Today's pick
Numeracle
A McLean, Virginia company that verifies real businesses and links them to the phone numbers they use, so carriers stop mislabeling legitimate calls as spam.
- Problem
- 8
- Traction
- 8
- Founders
- 8
- Market
- 7
- Novelty
- 6
Why today
Today's pick is Numeracle, the McLean, Virginia company that announced a 28 million dollar growth investment on October 29, 2026, with Edison Partners as the sole investor. Numeracle verifies that businesses are who they claim to be, links that identity to the phone numbers they call from, and shares it with carriers so call-screening systems stop flagging legitimate calls as spam, scam or fraud. Founder and CEO Rebekah Johnson started the company in 2018 after warning carriers during an FCC robocall task force that their own call-screening efforts would catch honest businesses in the crossfire, and she has since grown it to about 4,000 business customers, 85 employees and profitability in 2026, with roughly 90 percent of new sales arriving through unpaid inbound inquiries. The same 24 to 48 hours produced a wide spread of other deals worth watching: London robotics startup Machenta emerged from stealth with a 40 million dollar seed round to teach robots new physical tasks from a single demonstration, US clinical evidence platform Vera Health closed a 28.5 million dollar Series A, Polish auto-parts marketplace Autofixer took on 3 million euros in venture debt to expand across Europe, and Indian B2B marketplace Bijnis relaunched as Zorit after raising nearly 27 crore rupees to fund its pivot to quick commerce. Numeracle stands out because it is already profitable and has a full-time paying customer base, a rarer combination than most funding headlines this week, and because Edison Partners' bet signals that the identity-fraud problem it fixes is spreading well beyond phone calls into messaging, chat apps, marketplaces and AI agents.
Problem
Carriers screen every call for spam, scam and fraud risk, but those systems cannot reliably tell a legitimate business apart from a fraudster impersonating one, so real companies routinely get calls blocked or flagged as likely spam. Fraudsters have gotten better at mimicking legitimate businesses, registering fake companies with real state filings, employer identification numbers and even employee LinkedIn profiles, which makes the problem harder to solve with screening alone. For businesses in healthcare, financial services, home services and government outreach, a blocked or mislabeled call can mean a missed appointment reminder, a fraud alert that never reaches a customer, or a sales call that never connects, and the problem is now spreading beyond phone calls into messaging, chat apps and AI agents.
Product
Numeracle verifies that a business is real and operates as it claims, then links that verified identity to the phone numbers it calls from and shares this information directly with carriers' call-screening systems to get incorrect spam labels removed. It also offers Branded Calling ID, which displays a business's verified name, logo and reason for calling on the recipient's phone, and lets other companies pay to verify businesses they are evaluating as customers or partners. Numeracle charges an annual subscription for ongoing monitoring and spam-label correction plus a per-call fee for branded display, and is extending the same verification approach to messaging platforms, chat apps, online marketplaces and AI agents as those channels face the same impersonation problem.
Traction
Numeracle has around 4,000 business customers and about 85 employees, and the company became profitable in 2026, sooner than founder Rebekah Johnson expected. Roughly 90 percent of new sales inquiries arrive through unpaid inbound channels rather than outbound sales effort, a sign of organic demand for the problem it solves. One contact center operator using Numeracle reported that answered calls rose from 19,000 to 22,000 out of 40,000 monthly calls after fixing its spam labels. Customers span financial services, home services, higher education, government agencies and charities, though Numeracle has not named individual enterprise accounts publicly.
Team
Numeracle was founded in 2018 by Rebekah Johnson, an engineer who had worked in regulatory compliance at telecom provider West. While serving on the FCC's Robocall Strike Force in 2016, she warned carriers that their call-blocking efforts would also catch legitimate businesses, and a carrier's regulatory counsel reached out to her roughly three months later, which led her to start the company. Johnson built Numeracle as a newly single mother who had lost her job, using her own savings and working from cafes while living in Grand Bay, Alabama, without home internet access. That founder story, paired with deep regulatory and telecom-industry expertise, has carried the company from bootstrap to a profitable 85-person business eight years later.
Funding
Edison Partners was the sole investor in Numeracle's 28 million dollar growth round, announced October 29, 2026, with general partner Lenard Marcus joining the deal. The round follows a 6.8 million dollar Series A in December 2023 and brings Numeracle's total funding to 34.8 million dollars since its 2018 founding. Numeracle plans to use the new capital to hire, expand internationally with particular interest from Europe, deepen marketing in industries like healthcare, and extend its identity-verification tools beyond phone calls to messaging, chat apps, marketplaces and AI agents. Marcus said he sees demand for the product across healthcare, retail, home services and finance, describing business-identity fraud as a problem that cuts across industries rather than one specific to telecom.
