What separates the software companies pulling ahead from the ones falling behind? @alexrkonrad dug into our latest research and put it plainly. His piece highlights some of the key signals we identified in our report: faster paths to $100M ARR, sustained new-logo growth, aggressive investment, and improving burn at scale. Download our annual Topline Growth and Operational Efficiency Report: @UpstartsMediaCo Disclaimer:

The Great Sorting has begun. A new class of software companies identified from our dataset, which we call Pacesetters, is compressing years of growth into a fraction of the time. They’re spending more, growing faster, and generating more for it. Earlier this year, we explored this shift in “A Coming Age of Reason.” Our latest report puts the data behind that thesis. Download the 2026 State of Scaling: our annual Topline Growth and Operational Efficiency Report: Disclaimer:

A 20-kilowatt satellite is flying today, and a 100-kilowatt platform is planned next. @neelkunjur, co-founder of K2 Space, on why progress in space compounds when improvements in launch enable improvements in spacecraft, and why K2 builds for mass production rather than one-off engineering. Learn more about @KaranKunjur and Neel's journey building K2 Space: Disclaimer:

“Losing like a scientist” is one of @outtake_ai's values, and the most personal one for founder @adylon7. Each Sunday, he reviews every meeting from his week and asks what he could have done better. He pairs that habit with the optimism early-stage companies typically require. One makes the other possible. Learn more about Alex and his journey to found Outtake: Disclaimer:

Opening custodial accounts can take a wealth management firm months. @neviswealth does it the same day. @MarkSwan_ started with one of the industry's biggest bottlenecks, the manual PDFs behind every new account. Learn more about Mark and his journey to co-found Nevis: Disclaimer:

"Every engineer you talk to wants to prove those people wrong." @neelkunjur, co-founder of @K2SpaceCo, on why some of the best engineers seek out problems others call impossible, and how a founding group of engineers created a cycle of talent that keeps compounding. Learn more about @KaranKunjur and Neel's journey building K2 Space: Disclaimer:

Alex Dhillon believes founding teams should become historians of their space. Brand protection has long been services-heavy, with thin margins and churn baked in. @outtake_ai chose agents from day one, and the data asset it built now supports a broader platform. Learn more about @adylon7 and his journey to found Outtake: Disclaimer:

Congratulations to @PeterRahal and the @medicibrands team on their Series B. At the heart of Medici is a simple idea: people shouldn’t have to choose between the foods they love and better nutrition. @david_protein has already shown how powerfully that can resonate, growing from a single product into a brand sold in more than 35,000 retail locations in just two years. We’re honored to support Peter and the team as they continue rethinking familiar foods around better nutrition, without compromising on taste or experience. Disclaimer:

Approximately 50 trillion dollars in US assets. Tens of millions of people receive financial advice every year. And some of the best AI talent tends to overlook it. @MarkSwan_ saw a misunderstood industry, and @neviswealth was born. Disclaimer:

"We need to own those things." Neel Kunjur, co-founder of @K2SpaceCo, on the lesson legacy satellite makers learned the hard way: outsource your components and you eventually outsource your schedule and cost. K2 builds its own. Learn more about @KaranKunjur and @neelkunjur's journey building K2 Space: Disclaimer:

Taking down one fake website involves dealing with the registrar, the host, and the bad actor who built it. @outtake_ai's agents show up with evidence: the domain traced to an IP, related attacks mapped, sometimes the actor identified. @adylon7 says that kind of product can’t be vibe coded. Learn more about Alex and his journey to found Outtake: Disclaimer:

The August edition of ICONIQ Pulse is live, featuring @RilletHQ Series C, @Whatnot Series G, @altruist joins Vanguard, New Hiring Filter series, and more. Subscribe and share: Disclaimer:

Is AI freezing headcount? Not for hypergrowth companies (companies growing revenue 100%+ YOY). Hypergrowth companies generally reported increased headcount by an average of 133% in the first two quarters of 2026, up from 119% in 2025. Everyone else is hiring too, just far more cautiously. So while AI may be changing how teams work, our data suggests it is not replacing the need for people to fuel growth. More on where that hiring is happening, and how AI is reshaping the calculus, in our upcoming report. Sign up to receive it directly to your inbox: Data as of 08/04/2026 Disclaimer:

