Investment Led by M12 Accelerates Development of Industry-First Workload Isolation Technology, Empowering Developers to Build with Speed While Eliminating Security Trade-offs and Reducing Cloud Costs

SEATTLE, Feb. 25, 2025 — Today’s cloud infrastructure forces organizations to choose between security and efficiency. Containerized workloads share resources and kernels, creating inherent security vulnerabilities that attackers exploit through privilege escalation and lateral movement. Traditional solutions either compromise performance or require complex configuration changes, leaving platform teams frustrated and security teams alarmed. This problem is especially prevalent in AI workloads, where shared GPU resources amplify security risks. Edera solves these challenges by making workload isolation a reality for the first time.

Edera, the pioneer of strong workload isolation technology, announced $15 million in Series A funding led by M12, Microsoft’s Venture Fund, with participation from Mantis VC and In-Q-Tel (IQT). Existing investors Eniac Ventures, 645 Ventures, FPV Ventures, Precursor Ventures, and Rosecliff Ventures also participated in the round.

This investment, arriving just three months after Edera’s $5 million seed round, brings total funding to $20 million, validating the company’s breakthrough solution, Edera Protect, which delivers cloud-native isolation making containers secure by default across all workloads. This round will fund product expansion to include support for AI infrastructure. By embedding security at the architectural level, Edera enables developers to maintain their existing workflows while automatically ensuring workload isolation and protection from the start.

“This funding accelerates our mission to empower engineers to develop with speed and confidence,” said Emily Long, CEO and Co-Founder of Edera. “We’re eliminating the traditional tension between development velocity and security by making isolation intrinsic to the infrastructure. Platform teams can focus on creating value while knowing their workloads are secure from the start – no workflow changes required, no security burden post-deployment, just native security that scales with their applications.”

“Workload security requires being closer to the hardware than the attacker,” said Tyler Shields, Principal Analyst, Risk & Vulnerability Management at Enterprise Strategy Group. “Edera’s isolation capabilities provide protection at a technical layer low enough to stop lateral movement, protecting the container and workload sanctity. Workload security increases in importance as GPU and AI become more prevalent. Edera is well positioned to secure these modern systems.”

Introducing Edera Protect AI: Securing the Foundation of AI Infrastructure

Alongside the funding, Edera launched Edera Protect AI, the industry’s first secure-by-design solution that automates GPU configuration while securing AI infrastructure. Recent vulnerabilities discovered in NVIDIA’s container toolkit highlight the critical need for secure GPU isolation in AI environments. Edera AI automatically configures and isolates GPUs, eliminating costly manual configuration while protecting AI models from compromises that could pose significant risks to both enterprise security and society at large.

“AI is transforming industries at an unprecedented pace, but without secure, sovereign and sustainable infrastructure, its full potential can’t be realised,” said Nick Jones, Head of Engineering at Nscale. “As AI adoption accelerates, protecting sensitive workloads from emerging threats is no longer optional – it’s imperative. Edera’s advanced isolation technology provides a crucial layer of protection, preventing lateral movement and ensuring data integrity. In a world where GPU-powered AI is becoming the backbone of innovation, robust security is the foundation of a resilient and trustworthy AI ecosystem.”

Edera significantly reduces cloud computing costs by enabling enterprises to consolidate workloads that traditionally require separate clusters or specialized hardware – including GPU workloads – onto standard cloud instances while maintaining strict isolation. The multi-cloud compatibility further reduces costs by enabling workload portability and eliminating vendor lock-in, while its proven performance benchmarks show it can be more efficient than standard Docker deployments for specific workloads.

“Edera’s technology delivers true workload isolation while maintaining native container-like performance in today’s multi-tenant cloud environments,” said Alex Zenla, CTO and Co-Founder of Edera. “We provide platform teams with robust isolation boundaries that enhance security without requiring changes to existing infrastructure or sacrificing the speed and agility that businesses depend on. This breakthrough allows organizations to finally achieve both maximum security and peak performance in their cloud operations.”

“Secure, isolated workloads are a bigger priority than ever for the industry. We are encouraged to see innovative approaches like Edera and look forward to collaborating on how to bring this critical technology to the ecosystem,” said Mandy Andress, CISO at Elastic.

The team is expanding its leadership bench and brought on industry veteran Kaylin Trychon as Chief Marketing Officer, formerly of Google and Chainguard. As the first marketing hire at Chainguard, Trychon was responsible for building the brand and marketing team that led the company to a $1.1 billion valuation after just three years.

