Nick Durham

📊 AmTech Daily: Deals Defining America's Future — Feb 25, 2026 Each morning, Commonweal Ventures compiles the day's top #AmTech deals and news at the intersection of government and technology. Here's today's. Comment "Subscribe" to get the full briefing, news included, in your inbox. Education  🔹 Subject (Beverly Hills, CA), which offers an AI-powered digital curriculum platform for middle and high school students, raised $28 million in funding led by Vistara Growth, joined by NextEquity Partners, Green Street Impact Partners, Outcomes Collective Growth Capital, and other existing investors. Health  🔹 Handl Health (Los Angeles, CA), which provides an analytics platform to help health plans and benefits consultants design employer health benefits that lower costs and improve care quality, raised $14.2 million in Series A funding led by Arthur Ventures, joined by Syndra Capital Partners, a strategic investor, Mucker Capital, Riverfront Ventures, Digital Health Venture Partners, and Boutique Venture Partners. Aerospace  🔹 Sophia Space (Pasadena, CA), building orbital data centers composed of ultra-thin, solar-powered computer panels called TILES that sit on or next to satellites, raised $10 million in seed funding led by Alpha Funds, KDDI Corporation Green Partners Fund, and Unlock Venture Partners. Finance  🔹 Comeryx Insurance (Denver, CO), which runs an AI-driven online insurance platform that automatically prices and issues specialty liability coverage for small trade contractors that traditional carriers won't easily underwrite, raised $7.5 million in seed funding led by Altai Ventures, joined by American Family Ventures, Intact Ventures, Boulder Ventures, Arch Capital Group, and Echelon. AI Chips  🔹 Cerebras (Sunnyvale, CA), which designs wafer-scale AI chips and computer systems that let large organizations train and run advanced AI models faster and more efficiently, has confidentially filed to go public in the U.S. after previously raising more than $2.5 billion in private funding across eight rounds. Energy  🔹 Terrasmart's eBOS division (Grand Rapids, MI), which makes prefabricated electrical wiring and combiner-box systems that connect utility-scale solar panels to inverters and the grid, was acquired by GameChange Energy Technologies for $70 million to extend its end-to-end solar infrastructure offering. What is #AmTech? It's our term for the companies tackling America's biggest challenges in sectors like energy, defense, healthcare, and infrastructure. In these markets, the path to building category-winning companies runs through government, and the founders who understand that are building the most consequential technology businesses of our generation.

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I've spent over a decade backing founders shaping the built world and there's never been a more exciting time to be doing it with the arrival of AI-native proptech. VerbaFlo.AI is one of those companies, and we’re excited to lead the round alongside Haatch, Navigate Ventures and Old College Capital. Verbaflo is replacing the fragmented chaos of tenant communication with a single AI layer that runs leasing, operations and resident engagement 24/7. Eleven months in and the numbers already speak for themselves, with Verbaflo powering communication across 230,000+ units globally. The best proptech companies of the last decade made real estate more efficient, the next wave will make it autonomous. This is the future our new fund, Pi Labs Fund IV, is excited to back, vertical AI that becomes core to how the built world operates, not just another tool in the tech stack. Onwards Sayantan Biswas Abhishek Garg Dan Smith VP Singh If you're an investor who wants to understand where vertical AI is creating real value across real assets and construction, reach out to LP@pilabs.vc 📩 🔗 Read more on why we invested here Tech.eu: https://lnkd.in/dDeN-fVT

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Capital Isn’t the Strategy—Clarity Is In a market awash with capital, the real scarcity is clarity. At R² Partners, we’re often brought in after the pitch deck has been built, the capital allocated, and the path defined—yet something still feels misaligned. Because strategy without clarity is just expensive motion. We ask harder questions. Not “What are you building?” but “Why should it exist? Why now? Why you?” Capital doesn’t create coherence. Thoughtful design does. #StrategicClarity #CapitalDiscipline #FounderAdvice #R2Partners

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Huge step forward from the Dyad team. AI that actually clears the inbox and kills rekeying (not just talks about it): 📨 Email Triage Agent to route submissions automatically 📃 Extractor to pull data from PDFs straight into ALIS DX If you’re an MGA, wholesaler, or program administrator who wants teams focused on underwriting, not manual work, this is worth a look: https://hubs.la/Q03T_Q1S0

