Participated · Series A · Sep 2025

Tidal Cyber offers a Threat-Led Defense platform that helps organizations measure and improve the effectiveness of their security stack against real-world threats and adversary behavior. The platform operationalizes MITRE ATT&CK and delivers independent tools and services to align security efforts to the threats that matter without vendor bias. Tidal Cyber plans to build a comprehensive CTI and adversary behavior–driven platform to shift organizations from managing intel to proactive, threat-informed defense. The company raised $10 million in Series A funding to accelerate product innovation and fuel company growth. Tidal Cyber was founded in 2022 and is based in Reston, Va. It was co-founded by three former MITRE experts — Rick Gordon, Richard Struse, and Frank Duff — who bring extensive experience in threat-informed defense and related standards and programs. Tidal Cyber offers a Threat-Informed Defense SaaS platform (Enterprise Edition) that aggregates MITRE ATT&CK®, third-party threat intelligence, and internal research to produce Tidal Confidence Scores and Coverage Maps. The platform recently integrated Breach and Attack Simulation (BAS) test results to compare tests against existing confidence scores. The company also maintains a freely available Community Edition used by over 3,000 security professionals globally. Tidal Cyber plans to use new investment to accelerate go-to-market activities, expand sales and marketing, and enhance both Community and Enterprise Editions. The company reported customer and financial growth exceeding 10x over the past year. Founded in January 2022 by threat-intelligence veterans with experience at MITRE and the U.S. Department of Homeland Security, Tidal Cyber aims to lead adoption of Threat-Informed Defense across critical infrastructure segments. Tidal Cyber offers a threat-informed defense platform that embeds the MITRE ATT&CK knowledge base to help security operations teams focus on the most relevant adversarial tactics and techniques. The platform includes a threat profile builder to identify and prioritize relevant threats, a prioritized to-do list for daily defensive actions, a map to optimize defensive tooling, and a proprietary confidence score to assess cyber posture. Tidal’s tools aim to align threats with the right defensive capabilities and streamline communication about an organization’s security program. The company is led by CEO Rick Gordon, CTO Richard Struse, and CINO Frank Duff. Tidal plans to use newly raised capital to accelerate growth of its platform. The company is based in Reston, VA. Tidal Cyber offers a SaaS-based threat-informed defense platform that maps an organization’s security capabilities to adversary tactics and techniques, including MITRE ATT&CK and additional intelligence sources. The platform includes a registry of vendor product capabilities mapped to adversary behaviors to produce actionable insight on defensive coverage, gaps, and overlaps. Tidal provides a free Community Edition that was made generally available at Black Hat USA in early August, featuring enriched technique data and the Tidal Product Registry. The company plans an enterprise edition with enhanced features, including reporting driven by a Tidal Confidence Score to help evaluate and communicate cyber risk reduction. Led by CEO Rick Gordon, Tidal intends to use the new funding to expand the platform and ramp up customer acquisition. Financially, the company raised $4M in funding to support these product and go-to-market efforts.

Participated · Series B · Jun 2025

Conquest Planning builds AI-powered financial planning software (its Strategic Advice Manager, or SAM) that performs thousands of calculations to generate personalized, dynamic financial plans for advisors and end clients. The platform supports banks, brokerages, wirehouses, insurance firms and pension providers and is used by more than 1,000 financial services organizations. Conquest offers features for onboarding, robust plan analysis, dynamic content creation, and estate and legacy planning to serve both retail and generationally wealthy families. The company has launched SAM Bytes to engage self-directed investors and foster advisor relationships during key planning moments. Conquest says it counts more than 60% of the Canadian financial advisor market as users, is rapidly gaining adoption in the U.S. and U.K., and has nearly 1.5 million plans created on its platform. It plans to use new funding to accelerate U.S. expansion and continue evolving its AI planning capabilities. Conquest Planning is a product-led financial planning software company founded in 2018 and based in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Its core product is an intuitively designed platform that uses data-driven AI and an AI-based strategic advice manager (SAM) to help advisors build flexible, hyper-personalized financial plans quickly. The platform aims to reduce the time advisors spend creating plans and to improve interoperability with CRM and other tech stacks. Conquest has forged relationships with tens of thousands of advisors in Canada and is expanding into the United States and the United Kingdom. The company serves retail investors and high-net-worth families by making personalized planning accessible at scale. Most recently it raised $24 million (CAD) in a Series A and has almost $35 million (CAD) in total funding to date to support UX investments and international expansion. Conquest Planning is building AI-driven financial planning software designed to help advisors and consumers understand the impact of financial decisions and create personalized plans. The company aims to simplify and modernize a complex planning process to make it more approachable. Conquest plans to bring its product to market later this year and to expand its current team of around 20 employees in advance of launch. The startup was founded in 2018 and is based in Manitoba. Mark Evans, president and CEO and former head of EISI, leads the company and emphasizes increasing accessibility to financial planning. Financially, Conquest has raised seed capital to support its market entry and growth plans.

