Backed by AQC Capital, Hidden Layers Capital, Mila, and strategic angel investors, Jetty enables AI agents to run, evaluate, and learn from their own mistakes in production.

MONTREAL, May 6, 2026 – As companies deploy autonomous AI agents, what works in a demo often fails unexpectedly in production. Jetty builds the infrastructure layer to fix this, giving AI systems the ability to run end-to-end workflows, evaluate their own performance, and continuously improve.

“Enterprises need a way to deploy their models with the kind of audit trail required to build trust with their customers. Jetty is solving this critical pain point to allow AI to be reliably deployed.” said Alex Shee with Mila Ventures.

Jetty announces its raise of over $2 million in pre-seed funding led by AQC Capital (David Dufresne) and Hidden Layers Capital (Therence Bois). Strategic investors include Akinox Inc. (Alex Dahl) and angel investors experienced in scaling AI systems at frontier labs like Google and Meta AI.

“Most AI systems today are still fragile – they work in isolation but break under real-world complexity,” said Jonathan Lebensold, Founder and CEO of Jetty. “Jetty gives AI agents a mission, not just a prompt. By combining structured runbooks, isolated execution environments, and rigorous evaluation, we enable systems that can run, assess themselves, and iterate with a human in the loop until they meet a defined quality bar.”

Doina Precup, Professor at McGill University and CIFAR AI Chair, agrees: “As AI systems become more autonomous, ensuring they behave reliably in complex environments becomes a central challenge. Jetty is building critical infrastructure that enables these systems to evaluate their own performance and improve over time; something that will be essential as agentic AI moves into real-world applications.”

The funding will accelerate product development, expand the engineering team, and support traction with enterprise customers deploying agentic AI. The experienced operating team includes Roberto Cipriani, former CTO/COO of Paper, and Tracy Milner, COO, serial founder-CEO with inception to exit track record. This raise positions Jetty as a foundational layer for agentic AI infrastructure, helping organizations move to reliable, continuously improving systems they can trust at scale.

About Jetty
Jetty is building infrastructure for agentic AI workflows, enabling organizations to run autonomous AI systems in sandboxed environments, trace every decision from instruction to output, and apply rigorous evaluation loops that improve with every run.

SOURCE Jetty Solutions Inc

Strategic acquisitions and new capital accelerate company’s leadership position in AI-native application security

MONTREAL, May 6, 2026 — Boost Security today announced the acquisitions of SecureIQx and Korbit.ai, alongside $4 million in additional funding from White Star Capital, Amiral Ventures, Accelia Capital, and Sorensen Capital.

Software development is changing rapidly as AI tools generate increasing volumes of code and organizations rely on large ecosystems of third-party packages and libraries. Security teams must analyze growing amounts of code while determining which vulnerabilities actually pose risk in production systems.

Boost Security is the AI-Native SDLC Defense Platform that runs on the exact same clock as today’s coding agents. By unifying Developer Endpoint Protection, Software Supply Chain Security, and AI-Native ASPM into a single platform, Boost secures the entire development lifecycle. The platform actively defends the AI toolchain, blocks supply chain threats before ingestion, and auto-remediates vulnerable code, allowing engineering teams to ship at machine speed without the security bottleneck.

“Recent high-profile supply chain attacks are just the opening act,” said Catherine Ouellet-Dupuis, Partner, White Star Capital. “The deeper risk is that every engineering team on the planet is now shipping code written by AI agents that can unknowingly introduce vulnerabilities at machine speed and machine scale, and you can’t ask the same agent that wrote the bug to be your last line of defense. Boost is one of the few platforms built from the ground up to sit outside that loop, intercepting threats before they ever reach production. That’s the security architecture this new era demands.”

Acquisitions

• SecureIQx, an MIT-founded startup, developed a Software Composition Analysis (SCA) reachability engine capable of analyzing both binary and source code across more than a dozen programming languages. The technology helps organizations determine whether vulnerable components are actually reachable and exploitable within their applications.
• Korbit.ai built an AI-based pull request review platform designed to detect security vulnerabilities, performance issues, and coding flaws during the code review process. The technology has been trained on hundreds of millions of lines of code across thousands of companies.

Together, the acquisitions add advanced reachability analysis and AI-native SAST capabilities and code review technologies to Boost Security’s platform.

“We’re in a new era. By some estimates, 15 times more code was produced in 2025 than in 2024, and most of it wasn’t written or reviewed by humans. At the same time, supply chain attacks are becoming more frequent and more sophisticated. With these acquisitions, we are bringing deeper agentic capabilities into the Boost Security platform to meet that reality,” said Zaid Al Hamami, founder and CEO of Boost Security.

Funding

Boost Security also announced $4 million in additional funding from White Star Capital, Amiral Ventures, Accelia Capital, and Sorensen Capital. The investment will support continued development of the company’s platform.

