SAN FRANCISCO, June 24, 2026 — Valence AI, an emotional intelligence infrastructure company, today announced $5 million in total funding, including a seed round led by Differential Ventures, with participation from Difference Partners, Willowtree Ventures, Change Paradox Ventures, and SRI International. The announcement coincides with the issuance of two U.S. patents on the company’s proprietary audio signal processing pipeline, among the only patents ever issued on identifying emotional state from live speech in real-time conversation using deep learning.

The company builds the emotional intelligence infrastructure for voice AI. Its Pulse Emotion model analyzes live calls and classifies emotional state from speech in real time, turning tone, pacing, and other vocal cues into structured data that voice agent builders, contact center platforms, and sales and support teams can act on alongside transcripts and intent. The company was founded by Chloe Duckworth and Shannon Brownlee, who launched Valence AI after a hackathon project focused on helping neurodivergent people better understand emotional cues in conversation.

Valence AI develops and publishes its own foundation models, trained on proprietary speech datasets built to reflect a wide range of demographic and neurotype diversity, and reports 92 percent accuracy on internal benchmarks. Products include emotion-aware IVR, an Agent Assist copilot for live call coaching, emotionally intelligent AI voice agents, and post-call quality assurance. Integrations with ElevenLabs and Cartesia enable realistic, expressive audio informed by its emotional analysis of the speaker. In production deployments, the company reports handle time reductions of 30 percent, alongside gains in customer satisfaction scores, close rates, and time to close.

“Voice AI has made enormous progress toward understanding what people say. The more challenging gap remains what people mean, and emotional state understanding is the signal that closes that gap,” said Nick Adams, Managing Partner at Differential Ventures. “Valence AI is building the infrastructure layer that makes that signal usable, and they are doing it with proprietary models, issued patents, and enterprise-scale deployments that deliver measurable business impact.”

The company holds two U.S. patents on identifying emotional state from live speech in real-time conversation, both issued in June 2026. The patents cover how Valence AI converts raw audio into an emotion classification, normalizing for pitch and timbre so the signal reflects a speaker’s emotional state rather than their demographic profile. One patent covers the core signal processing pipeline; the other extends that method to include live haptic feedback. Valence AI both owns the IP and runs commercial deployments on the same technology, a combination that remains uncommon in the emotion AI market.

“Voice AI has gotten remarkably good at understanding what people say, but it still can’t hear how they feel: the frustration under a polite request, the hesitation before someone hangs up,” said Chloe Duckworth, co-founder and CEO of Valence AI. “That gap between human experience and machine intelligence is exactly what we close. Real emotional alignment begins when models understand both the intent and impact of their output. We’re building the emotional communication layer that gives voice AI that understanding.”

The new funding will support expansion of Pulse’s language coverage, currently live in English with additional languages underway, deeper integrations across voice AI orchestration platforms, and new hires in engineering, go-to-market, and customer success. Valence AI’s customers include Harte Hanks, CustomerHD, and BPO Centers. Its technology is deployed across Fortune 500 retailers, healthcare, and clinical research environments. The company has also introduced the Emotion Quotient, a customer satisfaction metric calculated from real-time emotional signals during each turn of a call rather than post-call surveys, designed as a more precise alternative to NPS for voice-heavy businesses.

About Valence AI
Valence AI builds emotional intelligence infrastructure for voice. Its patented signal processing pipeline and Pulse Emotion models listen to how people sound on calls, detect how they feel in real time, and turn that into data voice AI systems can use alongside intent and transcripts. The company holds two issued U.S. patents on its core signal processing methodology and serves customer intelligence and contact center operators across customer support, financial services, and healthcare. Its products, including emotion-aware IVR, Agent Assist, AI Agent, and post-call quality assurance, are SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA compliant. Learn more at getvalenceai.com.

About Differential Ventures
Differential Ventures is an early-stage venture capital firm founded in 2018, that invests in enterprise AI and data infrastructure companies at the pre-seed and seed stages. The firm partners with technical founders building dynamic AI systems and data technologies that enable the data-driven economy. Differential is comprised of industry experts from leading hedge funds and executives from high-growth tech companies who provide domain expertise, operational support, and a specialized network to help portfolio companies scale. For more information, visit https://www.differential.vc/.

Media Contact 
Laura Anderson McGrath for Valence AI
[email protected]

SOURCE Valence AI

Felicis and Khosla Ventures double down to help Runlayer bring AI enablement and governance to the entire enterprise workforce

NEW YORK, June 24, 2026 — Runlayer, the platform helping companies become AI-native, today announced a $30 million Series A led by Felicis, with participation from Khosla Ventures. This brings Runlayer’s total capital raised to $42 million.