Competitors
The Crunchbase News report on this round did not name specific competitors, describing the landscape only in terms of existing and newer rivals in call-identity and spam-label management. Numeracle's own marketing points to number reputation management, branded caller ID and KYC-as-a-service as its three pillars, which puts it up against both carrier-side screening vendors and other branded-calling providers competing for the same enterprise budgets. Its edge is combining spam-label remediation with business verification in one product and extending that verification beyond voice calls as fraud shifts into messaging and AI-driven channels, though it will need to keep pace as carriers and larger communications platforms build similar verification features of their own.
VC lens
Would YC fund it? Probably not at this stage: Numeracle's profitability and eight years of grinding in a regulatory niche are exactly the kind of resilience YC prizes, but a 28 million dollar growth round with an institutional lead is well past the scrappy seed stage YC typically backs.
Biggest risk: Numeracle's growth is built on carriers' cooperation with its verification data, so any shift in how carriers or the CTIA-led branded-calling standards work could undercut its core product, and larger communications platforms could eventually fold similar verification features into their own offerings rather than paying a third party.
Runners-up
Machenta
A London robotics startup founded by an Imperial College robot-learning professor and his PhD student, building an AI model that trains entirely in simulation and lets robots learn new physical tasks from a single demonstration, which emerged from stealth with a 40 million dollar seed round co-led by Creandum and Union Square Ventures. (Oct 27)
Vera Health
A clinical AI search platform used by more than 800,000 clinicians worldwide to find and assess medical evidence, which closed a 28.5 million dollar Series A led by Threshold Ventures with Optum Ventures, Mantis VC and SV Angel participating. (Oct 27)
Autofixer
A Polish automotive e-commerce platform that matches car parts to vehicles for distributors and retailers across Europe, which took on 3 million euros in venture debt financing from Orbit Capital to fund its expansion into Czechia and other European markets. (Oct 28)
Zorit
An Indian B2B quick-commerce platform, relaunched from its earlier Bijnis marketplace brand, that lets offline retailers source inventory from local dark stores with deliveries in as little as 60 minutes, which raised nearly 27 crore rupees led by Sparrow Capital. (Oct 28)
Archive
48 reports · click a row to open it| Date | Winner | One-liner | Runners-up | Open |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2026-10-29 | Numeracle | 28 million dollar growth investment from Edison Partners, as the profitable McLean, Virginia company's business identity verification tools kept legitimate calls from 4,000 customers from being wrongly flagged as spam | Machenta, Vera Health, Autofixer, Zorit | |
| 2026-10-28 | Simplismart | 14 million dollar Series B led by Dallas Venture Capital with Nvidia participating, as the Bengaluru AI inference startup's annualised revenue run rate grew 14x in six months on the back of US customers like HeyGen and Shiprocket | Nova Spectral AI, Live2.ai, Mochatrade, Troovy | |
| 2026-10-27 | Bedrock Robotics | 600 million dollar Series C co-led by CapitalG and Emergence Capital at a 4.1 billion dollar valuation, as the Waymo-founded startup's retrofit kit for autonomous excavators moved from pilots to paid commercial work on job sites in Nevada, Texas and Arizona | Matiks, Nous, adsilico, Volare | |
| 2026-10-26 | Blacksmith | 66 million dollar Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a 1 billion dollar valuation, as the YC-backed CI platform's weekly jobs run grew from 5 million to over 90 million amid a flood of AI-written code | Enact Intelligence, QuantrolOx, Beyond Vision, Maxinsights | |
| 2026-10-25 | Flapping Airplanes | 1 billion dollar Series A at a 6 billion dollar valuation co-led by Index Ventures and Lux Capital, as the year-old AI efficiency lab's valuation quadrupled nine months after its seed with still no shipped product | Air Space Intelligence, Whop, Arda Industries, AuxoAI | |
| 2026-10-24 | CureBay | 100 crore rupee Pre-Series C led by IvyCap Ventures, as the rural healthcare startup's network of technology enabled clinics and community health workers across seven Indian states passes 1.7 million patients served | Slingshot Insurance, Firstwork, Karta AI, Chapter Home | |
