NEW YORK, June 16, 2026 –HeyMilo AI, the agentic recruiting platform for high-volume hiring, today announced it has raised a total of $6 million led by Category Ventures, with participation from Canaan Partners, Alumni Ventures, and ERA.
The company has onboarded leading staffing agencies, RPOs, and enterprise employers including Randstad, WilsonHCG, and Neo Financial, and has screened more than one million candidates in production across staffing, BPO, and high-volume corporate hiring.
Hiring teams face a growing mismatch: candidates use AI to apply and prepare at scale while most recruiting processes still run on a PDF and a phone call. HeyMilo builds structured, interactive screening directly into the application itself. When someone applies, screening starts immediately across voice, video, phone, SMS, and resume agents. Recruiters receive rubric-scored results and evidence-backed transcripts inside the ATS they already use.
“High-volume hiring only works if you can vet everyone fairly and send recruiters to the people who deserve their time,” said Sabashan Ragavan, co-founder and CEO. “We are changing how companies hire by changing what happens from the second a candidate applies. With some of the largest staffing agencies and enterprises screening candidates across conversational SMS, resume screening, video and voice interviews, and candidate fraud detection, the production signal is clear: recruiting teams are ready for a recruiting intelligence layer that delivers ROI at scale.”
Alongside the funding, HeyMilo is launching three new agent types. AI Scenario Assessment puts candidates through a live scenario with a built-in AI assistant and rubric-scores how they plan, prompt, and judge AI output, closing a proof gap that resumes and generic interviews cannot. Candidate Recommendations resurfaces previously screened applicants from the ATS and returns ranked shortlists without manual re-engagement. Notetaker captures structured notes across live recruiter-led interviews so every candidate interaction produces consistent, reviewable signals.
“AI is fundamentally changing the way companies need to vet applicants for roles and HeyMilo has quickly emerged as a leader in that transformation,” said Villi Iltchev, Founder & Managing Partner at Category Ventures.
About HeyMilo HeyMilo is an agentic recruiting platform for high-volume hiring teams. Founded in 2023 by Sabashan Ragavan and Ramie Raufdeen, HeyMilo has raised $6 million to date. Learn more at heymilo.ai.
New 36,000 sqft Massachusetts facility, modular production cell with Re:Build Manufacturing, and Kanematsu Corporation as commercial distribution partner anchor the next phase of MetalsFIRST deployment
BOSTON, June 16, 2026 — Foundation Alloy, the 21st-century metals company building a new way to engineer alloys, today announced $22 million in Series A financing to scale production on its MetalsFIRST™ platform—a fully integrated, solid-state metallurgy technology—to industrial volumes. The round was led by Voyager Ventures, with participation from Trust Ventures, Yamaha Motor Ventures, America’s Frontier Fund, Overlap Holdings, Material Impact, Engine Ventures, and El Cap. An additional investment was made by Kanematsu Corporation, a global Japanese trading house, which signed a definitive distribution partnership and is bringing Foundation Alloy’s materials to major industrial customers across Japan and Southeast Asia. Foundation Alloy products, all manufactured in the United States, are being piloted by customers today across North America, Europe and Japan.
Hot forging punches made from Foundation Alloy’s MC-X—outlasting M2 tool steel under severe thermal conditions.
Photo Credit: Foundation Alloy
Engineering alloys are the hidden enabler in every advanced industrial system on the planet, from jet engines, rockets, and energy infrastructure to precision components found in luxury goods like chef’s knives and watches. But the way they’re made hasn’t fundamentally changed since before the space race. Legacy melt-based methods are energy-intensive, slow, and bumping against a performance ceiling that the traditional process can no longer break through. In the military-industrial complex, specific metal components are running 900-day lead times, keeping aircraft on the ground and constraining the rebuilding of defense stockpiles. The bottlenecks for new technologies and systems are both performance and supply issues.
The funding transitions Foundation Alloy into an industrial supplier. This summer, the company is opening a new 36,000 sqft facility in Massachusetts, standing up an additional modular production cell with Re:Build Manufacturing in southern New Hampshire, and doubling headcount across production, engineering, and commercial operations.
“Metals made through our platform are being used by customers today in commercial pilots with Japanese industrials, in production trials across North America and Europe, and in forging demonstrations with LIFT in Detroit,” said Jake Guglin, CEO of Foundation Alloy. “This Series A funds the factory, not the lab. Our new Massachusetts facility and modular production cell are set to grow capacity from pilot-scale today to tons per week by 2027—a 100x increase, built on a modular equipment platform that deploys and scales 10x faster than traditional metals manufacturing. We’re hiring across production, engineering, and commercial teams to help meet surging demand in defense, advanced manufacturing, and energy where legacy materials and supply chains are failing. Our team is uniquely positioned to solve these challenges right now.”
