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Sometimes a startup makes a lot of public noise as it develops. And sometimes it just works away, popping its head up every once in a while to announce a meaningful milestone. MatX is the latter. Founded by two ex-Google Tensor Flow engineers, they’ve been quietly building specialized LLM chips optimized for a world being changed by AI. And while they tend to not speak at conferences, or write a Substack, or, well, say much of anything beyond their website, they did share a bit of good news this week, namely a $100+ Million Series A led by Spark Capital.

MatX is now fully capitalized to bring their systems to market with an amazing, highly technical team of 50+ people! And of course if you are passionate about building the best chips for LLMs, well, they’re hiring.

Shield AI doesn’t fit in your typical ‘defense tech’ box. For one, it was cofounded by a Navy SEAL vet, so there’s no glorification of the traumas conflict can cause to its combatants and civilians. Second, it was founded in 2015 when “gov tech” was a dirty word to most VCs and very few wanted anything to do with our nation’s military needs. And lastly, they long for a world without war - as they often tell their team, investors, and customers, their mission is “Autonomy for the world. The greatest victory requires no war.”

We can speak to these truths because we were fortunate enough to be the largest investor in their seed round and Satya sat on their Board for many years, through critical milestones in the company’s trajectory. And so it’s with pride and admiration that we see them well on their way to becoming one of the most important public sector startups of the 21st century.

There are many more challenges and tremendous work ahead to fulfill that promise, but it’s galvanizing to see financial and strategic investors get behind the Shield vision. Most recently this support has taken the form of a $240 million funding round, at a $5.3 billion valuation. As Bloomberg notes in its coverage of the round,

ShieldAI’s Hivemind software aims to make it easier for more developers and businesses to create autonomous hardware. The company’s tools can also help pilot autonomous vehicles ranging from one-way attack drones to F-16s, and support swarming operations. Shield says its software can allow vehicles to execute complex missions autonomously, including when GPS and communications are jammed.

Onward Shield AI! And if working for a transformative, mission-driven, well-capitalized American company appeals to you, they are definitely hiring.

From our earliest days working with the Albert founders it felt like there was the potential for something special. And while we can certainly debate whether venture funding is a leading or lagging indication of success (we’d argue the latter), it was great to see them get a strong Series A done last year. Well, we’re back to this blog sooner than we expected to share some additional financing news. Namely, an expansion of the round with $20 million more led by JP Morgan at a $270 million valuation, twice the valuation of the previous close.

The Albert team is spending zero time celebrating though. Instead, they just see this all as the opportunity to move quickly to address overwhelming customer demand for its software. That’s why their own announcement of the financing was more focused on upcoming demo sessions than patting themselves on the back.

Want to see how AI is transforming chemistry and materials science? Join their upcoming webinars:

🔬 How Scientists Invent Faster with Albert

📅 Wednesday, March 12, 2025, with sessions at 10AM PT and 3PM CET

🇺🇸 Register for the USA session: https://lnkd.in/eX5TZTSi

🇪🇺 Register for the EU session: https://lnkd.in/eD2RBvrP

And if working at an exciting, well-funded company like Albert appeals to you, they’re hiring.

It’s certainly an extraordinary time in technology right now. But innovation breakthroughs themselves don’t create great products and enduring companies. No, for those you need extraordinary founders and teams, too. Enter Helen Hastings and Quanta, the fastest accounting service for software companies.

The Quanta team is purpose built for this mission. Starting with Helen herself, who spent 5+ years at Affirm, building systems of record and an offline ledger for their accounting and finance teams. She’s joined by a team that has engineered financial systems at Stripe and Affirm, and led accounting teams at Notion and Intercom. They know what they’re building and who they’re building it for. They’ve started with a general ledger integrated into an AI powered accounting engine which allows customers to easily automate routing tasks.

The goals? Speed, reliability, and expertise (both built into the product and available to support customers as needed via Slack).

The impact? Before Quanta, their users didn't receive a draft of their books until, on average, more than 3 weeks after the month ended—and many days more to get them finalized. This means they didn't see January 1st data until around February 28th, and sometimes even longer. Now, users tell Quanta they use their up-to-date finances for strategic purposes multiple times a week.

The startup has been quietly building for a core set of customers over the past quarters and today is announcing its $4.7 million seed round, which Homebrew was fortunate to participate in.

If you think Quanta might help your software company, you can now check them out - early stage companies should be able to onboard and get a quick draft of their finances, easily and 24/7.

And if a company like Quanta sounds like where you want to continue your professional career, they’re hiring.