Runlayer gives every employee a golden path to delegating real work to agents, with AI enablement and control built into one platform. The platform’s customers include Fortune 500s and high-growth companies such as Instacart, Gusto, Decagon, Opendoor, dbt Labs, AngelList, Lemonade, and more. Runlayer has attracted engineers and operators from NVIDIA, Anthropic, Cursor, Databricks, Snowflake, Uber, Meta, Google, Block, Palo Alto Networks, Glean, Vercel, Applied Intuition, and Zapier.

In the future, people will go from asking AI questions, to delegating tasks, to directing agents, to supervising self-directed agents on whole missions. The most effective way for enterprises to be truly AI-native is for every employee’s tens-to-hundreds of agents to be governed by an interoperability layer—with security, observability, and cost control built in.

Today’s AI tools still force enterprises into an impossible tradeoff between adoption and control. Lock AI down and employees will use whatever helps them move faster anyway. Open the gates without control and security teams lose the visibility they need to move confidently. The companies that succeed are the ones that make using AI both safe and cost-effective for every employee.

Runlayer gives companies a golden path: a sanctioned way for employees to use and direct AI agents across their everyday work. When the right way is also the easy way, it becomes the default.

With Runlayer:

• Teams can use any AI client, agent, MCP, skill, or plugin, or create agents on demand by describing the work they want done. Runlayer gives them a sanctioned golden path with the right tools, permissions, and company context already connected, so agents can work across systems like CRM, Atlassian, Notion, meeting notes, and the data warehouse.
• AI transformation teams get a single control plane and interoperability layer across the enterprise AI stack. Runlayer supports the 5–20 AI clients the average enterprise uses, including IDEs, chat clients, vertical AI apps, independent agents, and platforms like Salesforce Agentforce. Teams get one managed home for all agentic work in the enterprise, with identity, permissions, policy enforcement, audit logs, and real-time visibility tied to every action.
• Security and IT teams use the same control plane to secure AI activity and uncover shadow AI. Runlayer combines security, observability, and cost control in one layer, with control over agent, token, and model consumption across the platform. Static and dynamic security models give full-session observability into every call, catching prompt injection, tool poisoning, output manipulation, exfiltration, and intent drift. Runlayer Watch identifies shadow MCPs, skills, plugins, clients, and unmanaged agents, routing employees toward approved tooling instead of relying on blanket bans.

Runlayer is led by Andrew Berman, a three-time founder who was most recently Director of AI at Zapier, working closely in partnership with OpenAI and Anthropic.

“Every employee will delegate their work to swarms of agents,” said Andrew Berman, co-founder and CEO of Runlayer. “Not as a novelty, and not as a side tool, but as a core part of how work gets done. AI-maximalist companies already understand the future is not a handful of power users experimenting with agents, but entire workforces operating alongside them. The challenge is that most companies still do not have a secure, scalable way to make that possible. That is the problem Runlayer exists to solve.”

“Runlayer is solving one of the most important enterprise problems of this moment: how to adopt AI at scale without losing control. This is the right team, in the right market, at the right time, which is why Felicis pre-empted this round. In fact, you’d be hard pressed to find a team that more deeply understands the entire ecosystem. When we introduced Runlayer to AI teams and CISOs in our network, the response was immediate and overwhelming; this is exactly the infrastructure enterprises have been waiting for. We’re proud to have led the series A and to double down on Runlayer as the golden path for every workforce going AI-native,” said Jake Storm, General Partner at Felicis. 

“Runlayer is one of those rare companies where the consequences of success are so large that almost nothing else matters. The team has found a powerful wedge by giving enterprises the solution they need to become AI-enabled. Their execution has been exceptional and adoption is accelerating because they are solving a problem no one else really delivers end-to-end, making them the first solution that makes it easy to become AI native versus trying to stitch together multiple point solutions,” said Jon Chu, the Partner at Khosla Ventures that led both their seed and A round investments into Runlayer.

“What makes Runlayer especially exciting is that this is not just a point solution for today’s AI adoption,” said Vinod Khosla. “As agents become ubiquitous, every employee will own tens or even hundreds of agents, and enterprises will need a new security fabric that governs how those agents access systems, handle data, and share information. Runlayer has the potential to become that foundational layer for the AI-enabled enterprise that every company must inevitably become to stay relevant.”

“Once it became clear Runlayer could become the agentic interaction fabric of the future, Vinod and I wanted to buy every available dollar of the round,” Chu added.

The funding will go toward expanding Runlayer’s engineering and go-to-market teams. If you want to help build the infrastructure that will fundamentally change how every person thinks, builds, creates, and operates at work, visit runlayer.com/careers.

About Runlayer

Runlayer is the way to become an AI-native company. It gives every employee a golden path to delegating real work to agents, with AI enablement and control built into one platform. Customers include Instacart, Gusto, Decagon, Opendoor, dbt Labs, AngelList, and Lemonade. Learn more at runlayer.com.

