A three-person clean energy team in Seattle is chasing China in pursuit of an increasingly popular alternative to traditional lithium-ion batteries. Emerald Battery Labs, a startup working out of the University of Washington, recently raised just under $1.1 million in a pre-seed round to continue scaling its sodium-ion battery technology.
The burgeoning energy storage option avoids the use of lithium, which is highly sought, difficult to extract and has limited U.S. production. Sodium, by comparison, is much cheaper and comes from the same element that’s in table salt. The sodium-ion batteries also last longer and present fewer fire concerns.
Battery demand is rising rapidly as these systems pair with renewable, intermittent sources like sun and wind; enhance hydro dam capacity; provide backup power for data centers; power drones and defense devices; and work with EV charging stations to reduce grid strain during peak demand.
“As battery chemistries evolve, as technology evolves, people are going to find new ways to use energy storage technology,” said David Bell, Emerald’s co-founder and chief product officer.
A recent Sightline Climate survey of investors and entrepreneurs in climate tech selected sodium-ion batteries as a top-pick for a 2026 breakthrough technology, coming in just behind the use of AI for clean tech materials discovery.
But there’s already a clear leader in the space.
“China, with its powerful EV industry, has led the early push” into sodium-powered batteries, according to MIT Technology Review.
Chinese auto and battery makers Contemporary Amperex Technology Co. Ltd., or CATL, and BYD are in hot pursuit of the technology, MIT reports. CATL claims to have a sodium-ion battery line operating at scale, while BYD is building its own massive production facility.
U.S. competitors include Peak Energy, Nanode Battery Technologies and Unigrid.
While this alternative chemistry offers numerous benefits, there’s an important trade off: it’s less energy dense — meaning sodium-ion batteries need to be larger than competing technologies to deliver the same amount of power.
Emerald is operating out of the UW’s CoMotion Labs and using the university’s Clean Energy Testbeds for fabrication work. The startup is scaling production and looking for partners to pilot test its products.
It plans to hire additional employees in the coming year. Emerald’s investors include Seattle-based E8, a network of angel investors that backs clean-tech companies; E8 members who directly invested; and an undisclosed family venture office.
Emerald’s founders bring deep battery experience:
The startup’s AI-native platform unifies exposure analysis, threat intelligence, investigation, and response.
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Claroty has raised a total of roughly $900 million and its valuation has reportedly reached $3 billion.
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The startup will use the new funding to accelerate product development and deepen remediation capabilities.
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AheadComputing, a Portland, Ore.-based chip startup that designs and licenses CPU cores aimed at boosting performance for AI and data center workloads, announced a $30 million funding round.
Founded in 2024 and led by former Intel engineering leaders, AheadComputing says its CPU cores are faster and more efficient than existing options for AI-heavy workloads.
The startup is building CPU cores based on RISC-V, an open-source instruction set that lets companies customize chips instead of relying on proprietary architectures.
GPUs may dominate headlines, but CPU performance remains critical to how efficiently AI applications run at scale. CPUs manage data movement, run core software, and handle tasks that can’t easily be split up across multiple cores.
AheadComputing has nearly 120 employees and is led by CEO Debbie Marr, who spent more than three decades at Intel and was chief architect of the Advanced Architecture Development Group (AADG) at the chip giant.
“This additional funding will allow us to continue to challenge traditional rules and sustain a fast pace of transformation and develop the fastest high-performance, general-purpose CPU because everybody deserves better compute,” Marr said in a statement.
Eclipse, Toyota Ventures, and Cambium co-led AheadComputing’s latest round, which included participation from Corner, Trousdale Ventures, EPIQ, MESH, and Stata. The company, which raised a $21.5 million round last year, also added Tenstorrent CEO Jim Keller to its board.
CyberNut emerged from stealth in May 2024 with $800k in pre-seed funding for its cybersecurity platform.
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The startup’s platform leverages AI to automate forensic investigations, accelerating incident response.
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Bitcoin is trying to hold above the $91,000 level as the market searches for support, but demand remains fragile after weeks of volatility. While the recent decline has pressured sentiment, a CryptoQuant report suggests January is still shaping up as a recovery phase rather than a full breakdown. The analysis points to cautious optimism driven by institutional and whale-level accumulation, while retail participation remains hesitant and risk-averse.
