SpaceWERX TACFI award advances Orbital’s path toward AI-driven factories for extreme environment materials — targeting the critical U.S. capacity gap in components that underpin missile defense, hypersonics, space vehicles, and nuclear energy
CAMPBELL, Calif., June 25, 2026 — Orbital Composites, Inc. (“Orbital”), a Campbell, CA-based advanced manufacturing company, today announced a $1.9 million Tactical Funding Increase (TACFI) contract award from SpaceWERX, the innovation arm of the U.S. Space Force. The contract funds continued development of Orbital’s robotic additive manufacturing (AM) platform for extreme environment materials — components engineered to survive conditions that destroy conventional parts: temperatures exceeding 3,000°C, high-velocity combustion gases, and repeated thermal shock cycles.
3D Printed Rocket Nozzle from Orbital Composites
Orbital S – Multi-Robot Additive Manufacturing Platform for Advanced Composite Rocket Nozzles
The award reflects growing recognition across defense, space, and energy sectors that the United States faces a structural shortfall in its ability to manufacture the advanced materials that underpin next-generation systems. Extreme environment materials — used in rocket nozzles, heat shields, hypersonic vehicle structures, jet engine hot sections, and nuclear reactors — have historically been constrained by prohibitive cost, 12- to 18-month production cycle times, and limited domestic capacity. Orbital combines robotics, advanced materials, and physical AI to streamline manufacturing of extreme environment materials.
“This work addresses a critical barrier to the rapid scaling of manufacturing for high-temperature rocket nozzles to serve the U.S. warfighter. Our initial goal is to eliminate the supply constraints on solid rocket motors that have long limited what the warfighter can field — and this award is a concrete step toward that objective. This is also about restoring U.S. manufacturing dominance in materials that are foundational to our national security and economic competitiveness. We are grateful to our SpaceWERX, AFWERX, and AFRL partners for their leadership in making that possible.”
— Amolak Badesha, Chief Executive Officer, Orbital Composites.
Extreme environment materials sit at the intersection of some of the most urgent national security and strategic industrial priorities. Solid rocket motors, hypersonic vehicles, low-cost missile defense interceptors, nuclear microreactors, and space vehicles all depend on components that can be produced faster, cheaper, and in greater volume than current methods allow. Orbital’s technology is designed to serve these markets from a single scalable manufacturing platform.
“Extreme environment materials are the bottleneck in some of the most critical systems the U.S. fields, and today’s manufacturing methods are too slow, too costly, and too capacity-constrained to meet what the moment demands. We are building toward a future where that constraint no longer exists — where AI-driven factories take in a design file and produce a mission-ready part, at operationally relevant cycle times and cost.”
— Cole Nielsen-Cole, Founder and Chief Technology Officer, Orbital Composites.
Orbital is working with defense prime contractors, U.S. government program offices, and commercial space and energy providers to scale qualification and production. The company is investing in manufacturing capacity, program qualification, and the physical AI systems that underpin its autonomous production vision.
The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Air Force, the Department of War, or the U.S. government.
About SpaceWERX
SpaceWERX, the innovation arm of the U.S. Space Force and a division of AFWERX, partners with startups, small businesses and nontraditional vendors to accelerate commercial space technologies for Guardians. Headquartered in Los Angeles, SpaceWERX connects industry innovation with defense needs to deliver capabilities faster. In partnership with Space Systems Command’s Commercial Space Office, SpaceWERX bridges innovation and acquisition to accelerate capability adoption. In fiscal year 2025, SpaceWERX awarded more than 300 contracts totaling $510 million. For more information, visit spacewerx.us.
About AFWERX AFWERX, the innovation arm of the Department of the Air Force and a division within the Air Force Research Laboratory, partners with small businesses, startups and nontraditional vendors to address challenges facing Airmen and Guardians. Headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, AFWERX strengthens the defense industrial base by expanding access to innovators, building partnerships and accelerating the transition of critical technologies to operational capability. In fiscal year 2025, AFWERX awarded more than 1,000 contracts totaling $1.37 billion and achieved 438 Phase III transitions valued at $8.1 billion. For more information, visit afwerx.com.
About Orbital Composites, Inc. Orbital Composites is building AI-driven factories for extreme environment materials. Physical AI is at its core — intelligence that runs the full loop from design to production, uniting autonomous robotics with mastery of the most advanced materials to turn mission requirements into mission-ready parts. Its robotic AM platform produces high-performance components — including nozzles and heat shields — at an order of magnitude faster cycle time and lower cost than conventional methods. Founded in 2015 and headquartered in Campbell, CA, Orbital works with the U.S. Space Force, Air Force Research Laboratory, and defense prime contractors to transition next-generation materials manufacturing from advanced development into operational capability. For more information, visit orbitalcomposites.com.
The Chicago Venture Summit, Future of Health, will convene investors, founders, academics, researchers, and corporate leaders on October 19 and 20, 2026
CHICAGO, June 25, 2026 — Today, Mayor Brandon Johnson and World Business Chicago announce the return of the Chicago Venture Summit on October 19-20, 2026, with a new focus on healthcare and life sciences. The gathering boosts innovation and growth capital ecosystems in Chicagoland’s right-to-win industries.
World Business Chicago | Chicago Venture Summit: Future of Healthcare 2026 Sponsors (as of June 25, 2026)
“Chicago has always been a city where big ideas are born and put to work, from the small business owner in one of our 77 community areas to the researcher, clinician, and founder developing the next breakthrough,” said Mayor Brandon Johnson. “The Chicago Venture Summit: Future of Health is about making sure Chicago-made innovation is connected to the growth capital, corporate partners, and customers it needs to scale, creating good jobs, stronger businesses, and better health outcomes across our city.”
The Chicago Venture Summit: Future of Health will bring together investors, startup founders, university researchers, corporate executives, and civic leaders to examine how health technology is shaping business growth, patient care, research commercialization, and job creation across the region.
Hosted by World Business Chicago (WBC), the Chicago Venture Summit is designed to connect emerging companies with sources of capital, customers, and strategic partners. The 2026 summit will focus on one of the region’s key growth sectors, where Chicago’s concentration of research institutions, hospitals, universities, corporate headquarters, and startup talent creates opportunities for investment and collaboration.
