OpenEvidence also announces the wide release of OpenEvidence DeepConsult™—the first AI agent purpose-built for physicians

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., July 15, 2025 — OpenEvidence, the most widely used medical search and AI application among verified U.S. clinicians, today announced a $210 million Series B round at a $3.5 Billion valuation. Google Ventures and Kleiner Perkins co-led the Series B round. Sequoia Capital, which led OpenEvidence’s Series A round earlier in 2025, followed on in this round. The round also included investments from Coatue, Conviction, and Thrive. OpenEvidence has raised more than $300 million since its founding.

OpenEvidence helps clinicians make high-stakes clinical decisions at the point of care. 
OpenEvidence is redefining evidence-based medicine in real-time and transforming how frontline healthcare providers access, evaluate, and apply the world’s medical knowledge. OpenEvidence is actively used across more than 10,000 hospitals and medical centers nationwide and by more than 40% of physicians in the United States who log in daily to make high-stakes clinical decisions at the point of care. OpenEvidence continues to grow by over 65,000 new verified U.S. clinician registrations each month. In July of 2024, OpenEvidence supported approximately 358,000 logged-in, verified U.S. physician consultations in one month. One year later, OpenEvidence now handles that many each workday—and supports over 8,500,000 clinical consultations by logged-in, verified U.S. physicians per month—a 2,000%+ year-over-year growth rate. More than 100 million Americans this year will be treated by a doctor who used OpenEvidence.

Clinicians are overwhelmed by information overload, with the volume of medical research published annually doubling every five years. Traditional medical evidence databases are slow, fragmented across multiple platforms, and require extensive manual searching that pulls physicians away from patient care. Through an array of strategic content partnerships (including the American Medical Association, The New England Journal of Medicine, The Journal of the American Medical Association, and all eleven JAMA specialty journals—such as JAMA Oncology and JAMA Neurology) OpenEvidence gives clinicians the power to search once, skip the scavenger hunt, and surface the science in seconds. Clinicians using OpenEvidence (which is HIPAA compliant) can input clinical questions or patient case details and receive point-of-care answers grounded in the latest research, complete with references and even follow-up suggestions. OpenEvidence rapidly surfaces relevant medical knowledge, synthesizes medical research, and gives clinicians the power to make faster, more evidence-based decisions—accelerating both medical literature review and clinical decision support. By reducing the lag between new evidence and bedside application, OpenEvidence enables improved patient outcomes.

“At a time when U.S. healthcare faces the dual challenges of clinician burnout and a projected physician shortfall of nearly 100,000 by 2030, the question of AI’s role in bridging the gap is paramount,” says Daniel Nadler, founder of OpenEvidence. “When physicians’ lives are hard, patients’ lives are harder. OpenEvidence’s commitment to building an AI copilot for clinicians is rooted in the belief that AI will be a force for good in the world, ultimately benefiting both healthcare professionals and the patients they serve. Physicians are superheroes, and OpenEvidence is giving these superheroes new superpowers.”

“Daniel Nadler is a magnet for talent, attracting top AI researchers and a world-class medical advisory board,” said Sangeen Zeb, General Partner at Google Ventures. “As a firm with a life sciences team largely composed of physicians and scientists, we deeply understand the challenges clinicians face with traditional tools. Physicians are drowning in information but starving for timely insights. OpenEvidence changes that equation, bringing clinicians into the modern era. As early investors in Daniel’s first company, Kensho, GV has been privileged to know him for over a decade. He is a once-in-a-generation founder building one of the fastest-growing technology applications ever seen.”

Legendary investor and Kleiner Perkins Chairman John Doerr—who co-led Google’s original Series A and has served on its board since 1999—said, “It’s hard to imagine a better use for AI than OpenEvidence. Daniel Nadler and his world-class team are building what I believe will become an AI-era treasure, a life-saving resource for doctors, patients, and their families. I can’t imagine the future without it.”

“It’s exceptionally rare to see a product reach this level of adoption—let alone among physicians, who are notoriously hard to win over and exacting in what they trust—and the fact that 40% of all physicians in the United States log in daily to OpenEvidence’s software is a staggering signal of both trust and utility,” said Mamoon Hamid, Managing Partner at Kleiner Perkins. “OpenEvidence is not just building a company, they’re setting a new global standard for how evidence-based medical decisions are made. We’re proud to support a mission with this kind of generational ambition.”

OpenEvidence has announced key strategic content partnerships with the American Medical Association (JAMA) and The New England Journal of Medicine so that full-text content and multimedia from the global gold standards of medical knowledge are used to inform answers in OpenEvidence—giving physicians, medical researchers, and healthcare professionals faster access to clinically relevant evidence to improve patient outcomes and save lives.

Robert M. Wachter, MD, Chair of the Department of Medicine at UCSF and author of the upcoming book, A Giant Leap: How AI is Transforming Healthcare and What That Means for Our Future, said, “Thus far, the digital transformation of healthcare has mostly fallen short in its efforts to deliver trusted, evidence-based clinical decision support to clinicians when they need it most. The partnership between the American Medical Association, a cornerstone of medical research and analysis for more than a century, and OpenEvidence, my preferred platform for AI-powered clinical insights, represents a significant step toward fulfilling that promise. I’m confident that both clinicians and patients will benefit.”