Foundation Alloy’s MetalsFIRST approach is a fully integrated, solid-state platform encompassing composition design, mechanical alloying, shape forming, and sintering, that produces engineered alloys without ever entering the molten state. This process enables faster, simpler manufacturing cycles, capital-efficient industrial scale up, and access to alloy compositions and properties impossible to achieve with legacy melt processes. Foundation Alloy’s specialty and stainless steels are engineered for the most demanding applications while requiring 80%–90% fewer production steps, while its Molyclast® product line includes MC1200, a molybdenum alloy that delivers more than 3x the strength of commercial alternatives. This combination of superior performance and manufacturability unlocks new capabilities for demanding applications across the industrial space.
“Foundation Alloy’s platform addresses the most persistent challenges our customers face—productivity, equipment utilization, and supply-chain reliability—through a fundamentally different production approach,” said Kenyu Okawara, General Manager, Kanematsu Corporation. “Client companies across our network are already evaluating Foundation Alloy’s materials for high-demand applications, and we look forward to delivering these next-generation alloys to manufacturers across Japan and Asia as part of our solution-oriented approach to the metals business. We see the potential for hundreds of millions of dollars of demand for these materials across Japan and Southeast Asia in the coming years.”
“Aerospace, defense, energy, and precision manufacturing need alloys that are stronger, cheaper, and faster to produce than anything available today. Foundation Alloy delivers this leap forward with metals engineered at the atomic level through its MetalsFIRST platform. Voyager is proud to back this team as they redefine metals and manufacturing, all made in America,” said Sarah Sclarsic, Founder and Managing Partner at Voyager Ventures.
Foundation Alloy’s products are in industrial pilots today through its Molyclast family of molybdenum-based alloys which are used across hot forging, die casting, and high-temperature applications. Foundation Alloy is already expanding into iron-based alloys, including stainless, tool and high-performance specialty steels with multiple customer pilot programs. The company’s near-term product expansion targets cutting tools and blades, with longer-term applications in aerospace components, defense systems, and next-generation energy technologies. Customers can take MetalsFIRST output as fully finished parts, near finished parts, or in stock form.
LIFT, the Department of War-supported national advanced materials and manufacturing innovation institute, is an accelerator connecting advanced materials, manufacturing processes, systems engineering and talent development enhancing America’s manufacturing competitiveness, national economy and security.
“The Department of War Manufacturing Innovation Institutes’ core mission is to accelerate transformational technology into the U.S. industrial base and to support the successful scale up of those innovations,” said Nigel Francis, CEO and Executive Director, LIFT. “We are tremendously proud to see that vision realized with Foundation Alloy and this important Series A funding. Our testbed and pilot plant facility in Detroit played a pivotal role in testing and demonstrating Foundation Alloy’s novel technology, helping to lay the foundation for this next phase of growth—right here in the United States.”
About Foundation Alloy Foundation Alloy is the 21st-century metals company. MetalsFIRST™ is a fully integrated, solid-state platform that ends the melt-based era of metals manufacturing. New alloys go from design to production in months instead of years, and finished parts ship in days with advanced performance legacy methods cannot match. The company has 17 granted patents on its underlying processes and is backed by Voyager Ventures, Material Impact, El Cap, Yamaha Motors, Trust Ventures, Engine Ventures, America’s Frontier Fund, Overlap Holdings, Kanematsu Corporation, Alumni Ventures, and Safar Partners. To learn more about how Foundation Alloy is building the metals layer of modern American manufacturing, visit foundationalloy.com.
After building a search firm that has generated more than $80 million in revenue, Jeremy Jenson is out to disrupt how companies hire at scale, productizing the playbook he used to turn his own company into a talent magnet.
HOUSTON, June 16, 2026 — For more than a decade, Jeremy Jenson has built his career on a blunt premise: the best people aren’t looking, so someone has to go get them. As Founder and CEO of Encore Search Partners, Houston’s largest privately held executive search firm, he turned that premise into more than $80 million in revenue, without a dollar of outside capital. Today, Jenson is launching TalentDemand, built for a problem his recruiting firm was never meant to solve: what a company does when it raises a major round and suddenly has to hire, not just one great person, but several.
Introducing TalentDemand. The alternative to recruitment fees – built to help companies stop searching for hires and start attracting them.
