for launch, they’re rethinking how spacecraft are built in the first place. The team has the technical foundation, experience, and ambition to pursue something genuinely different.”

Toyota Ventures

“What stood out to us is that autonomy isn’t an added feature. It’s fundamental to how Rendezvous is designing its spacecraft,” said Chris Abshire, Partner at Toyota Ventures. “The ability for individual modules to maneuver, connect, and eventually reconfigure in orbit could create an entirely new set of options for spacecraft designers and operators. Toyota Ventures sees significant potential in the combination of robotics, modularity, and autonomous control.”

University of Michigan Investment Office

“We’ve followed Ariel’s research with great interest and have tremendous confidence in her vision and the team she’s helped build,” said Daniel Feder, Senior Managing Director at the University of Michigan Investment Office. “Bringing breakthrough technology out of the research environment and into practical use takes both technical discipline and long-term commitment. Rendezvous has a strong foundation of research behind it, and we’re excited to support the next stage of its development.”

About Rendezvous Robotics

Rendezvous Robotics builds modular spacecraft designed to assemble, expand and adapt in orbit. Building on technology originally developed through MIT’s TESSERAE research, the company is advancing autonomous in-orbit assembly to enable larger, more capable and reconfigurable spacecraft for commercial, civil and national security missions. Rendezvous Robotics is headquartered in Golden, Colorado. For more information, visit www.rdvrobotics.com.

About MaC Venture Capital

MaC Venture Capital is a seed-stage venture capital firm based in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley that invests in technology startups leveraging shifts in cultural trends and behaviors. The general partners represent diverse backgrounds in technology, business, politics, entertainment, and finance, allowing them to accelerate entrepreneurs on the verge of their breakthrough moment.

About Toyota Ventures

Toyota Ventures is the early-stage venture capital arm of Toyota. Founded in July 2017, our mission is to discover what’s next for Toyota by helping startups bring disruptive technologies and business models to market quickly. With more than $800 million in assets under management, we invest in visionary founders building deep tech companies that solve hard problems. For more information about Toyota Ventures and our portfolio companies, please visit www.toyota.ventures.

About University of Michigan Investment Office 

The University of Michigan Investment Office manages the university’s long-term investment portfolio, including its endowment, one of the largest in the country. Established in 1999, the office is responsible for developing and executing investment strategy, asset allocation, and risk management practices designed to preserve and grow the real value of endowed funds over time. With assets exceeding $20 billion, the Investment Office generates sustainable distributions that fund student scholarships, faculty support, innovative programs, and life-saving research.

SOURCE Rendezvous Robotics

WASHINGTON, Oct. 28, 2026 — Oridian Capital Partners (“Oridian”), a lower middle market private equity firm formerly known as HCI Equity Partners, today announced that it has been named to Inc.’s 2026 Founder-Friendly Investors list for the seventh consecutive year. Inc.’s annual list recognizes private equity firms, venture capital firms and lenders with demonstrated track records of supporting founder-led businesses.

“Being recognized for seven consecutive years reflects our longstanding commitment to building trusted partnerships with founders and management teams,” said Doug McCormick, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Oridian Capital Partners. “We recognize the years of dedication and entrepreneurial vision that go into building a successful business. Our approach is grounded in preserving that foundation while providing the strategic resources, operational expertise and capital to help companies realize their full potential.”

To compile the Founder-Friendly Investors list, Inc. surveyed entrepreneurs who have sold their businesses to private equity and venture capital firms. Founders completed questionnaires detailing their experiences working with private equity, venture capital and debt firms and provided data on their companies’ performance during those partnerships. The resulting list highlights investment firms that founders identified as strong partners throughout the investment process.

“Oridian understands what it takes to build on the foundation of a founder-led business while positioning it for its next stage of growth,” said Scott Milberg, CEO of ACR. “Their team brings a collaborative mindset, deep operational experience and a commitment to working alongside management. That partnership has been instrumental as we continue to expand our capabilities and pursue new opportunities for growth.”

Bob Hund, Operating Partner at Oridian Capital Partners, added, “This recognition is particularly meaningful because it reflects feedback directly from the founders we partner with. Founder- and family-owned businesses have long been central to our investment strategy, and we understand the importance of aligning our operational expertise with their long-term objectives. This recognition reinforces the value of our approach and the results we work to achieve together.”

About Oridian Capital Partners

Oridian Capital Partners (formerly HCI Equity Partners) is a lower middle market private equity firm focused on partnering with growth-oriented, family and founder-owned service, distribution, and manufacturing companies. The firm targets entry points in large, stable, fragmented North American markets and drives transformational growth through disciplined M&A consolidation and operational excellence. Oridian is headquartered in Washington, D.C., please visit oridiancapital.com.

About Inc.

Inc. is the leading media brand and playbook for the entrepreneurs and business leaders shaping our future. Through its journalism, Inc. aims to inform, educate, and elevate the profile of its community: the risk-takers, the innovators, and the ultra-driven go-getters who are creating the future of business. Inc. is published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, along with fellow leading business publication Fast Company. For more information, visit www.inc.com..

Media Contact

LLYC

Christina Maldonado

[email protected]

Inc. Magazine’s Founder-Friendly Investors is a published list of U.S. founder-friendly private equity firms. Oridian Capital Partners has paid a fee to be considered for this recognition. Private equity firms that have exited U.S.-based, founder-led, public or private, portfolio companies within the past five years were eligible to apply. This recognition is based on the analysis of and information gathered by Inc. Magazine using its own criteria and methodologies. As part of the vetting process, Inc. Magazine interviewed one or more portfolio company representatives about their experience partnering with Oridian. For investments to qualify, portfolio company founders must have remained actively involved in their business for at least one year post-investment. The complete list of private equity firms considered for this award is not known to Oridian. The award reflects information about a sample of portfolio companies and may not be representative of every portfolio company’s experience with Oridian. There is no guarantee that similar awards will be obtained by Oridian in the future. Portfolio companies should make their own determinations about the prospects of partnering with Oridian.

SOURCE Oridian Capital Partners