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.

Portfolio Spotlight: Brooklyn Health

Laconia recently invested in Brooklyn Health’s $6.5 million seed round, alongside HealthX, Metrodora Ventures, Story Ventures, and RiverPark Ventures.

Brooklyn Health is transforming neuroscience clinical trials through Willis, its electronic clinical outcome assessment (eCOA) platform. Traditional CNS trials rely on subjective clinical interviews to measure treatment efficacy—an approach prone to bias and variability. Willis replaces that with a scalable digital phenotyping solution that brings accuracy and standardization to behavioral measurement.

The Willis platform is composed of:

• OpenWillis – a library of validated digital phenotyping methods

• WillisPipeline – infrastructure for processing behavioral data

• WillisAPI – tools for digital health platforms to adopt proven clinical measures

Brooklyn Health was founded by ‌Anzar Abbas, Founder and CEO. Anzar is a neuroscientist with a career in healthtech. Before starting Brooklyn Health, he served as Director of Digital Health at Cambridge Cognition and held multiple roles at AiCure, including Global Head of Digital Biomarkers and Director of Research and Development. Earlier in his career, Anzar worked as a science communicator for PBS and was an AAAS Mass Media Fellow at HHMI. He holds a PhD in Neuroscience from Emory University and studied History and Philosophy of Science at Michigan State University.

Laconia backs seed-stage B2B software companies bringing structure to complex workflows—and Brooklyn Health’s mission aligns perfectly with that thesis. We’re proud to support ‌Anzar Abbas and the team as they build the future of neuroscience research.

For more information on the investment, read here: https://www.mobihealthnews.com/news/brooklyn-health-scores-65m-improve-mental-health-assessment-clinical-trials

Portfolio Spotlight: SportsRecruits Acquisition By IMG Academy

Laconia is thrilled to announce the successful acquisition of our portfolio company, SportsRecruits, by IMG Academy.

By 2014, after four years of full-time angel investing together, Jeffrey and I (David) had refined an investment thesis around B2B seed-stage workflow automation that remains central to Laconia today. When launching Laconia, we wanted to provide our prospective LPs with a tangible, thesis-driven portfolio company they could be owners of from day one. That company was SportsRecruits.

We were introduced to SportsRecruits founders Chris Meade and Matt Wheeler through one of our pre-Laconia portfolio companies. Chris and Matt were solving a highly manual workflow problem—helping high school student-athletes create visibility into their club sports success for college programs, and vice versa.

SportsRecruits was a company we never lost sleep over. It was a capital-efficient platform that quickly generated cash flow while sustaining strong year-over-year revenue growth. Chris and Matt understood their customers’ needs and built a sales and marketing engine that continued to execute—even through the challenges of the youth sports market during the pandemic.

This moment is bittersweet—it marks a successful exit, but also brings a wave of nostalgia. It made us take a walk down memory lane. When we first backed Matt and Chris, they were recent Wesleyan grads—hungry, single, and ready to build. We, on the other hand, were proudly sporting full heads of dark hair. Today, as they exit the company they built from the ground up, they’re both married with families. And we… well, we have a little less hair, and what remains has gone gray.

Being Laconia’s first investment that showcased our thesis to our founding LPs gives this exit special meaning. A big congratulations to Chris and Matt—and a heartfelt thank you to our Fund I LPs for believing in Laconia from the very beginning.

When we invest, we strive for two outcomes: great returns and lifelong relationships. In this case, we’re proud to say—mission accomplished.

You can read more about the announcement here.

Portfolio Spotlight: Sunairio

Congratulations to our portfolio company, Sunairio, for successfully closing their latest $6.4M funding round led by Buoyant Ventures alongside Constellation Technology Ventures and MassMutual Ventures Climate Tech Fund.

We co-led Sunairio's first round alongside Thin Line Capital, Intelis Capital and MVP Capital back in 2022. When we invest as early as pre-seed, we look for strong founder expertise and signs of market demand validation. Sunairio’s founder and CEO, Rob Cirincione demonstrated both in spades. A former energy trader with deep energy industry domain expertise, he brings a unique vision to an increasingly urgent problem.

Sunairio is the first software company to leverage high-resolution climate data to simulate energy asset risk and grid variability. Unlike traditional, computationally intense, physics-based climate models that only predict average regional weather, Sunairio incorporates advanced statistics and generative AI to produce site-specific, asset-level climate simulations that integrate with existing energy modeling tools to support commercial decision making.

As more companies transition towards renewable energy – and as climate change makes forecasting more challenging – Sunario becomes more and more critical to reducing risk and uncertainty, improving planning, and driving impact.

We’re excited to support Sunairio’s continued growth.