Since its launch in 2014, the Chicago Venture Summit has convened participants from Chicago, the Midwest, and national innovation markets. The 2025 Future of Food edition brought together investors, startup CEOs, university innovators, and corporate executives focused on food, agriculture, and related technologies. It also featured a curated portfolio of startups designed to connect early-stage and growth-stage companies with investors and business partners.
Startup portfolio applications are expected to open in late summer 2026. Selected companies will receive access to summit programming, investor introductions, and growth support through World Business Chicago’s innovation and venture programs.
The Chicago Venture Summit: Future of Health will be held at 167 North Green Street by World Business Chicago board member, Shapack Partners, in Chicago’s Fulton Market District, with over 500 carefully curated guests, including founders, investors, corporate executives, and public sector leaders.
“Chicago’s future will be shaped by the entrepreneurs who are building new technologies, creating new industries, and solving meaningful challenges,” said Mark Tebbe, World Business Chicago Board Member, who also serves as longtime Chair of the WBC Innovation and Venture Advisory Council. “A thriving startup ecosystem is not only a source of innovation, but it is also a catalyst for inclusive economic growth, talent development, and long-term competitiveness. When we invest in local founders, we invest in Chicago’s capacity to reinvent itself and lead in tomorrow’s opportunities. The Chicago Venture Summit’s continued success, now including its inaugural Future of Health edition, reflects the strength of our entrepreneurial community.”
The healthcare industry is the Chicagoland region’s fastest growing by employment, with a workforce of over 552,000. $1.19 billion in growth capital was invested in Chicagoland’s healthcare-related startups, accounting for nearly 20% of all growth capital raised in Chicagoland in 2025 alone. As one of the region’s economic growth engines, the Chicagoland healthcare sector leverages specialized pharmaceutical manufacturing, strong talent pipelines from universities and medical schools, affordable lab space, and robust funding for research and development. As the nation’s third-largest healthcare hub, the Chicago region is positioned well to compete with top hubs and capitalize on technological disruptions in areas such as bioinformatics and AI. Learn more via the “2025 State of the Economy” report by the WBC Research Center: https://worldbusinesschicago.com/allnews/state-of-the-economy-2025/
“Our economic playbook, Chicago 2050, is designed to answer one of the central questions facing our city and region; that is, how do we grow our economy in a way that creates jobs, attracts investment, and strengthens Chicago for the long term,” said Phil Clement, President and CEO of World Business Chicago. “The Chicago Venture Summit: Future of Health is that strategy in action. It connects Chicago-made innovation to the capital, customers, and corporate partners that can help companies scale here and contribute to a stronger regional economy.”
World Business Chicago is grateful to its many sponsors, partners, and collaborators who bring the Chicago Venture Summit to life each year. Presenting Sponsors include the Grainger College of Engineering of the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, MATTER, Microsoft, Portal Innovations, and Shapack Partners. Innovation Sponsors include 1871, Business Leadership Council (BLC), the Chicago Biomedical Consortium, ChiForward, Clique Studios, the Greater Chicagoland Economic Partnership (GCEP), and TechNexus Venture Collaborative. Venture Sponsors include 2Flo Ventures and PACE Healthcare Capital. Additional sponsors will be announced in the near future.
“We are grateful to the board companies and partners whose support reflects one of Chicago’s clearest advantages: dedicated civic leadership,” said Charles Smith, Vice Chair of World Business Chicago. “In Chicago, business, health care, capital, research, and civic leaders do not operate in isolation. They come together to build the market. For investors, that is a distinct Chicago value proposition: access to major institutions, corporate customers, research talent, founders, and civic partners in one connected ecosystem.”
The Chicago Venture Summit: Future of Health is part of World Business Chicago’s broader innovation and venture strategy, which also includes programs such as Startup Chicago, Chicago Day at SXSW, ThinkChicago, and previous Chicago Venture Summits, including the Future of Food, Future of Climate Tech, and Future of Logistics.
In collaboration with the Chicago Biomedical Consortium (CBC), World Business Chicago serves as an official Supporting Partner for the Midwest BioBuilder’s Summit on November 12, 2026. The Summit, led by the CBC, facilitates connections among academics, entrepreneurs, and startups with investors, operators, and industry leaders who can help advance their innovations. With a pronounced emphasis on life sciences and biotechnology investment, the BioBuilders Summit echoes the Midwest’s industrial spirit, highlighting companies and platforms dedicated to translating breakthroughs into market-ready products and building the infrastructure needed for the next era of biotechnology. You can learn more at www.chicagobiomedicalconsortium.org.
In collaboration with WBC board member, University of Illinois System, the Grainger Engineering Tech Startup Challenge, hosted by The Grainger College of Engineering at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, will be held during the Chicago Venture Summit on October 20. Bringing together engineering-powered startups from leading universities across the Midwest and beyond, the competition provides entrepreneurs with a live stage to pitch their ventures to prominent investors, entrepreneurs, and industry leaders in Chicago’s thriving tech ecosystem. Participants compete for significant funding while gaining direct exposure to the networks and capital. The Challenge reflects The Grainger College of Engineering’s commitment to translating cutting-edge research into real-world impact and to positioning the Midwest as a hub for the next generation of deep tech innovation. You can learn more via https://landuyt.illinois.edu/programs/tech-startup-challenge.
To learn more about attending, supporting, or partnering with the 2026 Chicago Venture Summit Future of Health, visit https://worldbusinesschicago.com/chicago-venture-summit/ or contact [email protected]. Registration for this invite-only investor and startup conference will open in the coming weeks.
ABOUT WORLD BUSINESS CHICAGO: World Business Chicago drives inclusive and equitable economic development throughout the city’s 77 community areas, focused on high-growth sectors: food production, transportation, distribution and logistics; manufacturing; healthcare and life sciences, and our local innovation, startup, and venture ecosystem. World Business Chicago leads corporate attraction and retention, workforce and talent, community impact, and promotion of Chicago as a leading global city and region. Supported by a council of 300+ local leaders, World Business Chicago’s portfolio of innovation & venture programs includes: the Chicago Venture Summit series, Startup Chicago, and ThinkChicago. Follow World Business Chicago on LinkedIn for news and announcements on corporate relocation and expansion; industry and ecosystem growth, U.S. and world rankings, and economic development.
