Martis Capital Named to Inc.’s 2026 Founder-Friendly Investors List for Sixth Consecutive Year

WASHINGTON and SAN FRANCISCO and MIAMI, Oct. 27, 2026 — Martis Capital, a private equity firm exclusively focused on the middle market healthcare sector, has been named to Inc.’s 2026 Founder-Friendly Investors list, which recognizes the private equity firms, venture capital firms, and lenders with a demonstrated record of backing founder-led companies. Of the 294 firms recognized this year, Martis earned the honor for the sixth consecutive year and was one of 14 healthcare-exclusive private equity firms.

The prestigious Founder-Friendly Investors list celebrates the investors and firms that work closely with entrepreneurs and remain engaged with the businesses they back. Honorees are recognized for their approach to partnering with founders and supporting their companies through growth and beyond.

“Founders don’t get to choose their investors twice, so it means a great deal when the people who’ve actually worked with us say we were the right choice,” said Mario Moreno, Managing Partner of Martis Capital. “Healthcare is a demanding place to build a company. The regulatory, clinical, and operational complexity is real, and founders need a partner who understands it and shows up when it matters. That’s the role we’ve tried to play since 2011, and earning this recognition for six years running reflects the relationships we’ve built with our founders.”

“When we partnered with Martis, we were looking for more than capital. We wanted a team that respected the foundation of what we’d built and were eager to help accelerate our growth,” said Frank Burrell, CEO of Deerfield Group, a marketing and communications firm for the healthcare and life sciences sectors and a portfolio company of funds advised by Martis. “Martis earned Inc.’s Founder-Friendly recognition through its consistent commitment to the businesses it backs. For Deerfield, this means supporting our vision, providing meaningful strategic guidance, making key connections, and trusting our leadership. As specialists in healthcare investing, Martis deeply understands our industry, and together we are building what’s next for healthcare marketing, media, and communications.”

To compile the Founder-Friendly Investors list, Inc. went straight to the source: entrepreneurs who have sold to private equity and venture capital firms. Founders completed questionnaires about their experiences partnering with private equity, venture capital, and debt firms and shared data on how their companies have performed during these partnerships. The resulting list highlights investors that founders identified as strong partners throughout the investment process.

For more information or to view the complete list of honorees, visit https://www.inc.com/founder-friendly-investors.

About Martis Capital
Based in Washington, DC, San Francisco, and Miami, Martis Capital is a founder-friendly capital partner for growth-oriented healthcare companies. Since 2011, Martis Capital has raised more than $2.2 billion from a global base of institutional clients to invest in the middle-market North American healthcare sector. More information is available at www.martiscapital.com.

About Inc.
Inc. is the leading media brand and playbook for entrepreneurs and business leaders. Inc. is published by Mansueto Ventures LLC, along with fellow leading business publication Fast Company. For more information, visit www.inc.com.

Disclosures
Inc. granted Martis Capital the 2026 Founder-Friendly Investors recognition on August 13, 2026, based on an evaluation covering the preceding 12-month period. Martis Capital did not exercise any influence or control over the criteria used or the results generated by Inc. This recognition should not be construed as an endorsement or recommendation of Martis Capital by Inc., the ranking entity, or any regulatory authority. Martis Capital paid a fee to be considered for this award and in connection with the use and distribution of this recognition.

Frank Burrell is CEO of Deerfield Group, a portfolio company of funds advised by Martis Capital. He is not a client of Martis Capital or an investor in any fund advised by Martis Capital and received no compensation for his statement. His comments reflect his experience working with Martis Capital and may not be representative of the experiences of other portfolio companies, clients, or investors.

This press release is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an offer to sell or a solicitation of an offer to buy any security. Past performance is not indicative of future results.

Media Contact
Margaret Kirch Cohen
Newton Park PR
+1 847-507-2229
[email protected]

SOURCE Martis Capital

BROADWING CAPITAL NAMED TO INC.’S 2026 FOUNDER-FRIENDLY INVESTORS LIST

Co-Founder and Managing Partner Eliot Kerlin, Jr. also named one of 36 investors every founder needs to know in 2026

DALLAS, Oct. 27, 2026 — Broadwing Capital, the Dallas-based private equity firm specializing in the lower middle-market manufacturing, distribution, and services sectors, today announced that it has been named to Inc.’s 2026 Founder-Friendly Investors list for the first time.

