Dylan Casey

Project Vend reads less like a capability story and more like a governability story. Phase two improved because institutional scaffolding (tools, procedures, role separation) reduced predictable judgment failures—persuasion, compliance blind spots, boundary confusion, values drift. The board-level question isn’t “can an agent run a business?” but “what governance primitives must exist before we delegate authority.” Until incentives, escalation rights, and refusal boundaries are structurally enforced—not merely prompted—agents remain high-performing managers, not autonomous executives.

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🚀 Secondaries Are the New Frontier of Liquidity TL;DR The U.S. VC secondary market hit $61.1B in annual deal volume in Q2 2025. With IPO timelines stretching 12–15+ years, secondaries are no longer a side market they are becoming the backbone of venture liquidity. 💡 The Opportunity Unicorns are staying private longer, creating unprecedented demand for alternative liquidity. Secondaries offer access to elite late-stage companies while providing liquidity for employees and early investors. The infrastructure is catching up fast: SPVs, tender offers, and secondary trading platforms are building the pipes for a new era of private-market liquidity. ❓ Why This Matters For decades, IPOs defined venture capital’s big win. But today: IPOs are fewer, later, and concentrated in only a handful of sectors. Secondary trading channels are stepping in as the bridge repricing assets, creating transparency, and allowing institutions to participate earlier. What was once opaque and gated is now becoming structured, scalable, and investable. 💰 Implications for LPs & GPs LPs: Secondaries are evolving into a strategic allocation, providing earlier exposure to winners, portfolio diversification, and quicker liquidity. GPs: Partnering with platforms and structuring liquidity events is no longer optional it is a competitive edge for retaining talent and managing cap tables. 🌇 The Future of IPOs & Secondaries Secondaries aren’t replacing IPOs they are reshaping the path to liquidity. As trading channels mature and scale, secondaries will become a permanent, institutionalized asset class, redefining how private markets deliver returns. At Inspire Global Ventures, we believe companies building the infrastructure for this market will be some of the most important enablers of the next decade of venture investing. 👉 Come join Inspire Global Ventures at #SFTechWeek, where we’ll be diving deeper into the rise of secondaries and the tokenization of private assets two trends transforming the future of capital markets. 🔗 https://lnkd.in/ge-XB8bd #VentureCapital #LiquiditySolutions #PrivateMarketInvesting #SecondaryMarketTrends #InvestmentOpportunities #FinancialInnovation #FutureOfFinance #TechWeek2025 #AssetTokenization #InstitutionalInvestors #Secondaries #IPOs #VentureInvesting #LP #GP #Tokenization #SFTechWeek

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Dealwire.TECH Deal of the Week — Mesh ($75M Series C, $1B valuation) https://www.meshpay.com/ Crypto’s next chapter isn’t about speculation — it’s about payments infrastructure. Mesh’s $75M Series C at a $1B valuation signals a clear shift in investor conviction: capital is rotating from trading and token-centric narratives into real-world transaction rails. Mesh is building what many in the industry have talked about, but few have executed: a global crypto payments network that connects exchanges, wallets, and payment providers into a single interoperable layer. Consumers can pay with any supported digital asset, while merchants settle instantly in stablecoins or local fiat — no volatility risk, no wallet management, no fragmented integrations. The company’s asset-agnostic SmartFunding technology abstracts away blockchain complexity, routing “any-to-any” payments across chains and liquidity pools. The result is a horizontal payments layer that targets embedded deposits, remittances, and high-value cross-border commerce — areas where legacy card rails struggle with FX leakage, chargebacks, and delayed settlement. Led by Dragonfly, with participation from Paradigm and Coinbase Ventures, the round reflects strong alignment around an infrastructure-first thesis. Mesh’s ambitions — $1B in revenue and $1T in transaction volume — place it firmly in the category of next-generation global payment networks, not fintech tooling. Bottom line: If crypto is going to reach mass adoption, it won’t look like exchanges — it will look like invisible, instant payments embedded everywhere. #DealOfTheWeek #DealWire #CryptoPayments #Fintech #PaymentsInfrastructure #Stablecoins #Web3 #DigitalAssets

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Proud to support Esusu as it enters its next phase of growth with a new $50M Series C fundraise! Wemimo Abbey, Samir Goel and team continue to lead the industry in credit building and economic mobility for millions of renters nationwide. Esusu (Founder Institute San Francisco portfolio company) is setting a new standard for combining economic and societal impact. By helping renters get credit (literally) for paying their rent on time, they are increasing financial access and empowering more people to become homeowners - in fact, they have already empowered over $30BN in new mortgages from renters across their system. I'm especially excited about how they plan to leverage their massive dataset to create even more impact. By making rental payment data a more prominent feature in mortgage underwriting, Esusu will be able to increase the number of people that can buy homes and build generational wealth. This is a truly inspiring company 🙌 Read more here: https://lnkd.in/guUKsGtY

