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

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

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

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

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

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

With Runlayer:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Runlayer

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

SOURCE Runlayer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media Contact: 

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

SOURCE ARCYN Defense

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

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

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

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

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

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

Assort’s platform now includes:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Assort Health

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

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

SOURCE Assort Health

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Media contact: [email protected]

SOURCE Caplight

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

About Peregrine Technologies 

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

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

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

SOURCE Peregrine Technologies

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

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

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

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

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

JustAI’s platform is organized around four coordinated agents:

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

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

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

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

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

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

About JustAI

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

About Base10 Partners

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

SOURCE JustAI

The virtual-first, AI-enabled model helps health systems expand pediatric developmental care capacity and empower families with faster, more accessible care

BOSTON, June 23, 2026 — Ladder Health, a virtual-first pediatric developmental care company, today announced the close of an oversubscribed $7 million Seed financing round led by Nina Capital, with participation from Mairs & Power Venture Capital, South Dakota First Capital, and incubating partner 25madison Health. Other investors in this round include Hatteras Venture Partners, Create Health Ventures, Jumpstart Capital, White Oak Enterprises, Groove Capital, and 7Rock Ventures. The funding will support expansion across North Carolina, Massachusetts, and Maryland, accelerate entry into additional states, and continue investment in Ladder Health’s AI-enabled care platform and health system partnerships.

For the more than 27 million children in the U.S., the first 1,000 days of life and the critical “next 1,000 days” through age five together represent the most consequential window for brain development. However, for the roughly one in four children under age six who are at risk for a developmental delay or disability, families routinely encounter a system defined by months-long waitlists, workforce shortages, and limited access to specialty care. Average wait times for in-network pediatric developmental therapy now exceed six months. For families on Medicaid and those in rural communities, the barriers run deeper still.

Ladder Health was built to close the gap and reduce wait times from months to days. The company delivers speech, occupational, physical and feeding therapy through a virtual-first, AI-enabled platform available evenings and weekends. Unlike conventional therapy models built around episodic weekly visits, Ladder Health works directly with caregivers, activating parents as therapeutic partners and extending care into the home between sessions, helping kids get better, faster. A dedicated team of Ladder liaisons builds relationships with pediatric practices and health systems, serving as a referral and care-extension partner that helps providers reach more families without increasing headcount.

“Early developmental therapy changes life trajectories, but only if families can actually access it at the right time,” said Mitch Mudra, co-founder and CEO of Ladder Health. “Half of families in the U.S. rely on Medicaid, and the system simply wasn’t built to serve them well. We built Ladder Health for this moment, when the demand for care exceeds the system’s capacity and too many families are left without access to the care their children need.”

Originally developed in collaboration with clinical experts at Boston Children’s Hospital, the platform now partners with more than 80 provider organizations and health systems across Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Maryland, helping pediatric practices improve continuity of care, reduce fragmentation and reach more families earlier in the developmental journey.

“Delays in accessing developmental care can have lasting consequences for children and families,” said John Brownstein, Chief Innovation Officer at Boston Children’s Hospital. “Ladder Health’s model represents an important evolution, leveraging technology to extend clinical expertise into the home, where so much of a child’s development actually happens.”

“Health systems are desperate for solutions that expand pediatric capacity, but traditional models are too expensive and hard to scale,” said Marta G. Zanchi, Founder and Managing Partner at Nina Capital. “We led this round because Ladder Health has built a clinically rigorous model that solves the throughput crisis for providers while delivering immediate, life-changing care to the families who need it most.” 

That conviction was shared early by 25madison, where Ladder Health was incubated. “We were early believers that the right technology could extend expert developmental care beyond traditional care settings,” said Walt Winslow, Director at 25madison. “That opportunity remains especially significant for health systems serving rural and underserved communities.”

The raise reflects growing conviction among healthcare investors that caregiver-activated, technology-enabled models represent the most scalable response to the pediatric workforce shortage, as demand for developmental services continues to surge and the gap between need and access widens.