CHICAGO LEADERS ON THE CHICAGO VENTURE SUMMIT: FUTURE OF HEALTH
“The potential of healthcare and life sciences innovation is only realized when the right entrepreneurs, investors and industry leaders are working together to solve the same problems. Chicago is home to one of the most dynamic healthcare communities in the country and the Chicago Venture Summit is a powerful platform to showcase that. We’re proud to be a premier sponsor and look forward to the conversations and collaborations that will come out of this year’s event.” – Steven Collens, CEO, MATTER
“Technology has the potential to power advancements in every industry, and nothing is more central to each of us & the communities we live in than our health. This year’s Chicago Venture Summit will bring together all the ingredients in one place to build the future of health – pairing the awesome opportunities empowered by technology and innovations from startups & industry leaders with the collaborative & industrious spirit of Chicago. We’re excited to be part of the summit and can’t wait to see what we can achieve together as a community.” – Tony Surma, CTO, Americas Enterprise Partner Solutions, Microsoft
“The Grainger Engineering Tech Startup Challenge brings together some of the nation’s most promising deep tech entrepreneurs to tackle real-world challenges with breakthrough solutions. Partnering with the Chicago Venture Summit connects them to Chicago’s thriving innovation ecosystem and the investors positioned to help them scale — creating real economic impact for the Midwest.” – Jed Taylor, Assistant Dean for Innovation and Entrepreneurship, The Grainger College of Engineering, Landuyt Executive Director of the Landuyt Center for Entrepreneurship
“Chicago has emerged as one of the most dynamic life science ecosystems in the country and events like the Chicago Venture Summit: Future of Health reflect how that momentum continues to build. Portal’s mission is to invest in and build early-stage ventures and connect them with the resources and relationships needed to accelerate their life-changing technologies, while activating innovation ecosystems that support that trajectory. Those ecosystems take committed institutions, investors, and industry partners all pulling in the same direction. That is what makes Chicago special, and it is exactly the kind of energy we are honored to be a part of and help catalyze. We look forward to connecting with the innovators and leaders who are shaping the future of healthcare for patients.” – John Flavin, Founder and CEO, Portal Innovations
“For two decades, TechNexus Venture Collaborative has been at the center of Chicago’s tech and venture community — connecting founders, investors, and corporations under one roof at TeamWorking by TechNexus and backing companies across the categories shaping tomorrow’s economy. Health and wellness is one of the most exciting areas we’re seeing right now, with entrepreneurs reimagining everything from how we move to how we’re cared for, and Chicago is producing some of the most compelling companies in that space. Events like the Chicago Venture Summit: Future of Health are a reminder of why this city continues to attract serious talent and capital — and why we’re proud to be part of the ecosystem fueling it.” – Fred Hoch, Co-founder and General Partner, TechNexus Venture Collaborative
“Healthcare is one of the most important opportunities for innovation over the next decade, and Chicago is uniquely positioned to lead. Our region combines world-class healthcare institutions, leading corporations, breakthrough research, and entrepreneurs building solutions to some of the industry’s biggest challenges. We’re proud to support a summit that brings together the people, ideas, and capital building the future of healthcare.” – Betsy Ziegler, CEO, 1871
“The CBC’s mission is to translate university innovation into the next generation of homegrown Midwestern biotech products. We are proud to host our BioBuilder’s Summit, which reflects the Midwest’s industrial spirit and spotlights biotech innovation in therapeutics and devices, in November following WBC’s Venture Summit, which celebrates promising advancements across the healthcare industry. The CBC is committed to advancing Illinois’ position as an emerging hub for Life Science innovation, and we’re proud to stand alongside partners who share that vision.” – Michelle Hoffmann, PhD, Executive Director, Chicago Biomedical Consortium
“Technology is a powerful force that can improve access and quality of care for communities across the world. 2Flo Ventures is a proud investor in emerging healthcare technologies that have the potential to transform the lives of underserved communities. We support determined founders who have spent their careers dedicated to improving our quality of care. As a Chicago-based firm, we bring together hundreds of strategic partners to support these innovations in a way only Chicago can – with authenticity and dedication to systemic improvement.” – Ibraheem Alinur, Vice President, 2Flo Ventures
“The next decade of digital healthcare will be defined by companies that make care more accessible, affordable, and human. And many of them will be built where healthcare actually operates: in the middle of the country, close to payers, providers, and patients. That proximity drives better products, faster commercialization, and more durable businesses. PACE backs these founders with disciplined capital and hands-on support. The Summit helps accelerate that momentum, and we’re proud to support it.” – Julia Monfrini Peev, Managing Partner, PACE Healthcare Capital
The round is led by Pantera Capital and backed by Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Decasonic, Blast, Outbound, Surreal, and other strategic investors
Orthogonal was founded by former leaders from Coinbase, Vercel, Google, and Amazon Robotics, and today supports 35+ APIs that power AI agents and automated workflows
Orthogonal gives AI agents a unified way to discover and access the capabilities they need in real time, allowing them to complete complex tasks without consistent failing, hallucinating, or relying on human intervention
SAN FRANCISCO, June 25, 2026 — Orthogonal, the discovery, orchestration, and payment layer for the internet, today announced it has raised a $4.3 million seed round led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Decasonic, Blast, Outbound, Surreal, and other strategic investors.
Orthogonal Raises $4.3M Seed for AI Agent Service Discovery, Orchestration, and Payments Across the Internet
AI agents are quickly becoming a new class of internet users as agentic commerce is projected to orchestrate between $3 trillion and $5 trillion in global economic activity by 2030, according to McKinsey. While people can search for services, compare options, and stitch together workflows online, agents remain largely limited to the tools they were originally given. When they encounter tasks requiring new capabilities, they often fail, hallucinate, or require human intervention. Orthogonal solves this issue by giving agents the ability to discover the services they need in the moment, orchestrate them, and pay them instantly. This capability means an agent describes what it wants, and then Orthogonal composes the result, calling the right services in the right order.
