Danny Holtkamp

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[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

I built a free daily feed of newly funded startups with founder contacts + cold outreach angles baked in.

no login. no paywall. updated daily.

https://t.co/aZl52u6sSQ

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

@PrismML just closed a $22.25 million seed round backed by Khosla Ventures, Cerberus Capital and Caltech to bring LLM compression research out of the lab. https://t.co/aFi7cpZ2O6

founder and CEO @BabakHassibi is a Caltech professor who built the company around deep technical research rather than pure scale, leaning on Caltech's own research talent.

a university itself investing alongside Khosla and Cerberus is an unusual signal of institutional conviction, worth watching whether compression research translates into something enterprises actually deploy faster than the labs chasing scale alone. View all funded startups at https://t.co/gq9A9xSINY, free, no login

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

Viabot just raised a $24 million Series A from Walden International to expand its autonomous sweeping robots across commercial properties. https://t.co/1071N2vB8b

CEO and co-founder Gregg Ratanaphanyarat first conceived the robotic sweeping concept in college, and co-founder and CTO Dawei Ding built the navigation stack combining cameras, lidar, depth sensors and DGPS that powers the Viabot One robot.

going from a $6.1 million seed to operating across 25 million square feet of commercial property in eight states is real deployed usage, not just a pilot number, worth watching how fast that footprint grows now that Walden International is backing the next phase. View all funded startups at https://t.co/gq9A9xTgDw, free, no login

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

Magentic just raised an $18 million Series A to build AI agents for supply chain operations. https://t.co/E43SwYV1fV

co-founder and CEO Robin Van Aeken previously worked as a supply chain consultant at McKinsey, and teamed up with co-founder Odhran O'Donoghue, a machine learning PhD who worked at OpenAI, NASA and the Crick Institute.

going from a $5.5 million seed to an $18 million Series A in about 14 months since a July 2025 launch is a fast pace even by AI startup standards, worth watching how quickly that McKinsey supply chain background converts into enterprise contracts beyond the pilot stage. View all funded startups at https://t.co/gq9A9xTgDw, free, no login

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

Kastle just raised a $24 million Series A, with Y Combinator returning as an investor, to build AI agents that work inside banks' existing legacy systems. https://t.co/3T81i457lS

founder and CEO Rishi Choudhary built the company through Y Combinator, and Kastle's agents have already processed more than $1.8 billion in transactions ahead of this round.

building agents that plug into legacy banking infrastructure instead of asking banks to replace it is a much easier sell than a rip and replace pitch, worth watching how fast that $1.8 billion processed number grows now that Insight Partners and Commerce Ventures are also in the round. View all funded startups at https://t.co/gq9A9xTgDw, free, no login

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

this is basically the same lesson SEOs learned a decade ago except the source pool is smaller and more brittle, Vendr, Reddit and G2 controlling most of the answer means three sites you dont run are now setting the story on your pricing. the fix probably isnt hiding pricing further, its making sure your own page is the most current, specific answer of the bunch so the model has a reason to cite it over a stale G2 thread

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

the "10% improvement for a comparable budget beats doubling a tiny business" point is exactly what we tell clients at Leadriver when theyre choosing which logo to lead with. buyers dont read case studies for the percentage, they read them to see themselves in the starting position, if your best number came from a business three sizes smaller than them it just signals you havent done their size yet

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

Hello Haven just raised a $15 million pre-seed round from Mayfield to build a persistent digital twin AI across iPhone, Android and web. https://t.co/BnBDPIuq33

founder and CEO @FrankAddante is a six time entrepreneur with two IPOs and three acquisitions behind him, and Mayfield is backing him again after first investing in his company Rubicon Project.

users have already interacted with their Havens over 2 million times since a private beta opened last month, worth watching whether a fifteen million dollar pre-seed round from a repeat founder investors already trust can turn that early engagement into something people actually pay for. View all funded startups at https://t.co/gq9A9xSINY, free, no login

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

Rune just raised a $40 million Series A to convert underused solar power directly into on-site compute capacity. https://t.co/5NeK1G3ntK

CEO William Layden has grown the company to a live 200 megawatt solar-to-compute deployment in Texas, bringing total funding to $53.5 million as demand for power-constrained data centers grows.