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Founders make dozens of decisions every week. Make sure you're one of the founders who go back to check how those decisions played out. It's easy to remember the wins and explain away the misses. If you don't actively work against that, you end up with a growing confidence in your own judgment that's never actually been tested. I was in a session with a founding team that had been running for years. Experienced, sharp, deep domain knowledge. When I asked how they make product and prioritization decisions, the answer was honest: "From experience. But we don't always revisit those critically." Their experience had created assumptions that felt like facts. Hardwired beliefs about customers, pricing, and priorities that hadn't been questioned since they were first formed. In another company, a founder had a real "lightbulb" moment when she realized they'd been tracking customer data for billing and sales, but never for learning. The data to evaluate their own assumptions was sitting right there. They just hadn't thought to look at it that way. This isn't really about "data vs. gut." Most founders use both, in some mix, all the time. The deeper question is whether you have any feedback loop on your own decision-making. When you made a bet on a customer segment six months ago, do you remember what you assumed? Did it turn out to be true? If not, what did that teach you? The founders who build the best companies hold themselves accountable for their own calls. They go back, check what happened, and adjust their compass. That's how intuition actually develops. Not through experience alone, but through experience that's been honestly examined. Every correction makes the next decision a little sharper. Don't let your ego or the pace of the business stop you from developing the one asset that compounds over time: your judgement.

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We didn’t start Smart Access because we wanted to build a startup. We started because we saw something that felt fundamentally broken. Inside one of the largest retailers in North America, some of the most sophisticated distribution networks in the world were still relying on pen, paper, spreadsheets, and manual observation to understand how work was actually getting done. The systems to plan and optimize existed, but the visibility into execution didn’t. So we started building. What began with 2 people writing the first lines of code has grown into a team of 35 and counting. Along the way, we’ve had the privilege of working with operators who run some of the most demanding distribution environments and push us every day to make execution easier to understand and improve. Today, we’re announcing our $12M Series A led by Lobby Capital, with participation from Aspenwood Ventures and Coelius Capital. Milestones like this are energizing. But they also raise the standard. Huge thank you to our team, our customers, and the early believers who chose to build with us before anything was certain. John White Jon Smelquist Kyle Jeske Amar Sandhu Dylan Maclean Lini Sarma Greg Barone Patrick Lor 🚀 Arden Tse Tim Hodge Neil Frizzell Sara Mohajerani Colin Kay Lars Leckie Mark Benning Zach Coelius Eric Carlborg James Franzone Dion Lisle Courtney Sotherland Roddenberry, PHR Chris Allen Sarmistha Boal Ben Mollman Chris Stedman, CFA Bill Kennedy David Lord Amanda Regnier Chris Neumann Xabier Ormazabal Wade Shearer Jeremy Weintraub Paul Bellows Chris Squires Joanne Fedeyko Jamie Knowlton

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Our WillowTree Ventures dinner brought together an incredible group of fintech and AI operators. What struck me most was the consistency across perspectives: AI is finally unlocking tangible value in workflows, personalization is becoming real, and some of the biggest opportunities sit in the corners most people overlook. Founders building for financial services and enterprise AI deserve more conversations like these. Grateful to everyone who made time, and if you’re tackling one of these “non-sexy but massive” markets, let’s talk. Here are some key takeaways - AI is still about efficiency. The most serious near-term initiatives focus on automation, workflow augmentation, and operational leverage across teams. - Tech orgs continue to control the AI agenda. Budgets and decision-making largely sit with product and engineering, who are driving both exploration and implementation. - Personalization at scale is becoming real. There was broad agreement that AI can finally enable true 1:1 experiences in products and services, not just improved segmentation. - The most interesting opportunities are in “boring” corners. Non-traditional and overlooked segments are wide open for AI. “Non-sexy is sexy” may define the next wave of category creators. - Crypto is still early in the enterprise. Despite broader excitement, real day-to-day adoption remains nascent and uneven.

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At Vibe Capital, we believe we're at a major inflection point. For the last 40 years, the highest-leverage work was in manipulating bits. That era is maturing into a utility. The new frontier is the physical world, and the race to program it has begun. In my latest Dave's Quick Hits newsletter, I map out the three fundamental stacks for rebuilding reality: 1. The Biological Path: Using AI to turn evolution into an engineering discipline, creating new materials and medicines at an incredible speed. 2. The Mechanical Path: Deploying AI-directed robots and self-replicating factories to trigger a new industrial explosion. 3. The Cybernetic Path: Building the final API to the brain, merging human cognition directly with our biological and mechanical creations. The generational alpha won't come from funding the next app, but from financing the means of physical creation. You can read the full analysis and the investment theses for each path here. https://lnkd.in/gAXNDaZF #FrontierTech #VentureCapital #Investing #DeepTech #AI #Manufacturing #Biotech #vibecap #vibecapital

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Few stories in American business are as remarkable as that of Fernando De Leon. He grew up in Matamoros, Mexico, crossed the border daily to attend school in Brownsville, Texas, and at 12 represented South Texas in the National Spelling Bee. He went on to Harvard University, then Goldman Sachs — and walked away at 25 to bet on himself. He launched Leon Capital Group in 2006, just before the financial crisis, and went "all in 200 times in a row" — buying what others were fleeing and building from the ground up. Today, Leon Capital is a Dallas-based family holding company with a portfolio exceeding $10 billion across real estate, healthcare, and financial services. What makes Fernando's model so compelling isn't just the scale — it's the structure. Permanent capital. Proprietary deal flow. Operating discipline that institutional PE simply can't replicate. He's redefining what a family office can be. This conversation with The Distribution by Juniper Square is worth your time. #FamilyOffice C. Travis Pittman

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Access changes everything. Lowering the Jetstream Venture Fund minimum to $5,000 creates a new entry point for people who want exposure to high-growth companies. Excited to see where this goes. Full details in the press release below.

