May 2026 Newsletter
The latest from Garuda Ventures, new investments, news from our portfolio, and a few tidbits!
Welcome to the latest edition of the Garuda Ventures newsletter!
New Investments: It’s been an active start to the year as we’ve partnered with seven new founding teams:
🏭 Foundry Robotics, building the “Everything Factory”, an AI+robotics first, assembly-focused, dual-use contract manufacturer to power the next century of American manufacturing. Adarsh is a veteran of Scale AI, Ghost Robotics, and Penn’s GRASP Lab, and Emmanuel led Tesla’s Model Y manufacturing. We invested in the seed alongside Khosla Ventures, Red Glass Ventures, Hanabi Capital, and others (read more here)
📱 Mirai Labs, building models, runtime & infrastructure to make
on-device AI interactive, ambient & continuous. We’re thrilled to be working with Dima and Alexey, and partnering with our friends at Uncork Capital, together with an amazing group of angels from ElevenLabs, HuggingFace, Snowflake, and more (read more here)
🤖 Mind Robotics, building AI-native robotics-driven intelligence, dexterity, and adaptation to manufacturing, founded by RJ Scaringe, Founder and CEO of Rivian. We invested alongside our friends at Kleiner Perkins, Accel, A16Z, Eclipse, Greenoaks, Meritech, Redpoint, and others (read more here)
🚚 Armada, building the hyperscaler for AI edge compute, founded by Dan Wright and Jon Runyan. We co-invested alongside Overmatch Ventures, 8090 Ventures, Blackrock, Johnson Controls, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Felicis, Shield Capital, Marlinspike, and others.
🔬An autonomous AI scientist, founded by a team of PhD researchers out of a top research institute (unannounced)
🛸 Deep space transport and data infrastructure, founded by a 10-year veteran of space technology (unannounced)
🌊 Harnessing ocean thermal energy to generate affordable, off-grid electricity at sea to power off-grid AI data centers (unannounced)
Garuda AGM: We hosted our 2026 AGM at the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco, followed immediately by our Spring Celebration on the rooftop. As always, it was a highlight of the year to bring together our growing community of LPs, founders, and friends of the firm. Special thanks to our founder speakers, our special guests Jonathan Roosevelt at Goldman Sachs and Rory O’Driscoll at Scale Venture Partners, and our wonderful partners Burkland, Citizens Bank, Fenwick, and Neutech for their support
Portfolio News
Arena Physica, building electromagnetic superintelligence, announced the underlying foundation model for electromagnetics, Heaviside-0. They also launched Atlas RF Studio, an interactive sandbox for AI-driven inverse RF design
Mastra, the modern Typescript framework for AI-powered applications and agents, raised a $22M Series A led by Spark. They also announced Mastra Platform and Mastra Observability
Mesta, the global B2B fiat + stablecoin operating system, announced a dramatic expansion of their product capabilities beyond a payment network into a full-blown operating system, from store to grow to pay. The also announced they have crossed $1.5B in TPV
Monark Markets, API infrastructure for private markets access, closed its $8.1M round led by F-Prime. Check out their feature article in Upstarts here.
OpsHelm, offering real-time enriched cloud inventory data across your entire cloud infrastructure, was acquired by Cribl, which recently announced it has crossed $300M in ARR.
Hiring Across the Portfolio
The Garuda Ventures portfolio is always hiring! If you’re in the market for an exciting new role at an early-stage business, head to jobs.garuda.vc or click the button below to discover opportunities across our network of companies.
Garuda’s Bookshelf
In a world of bite-sized, easily consumable content, we love asking and getting the question, “Have you read any good books lately?” In this month’s bookshelf:
Non Fiction: The Power of Regret by Daniel Pink
A quick read on how to harness regret for good. Pink argues that by analyzing the four core types of regret - foundation, boldness, moral, and connection - we can identify what we value most and uncover lessons from past mistakes.
Fiction: James by Percival Everett
James by Percival Everett is a brilliant reimagining of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the perspective of the enslaved Jim, who is revealed to be a literate and intellectual man hiding his intelligence to survive. The book won the Pulitzer Prize in 2025.
Garuda Ventures is a first check fund that partners with relentless, ambitious founders. Subscribe below to get the latest from us, and visit garuda.vc to learn more.