Software eats the world? We prefer software enables the world. Over the past decade Homebrew has had the chance to see founders bring technology to industries that pre-date the PC, developing modern tooling for talented professionals. One great example is Monograph, which has quickly become a budgeting and collaboration system of record for the architecture industry. These companies need collaboration, a single source of truth, and the ability to pull together crossfunctional teams on a project by project basis. Monograph does this - and more - for them.

Homebrew has been fortunate enough to back this company since its earliest days so while none of what they’ve accomplished surprises us, we are very excited about the work still left to do. And thrilled that Monograph is announcing a $20 million investment, led by Base10.

If you think Monograph can help your company, let them know. And if you want to work at a well-funded, fast growing SaaS company, they’re hiring.

Whether it’s humans writing the code, machines writing the code, or a hybrid, one thing is for sure: you better QA that code. That’s where Ranger comes in. Ranger is the first and only AI product that writes, runs, and maintains QA tests that find real bugs. Its mission is straight-forward: power testing for the world’s most ambitious engineering, product, and design teams so they can get back to building.

So many of our friends already knew Ranger’s CEO Josh Ip that it felt almost natural to join them in the recently announced seed round. That conviction grew as we spent time with Josh and realized he’s our favorite personality type: love in his heart, chip on his shoulder. And it doesn’t surprise us that many wonderful folks came together on the cap table since we all recognize the potential here.

See Ranger at work here or book a demo.

Or, if working at a place like Ranger sounds exciting to you, they’re hiring.

AI is moving rapidly into every industry - and in marketing the velocity is especially high. That’s why Masterful is joining Moloco, one of the leaders in machine learning powered advertising solutions. In Masterful CEO Tom Rikert’s own words:

Over the past 6 years, Moloco has become one of the fastest growing ad tech companies in history (100X growth), with billions in ad spend across 3 products. We’re excited to join this rocket ship with our team and technology, and we saw so many synergies: huge customer empathy, deep ML experience, and a product-driven culture. Over the years I’ve also seen some of my most talented former colleagues join Moloco. Knowing them, I can also say it’s not just a high-performance team, but also a company full of good human beings.

Congratulations to Tom and team! We know they will have a huge impact at Moloco.

Software may be eating the world but there’s still quite a bit left to digest! Many large industrial companies are taking a hard look at what benefits can be gained from the wave of AI-driven software, especially as it impacts research and development, their core driver of innovation. Fortunately startups are rising to this challenge and in the chemical engineering industry that startup is Albert.

After using its seed round to build a robust product and prove market demand, Albert saw opportunities to put more resources behind its efforts, raising a $22.5 million Series A from Coatue. Its platform takes best-of-class SaaS tools and integrates proprietary AI models. In the words of cofounder/CEO Nick Talken, “you don’t want to just take the corpus of data on the internet. You need to take domain-specific knowledge. And so we’ve taken pretty much the entire public information space around chemistry, around 15 million molecules, built a foundational model, and that’s what powers Albert Breakthrough.”

It’s been a joy to work with the Albert team since their seed financing and Homebrew continues our support in the Series A. If you want to join a smart, global, focused team on hard software and science problems, Albert is hiring.

We know, we know, #DadJoke. Couldn’t help it. But appropriate because the Gatheround team built with both focus and joy. They had a vision for what employee engagement, collaboration and conversation could look like that went beyond the standard video conference or all hands slide show. And culture-forward customers like Lyft, Gusto, Salesforce, Cisco and others all agreed.

Ultimately, to reach the largest number of customers, Gatheround believed it could be an important part of a like-minded company’s business, versus going it alone. Gatheround CEO and cofounder Lisa Conn threw herself into this discovery process in a manner which impressed us and further solidified our view of her as a founder, leader, and executive we want to work with repeatedly. And when Donut raised its hand as a ‘best fit’ home, Homebrew enthusiastically supported the combination.

Congratulations to the Donut leadership. You added a great product and team that will hopefully take your business to even greater heights.

What if it was possible to deliver cargo to anywhere in the world, within minutes, from space? Well, the gap between potential and reality for this vision is compressing rapidly as a result of the innovations from Inversion Space. The company just announced a $44 million Series A raise to power the next set of technical and commercial milestones. Homebrew is excited to become an investor alongside our friends at Spark, YC, Kindred and others.

Both the public and private sector are eager for Inversion’s capabilities, as evidenced by the $71 million contract from SpaceWERX awarded earlier this fall. In CEO Justin Fiaschetti’s own words, “there are times like natural disasters and some national security situations in which you need the thing at the location immediately. You can prepare for that need maybe even years in advance, but not for the time or place."

If working on next generation space technology sounds like it should be your next adventure, Inversion Space is hiring.