SOURCE Runlayer

Trusted by Zoom, Deepgram, and other Fortune 500 companies, voice AI testing platform Coval brings enterprise-grade evaluation infrastructure to autonomous voice agents

SAN FRANCISCO, June 24, 2026 — Coval, the evaluation platform for voice AI, today announced a $28 million Series A round of financing led by Norwest with participation from Base10 Partners, Twilio Ventures and Y Combinator. This brings the total capital raised to $31 million since its launch in 2024.

Coval is the leading simulation, observability and labelling platform for AI voice and chat agents that allows enterprises to scale voice and chat AI agents. As Fortune 500 companies look to deploy voice AI and explore how it can change the paradigm for their businesses, Coval gives them the infrastructure to do it reliably and with confidence. The new funding will enable Coval to address the growing reliability and compliance challenges enterprises face as they deploy autonomous voice agents. Coval runs tens of millions of evaluations, and with this new capital, the company will expand its sales and solutions engineering teams to scale and meet this growing demand. Coval will also advance product capabilities including deeper simulation, new integrations, and enhanced human review and monitoring features.

“Every company is going to have a voice agent just like they have a mobile app or a web app. But today, most enterprises don’t have the infrastructure to deploy these systems with confidence,” said Brooke Hopkins, founder and CEO of Coval. “Coval gives teams the ability to simulate, monitor and continuously improve voice agents, so they can move from experimentation to reliable production at scale.”

Coval’s Full‑Stack Platform for the Entire Voice Agent Lifecycle

The voice recognition market is growing rapidly, with more than $7 billion invested in voice AI in the first quarter of 2026 alone and expectations that it will reach more than $20 billion by 2031.

Enterprises are rapidly adopting voice AI for customer service, sales, financial services and healthcare, but most still rely on manual QA processes that break under real‑world complexity and scale. Coval’s platform empowers enterprises with a comprehensive testing and monitoring infrastructure for voice AI.

“Voice is going to be the number one interface for how humans interact with AI, and that shift creates an entirely new infrastructure layer for enterprises,” said Scott Beechuk, partner at Norwest. “With her deep experience building evaluation systems for autonomous technologies at Waymo, Brooke is uniquely positioned to lead Coval in defining how companies deploy and scale voice agents reliably. She helped prove self-driving cars could work, and now she’s tackling voice AI.”

Unlike other evaluation tools that are built for developers, Coval is built to help teams across operations, QA, engineering and product collaborate and scale autonomous agents. Coval offers a full‑stack platform spanning the entire voice agent lifecycle, from pre‑deployment simulation and live production monitoring to human review and structured evaluation. Its architecture is purpose‑built for voice, audio processing and quality analysis, telephony latency, transcription error analysis and evaluation of agent workflows. The company’s autonomous‑systems roots also set it apart, applying the simulation‑first discipline Hopkins developed at Waymo to bring production‑grade rigor to voice AI. Similar to self-driving cars, voice agents navigate the world autonomously by running models in parallel to listen (transcription), reason (LLMs) and speak (text-to-speech) in the same way that self-driving cars use perception, planning and controls to navigate the world. Testing between the two systems have similar parallels – simulation is critical for testing voice AI applications.

“Twilio’s open, flexible, and model-agnostic infrastructure for the agentic era is driving the shift toward human-like voice AI agent experiences becoming the norm in customer engagement,” said Andy O’Dower, VP, Field CTO at Twilio. “Trust is critical to scaling these experiences, and our investment in Coval reflects our conviction that comprehensive evaluation and testing tools, combined with a strong observability and reliability layer, are foundational to maintaining momentum in today’s voice AI renaissance.”

Coval automates voice AI agent testing to continuously improve evaluation accuracy. The platform enables enterprises to run probabilistic evaluations across millions of voice interactions. Companies like Zoom, along with more than 60 additional enterprises, rely on Coval to reduce manual QA processes by up to 30x and increase voice agent deployment times by up to 10x.

Companies Like Zoom and DeepgramTrust Coval to Deliver Better Voice AI Experiences

“Reliability and observability are a top priority for us at Zoom as voice AI moves into customer-facing production environments,” said Ram Rajagopalan, Head of Product – CX AI at Zoom. “Coval gives Zoom’s customers the ability to evaluate conversations systematically at scale, identify edge cases before they impact users, and move significantly faster with confidence.”

“Voice agents introduce a new level of complexity compared to traditional software testing,” said Anoop Dawar, COO at Deepgram. “Brooke has built Coval into a core part of the modern enterprise’s evaluation stack by improving reliability before scaled deployment. For any serious enterprise deployment, this is no longer a nice-to-have. At Deepgram, we power the voice AI infrastructure teams build on, but thanks to our partnership with Coval, enterprises can rest assured it’s working properly.”

