Recent news from across the Valor portfolio.
August 13, 2026
Cisco published an in-depth feature on its partnership with Autonoma through Cisco's Country Digital Acceleration (CDA) program, pairing AutoVerse — Autonoma's physics-based airport digital twin — with Cisco compute, networking, and IoT infrastructure. The piece confirms two live deployments: Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International, the world's busiest airport, where Autonoma built a high-fidelity digital twin for Delta to test and validate gate assignments and schedule changes before rollout, then extended it into four-to-six-hour operational forecasting as weather moves in; and Augusta Regional Airport, where the team simulated roughly 40 parking strategies across varying traffic levels ahead of the Masters surge. Founder and CEO Will Bryan cites a 99% reduction in deployment risk, enabled by running simulations hundreds of times faster than real time with 50 in parallel on a single machine — compressing months of scenario coverage into a day. Cisco CDA's Wayne Cuervo, who first met Autonoma through Cisco's Fast Future Innovation Awards, frames airports as "the front door to a country and its economy." Bryan positions the airport work as a proof of concept transferable to smart cities and healthcare.
August 5, 2026
Vermeer co-founder and CTO Suresh Kumar appeared on The Techne Connect's Connect To Visionaries podcast, tracing his path from aerospace engineering and autonomous drones to co-founding Vermeer and leading its autonomy programs. The conversation covers how software, AI, computer vision, and autonomous systems are reshaping modern defense, and why venture-backed startups iterate faster than traditional primes. Kumar also discusses building high-performing engineering teams and a culture of experimentation. Vermeer lists the episode on its own news feed as of August 2026.
July 30, 2026
Cleerly, the AI-powered cardiac CT imaging company, partnered with Allelica to launch the Cleerly Polygenic Cardiovascular Risk Score Test, powered by Allelica's proprietary multi-ancestry PRS technology. The saliva-based, CLIA-lab test estimates a patient's inherited risk of coronary artery disease and can be used on its own or alongside Cleerly's FDA-cleared AI coronary CTA analysis — pairing inherited risk with direct visualization of existing plaque. The score is calibrated for diverse and admixed populations, extending Allelica's multi-ancestry advantage into a commercial channel. Now available to physicians in the U.S., the partnership moves Allelica's PRS platform from research and health-system validation into a productized clinical offering, following its citation in the 2026 ACC/AHA guidelines and deployments with the VA and Mass General Brigham.
July 23, 2026
Memphis-based Visalaw Ai won the $100,000 grand prize at the second annual Sloss.Tech/Ideas Southeast Pitch Competition, hosted by TechBirmingham at Sloss Tech 2026 (June 24–26, Birmingham) and funded by a Regions Foundation grant. Sixteen finalists from ten Southeastern states competed for $135,000 in total awards; Visalaw Ai took the grand prize and also won the $10,000 Talent and Productivity Technology category. Judges cited the platform's application of AI to one of the most complex areas of legal practice — pairing a proprietary, attorney-validated immigration law database with generative AI to help attorneys research, draft petitions, and prepare filings faster. Founder and CEO Josh Waddell, an Alabama native and Samford graduate, said the award will fund continued development for the immigration legal community. Visalaw Ai is a legal technology spinoff of immigration law firm Siskind Susser PC.
July 14, 2026
Map My Customers announced Team Transparency, a new Enterprise release giving field sales leaders a live view into how distributed teams operate in the field. The release bundles three capabilities: Routing 2.0 (faster web route planning with intelligent optimization, calendar integration, and office-to-field syncing), Efficiency Widgets (connecting travel time, customer visits, and territory coverage to revenue KPIs), and Field View (real-time territory activity for coaching and account prioritization). Founder and Chief Product & Strategy Officer Matthew Sniff framed the release around a persistent gap: field sales drives revenue but remains one of the least visible parts of the business, and CRMs act as a system of record without supporting reps or the leaders managing them. Team Transparency is available now to Map My Customers Enterprise customers across manufacturing, distribution, healthcare, and business services.