Edera is growing! Join the mission to make secure computing simple. Check out the job openings at Edera today or meet with the team in person at one of their upcoming events.

About Edera
Edera is transforming cloud security by making true workload isolation a reality for the first time. Edera Protect builds security into the foundation of the infrastructure, allowing developers to maintain their preferred tools and processes while automatically preventing attacks from spreading between workloads. Organizations can now achieve secure multi-tenancy for Kubernetes and AI workloads without sacrificing development speed or increasing cloud costs. Female-founded and headquartered in Seattle, Edera is built on the principle that diverse perspectives and balanced teams create better technology. For more information, visit https://edera.dev

Media Contact
Jennifer Cloer
For Edera
[email protected]
503-867-2304

SOURCE Edera

NEW YORK, Feb. 25, 2025 — Camber Partners is pleased to announce the successful closing of Fund II with total capital commitments of $210 million, surpassing the fund’s original target of $150 million and the hard cap of $200 million. The oversubscription reflects the strong demand from investors and highlights confidence in Camber’s approach and ability to drive exceptional outcomes. The Fund received support from a diverse base of both existing and new investors, including pension funds, foundations, health systems, insurance companies, fund of funds, and family offices.

Camber’s mission is to partner with growth-stage software companies and inflect their trajectory by providing more than just capital. The firm delivers a combination of operational expertise and data-driven strategies to drive sustainable growth. Camber takes a hands-on, collaborative approach: an internal Growth Team works closely with each portfolio company on marketing, sales, and customer success initiatives. Meanwhile, a dedicated Data Science Team and a proprietary data platform empower founders to uncover actionable insights from product and customer data. This differentiated engagement model is available to all Camber portfolio companies, enabling software entrepreneurs to leverage the high-caliber go-to-market and data resources typically found in much larger organizations. 

“We are extremely grateful for the support and confidence our investors have shown in us,” said Scott Irwin, Founder and Partner at Camber Partners. “The strong support for Fund II validates our differentiated strategy, and we remain steadfast in our commitment to supporting software founders and entrepreneurs as they scale their businesses to new heights.”

Goodwin Proctor served as legal counsel. Metric Point Capital served as advisor.

About Camber Partners

With $350M under management, Camber Partners provides flexible capital, hands-on operational expertise, and a proprietary data platform to accelerate the long-term, capital-efficient growth of B2B software businesses. For more information, please visit https://www.camber.io/.

Contacts
Camber Partners
[email protected]

SOURCE Camber Partners

MONZA, Italy, Feb. 25, 2025 — Truesense, a European leader in Ultra-Wideband (UWB) technology, AI-driven platforms, and smart nodes, is proud to announce the successful closure of its first seed investment round with Magic Spectrum and The Hashgraph Group (THG). This strategic investment will reinforce Truesense’s growth plans in software, AI, blockchain, and platform solutions, enabling cutting-edge UWB applications across multiple industries leveraging Hedera’s distributed ledger technology (DLT).

Pioneering AI-Enabled UWB Solutions
Truesense develops advanced smart UWB nodes for ranging, radar, and a variety of applications, including secure access control, real-time location services, health monitoring, and smart tracking. By integrating AI-driven software with robust hardware solutions, Truesense enhances these capabilities, delivering precise, efficient, and intelligent UWB communications across industries such as mobility, logistics, security, healthcare, and smart environments.

Converging Blockchain and UWB Technology
The integration and convergence of blockchain with UWB technology represents a revolutionary step towards providing secure and traceable node-to-node communications. The Hashgraph Group, with its Hedera-powered DLT platform and Hedera-certified engineering team, provide the ideal distributed framework and Web3 expertise to enhance the UWB capabilities of Truesense and enable multiple industry use cases, as an example:

• Secure transactions for physical access control (e.g., offices, venues, transport hubs)
• Local mobility solutions, such as automated ticketing and car-sharing authentication
• Seamless interaction for pay-content services, including digital entertainment and media
• Real-time and immutable asset tracking solutions and smart contract-based automation

Speaking on the investment partnership Armando Caltabiano, CEO of Truesense, said, “This new investment further strengthens our market position and underscores the trust in our solutions for secure, real-time wireless interactions. Partnering with The Hashgraph Group and leveraging their advanced Hedera technology will enable us to push the boundaries of UWB applications, delivering scalable, high-performance solutions that redefine the way devices communicate, transact, and interact in an increasingly connected world while ensuring compliance, security, and legal traceability of digital transactions.”