About Coval
Coval is the evaluation platform for voice AI quality, helping enterprises simulate, evaluate, monitor and improve their AI voice agents at production scale. Founded by Brooke Hopkins, who previously led evaluation job infrastructure at Waymo, Coval brings the simulation-first discipline that made autonomous vehicles safe for public roads to the next generation of autonomous AI agents. Founded in 2024 and a Y Combinator graduate, the company is trusted by over 60 organizations, including Zoom, Deepgram and Fortune 500 enterprises, to ensure their voice agents work as expected before and after deployment. Coval is based in San Francisco and has raised a total of $31 million from Norwest, Base10 Partners, Twilio Ventures, Swift Ventures, and Y Combinator. For more information, visit www.coval.ai.

SOURCE Coval

ALISO VIEJO, Calif., June 24, 2026 — ARCYN Defense Corp. today announced the opening of its second seed financing round following the successful initial seed round earlier this year. The company is developing a kinetic energy system designed to counter unmanned aerial systems (UAS) and other airborne threats reshaping the modern battlefield.

The new round will support accelerated development, testing, and field validation of ARCYN Defense’s counter-UAS platform, Iron Rain™, which combines patent-pending kinetic innovation, configurable projectile architecture, edge-AI-enabled targeting, and a high-rate-of-fire design to deliver precise, scalable protection against emerging aerial threats.

“Recent conflicts have made clear that drones are no longer a future threat. They are a present and growing danger to military forces, critical infrastructure, and civilians,” said Retired Lieutenant General Eric Wesley, Senior Defense Advisor to ARCYN Defense. “Many existing systems were designed for a different era of warfare. ARCYN Defense is building a system intended for today’s battlefield, where speed, scale, precision, and affordability all matter.”

ARCYN Defense’s system is being designed to leverage edge AI, advanced fire-control integration, and modular kinetic effects to detect, track, prioritize, and defeat drone threats in real time. Unlike systems that rely primarily on jamming, cyber effects, directed energy, or interceptor drones, ARCYN is intended to provide a rapidly deployable, platform-integrated kinetic option for contested environments, including autonomous, EW-hardened, or high-volume drone threats.

“Much of the Counter-UAS market is still focused on solutions that can be expensive, narrow in application, or difficult to scale in contested environments,” said Dr. Aaron Poynton, CEO of ARCYN Defense. “ARCYN is building a complementary kinetic layer designed for speed, portability, precision, and affordability. Our goal is not simply to detect or disrupt drones, but to give operators a practical way to defeat them at scale.”

Given the urgency of the threat environment, ARCYN Defense has accelerated its development timeline. The company recently signed a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA) with the U.S. Army Combat Capabilities Development Command Armaments Center (DEVCOM) and is preparing to participate in an upcoming Department of War field trial. ARCYN Defense is also engaged in active conversations with major defense systems integrators as it advances toward demonstration, validation, and broader deployment.

Dr. Fazel Farahmand, CTO of ARCYN Defense, added: “Our technical objective is to deliver a precise, adaptable, and operationally relevant kinetic defense capability for modern aerial threats. By combining our edge-AI targeting, real-time trajectory prediction, and configurable projectile architecture, we are building a modular, high-rate-of-fire, portable, hypersonic defense system designed to respond quickly, integrate across platforms, and scale with the evolving threat environment at a low cost per defeat.”

The company expects proceeds from the second seed round to support additional engineering, prototype refinement, field testing, strategic partnerships, and preparation for broader commercialization.

About ARCYN Defense
ARCYN Defense Corp. is a U.S.-based defense technology company developing next-generation air defense systems for contested environments. The company’s technologies merge kinetic innovation with AI to deliver high-precision protection against emerging threats, with a focus on counter-autonomy, battlefield resilience, scalable defense, and low-cost kinetic defeat for military and civilian infrastructure.

Forward-Looking Statements
This release contains forward-looking statements regarding ARCYN Defense (the “Company”), including statements about its business strategy, product development, capital-raising efforts, and anticipated growth. Forward-looking statements are based on management’s current expectations and are subject to risks and uncertainties including those relating to early-stage operations, defense-sector and regulatory conditions, competition, and the Company’s ability to secure financing. Actual results could differ materially. The Company undertakes no obligation to update them except as required by law.

Media Contact: 

Aaron Poynton
(949) 414-9961
[email protected]

SOURCE ARCYN Defense

SAN FRANCISCO, June 24, 2026 — Assort Health, the most widely-used AI agents platform for the patient journey, today announced a $120 million Series C led by Menlo Ventures at a valuation of $1.2 billion. Assort has now raised more than $222 million to become the standard for healthcare organizations wanting to transform the patient journey with AI.

Healthcare providers now spend nearly twice as much on administration as on direct patient care. That $1.1 trillion in annual administrative burden, from scheduling calls to intake forms to referral loops, is one of the most consequential and correctable failures in modern healthcare. Assort was founded on a simple, uncomfortable conviction: the industry would never fix this problem from the middle. You had to start at the front door.