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Presto Phoenix, a San Mateo-based company specializing in enterprise-grade Voice #AI for quick-service restaurants (QSRs), has raised $10M in funding. The round was led by Metropolitan Partners Group, with participation from REMUS Capital, Link Ventures, and strategic angel investors including the CEO of ElevenLabs. 🗣️ About Presto Phoenix, Inc. Provides Voice AI solutions for restaurant drive-thrus Helps operators increase revenue, reduce labor costs, boost staff productivity, and enhance the guest experience Enterprise-grade solution, built for scaling operations efficiently Y Combinator alum 🔮 What’s Next The funding will support operational expansion and continued product development, helping Presto scale its Voice AI technology to more QSR operators. Kat Hoffman-Flynt Kareem N. Lillian Meyer, CFA Bill Healey #VoiceAI #PropTech #QSRTech #AIinRestaurants #StartupFunding #DigitalRestaurants #YCombinator

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Venture funding isn't success of course, but it's nearly impossible to win big markets without it. Unlike the AI hype, Ando is very, very real. And unlike others, Ando is here to make lives genuinely better for everyone. (*) #proudinvestor #micdrop #oversubscribed Big thx to Bradford Oberwager and James Kairos, Ben Metcalfe, Andy Mutz, Joseph Chittenden-Veal, Scott Sanders, Massy Ghausi, John Lyman, Thomas Wesley, John Holder… and of course Phoenix Toews and Paul Wellons (to name a few) — (*) Yeah yeah, some pencil-pusher will use AI to over-optimize profits over people, but as American Airlines is learning the hard way (WSJ: https://lnkd.in/ePz_QNzt ), net of competition, "people businesses" don't work that way. You HAVE to care for people or you lose. Ando plays a beautiful collaborative role in that dialogue, helping profit-focused management more clearly see the effects of a motivated labor force. That's why I'm truly #proudinvestor --- Posts co-authored with my LinkedIn secret weapon Dennis Buckley

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FUNDING NEWS: Seattle-based fintech startup Plutus has raised $1.2 million in funding from investors including Rocketship and Visse Capital to fuel the growth of its investing marketplace. Details below. https://lnkd.in/gbY7PFF3 #BuiltInSeattle #SeattleTech #FundingNews

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Excited to share CipherOwl’s $15M seed, co-led by General Catalyst, Flourish Ventures, alongside Coinbase Ventures, OKX Ventures, Enlight Capital, Sancus Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, Road Capital, and Predictive. At CipherOwl, we’re building the AI-native intelligence layer that makes institutional crypto explainable, auditable, and trustworthy by design. Our Impact? • Powering compliance automation across leading crypto and fintech ecosystems • Delivering evidence-based decisions regulators can verify and replay • Enabling institutions to scale with transparency and confidence • Turning blockchain data into regulatory-grade evidence • Moving from weeks of manual review to minutes of automation Thank you to our investors, customers, and early partners for believing in this mission from the start. Building institutional trust takes collaboration, precision, and relentless focus and that’s what drives us every day. Building in crypto, fintech, or compliance? Let’s connect. https://lnkd.in/gyXBAReq

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Today we announced the closing of our strategic funding round and the launch of TYTL’s blockchain-based fractional real estate equity platform. For decades, accessing home equity has meant taking on debt — HELOCs, refinancing, reverse mortgages. That model hasn’t changed in generations. TYTL Holdings changes that equation. Instead of issuing loans, we acquire deed-recorded fractional equity interests in prime U.S. residential real estate and verify ownership on-chain using Solana infrastructure. No monthly payments. No interest. No future repayment obligations. According to Federal Reserve data, U.S. homeowners hold more than $35 trillion in home equity. We believe much of that equity can be accessed without turning homeowners into borrowers. With the support of Strobe Ventures, Fifth Era & Blockchain Coinvestors, Beeline, and Anchorage Digital Bank, we are building institutional-grade infrastructure to modernize how residential real estate equity is structured, recorded, and scaled. This is just the beginning. #RealEstate #Blockchain #Tokenization #RWA #HomeEquity #Solana

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Plaid Takes on AI Fraud, Future-Proofing Core Fintech Infrastructure “Fraud has become a cat-and-mouse game,” says Zachary Perret, Plaid’s CEO, as the company fortifies its fintech plumbing against a new wave of AI-powered threats. With fraud losses hitting $12.5B in 2024, Plaid is deploying machine learning defenses across its network - which connects one in two Americans to banks. It's training every engineer in AI tools and pushing for real-time payments modernization. Here’s why this matters for product leaders in fintech (and beyond): - AI-Fueled Attacks Require AI-first Defense Fraudsters are using deepfakes, synthetic identities, and AI-driven document fraud. Plaid’s data network enables real-time signals that outpace isolated silo defenses. - Embedding AI Across Engineering Culture is Key Plaid isn’t just adding features; they’ve made AI fluency a core skill for every engineer. That makes resilience systemic, not siloed. - Infrastructure as Trust Anchor With instant rails like FedNow enabling real-time transfers, fraud prevention must operate at millisecond speed to transform security from backend cost to competitive advantage. Key Takeaways for Product Leaders 1. Treat fraud defense as infrastructure, not an add-on. 2. Invest in real-time, behavioral AI models that span your network. 3. Build AI fluency across teams, not just in data science. In the age of real-time finance, trust isn’t optional. Your security systems need to be as dynamic and intelligent as the threats they face. What proactive steps are your product team taking to stay ahead in the AI fraud arms race? #Fintech #AI #FraudPrevention #ProductStrategy #RealTimePayments #FintechInfrastructure #PlaidProtect #EmbeddedSecurity #AI #StartupProduct #ProductManagement

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