| 2026-10-23 | Warhound | 200 million dollar round at a 1.2 billion dollar valuation from In-Q-Tel, Sequoia and 8VC, as Colossal Biosciences founder Ben Lamm and Anduril co-founder Palmer Luckey launch a company that genetically engineers and clones working dogs for the military and arms them with Anduril sensor gear | Enact, Beyond Vision, QuantrolOx, Indurex | |
| 2026-10-22 | Legora | 550 million dollar Series E at an 8.8 billion dollar valuation led by Atreides Management, as the legal AI company's annual recurring revenue doubled past 200 million dollars in six months while US in-house legal teams became its fastest-growing customer base | Pigment, Opply, Photon Bridge, Blacksmith | |
| 2026-10-21 | Daytona | 60 million dollar Series B at a 1 billion dollar valuation led by FirstMark, as the AI agent sandbox company's revenue run rate rose twenty-five fold in nine months on a customer list including Anthropic, OpenAI, Nvidia, Cursor, Cognition and Meta | Blackwall, Vessla, Linkener, Coherence Quantum | |
| 2026-10-20 | Tenstorrent | 1.5 billion dollar round at a 6.2 billion dollar valuation, more than doubling its 2024 mark, as chip architect Jim Keller's inference-chip startup turns down Intel and Qualcomm buyout interest to keep challenging Nvidia independently | Town, Hunar.AI, Rabot Energy, Otter Health | |
| 2026-10-19 | Modal Labs | 750 million dollar Series D led by Accel at a 15.75 billion dollar valuation, as the AI infrastructure startup says its annualized run rate crossed 1 billion dollars with usage tripling in five months, built on serverless GPU access for inference, training and agent sandboxes | OMass Therapeutics, Scanntech, North.cloud, Fortem Technologies | |
| 2026-10-18 | Mueon | 65 million dollar Series A led by Maverick Silicon, as the Portland semiconductor startup founded by two Intel veterans scales Cubelets, modular 3D blocks bundling compute, memory, power and cooling to cut AI data center power and density limits, already in use by AI chip startup d-Matrix | Estuary Biotherapeutics, Fission, Otter Health, HyLight | |
| 2026-10-17 | Chariot Claims | 10 million dollar Series A led by Silverton Partners, as the rebranded ClaimClam legal-tech platform scales automated matching of consumers to mass arbitration and class-action claims over hidden fees and hard-to-cancel subscriptions, building on more than 65,000 claims already processed toward an estimated 92 million dollars in settlements | Marklo, Siena, Rein Security, Peppermint | |
| 2026-10-16 | Salience Labs | 125 million dollar oversubscribed Series B led by Bullhound Capital, as the Oxford-spun-out photonics company wins new backing from AMD Ventures and Intel Capital for all-optical circuit switches meant to break the power and latency ceiling facing electronic switches as AI GPU clusters scale toward tens of thousands of chips | Navra, Type One Energy, Oratomic, Gallatin AI | |
| 2026-10-15 | Soufflé Therapeutics | 135 million dollar Series B led by Juvia Group, as the MIT bioengineer Robert Langer-founded biotech works to deliver RNA medicines to muscle and heart tissue, a problem that has stalled the entire siRNA drug class, backed by more than 3.5 billion dollars in big pharma partnerships before any program has reached the clinic | ICON, Pluto Security, Nous Research, Atomic Machines | |
| 2026-10-14 | Vitalize | 31 million dollar Series A led by Oak HC and FT, as the Y Combinator-backed startup unifying hospital staffing, scheduling, patient flow and capacity management expands after enterprise customers reported cutting manual scheduling work and premium labor spend | Gallatin AI, byteXL, Desible.ai, Credfix | |
| 2026-10-13 | Universal Quantum | 100 million dollar Series A co-led by DCVC and Firgun Ventures, a record raise for a UK quantum computing company, as the University of Sussex spinout races to prove its modular trapped-ion chiplet interconnect can out-scale newly public rivals Quantinuum and IonQ | Atlas Atomics, Type One Energy, Sabi, Catalyst | |
| 2026-10-12 | Manus | 500 million dollar funding round led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, the general AI agent's first raise since China blocked Meta's 2 billion dollar bid for the company and barred its founders from leaving the country, as Manus pursues a reported 4 billion dollar valuation on roughly 125 million dollars of annualized revenue | Oratomic, Matchpoint Therapeutics, Oxide Computer, Stuut | |
