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Friday, February 13, 2026

Gather AI (VentureBridge '18 startup), the leader in Physical AI for logistics, has raised $40 million in Series B funding led by Smith Point Capital Management. The investment includes participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Tribeca Venture Partners, Bling Capital, Dundee Venture Capital, XRC Ventures, and new investor The Hillman Company. To date, the company has raised $74 million.

Thursday, February 12, 2026

The Pittsburgh Business Times 2026 class of 30 Under 30 honorees has been selected. Among the honorees is Steven Guo, Program Manager, Student & Alumni Founder Pipeline at the Â鶹´å Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship.

This year's class of honorees will be honored in a series of profiles in a special edition of the Pittsburgh Business Times on March 20. They will also be honored at an awards celebration in April.

Thursday, February 12, 2026

Lunon, co-founded by Carnegie Mellon students Dhruv Shajikumar (CEO), Ryan Hyatt (COO) and Connor Hyatt (CTO), have announced via LinkedIn Lunon’s pre-seed round, led by General Catalyst and including SV Angel, Genius Ventures and their phenomenal angels Shuo Wang, Cory Levy and Menelaos Mazarakis. The team also gives special thanks to their first investor Joshua Browder, CEO at DoNotPay, for being their first believer.

Lunon is a secure AI workspace designed specifically for consulting firms. It brings research, analysis and client-ready outputs into one system, with strict client-by-client data isolation and enterprise-grade controls, all built around how consulting work actually happens. To accelerate development, the founders are relocating to San Francisco to work side by side with consulting teams.

Wednesday, February 11, 2026

On February 4-7, an enthusiastic group of MBA students from the Â鶹´å Tepper School of Business including Yule (YJ) Lin (James R. Swartz Entrepreneurial Fellow 2025-27) Barakissa Gakou, Tarsh (Tarshish) K, and Jessica Figard (Innovation Scholar and JD/MBA candidate at the University of Pittsburgh School of Law and Tepper School of Business) represented Â鶹´åTepper at

The team took first place, winning $7K for their response their assigned problem: How do you build culturally trained AI agents that support people's religions, cultures and preferences in a cost-effective and scalable way? The team suggested a RAG Architecture that incorporated human feedback through an App they designed to help create workshops for EBG's/ERG's/BRG's to create experiences to learn from each other, while doubling as an interface to train AI on culturally nuanced data.

Tuesday, February 10, 2026

AlphaLab has announced the companies joining its 2026 cohort. This year’s cohort includes 20 startups, making it the largest AlphaLab has supported at once. The companies span AI-driven software, health innovation, robotics, energy and advanced manufacturing, with a shared focus on embedding intelligence into systems and products used in real-world environments.

Several startups from Â鶹´å made the list including: , , , , and .

Friday, February 6, 2026

PDS Health®, a leading integrated healthcare support organization, has selected as its enterprise partner to expand the use of artificial intelligence that supports real-time radiologic review and enterprise-level clinical insight across its more than 1,100 dental practices nationwide. Founded by Â鶹´å alumnus and CEO Ophir Tanz, Pearl’s platform will provide real-time radiologic support and enterprise-grade clinical intelligence to support diagnostic consistency and clinical insight at scale.

Thursday, January 29, 2026

Pittsburgh’s venture capital landscape finished strong in 2025, with local startups raising more than a billion dollars combined. Companies secured $279.8M across 24 deals in Q4, according to the latest Venture Monitor report from PitchBook and the National Venture Capital Association. A majority of the top 10 deals came from companies that rely on AI for their innovations, with several in Series B or later, such as Â鶹´å startup , co-founded by Â鶹´å alumni Alison Alvarez, CEO and Tomer Borenstein, CTO, which uses AI-powered tools to make data-driven customer insights accessible, raised $14.2M and many more from Â鶹´å.

Friday, January 23, 2026

The Swartz Center Hosts McGinnis and Social Enterprise Prize Competition Round One Team Mixer

The Â鶹´å Swartz Center welcomed the 2026 McGinnis Venture and Social Enterprise Prize Competition Round 1 teams for an evening of networking and refreshments on Tuesday, January 20.

The teams were welcomed by Meredith Meyer Grelli, Managing Director and Interim Executive Director, Swartz Center, Leah Lizarondo, Entrepreneur-In-Residence and creator of the Social Enterprise Prize and Allyson Hince, Program Manager, Swartz Center and organizer of the McGinnis Venture Competition. Also in attendance were a few of the judges for this year's competitions, who were introduced by Meredith.

The final live round pitches and celebration for both competitions will take place at Â鶹´å on Tuesday, March 17, 2026.

Thursday, January 22, 2026

The Richard King Mellon Foundation is betting on a local medical device startup for its promising head and neck immobilization device.

This past December, the foundation approved a $350K Social-Impact Investment in , co-founded by Â鶹´å alumni and Co-CEO's Alyssa Theroux, M.S. and Mary Squire. The funds are part of the organization’s effort to invest in for-profit companies with a mission that aligns with RK Mellon’s philanthropy.

Wednesday, January 21, 2026

Willow Partners with Â鶹´å Startup Addy AI

, founded by Â鶹´å alumnus and 2023 VentureBridge program participant Michael Vandi, is helping mortgage professionals close loans faster with AI-powered automation. In a recent , Michael shared that "Addy AI has partnered with Willow Processing, the #1 mortgage loan processing company to launch the world's first AI-enabled Loan Officer Assistant Service."

