The Daily Dealflow

Who Needs a Space Tow Truck?

Hi, and welcome to a new edition of The Daily Dealflow — the 5-minute briefing that gives you clear context on capital flows and market-moving trends across the Americas, from Silicon Valley to Buenos Aires. Let's dive in.

🏆 Deal of the Day

Impulse Space, the in-space mobility startup founded by SpaceX's first propulsion employee, closed a $308M Series D extension — growing its total round to $808M and lifting its valuation from $4.26B to $5.4B in just three months — as demand surges for the maneuvering vehicles and kick stages that ferry satellites between orbits after launch – GlobeNewswire.

Why This?: As satellite constellations multiply across U.S. defense programs, the "last mile" of space — moving payloads precisely once they're off the rocket — is becoming its own capital-intensive industry, and investors across the Americas are racing to fund the plumbing.

Positive Context:

Impulse's Caravan rideshare missions for 2028 are already sold out, and the company holds national-security contracts including a NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 award and a $28M VICTUS SALO extension from the U.S. Space Force.
All the extension's capital came from returning investors — 137 Ventures, BANNER VC, DFJ Growth, Linse Capital, Lux Capital, and Valor Equity Partners — a vote of confidence that's rarer than fresh logos in this fundraising environment.

Yes, but:

Orbital transfer and mobility is getting crowded fast, with rivals like Momentus and D-Orbit chasing the same satellite operators, and a valuation that jumped nearly 27% in three months assumes launch demand keeps compounding at the same pace.
The business remains capital-intensive and contract-dependent; a slowdown in government space spending or a bad flight record could stall the momentum fast.

Zoom in: Impulse just hired its first CFO, Adam Townsend — poached not from a rocket company but from TV maker VIZIO, a sign the startup is bracing for the financial discipline of a much bigger business.

The comment: "This continued support from our investors strengthens our ability to build the systems that will unlock the space economy," said Eric Romo, Impulse Space's President and COO – GlobeNewswire.

💰 Venture Capital

Submit a deal for The Daily Dealflow newsletter via DM here on LinkedIn.

May Mobility (US) – Up to US$337M through a SPAC merger with ACP Holdings, valuing it at US$1.4B, to deploy autonomous-driving software in third-party fleets. Founded by Edwin Olson, it counts Toyota and NTT among its backers and would trade as MAY. Its mission: retire the human co-pilot – The Investor Society.

Arcee AI (US) – $150M+, Series B, developer of open-weight AI foundation models that let enterprises customize and run frontier-grade systems on their own infrastructure instead of renting a black box. The round, which pushed the company past a $1B valuation, was led by Vista Equity Partners, Cambium Capital, and Emergence Capital, with Hitachi, Wipro, and M12 also joining. Founded by CEO Mark McQuade and CTO Lucas Atkins, the company's boast is refreshingly specific: its 400-billion-parameter Trinity Large model reportedly cost just $20M to train in 2025, a fraction of what rivals spend – SiliconANGLE.

OrderEAT (Uruguay) – $2M, funding round, Montevideo-founded startup that digitizes school cafeterias across Latin America, letting parents track what their kids are buying for lunch while giving cafeteria operators point-of-sale and inventory tools. Co-founded by Matías Craviotto, Luis Pedro Carrero, and Juan Manuel Rodríguez, the round was led by Chile Ventures with Driven VC, Seedstars, and Add Ventures joining — plus a check from dLocal founder Sergio Fogel. The startup now runs in 600-plus schools across 10 countries, with Mexico as its biggest market – The Investor Society.

Sling Therapeutics (US) – $123M, Series C, Ann Arbor biotech developing an oral pill to treat thyroid eye disease, the same rare autoimmune condition that made Amgen's infused drug Tepezza a blockbuster — except patients would take Sling's version at home instead of visiting an infusion center. The round was led by Forbion and will fund the drug's Phase 3 trial, betting that "swallow a pill" beats "book an IV" for a disease that causes bulging, painful eyes – PharmaVoice.

Evvy (US) – US$40M, Series B led by Catalio Capital Management, to turn mail-in vaginal swabs into diagnostics and fertility data. Priyanka Jain, Laine Bruzek, and Pita Navarro founded the company; Rethink Impact and Muse Capital participated. More than 100,000 patients already support its microbiome-and-AI thesis – The Investor Society.