Founded by industry veterans with experience building payments and infrastructure at Coinbase, Vercel, Google, and Amazon Robotics, Orthogonal is already live in production with GTM teams and AI-native startups. The platform currently supports more than 35 APIs, including Apollo, People Data Labs, Coresignal, Olostep, and Linkup, while developers actively integrate Orthogonal into production agents and workflows.
The funding will be used to accelerate development of the company’s core platform: infrastructure that enables AI agents to discover new capabilities, access services instantly, and complete payments in a single workflow. It will also support expansion of Orthogonal’s engineering and go-to-market teams.
“Soon, there will be more agents than people online,” said Christian Pickett, co-founder and CEO of Orthogonal. “Those agents will book flights, hire contractors, enrich customer data, conduct research, and complete transactions without a human in the loop. But before that future can happen, agents need a reliable way to discover capabilities, orchestrate them, and pay for them. Orthogonal is building that missing layer.”
Orthogonal offers developers a unified SDK, API, MCP, and CLI that connects agents to internet services through a single integration. Similar to how infrastructure providers such as OpenRouter route requests across AI models, Orthogonal routes agents to the services and APIs they need to accomplish real-world tasks.
The company’s platform serves both sides of the marketplace. Developers and agent builders gain immediate access to a growing ecosystem of services through a single account, authorization flow, and invoice. Service providers can list once and become discoverable to agents and developers across the Orthogonal ecosystem and its growing network of distribution partners.
Orthogonal already supports multiple payment rails, including traditional fiat payments, x402 and MPP with additional support for emerging agent-native payment standards planned in the future. They have also been working with the Privy and Tempo teams at Stripe for easier means of payment execution for agents.
“Discovery, orchestration, and payments are the three critical problems standing between today’s agents and true autonomy,” said Bera Sogut, co-founder of Orthogonal. “Most companies are focused on building better models or better agents. We’re focused on the infrastructure layer that allows every agent to find and use the services it needs to get real work done.”
“We are moving rapidly toward an internet where the primary consumers of data and services aren’t humans clicking links, but autonomous agents executing complex financial decisions. McKinsey projects agentic commerce will drive trillions in economic activity by 2030, but that economic engine can’t run on legacy rails. Orthogonal is building the definitive, agent-native infrastructure for discovery, orchestration and payments and it has the potential to become a foundational part of the agent economy,” said Franklin Bi, General Partner at Pantera.
Over the next 12 months, Orthogonal plans to expand from dozens of integrated services to thousands, while scaling usage from hundreds of active developers and agents to a significantly broader ecosystem.
“Our goal is simple,” added Pickett. “When an agent needs a capability it doesn’t already have, Orthogonal should be the first place it goes. We want to become the default front door for the internet”
To learn more, follow Orthogonal on X and LinkedIn.
About Orthogonal Orthogonal is the discovery, orchestration, and payment layer for the internet. Through a single integration, agents can discover new capabilities, access services instantly, and pay for them seamlessly. Founded by former leaders from Coinbase, Vercel, Google, and Amazon Robotics, Orthogonal is building the infrastructure that enables autonomous agents to transact and operate across the internet. For more information, visit Orthogonal.com.
Partnerships connect Singapore’s most promising deep tech start-ups with the US market.
New university-led, Silicon Valley outpost at Playground Global to sharpen Singapore start-ups’ product-market fit.
SINGAPORE, June 25, 2026 — US-based venture capital (VC) firms, Playground Global and Matter Venture Partners, have partnered with NUS Enterprise, the entrepreneurial heart of the National University of Singapore (NUS), to join its US$117 million NUS VC Programme. Through these partnerships, both VC firms will gain closer access to Singapore’s deep tech ecosystem and its pipeline of start-ups developing breakthrough innovations in artificial intelligence, biotech, quantum technologies and advanced materials.
Early access to deep tech start-ups built for global scale
i3 Building, NUS Enterprise headquarters.
For US investors and corporates, Singapore serves as a strategic gateway to Asia’s innovation economy. The city-state is home to more than 4,500 tech start-ups[1] and has committed approximately US$29 billion under its Research, Innovation and Enterprise (RIE) 2030 plan[2] to deepen its national innovation capabilities. Many Singapore start-ups are also designed for international expansion from inception, offering the US market early exposure to technologies refined by Asian market dynamics, regional supply chains, and diverse regulatory landscapes.
Through these partnerships, Playground Global and Matter Venture Partners will gain privileged access to pre-screened, high-potential deep tech companies from Singapore’s innovation ecosystem. In turn, these start-ups will benefit from Silicon Valley’s venture networks, market intelligence, technical expertise and corporate partnerships, enabling them to sharpen product-market fit and accelerate international growth.
Based in Silicon Valley, Playground Global is an early-stage VC firm that backs the most technically ambitious founders working at the frontier of engineering and science. The firm is recognised for helping transform breakthrough technologies into globally competitive businesses. With approximately one in five portfolio companies achieving unicorn status and US$1.7 billion in assets under management, Playground invests in early-stage companies shaping the future of next-generation computing, automation, energy, and engineered biology.
“We are excited to partner with NUS Enterprise to support the next generation of deep tech founders emerging from Singapore,” said Bruce Leak, General Partner, Playground Global. “Building globally competitive technology companies requires access to long-term support, deep technical expertise, and access to international networks. We look forward to helping more global founders navigate that journey.”
Matter Venture Partners complements this with a deeply technical and globally connected platform spanning Silicon Valley and key industrial ecosystems across Asia and beyond, including Taiwan, Japan, South Korea, Europe, and the United Arab Emirates. The firm focuses on partnering with “HardTech” founders developing advanced semiconductor, electronics, and Physical AI innovations. The Matter team provides hands-on support and access to a strategic network of partners to help founders navigate supply chains, scale manufacturing, and bring complex technologies to market, with key competencies in areas such as robotics, advanced materials, and next-generation manufacturing.
“The next generation of globally significant HardTech companies will be built across ecosystems, not within a single geography. Singapore is a critical node in that network, with talent, capital, technology and ambition concentrated in one place. Through this partnership with NUS Enterprise, Matter Venture Partners is excited to support Singaporean HardTech founders who are thinking globally from day one, by connecting them with the right partners, manufacturing networks, and market access needed to succeed at scale,” said Dr Wen Hsieh, Founding Managing Partner, Matter Venture Partners.