The Hashgraph Group and Truesense are already collaborating and developing a new generation of UWB-powered TV and Mobile device interactivity that, in combination with Hedera’s distributed ledger technology, will unleash new Web3-enabled consumer loyalty and engagement solutions that directly interact with digital media content. Through an initiative (Symera), the integration and convergence of UWB technology and DLT to create a suite of gamification and loyalty programs, will improve consumer engagement mechanisms and supercharge value creation for many direct to consumer (D2C) enterprises, while leveraging artificial intelligence and behavioural science.

Stefan Deiss, CEO of The Hashgraph Group, said “The increasing global adoption of Hedera’s distributed ledger technology and convergence of ultra-wideband technology is enabling an ever-growing number of enterprises in the Media, Sports, and Telco sectors to generate new revenue streams through Web3-centric loyalty programs, peer-to-peer consumer interaction, gamification, and micro-transactions. This strategic investment in Truesense marks a pivotal step in fostering innovation in UWB tech with a company that shares our vision of empowering users with tokenized digital content, gamification models, and monetisation opportunities that foster brand loyalty.”

About Truesense:
Based in Milan, Italy, Truesense specializes in AI-driven UWB solutions, providing ranging, radar, and smart node applications for industries such as IoT, security, automotive, healthcare, and industrial automation. Truesense combines cutting-edge software, AI algorithms, and platform solutions to deliver real-time, intelligent wireless communication systems.

For more information, visit: https://www.truesense.it

About The Hashgraph Group
The Hashgraph Group is a Swiss-based international business, venture capital, and technology company that operates exclusively within the Hedera ecosystem, and is focused on empowering entrepreneurs, enterprises, and governments to adapt and compete in the Web3 economy through strategic investments, technology convergence, and venture-building programs globally.

For more information about The Hashgraph Group, visit www.hashgraph-group.com.

SOURCE The Hashgraph Group

BROOKLYN, N.Y., Feb. 24, 2025 — Floodbase, the parametric platform for insuring uncovered flood risk, today announced a $5 million investment led by Ecosystem Integrity Fund (EIF) with participation from Pulse Fund. The investment will allow Floodbase to accelerate development of flood insurance programs, cementing its position as the industry standard for a new category of flood insurance.

Flooding is the most common and pervasive natural disaster, yet 83% of global economic flood loss over the past decade was uninsured. Hurricane Helene was the single most devastating natural catastrophe event in 2024, estimated to have caused $75 billion in economic loss, mainly due to flooding. Season after season, businesses and local governments are left to navigate financial uncertainty and millions of dollars in damages, lost revenue, and recovery expenses. The expected increase in flood intensity and frequency only amplifies the need to address uninsured risks and secure rapid funds as floods happen.

“Flood insurance has typically been limited to direct property damage, which only represents a fraction of the overall economic loss” said Bessie Schwarz, Co-founder and CEO of Floodbase. “We’re enabling a financial safety net that can cover any economic loss associated with a flood event. Not only does this remove uncertainties around what’s covered, the fast and flexible liquidity is a game changer for those managing the aftermath”.

Since its series A in 2023, Floodbase has operated across 40+ countries and enabled more than 9,000 flood insurance policies, becoming a preferred partner for leading re/insurers including Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, Liberty Mutual Re, and AXA Climate. Floodbase’s platform, built on a decade of groundbreaking peer-reviewed science, continuously monitors flooding globally, allowing the company to power flood insurance programs across industries and geographies.

Schwarz added, “With the growing demand for new flood insurance programs, we are thrilled to partner with EIF to accelerate our growth. We’ve known EIF for a long time and are excited to formalize our partnership. With their support, we’ll continue to lead and empower the market to close the global flood protection gap.”

“New solutions are urgently needed to adapt to an increasingly volatile climate. The frequency and severity of floods is growing, adding to the already tremendous global flood protection gap. Floodbase can power a new category of flood insurance products and has become the preferred platform for its insurance partners. We are thrilled to be partnering with the company to help accelerate the growth of their critical resiliency offering,” said Sasha Brown, Partner at Ecosystem Integrity Fund.

“By funding adaptation projects and cutting edge climate tech companies like Floodbase, Pulse Fund aims to bolster resilience and enhance the economic security of communities. Floodbase’s platform enables a much needed, new category of flood insurance products at a time when historic flood events, and the financial devastation they cause, are becoming the norm,” said Pulse Fund Founder and Managing Partner, Tenzin Seldon.