OpenEvidence, founded by Harvard– and MIT-trained PhDs, also today announced the wide release of OpenEvidence DeepConsult™, the first AI agent purpose-built for physicians. DeepConsult empowers every physician with a personal, private team of PhD-level, medically-specialized AI agents built by OpenEvidence—capable of conducting advanced medical research while the physician steps away, whether to see the next patient, take a lunch break, or get some rest. OpenEvidence DeepConsult agents use advanced reasoning models to autonomously analyze and cross-reference hundreds of peer-reviewed medical studies in parallel—surfacing not just direct answers, but novel, cross-cutting connections across the literature that might otherwise go unnoticed. The result is an evidence-based synthesis: An integrative, interdisciplinary understanding distilled from hundreds of peer-reviewed medical studies—what would otherwise take a human researcher months of painstaking effort to produce for a single clinical topic.

While OpenEvidence’s core search product is designed for speed—returning precise, evidence-based answers in the 5–10 seconds physicians often have between patients—DeepConsult addresses a different kind of clinical use case: when physicians have more time to ramp up on a new body of knowledge. A physician can pose a complex question before heading to lunch—and return to a comprehensive PhD-level research report in their inbox by the time they get back. This marks a new era of medical productivity: tireless, agentic assistants—PhD-level research intelligence, never tired, never off-duty—reasoning at unprecedented scale, uncovering insights, unlocking new knowledge, and reshaping the future of care.

Each DeepConsult run requires over 100 times the compute and cost of a standard OpenEvidence search. Some leading foundation model companies have publicly speculated about charging tens of thousands of dollars per month for their envisioned PhD‑level agents that are still under development. Yet as part of its mission to support physicians at the point of care, OpenEvidence is offering DeepConsult entirely free to all verified U.S. clinicians—regardless of their institution or workplace.

OpenEvidence will use the funding to expand strategic content partnerships that enhance its library of advanced medical knowledge. OpenEvidence was founded by serial entrepreneur Daniel Nadler, founder of Kensho. Kensho became the most valuable artificial intelligence company of the 2010s when S&P Global acquired it for $700 million in 2018. Google Ventures was the first major investor in Kensho, funding the company while Daniel Nadler was completing his PhD at Harvard University. In 2025, OpenEvidence founder Daniel Nadler was named to the TIME100 Health list of the 100 Most Influential People in global health.

About OpenEvidence

OpenEvidence is the fastest-growing clinical decision support platform in the United States, and the most widely used medical search engine among U.S. clinicians. Trusted by hundreds of thousands of verified physicians, nurses, and other healthcare professionals, OpenEvidence is actively used across more than 10,000 hospitals and medical centers nationwide and by over 40% of physicians in the United States who log in daily to make high-stakes clinical decisions at the point of care.

OpenEvidence continues to grow by over 65,000 new verified U.S. clinician registrations each month. Aside from Google itself, there has never been a piece of technology adopted by clinicians as quickly as OpenEvidence. OpenEvidence is transforming how frontline healthcare providers access, evaluate, and apply the world’s medical knowledge. More than 100 million Americans this year will be treated by a doctor who used OpenEvidence.

OpenEvidence was founded by Daniel Nadler and Zachary Ziegler. Founded with the mission to organize and expand global medical knowledge, OpenEvidence is redefining evidence-based medicine in real-time. In recognition of this impact, in 2025, OpenEvidence founder Daniel Nadler, PhD, was named to the TIME100 Health list of the 100 Most Influential People in global health.

SOURCE OpenEvidence

Founded in 2003, vCompute was among the first U.S. companies to offer dedicated and on-demand cloud-based HPC services. Today, the company serves mission-critical workloads across industries such as energy, manufacturing, geophysics, life sciences, and climate research. The planned expansion will increase hosting capacity and support demand for advanced AI and HPC infrastructure solutions.

“We’re seeing exponential demand growth,” said Edward Hawes, CEO of vCompute. “This capital raise marks a strategic inflection point. With proven infrastructure designs, extreme automation, and strong financial discipline, we’re positioned to scale quickly and profitably — both through organic buildouts and potential acquisitions.”

vCompute operates two debt-free data centers in Houston, engineered for cost-efficiency and operational resilience. Automation and intelligent monitoring systems minimize labor requirements, resulting in a lean expense profile and strong margins.

“We’ve remained conservative and profitable since the beginning,” Hawes continued. “Now, with operational risk minimized and market validation firmly established, we are accelerating our growth. This expansion represents a rare opportunity for investors to participate in a high-margin infrastructure play with substantial upside.”

Key Investment Highlights

• Established Operator: 20+ years of HPC infrastructure expertise with a global client base.
• Debt-Free Platform: Houston facilities fully owned and optimized for efficiency.
• High Growth Market: AI, big data, and HPC workloads are growing rapidly across industries.
• Capital-Efficient Expansion: Proprietary automation reduces capex and opex burden.
• Scalable Architecture: Proven designs support rapid cluster deployment and client onboarding.

