• The round is led by Pantera Capital and backed by Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Decasonic, Blast, Outbound, Surreal, and other strategic investors
• Orthogonal was founded by former leaders from Coinbase, Vercel, Google, and Amazon Robotics, and today supports 35+ APIs that power AI agents and automated workflows
• Orthogonal gives AI agents a unified way to discover and access the capabilities they need in real time, allowing them to complete complex tasks without consistent failing, hallucinating, or relying on human intervention

SAN FRANCISCO, June 25, 2026 — Orthogonal, the discovery, orchestration, and payment layer for the internet, today announced it has raised a $4.3 million seed round led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Decasonic, Blast, Outbound, Surreal, and other strategic investors.

AI agents are quickly becoming a new class of internet users as agentic commerce is projected to orchestrate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global economic activity by 2030, according to McKinsey. While people can search for services, compare options, and stitch together workflows online, agents remain largely limited to the tools they were originally given. When they encounter tasks requiring new capabilities, they often fail, hallucinate, or require human intervention. Orthogonal solves this issue by giving agents the ability to discover the services they need in the moment, orchestrate them, and pay them instantly. This capability means an agent describes what it wants, and then Orthogonal composes the result, calling the right services in the right order.

Founded by industry veterans with experience building payments and infrastructure at Coinbase, Vercel, Google, and Amazon Robotics, Orthogonal is already live in production with GTM teams and AI-native startups. The platform currently supports more than 35 APIs, including Apollo, People Data Labs, Coresignal, Olostep, and Linkup, while developers actively integrate Orthogonal into production agents and workflows.

The funding will be used to accelerate development of the company’s core platform: infrastructure that enables AI agents to discover new capabilities, access services instantly, and complete payments in a single workflow. It will also support expansion of Orthogonal’s engineering and go-to-market teams.

“Soon, there will be more agents than people online,” said Christian Pickett, co-founder and CEO of Orthogonal. “Those agents will book flights, hire contractors, enrich customer data, conduct research, and complete transactions without a human in the loop. But before that future can happen, agents need a reliable way to discover capabilities, orchestrate them, and pay for them. Orthogonal is building that missing layer.”

Orthogonal offers developers a unified SDK, API, MCP, and CLI that connects agents to internet services through a single integration. Similar to how infrastructure providers such as OpenRouter route requests across AI models, Orthogonal routes agents to the services and APIs they need to accomplish real-world tasks.

The company’s platform serves both sides of the marketplace. Developers and agent builders gain immediate access to a growing ecosystem of services through a single account, authorization flow, and invoice. Service providers can list once and become discoverable to agents and developers across the Orthogonal ecosystem and its growing network of distribution partners.

Orthogonal already supports multiple payment rails, including traditional fiat payments, x402 and MPP with additional support for emerging agent-native payment standards planned in the future. They have also been working with the Privy and Tempo teams at Stripe for easier means of payment execution for agents.

“Discovery, orchestration, and payments are the three critical problems standing between today’s agents and true autonomy,” said Bera Sogut, co-founder of Orthogonal. “Most companies are focused on building better models or better agents. We’re focused on the infrastructure layer that allows every agent to find and use the services it needs to get real work done.”

“We are moving rapidly toward an internet where the primary consumers of data and services aren’t humans clicking links, but autonomous agents executing complex financial decisions. McKinsey projects agentic commerce will drive trillions in economic activity by 2030, but that economic engine can’t run on legacy rails. Orthogonal is building the definitive, agent-native infrastructure for discovery, orchestration and payments and it has the potential to become a foundational part of the agent economy,” said Franklin Bi, General Partner at Pantera.

Over the next 12 months, Orthogonal plans to expand from dozens of integrated services to thousands, while scaling usage from hundreds of active developers and agents to a significantly broader ecosystem.

“Our goal is simple,” added Pickett. “When an agent needs a capability it doesn’t already have, Orthogonal should be the first place it goes. We want to become the default front door for the internet”

To learn more, follow Orthogonal on X and LinkedIn.  

About Orthogonal
Orthogonal is the discovery, orchestration, and payment layer for the internet. Through a single integration, agents can discover new capabilities, access services instantly, and pay for them seamlessly. Founded by former leaders from Coinbase, Vercel, Google, and Amazon Robotics, Orthogonal is building the infrastructure that enables autonomous agents to transact and operate across the internet. For more information, visit Orthogonal.com.

Media Contact
[email protected]

SOURCE Orthogonal

• Partnerships connect Singapore’s most promising deep tech start-ups with the US market.
• New university-led, Silicon Valley outpost at Playground Global to sharpen Singapore start-ups’ product-market fit.

SINGAPORE, June 25, 2026 — US-based venture capital (VC) firms, Playground Global and Matter Venture Partners, have partnered with NUS Enterprise, the entrepreneurial heart of the National University of Singapore (NUS), to join its US$117 million NUS VC Programme. Through these partnerships, both VC firms will gain closer access to Singapore’s deep tech ecosystem and its pipeline of start-ups developing breakthrough innovations in artificial intelligence, biotech, quantum technologies and advanced materials.

Early access to deep tech start-ups built for global scale

For US investors and corporates, Singapore serves as a strategic gateway to Asia’s innovation economy. The city-state is home to more than 4,500 tech start-ups^[1] and has committed approximately US$29 billion under its Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) 2030 plan^[2] to deepen its national innovation capabilities. Many Singapore start-ups are also designed for international expansion from inception, offering the US market early exposure to technologies refined by Asian market dynamics, regional supply chains, and diverse regulatory landscapes.

