Purple Arch Ventures (an Alumni Ventures Fund)

We’re excited to announce that Vultron has raised a total of $22 million, including our latest Series A funding round. This round was led by Greycroft, with continued support from Craft Ventures, Long Journey, South Park Commons, and a standout group of strategic angel investors. At Vultron, we’re transforming how federal contractors compete and win. Our AI-Native Operating System empowers federal pursuit teams to draft high-quality proposals in hours, respond strategically at scale, and drive more wins with fewer resources. Today, Vultron is trusted by some of the largest defense contractors and Fortune 500 enterprises. This is a clear signal that we’re redefining how companies operate and grow in the federal market. Thank you to our incredible customers, partners, and team for believing in our mission and pushing us forward. Read more: https://lnkd.in/g3xEC7eY

When you’re building business and brand momentum, it feels good. When The Wall Street Journal notices how you’re “winning market share and taking over shelves” through “upgraded nostalgia” and “beautiful design,” it hits different! 🎉 Grateful for the coverage. Doubly grateful for our team, retail partners and fans who continue to believe in a gooder mac and cheese and a more joyful world. https://lnkd.in/dRfqaR73

🚨 We are thrilled to be launching Deep Search in Consensus today! 🚨 Deep Search is a research agent that conducts literature reviews across 200m academic papers in under two minutes. Every breakthrough stands on a mountain of prior knowledge. To accelerate discovery, we have to make this mountain of knowledge easier to climb. We are launching Deep Search to help make that possible 🔬 . Deep Search is designed to help you get up to speed on a research topic or question faster than ever before, whether you’re validating a new idea, identifying knowledge gaps, or surfacing key evidence. It breaks your research question into a multi-step strategy, like a researcher would. It digs into foundational work, surfaces counterpoints, and explores adjacent ideas to show where the science stands. Behind the scenes, it runs up to 20 targeted searches, reviews over 1,000 papers in detail, and selects the top 50 for analysis. The result is a fully cited literature review with an intro, methods, results, and discussion section. It also includes interactive visuals that map consensus, highlight key authors, trace claims to evidence, and reveal gaps in the research. Deep Search is available today for both Free and Premium users. To try it, select "Deep" mode in Consensus and enter your research question! 🧪 We built Deep Search to accelerate the path from question to understanding. Science moves faster when the right knowledge is at your fingertips. With Deep Search, we’re one step closer. Onward! 🫡 Huge shoutout to the Consensus team members that sprinted for this: Aakash Adesara, Jimmy Longley, Pablo Garcés, Chris Varano, Leila Elamine, Christian Salem, Arbaz Khatib, Andrew West and Alan Kalbfleisch

MAC FOR ALL: Our NEW microwaveable cups are available NOW! It’s the way 30% of mac and cheese fans like to eat it.  It’s the #1 MOST REQUESTED new product from our community.  And It’s finally here! NEW Cups are everything you expect from GOODLES - amazing nutrition and all the yum - in an easy-to-make cup you can enjoy ANYWHERE, ANYTIME! It’s the on-the-go GOODLES we’ve ALL been waiting for. It wasn’t easy to pull off, but GOODLES Cups deliver: ✅ That “have it all” GOODLES taste + protein, fiber & nutrients! ✅ A new kind of cup, thoughtfully engineered to be BPA/PFAS-free! ✅ Clean label certification, just like you’d expect from GOODLES! This isn’t just “convenience” food. This is delicious, nutrient-packed mac, made versatile. This is more people in more places enjoying GOODLES. This is MAC FOR ALL. #GOODLES #ProductLaunch #FoodInnovation #MacAndCheese #Convenience #Nutrition #CPG https://lnkd.in/ghgkmHZb

It’s a proud day for Trustible! We’re thrilled to announce our $4.6M Seed round, led by Lookout Ventures, with participation from the Office of Eric Schmidt, Tau Ventures, Inner Loop Capital, Alumni Ventures, FoundersX Ventures, former Deloitte CIO Larry Quinlan, former Relativity CEO Mike Gamson, and former Washington DC Mayor Adrian Fenty, alongside existing investors Harlem Capital, VamosVentures, and JHH vc. As rapid innovation AI and shifting regulations leave enterprises unsure of risks, we’ve seen inefficient governance processes create bottlenecks in accelerated AI adoption. Trustible’s mission has always been to empower organizations to adopt AI securely and at scale, and we’re excited in this next stage to expand how we’re enabling enterprises to identify, measure, and mitigate AI risk to accelerate AI adoption. Read more about the news from Trusitlble CEO & Co-Founder Gerald Kierce-Iturrioz: https://lnkd.in/eUTXQ7Py #AIGovernance #AI #AIPolicy #AIStartup #DCTech