This investment highlights Floodbase’s success amid the persistent underfunding of women-led startups. In 2023, only 2% of venture capital went to companies founded by women, with that figure dropping to 1.9% in early 2024, according to PitchBook. Co-founded by Bessie Schwarz and Dr. Beth Tellman, Floodbase has now raised $17 million in venture capital, including Collaborative Fund, Floating Point, Lower Carbon Capital, and Vidavo Ventures, defying this trend and setting an example for diversity in tech innovation.

About Floodbase
Floodbase is a parametric platform for insuring uncovered flood risk. Built on more than a decade of groundbreaking science, we continuously monitor flooding worldwide. Leading re/insurers rely on Floodbase to cover large corporate and public sector clients against previously uninsurable economic loss from flooding. Floodbase also supports FEMA, the UN, The New York Times, and others to identify and respond to major events. Follow Floodbase on LinkedIn for more news and insights.

About Ecosystem Integrity Fund
Ecosystem Integrity Fund (EIF) invests in early growth-stage companies contributing to environmental sustainability across multiple sectors including renewable energy, transportation, agriculture and food, climate resilience, green chemistry, waste reduction, and efficiency. EIF takes a systems-based approach to sustainability investment, studying both the drivers for change as well as the constraints to innovation in market niches that are ripe for development. EIF invests in companies solving real problems, resulting in better investment opportunities and greater impact. The firm has over $600 million in assets under management.

About Pulse Fund
Pulse Fund is a venture capital fund investing in high-growth climate companies. Pulse invests horizontally across 4 key verticals: food and agriculture, infrastructure, energy, and mobility. The fund is focused on scalable, vertically-integrated companies that offer superior margins, outsized financial wins, and supply chain risk mitigation. The team brings together a unique blend of investment and climate science expertise to identify long-term opportunities that drive capital, innovation and tangible climate progress.

SOURCE Floodbase

• Deerfield Management to collaborate with QIA as part of Fund of Funds venture capital program
• Regional office set to open in Doha in mid-2025
• Activities to include upskilling local entrepreneurs and fostering the Qatari innovation ecosystem via a healthcare startup accelerator

DOHA, Qatar and NEW YORK, Feb. 23, 2025 — Deerfield Management today announced a collaboration with Qatar Investment Authority (QIA) as part of QIA’s Fund of Funds program.

The partnership unites Deerfield’s mission of advancing healthcare with QIA’s commitment to sustaining a vibrant startup ecosystem in Qatar and the wider MENA region.

QIA’s inaugural Fund of Funds venture capital program was launched in 2024 with a primary focus on technology and healthcare amongst other fast-growing sectors. The initiative is intended to boost economic diversification, support local development, and bring global best practices and capabilities to Qatar.

In support of this program, Deerfield is set to open a regional office in Doha by mid-2025. The office will seek to support the upskilling of local startups and entrepreneurs, coordinate educational programs, and serve as a resource hub for healthcare-focused ventures in the region. The partnership will foster international collaboration and champion technological creativity.

Deerfield, through the Cure, will additionally direct a healthcare startup accelerator program in which a cohort of global and local entrepreneurs will work to sharpen their understanding of business and financial modeling; learn to conduct and analyze market research; advance the development and design of healthcare products; practice delivering effective investor presentations; and more. The accelerator program will take place both virtually and on the ground in Doha and will culminate in a pitch competition wherein entrepreneurs have the opportunity to showcase their ideas to interested stakeholders.

“Qatar’s rich cultural and economic environment makes the State a fertile environment for businesses to grow,” said James Flynn, Managing Partner at Deerfield. “In partnering with QIA, we hope to support local entrepreneurs and help a sustainable healthcare and life science ecosystem thrive.”

News of the partnership was announced at the 2025 Web Summit Qatar, an international gathering connecting thousands of entrepreneurs in the Middle East and beyond to investors, journalists, and technology professionals around the world.

About Deerfield Management

Deerfield is an investment management firm committed to advancing healthcare through investment, information, and philanthropy. The Firm works across the healthcare ecosystem to connect people, capital, ideas, and technology in bold, collaborative, and inclusive ways. For more information, please visit www.deerfield.com.

About QIA

QIA is the sovereign wealth fund of the State of Qatar. QIA was founded in 2005 to invest and manage the state reserve funds. QIA is among the largest and most active sovereign wealth funds globally. QIA invests across a wide range of asset classes and regions as well as in partnership with leading institutions around the world to build a global and diversified investment portfolio with a long-term perspective that can deliver sustainable returns and contribute to the prosperity of the State of Qatar.