Through these partnerships, Playground Global and Matter Venture Partners will gain privileged access to pre-screened, high-potential deep tech companies from Singapore’s innovation ecosystem. In turn, these start-ups will benefit from Silicon Valley’s venture networks, market intelligence, technical expertise and corporate partnerships, enabling them to sharpen product-market fit and accelerate international growth.

Based in Silicon Valley, Playground Global is an early-stage VC firm that backs the most technically ambitious founders working at the frontier of engineering and science. The firm is recognised for helping transform breakthrough technologies into globally competitive businesses. With approximately one in five portfolio companies achieving unicorn status and US$1.7 billion in assets under management, Playground invests in early-stage companies shaping the future of next-generation computing, automation, energy, and engineered biology.

“We are excited to partner with NUS Enterprise to support the next generation of deep tech founders emerging from Singapore,” said Bruce Leak, General Partner, Playground Global. “Building globally competitive technology companies requires access to long-term support, deep technical expertise, and access to international networks. We look forward to helping more global founders navigate that journey.”

Matter Venture Partners complements this with a deeply technical and globally connected platform spanning Silicon Valley and key industrial ecosystems across Asia and beyond, including Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Europe, and the United Arab Emirates. The firm focuses on partnering with “HardTech” founders developing advanced semiconductor, electronics, and Physical AI innovations. The Matter team provides hands-on support and access to a strategic network of partners to help founders navigate supply chains, scale manufacturing, and bring complex technologies to market, with key competencies in areas such as robotics, advanced materials, and next-generation manufacturing.

“The next generation of globally significant HardTech companies will be built across ecosystems, not within a single geography. Singapore is a critical node in that network, with talent, capital, technology and ambition concentrated in one place. Through this partnership with NUS Enterprise, Matter Venture Partners is excited to support Singaporean HardTech founders who are thinking globally from day one, by connecting them with the right partners, manufacturing networks, and market access needed to succeed at scale,” said Dr Wen Hsieh, Founding Managing Partner, Matter Venture Partners.

A pipeline calibrated to US market demand

NUS Enterprise will also establish its first global outpost at The Studio, Playground Global’s 70,000-square-foot incubation facility in Silicon Valley. With access to wet and dry laboratories, advanced prototyping workshops and precision engineering tools, NUS-backed founders will gain the infrastructure and market exposure needed to validate technologies, engage US customers and sharpen product-market fit.

The outpost is part of NUS Enterprise’s broader strategy to connect Singapore’s innovation ecosystem with key global markets. It will help founders gather market insights from Silicon Valley, better understand customer needs and refine their solutions in one of the world’s most mature venture markets. Insights gained through the outpost will also strengthen NUS Enterprise’s education, research and commercialisation pathways. Over time, this will build a stronger pipeline of Singapore deep tech start-ups with clearer market validation, greater commercial readiness and stronger appeal to global investors and industry partners.

“Silicon Valley is one of the most demanding proving grounds for deep tech, with investors and competitors that move at a relentless pace,” said Dr Tan Sian Wee, NUS Senior Vice President (Innovation and Enterprise). “Research-based founders need investors who understand how deep tech companies are actually built and scaled, not just funded. Through our partnerships with Playground Global and Matter Venture Partners, and from our Silicon Valley outpost, our ventures can see opportunities early, test against real customer demand, sharpen product-market fit, and grow into category leaders across global markets.”

About National University of Singapore (NUS)

The National University of Singapore (NUS) is Singapore’s flagship university, which offers a global approach to education, research and entrepreneurship, with a focus on Asian perspectives and expertise. We have 15 colleges, faculties and schools across three campuses in Singapore, with more than 40,000 students from 100 countries enriching our vibrant and diverse campus community. We have also established more than 20 NUS Overseas Colleges entrepreneurial hubs around the world.

Our multidisciplinary and real-world approach to education, research and entrepreneurship enables us to work closely with industry, governments and academia to address crucial and complex issues relevant to Asia and the world. Researchers in our faculties, research centres of excellence, corporate labs and more than 30 university-level research institutes focus on themes that include energy; environmental and urban sustainability; treatment and prevention of diseases; active ageing; advanced materials; risk management and resilience of financial systems; Asian studies; and Smart Nation capabilities such as artificial intelligence, data science, operations research and cybersecurity.

For more information on NUS, please visit nus.edu.sg.

About NUS Enterprise

At NUS Enterprise, the entrepreneurial heart of the National University of Singapore (NUS), we advance the University as a global magnet for talent and an engine for impactful innovation. We seed ideas, spark innovation, and scale ventures through our distinctive 360° framework, integrating education, ecosystem support, and world-class venture building and investment. 

This creates a self-reinforcing cycle powering both educational and entrepreneurial outcomes across industries and communities. Since 2001, NUS Enterprise has nurtured 10 unicorns, over 3,000 start-ups, and 5,500 students. Our ambition: to improve the lives of 1 billion people by 2035. 

For more information on NUS Enterprise, please visit enterprise.nus.edu.sg.

Annexe: NUS VC Programme

The US$117 million NUS VC Programme aims to enhance support for early-stage tech innovation by focusing on high-potential ventures within the NUS ecosystem, including start-ups from the National Graduate Research Innovation Programme (National GRIP). National GRIP empowers innovators to transform lab-based research discoveries into globally competitive, market-ready ventures.

The programme comprises two key components.

First, NUS has committed to invest US$39 million over the next three years in selected VC firms with strong track records in early-stage deep tech investments. These firms will provide structured, hands-on support to start-ups, including time, expertise, and access to their networks to help them scale effectively.

