For the past three months, the financial press has been writing about private credit as though the apocalypse is imminent. Redemption gates, illiquid assets, SaaS exposure, shadow banking lurking just outside the regulatory perimeter. If you’ve been following the coverage, you might think the entire $1.7 trillion industry is on the verge of collapse. It […]
“It’s like finding a needle in a haystack with fake needles everywhere.” – Anish Agarwal, co-founder and CEO of Traversal Website outages are painful, but in the age of AI-generated code they’re turning existential. Last year, companies, including Amazon Web Services, Azure, Cloudflare and Google Cloud all announced major outages, some lasting over 15 hours. […]
“If you’re feeling confident managing things at home, you can feel confident at work. And if you feel confident at work, you should definitely feel confident bringing that knowledge back home.” – Lindsey Stanberry, founder of The Purse For many founders and executives, managing money at work feels like second nature. You’re fluent in KPIs, […]
Hi there and welcome to Funded, where we spotlight the early-stage bets on the future of tech. This week, we’re looking at infrastructure for finance teams finally catching up to the complexity of modern B2B business models, and what it takes to make AI actually usable in that stack. Zenskar raised a $15 million Series […]
“I really did cringe, because I would not call myself godmother of anything.” – Dr. Fei Fei Li, on being called the “Godmother of AI” “People think, okay, there’s my intelligence and there’s AI. AI is not part of me, but it’s actually going to be part of you. It’s going inside your brain […]
A year after its Las Vegas debut, HumanX 2026 migrated to San Francisco, home of the AI boom and the city long considering itself the capital of the future. And at Moscone Center South, this future indeed arrived. With disco lights. Inside the conference’s Kaleidoscope Theater, strobe lights flashed as an AI-generated kickoff hype video […]
After helping build robots for Mars and underground mines, Dr. Ali Agha is bringing a safety-first AI brain to the world’s most dangerous worksites. When people think of modern robotics, they usually picture humanoids doing backflips, or doomsday scenarios of autonomous machines hitting the frontlines, and eventually turning into killer robots (like Black Mirror’s “Metalhead”). […]
Last week, I spent three days in Las Vegas attending Fintech Meetup and it was an epic show. Most of my time was consumed by the Lending Track, because I organized it, but I also caught some of the keynotes, did a breakfast Table Talk, and, of course, had plenty of one-on-one meetings. As you […]
This week, we’re looking at a familiar tension in enterprise AI—speed versus trust, and a startup betting that finance teams won’t accept one without the other. Numos, a San Francisco-based fintech, raised a $4.25 million seed round led by General Catalyst with participation from Operator Collective to bring AI deeper into the finance stack. The […]
“In financial services, every decision you make has to stand up to regulators, auditors, compliance teams, and determined fraudsters.” – Laura Spiekerman, Alloy Financial services is a tough proving ground for agentic AI due to a high regulatory bar and zero tolerance for unexplained decisions. But Alloy co-founder and president Laura Spiekerman thinks agentic AI […]