About QIA’s Fund of Funds Program  

The Fund of Funds program aims to develop a strong startup and venture capital ecosystem in Qatar, attract venture capital firms and entrepreneurs to the region, and help close the current funding gap for local and regional entrepreneurs. The program, first announced in February 2024, will place a priority focus on the tech and healthcare sectors. The Fund of Funds program has a mandate that includes delivering a positive development impact on the Qatari venture capital ecosystem. 

Media Contact

Deerfield Management: Jessica Sagers, PhD, Head of Communications, [email protected]

Qatar Investment Authority: [email protected]

SOURCE Deerfield Management Company, L.P.

Former Echodyne and Astranis Engineers Raise $5 Million to Field Advanced Spaceborne Radar Systems for National Defense and Commercial Use Cases

SEATTLE, Feb. 21, 2025 — Kapta Space, a Seattle-based space tech startup, today came out of stealth mode and announced that it has raised a $5 million seed round to support the development of its advanced spaceborne electronically-steered, radar-based imaging technology.  The round was led by MetaVC Partners, in participation with Entrada Ventures and Blue Collective.  The company will use the funds to accelerate on-orbit demonstrations.

Founded by Milton Perque (formerly of Echodyne) and Adam Bily (formerly of Apple and Astranis) in 2023, Kapta Space offers a solution that centers around a sophisticated, electronically-steered antenna radar array through the use of metasurface technology. Kapta’s novel approach to electronic beam steering will provide a more capable, scalable, and cost-effective solution compared to today’s state of the art technology, such as Active Electronically Steered Arrays (AESAs).

Kapta initially will enable two important capabilities from satellites in Low Earth Orbit (LEO): persistent geospatial imagery for Earth Observation (EO) and ground target tracking modalities for defense missions.

By employing a technique called Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Kapta can create high-resolution “around-the-clock” imagery and analytics from space to provide commercial industries persistent, actionable information that is largely lacking today.

Kapta believes there are blind spots in the EO industry (namely commercial SAR imagery, data, and analytics) that cannot be addressed with today’s technologies. While others are delivering high-resolution satellite imagery products to satisfy DoD/Intel demand, Kapta has a different thesis. “SAR isn’t just about capturing satellite images. Our system allows us to deliver a more diverse set of data products to serve the broader commercial market. Although our system can provide small, high-resolution images, we can also deliver many other imaging products and modalities that today’s technologies simply are not capable of,” says Kapta Space CTO and co-founder Adam Bily.

For example, Kapta’s system enables an imaging technique called InSAR (Interferometric Synthetic Aperture Radar). InSAR mainly is used for earth displacement monitoring (a key need of large-scale mining operations, for instance) and produces a 3D deformation map of the earth that can cover very large areas with centimeter-scale sensitivity from space. Satellites using Kapta’s technology are being designed to provide the highest quality InSAR data on the market. “With a modest constellation of around 10 satellites, we could provide rapid-revisit, practical 3D infrastructure monitoring of key locations all around the world,” says Bily.

Kapta Space CEO and co-founder Milton Perque suggested that their technology transcends just persistent EO imagery and analytics. “Our tech has much broader implications than just SAR,” says Perque. “What we see is more of an advanced, multi-mission Spaceborne radar sensor that would enable many of the critical defense missions that don’t exist at scale, like GMTI (or Ground Moving Target Indication; missions of tracking slow moving ground targets from space). That’s not possible with a low-cost, mechanically pointed system. To enable these critical missions, radar sensors are required to be sophisticated, yet cost-efficient. This is incredibly challenging, and it has never existed in space at scale.”

As far back as 25 years ago, the Department of Defense (DoD) began to explore moving airborne missions (like those performed by AWACs, Wedgetail and JSTARS) into space. Space-based operations guarantee global, persistent access to areas in conflict, like the current war in Ukraine. Conducting these advanced missions out of harm’s way is among the US military’s most challenging efforts.

The advancements Kapta brings to the defense domain are evident in its breakthrough performance and low cost.  For example, in Q2 of 2023, Kapta was awarded a $1.8M Direct to Phase II SBIR to build a version of its electronically steered antennas for spaceborne radar and granted security clearances needed to execute on classified defense contracts.  The company plans to continue to submit proposals to other non-dilutive funding vehicles throughout the year.