About Boost Security

Boost Security is the AI-Native SDLC Defense Platform built to secure software at the speed of generation. The platform unifies Developer Endpoint Protection, Software Supply Chain Security, and AI-Native ASPM into a single execution engine. By actively protecting the AI workspace, blocking supply chain threats, and auto-fixing flawed code before the commit, Boost empowers engineering teams to leverage AI and floor the accelerator safely. Learn more at boostsecurity.io.

SOURCE Boost Security

AI built for the aisles: Vori autonomously manages operations for a $1.5 trillion industry still running on technology from the Reagan administration

SAN FRANCISCO, May 6, 2026 — Walk into a grocery store and you are looking at the largest undigitized retail segments on earth. While nearly every other sector has been rebuilt by software, grocery still runs on fax machines, paper invoices, and dozens of disconnected systems.

Vori is building the self-driving operating system for grocery stores, designed to manage a store’s entire operations from end to end. It handles checkout and payments at the register, tracks every item on every shelf, places orders with wholesalers, sets prices, runs promotions, and more.

Today, Vori announced a $22 million Series B led by Cherryrock Capital, with participation from Greylock Partners and The Factory, led by Stanford AI researcher Chris Ré.

In the past six months, Vori has doubled payment volume, with new stores being onboarded every 24 hours. Since launching in January 2024, Vori has processed more than $500 million in payments across 55 cities, serving over 1 million consumers nationwide.

United States food retail—supermarkets, grocery stores, food marts, and specialty shops—is a $1.5 trillion market, bigger than restaurants and bigger than hotels. Walmart and Amazon have invested heavily in this space, capturing 25% of U.S. grocery spending.

But no one is building technology for the other 75% of the market, for the operators still running on tools from the Reagan era 40 years ago. Grocery is one of the most operationally complex businesses to run, with stores juggling tens of thousands of SKUs, inventory that spoils by the day, a web of fragmented suppliers, and margins so thin there’s no room for error.

At the core of Vori is a unified system that brings together all of the disparate components required to run a store:

• A system of record that tracks all activity happening in the store in one place: every sale at the register, every case in the back room, every price on every shelf, every order placed with every wholesaler, and every loyalty member. Today this lives across a POS, a separate inventory system, a separate ordering system, a separate loyalty app, and a stack of paper invoices.
• A system of action, where AI agents leverage what the store “knows” to actually do the work. When dairy runs low, Vori writes the purchase order and sends it to the wholesaler. When a heat wave hits, Vori cuts the price of ice cream, updates every shelf tag in the store, and reports the sales lift back to the owner that night.
• A system of transaction, which processes every dollar that flows through the store. Payments represent approximately 60% of Vori’s revenue, with support for EBT, WIC, HSA, and FSA, each requiring complex, state-by-state integrations.

Every additional store on Vori makes every other store on Vori smarter. A strategic pricing move that works for owners in Sacramento shows up as a recommendation in Tampa the next morning.

By the end of 2026, the work that today eats a store owner’s nights and weekends—counting inventory, calling in orders, hand-keying price changes, reconciling invoices against deliveries—will run on its own. Over time, the company aims to become the clearinghouse for trade across the global food supply chain, connecting stores, distributors, brands, and payment systems into a single network.

“My family has been in grocery for three generations, and for most of that time the answer to ‘how do we run this store better’ was simply ‘work harder,'” said Brandon Hill, co-founder and CEO of Vori. “That no longer works. Grocery stores require what seems like never-ending decisions and adjustments to be made every second of the day just to stay running. With AI now making it possible to automate all operations, the cost of inaction is now existential. We plan to be the platform that powers the industry-wide rebuild of the systems that run grocery.”

Vori is led by a team with deep roots in grocery and engineers from SpaceX, Stripe, Square, Lyft, DoorDash, Instacart, and Amazon. CEO Brandon Hill is a third-generation grocer—his grandparents were in the industry, his parents met in a supermarket, and his mother works at Vori today.

“Grocery is an antiquated business with an enormous market, which AI can catalyze to bring growth and efficiencies,” said Stacy Brown-Philipot, founder of Cherryrock Capital. “We back companies that have audacious visions grounded in relentless execution and Brandon’s team at Vori is one of them. Before writing a single line of code, the team spent four years earning a PhD in grocery, going store to store, learning the rhythms, workflows, and economics that no outside company had bothered to understand.”

For more information, please visit https://www.vori.com/.

About Vori

Vori is building the autonomous grocery store. The platform runs checkout, inventory, ordering, pricing, and payments as a single system, and gets smarter with every store that joins. The company was founded by third-generation grocers and engineers from SpaceX, Stripe, Square, Lyft, DoorDash, and Instacart.