Those hires have to build new divisions, open new geomarkets, bring in new business, and launch new product lines. No recruiter, however good, can run that many searches at once, and a direct-hire fee on every seat runs half a million dollars or more. The people who can do the work already have great jobs. They aren’t looking, and they ignore the cold calls and job posts everyone else is firing at them. The plan is rarely the problem. The talent to execute it is.
“When we wanted to grow Encore, we did what everyone does. We posted jobs, sent LinkedIn messages, got average results,” said Encore Search Partners Founder and CEO Jeremy Jenson, who is launching TalentDemand. “Then we got consistent about telling our story, our culture, our wins, the big commission checks our people were earning. People stopped needing to be convinced and started knocking on our door. Great people don’t want to be sold. They want to discover. And when it becomes their idea, everything changes.”
TalentDemand is a new kind of public relations, aimed at talent rather than customers, and it lives in the gap between three things every growing company already has: recruiters who touch a candidate once or twice, internal talent teams who post roles and wait, and marketing built for customers, not new hires. It fills that gap with a sustained campaign aimed at the exact people a company wants to hire through video storytelling outreach, across Linkedin, emails, and text messages, through at least 20 unique digital assets, dripped over several months. The point isn’t to pitch anyone in a message or two. It’s to tell a company’s story, its growth, its leadership, its wins, until joining becomes the candidate’s own idea. That’s the thinking behind the name. You don’t find great talent with the shotgun approach, you create demand for it.
TalentDemand is built to complement great recruiters, not replace them, and Jenson is adamant about that. It’s the foundation beneath them, so that by the time a recruiter calls, the best professionals already know the company and want to talk. He built it above all for one buyer: the venture capital or private equity operating partner who’s just funded a company and needs the market to know it. The six months after a raise, he argues, are the window when top talent starts gravitating toward a company on its own. People aren’t an HR line item, they’re an enterprise-value lever. Recruiting the right revenue producers can lift a company’s value faster than a traditional acquisition.
“Recruiting will always have a place. I built a company on it,” Jenson said. “But the companies that win the next decade won’t just out-recruit their competitors. They’ll out-attract them.”
About the launch
TalentDemand officially launched in June 2026.
A managed service that builds awareness and a talent pipeline at scale for companies hiring after a funding round, designed to complement, not replace, executive recruiting.
Founded by Jeremy Jenson, founder and CEO of Encore Search Partners.
Built for VC & PE backed companies scaling after a capital raise
More information: talentdemand.com
About TalentDemand TalentDemand is a service that helps fast-growing companies attract talent at scale by creating demand for it. Using direct outreach, video, and storytelling dripped over time, it makes a company’s growth story known to the exact people it wants to hire, so the best candidates come to it on their own. It lives in the gap between recruiting, internal talent acquisition, and marketing, and it’s built to complement executive search rather than replace it. Founded by recruiting-industry veteran Jeremy Jenson, TalentDemand is based in Houston, Texas. Learn more at talentdemand.com.
About Encore Search Partners Founded by Jeremy Jenson in 2013, Encore Search Partners is Houston’s largest privately held executive search firm, specializing in outbound, direct-hire recruiting of high-performing professionals nationwide across wealth management, legal, energy, industrial, manufacturing, and technology. Built without outside capital, the firm has been named one of the Houston Business Journal’s Best Places to Work six years running and ranked the #1 largest executive search firm in Houston. Learn more at encoresearch.com.
Media Contact Jeremy Jenson, Founder & CEO at TalentDemand
Partnership combines GoTraveler’s category leadership and an iconic travel programming library with Ionic’s operating apparatus, audience platform, and direct buyer access, sharpening one of CTV’s most engaged genres into a destination environment for travel advertisers.
NEW YORK, June 15, 2026 — Ionic Studios LLC (“Ionic”) and Questar Entertainment Group, Inc. (“Questar”) today announced the formation of Ionic Questar Holdings, LLC, a joint venture to operate, monetize, and grow GoTraveler, North America’s largest travel channel on free ad-supported streaming television. Under the partnership, Ionic serves as Publisher of Record and brings its full operating apparatus to the channel, while Questar contributes the GoTraveler brand and a content library built over more than four decades. Both companies are equally invested in establishing GoTraveler as the definitive travel destination on connected television.
GoTraveler is one of the most established channels in the FAST ecosystem, distributed across DIRECTV, LG Channels, VIZIO WatchFree+, Xumo, Sling TV, Dish Network, Plex, and additional connected television platforms across the United States. The channel runs 24/7 programming spanning destinations on six continents, with a content slate that balances destination guides, culinary travel, cultural immersion, and adventure programming. It is, by design, a lean-back, aspirational, brand-safe environment built to keep travel-engaged viewers on the screen.