A pipeline calibrated to US market demand
NUS Enterprise will also establish its first global outpost at The Studio, Playground Global’s 70,000-square-foot incubation facility in Silicon Valley. With access to wet and dry laboratories, advanced prototyping workshops and precision engineering tools, NUS-backed founders will gain the infrastructure and market exposure needed to validate technologies, engage US customers and sharpen product-market fit.
The outpost is part of NUS Enterprise’s broader strategy to connect Singapore’s innovation ecosystem with key global markets. It will help founders gather market insights from Silicon Valley, better understand customer needs and refine their solutions in one of the world’s most mature venture markets. Insights gained through the outpost will also strengthen NUS Enterprise’s education, research and commercialisation pathways. Over time, this will build a stronger pipeline of Singapore deep tech start-ups with clearer market validation, greater commercial readiness and stronger appeal to global investors and industry partners.
“Silicon Valley is one of the most demanding proving grounds for deep tech, with investors and competitors that move at a relentless pace,” said Dr Tan Sian Wee, NUS Senior Vice President (Innovation and Enterprise). “Research-based founders need investors who understand how deep tech companies are actually built and scaled, not just funded. Through our partnerships with Playground Global and Matter Venture Partners, and from our Silicon Valley outpost, our ventures can see opportunities early, test against real customer demand, sharpen product-market fit, and grow into category leaders across global markets.”
About National University of Singapore (NUS)
The National University of Singapore (NUS) is Singapore’s flagship university, which offers a global approach to education, research and entrepreneurship, with a focus on Asian perspectives and expertise. We have 15 colleges, faculties and schools across three campuses in Singapore, with more than 40,000 students from 100 countries enriching our vibrant and diverse campus community. We have also established more than 20 NUS Overseas Colleges entrepreneurial hubs around the world.
Our multidisciplinary and real-world approach to education, research and entrepreneurship enables us to work closely with industry, governments and academia to address crucial and complex issues relevant to Asia and the world. Researchers in our faculties, research centres of excellence, corporate labs and more than 30 university-level research institutes focus on themes that include energy; environmental and urban sustainability; treatment and prevention of diseases; active ageing; advanced materials; risk management and resilience of financial systems; Asian studies; and Smart Nation capabilities such as artificial intelligence, data science, operations research and cybersecurity.
For more information on NUS, please visit nus.edu.sg.
About NUS Enterprise
At NUS Enterprise, the entrepreneurial heart of the National University of Singapore (NUS), we advance the University as a global magnet for talent and an engine for impactful innovation. We seed ideas, spark innovation, and scale ventures through our distinctive 360° framework, integrating education, ecosystem support, and world-class venture building and investment.
This creates a self-reinforcing cycle powering both educational and entrepreneurial outcomes across industries and communities. Since 2001, NUS Enterprise has nurtured 10 unicorns, over 3,000 start-ups, and 5,500 students. Our ambition: to improve the lives of 1 billion people by 2035.
The US$117 million NUS VC Programme aims to enhance support for early-stage tech innovation by focusing on high-potential ventures within the NUS ecosystem, including start-ups from the National Graduate Research Innovation Programme (National GRIP). National GRIP empowers innovators to transform lab-based research discoveries into globally competitive, market-ready ventures.
The programme comprises two key components.
First, NUS has committed to invest US$39 million over the next three years in selected VC firms with strong track records in early-stage deep tech investments. These firms will provide structured, hands-on support to start-ups, including time, expertise, and access to their networks to help them scale effectively.
The programme currently has four VC partners:
Granite Asia: A leading multi-asset investment platform with a 25-year track record of backing breakthrough technology ventures globally.
4BIO Capital: A specialist life sciences investor focused on advanced therapeutics and breakthrough healthcare technologies.
Playground Global: A Silicon Valley-based investment firm backing research-driven companies developing advanced technologies across engineered biology, energy transition, robotics, and next-generation computing.
Matter Venture Partners: A Silicon Valley-headquartered VC firm supporting founders developing “HardTech” solutions that combine sophisticated hardware and software to address real-world challenges.
Second, NUS has set aside US$78 million for co-investments alongside these VC partners. These co-investments will be targeted at NUS-affiliated start-ups.
Aquiline and Flare Capital Partners co-led the round with participation from existing investors: 645 Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Triple Impact Capital and Techstars. The capital scales Upside across Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, and employer benefits.
FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla., June 25, 2026 — Upside, the only nationally scalable housing stability platform purpose-built for healthcare, today announced a $20 million Series A. Aquiline led the round with Flare Capital Partners and continued support from existing investors including 645 Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Triple Impact Capital and Techstars. The capital accelerates Upside’s national expansion, builds out go-to-market capabilities across health plans and employers, and deepens investment in the company’s AI-supported delivery platform. Upside is led by industry veterans who previously built category-defining healthcare companies, including MDLive, Papa, and Virta Health.
Housing instability is one of healthcare’s most expensive and most addressable gaps, and it spans both government and commercial lines of business. Health plans see it in claims: $9.3 billion in inpatient costs nationally, yet most still measure activity over outcomes. Employers see it in workforce data: workers who lose their homes are 11 to 22 percentage points more likely to lose their jobs, and their highest utilizers are frequently the same employees experiencing housing precarity. They are not looking at different problems — they are looking at the same person. And they both need one partner who finishes the work.
Upside was built for that standard. Operating across 10 states, the company pairs dedicated Care Guides with AI-supported housing orchestration, all powered by a proprietary, curated affordable housing inventory database spanning public and non-public data. Together they identify, engage, and stabilize members before housing challenges become medical crises. The model of care delivers 90%+ enrollment, more than half of members stabilized within 90 days, and up to 4x ROI in 12 months, while achieving industry-leading member satisfaction. In just the past 18 months, the platform has expanded rapidly, securing partnerships with more than 17 national, state and regional health plans and is now supporting four of the largest National Payers. “Housing is the highest-cost social problem in healthcare, and most solutions stop at the referral,” said Jake Rothstein, Co-Founder and CEO of Upside. “We go beyond that. Upside places people into stable housing and keeps them there. This growth capital means we get to do that for more people, in more markets, more quickly.”
