• Anello Photonics

  Participated · Series B · May 2026

  ANELLO Photonics develops the ANELLO SiPhOG™ (Silicon Photonics Optical Gyroscope), an integrated photonic system-on-chip designed to deliver fiber‑optic–class gyroscope performance in a chip-scale form factor. The company combines its silicon photonics platform with an AI-based sensor fusion engine and holds a portfolio of over 80 issued or pending patents. ANELLO positions its products for deployment across land, air, and sea to enable resilient navigation where GNSS signals are unavailable or contested. The firm emphasizes manufacturability and scale, aiming to provide lower-cost, continuous high-precision positioning compared with legacy systems. The company is headquartered in Santa Clara, California. The recent Series B-2 financing is intended to scale production, accelerate innovation, and expand customer deliveries.

• OpenLight

  Participated · Series A · Apr 2026

  OpenLight develops a heterogeneous III-V silicon photonics process and a foundry-validated process design kit (PDK) that integrates active and passive components—such as integrated lasers, modulators, amplifiers, and detectors—into custom PASICs. Its PDK is validated at Tower Semiconductor and is used by more than 25 companies to design and fabricate production-grade PASICs across datacom, telecom, AI data centers, sensing, and quantum computing. The company holds over 410 patents related to its PDK and manufacturing of heterogeneously integrated III-V photonics. OpenLight is advancing leading-edge components including 400G modulators and indium phosphide on-chip lasers and amplifiers, and plans to develop standards-based reference PICs at 1.6T and 3.2T. The firm aims to expand its PDK library, worldwide sales, and technical support as it scales; it is headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, with offices in Silicon Valley and has raised $84 million in total funding.

• Urban Sky

  Participated · Series B · Feb 2025

  Urban Sky develops high-altitude balloons (Microballoon™/mHAB), custom stratospheric payloads, control software, and AI-derived forecasting and autonomous flight control systems. Its flagship mHAB product is a rapidly deployable, navigable stratospheric balloon that can operate above 60,000 feet for multiple days. The company serves commercial, civil government, and U.S. defense customers, including NASA, the oil & gas sector, wildfire monitoring organizations, the U.S. Army, and the U.S. Air Force. Urban Sky demonstrated its Hot Spot LWIR imaging system with NASA and the Air Force, producing wildfire heat maps the company says are 100x finer than publicly available MODIS and VIIRS data. The firm plans to develop and commercialize a connected suite of products and to pioneer technologies to deploy a global constellation of long-duration, persistent stratospheric balloons for search & rescue, environmental monitoring, disaster response, communications, and intelligence support. Financially, Urban Sky closed a $30M Series B to accelerate development and commercialization of its technology and product portfolio. Urban Sky builds small, reusable stratospheric balloons—branded Microballoons—that are deployed from a pickup truck to collect high-resolution Earth imagery and data products. The company offers natural color optical images today and is developing near-infrared and long-wave infrared sensors (the latter, HotSpot, has been demonstrated to monitor wildfires in real time under a NASA grant with Air Force support). Urban Sky uses a patented termination and descent mechanism to recover balloons and a stratospheric flight simulator to back-predict launch sites, lowering operational costs. The 14-person startup has been running tasking missions in the Rocky Mountain region and has brought in millions in revenue. It plans to scale operations by building a routine catalogue of refreshed data over highly populated areas and other customer areas of interest. Urban Sky aims to drive down imagery costs—reporting roughly $5–$10 per square kilometer at 10 cm resolution—and compete on cost and revisit cadence with traditional satellite providers. Urban Sky is a Denver, CO startup focused on stratospheric technology and remote sensing. The company develops the Microballoon, leveraging component miniaturization and first-of-its-kind balloon reusability to operate in the stratosphere. Its approach uses the high vantage point of the stratosphere to reduce the cost of high-resolution remote sensing and weather-related data capture over broad areas. Urban Sky says this enables more impactful data collection across larger regions than traditional platforms. The company announced an over-subscribed $4.1 million Seed financing round. Investors in the round include Catapult Ventures, Union Labs, TenOneTen Ventures, New Stack Ventures, and Techstars.

• Samara

  Participated · Series A · Oct 2023

  Samara is a Redwood City-based company that offers a turnkey solution for accessory dwelling units, marketed under its flagship product, Backyard. The firm blends design, premium materials, and precision engineering to manufacture prefab homes that serve as in-law suites, home offices, or rental units. Samara manages every stage of the project, including design, permitting, delivery, and installation, providing homeowners with a streamlined experience. The company also offers financing options, lowering the barrier to adding flexible living space. With the newly raised capital, Samara plans to broaden its operations and accelerate product development. Although the article does not disclose revenue or user numbers, the Series B raise underscores investor confidence in the company’s growth trajectory.

• ISEE

  Participated · Series B · Nov 2022

  ISEE develops fully-autonomous self-driving yard trucks and software to automate operations in logistics yards. The company says its stack leverages cognitive modeling, game theory, and deep learning to provide a "humanistic" AI that gives yard trucks common sense. ISEE reports more than 10,000 completed self-driving trailer moves at customer sites, an industry-leading 100% pilot success rate, and revenue growth of more than 20x in the past 12 months. Its platform-agnostic system can convert diesel or electric fleets to autonomous operation with no infrastructure changes and begin live loads within four weeks. Customers include Fortune 100 firms in e-commerce, retail, automotive OEMs and major 3PLs, and ISEE says customers can achieve roughly 30% IRR from deployments. The company was spun out of MIT in 2017 and is based in Cambridge, Mass. iSee builds autonomous driving systems for trucks using an approach it calls “Multi‑Agent Tensor Fusion,” which parses visual data from scenes and individual agents to predict human‑like reactions. The company’s models emphasize social intelligence and learning-based prediction rather than narrow rule-following or pure pattern recognition. iSee grew out of MIT AI research and was founded in 2017 by Yibiao Zhao, Debby Yu and Chris Baker; Josh Tenenbaum serves as an adviser. The startup has run trials, including retrofitting a Lexus SUV to drive autonomously through Boston. According to PitchBook the company previously raised $2.7 million in seed funding led by MIT’s venture studio The Engine, and it is testing in a market with competitors such as PlusAI, Perrone Robotics and TuSimple. iSee says its approach produced industry‑leading autonomous trucking performance within two years of development.

No current team members are available.