Dan Stolyarov

Big milestone for Doppler Finance: Doppler just raised a $3M seed round led by Reforge, with participation from DCG, Maven 11, HashKey Capital, GSR, CMCC Global and others. Their goal? Unlock institutional-grade yield infrastructure on the XRP Ledger, something that’s been missing since day one. Here’s the opportunity: -> XRP’s ~$200B market cap has less than 0.1% in DeFi. -> Ethereum, by comparison, has ~20% of its market cap active on-chain. That’s hundreds of billions in idle XRP and Doppler is building the rails to activate it. With custody integrations (Fireblocks, Copper, Bitgo), verifiable proof-of-reserves, and plug-and-play APIs for wallets/custodians, they’re building for regulated capital but with open access. Their $500M+ capital pipeline speaks volumes. This is a major unlock for #XRPFi and one of the most promising attempts to bridge compliant yield infra with an underserved but globally significant asset. Excited to see how this one plays out.

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From our PearX S25 cohort, meet Pravāh, the AI-native operating system for the electric grid When Mohak Mangal, Dhruv Suri, and Aman Gupta looked at the strain on the U.S. electric grid, they saw a system pushed to its limits. Exploding demand and unpredictable supply have made blackouts increasingly common. This costs the economy more than $150B a year, a number that could 10x in the next five years. Mohak Mangal and team founded Pravāh to help fix it. Their platform helps utilities and grid operators make real-time decisions on load, generation, and congestion, reducing blackout risks, optimizing power procurement, and bringing much-needed stability to the backbone of modern life. We’re proud to support the Pravāh team as they take on one of the toughest and most important infrastructure challenges of our time.

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#AmTech Weekly Roundup: Apex - Spacecraft Manufacturing raised $200 million in Series C funding from Point72 Ventures, 8VC, Andreessen Horowitz, and Washington Harbour Partners LP. Apex builds satellite buses (core body with power, propulsion, and communications) that customers can customize cheaper and quicker than building bespoke buses for each mission.   Ian Cinnamon, Maximilian Benassi    Rainmaker Technology Corporation raised a $25 million Series A from Lowercarbon Capital, 1517 Fund, Long Journey, Garry Tan, and Naval Ravikant. Rainmaker uses drones for cloud-seeding. In addition to agriculture, they are thinking of it as water infrastructure: why build more pipes and canals when the clouds can do the heavy lifting?  Augustus Doricko    Jericho Security raised a $15 million Series A from Era, Lux Capital, and Gaingels. Jericho uses generative AI help corporations run cybersecurity trainings and simulations against increasingly sophisticated AI phishing attacks and social engineering.   Sage Wohns #VC #NationalInterest #USA #Startups

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"Build the event you wish existed" That's what we at Monadical did last week at #NYTW. We wanted an AI Engineers discussion for Engineers. There's always a lot of events out there for VCs to network, or for startups to learn about G2M, but very little on lessons learned from actual engineers in the field. So that's the event we hosted. Big thank yous to our awesome panel, Roy Pereira, Ben Cohen and Corey J. Gallon. Here's the key takeaways and the AI tools we're using. 🚀 All three panelists independently called AI Agents the most transformative LLM application they’ve used. They specifically called out Claude 3.5 Sonnet for its accuracy and reliability. 🪨 We dug into how LLMs are “jagged”, not general. They can be shockingly good at some tasks and completely fail at others. Everyone agreed: good evaluations are critical (and hard.) 🧪 Corey noted how public benchmarks and reality are two different things. Most public evals are saturated or gamed. ♊ Ben emphasized that AI projects are actually two projects: building the tool and building the evaluation process. 🧱 We explored how falling dev costs may impact startup defensibility and labor demand. Roy shared that founders are already shifting strategies in response. ⚒️ In a world of daily AI launches, the panel discussed how they decide what’s worth attention, and what’s just noise. They called out tools like Goose, Aider, Claude Code, and Monadical’s own Cubbi, which helps run agentic workflows safely in dev environments. (links in the comments). CTA: What would you want to hear in an AI Applied Engineering talk you attended?

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Excited to announce that Sequoia Capital is leading the Series B in Zed Industries Zed is an open-source, multiplayer code editor built for performance from the ground up in Rust, built by the creators of Atom and Electron. Zed is used by ~150K active developers including ~10% of the Rust community (up 10x y-o-y!). Nathan Sobo and team believe from first-hand experience that decade-old web tech (i.e. VS Code) just won't cut it to build a world-class editing experience. The IDE needs to evolve significantly for AI, and the Zed team believes a wholesale rewriting is necessary, prioritizing speed and collaboration as first-class attributes. Zed's multiplayer collaborative vision is especially important as developers begin collaborating with AI agents in our code bases. They've built some important primitives to enable this already, e.g. DeltaDB, an open-source sync engine that captures every code operation, enabling character-level permalinks and real-time collaboration. More exciting announcements here soon. Welcome to the Sequoia portfolio Nathan Sobo Antonio Scandurra Max Brunsfeld cc James Flynn. I know that creating the perfect tool for your craft has been your life's work for multiple decades now, and we are delighted to support you on this journey! https://lnkd.in/dpBCenv3