Media Contact:
Jenny Chao
[email protected]

SOURCE Vori

Co-founded by Maria Shriver and Patrick Schwarzenegger, MOSH accelerates national grocery expansion, debuts MOSH High Protein, a new bar with 20 grams of protein, creatine, and the MOSH Signature Brain Blend, and deepens its position as the pioneer of brain health nutrition

LOS ANGELES, May 6, 2026 — MOSH, the brain health nutrition brand co-founded by Maria Shriver and Patrick Schwarzenegger, has raised $13 million in Series A funding led by Main Street Advisors. The round, with participation from Great Circle Ventures, Rogers Healy and Morrison Seger, PCG, and Tonic Ventures, fuels MOSH’s national grocery expansion, an upcoming nationwide Target rollout, and the launch of MOSH High Protein, a new bar with 20 grams of protein, creatine, and the MOSH Signature Brain Blend.

The investment comes as MOSH, The Brain Brand^®, crosses 2,000+ U.S. retail doors, with the company’s retail channel on track to triple in 2026, driven by accelerating velocities at existing retailers, expanded facings, and the upcoming launch at Target. The brand has become a defining name in functional nutrition, built on a single idea: that the food we eat every day should nourish the organ we depend on most – the brain.

“When I co-founded MOSH, my hope was simple. I want to give people something delicious and genuinely nourishing that inspires them to take care of their brain, not just for today, but for the future,” said Maria Shriver, co-founder of MOSH, founder of the Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement at Cleveland Clinic, award-winning journalist, and eight-time New York Times bestselling author. “Every three seconds, someone in the world develops Alzheimer’s dementia, and two out of three of them are women. With every MOSH bar sold, we direct a portion of proceeds to fund Alzheimer’s research and women’s brain health, having raised more than $400,000 and funded three research grants to date. This is a recognition that millions of people are hungry for nutrition that supports brain health, and that MOSH is leading the way.”

“Our generation is rethinking what it means to take care of ourselves. You build the habits now that carry you forward,” said Patrick Schwarzenegger, co-founder of MOSH. “This Series A round puts MOSH on shelves at scale across national grocery stores and delivers category-first innovation like MOSH High Protein.”

“Scaling a consumer brand is fundamentally an execution story,” said Jeff Gamsey, President of MOSH. “Over the last two years, we’ve built out the team, the supply chain, and the playbook to vault MOSH from breakout brand to a category-defining, durably profitable business.”

“It’s not often you see a brand carve out real white space in a category as crowded as nutrition, but MOSH has done that while building a brand people genuinely love,” said Paul Wachter, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at Main Street Advisors. “Maria and Patrick are tapping into a major shift in how people think about brain health, and we’re proud to partner with them as they continue to grow.”

The funding arrives at a defining moment for brain health nutrition. The U.S. brain health supplements market is projected to nearly double from $3.56 billion in 2024 to $6.80 billion by 2030, according to Grand View Research, while high-protein bars continue to be one of the fastest-growing segments of the bar category. Yet according to the Alzheimer’s Association’s 2026 Facts and Figures report, 99% of Americans value brain health equally or more than physical health, while only 9% say they know a lot about ways to maintain it. MOSH was built to close that gap, pioneering a brain health nutrition category in a bar aisle that has long been dominated by legacy protein and energy claims.

Fueling the Next Chapter of Brain Health Nutrition

The Series A will fund four strategic priorities:

• National Grocery Expansion. MOSH will continue scaling across national grocery, with an upcoming launch at Target adding to an expanding footprint across major retailers including Sprouts, Albertsons, Kroger, HEB, and more.
• Category-First Product Innovation. MOSH is debuting MOSH High Protein, a new line of indulgent, delicious bars featuring 20 grams of protein, creatine, and the MOSH Signature Brain Blend. The line extends MOSH’s brain health platform with a formulation designed for consumers looking to support both cognitive and physical performance, and continues the brand’s pattern of pioneering functional benefits the bar aisle has not yet seen.
• Pioneering the Brain Health Category. In 2026, MOSH will fund a new (third) research grant that will examine gut biomarkers present in people with cognitive decline or Alzheimer’s, with the goal of developing early nutritional interventions.
• Team and Infrastructure. The company will grow its marketing, sales, and supply chain capabilities to support expanding retail scale.

About MOSH

Co-founded in 2021 by Maria Shriver and Patrick Schwarzenegger, MOSH, The Brain Brand^®, was born from a deeply personal journey after the mother-son duo witnessed a loved one battle Alzheimer’s. This ignited their shared mission to encourage every generation to proactively nurture their brain health. MOSH is defining the brain health nutrition category by bringing physical and cognitive nutrition together in a single format.

MOSH’s protein bars are the first and only bars to feature Cognizin^® Citicoline, clinically studied for its effects on focus, attention, and memory. Cognizin^® anchors the MOSH Signature Brain Blend alongside lion’s mane, ashwagandha, omega-3s, and vitamins B12 and D3.

