The Venture Codex

Participated · Series B · Jul 2026

CuspAI builds AI systems that search for and design new materials tailored to specified properties, serving customers including ASML and Meta. The company counts AI researchers Yann LeCun and Geoffrey Hinton as advisers. It plans to expand geographically across the US, APAC and Europe and to deploy an “AI Materials Foundry,” a global network of data, labs, compute and scientific expertise with founding partners such as Nvidia, Meta, Samsung and Hyundai and more than 40 other companies. Financially, CuspAI is a two-year-old startup that has raised over $670M to date, including a $450M Series B that values it at $2.6B. The firm says its platform addresses materials discovery bottlenecks across industries including energy, semiconductors, manufacturing, water treatment and carbon capture.

Participated · Equity · Jul 2026

State Affairs operates a newsroom that produces more than 2,000 originally reported, nonpartisan articles each month and a data team that gathers and structures policy information from statehouses and agencies. Its platform combines exclusive daily reporting, on-the-ground legislative and regulatory data, and an AI knowledge graph that tracks bills, regulations and hearings across all 50 states and the federal government. The company says one-third of state and federal elected officials use the platform and that enterprise customers include Walmart, Mastercard and McDonald's. State Affairs plans to hire many more full-time reporters and to further invest in objective journalism to widen its competitive moat. The company is led by co-founders Evan Burns and Jamie Roberts Seltzer with Alison Bethel as founding editor-in-chief and chief content officer, and it announced $70 million in funding to accelerate these efforts.

Participated · Series C · Jun 2026

Founded in 2023, Dream develops sovereign AI and cyber defense platforms for governments and critical infrastructure and operates from offices in Tel Aviv, Abu Dhabi, and Vienna. The company has three core platforms: Sphere, a national cyber defense system combining cyber intelligence, exposure management, attack path analysis, and AI detection and response; Hero, an autonomous AI security researcher that discovers vulnerabilities and stress-tests defenses; and Atlas, a sovereign AI platform that connects fragmented national data and enables deployment of mission-specific AI agents and models within secure government environments. Dream began commercial operations in late 2024 and has secured nearly $300 million in total contract value since then. The company employs approximately 350 people. After the latest $260 million round Dream is valued at $3 billion and has raised $412 million to date, and plans to use the new capital to accelerate global deployment of its platforms across multiple regions.

Participated · Equity · Apr 2026

Founded as an open-source project in 2023, ComfyUI developed a modular, node-based interface that lets creators control each step of generation from diffusion models for image, video, and audio. The tool has been adopted by creative professionals and technical artists, with the company reporting over 4 million users and usage across visual effects, animation, advertising, and industrial design. ComfyUI evolved from a community project into a formal startup and has raised multiple rounds, including $19 million in a late‑2024 Series A and the recent $30 million round at a $500 million valuation. Yoland Yan is the company’s co-founder and CEO and has emphasized the platform’s role in enabling precise, human-in-the-loop adjustments that prompting alone often cannot deliver. The company faces competitors in adjacent tooling, including Weavy, which was acquired by Figma.

Participated · Series C · Jan 2026

Automata builds an operating system for laboratories, combining modular robotic hardware, orchestration software, and unified data infrastructure to let scientists program experiments rather than robots. Its platform aims to close the gap between AI-driven computational biology and the manual workflows still common in wet labs, delivering higher experimental throughput, reproducibility, and resource efficiency. The company already serves five top pharmaceutical companies through repeat deployments and large-scale automation projects. New product work is focused on data and closed-loop experimentation capabilities that enable self-serve, AI-driven drug discovery. Automata plans to use fresh capital to scale global customer deployments and expand engineering, product, and customer-success teams. Headquartered in London, the company positions itself as the reference architecture for autonomous, software-defined labs in pharma, biotech, and advanced research.