The programme currently has four VC partners:

• Granite Asia: A leading multi-asset investment platform with a 25-year track record of backing breakthrough technology ventures globally.
• 4BIO Capital: A specialist life sciences investor focused on advanced therapeutics and breakthrough healthcare technologies.
• Playground Global: A Silicon Valley-based investment firm backing research-driven companies developing advanced technologies across engineered biology, energy transition, robotics, and next-generation computing.
• Matter Venture Partners: A Silicon Valley-headquartered VC firm supporting founders developing “HardTech” solutions that combine sophisticated hardware and software to address real-world challenges.

Second, NUS has set aside US$78 million for co-investments alongside these VC partners. These co-investments will be targeted at NUS-affiliated start-ups.

SOURCE NUS Enterprise

Aquiline and Flare Capital Partners co-led the round with participation from existing investors: 645 Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Triple Impact Capital and Techstars. The capital scales Upside across Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, and employer benefits.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., June 25, 2026 — Upside, the only nationally scalable housing stability platform purpose-built for healthcare, today announced a $20 million Series A. Aquiline led the round with Flare Capital Partners and continued support from existing investors including 645 Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Triple Impact Capital and Techstars. The capital accelerates Upside’s national expansion, builds out go-to-market capabilities across health plans and employers, and deepens investment in the company’s AI-supported delivery platform. Upside is led by industry veterans who previously built category-defining healthcare companies, including MDLive, Papa, and Virta Health.

Housing instability is one of healthcare’s most expensive and most addressable gaps, and it spans both government and commercial lines of business. Health plans see it in claims: $9.3 billion in inpatient costs nationally, yet most still measure activity over outcomes. Employers see it in workforce data: workers who lose their homes are 11 to 22 percentage points more likely to lose their jobs, and their highest utilizers are frequently the same employees experiencing housing precarity. They are not looking at different problems — they are looking at the same person. And they both need one partner who finishes the work.

Upside was built for that standard. Operating across 10 states, the company pairs dedicated Care Guides with AI-supported housing orchestration, all powered by a proprietary, curated affordable housing inventory database spanning public and non-public data. Together they identify, engage, and stabilize members before housing challenges become medical crises. The model of care delivers 90%+ enrollment, more than half of members stabilized within 90 days, and up to 4x ROI in 12 months, while achieving industry-leading member satisfaction. In just the past 18 months, the platform has expanded rapidly, securing partnerships with more than 17 national, state and regional health plans and is now supporting four of the largest National Payers. “Housing is the highest-cost social problem in healthcare, and most solutions stop at the referral,” said Jake Rothstein, Co-Founder and CEO of Upside. “We go beyond that. Upside places people into stable housing and keeps them there. This growth capital means we get to do that for more people, in more markets, more quickly.”

Building across plans and employers in parallel

Upside will deploy the Series A funding across Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, and employer-sponsored markets simultaneously. The employer push opens a meaningful new front. Upside’s care model translates cleanly into a workforce benefit covering housing navigation, rental and mortgage support, elder transition planning, and deposit assistance. With dedicated go-to-market investment, the company is positioned to bring that benefit to large self-insured employers at scale.

The round also funds leadership hires and operational depth, including Care Guide capacity, partner operations, and care model oversight, so the model that drove these results performs at greater volume without compromise.

“Housing instability is one of the most persistent drivers of avoidable healthcare spend. Upside has the model, team, and infrastructure to address it, and we’re excited to partner with the company in its next chapter,” said Dante La Ruffa, Partner and Head of Aquiline’s Venture & Growth Strategy. “We see significant opportunities to accelerate Upside’s momentum through Aquiline’s strategic connectivity across health plan, payer, and broker channels, as well as through product adjacencies that further expand the company’s value proposition for all key stakeholders.”

“The Health Related Social Needs solutions market is approaching the mid-innings of maturity. The first wave saw companies find success with population-wide screening and solutions directories, but stopped short of driving or guaranteeing outcomes. What drew us to Upside was the rapid cycle time of referral to engagement to success in closing key needs gaps, starting with housing, in a matter of months,” said Dan Gebremedhin, MD, Partner at Flare Capital Partners. “We look forward to partnering with the company to further deploy AI technologies to ensure this valuable service is cost-effective and can be deployed to more populations with proven medical and benefit design ROI.”

As part of the investment, Aquiline’s Avery Klinger will join Upside’s Board of Directors along with Dan Gebremedhin of Flare Capital Partners.

Human-led, AI-accelerated

Upside will continue investing in its technology platform, which combines proprietary AI workflows for acuity stratification, housing matching, and case management with a human-first delivery model. AI handles the repeatable work, surfacing housing options, summarizing cases, flagging risk, so Care Guides stay focused on the complex, relationship-driven work that actually drives outcomes.

“AI does not replace a Care Guide. It frees one up,” said Peter Badgley, Co-Founder and COO of Upside. “When the repeatable work runs in the background, our team can do more of what only people can do, which is sit with someone in crisis and get them somewhere safe.”

Since 2020, Upside has stabilized members across every major line of business in healthcare, from D-SNP and Medicaid to commercial and employer-sponsored populations. With this round, the company enters its next phase: larger in reach, deeper in technology, and faster in the markets where housing instability does the most damage. The mission is the same one Upside started with. Resolving housing instability completely, for the people who need it most.