July 2, 2026
Vermeer announced Recovery in an exclusive release to Tectonic Defense — a safeguard for its visual navigation platform that lets drones re-orient themselves mid-flight after losing track of position, without GPS. Recovery corrects visual-navigation drift over featureless terrain like open water or dense forest: the aircraft captures ground imagery every 15–20 seconds, then runs a coarse regional search followed by a fine match against onboard satellite reference maps to re-fix position. CTO and co-founder Suresh Kumar likened it to how humans reorient using landmarks. Now in field testing, Recovery has re-established position after drift of up to three kilometers, with a reported 95% success rate at ~1km of drift and roughly 80% approaching 3km, validated in Ukraine under real jamming conditions. It ships as an upgrade to Vermeer's flagship Visual Positioning System, which is trained on 25,000+ hours of aerial video and deployed with Lockheed, Northrop, Anduril, AeroVironment, Firestorm, and Ukrainian drone maker Skyeton.
Gartner named SmartCommerce a Sample Vendor in the Shoppable Media category in its July 2026 digital advertising research. The listing recognizes SmartCommerce's role in ad formats that convert content directly into revenue — the core of the Click2Cart platform. It is the company's second Gartner Hype Cycle mention in as many months, following a June 2026 Sample Vendor listing in Gartner's Digital Commerce report. SmartCommerce posted the recognition to its own newsroom rather than issuing a wire release.
June 24, 2026
Vermeer achieved Final Assessment of Status for Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Level 2, as required under DFARS 252.204-7021 for handling Controlled Unclassified Information. The assessment evaluated Vermeer's environment against the applicable NIST SP 800-171 requirements and CMMC Level 2 assessment objectives. The program was led internally by Trent Clark, Director of IT, Cybersecurity & Compliance, and went from buildout to certification in roughly seven months with a lean internal team after launching in November 2025. The certification is a gating requirement for direct work with DoD agencies and prime contractors — materially reducing procurement friction as Vermeer scales its GPS-denied visual navigation stack with the U.S. Army, Air Force, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, and AeroVironment.
June 17, 2026
SmartCommerce appointed Daniel Nissan to its Board of Directors, adding AI and commerce operating experience as the company enters its next phase of growth. Nissan is founder and former CEO of Structured.ai (formerly StructuredWeb), an AI-first partner marketing automation platform, and earlier founded and led NetGrocer, the first nationwide online supermarket. The appointment completes a rapid leadership build-out under new CEO Gregory Taylor, following the naming of Anj Yamsani as CTO in April 2026. SmartCommerce's Click2Cart platform has now driven more than $20B in carted value for CPG brands across 1,200+ retailers.
June 16, 2026
Mitratech unveiled three new integration partnerships for its INSZoom immigration case management platform at the AILA Annual Conference in San Diego, with Visalaw AI as a featured partner. INSZoom now connects directly with Visalaw AI's research and drafting platform — combining verified, lawyer-vetted sources with secure technology and hundreds of reusable automations for recurring firm tasks. The integration, part of Mitratech's ARIES AI ecosystem, embeds Visalaw's immigration-specific AI (backed by AILA publications, statutes, agency policy manuals, and millions of caselaw records) directly into one of the most widely used immigration case management systems.
June 15, 2026
Valor Ventures led Evrim's first institutional round in June 2026, with Techstars and others participating, and Valor founder and managing partner Lisa Calhoun joined Evrim's newly formed board of directors. Founded in 2024 and based in Arlington, VA by a team out of Thomson Reuters Special Services, Evrim is building the upstream economic-intelligence layer for financial institutions, the defense industrial base, and federal agencies — an agent-native collection stack that reaches foreign-government and hard-to-access sources and structures them into a continuously updated knowledge graph spanning 88,000+ sources across 150+ countries, 10M+ entities, and 500M+ relationships. The round follows early traction with the fourth-largest asset manager in the world.
June 3, 2026
Durham-based Arpio closed a $15M Series A co-led by S3 Ventures and Paladin Capital Group, with participation from Draper Associates, Uncorrelated, Valor Ventures, CreativeCo Capital, and Lookout Ventures. The capital will expand Arpio's automated recovery and cyber-resilience platform — deepening AWS and Azure coverage while extending support to Google Cloud and other AI-native services. Co-founded in 2020 by Doug Neumann and Shaw Terwilliger, Arpio helps enterprises recover from ransomware, cloud outages, and infrastructure failures, where ransomware events average 24 days of downtime and $1.53M in recovery costs.