| 2026-10-11 | Arena | 200 million dollar Series B co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures at a 3.1 billion dollar valuation, as the company behind the Chatbot Arena leaderboard nearly doubles its valuation in ten months on roughly 100 million dollars of annualized revenue from selling AI evaluation and alignment benchmarking to labs and enterprises, while Scale AI's new Seal Showdown contests its neutral-referee position | Gallatin AI, Rein Security, Rivercell, TeddyHoldings.AI | |
| 2026-10-10 | Multiply Labs | 75 million dollar Series B led by Patrick Soon-Shiong's NantWorks with new investors AstraZeneca, Lingotto, Teradyne and Strange Ventures, as the decade-old biologics-manufacturing robotics company passes 100 million dollars raised on the strength of its first commercial sale, an up to 85 million dollar deal with Retro Biosciences, while competing against well-funded rivals Cellares and Ori Biotech to automate cell and gene therapy production | Zomint, Parakeet Health, OuterSignal, Efficient Computer | |
| 2026-10-09 | RougeTx | 58 million dollar Series A led by BioGeneration Ventures and Angelini Ventures with the European Investment Bank's Aurea facility and Kurma Partners also investing, as the Leiden University Medical Center spinout launches the first disease-modifying candidate for hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia, a bleeding disorder with no approved therapies, built on more than two decades of pericyte research | GMI Cloud, Varda Space Industries, doxx.net, Beyond Appliances | |
| 2026-10-08 | General Medicine | 120 million dollar Series B led by Andreessen Horowitz with Eli Lilly and Mercy Health joining, as the PillPack founders' online healthcare marketplace brings total funding to 152 million dollars less than three years after launch on hundreds of thousands of customers and an 80 Net Promoter Score | Noah, Nous Research, Buntar Aerospace, Monid | |
| 2026-10-07 | Vinci | 250 million dollar Series B at a 1.5 billion dollar valuation co-led by Advent, Temasek and Xora Innovation, as the Palo Alto physics foundation model startup jumps from a 46 million dollar seed and Series A disclosed last December to a tenfold valuation leap less than a year later, aiming its technology at chip design incumbents Cadence and Synopsys | Spiko, Hadrian, WhiteLab Genomics, Inbolt | |
| 2026-10-06 | Pandektes | 13.5 million euro Series A led by Munich's Alstin Capital, as the Copenhagen legal-research startup grows revenue sixfold and wins customers switching off LexisNexis, Westlaw, Beck and Karnov with an API-first legal data platform | OneByZero, Fleuret AI, Laki Power, RobCo | |
| 2026-10-05 | PaleBlueDot AI | 200 million dollar Series C at a 3.2 billion dollar valuation led by ComputeCore, as the Palo Alto AI compute platform nearly triples its valuation in under nine months on more than 5 billion dollars of signed customer contracts | Simple Energy, Elio Mortgage, Menos AI, SedMed | |
| 2026-10-04 | Flow Engineering | 50 million dollar Series B at a 750 million dollar valuation co-led by Valor Equity Partners and Atreides Management, as the AI-native systems-engineering platform for hardware teams grows to over 100 million requirements managed and adds General Motors, Anduril and Intuitive Machines as customers less than a year after its Series A | Miter, Kanu AI, Beltic, Satlyt | |
| 2026-10-03 | EliseAI | 350 million dollar round at a 4 billion dollar valuation led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, as the housing and healthcare conversational AI company nearly doubles its valuation in thirteen months on 200 million dollars of ARR and five straight years of 100 percent revenue growth | Kahua, Breye Therapeutics, Amara, Kuro | |
| 2026-10-02 | Armadin | 255.5 million dollar Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel at a 2.5 billion dollar valuation, as Mandiant founder Kevin Mandia's agentic attacker-swarm security platform runs live attack campaigns for Fortune 500 and government customers seven months after stealth | Foundational, Seeds Fincap, Numeral, Chamelio | |
| 2026-10-01 | General Intuition | 220 million dollar Series B at a 6.2 billion dollar valuation, nearly tripling in three months, as the AI foundation model startup trains action models on billions of gameplay clips from its own sister company Medal | Varda, Jeeves, Sand.ai, Arivihan | |