Shawn Stephens, Chief HPC Architect, added:

“Our team has decades of experience in building and managing large-scale HPC clusters. We help clients choose the best technologies, optimize application performance, and reduce total cost of ownership — whether on-premises or in hybrid environments.”

Investor Inquiries

vCompute welcomes accredited investors and institutional partners interested in participating in this raise. 

SOURCE vCompute

Drake Real Estate Partners has closed its fifth flagship fund, building on long-term partnerships and fostering new relationships across the U.S., Latin America, Europe, Middle East & Asia.

NEW YORK, July 15, 2025 — Drake Real Estate Partners (“Drake”), a real estate investment manager pursuing a value-add strategy focused on under the radar opportunities, announced the closing of its fifth flagship fund, Drake Real Estate Partners Fund V (“DREP Fund V” or the “Fund”) with more than $515 million in commitments, exceeding its $500 million target in one of the most challenging fundraising environments in recent history.

Drake’s investor base has evolved and diversified from its original roots in large LatAm based family offices to a predominantly U.S. institutional capital base in DREP Fund V. “We surpassed our $500 million target raise with $515 million, plus co-investment allocations” said Nicolas Ibanez, co-founder and President of Drake. “This outcome is a testament to the long-term relationships we’ve built and our deliberate expansion into the U.S. and European institutional landscape, which complements our longstanding ties in Latin America. Achieving this scale of fundraising in the current environment is not only a major milestone, it’s a strategic advantage as we deploy capital in a heavily dislocated environment.”

The year and a half fundraising period required persistence and focus, Ibanez noted. “It was a constant dance requiring us to amplify our message among existing and prospective investors who were seeking differentiated access to U.S. real estate,” he said. “Drake focuses on niche real estate sectors, and smaller, under-the-radar opportunities that are often overlooked. In a market undergoing a structural reset, managers with flexible capital are able to pivot amid this shift and play with a big advantage. I think that really resonated with smart investors who saw the opportunity, and put us in this favorable position to take advantage of the environment.”

Founded in 2012, Drake implements a value-add approach by acquiring income-producing real estate assets, generally at a significant discount to replacement cost, and driving value through repositioning, leasing and improving operations. The Firm focuses predominantly on smaller transactions – generally between $5-25 million of equity – benefiting from the less efficient market dynamics in that target range. Drake frequently acquires its assets from long-time, non-institutional owners, overseeing capital improvements that these assets were previously lacking, and assembling them into attractive, scalable portfolios for future buyers.

“This fund vintage presents one of the most compelling risk/return profiles we’ve seen since the Firm’s inception,” said David Cotterman, Drake co-founder and Chief Investment Officer. “We’re creating value-add to opportunistic type returns while taking core plus to light value-add risk, in longstanding themes we’ve researched and invested in for more than 13 years.”

Over the past five years, Drake has increasingly pursued fragmented sub-sectors within industrial and residential themes, such as industrial outdoor storage (“IOS”), small bay industrial, and manufactured housing (“MH”), while opportunistically accessing more traditional property types, such as multifamily and data centers. The firm sources most acquisitions directly from owners, bypassing intermediaries and broadly marketed processes. “Drake’s growing focus on smaller assets allows us to create programmatic platforms with our partners and efficiently deploy capital in less liquid markets,” Cotterman said. “We aggregate portfolios of assets that are individually too small for most institutional investors. This marriage of institutional expertise and smaller assets in niche property types creates a unique edge for Drake.”

To date, IOS represents one of Drake’s highest conviction playbooks in DREP Fund V. The sector benefits from sustained demand across the broader industrial and logistics ecosystem, coupled with extremely limited new supply. These dynamics have driven rental growth that consistently outpaces traditional industrial assets, drawing increased institutional interest, particularly for larger portfolios such as the one Drake is actively assembling.

Within the residential space, Drake’s primary playbook in DREP Fund V has been manufactured housing (“MH”), where Drake executes what is mostly a land-lease model in which the firm owns and leases the land beneath residents’ homes. This approach is capital expenditure-light compared to traditional multifamily strategies, and targets a niche market defined by a persistent supply/demand imbalance. New development remains rare due to widespread NIMBY opposition, even as rental demand and growth fundamentals remain strong – driven by a sustained systemic housing shortage and rising construction costs.

Another notable opportunistic investment in the Fund includes a GP interest in a 1,000+ megawatt hyperscale data center development platform anchored by top tier tenants.

About Drake Real Estate Partners
Founded in 2012, Drake Real Estate Partners is a New York-based real estate investment manager with a track record of identifying and executing on under-the-radar opportunities across the U.S. The firm focuses on value-add strategies in income-producing assets, generally acquired at a significant discount to replacement cost. Drake has completed over $3.0 billion in transactions, leveraging its flexible capital and long-term mindset to invest across sectors and geographies.

Drake is a proud member of 1% For The Planet, committing 1% of the firm’s revenues to environmental nonprofits in the communities where it operates, and it represents its anchor initiative withing DREP BUILDS, Drake’s holistic approach to sustainability and real estate resilience.

For further information, visit www.drakerep.com.