What sets GoTraveler apart is the library behind it. Questar has been building travel and lifestyle programming since 1985, and the channel draws from a catalog that includes some of the most recognizable franchises in the category, among them Anthony Bourdain’s A Cook’s Tour, Rick Steves’ Europe, Exploring Mexico’s Kitchen with Rick Bayless, Smart Travels with Rudy Maxa, Curious Traveler, Dream of Italy, and America’s National Parks. The result is a channel with a clear editorial identity and a viewer who comes back to it intentionally, in a market where most travel inventory in FAST is recycled, thinly packaged, or sold against broad demographics.
Ionic brings the operating apparatus of a modern connected television publisher: ad operations and demand integration, agentic ad serving, SSP and DSP relationships, direct sales execution, and platform-level distribution expansion. Audience identification across GoTraveler runs on Ionic’s behavioral and contextual platform, surfacing high-intent travel viewers, both active travelers and those in the planning window, without relying on demographic assumptions alone. Buys can be structured through Ionic’s iX Access framework, giving travel brands, hospitality companies, online travel agencies, destinations, and financial services advertisers direct and transparent access to GoTraveler inventory rather than navigating opaque exchange supply.
The partnership comes as FAST audiences in the United States are projected to reach 131.4 million in 2026, accounting for 54% of all connected television users (eMarketer), while U.S. travel industry digital ad spend is on pace to approach $9.4 billion this year, nearly double its 2021 level. Travel as a category has the audience curve and the advertiser curve, but FAST has largely treated it as filler rather than a genre worth building. Ionic and Questar are taking the opposite view, and putting the operating investment behind it.
“GoTraveler has built something genuinely rare in FAST: a channel with a clear editorial identity and a viewer who comes back for it intentionally,” said Shafi Mustafa, Managing Director of Ionic Studios. “That is the kind of supply that deserves better than open-auction CPMs and broad-stroke demographics. With this partnership, we are putting GoTraveler in front of advertisers who understand the difference between reaching someone and reaching someone in the right moment, and we are building the channel into the destination the travel category has been missing in connected television.”
“GoTraveler is the connected television expression of a travel content business we have been building since 1985,” said Jonathan Plowman, Chief Executive Officer of Questar Entertainment. “Partnering with Ionic gives us the monetization, distribution, and commercial execution to scale that work the way it deserves, in front of the travel advertisers who should be in this environment. We are aligned with the Ionic team on what GoTraveler can become in CTV, and on the path to get there.”
The joint venture begins immediate work across three fronts: platform distribution expansion into additional FAST endpoints, content investment to deepen and refresh the GoTraveler programming slate, and direct advertiser activation across the 2026 and 2027 commercial cycles. Both parties are invested in the long-term growth of the channel as a category-defining destination on connected television.
About Ionic Studios
Ionic Studios is the studio for the open streaming ecosystem. The company assembles a scaled portfolio of exclusively represented, brand-safe FAST channels into a single, unified buying system, bringing the consistency, reach, and activation standards advertisers expect from premium walled gardens to the open CTV market. Ionic builds the portfolio through three paths: channels it owns and operates, joint ventures with content partners, and exclusive strategic partnerships with leading independent studios. The portfolio today reaches more than 100 million U.S. households across 94 exclusively represented channels, with over 250 million hours streamed monthly and 5.2 billion monthly ad impressions. For more information, visit ionic.tv.
About Questar Entertainment
Questar Entertainment, founded in 1985 in Chicago, is a media company specializing in travel and lifestyle content. Its flagship asset, GoTraveler, is the largest travel channel on free ad-supported streaming television in North America, distributed across the major FAST platforms in the United States. GoTraveler’s programming spans destinations on six continents and draws from a library of iconic travel franchises developed across four-plus decades of category-defining production. For more information, visit questarentertainment.com.
The founder-led venture firm triples in size from inception, expands its operating bench, and doubles down on New York based accelerator
NEW YORK, June 15, 2026 — Gutter Capital today announced the opening of applications for the second cohort of Elbow Grease, the firm’s small-batch accelerator in New York City, sponsored by Mercury and Orrick, alongside the close of Fund III at $75M.
Fueled by performance, the firm has closed a total of three funds in under three years. Both Funds I and II are in the top quartile of their respective vintages, according to Cambridge Associates benchmarks. Companies backed by Gutter Capital are twice as likely to graduate from Seed to Series A, and from Series A to Series B, based on Carta data.