According to Binance-related data, Bitcoin’s spot price action and funding rates have started to diverge in early 2026, signaling a spot-driven market environment. This setup is often viewed as constructive because it implies the latest move is being supported more by real spot buying than by excessive leverage in derivatives. In practice, a spot-led trend tends to reduce the risk of sudden liquidation cascades, which have recently amplified downside moves across the crypto market.
CryptoQuant notes that spot-driven conditions can also create more durable rallies, since they attract organic inflows and allow price to climb without relying on unstable speculative positioning. Historical comparisons to the 2021 and 2024 cycles show similar divergences between spot strength and muted funding rates often preceded extended upside expansions, ranging from 20% to 50%.
The CryptoQuant report raises a bigger question that many investors are now debating: is the traditional four-year Bitcoin cycle starting to fade? As the market matures, analysts argue that the old post-halving pattern may no longer apply in the same way. Since 2024, spot Bitcoin ETFs and corporate treasuries have been absorbing a growing share of supply, potentially creating steadier demand and reducing the boom-and-bust dynamics that defined prior cycles.
This argument gained traction in 2025. Despite being a post-halving year, Bitcoin failed to deliver the type of parabolic rally seen in previous cycles, while altcoins also struggled to produce a true “altseason.” That divergence has led some analysts to conclude that halvings are becoming less dominant as a driver, especially now that Bitcoin trades as a $2T+ macro asset.
Instead, market direction may be increasingly shaped by global liquidity conditions, including Federal Reserve policy, M2 growth, geopolitical risk, and large-scale institutional flows. Analysts like Raoul Pal have framed this as a shift toward longer liquidity cycles that could last five years or more, reinforcing the idea that the four-year framework may be outdated.
The report also highlights Binance as a critical reference point. Historically favored by whales, Binance remains a major leading indicator for broader crypto market positioning and flows.
Bitcoin is attempting to stabilize after weeks of heavy selling pressure, but the weekly structure still reflects a market fighting to reclaim lost ground. BTC is trading near $91,075 after printing a sharp weekly pullback, reinforcing that volatility remains elevated even as price tries to base. The recent rebound from the sub-$85,000 region shows buyers stepping in aggressively, yet the recovery still looks fragile while broader macro uncertainty keeps risk appetite limited across crypto.
From a technical perspective, Bitcoin is hovering around the zone where previous support has flipped into resistance. Price is currently sitting near the rising 100-week moving average (green), which is acting as a key pivot for bulls. Holding above this level would signal that demand is strong enough to absorb supply during dips. However, the 50-week moving average (blue) has rolled over and remains above price, highlighting that the broader trend has not fully reset bullish momentum.
The 200-week moving average (red) continues to trend higher far below current levels, confirming the long-term uptrend remains intact. For now, the market likely needs a clean weekly reclaim above $95,000 to shift sentiment. Until then, this bounce risks being treated as corrective rather than trend-confirming.
Featured image from ChatGPT, chart from TradingView.com
Plutus, a Seattle-area fintech startup founded last year, raised $1.2 million to help fuel growth of its investing marketplace.
The company aims to give everyday investors access to strategies traditionally used by hedge funds and ultra-wealthy clients. Plutus acts as an advisory marketplace between individual investors and providers such as Citrini Research. It lets users browse curated, thematic portfolios from independent research providers, select one that fits their goals, and replicate it automatically in their own brokerage accounts.
Unlike passive ETFs or mutual funds, the portfolios are designed for automated rebalancing and potential tax advantages. Plutus takes a cut of subscription fees set by each portfolio provider.
Plutus CEO Shashank Chiranewala said the company recently received its Registered Investment Advisor (RIA) license from the SEC and is starting to onboard customers on its waitlist.
Chiranewala, a former investment banker and program manager at Microsoft and Meta, co-founded Plutus with Mitren Chinoy, a former senior software engineer at Snowflake and Microsoft. The pair previously started and sold digital form startup Formloge last year for an undisclosed sum.