Contact
Drake Real Estate Partners
[email protected]

SOURCE Drake Real Estate Partners

Callidus will use the funds to accelerate product development and expand the team to continue its impressive growth trajectory through the second half of 2025

SAN FRANCISCO, July 15, 2025 — Callidus Legal AI, the AI platform that automates and accelerates core litigation workflows, today announced $10M in funding, bringing the company’s total funding to date to $13M. The highly oversubscribed round was led by Cervin Ventures, with participation from AI Fund, Myriad Venture Partners, Tandem Ventures, Active Capital, Capital Factory, Foley & Lardner, and a consortium of partners from a top 25 law firm. With this new capital, Callidus will continue its strong growth trajectory, double the speed of its product development to support its 1,000+ customers, and extend its market reach.

Goldman Sachs estimates 44% of the $1T legal industry will soon be automated by AI and Callidus’ current momentum and ambitious roadmap suggest the industry could grow multiples beyond the $64B estimate of industry analysts. In the first half of 2025, Callidus has tripled its recurring revenue, offering a new generation of legal solutions in its end-to-end AI operating system for litigators.

“AI has advanced to the point where substantially automating legal work is no longer a question of possibility; it’s a series of tough but solvable engineering challenges. We’re building the most advanced and interactive AI platform for litigators,” said Justin McCallon, CEO of Callidus Legal AI. “Success requires the right combination of a world-class user experience, a robustly engineered middle-layer, and high-quality legal data. Callidus brings all of that together cohesively. With the support of our partners, and on the shoulders of the research labs, we’re reinventing litigation legal tech.”

Unlike competitors that rely on chatbots and generate brief, high-level answers, Callidus produces real legal work. These outputs include exhaustive precedent research, element-by-element legal outlines, and fully drafted, citation-rich litigation documents. The highly visual Callidus research system keeps the lawyer in the loop, with the AI synthesizing robust data and the lawyer making strategic decisions, ultimately condensing a typical week-long task into about 10 minutes for 85% completion. From there, the lawyer can polish the full litigation outlines and extensive litigation draft document outputs with other Callidus tools, including tools integrated with Microsoft Word, to prepare final versions for court.

“Callidus isn’t trying to replace lawyers, it’s giving them superpowers,” said Taylor Oliver, Partner at Cervin Ventures. “Callidus turns a week’s worth of research into ten minutes of structured insight, all while keeping the attorney in the loop. That kind of precision, paired with deep respect for how law is actually practiced, is rare in legal tech.  We’re backing the Callidus team because they’re not only building fast, but building right – with discipline, focus, and a deep understanding of the profession they’re supporting.”

In May, Callidus launched its most advanced legal research and drafting system to date, powered by proprietary engineering, agentic AI, and a fully integrated U.S. case law database. After gathering over 10 million U.S. legal cases, Callidus built specialized agents to enrich the database with detailed metadata, case summaries, and issue-based tagging for high-precision retrieval and research. The company plans to roll out transformative new platform features throughout the second half of 2025, with a goal of addressing the core needs of litigators across the entire litigation lifecycle by year’s end.

“What excites us about Callidus is their technical depth: custom legal reasoning models, intelligent document understanding, and end-to-end automation that mirrors how great lawyers work,” said Andrew Ng, Managing General Partner, AI Fund. “Justin McCallon and his team are building AI agentic support for litigators — a platform that represents a generational shift in legal service delivery that’s faster, smarter, and more strategically insightful. The legal industry will benefit tremendously from this approach.”

“The legal tech industry is a prime example of an industry that can be transformed by AI, and Callidus is at the forefront of this shift,” said Chris Fisher, Founder & Managing General Partner at Myriad Venture Partners, who has an extensive legal background, including prior to founding Myriad Venture Partners, advising private equity firms and multinational clients on M&A, complex transactions, early stage investments, and corporate governance. “Callidus’ AI-powered platform is already streamlining workflows for litigators, delivering solutions that meet their real-world needs. This momentum is a testament to the difficult problems and workflows Callidus is addressing and to the outstanding Callidus team. We’re excited to see what the next phase of growth looks like as Callidus continues building critical software for the legal industry.”

Callidus expects to triple its team size over the coming months, with new hires across product, engineering, customer success, and legal AI research in both Texas and California.

For more information, please visit: https://callidusai.com/.

About Callidus Legal AI

Callidus Legal AI is a next-generation legal technology company leveraging advanced artificial intelligence to automate legal research, drafting, and litigation preparation. With a proprietary case law database and deeply agentic AI infrastructure, Callidus delivers unprecedented productivity and accuracy across the most demanding areas of legal practice. To learn more information, please visit: https://callidusai.com/. 

Press Contact:

Jenny Bourne
208-761-8447
https://www.wildflower-pr.com/

SOURCE Callidus Legal AI

XTEND’s AI-powered systems are actively used by the U.S. Department of Defense, Singapore, Europe, the UK, and the Israel Defense Force to improve strategic capabilities and mission success in challenging environments. With this Series B funding, XTEND plans to scale up U.S. and global production, integrate real-time AI capabilities across its platforms, and expand deployments with U.S. and allied defense forces, as well as for humanitarian and emergency response efforts.