pairing solar power directly with compute instead of selling it back to the grid sidesteps the interconnection queue thats stalling data center buildouts everywhere else, worth watching how fast that model scales beyond one 200 megawatt site in Texas. View all funded startups at https://t.co/gq9A9xTgDw, free, no login

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

Treble just raised a 15 million euro Series A, its second Series A round, to build sound and voice data for physical AI. https://t.co/90pew5avXN

co-founders Finnur Pind and Jesper Pedersen are both acoustic engineers who started the company in Reykjavik in 2020, growing from an 11 million euro Series A in 2024 to more than tripling total funding with this round.

customers like Amazon and Logitech already buying into an acoustic engineering niche most AI infra investors overlook suggests physical AI needs sound data as much as it needs vision data, worth watching how fast that thesis spreads beyond Treble's early enterprise base. View all funded startups at https://t.co/gq9A9xSINY, free, no login

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

Noetive just raised a $41 million seed round backed by Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth and Airbnb CTO Ahmed Al-Dahle to build world models for physical industries. https://t.co/1hSfGPpadR

founder Amir Frenkel is a former Meta VP of Generative AI who left to build Noetive alongside co-founder Dan Barak, a former Netlify product leader.

two sitting Big Tech CTOs personally writing checks as angels into a former colleague's seed round is about as strong an insider signal as it gets, worth watching how fast a 10 to 15 percent production line improvement at one customer turns into a broader industrial rollout. View all funded startups at https://t.co/gq9A9xTgDw, free, no login

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

@ExpanseCompute just raised a $5.3 million seed round to find and reclaim idle compute capacity for enterprise customers. https://t.co/Db0TVdv4JB

founder and CEO Ismaeel Bashir is one of four University of Edinburgh engineering graduates who previously ran large-scale compute infrastructure in quantitative finance and national supercomputing before founding Expanse in 2025.

identifying nearly 8 million dollars of idle compute for a single customer in one month is the kind of number that sells itself, worth watching how fast that pitch turns into a broader enterprise rollout as compute costs keep climbing. View all funded startups at https://t.co/gq9A9xTgDw, free, no login

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

good test because it exposes the deals people fool themselves on, a champion who only talks to you when youre on the call isnt a champion, theyre just a friendly contact. the real ones are the ones who message you between calls asking for a slide or a number because they already had the internal conversation without you

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

this is the exact conversation we have with clients before touching a single campaign at Leadriver, the ICP decision is made before the messaging is written, not after a few weeks of bad reply rates. the older, unsexy industries are also just easier to reach, the CEO isnt buried under 40 vendor DMs a week the way a seed stage founder is, so the same email that gets ignored in one inbox actually gets read in the other

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

this is why we push so hard on qualification at Leadriver before a rep ever gets on the call, most objections at the discovery stage arent actually objections, theyre the prospect telling you they were never the right fit and now youre negotiating with someone who was never going to buy. prevention starts in the list, not the pitch

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

this is close to the template we run at Leadriver, the one addition that moved our reply rate was making line 1 something we could only know by actually checking their site or a recent post, not something that could apply to 500 other companies. the specificity is what tells them a human looked before hitting send, even when it wasnt

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

the "not interested energy" line is underrated, most reps confuse persistence with skill and keep pushing on a lead thats already told them no in tone if not in words. the reps who hit number consistently arent the ones who close the hardest no, theyre the ones who disqualify fastest and get back to the next dial

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

40% take home on a 2 year old agency is genuinely good, most people underestimate how much of that margin gets eaten by delivery headcount once you scale past yourself. the healthiest agencies we see at Leadriver keep the founder in sales and hire cheap into delivery, not the other way around

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

this matches what we see running campaigns at Leadriver, reply rate barely moves when we tweak subject lines but jumps hard when the client finally lets us cut the offer down to one sharp claim instead of five vague ones. volume was never really the bottleneck, most founders just havent been told no enough times to find the version of the pitch that actually lands

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

we run into this from the outbound side at Leadriver, a prospect who wants to book something 6 weeks out is usually just being polite instead of saying no. we started defaulting to "does something in the next 3 business days work" in the booking flow and the show up rate on calls that far out is night and day better than the ones people schedule for a random Tuesday next month

[Danny Holtkamp @danholtkamp87]

the reserve pool is the part most agencies skip because it looks like idle cost on a spreadsheet until the day you need it. the real tell of a mature outbound setup isnt the send volume, its how fast you recover from a flag without the client ever noticing a dip in meetings booked