In addition, Eliot Kerlin, Jr., Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Broadwing, was also named to Inc.’s 2026 Founder Champions list, which Inc. deems as “36 investors every founder needs to know in 2026.” The list honors investment professionals with a track record of supporting founder-led companies and fostering meaningful, lasting partnerships.

Inc.’s Founder-Friendly Investors program recognizes private equity firms, venture capital firms, and lenders that back founder-led businesses and help them thrive. As part of the selection process, Inc. speaks directly with founders of each applicant’s portfolio companies about their experience partnering with the firm.

“This recognition is especially meaningful to us because it reflects the experience of the founders we partner with,” said Eliot Kerlin, Jr., Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Broadwing. “When a founder chooses Broadwing, they are putting their trust in our team to help carry forward something they have worked years, sometimes generations, to build. We take that responsibility seriously. For us, being founder-friendly is not a tagline. It is how we believe partnerships should work.”

Broadwing’s founder-friendly approach is central to how the firm builds every partnership. Broadwing often serves as the first institutional capital partner to the businesses it backs. Its team takes the time before an investment is made to understand what owners have built and what they hope to achieve through an outside investment. After closing, Broadwing works side by side with management teams, providing the resources and support needed to accelerate growth while preserving the people and values at the core of each business.

“We are proud to be honored with Inc.’s Founder Friendly Investor Award because our approach to working with founders and families is core to our strategy,” said Andrew Boisseau, Co-Founder and Partner of Broadwing. “Our role is to bring the capital, people and operational resources that can help a business reach its full potential, while protecting the culture, relationships and entrepreneurial spirit that made it successful in the first place.”

The recognition caps a milestone year for Broadwing. In August, the firm closed its oversubscribed inaugural fund, Broadwing Capital Fund I LP, with $465 million in total capital commitments, exceeding its $350 million target.

“With the current funding environment and rapid changes facing growing companies, founders are looking for more than just capital from their investors. They want true partners who believe in their business, but who are also able to provide the critical advisement and strategic support they need to reach their potential,” says Bonny Ghosh, editorial director at Inc. “The 2026 Founder-Friendly Investor awards celebrate those firms –– the ones committed to partnership, excellence, and helping founder-led companies grow.”

About Broadwing Capital
Broadwing Capital Management and its affiliates (“Broadwing”) is a Dallas-based private equity firm specializing in the lower middle-market manufacturing and services sectors. The firm thoughtfully scales niche platforms into market leaders through hands-on operational support that enhances companies, cultures, and communities. Broadwing is known for its founder-friendly approach, deeply embedded resource partners, and a values-driven commitment to long-term value creation. Broadwing has had decades of combined private equity value-creation experience, has invested in 26 lower middle-market companies and manages over $700 million of regulatory AUM.

To learn more, visit our website and follow on LinkedIn.

Media Contact:
[email protected]

SOURCE Broadwing Capital

Infisical Raises $40 Million at $600 Million Valuation to Secure the AI Agent Economy

Led by Elad Gil, the funding will accelerate Infisical’s expansion as enterprises adopt AI agents that need secure access to critical systems

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 27, 2026 — Infisical today announced it has raised $40 million in Series B funding at a $600 million valuation. The round was led by Elad Gil, who previously invested in the company’s Series A, with Gradient and Y Combinator among its other investors.

Infisical provides cybersecurity infrastructure organizations use to secure sensitive credentials, manage access to critical systems, and keep digital certificates renewed and trusted. Cyberattacks, vulnerabilities, and breaches are proliferating, which makes cybersecurity increasingly important. Novel threats from AI agents make the situation even more difficult.

AI agents need access to source code, databases, cloud infrastructure, and other critical systems to function. This requires credentials like API keys, passwords, and authentication tokens, which AI agents cannot be trusted with.

Infisical’s Agent Vault lets companies give AI agents access without handing over credentials. Companies can define the access each agent needs and be assured it cannot leak credentials in a cyberattack or inadvertently send them to LLM providers or other tools it communicates with.

“You wouldn’t give an employee unrestricted access to every system in your company, and AI agents shouldn’t be any different,” said Vlad Matsiiako, co-founder and CEO of Infisical. “Agents need access to company systems to do their jobs, but giving them actual passwords and API keys is a major security risk. We let agents get their job done safely without ever having those credentials in their hands.”

