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Good Things Come in Threes - it comes with great joy to announce defy III, our latest $300M venture capital fund!! Thank you to @crunchbasenews @geneteare bit.ly/3HLeTCo
defy.vc retweeted
Today we're officially live.
Front Office Sports just covered our launch and we’re now letting fans participate in professional athletes' careers through regulated offerings.
The sports industry has spent years monetizing fans through betting apps, prediction markets, and daily fantasy. 95-97% of sports bettors lose money. 84% of Polymarket traders are in the red. $17 billion was extracted from American consumers by sportsbooks in 2025 alone.
Agentiq is the opposite of that without a house edge and a real economic interest in the athletes you believe in.
Our roster is anchored by Justin Martinez, a 25-year-old flamethrowing closer of the Diamondbacks, Hunter Dobbins, the Cardinals up-and-coming starting pitcher and Esmerlyn Valdez, the 22-year-old Pittsburgh Pirates outfielder who has emerged as one of the most electric rookies in the MLB this season.
Backed by a $4M seed round led by defy.vc and a group of industry heavy hitters who own two major European football clubs.
We're just getting started.
Another startup is selling shares in the future earnings of athletes.
Agentiq, a startup that already has multiple MLB players on its platform, launched this week with $4 million in VC backing.
frontofficesports.com/articl…
Everyone's watching the humanoids. But @mkhandel is watching the layers underneath. 250+ physical AI companies, mapped:
bit.ly/46eiXGQ
#physicalAI #robots #drones #machines #morethanyoucansee
Eudia is a launch partner on @googlecloud's Gemini Enterprise for Legal.
Legal teams on #GeminiEnterprise can scale their institutional knowledge and automate multi-step contract analysis in hours rather than days, giving enterprises a faster path to trusted, governed legal AI.
🚀 Proud to be named #71 on @TIME 's "America's Top Venture Capital Firms of 2026" (@StatistaCharts).
Grateful to our team, partners, LPs, and the founders who let us be part of their story.
Onward to backing more daring ideas!
#VC #venturecapital #defy
defy.vc retweeted
Exciting news from Hakimo!
We've raised $12 million in growth funding led by Zigg Capital, bringing our total funding to $32 million.
Over the past year, we've:
- Tripled revenue for the second consecutive year
- Grown to more than 300 customers
- Doubled our team, including welcoming Bret Knobelauch as Chief Revenue Officer
- Helped customers reduce security incidents by up to 60%
- Added new product capabilities like AI-Powered Forensic Search
Physical security is at a turning point. Guard costs continue to rise, labor shortages persist, and most camera systems generate more alerts than teams can realistically manage.
Hakimo is transforming existing security cameras into AI-powered security operators, enabling one operator to oversee the work that once required ten. The result is faster threat detection, quicker response, lower costs, and stronger security without replacing existing camera infrastructure.
Today, leading operators, from homes to iconic buildings, trust Hakimo to protect their properties with AI-driven security monitoring.
This funding will help us accelerate our mission to modernize physical security with agentic AI and build the future of security for the built world.
A huge thank you to our customers, partners, investors, and every member of the Hakimo team for making this milestone possible.
This round was led by Zigg Capital, with continued support from neotribe.com, vertexventures.sg/, Rocketship.vc and defy.vc.
We're hiring across engineering, AI, product, sales, and more. If you're excited about building the future of AI-powered physical security, we'd love to hear from you.
Read the full story in Axios: lnkd.in/g-NQvj2e
#FundingAnnouncement #PhysicalSecurity #AgenticAI #AIInPhysicalSecurity #AISecurity #SecurityInnovation #StartupGrowth #Hakimo
Check out @ChoubeySahab interview with @neil_sequeira on @VC10X_ chat #ownership #venturecapital #conviction #deals @thekcpr
vc10x.beehiiv.com/p/how-defy…
Thrilled to announce our investment in Champ AI!
Built by @Instacart veterans, Champ's AI agents automate the back-office busywork that slows companies down. $8.5M raised alongside Redpoint, SV Angel, Max Mullen. 🏆 bit.ly/4ucbT7W @BusinessInsider #AgenticAI @mkhandel
Healthcare must be a theme, congrats to Synthpop's Series A! We’re proud to continue supporting this exceptional team as they execute on their important mission of scaling AI that makes healthcare more human.
bit.ly/4bDnUwQ @axios @thekcpr @mkhandel #HealthcareAI
I just published Thanks to a relentless founder: Adam Lewis and the Apploi journey medium.com/p/thanks-to-a-rel…
Thanks to a relentless founder: Adam Lewis and the Apploi journey. @neil_sequeira tells the story of our investment in @Apploi
bit.ly/4kignFK
#sold #HealthcareInnovation #HealthcareAI #HealthcareInnovation #experience
When code moves at superhuman speed, security has to move faster. @AlmanaxAI v2 is a big step toward security that actually keeps up. Congrats on the launch!
