When Senra CEO Jordan Black was a SpaceX engineer, he took on the job of scaling up the company’s wire harnesses to support production of Starship, the company’s next-generation rocket.

Wire harnesses are what they sound like: the internal electrical cabling that runs through a rocket ship, car, plane, or tractor and becomes increasingly important the smarter those vehicles get. They’re bespoke, put together by technicians who are, functionally, experienced craftspeople.

“I traveled all over the world to go visit wire harness companies,” Black told TechCrunch last month. “It really hasn’t changed since the Cold War era of wooden tables [and] manual processes.”

Black and co-founder Benjamin Shanahan started Senra in 2023 to offer a more modern solution to vehicle manufacturers. Today, the startup is announcing a $65 million Series B round, co-led by Lowercarbon and Interlagos with participation from General Catalyst, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, and Founders Fund, among others.

Senra isn’t looking to take humans out of the handmaking process — at least not while robots find manipulating wires a challenge and relevant training data remains scarce. Instead, it’s turning to software tools and other forms of automation to modernize aspects of the traditional manual work.

The company is benefiting from the surge of money into U.S. manufacturing, particularly the defense industrial base. While Black couldn’t disclose customers, he said they include builders of “anything from submarines and maritime vehicles, to defense vehicle systems on land, to launch vehicles, to satellites.”

If it doesn’t sound immediately important, consider a recent wire harness disaster. In 2023, Boeing discovered that its Starliner spacecraft’s wiring was held together with flammable tape, forcing an expensive delay while the entire wiring system was redone.

Black points to that experience as a reason to raise the standards for wire harnessing, using automated systems to track materials and engineering changes. “Having it all in the same software is probably the most important thing, because it’s all the little inputs that happen that can make a catastrophic change down the road,” he said.

Senra uses Amp, a proprietary software platform, to standardize the inputs throughout the wiring process and produce a digital twin to guide its technicians, who are trained by the company in what Black says is the only federally certified wire harness training program. The company is also, as it scales, finding ways to automate more of the process.

“It goes back to the Elon principle of, ‘automation is last,’” Black told TechCrunch. “We’re working on it now, but a lot of it the standardization and the foundation building that made SpaceX be able to scale something like rockets, which you could only build one a year if you were lucky, and now they do hundreds a year.”

Senra — which, by the way, is “harness” spelled backwards, minus the “h” and “s,” because Black says the company takes the “horsesh*t” out of harnesses — produces 1,000 each month across two different factories and plans to increase production to 10,000 a month in 2027.

Physical badges used to be all you needed for identity management at a company. But with humans now working alongside machines and AI agents in digital environments, even the identity tools built for the cloud era are proving inadequate.

That’s the gap Israeli startup Oak is stepping out of stealth to fill, it says. Co-founded by serial entrepreneur Shai Morag, the company has been quietly building a unified control plane that governs identity across an organization, and is now emerging publicly with its product generally available and already deployed by enterprise clients, backed by $60 million in seed funding that it raised late last year.

The company didn’t disclose client names, but said its solution is already generally available and deployed by enterprise clients.

Outdated credentials and poor identity access management — or IAM, the systems that control who and what can access company data — are a common security vulnerability, one that AI is expected to make even easier for attackers to exploit. Oak also calls itself AI-native, positioning itself as a replacement for legacy tools that were already showing their limits but had no consolidated alternative.

According to Oak’s other co-founder, chief product officer Tal Marom, the startup spent months talking to 100 CISOs and IAM leaders before building its product: an AI connector framework that maps access to actual app usage and removes permissions that are no longer needed in real time, rather than only during periodic reviews.

“Right now, the whole process is too manual, and it’s operations-based, not risk-based — for instance, there’s no trigger when an employee logs in from an unusual location,” said Morag, a former army major who spent more than two decades in cybersecurity. During that time, he had three exits, including selling cyber startup Secdo to Palo Alto Networks in 2018.

