The Venture Codex

Participated · Seed · Jun 2026

HighGround builds an intelligence layer for defense and aerospace capital markets, ingesting budget, procurement, and vendor signals from more than 500 federal sources and linking them into a behavioral model of government purchasing. Its products include a chat interface, a structured API, and an MCP endpoint that integrates with large AI models like Claude and ChatGPT. The company is led by co-founder and CEO John Price, a former Green Beret and Senate defense and technology policy advisor. HighGround positions its platform to give investors, operators, and advisors a single source of truth to accelerate diligence and surface procurement-driven demand signals earlier. The recent $6.5 million seed round will be used to accelerate data coverage and deepen analytical models so customers can embed defense intelligence into decision workflows. The business frames itself as bringing institutional-grade intelligence to a capital-intensive and under-analysed asset class.

Participated · Series A · Sep 2015

uSens is an augmented reality and virtual reality developer that builds hand and head position tracking technologies enabling naturally interactive AR/VR experiences without wired controllers or peripherals. The company leverages machine learning and computer vision techniques to deliver its tracking solutions. It was founded in 2013 by Anli He (CEO) and Yue Fei (CTO) and is based in San Jose, California. uSens raised $20M in a Series A to support product development. The company intends to use the funds to launch in 2016 its 26DOF hand-tracking and 6DOF head-tracking tools. Returning investor Maison Capital and several new investors joined the financing, indicating existing support and new strategic backers. uSens, Inc. is a San Jose, California–based provider of full 3D interactive solutions for virtual reality and augmented reality. The company offers 3D gesture recognition on mobile platforms that combines virtual and augmented reality and targets applications beyond gaming, such as education, healthcare, entertainment and business training. Its product lineup includes the Impression Pi mobile VR+AR headset with gesture control and 6DOF head position tracking, and the Fingo Virtual Touch (FVT) touch-free 3D interactive kiosks in China. Co-founded in 2013 by Anli He (CEO), Dr. Yue Fei (CTO) and Dr. Chris Shi, uSens focuses on computer vision and 3D interactive solutions. The company completed a $5.5M pre-Series A financing and plans to use the funds to expand R&D in computer vision and 3D interactive solutions, further product development, and business development in the United States and China.