Building across plans and employers in parallel
Upside will deploy the Series A funding across Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, and employer-sponsored markets simultaneously. The employer push opens a meaningful new front. Upside’s care model translates cleanly into a workforce benefit covering housing navigation, rental and mortgage support, elder transition planning, and deposit assistance. With dedicated go-to-market investment, the company is positioned to bring that benefit to large self-insured employers at scale.
The round also funds leadership hires and operational depth, including Care Guide capacity, partner operations, and care model oversight, so the model that drove these results performs at greater volume without compromise.
“Housing instability is one of the most persistent drivers of avoidable healthcare spend. Upside has the model, team, and infrastructure to address it, and we’re excited to partner with the company in its next chapter,” said Dante La Ruffa, Partner and Head of Aquiline’s Venture & Growth Strategy. “We see significant opportunities to accelerate Upside’s momentum through Aquiline’s strategic connectivity across health plan, payer, and broker channels, as well as through product adjacencies that further expand the company’s value proposition for all key stakeholders.”
“The Health Related Social Needs solutions market is approaching the mid-innings of maturity. The first wave saw companies find success with population-wide screening and solutions directories, but stopped short of driving or guaranteeing outcomes. What drew us to Upside was the rapid cycle time of referral to engagement to success in closing key needs gaps, starting with housing, in a matter of months,” said Dan Gebremedhin, MD, Partner at Flare Capital Partners. “We look forward to partnering with the company to further deploy AI technologies to ensure this valuable service is cost-effective and can be deployed to more populations with proven medical and benefit design ROI.”
As part of the investment, Aquiline’s Avery Klinger will join Upside’s Board of Directors along with Dan Gebremedhin of Flare Capital Partners.
Human-led, AI-accelerated
Upside will continue investing in its technology platform, which combines proprietary AI workflows for acuity stratification, housing matching, and case management with a human-first delivery model. AI handles the repeatable work, surfacing housing options, summarizing cases, flagging risk, so Care Guides stay focused on the complex, relationship-driven work that actually drives outcomes.
“AI does not replace a Care Guide. It frees one up,” said Peter Badgley, Co-Founder and COO of Upside. “When the repeatable work runs in the background, our team can do more of what only people can do, which is sit with someone in crisis and get them somewhere safe.”
Since 2020, Upside has stabilized members across every major line of business in healthcare, from D-SNP and Medicaid to commercial and employer-sponsored populations. With this round, the company enters its next phase: larger in reach, deeper in technology, and faster in the markets where housing instability does the most damage. The mission is the same one Upside started with. Resolving housing instability completely, for the people who need it most.
About Upside
Upside is the only nationally scalable housing stability platform purpose-built for healthcare. The company partners with health plans and employers to identify and stabilize members and employees experiencing housing instability, connecting them to safe, supportive housing while reducing avoidable emergency utilization and improving health outcomes. Upside pairs dedicated Care Guides (licensed social workers and housing specialists) with AI-supported housing orchestration to deliver measurable results at scale. The platform serves Medicaid, Medicare Advantage, D-SNP, commercial, and employer-sponsored populations across the full housing continuum, from crisis intervention to long-term tenancy support. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Fort Lauderdale, FL, Upside is redefining how healthcare addresses housing as a foundation of care. Learn more atwww.joinupside.com.
About Aquiline
Aquiline is a global private investment firm with offices in New York, London, and Philadelphia that focuses on financial services and technology. As of December 31, 2025, Aquiline had approximately $12 billion of assets under management and deployed approximately $8.3 billion of capital across the firm’s strategies since inception.
About Flare Capital Partners
Flare Capital Partners is a leading healthcare technology venture capital firm advancing innovation-driven companies to improve positive health outcomes, broaden care access, and lower healthcare costs. We partner with exceptional founders solving healthcare’s hardest challenges, supporting each with our deep sector expertise, unparalleled industry resources, and proven access to commercial opportunities. Our team of established investors and senior operating executives has invested in 80+ companies and has nearly $1 billion in assets under management. Learn more at www.flarecapital.com.
Neurometric helps companies optimize token spend for cost, speed, and reliability.
NEW YORK, June 25, 2026 — Neurometric AI, an AI infrastructure company helping businesses control the cost and performance of agentic workloads, today launched its automated token engineering platform and announced $4 million in funding closed earlier this year.
As companies move AI agents from experimentation into production, a single workflow can generate dozens of model calls. Many businesses continue to send each task to a frontier model, even when a smaller and less expensive model could deliver the same or better result. Neurometric evaluates those calls individually, modifies prompts as needed, and routes each task to the most cost-effective model capable of meeting the required performance threshold and creates a purpose-built small language model when no available option fits. For simple high volume workloads, the Neurometric platform automatically generates specialized small language models to optimize the speed and cost of the tasks.
“Companies have spent the past year proving that AI agents can perform increasingly complex work. Now they have to prove the economics still make sense when those agents are operating at scale,” said Rob May, CEO of Neurometric. “Every model call is also a pricing decision, and those decisions compound across an agent’s workflow. Token engineering gives companies a way to control that cost without sacrificing quality.”
Neurometric Brings Token Engineering Into One Platform
Companies currently rely on a mix of manual testing and individual point solutions to decide which models should handle different AI tasks. Those choices can quickly become outdated as new models enter the market and pricing, speed and performance change.
Neurometric brings model routing, small language model creation and access to a marketplace of pre-trained task specific SLMs into one platform. Its Task Endpoint Manager evaluates incoming requests against continuously updated model performance and pricing data, then routes each task according to the customer’s accuracy, cost and latency requirements.
When no existing model meets those requirements, Neurometric’s Auto-SLM Creator builds and serves a small language model designed for the specific task. The platform’s SLM marketplace also allows customers to access models already developed for common and recurring workloads.
This approach allows companies to use frontier models where their capabilities are necessary while moving more narrowly defined tasks to smaller and less expensive alternatives.