Enterprise Adoption and Investment

Infisical serves more than 1,300 customers and 300,000 developers and secures 10 billion secrets every day. Its open-source project has earned more than 30,000 GitHub stars. Customers include Airbus, Volkswagen, Hugging Face, OpenRouter, Lucid, First American Financial Corporation, Wise, and Clay.

Infisical will use the new funding to accelerate product development, expand its engineering and go-to-market teams, and build out its security infrastructure for AI agents as enterprise adoption increases.

“AI agents are becoming a new class of users inside every enterprise, and securing their access will be one of the biggest cybersecurity challenges of the next decade,” said Elad Gil. “Vlad and co-founders Maidul and Tony recognized early that AI agents would create an entirely new set of security challenges, and they’ve built Infisical into a platform that I believe can become essential infrastructure for the AI era.”

About Infisical

Infisical is a security infrastructure platform for developers, machines, and AI agents. The company helps organizations securely manage secrets, certificates, encryption keys and privileged access across their infrastructure. Its Agent Vault enables AI agents to access sensitive systems without exposing underlying credentials. Infisical serves more than 1,300 customers and 300,000 developers worldwide. Learn more at infisical.com.

SOURCE Infisical

University of Detroit Mercy receives $7.75 million from U.S. Department of War

DETROIT, Oct. 27, 2026 — The U.S. Department of War awarded University of Detroit Mercy $7.75 million to expand an education-to-workforce pipeline as the U.S. faces growing workforce shortages in critical technology fields.

The award addresses critical shortages in the military and defense industrial base while preparing students for careers in technology fields. It will focus on advancing technological disciplines essential to modern military operations including cybersecurity, artificial intelligence, machine learning and systems engineering.

U.S. Sen. Gary Peters was instrumental in securing funding through the Senate Appropriations Committee in the Fiscal Year 2026 Appropriations Bill.  

“These investments are critical to strengthening our national security while creating educational and career opportunities for Michiganders,” Peters said.

According to the U.S. Office of the National Cyber Director, the U.S. faces a shortage of cybersecurity professionals at a time when cyber threats, AI-driven risks and rapidly evolving warfare technologies have skyrocketed.

“In new technology areas, where we see both opportunities and challenges, ethical leadership is vital,” Detroit Mercy President Donald B. Taylor said. “Detroit Mercy is perfectly positioned to provide both the technical skills and the ethical grounding that will make our graduates excel.”

Funding supports initiatives to strengthen workforce pathways from high school through doctoral candidates, active-duty military personnel, DoW civilian employees and defense industrial base professionals. It will also provide scholarships for students interested in these fields.

Advanced technologies will be integrated into pre-college programming, undergraduate and graduate degrees, micro credentials, and research opportunities, and create pathways to defense-focused internships and career advancement.

A board of advisors composed of industry leaders, the military and academia, will guide the strategic priorities to ensure they align with the evolving needs of the DoW.

Katherine Snyder, dean of the College of Engineering & Science and co-principal investigator, said the award represents another step in expanding experiential learning and career opportunities for students.

“By expanding opportunities for research, experiential learning and collaboration, we will help meet critical technical workforce needs in Detroit, across the region and throughout the nation, including areas important to our nation’s security,” she said.

Detroit Mercy is a cybersecurity education and defense workforce development leader. The University has been recognized by the National Security Agency as a Center of Academic Excellence in Cyber Defense, one of the original 50 programs designated across the nation in 2004. Visit https://www.udmercy.edu/academics/cybersecurity.php. 

SOURCE University of Detroit Mercy

Vera Health Quietly Became One of the World’s Most Used Clinical Tools. Now It Has Raised $32 Million to Give Every Clinician in the World the Best Medical Knowledge in Seconds

With a team of just 12 employees, the clinical AI company has grown largely through physician referrals, bringing total funding to $32 million

  • More than 800,000 clinicians across 190 countries use Vera Health, including approximately 1 in 4 physicians in Spain and Italy, with most discovering the platform through recommendations from colleagues.
  • Threshold Ventures led Vera Health’s $28.5 million Series A, with participation from Mantis VC and SV Angel. Existing investors Y Combinator and Gradient tripled down, bringing total funding to $32 million.
  • The investment will accelerate Vera Health’s evidence-focused clinical AI platform, expanding its ability to make global medical knowledge locally relevant and deepening partnerships with medical societies, publishers and health systems.

