There, she served on the firm's investment committee and led investments across enterprise software, developer tools, and consumer technology, including Evident, Kindred, Cleo, Greenlight, and Mejuri. She also served as a board observer at Robinhood leading up to its 2021 IPO. Before transitioning to venture capital, she built a career as a product leader and founder. After earning a degree in computer science with honors from the Georgia Institute of Technology, she began her career at Microsoft working on Xbox and Kinect V1, before leading core product teams at companies like Twilio and Box. She also founded an app development startup that she successfully ran and sold before joining NEA. Crunchbase News recently sat down with Larco to discuss how changing founder preferences and the Silicon Valley Bank (SVB) collapse drove her to launch a specialized pre-seed and seed fund designed to make early-stage founders a top priority. Among other topics, we also discussed how she evaluates startups based on founder potential rather than initial ideas, looking for teams that leverage AI to make products dramatically faster, cheaper, or easier to use while avoiding rigid, single-model wrappers....

G2 Venture Partners and Eclipse co-led the financing, which included participation from Decarbonization Partners (BlackRock/Temasek), Lowercarbon Capital, Bill Gates' Breakthrough Energy Ventures, John Doerr (chairman of Kleiner Perkins), Ribbit Capital and others. With the latest round, San Jose, California-based Antora has raised $770 million since its 2017 inception, per Crunchbase. It raised $150 million in a Series B round in February of 2024. With so much data center demand amid the artificial intelligence explosion, Antora says it will use its new capital to speed up deployment of 'large-scale' projects across the country 'to meet surging energy demand.' It recently deployed what it describes as one of the world's largest battery storage projects, a 5 gigawatt-hour system in South Dakota. The company says its tech is differentiated in that thermal batteries store low-cost electricity as heat in insulated blocks of solid carbon and 'deliver it around the clock as heat or power.' Antora says that the same factory-built modules can serve a chemical plant, a food producer, a steelmaker, a data center, or the grid, without supply- constrained critical minerals or multi-year construction timelines. As a result, it can provide 'cheap, clean energy that's fast to deploy.'...

'We did a retro, and wouldn't you know' The person who's asking for the new request was the new decision maker [we] didn't even realize existed,' said Kataria, co-founder and CEO of San Francisco-based Centralize, in an interview. 'We missed the fact that the prior person had left, and the context had shifted hands, and no one had tracked that.' The financing includes participation from Salesforce Ventures,1 Y Combinator, 20 Sales, Ritual Capital, Adverb Ventures and high-profile angel investors including former Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield and Scott Woody, CEO and founder of Metronome. Combined with a previous $4 million seed round led by Salesforce Ventures, Centralize has now raised $19 million since its 2023 inception to build what Kataria calls a 'deal GPS' for enterprise revenue teams. Both went on to build high-scale products across Big Tech. Kataria served as a founding engineer on Facebook Shops during Meta's e-commerce push during COVID-19, scaling the platform from zero to a quarter billion monthly active users in a year. Wang, meanwhile, created Slack Huddles, building the initial version alongside Slack executives Cal Henderson (CTO), Noah Weiss (VP of product), and Butterfield (CEO), and later leading engineering and product teams at Slack....

Enterprise AI startup Freehand has raised $75 million in a Series B funding round to scale its autonomous AI agents, which manage complex supply chain spend and back-office operations for enterprise companies. Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners co-led the financing, which included participation from Nexus Venture Partners and former U.S. Commerce Secretary Penny Pritzker. With its latest capital injection, San Francisco-based Freehand has now raised $100 million. The deal comes as tariffs, taxes, and immigration policy strain the outsourcing model that ran supply chains for decades. Freehand's fundraise also lands amid an uptick in venture funding to supply chain and logistics-related startups, with 2026 on pace to deliver the strongest year since 2022, per Crunchbase data, with $6.2 billion raised by such companies in the first half of this year across 350 deals. Freehand was founded in February 2024 by Jayakrishnan and Abhijeet Manohar, two enterprise logistics veterans who previously co-founded and recently sold Pando, a SaaS transportation management system (TMS) and procure-to-pay system of record for large enterprise logistics....