Sometimes your cup runneth over, other times it is late summer and early in the school year so you take what you can get. For the third week running our tracking came back with three investments across six states.
The dollars are a different matter, and they are the reason a thin week is worth reading. The three rounds below come to $53.8 million between them, with a single Series B accounting for $40m of this week's figure.Two of the three sell into factories, one retrofitting the machines already on the floor and one replacing the tooling altogether, while the third is aimed at litigation teams. For a region that spends a good deal of time arguing with itself over whether its manufacturing base is an asset or a museum piece, a week in which most of the capital went to companies retooling that base is at least coherent.
Here are the Midwest investments from across the great states of Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, Minnesota, Ohio and Wisconsin that we've been able to track and verify this week, ending September 11th, 2026.
As always, every company and investor below can also be found in our startups and investors database.
While you're here: If you'd like to make sure you're notified about any funds raised from the six states we cover, then make sure you're subscribed to our newsletter
Impossible Objects
Location: Northbrook, greater Chicago, Illinois
Business Type: Manufacturing
Amount Raised/stage: $40m Series B, led by Inflection Equity, with Aaron Wealth Management, OCA Ventures, Impact Capital and Excell Partners
What they do:
Builds industrial 3D printers around its Composite-Based Additive Manufacturing process, which stacks sheets of carbon fiber or fiberglass with polymer and bonds them under heat and compression to produce strong, lightweight parts at production speeds rather than prototyping speeds. The company claims its CBAM 25 system runs 15 times faster than competing production additive technologies, and says the process removes the need for tooling in work usually handled by CNC machining or injection molding. Founded in 2009 by Robert Swartz, Impossible Objects has also secured $20 million in U.S. government contracts and awards, including SBIR work on long-range drones and aircraft wing and fuselage structures.
Harmoni
Location: Akron, Ohio
Business Type: Artificial Intelligence
Amount Raised/stage: $10m Series A, led by Bessemer Venture Partners
What they do:
Makes custom tablets and AI software that retrofit onto the machinery a factory already owns, letting workers clock in, pull up instructions, track jobs and report problems from one place. The tablets attach magnetically and connect to equipment ranging from current systems to machines built during World War II, which is rather the point: the company is aiming at the roughly 280,000 existing American factories rather than at newly built automated ones. Founded in 2023 by David Caputo and Adam Ellis, Harmoni is based in Akron and says it has around 40 customers with aerospace and defense the largest segment.
Concorda
Location: Kildeer, Illinois
Business Type: Artificial Intelligence
Amount Raised/stage: $3.8m seed, led by Sazze Partners, with Amino Ventures, Gaingels, G2C Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Service Provider Capital and Andreessen Horowitz's a16z speedrun
What they do:
Builds an AI platform for litigation teams that pulls legal research, matter management and drafting into one system, covering a case from intake through to settlement or trial. The pitch is that existing legal AI tools sit on top of a firm's workflow rather than running it, so Concorda drafts discovery responses, motions and briefs from the case record and searches its own database of case law, statutes and local rules. Founded in 2025 by Samuel Oh and Ke Ma, both lawyers with engineering backgrounds, the company went through Andreessen Horowitz's a16z speedrun program and says the money will go on hiring as it widens its customer base.
Read more here and here.
Want to know more?
Read the latest quarterly funding reports for each state here:
Illinois startup funding - Q2 2026
Indiana startup funding - Q2 2026
Ohio startup funding - Q2 2026
Michigan startup funding - Q2 2026
Minnesota startup funding - Q2 2026
Wisconsin startup funding - Q2 2026
While you're here: If you'd like to make sure you're notified about any funds raised from the six states we cover, then make sure you're subscribed to our newsletter