SAN FRANCISCO, Oct. 27, 2026 — A year ago, a few thousand clinicians were using Vera Health. Today, more than 800,000 are, most having discovered the platform through a colleague. Every month since June, Vera has been the most downloaded clinical app in the world across the App Store and Google Play.¹ In September alone, it was downloaded more times than OpenEvidence and Doximity combined, while monthly downloads had more than tripled since February. With a team of just 12 employees, Vera has reached clinicians in 190 countries, including approximately 1 in 4 physicians in Spain and Italy, largely through word of mouth. Vera Health is a clinical AI search engine that reasons like a clinician, helping physicians find and evaluate medical evidence in seconds.

Today, Vera Health announced a $28.5 million Series A led by Threshold Ventures, with participation from Mantis VC and SV Angel. Existing investors Y Combinator and Gradient, tripled down in the round, bringing the company’s total funding to $32 million. The investment will accelerate Vera Health’s mission to close the gap between what medicine knows and what every patient receives.

Only a few months after raising its Series A, Vera already has more daily active users than it had monthly active users at the time of the raise. Clinicians went from asking Vera a few thousand questions a day to asking hundreds of thousands, every single day.

“Clinicians are the best data scientists I’ve ever met. They make the call in seconds, with more evidence than any human could ever read,” said Taieb Bennani, Co-Founder of Vera Health. “The secret to building for them is to live and breathe the problem like no one else. Everyone on our team is a clinician, or the child or sibling of one, like Maxime and me. That passion translates into every detail of the product, and when you build with that kind of obsession, the product speaks for itself, and clinicians share it with their colleagues. We don’t have the biggest team or the most money. We have the people who care the most about getting it right.”

How does Vera Health differ from general-purpose AI tools?
Clinical AI is increasingly being used to help physicians navigate complex medical questions, but the ability to generate an accurate-sounding answer does not necessarily establish whether the underlying research is reliable. Medicine now publishes a new scientific paper roughly every 20 seconds. Chatbots are built to sound confident. Vera is built to be accurate, and honest when the evidence is thin. Physicians are expected to keep up with an expanding body of research while interpreting guidelines, evaluating treatment options and making decisions for individual patients, sometimes within seconds.

Vera Health finds the evidence first, then writes the answer. Its technology searches more than 60 million peer-reviewed publications, clinical guidelines, consensus statements and drug labels, evaluating sources based on study design, level of evidence, cohort size, recency, journal quality and citation impact. Every claim is linked to its supporting research and color-coded to show the strength of the available evidence. Sometimes that color is red. A rare condition may have no large randomized trial or comprehensive guideline behind it, leaving only a small case series or a report involving a single patient. Vera Health surfaces that research while making its limitations visible, allowing physicians to assess how much weight the findings deserve.

“Medical knowledge moves too quickly for any one clinician to read, and general-purpose AI tools can make uncertain evidence sound settled,” said Maxime Allouch, co-founder, Vera Health. “Unlike other tools, we believe there’s value in making uncertainty visible. The grade shapes what Vera retrieves and writes, while the clinician brings the patient, the context and the judgment.”

Vera Health developed its approach alongside physicians who evaluate medical evidence and help write the guidelines other clinicians follow. Through its partnership with the American College of Emergency Physicians (ACEP), the platform integrates ACEP clinical policies with source attribution, bringing medical society guidance directly into clinical research workflows.

“In medicine, not all evidence is equal,” said Scott M. Silvers, MD, FACEP, Chair of the American College of Emergency Physicians’ Clinical Policies Committee and former Chair of Emergency Medicine at Mayo Clinic. “A large, randomized trial and a case report should never carry the same weight, yet most AI tools blend them into the same confident answer. Level of evidence is the foundation of every guideline we write, and Vera Health is built on it.”

For Dr. Bernard P. Chang, Vera Health’s Chief Scientific Advisor and Vice Chair of Research in the Department of Emergency Medicine at Columbia University, the importance of clinical evidence extends to how physicians evaluate patients.