#Web3 #Cybersecurity #Blockchain #AI #SecurityEngineering #PortfolioUpdate @bmrothenberg
Our biggest product launch yet!
We started with one goal: build automated security that works like a real security engineer.
We are closer than ever to that reality
In a world where code moves at superhuman speed, security can't be the thing that slows it down — or it will be neglected.
Bad actors now have much more powerful weapons, but now, so do defenders.
Welcome to Almanax v2!
defy.vc retweeted
🚀 Excited to share that @defyvc is leading the $3.5M seed for Interface, an AI platform transforming industrial safety + compliance — one of the most complex, high-stakes problems in heavy industry.Industrial operators rely on millions of pages of SOPs, technical manuals, and regulatory documents.
Auditing them manually is slow, expensive, and often impossible to do comprehensively. Mistakes don’t just cost money — they cost lives.
Interface’s AI “safety copilot” changes that. It’s already 10× faster and 4× cheaper than traditional review, and is being piloted today with some of the world’s largest oil & gas companies.
This is AI enabling workflows that simply weren’t possible before.What made us lean in quickly was the founder–market fit, captured so well in @Cookie's @TechCrunch profile (linked below).
CEO, @thomasleeyoung, grew up in Trinidad & Tobago around rigs, saw the impact of safety failures firsthand, and later worked in human factors engineering at Jaguar Land Rover.
His co-founder, Aaryan Mehta, brings deep technical expertise — AI + Math from Imperial College London, and ML pipeline + fault-detection work at Amazon.
Together, they have a rare combination of domain depth + AI rigor that this category demands and this is the right product at exactly the right moment.
Thrilled to partner alongside @PrecursorVC, @RockYardVC, and exceptional angels on this journey — and grateful to @Cookie + @TechCrunch for telling the founders’ stories with such nuance. Thomas + Aaryan — we’re all in. Heavy industry needs what you’re building. This is only the beginning. 🚀
defy.vc retweeted
I’ve always believed the best founder–VC relationships start before the pitch.
Years before investing in @noviconnect, I worked with its founder @kimberly_shenk at Eventbrite — she led data science, I led growth. That trust built in the trenches made backing her next company, Novi, feel full circle.
Novi is the trusted data layer helping brands win in the AI-driven commerce era.
We talked about how AI is becoming the new search interface — and what it means for brands to be found by machines, not people.
🎥 Marketing to Machines: How AI Shopping Is Changing SEO, Trust & Brand Growth
YouTube: youtube.com/watch?app=deskto…
Apple: podcasts.apple.com/us/podcas…
Spotify: open.spotify.com/episode/3aU…
Thanks @VCFMpodcast for hosting!
cc @defyvc
🔍 Proud moment — our Analyst, Noah Lin, was featured in the @WSJVC newsletter. He replied to @marcvarta questions last week on AI startups and lasting revenue: bit.ly/46FNQ6C
👏 Congrats Noah!
@thekcpr #startups #AI #ROI #revenue #WSJ #value
Congratulations to @BirchesHealth for their Series A and bringing to light the need for advancements in behavioral health, namely, gambling addictions. bit.ly/4mmQeFb @axios @thekcpr @mkhandel
defy.vc retweeted
Great meeting with commissioner @HesterPeirce of the SEC.
When AI deals move at 2AM, there’s no such thing as “slow summer.” Our founder @neil_sequeira is featured in @WSJ "VCs Had No Time Off This Summer. Blame AI" as he tells us what happened at 2AM where we chased credplatform.com/
bit.ly/4lX33G6 @marcvarta @thekcpr
Want to make smarter startup moves? Think like a VC. @bmrothenberg dives into:
• False signals vs. real traction
• Defensible business models
• How to pitch & why job seekers should think like investors
▶ bit.ly/45KFBpF
Fund/Build/Scale Podcast with Walter Thompson
New podcast alert! Thank you @Jacksonfordyce for another great listen on Venture Daily featuring @mkhandel on the topic of: "Is Agentic Shopping Right Around the Corner?"
bit.ly/41EJZ8j
#agents #shopping #pinterest #agentic #AI #buying #shopping #FutureOfCommerce
New from @mkhandel & Noah Lin — practical playbooks for scaling AI-first GTM. Previously published on @crunchbase but here's the full article → bit.ly/40UvHAe
#AI #SaaS #GoToMarket #Innovation #Tech