What began as the first voice AI agent to schedule a specialty appointment is now a platform spanning scheduling, intake forms, referrals, document processing, medication refills, real time eligibility, lab requests, and payments. That expansion has been powered by more than 190 million patient interactions, 62,000 care protocols, and 1.6 million decision pathways, creating the largest proprietary specialty dataset in healthcare.

Synapse, Assort’s proprietary AI model, learns the patterns of specialty workflows across every deployment, then generates the edge cases, tests, and simulations each one has to handle. Even the most complex, provider-specific workflows go live with high automation and resolution rates. That advantage compounds with scale. In the last 15 months, revenue has grown 20x.

“After investing in Anthropic, our thesis was simple: find the best application-layer companies in every category,” said Matt Murphy, Partner at Menlo Ventures. “The value of Assort’s platform compounds with every patient interaction. Each one surfaces a new edge case and a new way to improve care, and the platform gets better for the next patient, automatically. That is a structural advantage that grows with scale, and it lets Assort deliver outsized value for every customer in a way other platforms simply haven’t matched.”

“Every so often a company comes along that fundamentally reimagines how an industry operates. Assort is that company for healthcare,” said JP Sanday, Partner at Menlo Ventures. “They’ve built not just another point solution, but a unified platform of AI agents that elevates the entire patient journey. Assort’s customer-obsessed approach and exceptional product velocity position them to lead the AI transformation of the multi-trillion-dollar healthcare industry, which is why the best healthcare groups keep working with Assort.”

Assort’s platform now includes:

• Concierge: handles inbound calls, triage, lab requests, med refills, scheduling, insurance eligibility, and intake in any language;
• Activate: reaches patients proactively to close referral loops, automatically act on detected care gaps (i.e. mammograms, colonoscopies, vaccines), recover no-shows, and resolve payments;
• Orchestrate: runs the operational work behind each visit and writes every detail back to the EHR, including referrals, document processing, patient intake, and personalized pre-post visit forms;
• Empower: equips staff with an AI copilot to manage complex patient access needs in real time. It unlocks the ability to build and ship personalized AI agents with access to real time benchmarking data and insights on patient journey performance.

All four products are connected by Patient Journey Memory, patient context that creates a continuous record for each patient, allowing the platform to: 1) give every patient a personalized experience with their agent, 2) identify and act on signals across every modality, and 3) activate patients when they’re high intent, creating one continuous and unified patient journey across every interaction. Healthcare organizations are already seeing the impact of a more connected patient journey.

“When a patient reaches out for care, you often get one chance to earn their trust. A mishandled interaction doesn’t just create operational problems; it can mean losing that patient altogether,” said Jon Shaker, Executive Director, Boston Bone and Joint Institute. “That’s why we wanted a partner with a proven track record of handling specialty care complexity at scale. Assort’s experience across hundreds of deployments gave us confidence they could deliver from day one, and they’ve helped us ensure patients move through the right care journey from their very first interaction.”

“We evaluated every AI solution on the market. Assort was the only true platform,” said Dr. Parinita Amin, CEO of MDCS Dermatology. “It runs the full patient journey as one connected system, from referrals and document processing to intake, care gap closure, real-time eligibility, and payments. The difference is memory. Everyone else automates one piece and forgets the rest. Assort remembers every patient across every interaction and connects it all into one conversation. Our automation rate climbs every quarter as they execute against an ambitious roadmap, and the gap between Assort and everyone else keeps widening.”

“This market is going to consolidate in the same way every other one has. Provider groups know it, and the smart ones aren’t buying another point solution. They want one partner with the capital and the engineering depth to transform how they operate over the long run. That’s what we built. Our engineers learn across hundreds of customers and build every implementation for the specific practice in front of them, and we have now raised over $220M to make that engine better,” said Jon Wang, Founder and Co-CEO of Assort Health.

Assort also announced a major expansion into health system operations, bringing the platform behind the largest AI-powered patient access deployment among provider groups to health systems ranging from large community-based organizations to academic medical centers. Several health systems, such as John Muir Health, are partnering with Assort as demand grows for platforms that can support increasingly complex ambulatory operations.

“Specialty care is a different discipline than most AI vendors realize, and that difficulty only compounds at large health systems. It’s exactly what we built Synapse for. Our proprietary model learns the patterns of specialty workflows and gets sharper with every deployment, and that’s what lets us move past answering calls to automating the entire patient journey. That depth is our advantage, and Synapse is the foundation that lets us build faster than anyone in the market,” said Jeffery Liu, Founder and Co-CEO of Assort Health.