“On a recent emergency-department shift, I saw a young woman with cough and shortness of breath. The symptoms could easily be attributed to a routine respiratory illness,” said Chang. “Vera Health surfaced evidence that raised my concern for pulmonary embolism, a potentially life-threatening blood clot in the lungs, and led me to broaden my evaluation. What interests me isn’t AI simply providing an answer. It’s whether it can reliably surface evidence that challenges our initial assumptions and improves clinical reasoning. That’s what we’re now evaluating rigorously, inside the academic medical centers where medicine is actually practiced.”

Vera Health’s clinical advisors also include Christopher Baugh, MD, MBA, FACEP, Vice Chair of Clinical Affairs in Emergency Medicine at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Associate Professor of Emergency Medicine at Harvard Medical School. Its clinical council includes physician leaders affiliated with Mayo Clinic, Yale, Harvard, Columbia and Penn.

Why is Vera Health growing so quickly across international markets?
Bennani and Allouch grew up in families of physicians and initially developed Vera Health for their own fathers. What began with two users has since grown into a platform serving hundreds of thousands of clinicians, with physicians asking hundreds of thousands of questions each day. The company’s international growth reflects an approach built around a central reality of medicine. Medical knowledge is global, but clinical practice is local.

An emergency physician in France may follow different treatment guidelines than a physician in the United States. An oncologist reviewing a complex case may need an exhaustive evaluation of the available research, while an emergency physician needs a concise answer within seconds. Even physicians practicing the same specialty may follow different protocols depending on their institution.

Vera Health accounts for those differences by prioritizing locally relevant guidance while drawing on medical research from around the world. Through Vera Spaces, health systems can also integrate their own clinical protocols and pathways alongside national guidelines and international medical literature.

“Medicine is global, yet most tools in our space were built for a single geography,” said Allouch. “We went international from day one, because only a global view reveals what is truly local.”

The approach has helped Vera Health expand across Europe, where approximately 1 in 4 physicians in Spain and Italy and 1 in 7 in France use the platform, according to company data. Vera Health has achieved that international reach with a small team and a product that clinicians have largely discovered through their peers.

What will Vera Health’s Series A funding support next?
The financing will support further development of Vera Health’s clinical evidence infrastructure, expansion into additional healthcare markets and deeper partnerships with medical societies, publishers and health systems. The company will continue investing in locally relevant clinical guidance and tools that allow healthcare institutions to incorporate their own medical knowledge into the platform.

“In healthcare, trust is earned, not bought. Vera’s adoption among clinicians worldwide speaks to what Taieb and Maxime have built. By combining the most rigorous medical evidence with an understanding of each physician’s specialty, protocols and practice context, Vera makes the world’s medical knowledge relevant to how care is actually delivered. We believe that creates an enormous opportunity to improve global health,” said Andrew Brackin, Partner at Gradient.

“Vera is compelling because it starts with the evidence, not just an answer—helping clinicians find and assess the research behind a decision while making its strengths and limitations visible. By bringing that evidence to the point of care, Vera becomes a trusted clinical intelligence layer, not just another AI tool,” said Emily Melton, co-founder and managing partner of Threshold Ventures.

Vera Health will remain free for licensed clinicians and medical trainees worldwide as it expands access to medical evidence and locally relevant clinical guidance.

New medical knowledge takes an estimated 17 years to reach routine clinical practice, according to research published in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine. Vera Health aims to reduce the time physicians spend searching for and evaluating that knowledge, bringing relevant evidence closer to the moment clinical decisions are made.

“Our mission is to close the gap between what medicine knows and what every patient receives,” said Bennani. “Today, that gap is measured in years. We want it measured in seconds.”

About Vera Health
Vera Health is the search engine that reasons like a clinician, finding and grading evidence before showing the source, strength and limits behind every answer. More than 800,000 clinicians in 190 countries use Vera, which is free for licensed clinicians and trainees, never trains on clinicians’ questions, and is HIPAA and GDPR compliant and SOC 2 Type II certified. Founded in 2024 at Y Combinator by MIT graduates and sons of physicians Taieb Bennani and Maxime Allouch, Vera is headquartered in San Francisco and backed by Threshold Ventures, Gradient, Y Combinator, SV Angel and Mantis VC.

Learn more at verahealth.ai.

¹ Download data: Appark, worldwide App Store and Google Play downloads, June through [September] 2026.

Media Contact
Interdependence
(949) 259-6377 x 225
[email protected]

SOURCE Vera Health

OriginPoint Lands $200 Million-Plus Producing Team Led by Mortgage Industry Powerhouses, Daniel Arias & Ron Sequeira

The We Fund LA team will be instrumental in accelerating OriginPoint’s record-setting growth across Southern California.