Today, we’re proud to congratulate @jasonwenk and the entire @altruist team on joining @Vanguard_Group. This milestone reflects a powerful validation of the belief that has guided Altruist from the start: financial advisors should spend their time helping clients, not fighting the systems meant to support them. Jason lived that problem for over two decades in wealth management, running advisory firms on infrastructure that hadn’t kept pace. So Altruist rebuilt it, combining self-clearing custody with an end-to-end software platform, owning the full stack to help simplify the advisor experience and implement AI in differentiated ways. Custody is one of the hardest categories in financial services to disrupt. Trust is earned slowly. Yet we’ve seen Altruist break through, and we were proud to lead their Series E in 2024. Since then, Altruist has launched numerous new products and features to help advance the platform, including Hazel to bring AI into the heart of the advisor workflow, powered by infrastructure the company owns end to end. Vanguard has spent 50+ years lowering the cost of investing. Altruist has spent eight years modernizing the infrastructure behind financial advice. Together, they have the opportunity to continue to meaningfully make investing more accessible. To Jason and the Altruist team: building a new custodian from scratch, and earning real trust in the industry, was no small feat. Congratulations, we know this is just the beginning. Read more: @yoonkeesull @dougpepper Disclaimer:

These systems were built for humans reading charts. Now AI agents are starting to act on the data itself. At HLTH, Brad Genereaux, Global Lead for Healthcare Alliances at NVIDIA, and Susan Mullaney, Chief Operating Officer at Blue Shield of California, join ICONIQ's Caroline Xie to explore what AI-ready data infrastructure requires when the end user is a system making decisions at scale. 📅 Tuesday, November 17, 3:20-4:00pm 🎙️ "Reimagining Interoperability for the Agentic Era" 📍 Ferrari Stage Register now: Disclaimer:

"Go smaller to go cheaper, faster." That was the message from a senior government official until @neelkunjur and @KaranKunjur, co-founders of @K2SpaceCo, asked which part he actually cared about. The answer was that one is impossible without the other. K2 treated it instead as an engineering problem, one the right group of engineers could solve. Disclaimer:

Impersonation attacks already existed. High-fidelity fakes took real skill, so they were relatively rare. Working with LLMs at Palantir when ChatGPT launched, @adylon7 saw that barrier begin to fall. He founded @outtake_ai to address the problem early. Learn more about Alex and his journey to found Outtake: Disclaimer:

Finance teams can spend days, sometimes weeks, waiting for the close while the business keeps moving and decisions still need to be made. @RilletHQ founder @nicckopp saw that pattern across companies and began questioning the architecture behind it. The general ledger was built for a different era, and Rillet is rethinking it around continuous, agent-driven workflows that preserve the financial controls and auditability teams depend on. We partnered with Nic and the team at their Series B. A year later, that vision is becoming increasingly tangible. Congratulations to Nic and the entire Rillet team. Read more about our partnership: Disclaimer:

In 2019, when we first partnered with @Highspot, many companies treated sales enablement as a nice-to-have — a slide library, maybe a training module. @RobertWahbe and the team saw it differently from day one: as infrastructure that revenue teams couldn't function without. Six years later, that view has become widely recognized as an industry standard. Today, with the merger with @SeismicSoftware officially closed, Highspot enters its next chapter with a broader set of AI-powered tools for how sellers prepare, learn, and engage. It's a good moment to look back on how far the category has come, and to recognize Rob and his team as an integral part of that story. Congratulations, Robert, Rob, and the Highspot and Seismic teams, it’s been a privilege to be by your side. Read more about the announcement: Disclaimer:

A year after partnering with @RilletHQ on their Series B, we're honored to deepen our partnership with @nicckopp and the team by leading their Series C. Over the past 12 months, Rillet has grown to serve more than 600 companies across 60 countries, is winning head-to-head evaluations against legacy incumbents, expanded Aura AI into a platform of purpose-built agents across the accounting cycle, and built a partner ecosystem spanning EY, KPMG, and half of the top 30 U.S. accounting firms. The clearest sign of progress to us comes from customers closing their books in hours and pushing toward a zero-day close. Nic and the team are bringing reliable, real-time financials within reach for modern finance teams, and we're honored to be by their side for the journey. Read more about our partnership: Disclaimer: