☕ XOXO, Your Daily Dose of VC Tea | March 16, 2026
Spilling the latest VC tea: from a $45M crypto accounting investment to record-breaking European AI funding, we're serving high drama!
Hey Upper East Siders (and Sand Hill Road dwellers)...
Gossip Girl here, your one and only source into the scandalous lives of Silicon Valley's elite. And darlings, today's tea is piping hot — from a $45M crypto accounting play to European AI infrastructure breaking records, the VC world is serving drama with a side of mega-valuations. Grab your oat milk latte and settle in.
Word on the street: Cryptio, a digital asset accounting platform, just raised $45 million in Series B funding co-led by BlackFin Capital Partners and Sentinel Global. Existing investors Alven, BlueYard Capital, 1kx, and Cathay Innovation also piled on.
Here's the tea: while everyone's obsessing over crypto prices, Cryptio is quietly building the plumbing that makes institutional crypto accounting actually work — reconciliation, financial reporting, loan management, and tokenization compliance. You didn't hear it from me, but when BlackFin writes a $45M check for "crypto accounting," they see a future where every hedge fund and bank needs this infrastructure. Boring is the new sexy in crypto.
Spotted: When the crypto winter ends, the accountants will inherit the earth.
Spotted: Isembard, a London-based AI-powered manufacturing startup, just raised £37.5 million ($50 million) Series A led by Union Square Ventures. Less than a year after their seed round, mind you.
The company builds AI-powered factories for aerospace and defense — high-precision manufacturing with their proprietary MasonOS agentic operating system. Notable angels include Deel founder Alex Bouaziz and former Wise CFO Matt Briers. You didn't hear it from me, but when USV bets on manufacturing in 2026, they're betting that AI + physical infrastructure is the next trillion-dollar category.
Sources say Waiv, a spinout from French-American biotech Owkin, just launched as an independent entity with $33 million in funding. The company develops AI-powered precision testing for oncology — analyzing routine pathology slides to predict treatment response and identify biomarkers.
Their products include RlapsRisk BC (breast cancer relapse prediction), MSIntuit, and BRCAura. You didn't hear it from me, but when a company spins out from Owkin with $33M and pharma partnerships already locked down, the path to IPO just got a lot shorter.
Word on the street: Qevlar AI, a Paris-based cybersecurity startup, just raised $30 million Series A co-led by Partech and Forgepoint Capital International. Here's why that's spicy: the average enterprise security alert takes 32-61 minutes to investigate manually. Qevlar does it in under 3 minutes.
Their agentic AI platform connects to existing security tooling and automates full investigation workflows. You didn't hear it from me, but when security teams are drowning in alerts, "3 minutes vs 1 hour" is the kind of pitch that closes rounds in 48 hours.
Spotted: Saltz, a Vilnius-based food distribution platform, just raised €20 million Series A. Founded by veterans of Oberlo and Shopify, they're building what they call "the Shopify for restaurant supply chains."
The platform connects restaurants with food suppliers across 20 countries, serving Hilton, Marriott, and independent operators. You didn't hear it from me, but when ex-Shopify operators raise €20M to digitize the restaurant supply chain, they're betting that every hotel kitchen in Europe is about to get an upgrade.
Sources say Orqa, a Croatian drone maker, just raised €12.7 million Series A led by Expeditions with Lightspeed Venture Partners, Taiwania Capital, Aymo, and Radius Capital joining. Here's the kicker: they manufacture up to 280,000 NDAA-compliant drones annually with zero Chinese components.
The Pentagon's Drone Dominance Programme plans to procure 300,000 small attack drones by 2027. You didn't hear it from me, but when a Croatian startup gets Lightspeed money for defense drones, geopolitics and venture capital are having a very interesting dinner party.
Spotted: Lemrock, a Paris-based startup building infrastructure for brands to sell directly within AI chat environments (ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity), just raised €6 million seed led by Galion.exe. Criteo founder Jean-Baptiste Rudelle joined the board.
They already work with 60+ brands including Maisons du Monde, Cdiscount, and Engie, processing 100M+ interactions monthly. You didn't hear it from me, but when the founder of Criteo joins your board, you're not just building a startup — you're building an ad tech dynasty 2.0.