“AESAs are plagued with several problems that generally make them impractical for spaceborne applications at scale,” said Chris Alliegro, managing partner, MetaVC Partners, a metamaterials-focused VC firm. “That’s where metamaterials come in. The Kapta team has designed a metamaterials-based radar imaging device that offers improved electronic scanning at lesser cost, complexity, and power consumption than spaceborne AESA’s. And we are incredibly lucky to have Milton and Adam at the wheel, two early pioneers in the development of metamaterials-based systems.”

About Kapta Space

Seattle-based Kapta Space is a developer and operator of spaceborne radar technology that provides low-cost, advanced, electronically steered array sensors.  By employing a technique called Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR), Kapta creates high-resolution imagery and analytics from space in near real-time, addressing the limitations of high costs and small area coverage, and providing critical data for a variety of applications. This innovative technology has the potential to revolutionize industries such as defense, intelligence, and commercial earth observation. For more information on Kapta Space, go to our website at www.kaptaspace.com.

Media Contact:
Tim Turpin
CodePR
[email protected]

SOURCE Kapta Space

Through diverse programming including a CEO Series and a Digital Accelerator program, the funds will accelerate small businesses and close the digital divide resulting in a stronger, more vibrant community

LOS ANGELES, Feb. 21, 2025 — Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corporation (VSEDC) received a $100,000 grant from PNC Bank to support VSEDC’s comprehensive programming for small businesses and entrepreneurs in South LA. Designed to inspire economic growth, the funds will support VSEDC’s signature programs including a Digital Accelerator program with Youth and the organization’s signature CEO Series to serve entrepreneurs who are ready to launch and scale their business.

“VSEDC is honored to partner with PNC Bank to enhance opportunities for small businesses on their journey to success,” said Quentin Strode, President & CEO of VSEDC. “South Los Angeles is home to brilliant minds and motivated entrepreneurs who simply need resources and a chance. We are thrilled that PNC shares our vision for uplifting communities that have historically lacked the resources all communities deserve.”

Recognizing that small businesses often lack the necessary tools for elevation, VSEDC designed a CEO Series—a seven course cohort that guides entrepreneurs through the process of launching and scaling their ventures. Led by a team of experts from across a wide spectrum of experience, course topics include business models, determining market needs, finding ideal customers, operating skills, marketing and social media strategies, and more. To serve current entrepreneurs and simultaneously prepare the next generation of leaders, VSEDC’s Digital Accelerator program with Youth that bridges the digital divide by providing small business entrepreneurs, with an emphasis on minority-and women-owned businesses, with digital marketing and website development training. This unique venture trains South LA youth (ages 18-24) in parallel to excel in digital marketing, and place them in internships with the participating businesses.

“PNC takes great pride in empowering small businesses to thrive in an ever-evolving economy,” said Todd Wilson, regional president of Greater Los Angeles for PNC Bank. “We’re honored to support VSEDC’s mission through a meaningful investment that fosters local entrepreneurial growth and drives lasting impact.”

By equipping entrepreneurs with essential skills, The CEO Series helps businesses expand leading to a stronger local economy. As businesses grow, they create jobs, reduce unemployment, and strengthen the overall health of households in underserved communities. According to recent statistics, more than 100,000 LA County residents live without internet access. The Digital Accelerator program is an immediate solution that connects youth to practical training in digital marketing, website development, and online branding—equipping them with real-world skills that are essential in today’s economy. Unlike many unpaid programs, this initiative pays youth for their work, allowing them to earn income while gaining valuable job experience as a major step toward financial independence.

“With a history that spans nearly 50 years, we are relentless in our quest to end the cycle of poverty that threatens South Los Angeles,” said Strode. “Thanks to the dynamic support from partners like PNC Bank, we take one step closer to creating a more equitable city where every person has the chance to thrive.”

About VSEDC
For more than four decades, VSEDC has facilitated community development of the South Los Angeles area by providing programs that revitalize the physical, economic, and social life of the community. A newly-designated Community Development Financial Institution (CDFI), VSEDC has developed and implemented a comprehensive approach to community economic development that includes business development, access to capital, technical assistance and training, commercial, and industrial development. Founded by the late Marva Smith Battle-Bey in 1981, VSEDC works to create a South Los Angeles with strong neighborhoods and thriving communities. To learn more, please visit www.vsedc.org.

About PNC Bank

PNC Financial Services Group, Inc. is one of the largest diversified financial services institutions in the United States, with an extensive coast-to-coast branch network, a presence in all 30 of the country’s largest markets, and a history dating back to 1865, providing retail banking, including residential mortgage, corporate and institutional banking, and asset management to individuals, institutions, and businesses of all sizes.