The firm attributes that performance to a hands-on approach to early stage investing that has been core to Gutter since its founding, and is central to Elbow Grease. Gutter Capital was founded in 2021 by Dan Teran, former co-founder and CEO of Managed by Q, and James Gettinger, a computer scientist and professional gambler turned investor. The pair made over 110 angel investments together prior to Fund I, and in 2020 began working closely with a small handful of companies out of a shared office in downtown New York, helping founders to recruit early teams and navigate early strategic decisions.
“We saw that founders without typical Silicon Valley pedigree can do incredible things with the right team around them,” said Teran, who founded his company at age 24 and led as CEO through a $200M exit. “In a market that is obsessed with second time founders, we saw a big opportunity to do old school venture capital – partner closely with overlooked founders to build companies of consequence.”
To scale their impact, Teran and Gettinger have built a senior bench of Operating Partners. Richard Hughes joined as founding Head of Talent at inception. Since joining, Hughes has recruited over 100 engineers, designers, sellers, and marketers to Gutter companies. This year, Vince Li joined Gutter as Head of Product, to accelerate critical product, engineering, and design work within Gutter portfolio companies.
“It is hard to overstate how critical the Gutter team has been to Rebuild’s success” said Alex Toporek, Co-Founder and CEO of Rebuild, a Fund II investment. “Richard helped recruit almost every member of our incredible NYC-based team, and Vince has raised the bar on our product while helping to deliver critical features in record time.”
In January 2026, the firm launched the inaugural cohort of Elbow Grease, a small batch, founder-led accelerator in New York City, to return to their hands-on, early stage roots. The second cohort, starting this fall, will consist of up to 15 teams. Each company will receive a $300k initial investment, and spend 10 weeks on-site at Gutter’s headquarters, where they will work directly with the Gutter Capital partnership.
“Elbow Grease brings out the best in Gutter, and offers something different,” said Gettinger. “We partner with founders to help them achieve their goals, and when they do, we keep investing, so they can spend their time building the company, not prepping for demo day.”
In addition to working one-on-one with Teran and Gettinger, each company will be matched with a mentor; founders who have raised past Series B or exited, including Carly Strife, Co-Founder of Bark Box; Ryan Denehy, CEO of Electric AI; and Zach Garippa, CEO of Order. Mentors have close ties to the firm, many have taken investment from Gutter themselves, and are investors in Gutter funds.
“We joined Elbow Grease because of the opportunity to learn from some of the best operators in the business,” said Rohan Kumar, CEO of QuickSecure, who at age 19 took a leave of absence from Georgia Tech to participate in the inaugural cohort. “We didn’t need the money.”
Elbow Grease is at the center of the thriving New York tech ecosystem. Participating teams work alongside more than 70 founders and operators in Gutter’s headquarters in Chinatown. Founders participating this fall will join a series of off-the-record conversations with industry leaders in New York, including Scott Belsky, Partner at A24; Neil Blumenthal, Co-CEO of Warby Parker; and Kate Ryder, CEO of Maven.
During the first cohort, Rohan Kumar and his co-founder made the decision to relocate to New York to continue building QuickSecure at Gutter headquarters. “After seeing the value Gutter could bring to our company in just a few weeks, we knew this was where we needed to be.” Since the program’s conclusion, they have made their first two hires, and raised follow-on investment from Gutter Capital.
Applications for Elbow Grease are open now at elbowgrease.gutter.cc and close July 31, 2026. The accelerator will run from September 15 through November 19, 2026.
About Gutter Capital
Gutter Capital is an early-stage venture firm that builds companies of consequence in partnership with mission-driven founders. Gutter was founded in 2021 by Dan Teran and James Gettinger. The firm is small by design, making few investments each year and providing direct operational support to achieve exceptional results. Gutter Capital has been recognized by Business Insider as a Top 100 Seed Investor in 2023, 2024, and 2025.
LOS ANGELES and MINNEAPOLIS, June 15, 2026 — Truelink Capital (“Truelink”), a Los Angeles-based private equity firm focused on growth and long-term value creation, announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement to make a significant investment in Horwitz (“Horwitz” or the “Company”), a leading provider of mechanical, electrical, and plumbing (“MEP”) services supporting complex commercial and industrial facilities across the Twin Cities region. Horwitz primarily serves high-growth private sector end markets, including data centers, medtech, semiconductor fabrication, healthcare, and advanced manufacturing. Horwitz’s management team, led by CEO Matt Dekkers, will continue to lead the business and will retain a significant ownership stake in the Company. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.