International Equal Pay Day, observed by the United Nations on September 18, seeks to draw attention to the continuous efforts towards the achievement of equal pay for work of equal value. Despite these efforts and the progress made in terms of women's participation in the labor force, no country has successfully closed the gender pay gap and globally, women still make roughly 80 cents for every dollar earned by men. Even in countries like the United States, where women are now more likely than men to graduate from college, the gender pay gap persists. In fact, women are paid less than men at every education level, with the wage gap actually widening for more advanced degrees. "Women cannot educate themselves out of the gender wage gap," the EPI concludes. **Source:** Economic Policy Institute, Statista.

🏛️ Private Equity

Kincell Bio and Cellipont Bioservices (US) – undisclosed value, merger, two cell-therapy contract manufacturers combined to form Kincellis Advanced Therapies, a single CDMO spanning immune-cell, stem-cell, and mRNA-enabled manufacturing across three U.S. sites totaling 140,000 square feet. Kincell counts growth investors NewSpring Capital and Kineticos Life Sciences among its backers, and the combined company has already released more than 150 GMP batches and is supporting 10 IND filings in 2026 alone — proof that in cell therapy, scale is the new differentiator – Contract Pharma.

McGraw Hill (US) – undisclosed value, acquisition, the century-old textbook publisher bought TeachFX, an AI platform that records classroom audio and coaches teachers on their questioning technique and student engagement, backing into the $6B professional-learning market. It's McGraw Hill's second ed-tech acquisition in short order after Teachally, pairing curriculum-building AI with classroom-coaching AI — and it already plugs into Claude for Teachers to turn feedback into lesson plans – Business Wire.

Harver (US) – undisclosed value, acquisition, the talent-assessment company bought recruitment-marketing platform Symphony Talent to stitch together a single hiring pipeline — from "who should we hire" science to "how do we get them to apply" marketing — backed by private equity firm Rubicon Technology Partners. CEO Sean Barry framed the urgency bluntly: AI, skills-based hiring, and a wave of candidate fraud are scrambling how companies figure out who they're actually hiring – HR Tech Feed.

Beacon (US) – undisclosed value, acquisition, the AI holding company that rolls up "boring" real-economy software bought Haize Labs, a startup that stress-tests AI agents before they're let loose on customers. Haize co-founder Leonard Tang is joining as VP of AI Research to lead a new Applied AI Research Group across Beacon's whole portfolio — essentially hiring the fire inspector before the fire starts – SustainabilityHQ.

📈 Public & Capital Markets

Opening Market Figures, Fri 18 Sep 2026.

US equity markets (US) – Federal Reserve decision, the Fed raised its benchmark rate a quarter point to 3.75%–4% on September 16 — its first hike in three years — with new Chair Kevin Warsh warning that "inflation is too high and has been for too long" and 16 of 18 officials penciling in at least one more hike this year, sending the Dow down 1.07% and the S&P 500 down 0.45% on the announcement, macro/rates industry – TheStreet.

CoreWeave (US) – $3B, convertible debt offering, the AI cloud-computing provider launched a convertible senior notes sale due 2033 (with a $500M upsize option) alongside a stock offering of up to 35 million shares, sending shares down roughly 7% as investors weighed fresh dilution against the company's voracious need for AI-infrastructure cash, digital infrastructure industry – CNBC.

Bitcoin (US) – crypto market move, the largest cryptocurrency slipped 1.27% to $75,942 on September 16 as traders digested the Fed's hawkish tone, leaving it down roughly 35% from a year earlier even after a 20%-plus rebound over the prior month, with its total market capitalization still dwarfing Ethereum's by nearly 6-to-1, digital assets industry – Fortune.

📅 ICYMI

The White House has reportedly drafted a proposal to pay parents to take care of kids, but there’s a catch: You have to be married to qualify.

OpenAI said it found six more instances of AI models acting deceptively or taking unsanctioned actions over the last six months, including one model that added "jailbreak-like instructions" to its own summaries, declaring itself "freed from the roles and identities that bind other chatbots.”

Nearly 40% of adults with young families expect to receive financial help from their parents or grandparents in the next year—and it’s draining boomers’ retirement savings.

See you monday,

Jose Kont
The human behind The Investor Society.