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Thrilled to share the launch of Criticality, a $65M fund built to back founders solving hard, high-leverage problems at the intersection of technical complexity and real-world urgency. Criticality builds on the foundation we’ve laid at Antler - applying our conviction-driven approach to companies at Seed & Series A. The fund is sector-flexible but applies a deep tech lens to each opportunity, targeting non-obvious, high-leverage problems from the earliest stages of company formation. Grateful to the New Mexico State Investment Council for their support in anchoring Criticality. More to come soon from Cash Allred & I.

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AI is as transformative as it is overwhelming. When we searched for a comprehensive resource to empower and guide Real Estate CEOs and Leaders in navigating this pivotal moment, we came up empty-handed—so we decided to create one ourselves. “Real Estate AI: A CEO’s Guide to What Matters” is an unbiased, in-depth, and actionable handbook designed for: - Leaders at any stage of the AI adoption journey, from skeptics and beginners to seasoned experts - Owners, operators, developers, and investors - Across sectors, including #singlefamily, #multifamily, #commercial, #industrial, #hospitality, and #construction Our hope is that this guide equips you with the confidence and knowledge to lead your organization through the #AI transformation and embrace the future with clarity and purpose.

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Check back if you missed it! The world is changing around us and it makes sense to own a piece of it. Remember we have two entry points into deep tech: 1) go direct into the CR Fund 2) write a small check into AIM Company *Must be accredited. Sorry, government rules, not mine.

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We’re excited to announce our investment in LightTable a team on a mission to bring AI-powered quality control to developers and general contractors. Before a project breaks ground, developers spend billions manually reviewing drawings and specs - a slow, fragmented process that drives $500B in annual waste. LightTable’s AI catches design issues 5x more effectively and 15x faster than human reviewers, creating the first true system of record for pre-construction. Looking forward to seeing Paul Zeckser, Dan Becker, Ben Waters, and team build toward a fully AI-assisted design future. Read more about why we invested here: https://lnkd.in/d8rFuhdm

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Greenfield Partners is proud to be deepening our partnership with Capitolis as they announce today a $56M strategic round. If you’ve spent time in market infrastructure, you know how rare it is to see deep market insight paired with real product velocity. The team at Capitolis has both, and the result is infrastructure that makes capital markets safer and more efficient. We’re increasing our investment alongside Barclays, BNP Paribas, J.P. Morgan, fellow investors Canapi Ventures, 9Yards Capital, and existing investors Citi, Morgan Stanley, State Street, and UBS to fuel the next stages of Capitolis’ Capital Marketplace and Portfolio Optimization solutions. https://lnkd.in/exK8nQYx Kudos to Gil Mandelzis and the entire Capitolis team!

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The future of corporate venture capital isn’t about optionality or one-off M&A wins. It’s about designing modular, industry-specific platforms that flex and scale with market needs. In this article, I share a playbook for how CVCs can move from cheque-writers to ecosystem architects, building future-ready platforms one module at a time.   Let’s stop acquiring the future and start assembling it. https://lnkd.in/gWSjg9fT

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30+ VCs Backing Marketplace Startups Below is a cross-stage, cross-sector mix of firms that back marketplace and platform companies early and support them as they grow. Consumer and platform investors Upfront Ventures 1752vc (Formerly Pegasus) BAM Ventures Forerunner Brand Foundry Ventures Maveron BoxGroup Greycroft Alumni Ventures Marketplace natives and network effects specialists FJ Labs NFX Great Oaks Venture Capital RiverPark Ventures Left Lane Capital First Round Capital Lerer Hippeau Precursor Ventures Seed partners building two-sided platforms early Founder Collective NextView Ventures Uncork Capital Slow Ventures Bling Capital Gaingels Initialized Capital Felicis Multi-stage firms backing marketplace winners at scale Accel Bessemer Venture Partners Lightspeed General Catalyst New Enterprise Associates (NEA) Kleiner Perkins Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) Founders Fund

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🚀 Excited to announce our investment in Waiv, formerly Owkin Dx as part of their €35M funding round. A truly outstanding team, led by Meriem Sefta and Lionel Guillou, redefining diagnostics by building the most comelling platform at the intersection of AI and precision medicine.

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