We’ve had the chance to watch the Cometa team build since their earliest days coming out of the Stanford GSB, and we’re now excited to increase our support as part of a $12 million Series A led by our friends at Reach Capital.

Cometa has built a software platform used by private schools in Mexico to manage their business operations, including admissions, payments, and other financial reporting. With this funding the company will continue expanding in-country and in-region, from over 350 schools today on the platform. 90%+ of the private schools in the region are family owned, and Cometa is helping them embrace software to help more efficiently run their businesses, so they can put students and education first.

If building software + fintech for LatAm schools sounds like it should be your next adventure, Cometa is hiring.

Just as the most effective sales programs today are omnichannel, the future is omniagent, blending humans and AI agents to create an effective, personalized and hyperscalable revenue-driving machine. That’s where Regal comes in.

Regal’s platform is a system of record for your sales efforts, spanning both inbound and outbound flows. Every interaction is personalized and aided by AI, all the way through to the future of AI agents across phone, text, email and chat. Regal also provides analytics, visibility, and a testing platform, so no more black boxes or just managing via vibes.

Given the quickly expanding capabilities of its technology and the hundreds of customers already on board, it’s not surprising that Regal has attracted attention from the investor community. The company is excited to announce a $40 million raise to continue growing the team, product and sales efforts.

If a quick moving, well-funded, software startup transforming the sales industry via AI sounds interesting to you, they’re hiring.

There’s no doubt that smart machines working alongside humans are the future in almost every industry, but each vertical has its own unique opportunities and challenges. The variability of tasks in a warehouse is extensive so any robotics and automation are going to need to accommodate a variety of layouts, job types, and customer workflows. And that’s where Third Wave Automation comes in.

Their tagline of “putting AI to work and keeping humans in the loop” speaks to the functional breadth of their Shared Autonomy Platform. The TWA forklifts can operate autonomously or seek help from remote operators who can take control from the safety of their office. And they’re also able to operate in four modes: fully autonomous, remote assist, remote operation and traditional manual operation. Combine innovations around machine learning and mapping, and these forklifts integrate seamlessly into any warehouse management system.

With all of this technology - and customer success - it’s not surprising that Third Wave Automation continues to attract capital, now with an additional $27 million round, led by Woven Capital, Toyota’s growth fund.

Congrats to the Third Wave Automation team!

We’re in. That was basically our response upon learning that Nir Zicherman and Mike Mignano were building another company. After having had the pleasure of backing Anchor, their previous startup, which democratized podcasting (and exited successfully to Spotify), we were excited they were turning their attention to learning with Oboe.

In Nir’s own words:

Today, so much of our focus is spent on making machines smarter. At Oboe, we believe it’s time for machines to make humans smarter.

At Oboe, we’re building products aimed at empowering those billions of people to learn exactly what they want to learn, ten times more efficiently, effectively, and affordably than ever before. Our vision for the future is one in which knowledge is much more easily attained, not only because it can be, but because it should be.

The time is right. The mission is right. Oboe is currently building their core team — looking for a product designer in particular. If you or someone you know is based in the NYC area and interested in joining them, please reach out at jobs@oboe.fyi.

For everyone else, sign up here if you're interested in beta testing Oboe once it's ready, and follow them on X @oboelabs and Threads @oboelabs.

If “Data is the New Oil” then data security is more important than ever. The Concentric team knew helping companies deal with a fundamental question would be the foundation of their vision: how to classify the sensitivity of your data no matter where it exists. In their own words:

When we started Concentric AI five years ago, it was obvious that enterprises had a massive data security problem. On one hand, data volumes were growing, data was sprawled across their environments – both cloud and on-premises – and the nature of business-critical data spanned the gamut from IP to financial data to business confidential data to PII/PCI/PHI. And on the other hand, customers were still relying on age old techniques – from cumbersome rule writing to pattern matching to complex policies just to answer basic questions on where their sensitive data might be. It also meant that if you don’t know what you have, you can’t protect it.

And now, in 2023, the problem is bigger and more urgent than ever - which is why Concentric has grown 300% year-over-year and tripled its customer base in six months.

To meet the enthusiastic market demand the company is also announcing a $45 million Series B fundraise. And of course, they’re hiring.

FinTech ain’t easy. You need to really understand where value accrues in global networks, build deep product in a regulated environment, and often employ a business model that only works at scale. But when it works, it produces some of the most valuable and durable companies in the world. Well, Finix is working. And it just announced a $75 million Series C fundraise to continue building.