In addition to Menlo Ventures, investors participating in this latest round include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Felicis, First Round Capital, Chemistry, Joe Montana, Tau Ventures, and Quiet Capital. JP Sanday, partner at Menlo Ventures, will join Assort’s Board, and fellow partner Matt Murphy, will serve as a Board Observer.

For more information, or to join the team, visit assorthealth.com.

About Assort Health

Assort Health is the most-widely used AI agents platform for the patient journey, from scheduling and intake to referrals, forms, document processing, medication refills, and payments. It is built on 190 million specialty patient interactions and a model that updates in real time to handle the complexity of healthcare that general-purpose AI can’t. That foundation now powers patient access across multi-site practices, multi-specialty groups, and health systems. Customers see a 5% lift in appointment volume, a 115% increase in labor capacity, and a 4.3 out of 5 patient satisfaction score. The platform integrates natively with leading EHR and practice management systems, including Epic and Athena, enabling deployment without disrupting existing clinical workflows. Provider groups and health systems turn to Assort when the complexity outgrows their existing tools. To learn more, visit assorthealth.com.

Media Contact: Kara Spak, 120/80 MKTG, [email protected]

SOURCE Assort Health

SAN FRANCISCO, June 24, 2026 — Caplight Technologies has closed a $16 million Series A led by BlackRock and Fin Capital, with strategic participation from UBS Investment Bank. The round extends its lead in venture secondary data and fuels expansion across private market data and agentic workflows for research and transactions.

Caplight’s data shows VC has tripled into a $12+ trillion asset class in three years, outpacing the infrastructure built to navigate it. Caplight unifies private markets data and investing in one platform: 100,000 company and investor profiles, $4 trillion in funding round data, $300+ billion in proprietary secondary data, and $5+ billion in daily live transaction flow. Customers collectively manage over $52 trillion in assets and access Caplight via platform, API, and MCP server.

“Transparency unlocks private markets for institutional investors,” said Javier Avalos, CEO of Caplight. “We give the world’s best investors the data they need to understand the venture market and the infrastructure to participate in it. In an age where proprietary data is at a premium, we’re proud to be their source of truth.”

BlackRock joins as a strategic investor, supporting the company’s mission to improve private market transparency, data infrastructure, and secondary market liquidity. The investment establishes a framework for future collaboration across BlackRock’s private markets and technology ecosystem, including Aladdin and Preqin.

“With private markets becoming a growing part of portfolios, investors are increasingly demanding better data, transparency, and efficient secondary market infrastructure,” said Kunal Khara, Senior Managing Director and Global Head of Aladdin Product at BlackRock. “We believe Caplight is well positioned to serve these evolving client needs and are excited to support the company as it continues to scale its business.”

Fin Capital, a leading fintech-focused investor and longtime Caplight backer, led the round alongside BlackRock. New investor LEAP Global Partners co-led. UBS Investment Bank joined as a strategic investor. Existing backers DB1 Ventures, the corporate venture arm of Deutsche Börse Group, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Clocktower Ventures, and Dash Fund increased their positions.

About Caplight Caplight Technologies, Inc. is building data and transaction infrastructure for venture capital. The platform combines proprietary private company data with a marketplace that connects investors and broker-dealers for secondary market liquidity. The company was founded by Javier Avalos and Justin Moore in 2021, and is based in San Francisco.

Securities transactions are offered through Caplight Markets LLC, member FINRA/SIPC.

Media contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Caplight

STOCKHOLM, June 24, 2026 — Stegra today announces the closing of its €1.4 billion financing round. The round is led by a Wallenberg Investments-consortium and has strong support from existing investors as well as the original lender group.

In April, 2026 Stegra announced that the new financing round had been agreed in principle, subject to certain approvals, including customary regulatory approvals. The financing round is now completed.

The Wallenberg Investments-led consortium consists of existing investors IMAS and Temasek as well as new investors Bolero and SEB-Stiftelsen. In addition, a large group of Stegra’s existing shareholders continue to invest in the company. These investors include Altor, that will become the second largest shareholder, Hy24 and Just Climate, as well as AMF, AP2, Climate Infrastructure Fund**, Kallskär, Kobe Steel, Lingotto Innovation, Scania, Schaeffler, Security Trading* Stena Metall Finans and Swedbank Robur. Also, a group of Stegra’s second lien lenders, led by AIP Management, have decided to support the project as direct equity investors.

“We are grateful for the support for the work we are doing in bringing near zero emissions steel to the market from both new and existing investors, as well as from lenders. It’s a strong sign of confidence in our business case and the project,” says Henrik Henriksson, CEO Stegra.

The financing has also received 100% approval from the Stegra lender group. All banks participating in Stegra’s financing package continue to support the project and the company will have access to the undrawn debt facilities established as part of the company’s 2024 financing.