LOS ANGELES, Oct. 27, 2026 — OriginPoint Mortgage today announced that the We Fund LA team, co- managed by Daniel Arias and Ron Sequeira, has joined the company from New American Funding, bringing more than $200 million in annual mortgage production and a well- established presence across Southern California.

With 22 years of industry experience, Arias has built a reputation as one of the nation’s leading mortgage professionals, serving borrowers and real estate partners throughout Los Angeles, Southern California and Santa Barbara. His career accomplishments include perennial President’s Council honors, recognition among the nation’s top 1% of mortgage originators, and distinction as a Scotsman Guide Top Originator year after year.

Daniel and Ron exemplify the unmatched talent fueling OriginPoint’s extraordinary growth,” said James Elliott, President & CEO of OriginPoint. “They’re not only powerhouse originators but also exceptional leaders who understand lasting success is built on relationships and results. In today’s market, the best originators aren’t looking for just another lender. They’re looking for a competitive advantage. Our job is to give exceptional people the resources, support and freedom to dominate their markets. We’re thrilled to welcome the We Fund LA team to the OriginPoint family, and I couldn’t be more excited about what we’ll accomplish together.”

Through We Fund LA, Arias, Sequeira, and team have distinguished themselves by combining an extensive range of financing solutions with proprietary technology and a highly personalized approach to service. Their focus on solving complex financing challenges and delivering a seamless client experience has helped establish lasting relationships with borrowers and real estate professionals throughout the region.

For Arias, the decision to join OriginPoint reflects his commitment to continued growth and delivering exceptional value in an increasingly competitive lending environment. “During challenging times, there is a flight to quality, which is why our team continues to grow market share no matter what environment we find ourselves in,” said Arias. “That’s always been the foundation of our success at We Fund LA. Joining OriginPoint gives us the opportunity to build on that momentum with a platform that shares our commitment to exceptional service, competitive pricing and doing what’s right for the customer. We’re excited about this next chapter and confident that the best is still ahead of us.”

The addition of Arias, Sequeira, and the We Fund LA team underscores OriginPoint’s continued investment in top-tier talent and its commitment to providing mortgage professionals with access to the unmatched power of the Compass International Holdings relationship, competitive pricing, industry-leading technology, and the operational support needed to grow their businesses.

About OriginPoint

OriginPoint is a top national mortgage lender built for high-performing mortgage professionals, the borrowers they serve, and the real estate agents they partner with. Combining the strength, scale and resources of a broad platform with the agility, responsiveness and personalized service of a relationship-driven mortgage company, OriginPoint truly offers the best of both worlds.

For borrowers and referral partners alike, OriginPoint’s approach is grounded in local expertise, clear communication, and practical guidance. The company works to make home financing more understandable and efficient while helping its teams build the trusted relationships that drive long-term success. By bringing together exceptional mortgage professionals, innovative tools, and an unrelenting commitment to service, OriginPoint is redefining what mortgage lending can look like for today’s market.

For more information, visit www.OriginPoint.com.

Contact Information
Daniel Arias
We Fund LA | OriginPoint Mortgage
NMLS #4461805
Phone: (323) 697-3240
Email: [email protected]

SOURCE OriginPoint

Byzfunder Names Filippo Guidi Chief Strategy Officer to Lead Capital Markets, Strategic Planning and Ventures

Former TimePayment CFO joins Byzfunder, one of the fastest-growing small-business lenders, with more than $2 billion funded across over 35,000 businesses.

NEW YORK, Oct. 27, 2026 — Byzfunder, a small-business lender, today announced the appointment of Filippo Guidi as Chief Strategy Officer. Mr. Guidi joined the company in October 2026 and will oversee capital markets, strategic planning, and ventures and partnerships.

Mr. Guidi brings more than twenty years in finance across operating, banking and investing roles. Most recently he was Chief Financial Officer and Chief Administrative Officer of TimePayment, a micro-ticket equipment lessor, where he led the company’s sale from Fortress Investment Group to BasePoint Capital. Earlier he was an investment banker at J.P. Morgan and Evercore Partners, and an investor at Silver Point Capital and Madison Dearborn Partners. He holds a bachelor’s degree in Economics with honors from the University of Chicago.