Word on the street: Replit, the cloud-based coding platform, just hit a $9 billion valuation — triple the $3B it achieved just six months ago. Six. Months.
You didn't hear it from me, but when your valuation triples in half a year, either you're shipping features faster than the competition can copy them... or AI coding assistants have fundamentally changed how developers work. (Probably both.)
Spotted: Quince, the direct-to-consumer affordable luxury brand, just raised $500 million at a $10 billion valuation led by Iconiq. In a year when consumer startups are supposed to be dead.
You didn't hear it from me, but when a sweater company hits $10B during an AI funding frenzy, the "boring business" thesis is alive and well.
Sources say Lovable, the AI coding assistant, added $100 million in revenue last month alone — with just 146 employees. That's $684K revenue per employee. Per. Month.
You didn't hear it from me, but when you're doing Stripe-level revenue density with AI-native tooling, the old SaaS playbook just got shredded.
Darlings, the timeline is absolutely on fire today. From founder market reflections to fundraising bar-raising advice, here's what the smart money is saying:
Jason Yeh (@jayyeh), partner at Adamant Founders and former VC at Greycroft, dropped a truth bomb on pitching that's making the rounds:
"Stop practicing how to present your deck. Start practicing how to have a conversation about what you're building. Investors fund founders who know their shit so deeply they don't need the slides."
In a longer thread, he explained how founders make the mistake of treating decks like scripts when they should be "artifacts" — things you reference, not read. "Every slide has one job. Not ten. One. You should know exactly what belief you want the investor to walk away with."
You didn't hear it from me, but when a VC says "stop reading your slides," what he really means is "stop sounding like a robot and start sounding like a founder who actually cares."
Read the thread on X (twitter.com/jayyeh)
Ilya Cherepanov (@iliach), pioneering researcher and frequent VC commentator, posted a sector breakdown that's being shared across founder groups:
"VC funding in Q1 2026 by sector: 🟢 AI-integrated SaaS: strong 🟢 Defense tech: strong 🔴 Healthtech: brutal 🔴 Consumer apps: brutal 🟡 Fintech: mixed. If you're fundraising right now, your narrative has to be 'AI + [legacy category].' Pure plays are getting killed on valuation."
The takeaway? AI isn't just a feature anymore — it's the frame. If you're pitching healthtech, you'd better be pitching "AI-powered healthtech." If you're pitching fintech, it better be "AI-native finance." You didn't hear it from me, but the "AI + X" formula isn't just a marketing gimmick anymore — it's a valuation survival strategy.
Read the post on X (twitter.com/iliach)
More wisdom from Jason Yeh on the counterintuitive nature of raising capital:
"Raising capital is weird because the harder you work on the wrong things, the further behind you get... there are maybe 5 real decisions that shape your raise. everything else is noise. confusion is expensive. it costs you months. it costs you energy. it costs you momentum."
You didn't hear it from me, but when a founder-turned-VC tells you that "confusion is expensive," he's not being metaphorical. He's talking about the 6-month fundraise that should have taken 6 weeks.
Read the post on X (twitter.com/jayyeh)
Spotted: Europe is having a moment. From Paris to London to Vilnius, European startups raised over $3 billion this week alone. Nscale's €1.7B and AMI Labs' $1.03B seed (!!!) are redefining what's possible outside Silicon Valley.
Word on the street: The "AI infrastructure" category is eating everything. Accounting (Cryptio), manufacturing (Isembard), cybersecurity (Qevlar), food distribution (Saltz) — every sector is getting an AI-native rebuild. If your pitch deck doesn't mention AI by slide 3, you're already behind.
Sources say: Mega-funds are back. General Catalyst, Spark Capital, and Founders Fund are all raising billion-dollar+ funds. The concentration of capital at the top means winner-take-all dynamics are intensifying. Raise big or go home.
Until next time, Upper East Siders...
You know you love me,
XOXO - Gossip Girl 💋
P.S. — Keep your burn rate low and your valuation high. See you tomorrow for more tea. 👀