Founded in 1918 and headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Horwitz is a regional MEP services provider of HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and building automation solutions focused on servicing complex, mission-critical commercial and industrial facilities across the Twin Cities and broader Midwest region. The Company operates in a large and fragmented regional MEP services market with strong demand driven by data centers, healthcare, and advanced manufacturing. Horwitz is active across three core service lines: service & maintenance, retrofit & upgrades, and new systems, underpinned by a strong recurring revenue base. With approximately 720 employees, including 540 highly skilled technicians, the Company serves a diversified base of long-tenured customers with over 10,000 annual engagements across the facility lifecycle.
“We are excited to establish this partnership with the Horwitz team to execute Truelink’s value creation playbook of driving operational improvements and accelerating growth through strategic investments and a robust M&A strategy,” said Luke Myers, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Truelink Capital. “Horwitz’s differentiated service capabilities, scaled regional platform, and deeply experienced management team make it an ideal partner as we look to build a leading and diversified MEP services business.”
“Partnering with Truelink Capital marks an exciting new milestone for Horwitz,” said Matt Dekkers, CEO of Horwitz. “Truelink shares our commitment to operational excellence and our vision for expanding the capabilities and reach of our platform. This partnership is a testament to the hard work of our entire team, and we look forward to leveraging Truelink’s resources and expertise to build on the strong foundation we have created.”
This partnership reflects Truelink’s continued focus on industry-leading companies in the industrials and business services sectors, and marks the 12th platform investment for Truelink Capital’s Fund I since its launch in 2022.
William Blair served as financial advisor and Fredrikson & Byron P.A. served as legal counsel to Horwitz and Svoboda Capital Partners.
ABOUT TRUELINK CAPITAL Truelink Capital is a private equity firm based in Los Angeles. Truelink pairs deep industry experience in the industrials and business services sectors with a commitment to building partnerships that drive long-term value through an operationally focused strategy. Truelink partners with management, corporate sellers, and founders to accelerate growth through the execution of strategic initiatives and transformative add-on acquisitions. Learn more at: www.truelinkcap.com.
ABOUT HORWITZ Horwitz is an MEP services provider headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, focused on complex, mission-critical commercial and industrial facilities across the Twin Cities region. The Company delivers mechanical, electrical, and plumbing services to a diversified base of customers across data centers, medtech, pharmaceutical, semiconductor fabrication, healthcare, education, industrial, and government end markets. Learn more at: www.horwitz.com.
ABOUT SVOBODA CAPITAL Svoboda Capital Partners is a Chicago-based private equity firm that invests in the professional services, industrial & commercial services, and transportation & logistics services sectors. Svoboda seeks to partner with outstanding management teams with a track record of success and a desire to execute on well-defined growth initiatives. Learn more at: www.svoco.com.
MEDIA CONTACTS Peter Lewis Head of Business Development [email protected] Truelink Capital
Construct Capital leads round to scale software-driven manufacturing of quick-turn industrial control panels
NEW YORK, June 15, 2026 — Podium Automation, the Brooklyn-based manufacturer reimagining how industrial control panels are designed and built, today announced it has raised $18 million in Series A funding led by Construct Capital, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Transition Ventures, Sunflower Capital, and Banter Capital. The round brings Podium’s total funding to more than $23 million and will fuel a rapid scale-up of manufacturing capacity to meet growing demand for quick-turn control panels from customers ranging from scale-ups to Fortune 500 manufacturers. As part of the financing, Dayna Grayson, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Construct Capital, will join Podium’s Board of Directors.
Jamie Niu Serota (Co-Founder & CEO) and Jacob Buser (Co-Founder & CTO)
Industrial control panels are the central nervous system of automated production and infrastructure, and govern how equipment starts, stops, communicates, and operates safely. Historically, control panel design and fabrication has been a bottleneck for manufacturers: lead times often exceed 12 weeks, and quality depends heavily on the tacit knowledge of veteran technicians.
Podium designs and manufactures control panels in less than 4 weeks using a software-enabled process that reduces time and errors. Digital models take the place of hand-drawn schematics, automated fabrication and intuitive work instructions handle physical assembly, and each panel is fully validated in Podium’s UL 508A certified facility before shipping.
Podium’s proprietary software streamlines the end-to-end process of panel design-build by connecting customer requirements, eCAD design tools, and shop floor instructions. Instead of relying on an electrical engineer’s knowledge of a vast component landscape, Podium’s software intelligently selects and connects electrical components based on customer and UL requirements. Panels are not only designed for manufacturability, but also for speed and availability of components in the upstream supply chain.