Across early customer engagements, models routed or created through Neurometric have achieved accuracy rates that have beaten frontier models by as much as 20 points, while reducing cost and latency compared with using frontier models for the same work.
“Companies need to know where frontier-level performance is worth paying for and where a smaller model can deliver the same result at a fraction of the cost. That discipline will determine whether agentic AI can move from promising pilots to a business model that scales,” said Neurometric COO Calvin Cooper.
“The number of available models is growing too quickly for companies to evaluate every option by hand,” May said. “And the number of tools and techniques to improve them are growing even faster. Things change so fast a human token engineer can’t keep up. That decision needs to be automated and continuously reevaluated as the market changes.”
$4 Million Raised to Expand the Platform
Neurometric closed $4 million in funding earlier this year while the team continued developing and testing the platform with customers.
The round included participation from Betaworks, ex-Ante, Everywhere.vc, Encoded, Vermillion, Abstraction, and Mu Ventures. Several prominent angels also participated including Jason Calacanis, co-host of the All-In Podcast, and Dharmesh Shah, CTO of Hubspot.
Neurometric will use the funding to expand the engineering and AI research teams to provide customers even more optimization tools as part of it’s core platform.
Alex Benik from Encoded, and investor in the round, stated “Neurometric is tackling one of the most pressing problems in the AI ecosystem today. The team has a unique mix of AI talent and systems engineering experience that positions them well to take on this task and help companies optimize their token spend at multiple layers of their infrastructure.”
A New Discipline for the Agentic AI Era
Neurometric is positioning token engineering as the discipline of determining how each task within an AI workload should be completed based on the required quality, cost and speed.
Unlike prompt engineering, which focuses on improving the instructions given to a model, token engineering determines which model should receive a task in the first place and whether a more specialized model should be created to handle it.
The need for that capability is expected to grow as companies deploy more AI agents, individual workflows generate more model calls and the number of available models continues to expand.
“Frontier intelligence will keep getting less expensive, but companies will also consume far more of it,” May said. “The winners will not be the businesses that simply buy the most tokens. They will be the ones that know where advanced intelligence creates value and where a smaller model can do the job just as well.”
Availability
Neurometric’s automated token engineering platform is available now at neurometric.ai. The company will be meeting with customers, investors and media during the AI Engineer World’s Fair from June 29th to July 2nd in San Francisco, California.
About Neurometric
Neurometric is the automated token engineering platform, routing every AI task to the most cost-effective model that meets the required quality bar, and generating purpose-built small models when none exists. Learn more at neurometric.ai.
Forward-Looking Statements
This release may contain forward-looking statements. Actual results may differ. Neurometric assumes no obligation to update such statements.
Backed by $4.85 million in funding, Samepage Signals automatically surfaces critical insights from across product, engineering, customer, and business systems.
NEW YORK, June 25, 2026 — Samepage today launched Samepage Signals, the AI-powered second brain for product leaders, alongside $4.85 million in funding from Craft Ventures, Freestyle VC, Glasswing Ventures, and angel investors including Justin Kan, Matt Mullenweg, and others.
Samepage Signals helps product leaders stay on top of everything happening across product, engineering, customer feedback, analytics, and go-to-market systems. The product connects to a user’s core tools and data — including Jira, Linear, Productboard, Slack, Notion, Gong, and Salesforce — builds a dynamic profile of what matters to them, and proactively surfaces the most relevant information and insights, from new feature ideas emerging in sales calls to competitor developments worth watching to clear summaries of what has shipped and what may be at risk.
“Product development is moving faster than ever, but the way product leaders stay informed is still far too manual,” said Sahil Jain, CEO and co-founder of Samepage. “We built Samepage Signals around a simple belief: information should be a push, not a pull. Instead of forcing product people to constantly go hunting across tools, Samepage Signals automatically delivers the context and insights they need to stay ahead and keep everyone aligned.”
Key capabilities include:
Connecting natively to 35+ core product, customer, and business data sources
Automatically building a dynamic profile of the product leader and what matters most to them
Surfacing relevant information and insights proactively, rather than requiring manual searching
Samepage tested Signals in beta with hundreds of product leaders before opening the product to the public today.
Built by Product Operators, for Product Operators
Samepage was founded by Sahil Jain, Jason Wu, and Paul Wicker, who previously built AdStage together for over eight years before its acquisition by TapClicks. The founding team has worked together for well over a decade and built Samepage based on firsthand experience with the challenge of information overload and cross-functional misalignment inside growing organizations.
Backing the Future of Product Intelligence
The new funding will support continued product development, broader adoption of Samepage Signals, and the company’s mission to build the second brain for product leaders.
“We backed Sahil and the team at AdStage and are thrilled to partner with them again at Samepage. Product leaders have more data than ever and less clarity than ever — Samepage Signals finally flips that equation,” said David Samuel, Partner, Freestyle VC.
Samepage is building AI products that help product leaders stay informed, aligned, and effective in fast-moving organizations. Its first product, Samepage Signals, connects to the tools teams already use, builds a dynamic understanding of each user, and automatically surfaces the information and insights they need most.
Investors include more than 60 angels from leading AI, developer tools, and infrastructure companies
SAN FRANCISCO, June 25, 2026 — Sazabi, the AI-native observability platform for fast-moving engineering teams, today announced an $8 million seed financing led by J2 Ventures, Village Global, and Y Combinator, with participation from Orange Collective and over 60 angel investors from leading AI companies, including Vercel, Cursor, LangChain, OpenAI, Anthropic, GitHub, Replit, Browserbase, and others. Sazabi will use the funding to expand its engineering team, accelerate product development, and deepen its integrations across modern cloud and developer platforms.
Sazabi is building observability for the AI era: a world where teams ship faster, production systems change continuously, and traditional dashboards, brittle instrumentation, noisy alerts, and manual incident response can no longer keep pace. Instead of asking engineers to configure complex telemetry stacks and dig through dashboards during incidents, Sazabi uses AI agents to understand a team’s logs, infrastructure, and codebase before proactively detecting, investigating, and resolving production issues.