Participated · Series B · Apr 2025

Near Space Labs designs and operates Swift robots—aircraft lifted by helium balloons that use wind currents to take high‑resolution (7cm) images from the stratosphere and glide back to earth. The company sells subscription imagery products largely to insurance customers for disaster response and risk assessment, and it is pursuing agricultural customers next. Near Space claims its approach can capture in hours what would take 800,000 drones days or weeks, and requires no special flight licenses because the systems are balloon‑powered and unmanned. Management says scaling coverage is straightforward and its ambition is to cover 80% of the U.S. population twice a year with 7cm imagery. The founders and leadership have technical backgrounds in space and physics, and the company is run out of the U.S. Near Space Labs builds and operates Swifty — small autonomous, wind-powered robots attached to weather balloons that reach 60,000–85,000 feet and capture 400–1,000 square kilometers of imagery per flight. The company positions Swifty as an alternative to satellites, claiming resolutions up to 50× better than satellite imagery and offering persistent, near-real-time coverage of rapidly changing urban areas. Devices are manufactured in a Brooklyn workshop while hardware R&D and engineering leadership are based in Barcelona; launches are coordinated with the FAA and air traffic control. As of the article, Near Space has eight Swifties in operation and has logged more than 540 flights through 2022; it sells non-exclusive data via a subscription API. Founded in 2017, the company is headquartered in Brooklyn and Barcelona, Spain. Near Space plans to use new funding to expand its geographical footprint and hire additional staff to scale operations.

Participated · Series B · Feb 2025

Lumotive pioneers programmable optics with its patented Light Control Metasurface (LCM™) platform, which turns photonics into a digital, software‑defined solution for sensing, switching, and communication. Its LCM technology is powering compact, solid‑state LiDAR and intelligent perception systems for autonomy, robotics, manufacturing, and smart infrastructure. The company says it holds more than 200 patents and is gaining commercial traction. Recent investments are intended to accelerate product deployments in industrial applications and expand its global market presence. Lumotive positions its semiconductor beamforming chips as a replacement for bulky mechanical optical components, enabling compact, software‑defined sensing for factories, robots, and logistics networks. Headquartered in Redmond, Washington, Lumotive is backed by a broad investor base that the company says will support scaling and commercialization efforts. Lumotive develops programmable optical semiconductors built around its patented light control metasurface (LCM™) chip, a software-defined photonic beamforming solid-state technology. The company says its technology improves perception, increases computing power, and enables reliable high-speed communication across multiple industries. Lumotive highlights applications including 3D sensing and AI computing. Led by CEO Sam Heidari, the company plans to accelerate sales growth of its LCM technology. Lumotive has identified three strategic areas for investment: global market expansion, data center AI infrastructure, and aerospace and defense. Lumotive develops Light Control Metasurface (LCM™) beam‑steering optical semiconductors that enable 3D sensing and software‑defined lidar. Its patented beam‑steering technology is intended to provide advanced perception capabilities for consumer, mobility, and industrial markets. Led by CEO Dr. Sam Heidari and based in Seattle, WA, the company produces optical semiconductor devices and chips. Lumotive raised $13M in a strategic funding round led by Samsung Ventures with participation from new investors USAA and Uniquest. The company will use the proceeds to accelerate development and customer delivery of optical semiconductor devices that enable next‑generation lidar sensors. The new investment brings the company’s total capital raised to more than $56M to date. Lumotive has developed a metamaterials-based lidar system that enables electronic beam steering to improve responsiveness, targeted illumination, and sensitivity compared with mechanically steered systems. The company’s chips are silicon-based, designed for fabrication with standard processes, and operate with ubiquitous 905nm lasers; devices can be sized or shaped for different platforms. In normal sweep mode the system can offer roughly a 20Hz frame rate with a 120×25° field of view and about 1000×256 resolution, while concentrating beam time on small regions for higher temporal and spatial fidelity. Lumotive emerged from Intellectual Ventures’ incubator and holds an exclusive license to IV’s metamaterials IP; its team includes CEO and co‑founder Bill Colleran. The product is currently in prototype but is showable as Lumotive pursues partnerships with automotive and tech firms. Financially, the company has run on a 2017 seed round funded by Bill Gates and Intellectual Ventures and is now seeking additional investment.

