Portfolio Spotlight

Portfolio Spotlight: Daptic

We’re excited to share that our portfolio company Daptic has raised a $15M Series A led by Canvas Ventures, with participation from IA Ventures, 8VC, and others, bringing the company’s total funding to $22M.

Laconia first invested in Daptic, then known as DiploAI, at the pre-seed stage in 2023. From the beginning, the team was tackling a critical but largely underserved problem: while the tools used to design and build physical products have become increasingly sophisticated, the process of understanding and applying regulation to those products has remained highly manual.

For manufacturers, regulatory requirements are often managed across spreadsheets, emails, consultants, and conversations between regulatory, legal, and engineering teams. When those requirements reach engineers too late, companies can face costly redesigns, certification setbacks, and delayed launches.

Daptic is changing that by building a product compliance lifecycle management platform that brings regulation directly into the product development process. Its platform gives regulatory specialists, engineers, and other stakeholders a shared system to understand which rules apply, interpret their impact, turn them into actionable product requirements, and coordinate the work needed to bring compliant products to market.

The idea is simple but powerful: compliance shouldn’t be a final checkpoint. Regulatory requirements should inform product decisions from the beginning, while teams still have the flexibility to act on them.

Today, Daptic is working with some of the world’s largest manufacturers, including Honda, as it expands its platform across increasingly complex products and global markets. The new funding will allow the company to scale alongside customer demand, support deployments across entire product portfolios, and continue investing in R&D.

The company is led by CEO Baptiste Bouvier, CTO Hannah Collins, and COO Gabby Finear, who met while at MIT. Their backgrounds across computer science, electrical engineering, AI, and physical systems helped them identify the gap between published regulation and the requirements teams actually need to design, build, and sell products.

At Laconia, we invest in founders building must-have technology for enduring industries and workflows that have been underserved by modern software. We’re proud to have backed the team from the early days and to continue supporting them as they build the infrastructure for how global manufacturers navigate regulation and bring products to market.

Read more about the Series A and what’s next for Daptic here.

Portfolio Spotlight: Bluefish

We’re excited to announce that our portfolio company Bluefish has raised a $43M Series B co-led by Threshold Ventures and New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from Laconia, American Express Ventures, TIAA, Salesforce Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Swift Ventures and Crane. This brings total funding to $68M.

We’ve worked with Bluefish from the earliest days, investing at pre-seed and previously backing CEO Alex Sherman and COO Jing Feng in their prior company PromoteIQ (acquired by Microsoft). From the start, the team was building toward a world where AI becomes a primary interface for how consumers discover and evaluate products.

Since launching in 2024, Bluefish has become a core platform for Fortune 500 brands building agentic marketing capabilities, already used by ~10% of the Fortune 500 across more than 15 industries.

As AI systems like ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Claude, Perplexity, and Amazon Rufus increasingly shape discovery, Bluefish provides a unified platform to monitor, influence, and measure how brands are represented. Its Agentic Marketing Platform connects insights to execution, helping teams improve performance with clear, measurable outcomes.

The company is led by Alex Sherman, Jing Feng, and Andrei Dunca, a team with a track record of building category-defining platforms.

At Laconia, we invest in founders building the infrastructure required for how markets are evolving. Bluefish is doing exactly that for enterprise marketing in an AI-driven world.

We’re proud to continue supporting the team as they scale and define this category.

Read more here.

Portfolio Spotlight: Trestle

Congratulations to our portfolio company, Trestle, on their recent investment led by ‌Camber Creek, a leading investor in the future of the built environment.

We first invested in Trestle alongside Lerer Hippeau, MetaProp, Alumni Ventures, The LegalTech Fund, Redbud VC, and Meridian Ventures after meeting co-founder & CEO Victor Zhang through a cold inbound pitch that immediately stood out. Victor’s 15 years in heavy construction, leading estimating and procurement teams on some of the largest projects in the country, gave him a clear, operator-led perspective on a problem the industry has long accepted as “just the way it is.”

Contractor prequalification is a critical step in construction, yet it remains surprisingly manual. General contractors still rely on static forms, spreadsheets, and disconnected systems to evaluate subcontractors’ insurance, safety, financials, and experience. This introduces unnecessary risk and friction into already complex projects.

Trestle is changing that.

The platform modernizes prequalification by centralizing subcontractor data, automating document review, and providing real-time visibility into vendor risk and performance. By replacing fragmented workflows with a dynamic, intelligent system, Trestle helps general contractors prevent millions in losses and proactively manage vendor compliance and performance risk with AI-powered automation, without adding overhead.

