Andreessen Horowitz

Tokyo – September 16, 2026 -- Japan's Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry will stage the Global Startup EXPO 2026 in Osaka from October 5 to 7, opening a direct channel for overseas venture capital firms into the country's startup and investment ecosystem.

METI targets deep tech commercialization as the event's central theme

Organized under the concept "Deeptech - from breakthrough to industry," GSE2026 is structured to move beyond exhibition format toward measurable industrial outcomes. The ministry frames the event as addressing a gap between capital deployment and market implementation, arguing that lasting impact requires technologies to reach commercial scale and generate sustainable economic value.

San Francisco – September 15, 2026 -- Lightfield has raised $47 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Maverick Capital, Coatue, Audacious, Alumni Ventures, Greylock, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. More than 5,000 companies have signed up for the platform since its November 2025 launch, ranging from early-stage startups to scaling firms with hundreds of CRM users.

Lightfield targets a structural flaw in legacy CRM systems built for manual data entry

Traditional CRM platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot were designed for people to type data into fields, stages, and notes rather than for AI agents to reason from. When agents are layered onto these systems, they inherit incomplete fields, stale close dates, and notes reconstructed from memory, producing work that companies cannot verify.

San Bruno, Calif. – September 13, 2026 -- Chariot Defense, a maker of software-defined power distribution systems for the battlefield, has appointed four defense and venture capital veterans to its Board of Advisors, following a $34 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz and a $7.4 million contract with the Pentagon's Department of War Innovation Unit (DIU).