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Congratulations to Space VC portfolio company Neros Technologies for announcing their $35M Series A today! This morning in front of an audience of 800 United States Department of Defense decision makers and industry leaders, Olaf Hichwa & Soren Monroe-Anderson shared the details of their new financing round from Vy Capital, Interlagos & Sequoia Capital. Re-industrializing the U.S. Defense Industrial Base starts with manufacturing all drone components in the United States. We unfortunately can no longer rely on critical drone components from companies and countries that are foreign adversaries. In recent months, the Neros Archer was the first FPV drone added to the BlueUAS, certifying that all Neros drones are 100% free of Chinese critical components & easy for the U.S. DoD to buy and operate. Last Fall, European allies gathered 200 of the world's best drone companies and poised a challenge: design a drone that satisfies all mission requirements, is ultra low-cost and thousands can be built monthly. The Neros Technologies team won the challenge, and in partnership with the International Drone Capability Coalition, another 6,000 Neros Archers are headed to Ukraine to help support European defense. Achieving these ambitious goals requires world-class talent, and Neros is rapidly expanding its team with engineers and operational experts across autonomy, robotics, hardware design, manufacturing processes, and software engineering. If you're interested, please explore here: https://lnkd.in/gmCKHC63 https://lnkd.in/g83gUBab

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Oracle will receive 2.3GW of natural gas power for their data centers through a new agreement with VoltaGrid. ⚡️ VoltaGrid develops power infrastructure, namely their Qpac modular natural gas power system.  Each reciprocating node generates up to 20MW of power, and can be combined for up to 200MW. Natural gas for the project will be supplied by Energy Transfer's pipeline network. This is a great solution for AI, which is not only highly energy intensive, but also highly variable. VoltaGrid’s power systems will allow Oracle to have more stability for their workloads, creating a more grid-friendly data center. 👍 What do you think of this deal? Share your thoughts below. Link to the full article in the comments ⬇️ Source: Data Center Dynamics 10/16/2025 Disclaimer: Nothing in this post constitutes investment advice. #datacenters #AI #naturalgas #powerdemand #technology

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Perigoso isso. "Later-stage startups are increasingly turning to venture debt as they struggle to keep up with growth expectations from VCs, and as a way to avoid raising equity financing at lower valuations."

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The Riverside Company just closed its Riverside Value Fund II (RVF II) at a $750 million hard cap, more than doubling the size of its predecessor. Oversubscribed. Locked up in five months. In a market where LPs are stingier than your uncle at a steakhouse, that's not just execution, it's orchestration. Credit goes where it's due: Co-CEOs Béla Szigethy and Stewart Kohl have built a platform that turns the smaller end of the middle market into a high-yield proving ground. Béla bootstrapped this machine out of a New York apartment in '88 with little more than a name and a nose for value. Stewart dropped anchor in Cleveland five years later and helped scale it into a global force. Nearly four decades and over 1,000 #investments later, they're not slowing down, they're doubling down. This isn't just another fund. It's a signal. A $750M vote of confidence in a team that knows exactly where the value hides, and how to pull it out with precision. Sean Ozbolt and Ron Sansom, the Managing Partners leading the RVF charge, have assembled a team in LA that reads like an operator's dream journal. Add in Andy Fohrer, Craig Kahler, and 50+ operating pros who've got more reps than most PE firms have exits, and what you get isn't a playbook. It's a blueprint. RVF II will target North American businesses generating $60M to $300M in revenue, the kinds of companies stuck between scrappy and scaled, often overlooked, usually undervalued. Carve-outs. Founder transitions. Integration nightmares. The stuff most GPs whisper about in boardrooms and avoid in term sheets. That's The Riverside Company's sweet spot. And the results speak volumes: Over the last 12 months, RVF moved more than $1B in enterprise value across 3 new platforms, 5 add-ons, and 1 clean exit. And while other firms chase IRR, The Riverside Company is sharing it. Through its continued partnership with Ownership Works, over 1,100 employees at RVF-backed companies now hold equity stakes. Real #wealth creation, not just for board members, but for the people turning wrenches, writing #code, and answering phones. That's not trend-chasing. That's thesis-driven. With a platform spanning 10 countries, 350+ employees, and $14B under management, The Riverside Company isn't chasing scale, it is the scale. And with RVF II, they're putting more capital behind the complex, the gritty, the misunderstood. #Startups #StartupFunding #StartupJourney #VentureCapital #VCFunds #Founders #FounderJourney #FundsAnnouncingFunding #Technology #Innovation #TechEcosystem #StartupEcosystem #Hiring #TechHiring If engineering peace of mind is what you crave, Vention is your zen.

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