| 2026-09-30 | Tiny Health | Oversubscribed $33M Series B led by B Capital as the at-home microbiome testing company posts 1,624% three-year revenue growth and quadruples its practitioner-facing business | Modulate, erad, Baselayer, Ande | |
| 2026-09-29 | Instinct | $1B Series C led by Sequoia, Benchmark and Coatue at a $10B valuation, a roughly 4x jump in five weeks, as its text-message AI agent passes 100,000 users with 10% daily compounding growth | SiMa.ai, Quartermaster, Outmarket AI, Humanos | |
| 2026-09-28 | Solcoa Industries | $75M seed ($45M equity led by Bain Capital Ventures plus $30M JPMorgan-anchored debt) to build a 500-tonne Nevada plant using a novel rare-earth metalmaking process, aimed at breaking China's 95% grip on metallization | Clastix, Prevision Medicine, Spiich, Barq | |
| 2026-09-27 | Ultraviolette | $85M Series E led by Yali Capital and TDK Ventures; Bengaluru performance EV motorcycle maker plans US entry by 2027 on 4-5x revenue growth | Micro1, Kasvu Therapeutics, HIFI, Dextr AI | |
| 2026-09-26 | Island | $400M Series F led by Evolution Equity Partners at a $6.4B valuation, more than doubling its 2024 valuation as the enterprise browser expands into governing AI agents | Cyera, Confido, Heidi Health, Firecrawl | |
| 2026-09-25 | Ema | $77M Series B led by Creaegis, more than quadrupling its valuation as every existing backer doubled down and Wipro scales its AI Employees to 240,000+ workers | Ando, Kasvu Therapeutics, HIFI, Nuvah | |
| 2026-09-24 | TEKEVER | $580M Series D led by UC Investments and Baillie Gifford; Ukraine-proven AI surveillance drone maker hits $6.4B valuation on a new 400M pound UK Army contract | Enveda Biosciences, Basecamp Research, Numeral, Brahma AI | |
| 2026-09-23 | Verda | $189M oversubscribed Series B led by Emergence Capital; profitable Nordic GPU cloud crosses $1B valuation on $165M ARR | Snorkel AI, Nexstrom, MacroCycle, Demoverse | |
| 2026-09-22 | BCI-Sonics | RMB 200M (~$30M) Pre-Series A led by HSG and Yunqi Capital; non-invasive ultrasound brain-computer interface racing China's invasive BCI leaders and OpenAI-backed Merge Labs | Spott, HighLife, CellPoint, Benford | |
| 2026-09-22 | Amber Electric | €49M Series E led by Morgan Stanley's 1GT; automates 50%+ of Australia's home batteries, expanding VPP software into Europe via E.ON | Corridor, Paymob, Unit1 Studio, Drivn | |
| 2026-09-18 | TypeSafe AI | $40M seed led by DCVC; "System One" model returns typed decisions for software, not chat — built by RLHF co-inventor Diogo Almeida | Space Epoch, Facilo, Treble Technologies, DheyaTech | |
| 2026-09-17 | Exein | $270M Series C at $1.7B valuation (30x in 2 yrs); kernel-level security layer for robots, drones and autonomous machines | Anew Labs, Delos Data, CADDi, AIUC | |
| 2026-09-16 | Euclyd | €200M+ Series A; Samsung-backed (investor + manufacturer) AI inference chip built to out-efficiency Nvidia, chaired by ex-ASML CEO | Profound, Flam, ENCOS, Nutshell Therapeutics | |
| 2026-09-15 | Fortaegis | $50M oversubscribed Series A; quantum-safe security rooted in silicon, chaired by Quantinuum founder Ilyas Khan | Qupital, Tandem Health, Atomarine, UniqYou | |
| 2026-09-11 | Positron AI | $875M Series C at $5B valuation; memory-first inference chips challenging Nvidia's HBM lock-in | The Boring Company, Mach Industries, Rogo Technologies, Swish | |
| 2026-09-10 | Cognition AI | $2B+ Series E at $48B valuation; Devin autonomous coding agent nears $900M run-rate | DigitalPaani, Algomatic Dynamics, Limetax, Fundly.ai | |
| 2026-09-09 | Bluecore Energy | Floating nuclear reactor barges for ports; $50M seed just 2 months after stealth launch | QNu Labs, ARC Ride, Circolife, Hope Care | |
| 2026-09-08 | Pixxel | $100M Series C, India's largest spacetech round; building orbital AI data centers | Nua, Navana.ai, GalaxEye, Atoms (Kalanick) | |
| 2026-09-07 | Medulance | GPS-dispatched ambulance network raises ₹24 Cr Series A-2 | Comet, Mokobara, Kit (Speakeasy), XDOF |
Sources
- Crunchbase News — Exclusive: Numeracle Raises $28M To Keep Legitimate Business Calls From Spam Label
- Numeracle — company homepage
- Tech.eu — London robotics startup Machenta raises $40M seed investment
- Tech.eu — From two doctors to 800,000 clinicians: Vera Health raises $28.5M
- Tech.eu — Autofixer receives €3M from Orbit Capital to support European expansion
- Entrackr — Bijnis rebrands as Zorit, raises Rs 27 Cr led by Sparrow Capital