Mr. Guidi’s appointment reflects Byzfunder’s commitment to expanding its reach in the small-business lending market and securing a larger, more diversified base of institutional funding. His mandate is to deepen capital-markets relationships, strategic planning and develop strategic partnerships that support the company’s next stage of growth.

“Our next phase of growth is about expanding our reach in small-business lending and securing the capital to support it,” said Ilya Fridman, Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Byzfunder. “Filippo has sat where our investors sit, and he has run the finance function of a lender at scale. That experience is exactly what we need as we build the capital structure to support Byzfunder’s next stage of growth.”

“Byzfunder has the two things that are hard to build and easy to claim: real origination volume and real underwriting data.” said Mr. Guidi. “More than $2 billion funded across over 35,000 businesses is not a pitch deck, it is a track record, and it is the basis for a serious conversation with institutional capital. My job is to turn that record into durable, diversified funding and into partnerships that reach small businesses the banks have stopped serving.”

Byzfunder provides financing to small and medium-sized businesses, including directly from its own balance sheet, with underwriting driven by business performance rather than credit score alone. Mr. Guidi’s responsibilities span the full capital stack — securitization, warehouse and forward-flow relationships — alongside strategic ventures, partnerships, and strategic planning, including the financial planning and analysis function that measures them.

In 2026, Byzfunder closed its inaugural $170 million KBRA-rated asset-backed securitization.

About Byzfunder

Byzfunder is a small-business lender providing working capital to small and medium-sized businesses across the United States. Founded in 2019, the company has funded more than $2 billion across over 35,000 businesses. Businesses can apply online and may receive funding the same business day.

For more information, visit byzfunder.com.

Media Contact
Xin Hamilton, CMO
[email protected]
byzfunder.com


SOURCE Byzfunder

Teragonia Expands Astradis™, the AI Operating System for PE-Backed Companies, and Makes Talk2Astra Generally Available

Astradis now runs the data engine behind every pipeline, so defensible numbers arrive in weeks. In January 2027, it goes headless.

CHICAGO, Oct. 27, 2026 — Teragonia today announced new Astradis™ capabilities and the general availability of Talk2Astra, its conversational intelligence agent.

PE-backed companies face a similar problem: answers exist, but they’re scattered across disparate systems. A question that should take seconds takes days, and can’t be defended to a board. The usual fix, a warehouse build, takes up to 18 months, nearly a third of a five-year hold. Astradis connects scattered data to the P&L in one governed foundation and now runs the data engine in a single portal, with pipelines running on schedule or whenever new data arrives.

“Data readiness is the hardest part of deploying AI that works,” said Thomas Thayyil Thomas, CEO and Founder of Teragonia. “Astradis builds a four-layer data foundation within weeks, so results show up in EBITDA immediately.”

Astradis connects systems through 700+ prebuilt connectors and turns contracts, invoices, and emails into governed data. Its patent-pending Data Modeling Autopilot drafts the data model for expert approval, compressing months into weeks. A shared ontology and knowledge graph let AI reason over the business, with answers scored and traceable.

“Connecting an AI model to company data is the easy part,” said Dr. Sai Mali Ananthanarayanan, Chief AI Officer and Co-Founder. “Trust comes from the foundation underneath, so leaders can explain exactly how a number was calculated.”

With Talk2Astra, an executive asks in plain English, such as which active recalls lack a documented protocol response, and gets the figure, source, definitions, and next steps. Unlike general-purpose assistants, Talk2Astra answers on your business.

Coming January 2027, Astradis goes headless. Astradis MCP opens governed data, metrics and ontology to the tools a company already uses, so executives get defensible answers where they work and can choose best-of-breed tools freely.

Astradis deploys in as little as 48 hours. Core systems connect within two weeks. By week three, your raw data is mapped to the KPIs you run the business on.

Email [email protected] or visit teragonia.com/astradis-platform to learn more.

About Teragonia

Teragonia’s mission is speed to value at PE velocity. Teragonia turns private equity value creation playbooks into agents that drive the operating rhythm of mid-market businesses within commercial, operations and finance functions.

