Happy New Year! 🎉

As we kick off 2026, we’re excited to share what we’re building at Raylu — and why we believe this year will mark a major step forward in how private-market teams originate deals.

We recently raised our Series A, led by HighlandX, to accelerate Raylu’s mission: helping private-market teams instrument, evaluate, and integrate every step of deal origination through a discipline we call Deal Engineering.

Origination isn’t just sourcing - it’s building a repeatable system from thesis to meetings.

When I was on the other side of the table as an investor, one thing became clear quickly:

The amount of information available to investors has exploded — but the workflows that turn a thesis into conviction (and then into meetings) still look like a patchwork of spreadsheets, point solutions, and manual effort.

The result is a familiar one: teams spend a disproportionate amount of time preparing to make decisions, instead of making them.

That’s why we built Raylu — and why we coined Deal Engineering: a new way to instrument, evaluate, and integrate origination so it becomes a repeatable system that compounds over time.

Built to mirror how investors actually work

Raylu is built to match the way real investing teams operate — not the way legacy tools assume you operate.

That means the workflow starts with how you think, and ends where your team executes:

• Start with a thesis

• Map the market

• Get to company-level intelligence fast

• Move into outreach with context

• Close the loop into your workflow/CRM

Because Raylu mirrors the end-to-end process, it becomes an AI-native engine that helps funds scale origination with precision at scale — across any market.

A lot in store for 2026

This round is a milestone — but more importantly, it’s fuel.

We’re investing aggressively in what we believe the future of private markets will run on: AI-native origination workflows that scale precision — not noise.

We’re excited to share what we’re building next, and we can’t wait to roll out what’s coming this year.

If you’re thinking about modernizing origination in 2026, book a demo here.