About Upside

Upside is the only nationally scalable housing stability platform purpose-built for healthcare. The company partners with health plans and employers to identify and stabilize members and employees experiencing housing instability, connecting them to safe, supportive housing while reducing avoidable emergency utilization and improving health outcomes. Upside pairs dedicated Care Guides (licensed social workers and housing specialists) with AI-supported housing orchestration to deliver measurable results at scale. The platform serves Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, D-SNP, commercial, and employer-sponsored populations across the full housing continuum, from crisis intervention to long-term tenancy support. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, FL, Upside is redefining how healthcare addresses housing as a foundation of care. Learn more at www.joinupside.com.

About Aquiline

Aquiline is a global private investment firm with offices in New York, London, and Philadelphia that focuses on financial services and technology. As of December 31, 2025, Aquiline had approximately $12 billion of assets under management and deployed approximately $8.3 billion of capital across the firm’s strategies since inception.

About Flare Capital Partners

Flare Capital Partners is a leading healthcare technology venture capital firm advancing innovation-driven companies to improve positive health outcomes, broaden care access, and lower healthcare costs. We partner with exceptional founders solving healthcare’s hardest challenges, supporting each with our deep sector expertise, unparalleled industry resources, and proven access to commercial opportunities. Our team of established investors and senior operating executives has invested in 80+ companies and has nearly $1 billion in assets under management. Learn more at www.flarecapital.com.

SOURCE Upside

Neurometric helps companies optimize token spend for cost, speed, and reliability.

NEW YORK, June 25, 2026 — Neurometric AI, an AI infrastructure company helping businesses control the cost and performance of agentic workloads, today launched its automated token engineering platform and announced $4 million in funding closed earlier this year.

As companies move AI agents from experimentation into production, a single workflow can generate dozens of model calls. Many businesses continue to send each task to a frontier model, even when a smaller and less expensive model could deliver the same or better result. Neurometric evaluates those calls individually, modifies prompts as needed, and routes each task to the most cost-effective model capable of meeting the required performance threshold and creates a purpose-built small language model when no available option fits. For simple high volume workloads, the Neurometric platform automatically generates specialized small language models to optimize the speed and cost of the tasks.

“Companies have spent the past year proving that AI agents can perform increasingly complex work. Now they have to prove the economics still make sense when those agents are operating at scale,” said Rob May, CEO of Neurometric. “Every model call is also a pricing decision, and those decisions compound across an agent’s workflow. Token engineering gives companies a way to control that cost without sacrificing quality.”

Neurometric Brings Token Engineering Into One Platform

Companies currently rely on a mix of manual testing and individual point solutions to decide which models should handle different AI tasks. Those choices can quickly become outdated as new models enter the market and pricing, speed and performance change.

Neurometric brings model routing, small language model creation and access to a marketplace of pre-trained task specific SLMs into one platform. Its Task Endpoint Manager evaluates incoming requests against continuously updated model performance and pricing data, then routes each task according to the customer’s accuracy, cost and latency requirements.

When no existing model meets those requirements, Neurometric’s Auto-SLM Creator builds and serves a small language model designed for the specific task. The platform’s SLM marketplace also allows customers to access models already developed for common and recurring workloads.

This approach allows companies to use frontier models where their capabilities are necessary while moving more narrowly defined tasks to smaller and less expensive alternatives.

Across early customer engagements, models routed or created through Neurometric have achieved accuracy rates that have beaten frontier models by as much as 20 points, while reducing cost and latency compared with using frontier models for the same work.

“Companies need to know where frontier-level performance is worth paying for and where a smaller model can deliver the same result at a fraction of the cost. That discipline will determine whether agentic AI can move from promising pilots to a business model that scales,” said Neurometric COO Calvin Cooper.

“The number of available models is growing too quickly for companies to evaluate every option by hand,” May said. “And the number of tools and techniques to improve them are growing even faster. Things change so fast a human token engineer can’t keep up. That decision needs to be automated and continuously reevaluated as the market changes.”

$4 Million Raised to Expand the Platform

Neurometric closed $4 million in funding earlier this year while the team continued developing and testing the platform with customers.

The round included participation from Betaworks, ex-Ante, Everywhere.vc, Encoded, Vermillion, Abstraction, and Mu Ventures. Several prominent angels also participated including Jason Calacanis, co-host of the All-In Podcast, and Dharmesh Shah, CTO of Hubspot.

Neurometric will use the funding to expand the engineering and AI research teams to provide customers even more optimization tools as part of it’s core platform.

Alex Benik from Encoded, and investor in the round, stated “Neurometric is tackling one of the most pressing problems in the AI ecosystem today. The team has a unique mix of AI talent and systems engineering experience that positions them well to take on this task and help companies optimize their token spend at multiple layers of their infrastructure.”

A New Discipline for the Agentic AI Era

Neurometric is positioning token engineering as the discipline of determining how each task within an AI workload should be completed based on the required quality, cost and speed.

Unlike prompt engineering, which focuses on improving the instructions given to a model, token engineering determines which model should receive a task in the first place and whether a more specialized model should be created to handle it.

The need for that capability is expected to grow as companies deploy more AI agents, individual workflows generate more model calls and the number of available models continues to expand.

“Frontier intelligence will keep getting less expensive, but companies will also consume far more of it,” May said. “The winners will not be the businesses that simply buy the most tokens. They will be the ones that know where advanced intelligence creates value and where a smaller model can do the job just as well.”

Availability

Neurometric’s automated token engineering platform is available now at neurometric.ai. The company will be meeting with customers, investors and media during the AI Engineer World’s Fair from June 29^th to July 2^nd in San Francisco, California.

About Neurometric

Neurometric is the automated token engineering platform, routing every AI task to the most cost-effective model that meets the required quality bar, and generating purpose-built small models when none exists. Learn more at neurometric.ai.

