The Venture Codex

Participated · Series A · Aug 2026

Starcloud is building a network of data centers in space, starting at kilowatts and scaling to gigawatt capacity. Falling launch costs allow us to take advantage of the abundant energy, radiative cooling techniques, and ability to rapidly scale in space. Join our team, push the boundaries of the space economy, and be part of this pioneering effort to redefine the future of energy.

Led · Seed · Jun 2026

HaloBraid develops a robotic braiding assistant that allows a stylist to start a braid and hand off the remainder of the process to the device, which can finish braids in seconds. The company’s first product is designed to be gentle on textured hair and to handle styles such as knotless and box braids, with a planned launch later this year. HaloBraid was founded by Yinka Ogunbiyi and has a team of about 15 people; it raised a $7M seed round led by Seven Seven Six. In customer research of 2,000 people the company found 95% said they would get braided more often if it took less time, and it estimates people spend roughly 8 billion hours braiding hair each year. The startup faces few direct competitors in the automated-braider space (notably Braidiant) and is already considering additional devices such as a tool to undo braids.

Led · Seed · Jun 2026

Zest is a newly launched restaurant discovery app that imports users' dining transactions via Plaid to build a personal dining map and deliver personalized recommendations. Users link a credit card and Zest imports only food-and-drink transactions, excluding fast-casual/fast food, to surface frequently visited and preferred spots. The app combines real transaction data with more than 80 million reviews scraped from sources across the web to enhance its suggestions and context. Zest was founded in November 2024 and was in beta before opening to the public; in the weeks after launch it recorded over 100,000 visits. Founders include Mario Gomez-Hall (formerly Head of Design at Saturn) and technical co-founder Alex Moller (ex-Apple experience). The team is rolling out features like freeform place notes and a "Fresh Picks" discovery feature and says it plans to expand beyond restaurants to other city hot spots over time.

Participated · Seed · Jun 2026

Plot builds an AI layer that analyzes hundreds of millions of social videos to capture untagged consumer mentions, track multimedia marketing campaigns, and run natural language research prompts. The company sells its platform to enterprise customers and counts Fortune 500 brands such as Visa, Mastercard, PepsiCo, Fenty Beauty, Benefit Cosmetics, and CAVA among its clients. Plot has demonstrated strong commercial traction, growing annualized recurring revenue 3.8x year-over-year and maintaining a 132% net revenue retention rate. Led by co-founder and CEO Megan Duong, the company plans to use the new seed funding to scale engineering, expand platform infrastructure, and accelerate automated creator sourcing and deep consumer research workflows. The product roadmap emphasizes expanded automation and enterprise-grade platform capabilities to meet growing enterprise demand.

Participated · Series A · Mar 2026

Deeptune builds high-fidelity digital "sandbox" environments where AI agents can practice complex tasks via reinforcement learning. Its platform creates simulated worlds intended to let agents convert raw model capability into reliable task performance, with example tasks including managing financial books or inboxes. The company emphasizes a sandbox architecture to give agents experiential training in controlled settings. Deeptune is led by a team with backgrounds at Anthropic, Scale AI, Palantir and Glean. Following the Series A, the company has $43 million in new funding to expand engineering and operations and to accelerate development of its simulation infrastructure. The article does not disclose revenue, user counts, founding year, or valuation.