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Business Insider
10 hours ago
- Business
- Business Insider
This SpaceX alum-founded startup raised $10 million in 36 hours
Underwater microphones — called hydrophones — spot enemy submarines and have been around for over a century. AndrenaM, a startup using artificial intelligence to analyze sonar data and deliver real-time insights, is seeking to give this legacy defense tool a high-tech upgrade. "Our vision is to secure the oceans," Matej Cernosek, the startup's cofounder and CEO, told Business Insider in an interview. "We're doing that by building a distributed sensing network — a sonar mesh." AndrenaM's $10 million seed round closed in 36 hours. Typically, this process takes early-stage startups weeks, even months. Its rapid fundraise signals just how eager investors are about the new wave of defense tech. First Round Capital led the fundraise, with participation from Also Capital, Long Journey, Homebrew, and the Colorado School of Mines Venture Fund, among others. In 2024, Cernosek, a former SpaceX engineer, started the Hawthorne, California-based company with Alex Chu, who is AndrenaM's chief technology officer. The founders met during their first week of college at the Colorado School of Mines, where they studied mechanical engineering. Chu previously worked at a robotics company and as a software engineer at Qualia, a real estate platform. Despite decades of sonar use, much of the data processing is still manual and analog. "It's been people in these shacks that have headphones on, looking at a fuzzy screen and analyzing data coming to them in mass," Cernosek said. AndrenaM's eight-person team, which includes former engineers from SpaceX and the defense tech giants Palantir, Anduril, and Saronic, is developing machine-learning-powered software designed to process underwater acoustic data and piece together what's happening in real time. So far, the startup has been buying hydrophones off the shelf and pairing them with its software, but the team wants to build its own buoys equipped with its tech, which would lower costs and help the team gather more training data for its algorithms. "We really want to vertically integrate the solution," Cernosek said. "A lot of our competitors are just integrators — they take all these parts from everywhere, patch them together with Band-Aids. It works, but it ends up being a bespoke system that's superexpensive." After seeing AndrenaM's pitch deck, Meka Asonye, a partner at First Round Capital, hopped in a plane and flew it (he's a pilot) from San Francisco to Hawthorne to meet the team that same weekend. "Naturally, we're a startup — we were working," Cernosek said, so they took the Saturday meeting. They had another call with First Round that Monday and got a term sheet that night. "Oftentimes these early-stage companies are drawing things on a napkin, and they're years and years away from being ready," Asonye told BI. "The AndrenaM team is actually deploying stuff off the coast of California, and the technology already works." Asonye was also drawn to the company's potential commercial use cases, like port security. Defense tech investors and the Pentagon are increasingly interested in startups that can serve both public and private sector customers. AndrenaM plans to use the seed funding to double its head count to 16 employees, focusing on hiring software engineers. The company also bought a boat with the funding to start assembling the hardware it hopes to build, Cernosek said. "If you want to be the forward-deployed engineer here and go on the boat with us and deploy these systems and train them, this is your opportunity," Cernosek said. "You can sit in a cubicle, but do you really want to?" Much of Cernosek's drive to build a national security startup comes from his personal background. His family immigrated to the US from the Czech Republic during communist rule, an experience that shaped his worldview. "We live in the best country in the world, and this country has done very well for my family — my parents came here with $60 in their pocket," he said. "I want to build a generational company that will have a massive impact for the United States."