In CEO Richie Serna’s own words,

“If Stripe is building for developer-centric startups, Square for micro-merchants, and Adyen for multinational enterprises, Finix is building for the 22M businesses without development teams that still want leading payment technology to better serve their customer needs. Today, over 60% of our customers utilize our no-code tools.

Finix’s suite of payment solutions supports the entire spectrum of customer preferences—allowing them to pick and choose what to build vs. outsource—enabling both experienced developers and those with little to no technical experience to get up and running in hours.”

Having had the opportunity to see the company build from their earliest beginnings, we know the team is focused not just on what’s been accomplished, but very much on what’s ahead. To that end, they are HIRING.

Riffing on McLuhan’s “the medium is the message,” today’s AI can be summarized as “the interface is the product.” That is, the new and powerful capabilities of AI models are often limited to and by the way users are being instructed to interact with them. And that’s why we’re excited about Cove.

Cove’s mission is to build a useful and evolving collaboration layer for AI, getting beyond the chatbot. The company envisions a layer that sits above and across the many public models, and accesses your personal/team/company content, to end up with a collaborative space that’s as unique as the work you need to get done. Ranging from conducting your own research to working across teams, vendors, collaborators - anyone you want to bring into your Cove board.

It takes a special team to bite off this large an opportunity and our relationship with cofounder/CEO Stephen Chau dates back to his earliest days at Google. So it was an easy decision to back their seed round alongside several other wonderful investors and operators.

You can dive into Cove today to give it a try.

Some speculate we’re heading for an “AI Winter,” and that’s not because it’s already October. Rather, the term refers to a chilling in enterprise adoption as organizations struggle to integrate, productize, and secure the disparate AI “R&D” occurring within their business units. In the end, you need value, not just innovation. Thread AI is here to warm that chill.

How? It starts with their origin story. Prior to founding Thread, founders Angela McNeal and Mayada Gonimah were AI Product and Engineering leads at Palantir. In their own words referring to the complexity of building across systems and teams:

“Back when we were at Palantir, we witnessed hundreds of different AI use cases across Fortune 100 companies and government agencies building AI systems in some of the most stringent environments. In doing so, we saw a clear pattern emerge: the most successful enterprise applications of AI, especially those used for workflow automation, were deeply integrated across teams and embedded into every part of the business.”

And now, with Lemma, their AI infrastructure platform, they are bringing this capability quickly to ALL companies, already working with some of the leading brands in luxury hospitality, digital marketing, public safety and financial services.

It’s been a joy to work with Angela, Maya and the Thread team. They’ve proven themselves to be strategic, action-oriented, and dedicated, which along with $6 million of seed capital, has created impressive business and product momentum.

If you are interested in growing your career and AI expertise at a startup where you’ll be proud of not just what you’re building, but how you’re building it, ThreadAI is hiring.

Enhancing our country’s manufacturing capabilities requires rethinking every step of the process, from what we’re building, where it’s being built, how it’s built, and who is doing the building. Fortunately there are entrepreneurs rushing in to help. The Purchaser.ai team has deep experience in this industry, now coming back together to build solutions for manufacturing procurement processes.

Now that Purchaser has announced its seed round, we’re happy to share that Homebrew is a supporting investor, alongside our friends at Ludlow Ventures and Long Journey. We’ve long believed that industries that pre-date the PC will continue to reap the benefits of software transformation. But that building these companies requires founding teams who disrupt with love, not contempt, for the customers they serve. Alongside you need a time-to-value and scale of impact that makes your product adoption a priority, otherwise there’s too much to get done to just run innovation pilots.

In addition, we’ve been investing in vertical applications of AI for years and continue to believe there is massive opportunity for category-leading companies to be created where there is no incumbent software provider because simply increasing efficiency or improving workflow is only a nice-to-have. We’re confident that recent advancements in AI enable software to not just aid the worker, but do the work. Combining existing models with needed context from the customer and first party data can allow that work to be done. Purchaser team shares this perspective and their vision is to not just improve procurement workflows but to get procurement done.

If this sounds interesting to you, they’re hiring.

We're happy to share the news that Treat has been acquired by Typeface, one of the leaders in bringing AI to brands for enterprise content creation. We became supporting investors in Treat’s seed funding, and have continually been impressed by the team’s foresight in how brands would use generative AI both now and in the future. Their first product uses data on customers to generate product images that incorporate elements known to perform well with certain target demographics. For example, if a fruit vendor’s data suggests that younger men prefer seeing food ads that show a person eating the product, Treat may create an ad that depicts someone biting into fruit.

It’s no wonder that Typeface wanted to bring this team and technology into their company and we’re continuing along for the ride with them. If this mission sounds interesting to you, Typeface is hiring.