MOSH also serves as a hub for brain health education with a portion of proceeds from every purchase directly supporting research and grants at The Women’s Alzheimer’s Movement (WAM) at Cleveland Clinic. MOSH products are available at moshlife.com and at leading retailers nationwide, including Sprouts Farmers Market, Target (launching in May 2026), Albertsons, Kroger, HEB, and more. Learn more at moshlife.com and @moshlife on Instagram.

About Main Street Advisors

Main Street Advisors, Inc. (MSA), based in Santa Monica, CA, is an investment and advisory firm serving a select group of artists, athletes, entertainers and entrepreneurs from the media, music, entertainment, and professional sports worlds. Founded in 1997, MSA has invested in and helped build category-defining businesses such as Fenway Sports Group, Beats by Dre, Alpine F1 Team, AC Milan, Complex, Dave’s Hot Chicken, IMG Academy, Kate Farms, MaryRuth Organics, On Running, Thorne, Truff, and the PGA Tour. For more information, visit www.mainstreetadvisors.com.

SOURCE MOSH

AUSTIN, Texas, May 6, 2026 — Modicus Prime, a former resident at Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JLABS @ Texas Medical Center, announced today the completion of an additional $4.5M in funding led by Frist Cressey Ventures, bringing total funding to $8M with additional backing from Silverton Partners and Oncology Ventures.  The funding comes following the multiple rollouts of the Trustworthy AI Compliance Software enabling scalable, audit-ready AI systems across global pharmaceutical companies, CROs, CMOs, CDMOs, and adjacent regulated sectors.

The Trustworthy AI Compliance Software enables pharmaceutical companies’ AI applications in regulated (GxP) environments, both internal and from AI suppliers, to be audit-ready across their organizations.  It integrates with pharmaceutical tech stacks and quality management systems, acting as a central layer that enables scalable AI use across sites and geographies with varying regulatory requirements. The integration enables a single source of truth for compliance with global regulators including the FDA and EMA across the full AI lifecycle (see Figure 1). Translating between data science, IT, quality, and compliance, the software reduces operational friction and ensures every pharmaceutical stakeholder works compliantly with AI in regulated environments. The result is safer AI adoption, reduced compliance risk and protected ROI of AI investments, allowing pharma organizations to stay focused on delivering medicines to patients.  Compliant AI ultimately accelerates adoption at scale and helps reduce, for example, costly quality control failures costing the industry an estimated $50 billion annually.

FCV founding partner Senator Bill Frist, MD states, “At the end of the day, every advancement in this industry must serve the patient. By simplifying and strengthening AI compliance, Modicus Prime enables pharmaceutical leaders to stay focused on accelerating innovation and delivering life-saving therapies to those who need them most.”

Modicus Prime’s leadership is helping drive the industry’s AI movement through authoring guidelines, keynotes, webinars, and talks informing regulators. Taylor Chartier, Modicus Prime’s CEO, co-authored the ISPE GAMP AI Guide and BioPhorum AI Implementation publication in 2025.  She also spearheaded ISPE’s GxP AI Webinar Series with fellow industry experts, which was an industry-first webinar series on implementing AI/ML solutions in GxP environments. Chartier continues to contribute to educational initiatives to upskill the pharmaceutical workforce in partnership with quality-focused organizations, including Pathway for Patient Health.

A former engineer and data scientist from Shire and Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Chartier states, “Pharmaceutical companies are investing heavily in AI, but without the infrastructure to deploy it compliantly and measure ROI, that investment is at risk. Adjacent healthcare sectors, including payers and providers, express the same need for compliance infrastructure.  This is the gap our Trustworthy AI Compliance Software addresses, enabling scalable AI adoption across regulated environments.”

Oncology Ventures’ Ben Freeberg states, “The next wave of cancer breakthroughs are coming, and every manufacturer has to survive a regulatory audit to ensure those drugs get to patients who need them. Modicus Prime is the compliance layer that makes this happen.”

Modicus Prime is using this new capital to further service their international pharmaceutical customers with additional customer support, including the continued enhancement of its platform to better support customer deployments and growing AI compliance needs.

About Modicus Prime
Modicus Prime’s AI Compliance platform bridges data science, IT, and quality, enabling regulated organizations to deploy and scale trustworthy AI.  By providing a single source of truth for regulators, the platform ensures AI applications remain compliant across their full lifecycle, from development through evolving GxP use.  A resident at Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JLABS @ South San Francisco, Modicus Prime is venture-backed and partners with leading pharmaceutical organizations to enable AI audit readiness at scale.  The platform integrates with existing tech stacks and quality management systems, supporting biologics, cell and gene therapies, and vaccine manufacturing across global regulatory environments.