Yahoo
29-05-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Accounting technology startup Rillet raises $25m
Rillet, an accounting technology startup, has secured $25m in its Series A funding led by Sequoia Capital. The investment, which follows Rillet's previous fundraising round ten months ago, includes participation from existing investors such as First Round Capital, Creandum, Susa Ventures, and angel investors such as former NetSuite CFO Ron Gill and former Twilio CFO Lee Kirkpatrick. Rillet intends to use the funds to speed up the integration and rollout of artificial intelligence (AI) in its platform, while also strengthening its marketing, sales, and customer service operations. Founded in 2024, the startup aims to address the challenges faced by accounting teams reliant on legacy enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems from the 1990s, which hinder the full adoption of AI. Rillet stated that many products are sluggish, obsolete, heavily manual, and overly complicated due to extensive customisation. It emphasised that fully leveraging AI demands a unified, reliable data source with clean, precise data. Rillet's platform is designed to 'redefine' ERP for the AI age by integrating with tools such as Salesforce, Stripe, Ramp, Brex, and Rippling. Its AI agents are designed to automate key accounting workflows, including accruals, reconciliation, and board reporting, facilitating faster and more efficient financial operations. By providing 'real-time', 'fully reconciled' financial data, Rillet says it empowers customers to close their books in hours rather than weeks, enabling quicker and more informed decision-making. Rillet CEO and co-founder Nicolas Kopp said: 'We are a team of accountants building for accountants. This means everything from the reports to the workflows is tailor-built for the challenges CFOs and controllers deal with on a daily basis.' Sequoia managing partner Roelof Botha added: 'Rillet has rethought the general ledger to automate accounting with real-time integrations and AI-driven workflows, allowing finance teams to work smarter and businesses to scale faster. 'This modern approach helps CFOs capture the full value of AI, and, ultimately, positions Rillet as the system of record for the next generation of finance teams.' Since its launch, Rillet claims to have experienced a fivefold year-on-year increase in revenue and the platform processing billions in transactions. Nearly 200 customers, including companies such as Windsurf, Decagon, and Postscript, have adopted Rillet to for their accounting processes. "Accounting technology startup Rillet raises $25m " was originally created and published by International Accounting Bulletin, a GlobalData owned brand. The information on this site has been included in good faith for general informational purposes only. It is not intended to amount to advice on which you should rely, and we give no representation, warranty or guarantee, whether express or implied as to its accuracy or completeness. You must obtain professional or specialist advice before taking, or refraining from, any action on the basis of the content on our site. Error in retrieving data Sign in to access your portfolio Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data Error in retrieving data
Yahoo
09-04-2025
- Business
- Yahoo
Business leaders from Bill Ackman to Mark Cuban react to Trump's tariff pause
President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced a 90-day pause in his tariff plan against some countries. Stocks, which had fallen following news of his aggressive strategy, surged in response to the pause. Business leaders across the spectrum, from Bill Ackman to Mark Cuban, reacted disparately. President Donald Trump on Wednesday announced via a social media post a planned 90-day pause in his aggressive tariff plan against some countries, sending ripples through the business community. The market, which had plummeted following news of the president's trade strategy, surged in response to the planned pause, while industry leaders from across the political spectrum gave their initial reactions. Billionaire hedge fund manager Bill Ackman, in a post on X, wrote, "This was brilliantly executed by @realDonaldTrump. Textbook, Art of the Deal." Ackman had previously advocated for a pause in the tariffs' implementation "to enable negotiations to be completed without a major global economic disruption that will harm the most vulnerable companies and citizens of our country." "The benefit of @realDonaldTrump 's approach is that we now understand who are our preferred trading partners, and who the problems are," Ackman said in a separate post following the announcement of the pause. "China has shown themselves to be a bad actor. Our counterparties also have a taste of what life is like if they don't take down their trade barriers. This is the perfect setup for trade negotiations over the next 90 days." Ackman continued: "Advice for China: Pick up the phone and call the President. He is a tough but fair negotiator. The longer China holds out and retaliates, the worse the outcome for China." Chris Fralic, a partner at the venture capital firm First Round Capital, posted on X a screenshot of the tickers of several surging stocks, writing it's, "Good to be liberated from Liberation Day." "If your portfolio drops by X% and then rises by X%, you'll still be below your starting point," Fralic wrote in a separate post. "The bigger the drop, the more pronounced this effect becomes. A 20% drop followed by a 20% rise leaves you at 96% of your original value." In response to a post by Shibetoshi Nakamoto, the pseudonym for Dogecoin co-creator Billy Markus, which read, "The next 4 years are gonna be an insane roller coaster, aren't they?" Tesla CEO Elon Musk replied simply with a "100" emoji. Over on Bluesky, the X alternative social media site, Cost Plus Drugs cofounder and "Shark Tank" star Mark Cuban re-posted a statement from economist Paulo dos Santos, which described Trump's tariffs as "the Ivermectin of economic strategy," referencing the anti-parasitic drug used by some to treat COVID-19 infections, despite reservations from the medical community. In a separate post made just before Trump announced the tariff pause, Cuban wrote: "What some people aren't factoring into their analysis is the reality that companies were buying tons of inventory to beat the tariffs. That's cash taken from being able to invest or hire. In fact the probably cut costs and jobs as a result." Read the original article on Business Insider
