Pressure-Washing Drones, Anthropic's Enterprise Tool Breached on Launch Day, and a Takeaway from the ACA Summit

Happy Thursday from Westminster, CO! You’re receiving this email later than usual today because I slept like a brick last night after two full days of the best networking of the year at the ACA Summit. In the building and haven’t stopped by our booth yet? We’re here till 2pm local today, be sure to come say hi.

Shoutout to the Fun Run crew who showed up at 6am yesterday for a beautiful start to the day!

On to today’s issue:

• Angel Deals of the Week | 173 Deals, 104 Networks

  • First time featured this week: Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs India

• Bookmarks I think you’ll enjoy

• The best nugget from the first two days at the Angel Capital Association

P.S. I’m actively hiring an A player Angel Operations Director for our service business. Know someone who would kill it running point on ops across multiple investor groups? Send them my way.

🔥 Angel Deals of the Week

Angel funding rounds announced in recent weeks, compiled from public sources or via direct announcement. These deals represent the elite few that survived an angel network’s vetting process. Note: I have not personally analyzed these companies and am sharing for informational purposes only.

📊 Angel Network Investment Tracker: 173 Deals, 104 Networks.

Lucid Bots | Autonomous drones for building exteriors

Participating Group: Keystone Investing

Lucid Bots manufactures autonomous cleaning drones and robots for commercial building exteriors, including the Sherpa drone and Lavo AI pressure-washing robot, produced domestically in Charlotte. The company says its drones clean facades, rooftops, and stadium structures up to 8x faster than traditional methods, keeping workers off scaffolding and lifts. More than 400 operators across 40+ U.S. states have generated over $75 million in cleaning revenue using Lucid's systems. Keystone Investing recently participated in a new capital raise, marking its fourth investment in the company.

Andrew Ashur | Charlotte, NC | April 2026 | Source

Variablegrid | AI-powered EV charging management

Participating Group: SWAN Impact Network

Variablegrid is developing a patented AI-driven energy management system (a platform that monitors real-time building power use and dynamically allocates available electricity) to enable EV charging across homes, multi-unit buildings, and commercial properties without costly electrical service upgrades. The Toronto-based company, which has partnered with Kia Canada, says its drop-in solution works with any EV charger or software. SWAN Impact Network recently announced an investment to support the company's growth.

Dan Lafferty | Toronto, Canada | April 2026 | Source

Mave Health | Wearable brain stimulation headset for focus

Participating Groups: Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs India

Mave Health is developing a non-invasive wearable headset that uses transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS, a low-level electrical brain stimulation technique) to support focus, mood, and stress regulation in 20-minute daily sessions. The company completed a 500-person beta program and, according to Mave, 80% of beta users self-reported productivity gains exceeding 60%. The company recently closed $2.1 million in seed funding led by Blume Ventures, with Stanford Angels & Entrepreneurs India participating, to support its US and India launch.

Dhawal Jain | $2.1M Seed | San Francisco, CA | March 2026 | Source

📣 Have an Angel Deal to Announce?

🔖 Bookmarks

1. 🫥 The biggest Startup You’ve Never Heard of: Jeff Bezos' Project Prometheus is close to raising $10 billion at a $38 billion valuation because, you know, it’s Jeff Bezos.

2. 🔓 Well That Didn’t Take Long: Apparently a Discord group gained unauthorized access to Anthropic's enterprise cybersecurity tool through a third-party vendor on launch day.

3. 🤖 Not All Agents Are Created Equal: Lenny's Newsletter breaks down the 3 types of AI agents; super helpful lens for diligencing whether a founding team is overengineering their roadmap.

🥇 The Nugget: My Top Takeaway from the ACA Summit 2026 So Far

AI Integrated Angel Groups

I’m still digesting insights from the last 2 days, but one thing is abundantly clear: thoughtful integration of AI into angel group workflows is becoming the norm. We’ve had dozens of conversations and presentations on how different groups are using the tech to improve their operations and ability to serve founders/members well, without sacrificing the human relationships and expertise that make angel groups so distinct.

Takeaway: Angel groups must find ways to begin seriously integrating AI tooling, or they risk falling behind the rest of the investor ecosystem.

Stay tuned for more, and be sure to follow the podcast to get notified when each episode drops over the next few weeks.

🛠️ We Run Angel Groups So You Can Lead Them

Quick note for anyone running an investor group: alongside this newsletter and podcast, I run an outsourced operations service for angel groups. Screening, communications, newsletters, platform management.

We serve 4 groups today representing 200+ angels and $5M+ deployed last year, and we’ve only got space for two new groups starting late Q3.

If that's useful timing, I'd love to connect.

Until Next Week 👋

Thanks for reading - have a great week.

-Andrew

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