Forward-Looking Statements

This release may contain forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ. Neurometric assumes no obligation to update such statements.

Media Contact: Andy Ellicott, 347-206-5651, [email protected]

SOURCE Neurometric AI

Backed by $4.85 million in funding, Samepage Signals automatically surfaces critical insights from across product, engineering, customer, and business systems.

NEW YORK, June 25, 2026 — Samepage today launched Samepage Signals, the AI-powered second brain for product leaders, alongside $4.85 million in funding from Craft Ventures, Freestyle VC, Glasswing Ventures, and angel investors including Justin Kan, Matt Mullenweg, and others.

Samepage Signals helps product leaders stay on top of everything happening across product, engineering, customer feedback, analytics, and go-to-market systems. The product connects to a user’s core tools and data — including Jira, Linear, Productboard, Slack, Notion, Gong, and Salesforce — builds a dynamic profile of what matters to them, and proactively surfaces the most relevant information and insights, from new feature ideas emerging in sales calls to competitor developments worth watching to clear summaries of what has shipped and what may be at risk.

“Product development is moving faster than ever, but the way product leaders stay informed is still far too manual,” said Sahil Jain, CEO and co-founder of Samepage. “We built Samepage Signals around a simple belief: information should be a push, not a pull. Instead of forcing product people to constantly go hunting across tools, Samepage Signals automatically delivers the context and insights they need to stay ahead and keep everyone aligned.”

Key capabilities include:

• Connecting natively to 35+ core product, customer, and business data sources
• Automatically building a dynamic profile of the product leader and what matters most to them
• Surfacing relevant information and insights proactively, rather than requiring manual searching

Samepage tested Signals in beta with hundreds of product leaders before opening the product to the public today.

Built by Product Operators, for Product Operators

Samepage was founded by Sahil Jain, Jason Wu, and Paul Wicker, who previously built AdStage together for over eight years before its acquisition by TapClicks. The founding team has worked together for well over a decade and built Samepage based on firsthand experience with the challenge of information overload and cross-functional misalignment inside growing organizations.

Backing the Future of Product Intelligence

The new funding will support continued product development, broader adoption of Samepage Signals, and the company’s mission to build the second brain for product leaders.

“We backed Sahil and the team at AdStage and are thrilled to partner with them again at Samepage. Product leaders have more data than ever and less clarity than ever — Samepage Signals finally flips that equation,” said David Samuel, Partner, Freestyle VC.

To learn more, visit samepage.ai.

About Samepage

Samepage is building AI products that help product leaders stay informed, aligned, and effective in fast-moving organizations. Its first product, Samepage Signals, connects to the tools teams already use, builds a dynamic understanding of each user, and automatically surfaces the information and insights they need most.

Media Contact

Sahil Jain

CEO & Co-founder, Samepage.ai

[email protected]

‪+1 (415) 409-8440‬

SOURCE Samepage, Inc.

Investors include more than 60 angels from leading AI, developer tools, and infrastructure companies

SAN FRANCISCO, June 25, 2026 — Sazabi, the AI-native observability platform for fast-moving engineering teams, today announced an $8 million seed financing led by J2 Ventures, Village Global, and Y Combinator, with participation from Orange Collective and over 60 angel investors from leading AI companies, including Vercel, Cursor, LangChain, OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub, Replit, Browserbase, and others. Sazabi will use the funding to expand its engineering team, accelerate product development, and deepen its integrations across modern cloud and developer platforms.

Sazabi is building observability for the AI era: a world where teams ship faster, production systems change continuously, and traditional dashboards, brittle instrumentation, noisy alerts, and manual incident response can no longer keep pace. Instead of asking engineers to configure complex telemetry stacks and dig through dashboards during incidents, Sazabi uses AI agents to understand a team’s logs, infrastructure, and codebase before proactively detecting, investigating, and resolving production issues.

“AI has changed how software gets written. Now it is changing how software gets operated,” said Sherwood Callaway, founder and CEO of Sazabi. “The first half of software engineering has been transformed by tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex. But the second half — monitoring, debugging, incident response, and reliability — is still stuck in the pre-AI era. Sazabi is rebuilding observability from first principles for a world where agents are part of every engineering team.”

The company’s approach is built around a controversial but powerful idea: logs are all you need. Instead of splitting observability workflows across logs, metrics, and traces, Sazabi treats log data as the single source of truth for understanding production systems. Sazabi uses AI to reconstruct the views engineers need from log data on its own, reducing instrumentation complexity while preserving the power of a traditional observability platform.

Since its public launch, Sazabi has seen strong early pull from AI-native engineering teams. In closed alpha, the company onboarded 50 new teams in two weeks, ran 8,000 background investigations, detected 2,000 issues, and opened 200 pull requests against customer code repositories.

Sandstone, a fast-growing provider of legal software, adopted Sazabi to move from a “chaos phase” of rapid shipping into a culture of reliability.

“Sazabi caught issues we otherwise would have missed and fixed them before customers noticed,” said Liam Germain, CTO at Sandstone. “It’s like having an extra engineer on call who reads every logline. We onboarded in 15 minutes and started receiving useful alerts immediately.”

Sazabi was founded by Sherwood Callaway, a two-time Y Combinator founder and software engineer with more than a decade of experience building infrastructure and observability systems at high-growth companies including Brex and Crunchbase. The Sazabi team includes early members of the Brex infrastructure engineering team as well as past founders in the observability space.