Investors in the new round include existing customers, Bay Area VC firm Rocketship, and Visse Capital, a multi-family office based in Madrid.
“We are proud to support the team as they build the infrastructure to democratize institutional-grade portfolio management and power the next generation of wealth creation,” Sailesh Ramakrishnan, managing partner at Rocketship, said in a statement.
Plutus has less than ten employees and is hiring. It recently moved into a new office in Kirkland, Wash.
The company will use the investment to accelerate the adoption of its solution among financial institutions and digital businesses.
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The startup is building the necessary infrastructure and tools to help organizations transition to post-quantum computing.
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MontyCloud, a Redmond, Wash.-based startup that helps companies optimize their cloud operations, raised a fresh Series B round to fuel growth.
The company announced the funding in a press release this week but did not reveal the amount raised. A new SEC filing shows $11.4 million raised. We’ve reached out to the company for details.
Founded in 2018, MontyCloud builds software that helps companies run and control their cloud infrastructure automatically, from enforcing governance policies to optimizing cloud spend. MontyCloud is part of a broader push to use AI not just for apps, but for automating back-end IT operations.
The company says cloud spend under management has grown more than 400% over two years, with recurring revenue nearly tripling (both measured by compound annual growth). MontyCloud targets Managed Service Providers (MSPs) as well as enterprise companies.
The latest round was led by Riverside Acceleration Capital. Other backers include Lytical Ventures, S3 Ventures, Madrona Venture Group, and Raptor Group.
MontyCloud is led by CEO Walter Rogers, a tech industry vet who joined the company in 2022. The company was founded by Venkat Krishnamachari, chief product officer, and Kannan Parthasarathy, chief technology officer.
“Our growth reflects a fundamental shift in how organizations approach CloudOps,” Rogers said in a statement. “The industry is moving away from manual processes and fragmented tools toward a model that enables teams to optimize and operate cloud environments while unlocking new opportunities to monetize CloudOps.”
MontyCloud has 85 employees, with a majority based in India, according to LinkedIn.
The startup will use the investment to accelerate R&D, expand go-to-market efforts, and hire new talent.
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OCOchem, a clean tech startup turning carbon dioxide into industrial chemicals, has raised $2.15 million and continues signing new partnerships — despite a cooling regulatory environment for sustainability and a decline in climate tech investing.
The Richland, Wash., company’s technology takes water and captured industrial carbon dioxide and runs it through proprietary electrolyzer cells to produce formic acid and formate compounds. This family of chemicals can be converted into clean-burning hydrogen fuel, serve as ingredients for other valuable chemicals, or be used as a relatively safe acid in critical mineral recovery.
The startup is making progress thanks to the abundance of its feedstock and the versatility of formate, said CEO and co-founder Todd Brix. As OCOchem scales up operations, “we’re opening up new vistas” as customers discover the company’s sustainable, affordable solutions for producing chemicals and clean fuels.
With the new funding, the company has now raised $11.2 million from investors and $8.3 million in government grants.
Initiatives underway include:
While the Trump administration has rolled back many climate and environmental policies, one recent change helped level the playing field for carbon reuse efforts like OCOchem’s.
The One Big Beautiful Bill Act retained the tax credit for carbon capture and increased the credit for processes that reuse carbon in industrial applications, raising it from $60 per ton to $85 — matching the credit provided when carbon is permanently sequestered.
Brix launched OCOchem in 2017 after a nearly two-decade career at Microsoft. The 17-person team includes Chief Technologist Arun Agarwal, who previously spent 12 years in R&D focused on renewable chemicals, energy, oil and gas.
The company faces competition in turning carbon dioxide into formate — particularly in the European Union, which is publicly investing in the technology, as well as at labs operated by Toyota.
But Brix said he’s ready to face his rivals. His company has “built the largest CO2 electrolyzer, worked fast to do that, and is operating at the highest performance today,” Brix said. “And so it’s a little bit of a race, but it’s a good race.”
The developer security company has raised a total of more than $84 million in funding.
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Novee provides continuous AI-driven penetration testing to uncover and address novel vulnerabilities.
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