As part of this investment, Aliya Capital Partners’ Founding Partner and CEO, Ross Kestin, has joined XTEND’s Board of Directors. Kestin explains: “XTEND’s mission—to deliver cutting-edge drone and robotics systems for high-risk, mission-critical environments—aligns directly with our vision of supporting technologies that protect and enhance life. We’re honored to back Aviv and his world-class team and help accelerate the impact of their technology across defense, security, and emergency response sectors.”

The announcement follows the grand opening of XTEND’s new U.S. headquarters and advanced drone manufacturing facility in Tampa, Florida, on July 1. The event brought together government, military, and industry leaders for a ribbon-cutting ceremony, remarks from key stakeholders, and a behind-the-scenes tour of the company’s state-of-the-art manufacturing operations.

“The grand opening of XTEND’s Tampa facility represents more than a physical expansion—it marks a new phase of operational scale, U.S. engagement, and global relevance,” said Lee Moser, Co-Founder and General Partner of Protego Ventures. “We’re proud to support this next chapter alongside the Aliya team.”

Lital Leshem, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Protego Ventures, adds: “We invested in XTEND because it’s clear they are building a category-defining platform for human-guided autonomy that can scale fast and make an immediate impact. At a time when defense innovation demands urgency and trust, XTEND stood out as ready to lead.”

XTEND CEO Aviv Shapira concludes: “The successful completion of our Series B financing highlights the surging demand for mission-critical autonomous systems from allied defense and public safety agencies. The investment will fuel accelerated R&D, scale manufacturing, and global deployment expansion. That said, the backing from Aliya and Protego isn’t just about fresh capital—it’s a powerful vote of confidence. Ross’s experience and strategic perspective are invaluable in navigating this pivotal growth phase. Furthermore, opening our Tampa headquarters is a major step forward as we continue to build cutting-edge systems that protect lives worldwide.”

Additional investor quotes:

Avi Fischer, Chairman of Clal Industries and Claltech, says: “When investing in companies, you typically meet the founders, the management team, the technology—and of course, dive into the virtual data room. But with XTEND, we did something far more important. On our very first visit, we walked into a room with over 50 end users, all being trained on the system. What convinced us to invest wasn’t just the tech—it was their feedback. They spoke about how the system has saved lives, how AI-driven training cut learning time by 99%, and how this technology is already changing the battlefield. That’s when we knew—we had to be part of this.”

Dr. Peter Kash, Chairman of the Board, XTEND, says: “This milestone represents the realization of XTEND’s vision to bring our groundbreaking technologies closer to the U.S. defense ecosystem. With this facility, we’re laying the foundation for sustained growth, high-tech job creation and meaningful contributions to America’s security and industrial capabilities. I’m incredibly proud of the team that made this moment possible, amplifying the connectivity of Florida and the future of AI and Robotics. I am incredibly proud of the team that made this moment possible, by helping attract blue chip investors that are aligned with our goal to amplify the connectivity of Florida and the future of AI and Robotics.”

Tal Recanati, Managing Director Union Tech Ventures: “Since our investment three years ago, we’ve seen the XTEND management team demonstrate exceptional execution and innovation. With the successful completion of this latest financing round, XTEND is now poised to strengthen its position as a global leader in defense technology.”

About XTEND

Founded in Israel, XTEND develops next-generation robotics and autonomous systems powered by proprietary AI and real-time human-guided operating software. Its platforms are engineered for precision and safety in the world’s most complex and hazardous environments. XTEND’s systems enable the deployment of self-reliant AI-driven tactical robotic teams in complex and dynamic mission scenarios. The company’s patented XOS operating system fuses the best human intelligence and machine autonomy to enhance the operator’s abilities, simultaneously reducing the need for direct physical confrontation, thereby minimizing casualties and injuries. Thousands of XTEND’s systems are already operationally deployed worldwide, and the company is continuously developing its XOS operating system and platforms to deliver the future of human-machine teaming to defense, HLS, and security professionals worldwide. Find out more here.

About Aliya Capital Partners

Aliya Capital Partners is a Miami-based investment firm with deep expertise across defense-tech, AI, autonomy, and national security. The firm backs companies delivering meaningful and unexpected impact, particularly at the intersection of advanced technology and global safety.

About Protego Ventures

Protego Ventures is an Israel-based defense venture capital fund investing in breakthrough technologies that address today’s most urgent defense and security challenges, including drones, AI and machine learning, sensors, aerial defense, and UAVs.

Video: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2731551/XTEND.mp4
Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2731510/XTEND_1.jpg
Photo: https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2731511/XTEND_2.jpg

Backed by Insight Partners, Heron automates document-heavy workflows in insurance, lending, and finance — bringing reliable AI to businesses and allowing humans to focus on complex tasks

NEW YORK, July 15, 2025 — Heron, a startup using AI to automate workflows in business lending, equipment finance, and insurance, has raised $16 million in Series A funding led by global software investor Insight Partners, with participation from existing investors Y-Combinator, BoxGroup and Flex Capital. The Series A will support Heron’s next phase of expansion, helping the company scale its AI-driven solutions to more segments.