Participated · Series B · Feb 2023

Trust & Will offers an online, attorney-approved estate-planning platform that helps users create wills, trusts, healthcare directives and other state-specific documents through a guided experience. The company serves more than one million individuals and families, supports 17,000+ financial advisors, 150+ enterprise partners, and reports $100+ billion in self-reported estate assets. Founded in 2017 and based in San Diego, Trust & Will emphasizes simple, secure integration with financial institutions. The business has expanded its credit union work from a single partnership in 2018 to more than 200 credit unions today and is forming a Credit Union Service Organization (CUSO) to deepen that integration. It has joined the National Association of Credit Union Service Organizations (NACUSO) as a Platinum Partner to accelerate industry partnerships and insights. The company announced a $4.5M investment from Curql as part of its Series C, which will support broader credit-union-focused distribution and enterprise integrations. Trust & Will provides a SaaS platform for accessible, attorney-approved estate planning, enabling users to create wills, trusts, and related documents tailored to state requirements. The company emphasizes integrations with financial advisors, attorneys, real estate professionals, member organizations, NPOs, and businesses to support multi-generational planning. It reports over one million Americans have started legacy planning on the platform. Trust & Will is investing in AI and data infrastructure to deliver personalized recommendations, analyze existing plans, and provide real-time updates. The platform maintains bank-level encryption and compliance with SOC 2 and HIPAA standards, is a certified B Corporation, and serves as the official estate planning provider for AARP members and other financial institutions. Founded in 2017 and headquartered in San Diego, the company aims to expand partnerships and embed estate planning into major life milestones like home or car purchases. Trust & Will provides an online platform for creating customizable estate plans and settling estates, with legal documents tailored to state and county guidelines. The company offers transactional purchases plus an annual membership for ongoing updates, and in October launched Trust & Will Probate to streamline probate and estate settlement. It partners with banks, credit unions, fintechs, insurtechs and nonprofits to educate members and offer discounts. Trust & Will reported that revenue more than doubled year‑over‑year and that its business has doubled annually since 2020, though specific revenue figures were not disclosed. The company crossed over 478,000 cumulative members at the end of January and is on track to exceed 500,000 this quarter. Leadership says the new capital will be used to scale operations, further integrate with financial institutions, and provide runway to achieve profitability with strong cash reserves. Trust & Will offers three primary products: a trust-based estate plan, a will-based estate plan, and "Guardian," a simpler setup for parents. Customers pay an upfront setup fee by product and a smaller recurring annual subscription. Since launching in mid-2018 the company says 160,000 users have signed up, and the team has grown to 24 employees. The company originally operated only in Nevada due to state digital-will laws but has expanded attorney support to multiple states and completed the first electronic will in Florida. Trust & Will has built partnerships with institutions including Fifth Third Bank, AARP, and Acorns. The startup has raised more than $23 million to date and has positioned itself to grow as more states put digital-will and estate-planning laws in place. Trust & Will offers a digital estate-planning platform that lets customers draft wills and trust-based plans, including tools to avoid probate and manage beneficiary instructions. The company sells tiered subscription plans priced roughly $399–$499 (plus annual fees) for trust-based plans, $69–$129 for beneficiary/asset-distribution plans, and $39–$49 for parents with minor children. Since launching in April, Trust & Will has enrolled 60,000 members representing $15.1 billion in total assets, $2.7 billion in reported life insurance policies, $137 million in charitable commitments, and with 88% of members holding real estate assets. The startup has formed partnerships to enable electronic closings (it closed its first electronic will in January with Notarize). With a team of 11 people, the company plans to use new capital to expand sales and marketing, advance product development, and grow partnerships. The product is positioned to capture demand as younger cohorts begin estate planning and to compete with legacy solutions like Quicken’s WillMaker and other startups.