About Frist Cressey Partners
Founded by former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, MD and Bryan Cressey, Frist Cressey Ventures (FCV) is a healthcare venture capital firm with $846M AUM focused on accelerating the growth of high potential healthcare companies through a differentiated healthcare network, hands-on leadership support, and healthcare policy expertise. Our mission is simple: to transform healthcare to improve lives. Our strategic partners, including The Cigna Group, MedStar Health and OhioHealth, provide healthcare to more than 50% of the U.S. population. We invest in early-stage startups that build technology or tech-enabled services to advance quality of care, system integration, patient outcomes, affordability, and access. To learn more about Frist Cressey Ventures, visit our website at www.fcventures.com.

About Oncology Ventures
Oncology Ventures is a specialized, Austin-based venture capital firm founded in 2022 by cancer survivor Ben Freeberg. The Fund invests in commercially-validated start-ups transforming the future of cancer care. Oncology Ventures is partnered with leading oncology institutions, including Texas Oncology, Fred Hutch Cancer Center, City of Hope, Moffitt and others.

Contact:
Taylor Chartier
[email protected]

SOURCE Modicus Prime

Company expands to meet growing demand from product-based businesses seeking flexible infrastructure, hands-on operational support, and the ability to scale across multiple locations

ATLANTA, May 6, 2026 — Saltbox, the operations hub for product-based businesses, today announced a major expansion milestone with the opening of its third Atlanta-area location in Chamblee, its entry into the Chicago market, and the close of a Series C funding round led by Packard Capital.

As product-based businesses continue to start up and scale across the U.S., entrepreneurs are rethinking how they run modern operations. Many are moving away from rigid warehouse leases and fully outsourced 3PL models in favor of more flexible, hands-on approaches that give them greater control over their inventory, fulfillment, and customer experience.

Saltbox is designed specifically to address this shift—bringing together flexible warehouse space, integrated logistics infrastructure, and on-site operational support in a single environment designed for businesses that are actively shipping, receiving, and evolving their operations.

Members are increasingly using Saltbox as a distributed network—operating across multiple locations to get closer to customers, lower shipping costs, and deliver faster, more reliable experiences without rebuilding infrastructure in each market.

“We don’t just give you a place to work—we help you run your business, in a space where everything around you was built with your operation in mind,” said Katerina Cirilli, CEO of Saltbox.

Expanding in Atlanta: Chamblee Location Opens

Saltbox’s third Atlanta location, in Chamblee, and its twelfth location nationwide, deepens its presence in its founding market, making its total square footage footprint in Atlanta across all three locations 300,000 square feet. The new location reflects both the company’s origins and its continued investment in supporting entrepreneurs where they are building and growing.

“We’re super excited to add Chamblee as our third location in the Atlanta market. Chamblee is one of the fastest growing cities in Georgia, and Saltbox is strategically located just around the corner from City Hall and close to MARTA,” said Lucy Voss, VP of Operations at Saltbox. “This location is especially meaningful because our co-founder, Tyler Scriven, ran and operated his ecommerce company out of this building back in 2019. This is where the vision of Saltbox was really born, so it makes this expansion extra special.”

The Chamblee facility will offer private warehouse suites, co-working amenities, a content studio, fulfillment services, and access to on-site teams that support day-to-day operations—including receiving inventory, picking & packing orders, and helping members troubleshoot and improve their workflows.

Entering Chicago: A Strategic New Market Coming This Fall

Saltbox’s expansion into the Chicago metropolitan area marks a key step in building a national footprint that enables members to operate beyond a single location.

“Chicago has consistently been a market businesses have asked us to be in, so to be finally launching here feels especially impactful,” said Olivia Mariani, VP of Marketing at Saltbox. “We’re seeing more members think beyond a single location—using Saltbox across markets to get closer to their customers, reduce shipping costs, and operate more efficiently. Chicago is a critical piece of that network.”

By entering the Chicago market, Saltbox strengthens its ability to support distributed operations—giving members access to a central logistics hub and enabling faster, more cost-effective shipping across the Midwest and beyond.

Series C Funding to Accelerate Growth

To support its continued expansion, Saltbox has raised a Series C funding round led by Atlanta-based Packard Capital. The funding round will be used to grow Saltbox’s national footprint, invest in logistics infrastructure, and expand the capabilities of its on-site operational support model.

“We’re excited to continue expanding our footprint and to bring Saltbox to more entrepreneurs across the country,” said Katerina Cirilli, CEO of Saltbox. “Packard is a valuable partner to us in both capital and real estate expertise, and we’re aligned in our belief that product-based businesses need more flexible, supportive infrastructure to operate and scale. Together, we’re building a platform that gives founders greater control, visibility, and the ability to grow on their own terms.”

Building the Future of Operations for Product-Based Businesses

Saltbox is purpose-built for businesses that run physical operations—not just store inventory. Each location combines co-warehousing with logistics capabilities, operational services, and an on-site team that actively supports execution.

Members use Saltbox to receive, store, and manage inventory; pick, pack, and ship orders; assemble and kit products; and continuously refine their operations. Unlike traditional warehouse models, Saltbox enables founders to stay close to their product while accessing the infrastructure and support they need to scale.

