Southeast Startup News From The Week Of September 15-19, 2025
Our Friday “Fund” Day series is a way to get your news from across the Southeast’s innovation ecosystem in one place. We take the week’s top stories, from fundraising deals in Atlanta to new startup accelerator programs in Memphis, and put them in any easily-digestible format.
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Our Friday “Fund” Day series is a way to get your news from across the Southeast’s innovation ecosystem in one place. We take the week’s top stories, from fundraising deals in Atlanta to new startup accelerator programs in Memphis, and put them in any easily-digestible format.These are the stories you need to know from this week:
Funding News
Atlanta-based FinTech startup Speedchain raised $111 million, a mix of debt and equity.
Atlanta-based Airia, the enterprise AI security and orchestration platform that enables organizations to safely deploy and scale AI, announced it has raised $100 million in funding to date. – including $50 million invested to date and a further $50 million commitment announced today. The funding comes from co-founder John Marshall, who previously co-founded AirWatch (acquired by VMware for $1.54 billion) and served as Co-Chairman of OneTrust until 2023. More details here.
Nashville-based Peerbridge Health, a HealthTech startup focused on changing how heart disease gets diagnosed, raised a $7M to support its commercial rollout. More details here.
Florida-based Tocaro Blue, an AI company for the marine industry, raised $2.1 million, per Crunchbase.
Atlanta-based Good Agriculture, a platform supporting regenerative farmers with their back office work, raised a $1.5 million seed round.
Miami-based Virtual Vision Health raised a $1 million seed round, per Crunchbase.
Miami-based HRTech startup Jobifi raised a $50,000
Accelerator News
Epicenter, Memphis’ hub for entrepreneurs, has selected five unique medtech startups to participate in the ZeroTo510 Accelerator for early-stage medtech founders looking to accelerate toward commercialization. Selected startups include:
Dichotics Inc.. (Memphis, TN)
Fluens Medical (Houston, TX)
NatureFound Biotech (Memphis, TN)
Navigator Medical (Memphis, TN)
Oya Medtech (Los Angeles, CA)
Top Hypepotamus Stories
In our Get To Know The CEO series this week, we spoke to Scott Downes, the former Bellhops CTO who is now leading the startup Supernal, a company building personalized AI employees. More here.
We caught up with Marlon Williams at the Atlanta Blockchain Center to better understand what he thinks about the state of crypto startups right now. More here.
In Other News
ViNIL, a Nashville startup that Hypepotamus profiled earlier this year, launched a new website for its media-focused AI startup.
EnviroSpark, Atlanta’s EV charging startup, is bringing more of its charging stations to California through a collaboration with Sutter Health, a not-for-profit integrated health network serving millions across California. The collaboration brings EV charging stations to multiple Sutter facilities, with installations already underway in Fremont and Oakland, Calif. including EnviroSpark's largest single network installation to date. More collaborations are planned across the San Francisco Bay Area and Central California.
New Orleans-based Informuta, a biotechnology company specializing in sequencing- and machine learning-based diagnostics for infectious diseases, has opened a new laboratory at the New Orleans BioInnovation Center (NOBIC).
People To Know
Kennesaw State’s HatchbBridge Incubator has a new episode out of its podcast Built In The Burbs that includes an interview with Wesley Davis, founder of Local Mushrooms. Take a listen to how Davis thinks about innovation within sustainable agriculture.