Hello world - Today we at Civis Analytics put out a new website, new AI features, and a great new case study with our friends at Covenant House International. https://lnkd.in/efdFuscF Feel free to read the case study on its own, but I wanted to take a moment to talk about the technology behind it and why we built it. Many of us have lived through the grind of managing in-house data operations. One of the biggest traps is picking a tech stack too early, only to realize you’re stuck maintaining it forever. Over the years, we kept hearing the same thing from customers: “I don’t want to build this myself. I just need it to work.” So we built it—an end-to-end, fully managed data platform that works out of the box and scales with you. Here’s how the Civis platform is different:  • 𝗙𝘂𝗹𝗹𝘆 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗱 𝗦𝗮𝗮𝗦. No need to stitch together tools, set up servers, or worry about scaling.  • 𝗘𝗻𝗱-𝘁𝗼-𝗲𝗻𝗱. From data ingestion to warehousing to dashboards and AI-powered analysis, it’s all included.  • 𝟯𝟲𝟬° 𝘃𝗶𝗲𝘄 𝗼𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂𝗿 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲. Our identity resolution tool unifies disparate lists of people into a single, trusted view.  • 𝗖𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝘀𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴𝘀. Unlike the ‘modern data stack’, our platform requires no IT investment or ongoing usage fees. 𝗦𝗼 𝘄𝗵𝗼’𝘀 𝗶𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿? If you’re a small to mid-size team that wants something reliable, powerful, and not another thing to maintain, we’re for you. 𝗪𝗵𝗼’𝘀 𝗶𝘁 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝗳𝗼𝗿? If you’ve got an enterprise-sized budget and a team of engineers ready to build your dream system from scratch—go for it. That’s not us. Which brings me back to Covenant House: This is a national nonprofit serving vulnerable youth, and their data operation is a small but nimble team of one. They know SQL and Power BI, and used to spend hours re-running queries just to get basic answers from a read-only database. Now, with Civis, Covenant House has a centralized data warehouse that pulls in data from their CRM, GA4, and internal spreadsheets on an automated schedule. Dashboards are automated. Vendor activation files are delivered on schedule. And they’re saving $400K in annual infrastructure costs. It’s a great story. Not because it’s flashy. It’s one dedicated person doing important work with infrastructure that actually helps. Take a read, and let us know if you’re interested in a conversation. Dan

Thrilled to announce some truly exciting recent wins. We’re kicking off 2025 bringing heywell to nearly 900 new stores nationwide! You will be able to now find our delicious, functional sparkling waters at Target and The Fresh Market, in addition to Mariano's, Fresh Thyme Market and Hy-Vee, Inc. with more exciting partners to be announced soon. This milestone comes on the heels of a strong year where we: * Tripled our DTC business * Doubled our overall retail sales * Outpaced the flavored sparkling water category by 5X (SPINS, 52 weeks ending 1/26/25) And we’re just getting started. With strong and growing consumer demand, proven retail traction, and our first-ever marketing campaign launching this year, 2025 is set to be an exciting one. Our mission has always been simple: to make wellness more simple and accessible for everyone, every day. Whether it’s hydration + stress support or energy + immunity, every can of heywell is designed to help people meet the demands of modern life. We can’t wait to share what’s next! 🎉 To read the full announcement, click the link below: https://lnkd.in/gtMVMcuX Ashley Selman Britt Dougherty Scott Coligan Walter Greenberg Taylor Foxman

Today, we’re announcing our $50 million Series B round led by Hanaco Ventures, with participation from Seraphim Space, Balerion Space Ventures, Vanderbilt University, JAWS, and others. We’re also honored to welcome Admiral John M. Richardson (USN, Ret.), former Chief of Naval Operations and Director of the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program, to our Board of Directors.   With over $70 million raised to date, we’re accelerating toward full-scale nuclear battery demonstrations in 2026, enabling deliveries to maritime and space customers in 2027. Read more from Axios: https://lnkd.in/eqgqTvJY