While many AI startups target developers or other technologists, Heron is at the frontier of deploying AI into real-life business operations in traditional industries like lending, banking, and insurance. Heron’s mission is to free up humans to focus on judgment-based work and complex edge cases while software handles the repetitive, monotonous work. Heron focuses on serving companies without large engineering departments, enabling more businesses to reap the rewards of the rapid advances in AI.

Heron’s system can automate time-consuming manual workflows end-to-end, completing tasks automatically or flagging edge cases for human review. That reliability has led many customers to fully offload entire processes to Heron — freeing up their teams to focus on critical work.

For example, SMB lenders employ teams of underwriting analysts that spend hours on repetitive intake work — scanning email inboxes for submissions, downloading and renaming files, checking packet completeness, manually entering data into CRMs, and running basic eligibility checks. Using Heron, these hours of work can be accomplished in seconds, and with higher accuracy, full auditability, and no manual overhead.

This focus on reliability and solving problems end-to-end has attracted more than 150+ customers to Heron, including insurance carriers and FDIC-insured banks, and enabled the company to process over 350,000 documents per week. One lender cut submission-to-decision time by 60%, while an insurer used Heron to automate over 80% of its inbound submission triage.

“Anyone who tells you they use AI to automate work with 100% accuracy is probably lying to you. Instead of chasing accuracy, we focus on clearly understanding where our software is successful and where humans still need to review. This allows customers to use Heron in situations where millions of dollars are at stake and reap the rewards of the AI revolution in a reliable fashion that drives business outcomes,” said Johannes Jaeckle, co-founder and CEO of Heron.

Founded in 2020 by Dom Kwok, Jamie Parker, and Johannes Jaeckle, Heron launched out of Y-Combinator’s Summer 2020 batch, initially building products for financial services companies with earlier generations of AI in the pre-ChatGPT era. The company eventually landed on a core insight: traditional industries weren’t waiting for flashy new tools — they were drowning in unstructured data, and paying millions of dollars a year to deal with it. In 2023, as LLMs matured, Heron pivoted to focus on AI document workflow automation. With minimal outside capital, the team tripled annualized revenue in 2024 and has continued to expand its presence in insurance and specialty finance this year.

“Heron’s AI models with vertical specific context automate the end-to-end data processing workflow, enabling automation and driving competitive differentiation in industries where speed to decisioning is of the essence,” said Philine Huizing, Managing Director at Insight Partners. “Heron’s founding team—Johannes, Jamie, and Dom—are an experienced trio that has proven their ability to adapt and execute. We’re thrilled to partner with them and the entire Heron team as they continue to scale up.”

The new capital will be used to scale Heron’s presence in insurance, equipment finance and SMB lending, while expanding into adjacent verticals that have shown demand for Heron’s solution. The company plans to grow its engineering and go-to-market teams in New York and London, and continues to invest in internal AI Tooling to enable a small team to serve more and more customers.

“We’ve proven we can win in one segment,” said Jaeckle. “Now we’re going workflow by workflow, industry by industry — giving people hours back in their day by eliminating time-intensive manual work.”

About Heron

Heron automates document-based workflows across industries like lending, insurance, and equipment finance. By turning unstructured documents into structured, actionable data, Heron helps companies process information faster, more accurately, and with less manual effort. Heron is based in New York and London, with the team bringing a wealth of experience from top-tier tech companies including Facebook, Spotify, N26, Revolut and Taptap Send.

Learn more at herondata.io

About Insight Partners

Insight Partners is a global software investor partnering with high-growth technology, software, and Internet startup and ScaleUp companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. As of December 31, 2024, the firm has over $90B in regulatory assets under management. Insight Partners has invested in more than 800 companies worldwide and has seen over 55 portfolio companies achieve an IPO. Headquartered in New York City, Insight has offices in London, Tel Aviv, and the Bay Area. Insight’s mission is to find, fund, and work successfully with visionary executives, providing them with tailored, hands-on software expertise along their growth journey, from their first investment to IPO. For more information on Insight and all its investments, visit insightpartners.com or follow us on X @insightpartners.

SOURCE Heron

Built by industry veterans, Covenant is redefining the legal industry by building the first AI-powered law firm targeting private market investors

NEW YORK, July 15, 2025 — Covenant, an AI law firm built for private market investors, today announced a $4 million Seed funding led by Flybridge Capital Partners, with participation from Neil Barsky, a former hedge fund manager.

By integrating advanced AI and legal advice, Covenant is able to increase deal velocity and unlock data insights with the same high-quality results as traditional law firms at a fraction of the cost. Since its pioneering launch in January 2024, top-tier endowments, foundations, fund of funds, sovereign wealth funds and other allocators have trusted Covenant as the only AI solution that can meet all of a client’s demanding accuracy, timing and security standards.

Covenant uses multiple foundational models to eliminate dependence on a single model and provide clients with the benefits of the latest AI developments quickly and effortlessly. AI-powered results undergo human verification, allowing clients the ability to harness the power of this technology with full confidence. Covenant upholds the highest standards of privacy and security with its SOC 2 Type II certification, ensuring responsible AI use through strict data protections – no training on client data, zero data retention, and anonymization of sensitive information.