To learn more, visit www.pnc.com.

SOURCE Vermont Slauson Economic Development Corporation

NEW YORK, Feb. 20, 2025 — Gracie Point Holdings, LLC (“Gracie Point“), a leading global provider of life insurance premium finance, announced today that it has closed on an equity capital raise led by funds advised by Searchlight Capital Partners, L.P. (“Searchlight”) and Hudson Structured Capital Management Ltd. (conducting its re/insurance business as HSCM Bermuda).

The strategic infusion of capital will be used to strengthen Gracie Point’s balance sheet and fund growth. This is Gracie Point’s fifth successful capital raise since inception.

The partnership with Searchlight Capital and HSCM Bermuda brings not only capital but deep industry expertise and operational support, strengthening Gracie Point’s market position as it scales.

Harish Raghavan, CEO of Gracie Point, said, “We are delighted to welcome Searchlight, a leading private equity investment firm, into our group of investors. Our existing partners stepping up to fund our growth is a testament to the strength and scalability of our platform.”

Andrew Frey, Partner at Searchlight Capital, commented, “We are excited to partner with Gracie Point. Life insurance is perhaps the last major asset class where consumers don’t have a readily available financing market. We believe Gracie Point can unlock that capability and be the first mover into a very significant, and deep asset-backed market globally.”

Vikas Singhal, Partner at HSCM Bermuda, commented, “The life insurance industry is undergoing a dramatic shift in complexion. We believe Gracie Point can be a partner to the industry as the industry re-thinks its core offerings to their end consumers.”

Goldman Sachs & Co. LLC served as exclusive financial advisor and Winston Strawn LLP served as legal advisor to Gracie Point. Citigroup Global Markets Inc. served as financial advisor, Oliver Wyman LLC served as commercial advisor and Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz served as legal advisor to Searchlight.

About Gracie Point

Gracie Point is a leading provider of life insurance premium finance, providing a consultative approach, combining insurance, financing and loan servicing expertise in the advisory marketplace. It serves affluent, high net worth and ultra-high net worth clients by working with agents and brokers. Based on its deep knowledge of the market, Gracie Point can quickly determine the optimal financing structure and can commit faster than most competitors. Because premium finance is Gracie Point’s only business, it can work more effectively with insurance agents without any concern of competition with the agents’ client relationships.

With offices in New York, Toronto and Hong Kong, Gracie Point can support client needs throughout North America and Asia.

About Searchlight

Searchlight is a global private investment firm with more than $16 billion in assets under management and offices in New York, London, Miami and Toronto. Searchlight seeks to invest in businesses where its long-term capital and strategic support accelerate value creation for all stakeholders. For more information, please visit www.searchlightcap.com.

About HSCM Bermuda

Hudson Structured Capital Management Ltd., doing its re/insurance business as HSCM Bermuda (“HSCM”), is a leading global alternative asset manager specializing in investments in the re/insurance and transportation sectors. Launched in 2016, HSCM is focused on core economic sectors that it expects to outgrow global Gross Domestic Product, offer low correlations with broader markets, and are experiencing a shift from balance sheet to market financing. The firm currently has offices in Bermuda, Connecticut, and New York. For more information, please visit www.hscm.com. 

Media Contacts

For Gracie Point:
Joseph Sevely (CFO/COO)
[email protected]

For HSCM: [email protected]

SOURCE Gracie Point Holdings, LLC

Largest-ever investment in AI observability for development and production underscores the critical need for better testing, evaluation, and reliability of AI agents, voice assistants and other gen-AI applications

BERKELEY, Calif., Feb. 20, 2025 — Arize AI, a leader in AI observability and LLM evaluation, today announced a $70 million Series C to accelerate its mission of making AI work reliably in production. The round—the largest-ever investment in AI observability—was led by Adams Street Partners, with participation from M12 (Microsoft’s venture fund), Sinewave Ventures, OMERS Ventures, Datadog, PagerDuty, Industry Ventures, and Archerman Capital. Existing investors Foundation Capital, Battery Ventures, TCV, and Swift Ventures also reaffirmed their confidence in Arize’s vision.

AI adoption is skyrocketing—business spending surpassed $13.8 billion in 2024, with 68% of enterprises planning to invest between $50 million and $250 million in generative AI in 2025. Yet, while AI models are more powerful than ever, most LLMs struggle to perform reliably in real-world applications like voice assistants. A growing number of cutting-edge AI models are trained and optimized using synthetic data—data generated by other AI models rather than real-world sources. But what happens when those models can’t accurately evaluate the results of their own synthetic data? 