Through its growing network of locations, Saltbox makes it easy for small and large businesses to expand into new markets, operate across regions, and scale efficiently—without the overhead, rigidity, or loss of control that comes with traditional alternatives.

About Saltbox
Saltbox is an operations hub for product-based businesses offering co-warehousing, logistics infrastructure, and hands-on support to help teams run their day-to-day operations.

By bringing everything needed to run physical operations into one place, Saltbox gives businesses more control, visibility, and flexibility—eliminating the tradeoffs between rigid warehouse leases and fully outsourced solutions.

Through a growing network of locations across major U.S. markets, Saltbox makes it easy to expand into new regions, get closer to customers, and scale operations efficiently without the overhead.

Founded in 2019, Saltbox operates in 8 major U.S. markets with ongoing expansion underway.

Learn more about Saltbox at saltbox.com

Media Contact: Monica Barker, Senior Content Manager
[email protected]
(469) 269-9448

SOURCE Saltbox

Early-Stage Companies Encouraged to Apply for Investment and Strategic Support

SEATTLE, May 6, 2026 — Climate resilience is no longer a future challenge. It is an urgent threat to the systems communities depend on for energy, water, and food. E8, a membership community of accredited investors specializing in cleantech, launched its 2026 Decarbon8 Impact Fund Request for Applications (RFA), seeking early-stage companies focused on climate resilience solutions across grid, water, and food. Applications are open through June 18, 2026.

“Climate resilience is as demanding of our capital, creativity, and commitment as climate mitigation,” said Marina Psaros, E8 Member & Decarbon8 Manager. “Decarbon8 is focused on finding and supporting innovators who are strengthening the grid, water, and food systems that people depend on every day.”

Selected companies receive an average of $300k in combined funding from the Decarbon8 Fund, Annual Fund, and direct E8 member investment. Beyond capital, selected companies gain access to follow-on investment opportunities, expert engagement, and visibility through E8’s investor network, events, and media coverage. This support has helped past portfolio companies raise over $8.4M in co-investment from the E8 community.

Eligible companies must:

• Demonstrate technology that addresses a hard climate resilience problem in grid, water, or food
• Have scaling plans based on well-validated assumptions
• Show a clear path to durable competitive advantage
• Have a leadership team with relevant domain and entrepreneurial experience
• Be at Pre-seed to Series A stage
• Have a funding round accepting investments up to mid-October 2026
• Be incorporated (C-, S-, or B-corp) in the USA or Canada

Solutions may focus on:

• Grid resilience — keeping energy systems running under stress and enabling more decentralized power
• Water security — securing supply through efficiency, monitoring, and distributed treatment
• Food security — enabling climate-adaptive production, distributed inputs, and alternative nutrition sources for a volatile climate

Finalists will be selected in mid-September and invited to pitch E8 for additional investment, with decisions and co-investment opportunities awarded by mid-October.

Applicants will be evaluated by a screening team of climate investors alongside expert judges: Alex Wilkins, Portfolio Manager at Cisco Foundation; Anastasia Telesetsky, Environmental Law Professor at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo; Arah Schuur, Research Advisor at Rutgers University and former DOE; and Christine Boyle, Partner at Burnt Island Ventures.

E8 and Decarbon8 are supported by Microsoft, University of Washington, Washington State University, K&L Gates, and CleanTech Alliance. Decarbon8 is administered by 501(c)(3) nonprofit Realize Impact.

Review the RFA and apply at https://www.e8angels.com/decarbon8-us/rfa. The application window closes June 18, 2026.

For media inquiries, contact Karin Kidder: 509-795-0116, [email protected].

About E8: E8 is a membership community of investors funding solutions for a sustainable future. Since 2006, E8 has mobilized over $75M across 180+ early-stage companies building toward a thriving planet. Learn more at https://www.e8angels.com/.

About Decarbon8-US: Decarbon8 is a philanthropic impact fund administered by Realize Impact that invests donations and grants into early-stage climate companies through equity and debt. Founded by E8 in 2020, the fund has deployed $10.4M in combined philanthropic and personal co-investment. Learn more at https://www.e8angels.com/decarbon8-us.

SOURCE E8

New senior hires from Google and The Collaborative Fund to lead product strategy and venture investing

Fund unveils first investment focus areas to catalyze new ‘Navigation Technology’ market, equipping Americans with cutting-edge tools to achieve economic security, opportunity and empowerment

ST. LOUIS, May 6, 2026 — NextLadder Ventures, a new fund backed by more than $1 billion in capital, today announced its priority investment areas for building a new market for “Navigation Technology” (NavTech) — tools that provide Americans with personalized solutions to navigate life’s challenges and achieve greater economic mobility — and announced its co-founding team, including two new senior hires.