“Sherwood is the kind of founder I back without hesitation,” said Hunter Walk, Founding Partner at Homebrew who previously backed AI code review platform Graphite. “A technical, second-time founder with clear product vision and deep subject-matter expertise. Sazabi reminds me of Graphite in the early days.”

“Software systems are becoming increasingly probabilistic and dynamic,” said Christine Keung, General Partner at J2 Ventures. “Existing observability tools were built for a far more deterministic world. If Datadog defined observability during the cloud-native era, Sazabi is defining it for the AI-native one.”

About Sazabi

Sazabi is the AI-native observability platform for fast-moving engineering teams. Built around chat, autonomous agents, and a logs-first architecture, Sazabi helps teams detect, investigate, understand, and fix production issues faster. Founded in 2025 and based in San Francisco, Sazabi is backed by J2 Ventures, Village Global, Y Combinator, Orange Collective, and over 60 angels from top AI, developer tools, and infrastructure companies. The company is currently onboarding new customers. Engineering teams can learn more or book a demo at www.sazabi.com.

About J2 Ventures

J2 Ventures is a Boston-based venture capital firm investing in technologies that advance both commercial markets and U.S. national security. Led by veterans, scientists, and entrepreneurs, the firm partners with early-stage companies developing critical innovations across advanced computing, cybersecurity, communications, and healthcare. J2 portfolio companies have raised more than $1 billion in follow-on capital and secured hundreds of millions in non-dilutive government funding, underscoring the firm’s mission to make innovation both scalable and enduring.

About Village Global 

Village Global is a network-native VC firm with ~$500 million AUM, chaired by Reid Hoffman and backed by industry luminaries like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. For more information, please visit www.villageglobal.com.

Media Contact: Liang Zhao, [email protected] 

SOURCE Sazabi

Investment enables breakthrough technology that recycles hazardous steel grinding sludge into secondary resources, delivering up to 470 kg CO₂e savings per tonne

GOTHENBURG, Sweden, June 25, 2026 — SKF today announced a strategic investment, together with Stephen Industries and Chalmers Ventures, in startup Anferra AB to tackle one of the industrial sector’s most persistent waste challenges – hazardous steel grinding sludge.

Grinding sludge is a finely powdered mixture of metal particles, abrasives, and contaminated grinding emulsion generated during metal grinding operations. It is commonly classified as hazardous waste with most non-recycled volumes handled through incineration or landfill. Globally, around 12 million tonnes are produced each year, creating both environmental risks and significant costs for industry. Additionally, variability in sludge composition makes standardized recycling difficult.

Anferra’s innovative process converts steel grinding sludge into ferric chloride which is a common chemical agent used for wastewater and water treatment. Another by-product is hydrogen gas which can be further used as an energy carrier, contributing to green energy solutions. This enables a potential net climate benefit of negative 470 kg CO₂-equivalents per tonne of sludge (equal to driving an electric car for 7500 km) compared to conventional disposal.

The process achieves up to 90% iron recovery with significantly lower energy demand, effectively transforming a costly waste problem into a valuable resource stream. Most importantly, the technology has the potential to shift grinding sludge from being treated as hazardous waste towards becoming a secondary raw material, aligning with the EU’s efforts to harmonise waste regulations and build a stronger market for secondary raw materials.

“Grinding sludge is one of the toughest recycling challenges in the steel and bearing industry. Anferra’s approach represents a smarter way forward and positions us well to drive circularity and decarbonization. This investment, which is the first initiative coming out of SKF Ventures – SKF’s initiative to accelerate new innovations, enables us to influence solution development, positioning SKF as a first mover in circular recycling innovations and creating new value from waste streams,” says Mikael Krook, Director, SKF Ventures.

“We are very happy to deepen our collaboration with SKF through this investment. SKF has been an important partner since the early stages of Anferra’s development and with their support and close collaboration, we can accelerate our journey toward industrial implementation around the world. Our ambition is to significantly reduce the landfilling of grinding sludge while increasing circularity and resource efficiency on a global scale,” says Ebba Adolfsson, CEO and Co-founder, Anferra.

This investment brings together complementary expertise across the three investors. Stephen Industries brings its expertise in scaling high-impact deeptech and greentech ventures. SKF contributes with industrial application knowledge, waste stream volume, and decades of experience in sustainability leadership. Chalmers Ventures provides venture building capabilities and close connection to the research ecosystem, enabling further development and commercialization.

SKF applies various circularity principles across its operations, including, remanufacturing bearings and circular oil use via RecondOil. Other initiatives such as exploring recycled steel solutions with ultra-low emissions and investigating hydrometallurgical methods are underway to minimize resource loss and accelerate the transition to a net-zero, more circular industrial ecosystem.

Aktiebolaget SKF
      (publ)

For further information, please contact:
Technology communications: Aparna Srivastava, +46 707 576 468; [email protected]
Press Relations: Carl Bjernstam, +46 31-337 2517; +46 722 201 893; [email protected]
Anferra: [email protected]

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

https://news.cision.com/skf/r/skf-invests-in-startup-anferra-to-transform-industry-s-toughest-waste-problems-into-circular-resourc,c4367194

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-Developing agentic AI-powered cross-border commerce infrastructure that automates shipping and customs duty prediction, translation, payment, and customs clearance

-Monthly transaction volume grew approximately sevenfold over the past six months through its Korea-Japan cross-border service; secured partnerships with Mercari, Rakuten, and more

-NAVER D2SF continues to discover and invest in young founders challenging global markets, while exploring potential collaboration with NAVER Commerce

SEONGNAM, South Korea, June 24, 2026 — NAVER D2SF, the corporate venture capital arm of NAVER, has made a new investment in SAZO (CEO, Maro Gil), a cross-border commerce startup building agentic AI-powered infrastructure for global shopping. SAZO has developed a platform where AI agents automate key processes required for overseas purchases, including shipping fee and customs duty prediction, translation, local pricing, payment, and customs clearance. NAVER D2SF decided to invest in the team based on its ability to rapidly build a product for the global market and validate its business potential through transaction growth and partnerships across Korea and Japan.

