The Venture Codex

Participated · Seed · Aug 2026

Apollo Atomics focuses on shrinking and mass-manufacturing the steam generator—the largest component in many nuclear plants—by using a compact metal block with needle-thin channels to transfer heat more efficiently. Its design, based on MIT research, enabled the company to build a reactor it says is roughly 40-times smaller than ones using conventional steam generators and to assemble systems in a factory rather than on site. Apollo has built a 40-kilowatt demonstration reactor at MIT and plans to offer reactor sizes from about 10 megawatts-electric up to 300 megawatts. The company projects it can build a 300 MW plant in under 24 months and estimates the reactor will cost four to five times less to produce than existing designs. Apollo targets a levelized cost of electricity near 3 cents per kilowatt-hour and aims for commercial deployment in 2028. It participated in Y Combinator’s Spring 2026 batch.

Participated · Seed · May 2026

Corvera offers an agentic platform that sits atop existing systems and ERPs to automate manual, fragmented back-office workflows for CPG brands, enabling tasks like order recording, fulfillment routing, and invoicing to be executed autonomously. The company aims to provide live visibility into financial performance, cash flow, and logistics while reducing operational overhead and improving margins. Corvera participated in Y Combinator's Winter 2026 cohort and has a leadership team with CPG and AI experience, led by CEO Chris Kong and CTO Dirk Breeuwer. The startup plans to use its newly raised seed capital to scale the product, expand its team, and grow its customer base. Corvera was founded in London and is currently based in San Francisco.

Participated · Seed · Nov 2025

Extellis designs and plans to operate satellites built to capture high-frequency synthetic aperture radar (SAR) imagery, with the company claiming each satellite can capture thousands of images per day using patented antenna technology developed at Duke University from DARPA-sponsored research. The platform is intended to provide consistent monitoring that works at night and through clouds, smoke and other conditions that limit optical imagery. Extellis targets infrastructure operators and industrial companies—such as pipeline, transportation and energy facility operators—that need frequent, wide-area visibility of distributed assets. The company is preparing a pathfinder mission to test technology and operating capabilities ahead of broader commercial service and is building the infrastructure required to serve industrial customers. Extellis recently expanded its seed financing with investment from Shell Ventures to support the pathfinder mission, team expansion and progress toward commercial operations. The company positions its offering as an alternative to helicopters, ground inspections and optical satellite imagery for more dependable, high-frequency monitoring.

Participated · Seed · Sep 2025

Eloquent AI builds an AI operator for automating customer support and operations in financial services. Its operator is powered by Oratio, a proprietary multimodal LLM trained on regulated financial workflows. The system uses browser-control technology and computer vision to observe human agents across internal systems and then mirror those actions with precision, without APIs, prompting, or engineering work. The company is based in San Francisco, CA. It plans to use the new funding to grow its engineering team in San Francisco and to expand its AI Operator capabilities into new verticals, including fraud, payments, lending, and onboarding. Financially, the company has just completed a Seed financing to fund these product and team expansions.

Participated · Seed · Apr 2025

Octane provides an AI-powered cybersecurity platform that analyzes smart-contract and blockchain code to pinpoint and automatically fix security flaws before they are exploited. The system combines large-scale code analysis with automated remediation, aiming to safeguard billions of dollars in on-chain assets. Led by CEO Giovanni Vignone, the company is positioning itself as a core security layer for teams building in crypto and Web3. With its newly secured seed capital, Octane plans to accelerate product development, grow its engineering and security research teams, and mass-label vulnerability data to improve model accuracy. The funds will also support broader adoption among developers integrating the platform into their continuous-integration workflows. The $6.75 million seed round represents the entirety of the company’s disclosed financing to date.