⛏️ Phoenix Tailings Secures $500M, One Way Summit Returns & AI ROI Startup Joins Portfolio
Q2-26 investment note • by Dawid Przybysz and Mimi Yagoub.
Hi friends,
This quarter we backed the AI company Modo; Lumara Health came out of stealth, and Phoenix Tailings joined our portfolio via their acquisition of Machinery Partner and landed a $500M conditional commitment from the U.S. Department of War.
We’ve also been building out our second annual One Way Summit, October 28 & 29 in San Francisco, with speakers including the founders of Duolingo, Slack, Mercury, and Rappi.
More below.
New Investment in Q2 2026
We’re excited to welcome Modo to the One Way portfolio.
Modo | AI
Modo is an AI adoption platform for enterprises that tracks how employees use AI, routes them to the right AI agent for the task at hand, and gives leadership a clear view of ROI.
It’s solving a problem many large companies are facing: they’ve bought the AI tools, but employees still don’t know how or when to use them.
Modo was co-founded by Johnny Chang and Angelina You. Johnny previously taught AI courses at Stanford and trained Fortune 500 leaders on AI adoption. Angelina was a data scientist building machine learning models at Meta. Together they founded Stanford Founders.
Portfolio Highlights
🚀 Phoenix Tailings landed a conditional $500 million loan from the U.S. Department of War to help build its Freedom Facility, a plant that will process rare earth metals in the U.S. The commitment anchors a nearly $1 billion effort to rebuild the country’s rare earth supply chain. [Mining.com]
🤝 Machinery Partner, the AI and automation company for industrial operations, was acquired by Phoenix Tailings, which has now joined our portfolio. Machinery Partner co-founder Clement Cazalot joined Phoenix Tailings as COO. [Techstars]
🏨 Lumara Health came out of stealth to transform the healthcare insurance ecosystem with their AI orchestration platform. Lumara streamlines sales and customer service processes for healthcare payors, eliminating manual work and enhancing the member experience. The founders draw from decades of healthcare and AI expertise. [LinkedIn]
💳 Debbie launched Rewards 2.0 - a financial points system rewarding users for savings versus spending - and announced their $5.3M seed round. [Techli]
🎯 Influ2 launched a new orchestration tool that lets B2B sales and marketing teams target individual buyers, not just whole accounts, across ads, sales outreach, and their CRM. [Business Wire]
🛰️ Helogen signed on as one of the first partners of Karnataka’s new state-backed Centre of Excellence for Space Technology, joining a small group chosen to help build out India’s space tech ecosystem. [Elets eGov]
Events
🌉 One Way Summit. We’re back for a second year. Join us October 28 & 29 in San Francisco, with speakers including the founders of Duolingo, Slack, Mercury, and Rappi and leaders at The OpenAI Foundation, Y Combinator and NFX. Register here.
Expect street parties, a 🔥 main stage and an immigrant founder pitch competition run by Startup Grind. Reach out to partner with us.
🎙️ Rhie on the road. Back to back at Boston Tech Week and NY Tech Week, Rhie met founders and hosted talks on frontier tech, including a panel on AI in longevity at the Aging Code Summit.
🇹🇼 Building without borders. Eugene joined a Block Party with Startup Island Taiwan, sharing the stage with Modo’s Angelina You to talk about building companies without borders.
🔥 Eugene’s story. Eugene shared his path from immigrant founder to VC at a fireside chat with the Extraordinary Ability Club, from moving to the U.S. as a child to founding AnchorFree.
One Way Ventures in the News
Lex was featured on the front page of Rest of World, talking about how the tech world should see the US vs. China. (Rest of World)
Semyon told International Business Times that “the U.S. message towards immigrants right now is that we don’t want them,” even as the country depends on them to keep its tech edge. (IBTimes)
Rhie wrote about the incredible advantages immigrant founders bring to building AI companies. (Unite.AI)
Eugene joined Walter Thompson’s podcast to talk about why the best founders are the ones who stay angry at the problem they are trying to solve. (Fund/Build/Scale)
Semyon joined the OuiTalkPod podcast to talk about his path from stateless refugee to leading an MIT blackjack team to backing immigrant founders. (YouTube)
Featured Jobs
Interested in working for a venture-backed startup? Explore some of our handpicked selections below or visit our careers page to learn more:
Engineering Manager at Provision (📍Toronto, ON)
Sales Executive at Nuvocargo (📍Remote, US)
Refurb Operations Associate at Tive (📍Boston, MA)
Talent Acquisition Executive at Easyship (📍London, UK)
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