David Head is CEO of Endorsed, a San Francisco identity verification startup that uses AI to screen candidates. That task includes detecting signs of potential imposters and fraudsters, which these days includes a torrent of North Korean operatives posing as IT workers, who over the past several years have snuck into hundreds of U.S. companies.
Cat Gioino here. Everyone wants safer neighborhoods, right? That was Flock CEO Garrett Langley’s pitch to VCs after he built Flock’s first prototype. The Georgia Tech electrical engineer was not yet 30 when a string of break-ins in his own Atlanta neighborhood convinced him local police lacked the right tools. Recruiting two former colleagues, Matt
This was a headline I’d been waiting to see. “Boiler room raised $74 million selling retirees SpaceX, Anduril, Anthropic, and Perplexity while reaping ‘massive hidden fees,’ SEC claims,” my colleague Amanda Gerut wrote last week, outlining a case that the SEC has brought against a Long Island-based financial firm it’s calling a pre-IPO “boiler room.”
Preston Fore here. Landing a defense contract has historically meant navigating layers of government bureaucracy, with proposals often taking years to turn into cash. But software unicorn Code Metal is getting something new defense contractors rarely get from the Pentagon: speed. The Boston-based firm just landed an $80 million contract to modernize and AI-enable WarMatrix,
It’s an AI world and we’re all just living in it. PitchBook released its Q2 2026 U.S. VC Valuations data this week, and the report aligns with the skewed venture market we’ve come to know: Investors are willing to pay up for a few anointed AI companies, and (almost) everything else is a pass or
Whatnot, started in a Funko Pop-flooded rental house, is now a $20 billion company. The live commerce platform exclusively told Fortune it recently raised its $545 million Series G, almost doubling Whatnot’s valuation from $11.5 billion in its October 2025 round. It’s an unlikely story in all sorts of ways, from the tech giant’s previous