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Stop. It’s such a simple street sign but one that many drivers ignore, creating safety issues that result in pedestrian injuries, car crashes, and even needless deaths. Obvio seeks to make roads safer, using an end-to-end product combining software and hardware. It begins with camera devices installed near intersections by local government partners. Then Obvio’s platform takes care of monitoring, educating and enforcing - and with the most egregious violations, helping issue tickets to the drivers.

In the company’s own words, “we’re on a mission to curb reckless driving and reduce the 40,000 annual deaths that happen on our roadways. Our first 5 cities went live earlier this year, and we’ve been excited to see the results: 50% reduction in unsafe driving events in just the first couple months of the program.”

The Obvio cofounders met while working together at an earlier company in the dashboard camera space. We were introduced to them during their seed phase and were immediately struck by the combination of technical excellence and customer focus. And the immense potential for the business was also apparent to other investors, resulting in a robust Series A fundraise led by Bain Capital.

If working at a well-funded, mission-driven startup appeals to you, Obvio is hiring.

It seems like just a few months ago we were writing about Thread helping public and private sector enterprises to implement AI workflows easily and securely. It WAS just last fall Thread unveiled Lemma, their infrastructure platform. On the momentum of that launch, and continued growth in the business, Thread raised an additional $20 Million in a Series A, in which Homebrew eagerly continued its support.

As the founders note, you shouldn’t have to blow up your whole existing tech stack just to implement AI. “Lemma is designed to democratize AI infrastructure. It’s a composable platform that allows enterprises to design, deploy, and scale AI-powered workflows by connecting AI models, data sources, and business logic into adaptable, end-to-end processes aligned with their specific needs.” Well, yes, that is how it should all work.

If helping organizations push towards AI’s future is your speed, Thread is hiring. Or if you’re more likely to be a customer than team member, just check them out.

Why does software often have less information on what’s inside than a generic multivitamin? Manifest is built to automate the discovery and tracking of bugs, security flaws and other vulnerabilities in your software and AI. By delivering a Software Bill of Materials (SBOM) to customers, Manifest can help identify the issues that would result in massive security incidents if uncorrected.

So it comes as no surprise that organizations of all sizes rely on Manifest, including Anduril, several Fortune 500 corporations and multiple US government agencies. This has allowed the company to grow its revenue 5x YoY alongside a 100% customer renewal rate. Growth like this attracts investors, and Manifest recently announced a $15 million Series A in which Homebrew was happy to continue participating as an investor.

Interested in Manifest’s product? Check them out here. And if a startup like Manifest could be where you’d like to continue your career, well, they’re hiring.

Windfall has built an incredible business off a simple premise - that data can help you find better customers, constituents, or donors. And they deliver this software platform to 1,000+ companies, organizers, non-profits and others who do targeted marketing or outreach. So we weren’t surprised when Windfall shared the news of a $65 million Series B led by Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital. Congratulations to the Windfall team!

If you believe Windfall’s product can help your organization, book a demo. And of course, they’re hiring.

Education is being transformed by AI and we’re no strangers to the ways teachers, parents, and students are embracing the change. SchoolAI is focused on bringing AI into the classroom, delivering personalized learning that works WITH the child and the educator, not against them. So it’s no surprise that their growth has attracted the attention of investors, most recently announcing a $25 million Series A led by Insight Partners.

If you are interested in joining a well-funded startup at the intersection of edtech and artificial intelligence, well, they’re hiring.

Russ and Jim have spent the last 25+ years building enterprise technology companies together, so when they told us the band was getting back together for Larridin, we were in. Many of our other friends raised their hands too and a $17 million fundraise has the company off to a quick start.

Larridin enables organizations to continuously measure and optimize workforce & AI agent productivity. In Russ’ own words:

Over the last year, they talked with thousands of our former customers and partners. Again and again we heard the same thing from CEOs, CFOs, Heads of HR, as well as other business leaders - the current tools to measure and understand corporate productivity are severely outdated and not helpful in a world of AI.

Every company now has humans working alongside AI and, in some cases, machines / robots.

Our solution is designed to fill the measurement void and help prioritize investment decisions across people, processes, and deployment of AI.

At Homebrew, we too believe that software gives superpowers to humans, helping them do their best and most meaningful work. Larradin is building with this mission in mind. If you’re interested in learning more, or even joining the team, visit their website.

“Take a low NPS industry and make it better” was a startup idea trope at one point. Well, it’s kinda true. And financial services has typically been a frustrating product category for startups and SMBs. No longer.

Mercury has seen incredible growth the last few years, providing an increasingly expansive stack of banking tools to over 200,000 customers. And building a durable company these clients can trust. Namely,

• Ten consecutive quarters of profitability based on both EBITDA and GAAP net-income
• $500 million in annual revenue in 2024
• 40% growth in customers year-over-year
• $156 billion in annual transaction volume, up 64% year-over-year.

So it’s not surprising that the venture capital community continues to take notice, most recently leading a $300 million Series C financing for the company.

We’re excited to be small existing investors in Mercury and that the team can now move forward even faster to their full potential.

If you’d like to join a well funded financial software company, they’re hiring.

“Email is dead.” That’s what dozens and dozens of investors told TheSkimm founders when they started out. These mostly male financiers didn’t care that Carly and Danielle had created a word of mouth sensation, growing virally, with daily open rates that were eye popping. And the same VCs were surprised the product was hard news in a digestible format.

Now of course email newsletters are well understood to be a powerful medium, and millions of subscribers later TheSkimm (which has broadened to podcasts, video, etc) was just acquired by Ziff Davis for its Everyday Health unit. The brand (and brand voice) you love will continue on, with an even bigger platform to build upon.

At Homebrew, the relationship transcends the company, and so while we wish Carly and Danielle well, we know it’s not the end for the four of us, just another milestone. Congrats to them and the team!

We had the pleasure of meeting the Graphite team in the weeks leading up to the COVID outbreak. Hunter spent time with them first, and then Satya followed up. When we were debriefing on that second conversation, Satya expressed his opinion clearly: “Let’s get them a termsheet before anyone else does.” And we did.

It’s been an incredible journey seeing this team navigate the idea maze, find PMF, and just press down the pedal with their AI Developer Platform. Whether your code is written by a human, by AI, or in a hybrid model, it all ends up in Graphite to ensure only quality end product ships. Revenue grew 20x in 2024, representing 10,000+ engineers at over 500 companies, including Shopify, Snowflake, Figma, and Perplexity.

This success, and the aggressive roadmap ahead, earned them the attention of the investor community and the team recently shared news of a $52 Million Series B, led by Accel. In Accel’s diligence they were blown away:

When speaking to Graphite users across enterprises, we were struck by how frequently adoption begins bottoms-up: individual developers and engineering leaders will champion the platform’s impact, and usage will organically spread to a company-wide rollout. One IC made her team a whole deck to convince them to use Graphite. Another threatened to quit if his team didn’t make the switch. It is rare but powerful to see engineers so passionately evangelize a tool with paradigm shift implications across an entire engineering organization.

In other words, everyone who interacts with Graphite is blown away - whether it be people who write code or people who write checks.

Graphite has also built an amazing culture in NYC - a true magnet for technical talent in the city. If you like working with smart engineers and selling a great product to smart engineers, well, they’re hiring.

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.