“We are pleased that this transaction is now closed. Together with Bolero, IMAS, SEB-Stiftelsen and Temasek, as well as Altor and other new and existing investors, we will now work closely with the Stegra team to complete and commission the plant in Boden. This large-scale green project represents an important step in Sweden’s competitiveness and the EU’s security of supply,” says Håkan Buskhe, Head of Special Investments at Wallenberg Investments and incoming board member of Stegra.

“We close this financing round with a higher equity ratio and a stronger and more resilient financial position for the company. We welcome the increased Swedish ownership through the Wallenberg Investments-led consortium and the continued support from the Swedish National Debt Office and SEK which remain committed to previously agreed facilities and have worked constructively with different stakeholders during the funding process,” says Henriksson.

Stegra is in the process of ramping up construction activities in Boden. During this period, the project timeline is under review.

* the investment company of Antti Herlin’s family
** managed by Demea Sustainable Investment

For more information, contact: Karin Hallstan, Head of Communications, Stegra at [email protected] or +46 76 842 81 04

This information was brought to you by Cision http://news.cision.com

https://news.cision.com/stegra/r/stegra-announces-closing-of–1-4-billion-financing-round,c4366881

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New financing will support Peregrine’s expansion across government and enterprise markets as it continues to launch new product capabilities

SAN FRANCISCO, June 23, 2026 — Peregrine Technologies today announced a $250 million Series D financing at a $6.8 billion valuation. The round was led by existing investors, including Fifth Down Capital, Sequoia Capital, OG Venture Partners, Goldcrest Capital, XYZ Ventures, and Godfrey Capital. 

The financing comes as Peregrine continues rapid growth across state and local government and its expansion into federal, enterprise, and international markets, with new offices now in Toronto and London. Over the past year, Peregrine has doubled its customer base and now supports more than 400 agencies and organizations across North America serving more than 125 million people. 

“From public works to public safety, Peregrine was built to help state and local governments better serve their communities,” said Nick Noone, co-founder and CEO of Peregrine Technologies. “Protection of privacy and civil liberties has been at the core of the product since day one, reflected in the permissions, auditability, and security controls built into the platform. We give customers the speed and precision of advanced AI, grounded in human decision-making, with the controls that our customers—and the communities they serve—demand.” 

Peregrine’s platform helps organizations unify information across siloed systems and put that information to work within a secure, permission-aware environment. Rather than creating or collecting new data, the platform helps customers make better use of the information they already maintain, with governance, auditability, and purpose-based access built directly into operational workflows. 

Customers use Peregrine to support a wide range of operational challenges. Peregrine’s platform has been used to coordinate operations for the Super Bowl, the Grammys, World Series, Kentucky Derby, Academy Awards, and eight of the eleven World Cup host cities are using Peregrine this summer. In Fairfax County, Virginia, investigators used Peregrine to help identify a child abduction suspect in 13 minutes. In Manatee County, Florida, the platform has supported hurricane response and recovery operations. Cities from San Francisco to Atlanta have relied on Peregrine to support public safety outcomes, and in Kansas City, Peregrine has supported SAVE KC, a data-driven focused deterrence initiative credited with helping drive an 18% decline in violent crime. 

“State and local government remains foundational to Peregrine,” Noone said. “Our customer agencies operate in complex, high-stakes environments where decisions carry real consequences for the communities they serve, and building alongside them has shaped a platform with the depth, reliability, and flexibility to serve a much broader set of organizations. This financing reflects the size of the opportunity in front of us and the trust customers across markets are placing in Peregrine to help them operate more effectively, securely, and responsibly as they enter a new era of advanced technologies.” 

The company’s growth reflects increasing demand for AI systems built for real-world operations, where security, governance, speed, and accountability matter. Peregrine has expanded its presence across government and public safety agencies in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., while also launching commercial pilots in sectors including financial services and travel. 

“Peregrine has built a platform that aims to solve some of the most important problems its customers face,” said Andy Spellman, founder and CEO of Fifth Down Capital. “What we believe makes Peregrine different is the combination of its technical talent and rigor, a product sophisticated enough for the most complex environments, and its distinctive implementation approach.” 

“To make AI work inside a complex organization, the model is not enough. It needs context. It needs to understand where information lives, what your terms mean, who is allowed to see what, and the rules your organization follows,” said Ben Rudolph, co-founder and CTO. “This is what we have built: the platform that gives AI the context it needs to help people and organizations complete the missions that matter most.” 

The new financing will support continued investment in product development, expansion of Peregrine’s engineering and implementation teams, international growth, and a liquidity opportunity for employees. 

About Peregrine Technologies 

Peregrine’s full-stack AI platform turns fragmented data into complete operational clarity, tailored to each organization’s unique workflows and context. By integrating data from disconnected systems into a unified, permission-aware view of operations, Peregrine enables personnel—from leadership to frontline operators—to make better decisions, faster. 