In a research effort called OpenEvals, Arize has demonstrated that LLMs struggle to reliably assess correctness of synthetic datasets compared to non-synthetic data—a major blind spot as enterprises rush to scale generative AI. These findings highlight serious risks in AI model training and self-improvement loops, where unchecked errors in synthetic data can compound over time. For engineering teams, LLMs are still a black box—unpredictable, difficult to troubleshoot, and prone to failures that can derail entire projects.

As the industry grapples with these challenges, AI engineers need better tools to ensure their models aren’t building on faulty foundations. With Arize’s AI observability and LLM evaluation platform, teams can test, troubleshoot, and course-correct AI systems before failures escalate into real-world consequences. This is especially important as enterprises race to implement semi-autonomous multi-agent systems, voice assistants, and increasingly sophisticated consumer-facing AI applications. 

“Building AI is easy. Making it work in the real world is the hard part,” said Jason Lopatecki, CEO and Co-Founder of Arize AI. “Enterprises can’t afford to deploy unreliable AI. Engineering teams need better infrastructure to test, evaluate, and troubleshoot their models before they impact customers. That’s exactly what Arize delivers—whether through our enterprise platform, Arize AX, or our open-source offering, Arize Phoenix.”

“As AI research and real-world applications accelerate, Arize will continue to pioneer new tools, like our recent first-to-market launch of audio evaluation for voice assistants, to help engineers working on these systems better evaluation, debug, and improve what they build,” added Aparna Dhinakaran, Chief Product Officer and Co-Founder of Arize. 

Since launching in 2020, Arize has become an AI observability and evaluation backbone for the world’s top enterprises and government agencies—including Booking.com, Condé Nast, Duolingo, Hyatt, PepsiCo, Priceline, TripAdvisor, Uber, and Wayfair, among hundreds more. Arize Phoenix, the company’s open-source offering, has emerged as the most widely adopted AI observability and evaluation library for development, with over two million monthly downloads.

Arize’s partnership with Microsoft is also expanding, with M12’s investment reinforcing a long-standing collaboration. The company recently launched deeper integrations with Azure AI Studio and the Azure AI Foundry portal, SDK, and CLI, making it easier than ever for AI engineers to integrate observability and evaluation into their workflows.

“We believe AI observability is the missing piece in making AI truly enterprise-ready,” said Fred Wang, Partner at Adams Street Partners. “As AI adoption accelerates, companies need robust, cohesive tools to ensure their AI systems are performant, reliable, and aligned with business goals. Through our research and diligence in this market, we believe Arize AI has built the category-defining platform for AI observability and evaluation, trusted by leading enterprises and AI-first organizations. We’re excited to support their vision as they scale to meet the growing demand for production-grade AI.”

“Arize AI’s innovative approach to AI observability and LLM evaluation is transforming the way enterprises deploy and manage AI systems. Our investment reflects our confidence in their ability to set new standards in the industry and empower AI engineers and developers to achieve real-world results,” said Todd Graham, Managing Partner at M12.

“Tripadvisor’s billion-plus reviews and contributions are becoming even more important in a world of AI search and recommendations where travel experiences are more conversational, personal and even agentic. As we build out new AI products and capabilities, having the right infrastructure in place to evaluate and observe AI is important. Arize has been a valuable partner on that front,” said Rahul Todkar, Head of Data and AI at Tripadvisor.

“With GenAI, we’re facilitating more tailored experiences that adapt and respond to travelers’ needs faster than ever before. As we continue to innovate, our technical teams blend an approach of pioneering new tools in-house and using platforms like Arize to help in testing, evaluating and tracing new AI-powered applications and workflows,” said Jeroen Hofman, ML Engineering Manager at Booking.

“Arize AI deserves a lot of credit for pioneering AI observability and creating a de facto standard for enterprises that want to achieve real-world results with generative AI,” said Brett Wilson, General Partner at Swift Ventures. “We’re proud to continue to back the company as it scales.”

About Arize
Arize AI is a unified AI observability and LLM evaluation platform that helps teams develop and maintain more successful AI. Arize’s automated monitoring and observability platform allows teams to quickly detect issues when they emerge, troubleshoot why they happened, and improve overall performance across both traditional ML and generative use cases. Arize is headquartered in Berkeley, CA.

Media Contact: Sarah Welsh, [email protected]

SOURCE Arize AI