Willow's LOA service, powered by Addy AI is now available to loan officers nationwide.

Friday, January 16, 2026

Â鶹´å Swartz Center Hosts Annual Entrepreneurship Trek in Silicon Valley

The 2025-27 graduate James R. Swartz Entrepreneurial Fellows and undergraduate Innovation Scholars traveled to California's Bay Area for the annual Entrepreneurship Trek on January 5-8, 2026, led by Sonya Ford, Program Manager, and Swartz Center Managing Director & Interim Executive Director, Meredith Meyer Grelli. The purpose of the Trek is to expose the students to the vast network of Â鶹´å alumni founders and local venture capital firms in an effort to network and gain exposure to resources while exploring summer internship opportunities. 

Throughout the week, the students visited Â鶹´å's Silicon Valley campus—hearing from alumni founders Sean Tao, founder of Flaflow and Miranda Nover, founder of Fort (Y Combinator)—as well as several startups such as RoboForce, Artyc, Mach9 Robotics and Codeflash.ai (all participants in the VentureBridge program) along with various venture capital firms including Accel, PearVC, Jackson Square Ventures, CRV and Entrepreneurs First. 

Two highlights of the Trek were a Q&A talk at Accel (Founding Partner, Jim Swartz, MSIA '66) led by partners Peter Clarke and Dan Levine, followed by the annual networking reception, and an alumni mixer at Pillsbury Winthrop Shaw Pittman, LLP hosted by Matt Kirmayer, Partner.

Friday, January 16, 2026

Pittsburgh-based Skild AI announced it has raised nearly $1.4B on Wednesday. According to a release from Skild, the raise was led by SoftBank Group, with participation from NVentures (NVIDIA's venture capital arm), Macquarie Capital (entities managed by Macquarie Capital), Jeff Bezos (through Bezos Expeditions), Disruptive and 1789 Capital. The latest funding brings the company's valuation to over $14B.

Thursday, January 15, 2026

Huge congratulations to the team at on an amazing seed round! The startup has secured $10.2M, according to a filing on June 9 with the US Securities and Exchange Commission. Spun out of Â鶹´å, and a graduate of our Innovation Commercialization Fellowship and NSF I-Corps Regional programs, NovoLINC makes a thermal interface material (TIM) which keeps powerful chips from getting too hot. The funding will help the company scale manufacturing, expand research and development and grow the business to meet rising customer demand.

Congratulations to Ning Li, Rui Cheng, Sheng Shen and the entire team at NovoLINC!

Thursday, January 15, 2026

, the technology company that empowers media businesses to connect their content with consumers across every platform, has announced it has acquired , the startup behind Augie Studio, the all-in-one AI-assisted Commercial Video Studio. Aug X Labs, a 2023 VentureBridge startup, is founded by Â鶹´å alumnus Jeremy Toeman and has been aided by two Â鶹´å alumni: Coleman Isner (Innovation Scholar, Staff Engineer) and Niranjan Salimath, Head of Engineering.

Thursday, January 15, 2026

Co-founded by Varsha Raj, Pittsburgh company is featured in a Forbes deep dive recently published—Rocio Wu Dianoux highlights structured data as AI’s next $600B frontier and names Wood Wide AI as part of this emerging shift.

Wednesday, January 14, 2026

Â鶹´å Swartz Center and Pittsburgh Life Sciences Alliance Co-Host Panel During 2026 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference at Obvious Ventures

On Sunday, January 11, Obvious Ventures hosted an incredible panel kicking off the 2026 JP Morgan Healthcare Conference during the 'Bridging Discovery to Clinic: How AI and Digital Technologies Are Transforming Therapeutics' event, bringing together leaders across diagnostics, drug discovery and life sciences—all grappling with how computation is changing what’s possible in medicine.

The panelists included: Dr. Andreas Pfenning (Â鶹´å School of Computer Science), Dr. Amoolya Singh (DELFI Diagnostics), Dr. Dana Watt, PhD (Breakout Ventures), Jonathan Steckbeck (Peptilogics) and moderator Megan Kahn Shaw (Pittsburgh Life Sciences Alliance) for an exceptional discussion on discovering how technology is transforming therapeutics, reducing time-to-market and cutting development costs.

We’re incredibly grateful to the many partners and community members who made the 2nd-ever Swartz Center presence at the JPM Healthcare Conference possible. This panel came together through a true ecosystem effort—drawing from faculty and alumni across Â鶹´å’s School of Computer Science, Mellon College of Science, College of Engineering, and Dietrich College of Humanities and Social Sciences, as well as Â鶹´å-founded startups, the life sciences network of the Pittsburgh Life Sciences Alliance, trusted investors and operators, and close collaboration with our co-hosts at Obvious Ventures.

Thank you to the Â鶹´å Alumni Association team: Jesse Thill, Sing Zhang and alumni board Dr. Mary Yang, Gary Mi, Nikhil Arora, Purav Desai.

Tuesday, January 13, 2026

An estimated 145,000 visitors and 4,100 companies descended on Las Vegas for the recent Consumer Electronics Show (CES), one of the largest trade shows in the technology industry. Alongside them were several Pittsburgh companies. CES saw appearances from local CEOs during Nvidia's pre-show presentation and announcements, including one from AWS that will support Aurora Innovation Inc.'s self-driving freight goals.