“Control panels are everywhere, but the way they’re designed and built hasn’t fundamentally changed in decades,” said Jamie Niu Serota, Co-Founder and CEO of Podium Automation. “We founded Podium to build the vendor we always wished we had. Ordering a control panel should be fast, accurate, and transparent. At Podium, faster and better are the same thing.”
“The industrial economy runs on essential components like control panels, and the legacy supply chain behind them is exactly the kind of foundational infrastructure Construct was built to invest in,” said Dayna Grayson, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at Construct Capital. “Jamie, Jacob, and the Podium team have created the modern vendor this category has been waiting for, and the demand they’re already seeing makes it clear how much the market needs what they’re building.”
“Podium is an excellent example of what happens when world-class software meets a foundational industrial category,” said Oliver Hsu, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Jamie and Jacob are founders who understand both the legacy world of control panel manufacturing and how to rebuild it from first principles. The result is a combination of product and operational excellence that meets the current moment for American reindustrialization.”
With the new capital, Podium will rapidly expand manufacturing capacity, grow its engineering and operations teams, and continue investing in the software platform that powers its design and fabrication process.
About Podium Automation
Podium Automation is one of the fastest UL 508A control panel manufacturers in the US, serving companies who need high-quality panels delivered quickly and efficiently. Podium’s software layer unlocks speed, quality, and transparency from first quote to final delivery. Founded in 2024 and headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, Podium is backed by Construct Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Transition Ventures, Sunflower Capital, Banter Capital, and SV Angel. Learn more at www.podiumautomation.com.
SUMMIT, N.J., June 15, 2026 — Simplicity Group (“Simplicity”) today announced the acquisition of August H. Velten & Associates, Inc., an independent retail wealth management and annuity producer based in Melbourne, Florida. With this acquisition, founder August Velten becomes a Simplicity Partner, and the RIA will soon rebrand as Simplicity Wealth Advisors: Melbourne.
“Augie Velten and his talented team have been exceptional partners to Simplicity for years, achieving impressive growth by leveraging our integrated training, marketing, and wealth management resources,” said Bruce Donaldson, Partner and CEO of Simplicity Group. “This transaction demonstrates our ability to successfully design and execute continuity and succession plans for our integrated advisors.”
“Joining Simplicity as a full partner is an exciting step forward for our firm and our clients,” said August Velten. “By deepening our alignment with Simplicity, we gain access to an unparalleled depth of institutional support, cutting-edge technology, and a broader array of products. This ensures our team is perfectly positioned to grow, while cementing a clear, stable succession path that guarantees our clients will be taken care of for a long time in the future.”
About Velten & Associates Velten & Associates is a family-owned financial practice dedicated to helping clients design and secure their ideal retirement lifestyle. The team delivers tailored wealth management and long-term planning strategies accessible to individuals and couples at every economic level.
About Simplicity Group Simplicity is the leading partner for advisors, financial institutions, and consumers by delivering the best combination of wealth accumulation and financial protection products that meet the needs of a consumer-oriented holistic financial plan. As one of the fastest growing partnerships in the financial services industry, Simplicity offers an unrivalled array of tools and technologies to grow and protect wealth, which can be accessed throughaffiliation,outsourcing, orjoining the partnership. In an ever-changing environment, Simplicity’s commitment to working in our clients’ best interest is unwavering and has always been anchored to our commitment toEducation,Value, andPartnership.For more information, please visit:www.simplicitygroup.comand follow the Company onLinkedIn.
MEDIA CONTACT Denielle Webb, Simplicity Group – P: 347-204-7181 / E: [email protected]
Security-first identity platform for the agentic era, rebuilt from the ground up for humans and AI agents.
Designed to eliminate prominent supply-chain risks across the modern enterprise identity stack.
Backed by Cyberstarts, Index Ventures, and Evolution Equity Partners.
TEL AVIV, Israel and SAN FRANCISCO, June 15, 2026 — NewCore today emerged from stealth with a security-first identity platform for the agentic enterprise, rebuilt from the ground up for the workforce that actually exists today: humans, machines, and AI agents. The company has raised $66 million from Cyberstarts, Index Ventures, and Evolution Equity Partners, and is led by a founding team of cybersecurity and enterprise-IT veterans whose prior exits include Check Point’s acquisition of Dome9.
Identity has become the primary attack surface in the enterprise. The largest breaches of the past three years, from MGM to Change Healthcare to Snowflake customers to compromises of major identity platforms themselves, share a common root cause: identity infrastructure designed for an earlier era, asked to manage a workforce it was never built to support.