This track record helped Oak raise what is a very big round by local standards, one that matches its plans to invest heavily in R&D and growth, Morag said. “Our vision is to be born as a giant,” he told TechCrunch.

Morag’s résumé already includes a stint at a giant organization. After public cyber company Tenable acquired his cloud identity and security startup Ermetic for $265 million in 2023, he stayed on as CPO. But after CEO Amit Yoran became ill and passed away, Morag left and told his wife he’d retire.

Instead of stepping back, though, Morag co-founded Oak with Marom, a product team lead he’d met at Tenable who’d previously held similar roles at Salesforce and in the Israeli military. While in stealth, the two also built a team of 50 people and are actively hiring, particularly in the U.S., where a majority of Oak’s staff will soon be based, Morag said.

Oak’s $60 million round was co-led by Accel, CRV, and Greylock Partners, with participation from AlphaDrive Ventures, Hetz Ventures, and angel investors. Morag told TechCrunch that VC interest was strong from the outset.

Accel partner Andrei Brasoveanu said Morag’s track record alone was a strong argument. Accel had led Ermetic’s Series A when it was pre-revenue; when Tenable acquired it, Accel gave Morag an informal standing offer to back whatever he built next, Brasoveanu said. “I knew he had it in him to build another company, but this time even bigger and even better.”

With AI as “a democratizing force,” Accel has been backing founders right out of high school, Brasoveanu said. But when it comes to identity management, experience still counts. “There’s complexity in the product, and there’s also complexity in the organizations you have to navigate to figure out how to sell something like this,” he said.

Both Brasoveanu and Morag expect Oak will face plenty of competitors trying to use AI as a catalyst for change in a space where vendor lock-in runs deep. That makes it critical for Oak to scale fast. Morag, who told his wife this will be his last company, says he won’t retire until he’s given it everything he’s got: “I will go big or go home.”

Pictured above, from right to left: Shai Morag and Tal Marom.

Realta Fusion has spent the last two years looking for somewhere to build its research and development facility. In the end, it chose the old Oscar Mayer factory in Madison, Wisconsin.

“From sausages to fusion,” Kieran Furlong, co-founder and CEO of Realta Fusion, told TechCrunch with a chuckle. The new center, called Forge, will create its first plasma in 2029, he said. Realta recently showed that it could convert energy from fusion reactions directly into electricity, potentially easing the path to a commercial power plant.

The Oscar Mayer site’s ample power was attractive, as was its proximity to Realta’s existing headquarters in Madison. But what ultimately pushed the startup to stay was bipartisan support from the state’s government, including the governor and the legislature.

“Wisconsin really decided they want to throw their weight behind fusion,” Furlong said.

For the state, the timing could be fortuitous. Fusion power has been on an upswing as demand for electricity surges on the back of economy-wide electrification and proliferating AI data centers. This year alone, fusion power startups have raised over $1.5 billion.

Realta Fusion will receive an estimated $55 million in incentives from the state of Wisconsin and the city of Madison. The startup also has deep roots in the city, having been spun out of an experiment at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And the university graduates a number of talented plasma physicists annually, providing a deep pool of talent. Shine, another fusion company, is located in a nearby suburb.

Realta’s decision to stay in Wisconsin is also surprising given that most fusion startups have located themselves near a national laboratory or on one of the coasts. Another Wisconsin-grown fusion startup, Type One Energy, decamped to Tennessee in 2024.

Since then, Wisconsin has embraced fusion power. Republicans and Democrats supported a sales tax exemption for the fusion industry, which was signed into law in April. That one measure alone will save Realta an estimated $37.5 million, a significant chunk of the total $55 million package. The state is kicking in another $15 million in enterprise zone tax credits, while the city of Madison has offered $2.8 million in tax increment financing.

While other states might have pitched similar amounts, Furlong said that there were other, intangible benefits to remaining in Wisconsin.

“It’s also advantageous to be the state champion,” he said. “We get the attention of people who matter, who can help us, who want to see Realta succeed and want to see Wisconsin be a major hub for fusion.”