Media contact
Chelsey Krull
[email protected]

SOURCE Teragonia

EDGE Sound Research to Scale Perception Infrastructure for Physical AI

Strategic investment by Stormbreaker Ventures brings total funding to $9 million as the company
expands its proprietary sensor data from live sports into physical AI, robotics and intelligent systems

RIVERSIDE, Calif., Oct. 27, 2026 — EDGE Sound Research, the company building perception infrastructure for AI to understand the physical world, today announced an additional $2 million in funding led by Stormbreaker Ventures, bringing total funding to $9 million. The new capital will fund continued deployments with live sports broadcasters, leagues and venues, expansion of its proprietary multimodal sensor data, and development of new applications for physical AI, robotics, autonomous systems and intelligent environments.

As AI moves into robotics, autonomous systems and intelligent environments, its ability to understand and act in the real world depends on not just what a camera sees, but on what else is happening around it. Real-world environments are noisy and sound provides valuable context, including activity outside a camera’s view.

EDGE Sound is building perception infrastructure that isolates useful sounds and combines them with other sensor data to help systems interpret what is happening in real time. Its platform captures signals from microphones and sensor arrays already installed in a space, isolates individual sources and events out of overlapping noise, and fuses them with video, tracking, timing and location data. The output is a structured, real-time picture of a scene: what happened, where, when and to which object. In sports, for example, those outputs can allow a broadcaster to automatically follow an individual player’s audio throughout a game. And rather than replacing the cameras, trackers and sensors an operator already owns, EDGE Sound connects them into a single interpretation layer.

Live sports gave EDGE an immediate commercial market while allowing the company to develop and validate its perception technology in some of the most complex, noisy real-world environments. Its Virtual Sound Engine is already deployed commercially across live sports, with customers and partners including Shure, the NBA, Fox Sports, the United States Tennis Association and others.

“Today’s robots and intelligent systems are like toddlers. They can reason at a high-level, but they don’t consider their full surroundings before making a decision,” said Valtteri Salomaki, co-founder and CEO of EDGE Sound Research. “Toddlers grow by combining what they hear, see and feel, then learning from what happens next. Machines don’t have that loop yet. We started with sound because it’s the signal most systems throw away, and solving it forced us to connect every other sensor in the room. A broadcaster following one player through a game and a robot knowing something happened behind it are the same problem.”

EDGE Sound’s approach grew out of doctoral research at the University of California, Riverside, where co-founders Valtteri Salomaki and Dr. Ethan Castro approached sound from two different perspectives. Castro, who was born hard of hearing and became a professional musician and composer, studied how people perceive their surroundings through hearing and physical vibration. Salomaki, whose background includes information systems, marketing and emerging technologies, viewed sound as a source of data. Together, those perspectives became the foundation for EDGE’s approach to perception.

“Every conversation about physical AI runs into the same wall. The models and the robots are ready, but the underlying systems cannot reliably tell what is happening in real time,” said Said Mia, Founder and Managing Partner at Stormbreaker Ventures. “EDGE is building that perception layer, and building it with paying customers in one of the most acoustically hostile environments there is. The team spent years on how humans actually understand their surroundings, and they are turning that into the infrastructure physical AI desperately needs.”

To learn more about EDGE Sound Research, visit www.edgesoundresearch.com.

About EDGE Sound Research

EDGE Sound Research builds perception infrastructure that helps computers understand the physical world by combining sound with video, tracking, timing, location and other sensor data. Its platform isolates individual sounds and events from noisy real-world settings and connects them with the broader context of an environment. Founded in 2020 out of research at the University of California, Riverside, EDGE works with leagues, broadcasters, venues and technology partners including the NBA, Fox Sports, the United States Tennis Association and Shure, and is extending its software to broader applications in physical AI, robotics, autonomous systems and intelligent environments. For more information, visit www.edgesoundresearch.com.

About Stormbreaker Ventures

Stormbreaker Ventures is an early-stage venture firm investing in the connectivity infrastructure powering AI, including Open RAN and AI-RAN, private 5G, satellite-cellular convergence, edge compute, IoT, connected mobility, and U.S. manufacturing modernization. Led by veteran operators and founders like Glenn Lurie, former President and CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Operations; Wade Oosterman, founder of Clearnet Communications; Derek Aberle, former President of Qualcomm; and Andy Funk, a three-time founder who built and sold Virtela and OverWatchID, Stormbreaker brings decades of experience building and scaling category-defining companies across telecommunications, mobility and enterprise technology. For more information, visit www.stormbreaker.vc.

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SOURCE EDGE Sound Research