“At Covenant, our goal is to empower private market investors to be radically smarter,” said Jen Berrent, CEO and co-founder of Covenant and former WeWork COO and Chief Legal Officer. “We built a legal solution from the ground up. We have combined the capabilities of AI – moving faster, saving costs and simplifying complexity – with the skill of lawyers – deep industry knowledge, unparalleled attention to detail and clear judgment. This funding will enable us to deliver on our vision to modernize legal systems for the private markets.”

Covenant’s limited partnership agreement (LPA) review tool delivers a robust summary within two business days, outpacing any other alternative. Today, Covenant is also announcing the launch of the first AI-powered Most Favored Nation (MFN) election tool designed for limited partners. With Covenant, the time it takes for clients to analyze hundreds of pages is reduced from hours to minutes. Over the past several months, Covenant has launched several other tools that are purpose-built for private market investors, including fund manager due diligence and NDA first-draft mark-ups.

“Covenant is redefining legal infrastructure for institutional capital,” said Jesse Middleton, General Partner at Flybridge Capital Partners. “As LPs face increasing complexity and compliance burden across their portfolios, the legal tech company is offering a unique AI solution that will fundamentally reshape how private market investors operate. I had the chance to work with Jen Berrent during the early days of WeWork Labs, where her legal expertise and commitment to founders stood out. That same clarity of vision is what makes Covenant such a powerful force for change in this industry.”

About Covenant
Covenant is the only AI law firm targeting private market investors. Built by curious lawyers and seasoned technologists, Covenant is reimagining the experience of legal work. With Covenant, clients dramatically reduce fees, increase transaction velocity, and unlock data insights across the investment lifecycle. Covenant’s client roster includes leading endowments, foundations, sovereign wealth funds and other global institutional investors. Headquartered in New York, Covenant is led by Jen Berrent (former COO and CLO of WeWork) and Richard Perris (former General Counsel of CVC). The company is backed by Flybridge Capital Partners.

SOURCE Covenant

Cloud-native spatial platform eliminates GIS bottlenecks, reduces deployment time by 75% with AI-powered tools

OAKLAND, Calif., July 15, 2025 — Felt, the leading cloud-native Geographic Information Systems (GIS) platform, today announced it has raised a $15 million funding round led by Energize Capital, with participation from BCV and Footwork. The funding will accelerate Felt’s mission to transform the enterprise GIS experience by injecting artificial intelligence throughout common GIS workflows, ultimately cutting deployment times by 75% and delivering the custom spatial tools modern teams need to achieve their goals.

Today, most critical industries rely on mapping technologies for operations and decision-making, driving what is now a $9.8 billion GIS market. Yet despite this growing demand, accessing and leveraging spatial data remains a challenge. Because traditional GIS platforms demand specialized expertise, business teams are often forced to route mapping and data requests through technical departments, slowing workflows and diminishing the utility of valuable geospatial insights. Felt eliminates this bottleneck by making it simple to connect any cloud source and build high-performance, user-friendly tools that empower teams across the organization.

“We’ve spent the past three years working closely with global enterprises to understand how spatial data can better empower entire organizational workflows—not just GIS teams,” said Sam Hashemi, CEO and Co-founder of Felt and former CEO of Remix (acquired for $100M in 2021). “Despite major investments in cloud infrastructure, spatial data remains underutilized. Felt changes that by combining the power of cloud-native tools with generative AI, making spatial insights faster to access, easier to scale, and more impactful across every business unit.”

Felt’s customer base includes prominent organizations such as MSCI, Arevon, Cambridge Systematics, INTENT, and the County of Santa Barbara Department of Public Works, demonstrating the platform’s versatility across industries and use cases. Their customers are tackling some of today’s most pressing challenges – from delivering renewable energy to mitigating mounting risks posed by climate change.

Felt’s Enterprise GIS platform is also accelerating critical government initiatives while reducing costs substantially. Northern Arizona University delivered cutting-edge fire prevention tool to Arizona Department of Forestry and Fire Management in a fraction of the time and budget initially allocated to the task:

“We needed a tool to share real-time spatial data with dozens of Arizona’s Department of Forestry and Fire Management foresters across the state,” said Alexander Shenkin, Director of the Ecosystem Science and Innovation Lab at NAU. “Our initial estimate was a year of development work and $250,000 in consulting fees. With Felt, our team built the EcoMonitor in just a few weeks, delivering critical forest health and fire-prevention data to the hands of our foresters a year early.”

Despite big investments in cloud data warehouses, spatial data access continues to be a bottleneck that constrains decision-making velocity. Felt AI transforms this dynamic by making it faster to get spatial solutions into the hands of the key business units who need them.

“Our team has done extensive research on the GIS market – and we have found that legacy tools have not kept up with the needs of the modern enterprise, which hemorrhage money on services as a result,” said Juan Muldoon, partner at Energize Capital. “Felt’s customers are delighted by the platform performance and intuitive design that makes it easy for anyone on the team to adopt. Their traction is undeniable, and with AI, they are about to transform the GIS experience even further.”