Built for high-stakes environments, Peregrine ensures organizations maintain full ownership and control over their data, with secure, role-based access and clear oversight of how AI is applied. It is shared situational awareness that helps shape the safety, stability, and strength of communities and companies around the world. 

Founded in 2018, Peregrine has more than 450 employees across offices in San Francisco, Washington DC, New York City, Toronto, and London. 

SOURCE Peregrine Technologies

New capital from investors Base10 Partners, Y Combinator, and Peak XV Partners, will
help JustAI scale its AI-native platform for enterprise marketing teams in the US

SAN FRANCISCO, June 23, 2026 — JustAI, an AI-native marketing platform helping companies automate personalization, experimentation and decisioning at scale, today announced it has raised $17 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Base10 Partners, with participation from Y Combinator and Peak XV Partners.The round also includes strategic investors and operators from anthropic, Chime and Notion, the CTO of HubSpot, and the founders of Eppo and Vapi.

Marketing and growth teams are under increasing pressure to deliver more output, more personalization and more measurable impact, without scaling headcount or adding more tools. At the same time, the martech landscape has become increasingly fragmented. The 2025 Marketing Technology Landscape counted more than 15,000 martech products, while Gartner’s 2026 CMO Spend Survey found that CMOs are allocating 15.3% of marketing budgets to AI, but only 30% feel ready to scale AI capabilities.

JustAI grew 5X in its annual recurring revenue this year and has ambitious plans to disrupt how marketing is run in large enterprises. It brings together strategy, creative, decisioning and data agents to help marketers move from manual campaign execution to autonomous marketing. Instead of relying on rigid workflows, rules-based segmentation and scattered experimentation history, JustAI gives marketing teams a unified system that can understand user context, generate campaigns, optimize decisions and continuously learn from results.

“We want marketers to spend less time managing tools and more time making the decisions that drive growth,” said Neha Mittal, Founder and CEO of JustAI. “Marketing teams have spent the last decade buying more tools to manage more workflows. But the real opportunity with AI is not another dashboard or another automation layer. It is giving every great marketer the ability to operate with the leverage of an entire team. JustAI is the infrastructure for that shift.”

JustAI’s platform is organized around four coordinated agents:

• The Strategy agent helps marketers audit users, segments and product surfaces.
• The Creative agent turns those insights into brand-forward messaging across channels such as email and in-app experiences.
• The Decisioning agent optimizes for business goals such as engagement, retention and revenue, while operating within marketer-defined guardrails.
• The Data agent continuously measures lift, surfaces insights and feeds learnings back into the system.

When describing how JustAI unlocked new capabilities at Coursera, Director of Marketing Vera Hui said: “It would have required a dev team in the past, wouldn’t have done it myself.” JustAI enables companies to predict the next best message or action for each user, replacing manual workflows and deterministic campaign logic with adaptive, AI-powered decisioning. Its infrastructure is designed to execute hundreds of sophisticated campaigns built by agents at scale while giving marketers visibility and control over the system.

JustAI was founded by Neha Mittal and Jeff Hara. Neha brings more than a decade of growth and retention experience from companies including Twitter and Pinterest, where she saw firsthand how difficult it was for marketing teams to personalize at scale using legacy tools. Jeff brings deep experience in machine learning and recommendation systems. Together, the founding team combines expertise across growth, infrastructure, creative and AI.

“JustAI is one of the few teams building a true decisioning and measurement layer for marketing teams that marketers have needed, and the traction backs it up: 5X ARR growth and over $100 million in customer revenue influenced last year. Neha and Jeff combine hard-won growth experience with deep ML depth, and we’re honored they chose us as partners for this round,” noted Rexhi Dollaku, General Partner at Base10 Partners.

The company will use the new funding to expand its engineering and go-to-market teams, deepen its agentic infrastructure, and extend the platform beyond consumer companies into e-commerce and B2B marketing use cases.

To get in touch with the JustAI team, reach out at [email protected].

About JustAI

JustAI is an AI-native marketing platform that helps companies personalize, experiment and optimize customer engagement at scale. Powered by reinforcement learning and agentic infrastructure, JustAI enables marketing teams to move beyond manual workflows and traditional A/B testing toward AI-first personalization. The company is based in San Francisco and works with high-growth enterprises across consumer, D2C, E-commerce and B2B markets.

About Base10 Partners

Founded by Adeyemi Ajao and TJ Nahigian, Base10 is a San Francisco-based venture capital fund investing in founders who believe purpose is key to profits and in companies that are automating sectors of the Real Economy. Through its program the Advancement Initiative, Base10 donates 50% of profits to underfunded colleges and universities to support financial aid and other key initiatives. Portfolio companies include Notion, Figma, Nubank, Stripe, Popmenu, Aurora Solar, and HappyRobot. Connect via base10.vc.

SOURCE JustAI