The Venture Codex

Led · Series A · Apr 2026

Featherless.ai operates a serverless inference platform designed to make open-source AI models production-ready and accessible at scale. The platform supports over 30,000 open models across language, vision, and audio and is described as the fastest-growing Hugging Face inference partner. The founding team created RWKV, an open-source architecture intended to provide an alternative to transformer dominance. Featherless.ai positions itself as a neutral layer unaligned with any hyperscaler or proprietary ecosystem and hosts core infrastructure in the US and EU while maintaining a global team. It pursues hardware diversity through a strategic collaboration with AMD to run popular open models natively on AMD ROCm. The company plans to launch a marketplace for specialized open models and deepen integrations with diverse hardware to lower inference costs and expand enterprise adoption. Financially, it recently completed a $20M Series A led by strategic corporate venture investors.

Participated · Series C · Feb 2026

Founded in 2017, CesiumAstro designs and manufactures full-stack, software-defined communications payloads, processors, and complete small satellites. Its core Element platform combines modular, in-house-built hardware with AI that optimizes signals in real time, allowing operators to reconfigure missions after launch. The technology has been flight-proven on eight SpaceX launches and targets dense low-Earth-orbit constellations as well as defense applications. By integrating payloads, satellites, and processors under one roof, the company aims to shorten upgrade cycles and reduce costs compared with legacy providers. With fresh capital, CesiumAstro will scale U.S. manufacturing, open a 270,000-square-foot headquarters near Austin, and increase hiring in the United States, United Kingdom, Germany, and Japan. The firm also plans to accelerate launches of its Element satellites, advance its AI capabilities, and pursue additional defense contracts through at least 2027.

Participated · Series A · Dec 2025

Founded in 2023 in Rhode Island by maritime practitioners and defense engineers, Vatn Systems is building scalable fleets of autonomous underwater vehicles for the U.S. military, allied governments, and civilian customers. Its flagship platforms, the Skelmir S6 and Skelmir S12, combine a plug-and-play payload architecture with INStinct, the company’s proprietary inertial navigation system that provides GPS-denied guidance at a fraction of traditional costs. The vehicles support distributed sensing, ISR, mine countermeasures, electronic warfare, and other emerging undersea missions, and can be re-configured for offshore energy, port security, and environmental monitoring in days rather than months. Throughout 2025 the company delivered AUVs to U.S. government customers, ran successful open-water demonstrations, and ramped production capacity to meet growing demand. Vatn positions itself as a future “underwater defense prime” by offering attritable, mass-deployable systems that align with shifting naval doctrines. Commercially, the same low-cost autonomy unlocks persistent coastal infrastructure monitoring and scientific research opportunities. The recent capital infusion is intended to accelerate production scaling and broaden mission profiles for both defense and civilian markets.

Led · Series A · Jun 2025

Qunnect develops the Carina product suite—entanglement sources and stabilization tools—that create, buffer, and preserve entangled photons for quantum communications and sensing. Its hardware is designed in a standard server‑rack form factor and operates at room temperature to enable deployment on commercial fiber. The company has delivered Carina products to customers in financial services, telecommunications, energy infrastructure, and defense/intelligence sectors. Qunnect has deployed two metropolitan quantum testbeds in New York City and Berlin and commercialized the first room‑temperature quantum memory in 2021. New funding will be used to develop turnkey variants of Carina with strategic industry partners to demonstrate next‑generation real‑world use cases. Qunnect is based in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Qunnect builds core technologies for scalable quantum-secure communication, including a high-fidelity quantum memory, entangled photon sources, and quantum network support hardware for timing and qubit stabilization. Its products are engineered for room-temperature operation and compatibility with telecom fiber and atomic-based devices, targeting real-world deployment rather than lab-only systems. The company packages these components into a Quantum Repeater product suite to enable long-distance entanglement distribution across existing telecommunications infrastructure. Qunnect commercialized the world’s first quantum memory in September 2021 and aims to complete its first-generation product suite in mid-2023. With the new funding, it plans to scale manufacturing and launch a multi-node R&D quantum network testbed connected to existing New York City fiber, the first of its kind in the U.S. The company is headquartered in the Brooklyn Navy Yard in New York City and has received research support from the U.S. Department of Energy, the U.S. Air Force, and the National Science Foundation. Qunnect, Inc., a Quantonation portfolio company, is developing a device suite to enable ultra-secure, long-distance quantum communications. All products are engineered to operate at room temperature, a critical design requirement for real-world deployment. Its first product, a Quantum Memory device, can store, coherently manipulate, temporally synchronize, and retrieve quantum states on demand. The company received a $1.5M Phase-II Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award from the U.S. Department of Energy. The Phase-II award supports development of features to integrate and use these devices on standard telecom fiber infrastructure. Qunnect will field-test products through collaborations with Brookhaven National Laboratory and ESnet on fiber networks connecting Brookhaven National Lab to New York City. The company aims to globalize quantum communications.

Participated · Series C · Jun 2025

Impulse Space, founded by SpaceX engine guru Tom Mueller, develops highly maneuverable spacecraft and propulsion systems for in-space mobility. Its product portfolio includes Mira, a maneuverable platform that has flown at least three missions, and Helios, a vehicle designed to move satellites rapidly to higher orbits. The company is targeting U.S. Space Force customers and is preparing another Mira launch expected before the end of the year after a prior flight encountered a navigation-related propellant issue. Impulse recently opened an office in Colorado as it expands its engineering team and plans to hire up to 200 new employees with proceeds from its Series D. The company’s software teams use AI coding tools, though leadership has expressed skepticism about applying current deep learning models to hardware design.