The agentic era demands a new identity architecture
AI agents now operate alongside the human workforce across the enterprise, spinning up in seconds and requiring fine-grained, revocable access to production systems. Yet the dominant identity platforms were architected fifteen years ago for a world of employees logging into web apps, built on aging protocols such as SAML, static service accounts, and password-derived session tokens that were never designed to serve as the security perimeter for this environment.
That gap cannot be closed with incremental upgrades or bolt-on products. A modern identity platform has to be designed for it from the start.
What NewCore built
NewCore is a single platform that discovers, secures, and governs every identity in the modern enterprise, human and agentic alike. It was built from the ground up to reduce risk, not just manage access, eliminating categories of exposure that prior architectures left open by design.
Eliminating the identity single point of compromise. Secure Split Key (SSK) removes the single point of failure in SAML and OIDC signing infrastructure, closing the class of attacks (Golden SAML, adversary-in-the-middle, session theft, token replay and identity vendor supply-chain exposures) behind some of the largest identity breaches on record.
Pioneering secure agentic identity. AI agents are first-class identities with their own lifecycle, trust scoring, and revocation path, not service accounts in disguise. Agent governance is a core design constraint of the platform, not an add-on. NewCore also ships an Agentic Skill: an integration package for all leading coding agents, including Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor, that lets them authenticate and operate within the enterprise trust map as first-class citizens, enabling secure agentic access in some of the most demanding production scenarios in the modern enterprise.
Retiring phishable factors. VisualMFA turns user verification into an out-of-band, visually verifiable exchange that resists relay, replay, and social engineering. Hardware-bound credentials, anchored in TPM and Secure Enclave, replace phishable factors entirely.
Discovering every identity. NewCore continuously discovers and maps every identity in the enterprise, human and agentic, including the shadow accounts, orphaned credentials, and ungoverned agents that legacy platforms never see. You cannot secure what you cannot see.
Inventing agentic migration. Customers move onto the platform in hours through an agent-driven coexistence model that preserves existing federations and policies: a clean, zero-downtime cutover with no disruption to users or applications.
The platform is engineered for environments where agentic identities outnumber human ones by two orders of magnitude or more. For modern identity, the meaningful measure is not uptime or provisioning speed but the volume of risk removed from the enterprise.
Leadership
NewCore was founded by seasoned cybersecurity professionals with deep technical expertise and a proven record of building successful businesses:
Zohar Alon, Co-founder and CEO, a three-time cybersecurity founder with nearly 30 years in the industry. He founded and led Dome9, acquired by Check Point, after building Provider-1, one of Check Point’s foundational enterprise products, earlier in his career.
Amihai Neiderman, Co-founder and CTO, founder of Nym Health and a pioneer in applied AI, a former research leader in Unit 8200, Israel’s elite signals-intelligence unit, and a veteran offensive-security researcher.
Erez Yarkoni, Co-founder and CCO, former Chief Information Officer at T-Mobile USA and Telstra, with deep enterprise operating experience from two of the world’s largest telecommunications carriers.
Under their leadership, the company has grown to more than 50 employees across Tel Aviv and the United States.
From founders, investors, and analysts
“Identity is broken, and yet it has become the control plane of the modern enterprise. We built NewCore for the workforce that actually exists today, one of humans, machines, and agents, and we built it security-first from day one. The goal isn’t to manage identity better. It’s to remove categories of risk that the industry and our customers have lived with for far too long.”
— Zohar Alon, Co-founder and CEO, NewCore
“Yesterday’s identity platforms were built for a very different world. AI agents are changing the shape of the workforce, and that demands a new architecture, not another layer of patches. Zohar and his co-founders have rebuilt identity from the ground up for a world of humans, machines, and agents.”
— Shardul Shah, Partner, Index Ventures
“What stands out about NewCore is that security isn’t a feature layer, it’s the foundation. Split-key architecture and phishing-resistant MFA at the platform level change the conversation CISOs can have about identity risk.”
— Lawrence Pingree, Head of Data Security and AI Research, Software Analyst Cyber Research (SACR)
Availability
NewCore is available to enterprise customers today. The company will demonstrate the platform at Identiverse in Las Vegas, June 15–18, 2026.
About NewCore
NewCore is the security-first identity platform for the agentic era. Rebuilt from the ground up, it secures, enables, and governs every human and agentic identity under a single, scalable architecture. Founded by cybersecurity veterans and Unit 8200 alumni. Backed by Cyberstarts, Index Ventures, and Evolution Equity Partners. NewCore. Identity Secured.™