As construction continues its long-overdue digital transformation, solutions like Trestle are becoming increasingly essential. We’re excited to see this next chapter for the team and proud to continue supporting them as they scale alongside Camber Creek.

Congratulations to ‌Victor and the entire Trestle team on this milestone.

Portfolio Spotlight: Messium

We’re excited to announce our newest investment in Messium, an AgTech software company leveraging AI and hyperspectral satellite technology to optimize fertilizer usage. We’re thrilled to co-invest alongside Future Planet Capital, Expansion Ventures, Mudcake, GRDC, GrainInnovate, and SuperSeed (thank you, Mads Jensen, for the introduction!).

Messium delivers lab-level nitrogen insights from space. Using cutting-edge hyperspectral satellite imaging and AI analytics, the company can accurately detect nitrogen levels in crops. Their technology provides precise recommendations to farmers on when and where to apply fertilizer, reducing nitrogen waste while maintaining or improving yields. In early trials, their product has delivered substantial cost savings while also reducing environmental impact.

At the helm of Messium are co-founders George Marangos-Gilks (CEO) and Vishal Soomaney Vijaykumar (CTO), who bring a rare combination of entrepreneurial experience and technical depth:

  • George Marangos-Gilks is a three-time founder with two prior exits. Before Messium, he founded and led The Tab and Magic Carpet AI (acquired by http://Blockchain.com) and holds a degree from Cambridge.

  • Vishal Soomaney Vijaykumar is a senior machine learning and backend engineer who has co-founded multiple award-winning companies focused on satellite-based environmental analytics, including forest fire detection.

The problem they’re tackling is massive: Nitrogen fertilizer accounts for over a third of a wheat farm’s cost base, with up to 60% of that often wasted. Globally, $500B of fertilizer is applied inefficiently, damaging ecosystems and eroding farmer margins. Messium’s technology is not only more accurate than anything previously available, but also designed to plug into farmers’ existing systems with ease, bringing precision agriculture into sharper focus than ever before.

Our investment in Messium continues our thesis around backing applied AI teams building tangible, high-ROI solutions for legacy industries. We believe Messium’s first-mover advantage, proprietary dataset, and exclusive imaging partnerships position them as a category-defining player in precision agriculture.

Please join us in welcoming the Messium team to the Laconia portfolio!

For more information on the investment, read here.

Portfolio Spotlight: Bluefish

We’re excited to announce that our portfolio company ‌Bluefish has raised a $20M Series A led by NEA and Salesforce Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding to $24 million within its first year of launch.

We’ve backed the Bluefish team from the very beginning, investing in the company at pre-seed and, before that, supporting CEO Alex Sherman and COO Jing Feng as a seed investor in their previous company, PromoteIQ (acquired by Microsoft).

As AI becomes the first stop for product discovery and purchasing decisions, enterprise brands face a new challenge: understanding and influencing how they appear in AI-generated responses. Bluefish is rebuilding the enterprise marketing stack for this new reality. Its platform analyzes millions of AI prompt responses across ChatGPT, Google AI, Meta AI, Amazon Rufus, and more, giving marketers real-time visibility into how their brands are represented. With this data, Bluefish enables teams to optimize content strategies, improve discoverability, and measure performance against custom KPIs. Unlike one-size-fits-all tools, the platform was built from the ground up for the Fortune 500, allowing each brand to tailor insights and actions to its unique business needs.

The results speak for themselves: Bluefish has grown revenue 10x over the past six months and now counts a host of Fortune 500 leaders among its customers. More than 80% of its client base comes from the Fortune 500, spanning industries from financial services and consumer packaged goods to travel, auto, and beauty. Bluefish’s newest release, Custom AI Audiences, allows marketers to define audience-specific profiles and insights, creating differentiated strategies that further expand competitive advantage.

The company’s founding team brings a deep track record of building marketing platforms for global brands. CEO Alex Sherman co-founded PromoteIQ, which was acquired by Microsoft in 2019. CTO Andrei Dunca co-founded LiveRail, acquired by Facebook in 2014. COO Jing Feng held senior leadership roles at Microsoft, PromoteIQ, and LiveRail. Together, they bring decades of experience and a clear vision for how enterprise marketing must adapt to the AI era.

At Laconia, we back seed-stage B2B software companies bringing structure to complex workflows, and Bluefish fits squarely within that thesis. By giving enterprise marketers the transparency, control, and tools they need to thrive as consumer behavior shifts to AI, Bluefish is building the future of marketing. We’re proud to support Alex and his team as they continue their journey and define what enterprise AI marketing looks like for the decade ahead.

For more information on the investment, read here.