The fund’s active focus areas are based on extensive research identifying the key experiences and high-stakes decision points that have an outsized impact on American families’ economic mobility. Launched investment areas include financial health, career navigation, and benefits and social services access, with further exploration underway around housing, legal aid, justice and re-entry, and mental and physical health. 

The organization is also today welcoming two senior leaders: Lauren Loktev is joining NextLadder as Managing Director of Investments and Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink as Managing Director of Product. Loktev was most recently a partner at the Collaborative Fund, where she backed several breakout companies in early child development, education, and sustainability. Gosselink comes to NextLadder from Google, where she led the company’s AI and social impact portfolio. They join a growing team which has deep expertise at the intersection of economic mobility, technology, public policy, and philanthropy.

NextLadder’s Focus Areas for Investment

Today, the fund is kicking off a plan to deploy $1 billion over the next seven years to accelerate the design, development, and deployment of accessible NavTech tools that aim to help families more successfully navigate the major life experiences that determine whether they get ahead or fall behind. As NextLadder’s inaugural frontier AI lab partner, Anthropic is supporting the build-out of the organization’s AI-native capabilities and is offering technical assistance to NextLadder’s portfolio organizations. 

As an increasing proportion of Americans across income levels find themselves overextended and overwhelmed, NavTech tools are designed to help individuals and families understand their options, connect to information and resources, and take action to recover from a setback or take advantage of an opportunity and reclaim their economic futures.

“Life is getting harder, and too many Americans are stuck facing some of the most complex and consequential moments of their lives without much support,” said Ryan Rippel, CEO of NextLadder Ventures. “Every day, millions in this country face fork-in-the-road decisions that have major implications on whether they climb up the economic ladder or fall farther behind. AI has understandably intensified many Americans’ anxieties about their jobs and their security in the economy. But these technologies are now also making it possible to deliver highly personalized, affordable tools to meet the needs of tens of millions of Americans in a way that has never been practically achievable or financially viable before. With NavTech tools, built for the reality of families’ everyday experiences, we can empower Americans to overcome setbacks, navigate life’s toughest financial decisions, and build more secure futures.”

NavTech tools, built with the needs of individuals, families, and trusted community partners at the center of their design, have the potential to ease burdens most acutely faced by 90 million Americans who live in households that have difficulty in paying for usual home expenses, and turbocharge the capacity of the 1.6 million community workers in non-profit or local, state, and federal government roles who serve them. This growing category of digital technologies includes tools that help families access opportunities such as personalized financial advice and legal aid, get connected with available resources and programs, and manage unexpected hurdles like losing a job or facing an eviction – while freeing social workers and service providers to spend more time on people and less time on red tape and paperwork.

The fund’s active investment areas include:

• Financial Health: Developing highly personalized, AI-powered financial health tools that can provide tailored, sustained counsel to help users build savings and protect and recover from financial shocks;
• Career Navigation: Building tools to support career navigation, manage and support career transitions, and help workers, case managers, and employers identify pathways to living wage work — all designed to help people successfully find the right jobs for them.
• Benefits & Social Services Access: Helping eligible Americans seamlessly identify and enroll in all the benefits and social services available to them, particularly those that support career navigation and transitions, help them navigate critical life moments, and achieve stability toward economic opportunity.

NextLadder is exploring additional focus areas, including housing, legal aid, justice and re-entry, caregiving, and mental and physical health. More on the organization’s vision of these focus areas is available HERE.

In addition to backing direct NavTech solutions, NextLadder is investing in the developers, partners, and standards required to build a durable, self-sustaining market. Across all focus areas, the fund is prioritizing efforts to ensure NavTech tools are reliable, protect users’ privacy, and are trusted by the families who depend on them.

NextLadder’s Co-Founder Leadership Team

NextLadder’s five co-founders will be CEO Ryan Rippel, Chief Strategy and Operations Officer Rhett Dornbach-Bender, Chief of Staff Callie Schwartz, and the two new senior hires: Managing Director of Investments Lauren Loktev and Managing Director of Product Brigitte Hoyer Gosselink, rounding out the fund’s expertise in investing, technology, and impact.

“We’re thrilled to welcome Lauren and Brigitte to the NextLadder team,” said Rippel. “Brigitte has spent her career proving that when applied purposefully, AI and technology can deliver meaningful benefits for communities, and she’ll set the bar for what NavTech tools can deliver for American families today and in the years to come. And with her deep experience backing mission-driven founders, Lauren is the perfect leader to build our venture practice from the ground up and accelerate the growth of the NavTech field. With this team in place, we’re positioned to make NavTech tools easier to build, fund, and access so they reach the people who need them most.”

Loktev brings 15 years of venture capital experience investing at the intersection of for-profit and for-good. Most recently at Collaborative Fund, she backed several companies to significant scale and launched Collab+Sesame, a first-of-its-kind thematic seed fund in partnership with Sesame Workshop focused on early childhood education. At NextLadder, she will build and lead the fund’s venture practice, sourcing and scaling investments in the founders building the next generation of NavTech tools.