“AI has changed how software gets written. Now it is changing how software gets operated,” said Sherwood Callaway, founder and CEO of Sazabi. “The first half of software engineering has been transformed by tools like Cursor, Claude Code, and Codex. But the second half — monitoring, debugging, incident response, and reliability — is still stuck in the pre-AI era. Sazabi is rebuilding observability from first principles for a world where agents are part of every engineering team.”
The company’s approach is built around a controversial but powerful idea: logs are all you need. Instead of splitting observability workflows across logs, metrics, and traces, Sazabi treats log data as the single source of truth for understanding production systems. Sazabi uses AI to reconstruct the views engineers need from log data on its own, reducing instrumentation complexity while preserving the power of a traditional observability platform.
Since its public launch, Sazabi has seen strong early pull from AI-native engineering teams. In closed alpha, the company onboarded 50 new teams in two weeks, ran 8,000 background investigations, detected 2,000 issues, and opened 200 pull requests against customer code repositories.
Sandstone, a fast-growing provider of legal software, adopted Sazabi to move from a “chaos phase” of rapid shipping into a culture of reliability.
“Sazabi caught issues we otherwise would have missed and fixed them before customers noticed,” said Liam Germain, CTO at Sandstone. “It’s like having an extra engineer on call who reads every logline. We onboarded in 15 minutes and started receiving useful alerts immediately.”
Sazabi was founded by Sherwood Callaway, a two-time Y Combinator founder and software engineer with more than a decade of experience building infrastructure and observability systems at high-growth companies including Brex and Crunchbase. The Sazabi team includes early members of the Brex infrastructure engineering team as well as past founders in the observability space.
“Sherwood is the kind of founder I back without hesitation,” said Hunter Walk, Founding Partner at Homebrew who previously backed AI code review platform Graphite. “A technical, second-time founder with clear product vision and deep subject-matter expertise. Sazabi reminds me of Graphite in the early days.”
“Software systems are becoming increasingly probabilistic and dynamic,” said Christine Keung, General Partner at J2 Ventures. “Existing observability tools were built for a far more deterministic world. If Datadog defined observability during the cloud-native era, Sazabi is defining it for the AI-native one.”
About Sazabi
Sazabi is the AI-native observability platform for fast-moving engineering teams. Built around chat, autonomous agents, and a logs-first architecture, Sazabi helps teams detect, investigate, understand, and fix production issues faster. Founded in 2025 and based in San Francisco, Sazabi is backed by J2 Ventures, Village Global, Y Combinator, Orange Collective, and over 60 angels from top AI, developer tools, and infrastructure companies. The company is currently onboarding new customers. Engineering teams can learn more or book a demo at www.sazabi.com.
About J2 Ventures
J2 Ventures is a Boston-based venture capital firm investing in technologies that advance both commercial markets and U.S. national security. Led by veterans, scientists, and entrepreneurs, the firm partners with early-stage companies developing critical innovations across advanced computing, cybersecurity, communications, and healthcare. J2 portfolio companies have raised more than $1 billion in follow-on capital and secured hundreds of millions in non-dilutive government funding, underscoring the firm’s mission to make innovation both scalable and enduring.
About Village Global
Village Global is a network-native VC firm with ~$500 million AUM, chaired by Reid Hoffman and backed by industry luminaries like Jeff Bezos, Bill Gates, and Mark Zuckerberg. For more information, please visit www.villageglobal.com.
Investment enables breakthrough technology that recycles hazardous steel grinding sludge into secondary resources, delivering up to 470 kg CO₂e savings per tonne
GOTHENBURG, Sweden, June 25, 2026 — SKF today announced a strategic investment, together with Stephen Industries and Chalmers Ventures, in startup Anferra AB to tackle one of the industrial sector’s most persistent waste challenges – hazardous steel grinding sludge.
Grinding sludge is a finely powdered mixture of metal particles, abrasives, and contaminated grinding emulsion generated during metal grinding operations. It is commonly classified as hazardous waste with most non-recycled volumes handled through incineration or landfill. Globally, around 12 million tonnes are produced each year, creating both environmental risks and significant costs for industry. Additionally, variability in sludge composition makes standardized recycling difficult.
Anferra’s innovative process converts steel grinding sludge into ferric chloride which is a common chemical agent used for wastewater and water treatment. Another by-product is hydrogen gas which can be further used as an energy carrier, contributing to green energy solutions. This enables a potential net climate benefit of negative 470 kg CO₂-equivalents per tonne of sludge (equal to driving an electric car for 7500 km) compared to conventional disposal.
The process achieves up to 90% iron recovery with significantly lower energy demand, effectively transforming a costly waste problem into a valuable resource stream. Most importantly, the technology has the potential to shift grinding sludge from being treated as hazardous waste towards becoming a secondary raw material, aligning with the EU’s efforts to harmonise waste regulations and build a stronger market for secondary raw materials.
“Grinding sludge is one of the toughest recycling challenges in the steel and bearing industry. Anferra’s approach represents a smarter way forward and positions us well to drive circularity and decarbonization. This investment, which is the first initiative coming out of SKF Ventures – SKF’s initiative to accelerate new innovations, enables us to influence solution development, positioning SKF as a first mover in circular recycling innovations and creating new value from waste streams,” says Mikael Krook, Director, SKF Ventures.
“We are very happy to deepen our collaboration with SKF through this investment. SKF has been an important partner since the early stages of Anferra’s development and with their support and close collaboration, we can accelerate our journey toward industrial implementation around the world. Our ambition is to significantly reduce the landfilling of grinding sludge while increasing circularity and resource efficiency on a global scale,” says Ebba Adolfsson, CEO and Co-founder, Anferra.
This investment brings together complementary expertise across the three investors. Stephen Industries brings its expertise in scaling high-impact deeptech and greentech ventures. SKF contributes with industrial application knowledge, waste stream volume, and decades of experience in sustainability leadership. Chalmers Ventures provides venture building capabilities and close connection to the research ecosystem, enabling further development and commercialization.
SKF applies various circularity principles across its operations, including, remanufacturing bearings and circular oil use via RecondOil. Other initiatives such as exploring recycled steel solutions with ultra-low emissions and investigating hydrometallurgical methods are underway to minimize resource loss and accelerate the transition to a net-zero, more circular industrial ecosystem.