Demand for cross-border commerce is growing rapidly, with 59% of consumers worldwide having purchased products from overseas retailers. As interest in content and creator IP increasingly translates into product purchases, demand is also rising for overseas goods, fashion items, secondhand products, and other long-tail items that are difficult to access through conventional distribution channels. On the supply side, e-commerce sellers, creators, and IP owners are increasingly seeking ways to sell their products to global customers.

SAZO addresses the information asymmetry and complex purchasing process in cross-border commerce through agentic AI. For overseas purchases, consumers often face uncertainty around final shipping costs and customs duties until the point of payment, while differences in language, currency, and customs regulations across countries create additional friction that limits conversion. SAZO predicts shipping fees, customs duties, and service charges with approximately 95% accuracy, while enabling AI agents to automate translation, local pricing, payment, customs clearance, and other transaction processes.

Through this infrastructure, consumers can purchase overseas products in a way that feels similar to domestic online shopping. Platforms and sellers can also expand their sales regions without building separate systems or taking on overseas inventory burdens. By connecting local platforms with logistics and payment infrastructure across countries, SAZO lowers the barriers to cross-border commerce for both consumers and sellers.

SAZO currently operates a cross-border commerce service connecting Korea and Japan, with monthly transaction volume growing approximately sevenfold over the past six months. The company has secured partnerships with leading commerce platforms in Korea and abroad, including Mercari, Rakuten, and Bungaejangter. In 2025, SAZO also attracted a strategic investment from Japan Post Capital, the venture capital arm of Japan Post Group, which operates one of Japan’s largest cross-border logistics infrastructures. Building on this foundation, the company is advancing its cross-border shopping experience and currently operates services in Korea, the United States, and Japan. Going forward, SAZO plans to expand into additional markets and grow into a global infrastructure company for cross-border agentic commerce.

Maro Gil, CEO of SAZO, is a founder in his twenties who founded the company in 2023 after leaving his studies in Japan, where he had been studying on a government scholarship. Since its founding, SAZO’s co-founding team has built its product and business structure for the global market, based on a deep understanding of AI agents and cross-border commerce. With this investment, the company plans to expand partnerships with brands and platforms targeting global markets, while actively hiring talent to build its next stage of growth.

“Cross-border commerce is not simply about exposing products to overseas customers. It requires connecting different languages, payment systems, logistics networks, and customs processes into a single purchasing experience,” said Sanghwan Yang, Head of NAVER D2SF. “SAZO is currently discussing various forms of collaboration with NAVER Shopping, and we expect the team to provide users with a more convenient overseas shopping experience while creating new global sales opportunities for sellers and creators.”

NAVER D2SF has recently been actively supporting and investing in young founders in their teens and twenties who are boldly challenging global markets. As AI continues to lower the barriers to product development, NAVER D2SF plans to further expand collaboration opportunities with young founders who quickly identify market problems and turn them into global products.

About NAVER D2SF

NAVER D2SF is NAVER’s in-house corporate venture arm, supporting sustainable growth by collaborating with startups. Founded in 1999, NAVER has maintained its position as Korea’s leading search engine for over 20 years and operates across commerce, content, fintech, and cloud services. Under the technological vision of D2 (For Developers, By Developers), NAVER is actively developing new technologies and global partnerships to grow as a leading tech company.

To learn more, visit https://d2sf.naver.com

SOURCE NAVER D2SF

Financing co-led by TCGX and ARCH Venture Partners with participation from a syndicate of premier healthcare-focused institutional investors

Proceeds will support global Phase 3 trials of IBI324 (Ollin R&D code: OLN324), a potential best-in-class VEGF/Ang2 bispecific antibody, in $15 billion retina market addressing leading causes of vision loss

OLN324 demonstrated faster and greater retinal drying and numerically greater vision gains versus Vabysmo® in a randomized head-to-head proof of concept JADE clinical trial, as reported earlier this year

SAN FRANCISCO and SUZHOU, China, June 24, 2026 — Innovent Biologics, Inc. (“Innovent”) (HKEX: 01801), a world-class biopharmaceutical company that develops, manufactures, and commercializes high-quality medicines for the treatment of oncology, autoimmune, cardiovascular and metabolic, ophthalmology and other major disease areas, today announced that the company’s partner Ollin has completed an oversubscribed $330 million Series B financing. The financing round was co-led by new investor TCGX and founding investor ARCH Venture Partners, with participation from a syndicate of leading healthcare-focused crossover investors, sovereign wealth funds, and other institutional investors new to Ollin, including a16z Bio+Health, Blackstone Multi-Asset Investing, Commodore Capital, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), RA Capital Management, accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Investment Management, Inc., and a leading sovereign wealth fund, alongside continued investment from co-founding investors Mubadala Capital and Monograph Capital.

Proceeds from the Series B financing will support global Phase 3 development of OLN324, a next-generation VEGF/Ang2 bispecific antibody, in DME and wet AMD, as well as the advancement of another drug candidate into clinical development this year.