About Ladder Health
Ladder Health is a virtual-first pediatric care company delivering AI-powered developmental and therapeutic care for children and families. By activating caregivers and extending care beyond the clinic, Ladder Health improves outcomes, expands access, and reduces cost, especially for families historically left behind by the healthcare system. Learn more at ladderhealth.co.

Disclosure Statement: Boston Children’s Hospital holds equity in Ladder Health

SOURCE Ladder Health

Patent-pending technology helps stylists finish braids 5x faster, flawlessly and without pulling.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 23, 2026 — Halo (https://halobraid.com/), a technology company creating category-defining products for textured hair, announced $7M in funding to introduce the world’s first braid assist device, HaloBraid.

HaloBraid’s technology helps stylists complete braids quickly, consistently, and gently. A stylist has full creative control; they start each braid by hand, and HaloBraid finishes it 5x faster while matching their braid style.

Braiding is one of the world’s oldest and most labor-intensive beauty practices, and the manual process hasn’t changed in thousands of years. 8 billion hours are spent braiding hair each year, with single appointments often lasting from 6 or more hours. For stylists, that means carpal tunnel syndrome, early-onset arthritis, and physical strain. For clients, it means giving up weekends or vacation days to get an essential hairstyle that only lasts 6-8 weeks.

HaloBraid was built to change that. It transforms salon economics by reducing the biggest barrier to growth: time. In a survey of 2,000 braid wearers, Halo found that 95% would get their hair braided more often if the process were faster. But stylists describe working overnight to meet surging demand, and leaving the industry because of the physical toll of braiding. With HaloBraid, stylists can serve more clients and grow their business without adding strain on their hands and bodies.

“Braiding is more popular than ever but the way we braid hasn’t changed. It’s still time-consuming and painful for stylists and clients alike,” said Halo’s CEO and Founder, Yinka Ogunbiyi. “Our technology transforms braiding by speeding up the most repetitive part of the process. We designed this with stylists, using their perspective to build a product that supports them, without replacing them. We’re excited to help stylists and clients reclaim their time in and behind the chair.”

The seed round was led by Seven Seven Six (“776”), Alexis Ohanian’s venture capital firm, with participation from AlleyCorp and Bling Capital. The funding will accelerate product development, stylist testing, manufacturing-readiness, and salon partnerships as the company prepares to bring HaloBraid to market and transform the global salon services industry.

“As an investor, I look for founders that see something broken that everyone else has accepted as fixed. Braiding is a perfect example: it is a process that has not materially changed in thousands of years, despite being one of the most popular hairstyles for millions of Americans and a significant part of the $270 billion salon services industry,” said Alexis Ohanian, General Partner at 776. “Halo has introduced a novel technology to a manual and highly specialized professional service.”

Long term, Halo plans to develop a broader portfolio of technology that addresses the unmet needs of people with textured hair globally.

“Innovation in this category is long overdue,” said Ogunbiyi. “HaloBraid is our first product, but our larger vision is to create breakthrough technology that makes textured hair care faster, easier, more comfortable, and more joyful.”

About the Founder

Yinka Ogunbiyi is the founder and CEO of Halo and creator of HaloBraid. The idea came from her lifelong experience wearing braids and witnessing the time and physical labor involved in the craft. During the pandemic, she braided her own hair for the first time–it took four days. As a biomechanical engineer and repeat hardware founder, she created HaloBraid to solve a problem she understood personally and knew could benefit hundreds of millions of braid wearers and their stylists. Prior to Halo, Yinka co-founded Desora, where she co-invented six patented smart cooking devices, and brought advanced consumer hardware to market. She holds a BSc, MS, and MBA from Harvard.

About Halo

Halo is a technology company building the future of haircare for all textures through exceptional engineering and human-centered design. The company creates category-defining products built for the complexities others overlook. Its first product, HaloBraid, is a braid assist device that helps stylists to complete braids faster. The patent-pending innovation launches later this year. Backed by leading investors including Seven Seven Six, AlleyCorp, and Bling Capital, Halo is a group of technologists creating a new era of innovation in hair technology. To learn more, visit www.halobraid.com.

SOURCE Halo