“We have a once in a generation opportunity to help steer AI solutions toward those who need them most,” said Loktev. “Many amazing, accomplished founders see this too, and they are on a mission to build scalable, transformative businesses in the critical verticals that help people navigate life-changing moments. I couldn’t be more excited to join NextLadder and to support the most inspiring leaders building this market from the ground up. Thanks to our unique, long-term mandate, we can be creative and flexible in investing across stage and check size to partner with the entrepreneurs and leaders we believe will change the world.”

Prior to her role at NextLadder, Gosselink spent over a decade at Google in several roles including Director of AI and Social Impact, directing more than $500 million in funding for organizations applying AI to address challenges including crisis response, education, and economic opportunity. At NextLadder, she will lead AI and product strategy across the fund’s portfolio, backing solutions and setting market-wide standards for how NavTech tools are designed, evaluated, and improved over time.

“If we collectively harness the AI transformation strategically and purposefully, we can transform the way Americans are empowered to access greater economic mobility,” said Gosselink. “We believe that people-centered products, combined with shifts in the market and the services available to families, can fundamentally reshape how millions of Americans navigate critical moments and achieve prosperity on their own terms.”

To request interviews from the NextLadder Ventures leadership team, contact media@nextladder.com.

About NextLadder Ventures

NextLadder Ventures is a time-bound venture with one goal: empower millions of Americans to reach their potential by 2040. Backed by over $1 billion in capital, the organization invests in breakthrough technologies that remove barriers to economic success and put people in control of their futures. NextLadder Ventures is trailblazing a new market for tech-enabled Navigation Technology tools that help people access the resources they need to navigate pivotal moments — offering flexible, risk-tolerant capital to entrepreneurs building these transformative tools today, while creating a pipeline of tech, talent, and capital for the long run.

SOURCE NextLadder Ventures

New funding led by Washington Harbour Partners will accelerate sensor deployment, software capabilities, and the buildout of a new Virginia-based production facility. The round also includes participation from Virginia Innovation Partnership Corporation (VIPC), Noblis Ventures, Decisive Point, Fusion Fund, and other existing investors.

RESTON, Va., May 6, 2026 — Scout Space, a leader in space domain awareness (SDA) sensors and software, today announced it has raised up to $18 million in Series A funding, led by Washington Harbour Partners. The new capital will support upcoming mission execution and the expansion of Scout’s manufacturing capabilities, including the buildout of a new 2,600-square-foot facility in Northern Virginia.

Scout’s sensors and software enable real-time awareness and responsiveness in space. Its platform-agnostic systems combine advanced optical payloads, edge processing, and autonomy to detect, track, and characterize objects in orbit—supporting safer, more informed operations across commercial and national security missions.

“At Scout Space, we understand that a widely proliferated network of in-space sensors is fundamental to understanding and operating safely in orbit,” said Josiah Gruber, CEO of Scout Space. “With this investment, we’re expanding our ability to deliver at speed for our customers—while deepening our presence in Northern Virginia, where proximity to mission partners and decision-makers is unmatched.”

Scout’s focus on scalable, modular architecture is a key differentiator in the sector. Rather than vertically integrating across the full hardware stack, the company is dedicated to becoming the trusted provider of SDA sensors and software—delivering high-performance, mission-specific capabilities that integrate with a wide range of platforms and partners.

“Space is becoming more dynamic, contested, and critical to national security,” said Mina Faltas, Founder and CIO of Washington Harbour Partners. “Scout is building the sensing layer needed to understand and operate in that environment. Their platform-agnostic approach allows them to integrate across missions and architectures—positioning them as a critical supplier in the next generation of space infrastructure.”

Scout enters this next phase with strong mission and contract momentum. The company is working with Blue Origin to integrate its flagship Owl sensor on the inaugural mission of Blue Ring, a highly maneuverable, multi-mission spacecraft designed for payload hosting and on-orbit services across GEO and beyond. In parallel, Scout continues to expand its footprint with the U.S. Space Force through multiple Tactical Funding Increase (TACFI) awards, advancing both its GEO-based sensing systems and data platforms for object identification, custody, and operational intelligence.

About Scout Space
Scout Space was founded in 2019 with the mission to enable a new era of space safety and transparency. Scout’s in-space products and services, first launched in 2021, allow spacecraft to see and understand things around them. The orbital distributed sensor network developed by Scout will significantly improve Space Domain Awareness (SDA) and ensure responsible use of the space environment. The company is a Techstars, MassChallenge, and venture-backed startup with ongoing government and commercial contracts. Scout holds the Established® 2021 Startup of the Year® title. For more information, visit www.scout.space.

Media Contact
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SOURCE Scout Space