In the recently completed 164-patient, head-to-head, randomized, proof-of-concept JADE clinical study comparing OLN324 to faricimab (Vabysmo®), OLN324 demonstrated meaningfully faster and greater improvements in retinal anatomy versus faricimab, in both DME and wAMD, as well as numerically greater vision gains.

Ollin has completed an End-of-Phase 2 meeting with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and has received scientific advice from the European Medicines Agency (EMA) on the Phase 3 program, and plans to initiate global Phase 3 trials of OLN324 in DME and wAMD in the second half of 2026. And through partnership with Innovent, the global Phase 3 trials will plan to include China and South Korea.

“We founded Ollin to challenge the status quo in ophthalmology. We are delighted to welcome a premier syndicate of new and existing investors who share our vision of advancing OLN324 as a potential new standard of care in retinal vascular disease. Their support reflects confidence in the strength of our scientific rationale and clinical data, the significant commercial opportunity in DME and wAMD, and the differentiated clinical profile we believe OLN324 can offer physicians and patients,” said Jason Ehrlich, M.D., Ph.D., Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Ollin Biosciences. “Following positive randomized clinical data and constructive feedback from both FDA and EMA, we believe OLN324 is well positioned to enter global Phase 3 development. This financing provides the resources to execute a registrational program designed to maximize the clinical and commercial potential of OLN324 while positioning Ollin for its next phase of growth as a company.”

“We are very pleased to see our partner Ollin complete this round of financing, which underscores the confidence of leading global investors in the differentiated clinical profile of IBI324 (OLN324) and its potential to become a best-in-class therapy for retinal vascular diseases,” said Dr. Lei Qian, M.D., Ph.D., Chief R&D Officer of General Biomedicine at Innovent Biologics. “As a partner and investor, we look forward to continuing our close collaboration with Ollin and, following discussions with regulatory authorities, to accelerate the global Phase 3 clinical development of IBI324 (OLN324), and to bring this promising therapy to patients worldwide.”

About IBI324 (OLN324)

Building on the clinical success of intravitreal VEGF/Ang2 inhibition, IBI324 (OLN324) is discovered by Innovent Biologics and in collaboration with Ollin Biosciences, as a next-generation VEGF/Ang2 bispecific antibody engineered with substantially higher Ang2 potency relative to faricimab, increased molar dosing relative to both faricimab and aflibercept (including Eylea HD®), and a smaller protein format. VEGF and Ang2 are central drivers of retinal vascular diseases such as diabetic macular edema (DME) and wet (neovascular) age-related macular degeneration (wAMD), with Ang2 playing a key role in vascular instability, leakage, inflammation, and fibrosis. In the recently completed head-to-head Phase 1b JADE clinical study comparing OLN324 to faricimab (Vabysmo®), OLN324 demonstrated meaningfully faster and greater anatomic outcomes in both DME and wAMD versus faricimab as well as numerically greater vision gains. Ollin plans to initiate global Phase 3 trials of OLN324 in DME and wAMD in the second half of 2026. And through partnership with Innovent, the global Phase 3 trials will plan to include China and South Korea.

About Innovent

Innovent is a leading biopharmaceutical company founded in 2011 with the mission to empower patients worldwide with affordable, high-quality biopharmaceuticals. The company discovers, develops, manufactures and commercializes innovative medicines that target some of the most intractable diseases. Its pioneering therapies treat cancer, cardiovascular and metabolic, autoimmune and eye diseases. Innovent has launched 18 products in the market. It has 1 asset under NMPA review, 5 assets in Phase 3 or pivotal clinical trials and 15 more molecules in early clinical stage. Innovent partners with over 30 global healthcare companies, including Lilly, Roche, Takeda, Pfizer, Sanofi, Incyte and MD Anderson Cancer Center.

Guided by the motto, “Start with Integrity, Succeed through Action” Innovent maintains the highest standard of industry practices and works collaboratively to advance the biopharmaceutical industry so that first-rate pharmaceutical drugs can become widely accessible. For more information, visit www.innoventbio.com, or follow Innovent on Facebook and LinkedIn.

Disclaimer: Innovent does not recommend any off-label usage.

Vabysmo® is a registered trademark of Genentech, Inc.; Eylea® and Eylea HD® are registered trademarks of Regeneron Pharmaceuticals, Inc.

About Ollin Biosciences

Established in 2023, Ollin Biosciences™ is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company dedicated to acquiring and developing best-in-disease therapies for vision-threatening diseases. With a differentiated pipeline, world-class team, and strong investor syndicate, Ollin is redefining what’s possible in ophthalmology. For more information, please visit www.ollin.bio and follow Olllin on LinkedIn and X.

Forward-looking statement

This news release may contain certain forward-looking statements that are, by their nature, subject to significant risks and uncertainties. The words “anticipate”, “believe”, “estimate”, “expect”, “intend” and similar expressions, as they relate to Innovent Biologics (“Innovent”), are intended to identify certain of such forward-looking statements. The Company does not intend to update these forward-looking statements regularly.

These forward-looking statements are based on the existing beliefs, assumptions, expectations, estimates, projections and understandings of the management of the Company with respect to future events at the time these statements are made. These statements are not a guarantee of future developments and are subject to risks, uncertainties and other factors, some of which are beyond the Company’s control and are difficult to predict. Consequently, actual results may differ materially from information contained in the forward-looking statements as a result of future changes or developments in our business, the Company’s competitive environment and political, economic, legal and social conditions.

The Company, the Directors and the employees of the Company assume (a) no obligation to correct or update the forward-looking statements contained in this site; and (b) no liability in the event that any of the forward-looking statements does not materialise or turn out to be incorrect.

SOURCE Innovent Biologics