Felt plans to use this new capital infusion to expand its team and product offerings, including Felt AI development and data analysis tools. To learn more, visit Felt.com.

About Felt

Felt the first cloud-native GIS platform that transforms how modern organizations work with spatial data. Founded in 2021 and headquartered in Oakland, California, Felt combines intuitive design with powerful AI capabilities to deliver unmatched performance, making it simple for any team to build and deploy sophisticated spatial tools.

For more information, visit Felt.com.

About Energize Capital

Energize Capital is a leading investor in climate solutions. Founded in 2016 and based in Chicago, Energize seeks to scale sustainable innovation by partnering with the builders and operators shaping the future. To date, Energize has funded 36 companies and deployed more than $920 million through its Venture and Endurance strategies. Founded in partnership with Invenergy, the firm is backed by strategic, institutional, and impact LPs including Första AP-Fonden (AP1), GE Vernova, Capricorn, CDPQ, Builders Vision, UBS, WEC, Reference Capital, Keeling Capital, Keysight Technologies, WEX Venture Capital, and more. For more information on Energize, please visit www.energizecap.com.

Media Contact:

Rachel Zack, [email protected]

SOURCE Felt

SAN FRANCISCO, July 15, 2025 — Tavrn, an AI-driven legal tech platform, announced today the successful close of a $15 million Series A funding round led by Left Lane Capital. Existing investors A*, Hummingbird Ventures, and Box Group also participated in the round, bringing the company’s total funding to $21.6 million.

Founded by Pedro Paulino (CEO) and Vitor Vavolizza (CTO), Tavrn was built to tackle one of the biggest hidden costs for law firms: the countless hours paralegals and attorneys spend manually reviewing medical records, drafting demand letters, and managing client intake. Tavrn uses AI agents to automate the entire workflow, helping firms cut costs, speed up case preparation, and focus on what matters most – winning cases and serving clients.

“Tavrn is committed to becoming the leading AI services company for law firms,” said Pedro Paulino, Tavrn’s CEO. “We’ve proven that automation can radically reduce both the time and cost associated with preparing critical legal documents. This funding will enable us to expand our product suite, accelerate our go-to-market strategy, and establish Tavrn as the must-have platform for modern law practices.”

While many legal tech startups rely on outsourced labor behind the scenes, Tavrn offers a fully autonomous product purpose-built for high-volume personal injury law practices. Most of these firms operate on contingency fees rather than billable hours, meaning speed, throughput, and efficiency directly impact revenue. By automating manual, tedious work, Tavrn helps firms take on more cases with greater accuracy, boosting both capacity and profitability. Demand letters, one of the most time-consuming parts of personal injury case prep, are now fully handled by Tavrn’s AI agents. This reduces the time it takes to prepare each case and drives down costs. The platform also supports other pre-litigation workflows such as client intake, medical record retrieval, and medical chronologies.

Since 2024, nearly $3 billion in venture capital has flowed into legal technology startups, with the majority focused on AI-native solutions. Yet while many entrants promise full-scale automation, few companies have delivered products that truly replace, not just augment, manual work. Tavrn’s team spent nearly a full year working directly with paralegals and attorneys at contingency-fee law firms, shadowing every step of case preparation from intake to settlement. That close collaboration led to a fully automated product tailored to high-volume, documentation-heavy firms—and has driven rapid adoption, sticky usage, and strong word-of-mouth growth. Tavrn stands out in a crowded market for its speed, execution, and product fidelity.

“Tavrn is quietly driving a major workflow shift in a traditionally conservative industry by delivering software that quickly proves its ROI and gives paralegals and attorneys meaningful leverage,” said Matthew Miller, Partner at Left Lane Capital. “Contingency fee-based law firms have a natural economic incentive to operate more efficiently, and Pedro and his team have built a fully autonomous product that allows law firms to process more cases with higher chances for successful outcomes. We are thrilled to partner with the Company as it continues to redefine tedious workflows for legal professionals.”

The funding follows strong traction across the US personal injury market and rising customer demand. Tavrn plans to use the capital to expand its product suite, further build its go-to-market team, and cement its position as the de facto AI platform for high-volume, small law firms. As firms increasingly look for ways to scale without compromising quality, Tavrn is emerging as the trusted partner for automating what is routine—so lawyers can focus on what is strategic.

About Tavrn

Tavrn is an AI technology company based in San Francisco, CA, dedicated to transforming law firms by automating manual and costly workflows. Tavrn’s flagship solution—including AI-driven medical chronologies, demand letters, and medical record retrieval services—empower personal injury law firms to improve operational efficiency and outcomes for their clients.

For more information, visit https://www.tavrn.ai/

About Left Lane Capital
Founded in 2019, Left Lane Capital is a New York and London-based venture capital and growth equity firm investing in high-growth internet and consumer technology businesses globally. Left Lane’s mission is to partner with extraordinary entrepreneurs who create category-defining companies across growth sectors of the economy. Select investments include Bilt Rewards, Steno, Olipop, Talkiatry, Wayflyer, Revv, Fetcherr, Blank Street, Kittl, and more.

For more information, visit www.leftlane.com

SOURCE Tavrn