1
Ken Griffin expands Brickell footprint
Ken Griffin is expanding the footprint of his multibillion-dollar Brickell development project. The billionaire founder and CEO of the hedge fund Citadel is planning to build a 300-unit apartment building with a 1,420-space parking garage on a lot Griffin owns near his planned office tower, Bloomberg and the Miami Herald reported.
Citadel’s office tower at 1201 Brickell Bay Dr. will serve as the company’s global headquarters. The financial firm has also revised its original office tower plans to include more office space, and a hotel is no longer planned for the building. The building’s height from 54 stories to 52 stories, and Citadel and Citadel Securities will reportedly occupy at least a third of the 1.7 million-square-foot office tower. Griffin has also been quietly buying up units in the nearby Solaris condo building, which he now owns, Bloomberg reported. Together, his ownership stake in the area is about five acres. Read more here.
2
Exowatt names Suchet Singh as CFO
Exowatt, the clean energy company building dedicated power infrastructure for the AI economy, has appointed veteran finance leader Suchet Singh as Chief Financial Officer based in Miami. Singh brings leadership experience from Amazon, Alphabet’s Verily, GE, and Terra Energy to help expand deployment, attract infrastructure investment, and strengthen domestic manufacturing capacity.
The appointment reflects a broader shift in how investors and operators are increasingly looking to distributed power solutions to address mounting electricity constraints. Exowatt is scaling an alternative approach to delivering reliable, round-the-clock clean power without waiting years for traditional utility interconnections.
“The challenge we face isn’t capital — it’s the physical limits, the bureaucratic permitting, and the grid interconnection queues that can take three to five years,” Singh said. “That is precisely why I joined Exowatt: to help finance a way around grid congestion entirely.”
3
FAU wins $1M grant for robotic underwater communications
Florida Atlantic University received a 12-month $1 million award through the AUKUS Maritime Innovation Challenge, a trilateral defense innovation initiative supported by the United States, Australia and the United Kingdom. Selected from a highly competitive international field, the project will develop a next-generation underwater communication system that enables autonomous vehicles, sensors and operators to exchange information more quickly, reliably and securely beneath the ocean surface.
The researchers will combine long-range acoustic communications with high-speed optical networking into a single software programmable platform, overcoming one of the greatest challenges in subsea operations: maintaining real-time connectivity in dynamic and often unpredictable environments. The technology has the potential to enhance maritime security, environmental monitoring, ocean science and autonomous maritime operations by allowing subsea systems to communicate, coordinate and adapt more effectively. Read more here.
4
NextEra exec joins Hut 8
Mark Eidelman, former head of investor relations at NextEra Energy, joined Hut 8 as investor relations lead and senior vice president of strategic finance. He will report to Hut 8 CFO Sean Glennan in that role, the South Florida Business Journal reported.
The data center operator builds and manages the power infrastructure needed for energy intensive technologies such as artificial intelligence and Bitcoin mining. It manages computing facilities across the U.S. and Canada. As publicly traded Hut 8 grows, it requires a professional who has operated at the highest levels of infrastructure finance and institutional capital markets, said CEO Asher Genoot.
Before leading investor relations at NextEra Energy, Eidelman led the mergers and acquisitions and joint ventures team at NextEra and before that was a managing director for power, utilities and renewables at JPMorgan Chase and Co. Read more here.
5
CodePath and Anthropic launch fellows program for nonprofits
CodePath and Anthropic are launching Claude Corps, a $150 million, fully funded fellowship that will place 1,000 paid, AI-skilled fellows inside nonprofits for 12 months. Early-career talent over the age of 18 with less than two years of full-time work experience can apply by July 17 for the first cohort that starts in October.
CodePath, a nonprofit that provides computer-science programs and career support for students in South Florida and across the country, announced in February that the organization was selected as Anthropic’s anchor partner for economic mobility in the AI era.
“For CodePath, this is the moment our work expands beyond college and into the broader workforce, and the start of helping transform how the entire social sector operates,” said CodePath founder and CEO Michael Ellison. Find out more here.
READ MORE: CodePath & Anthropic partner up for economic mobility in AI era
6
Community Capital Management funds LEBEC
LEBEC, a Miami-based provider of a finance platform, received an undisclosed investment from Community Capital Management. The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and its development efforts.
Founded by CEO Alix Lebec, LEBEC advises asset owners and social entrepreneurs on innovative finance strategies, narratives, and financial structuring. Through its investment manager, LEBEC Capital Partners, it constructs diversified private market fund portfolios designed to pursue competitive, risk-adjusted returns and accelerate decarbonization, adaptation, and economic mobility solutions.
7
Jobs, jobs, jobs
Doorloop – GTM Engineer
eMed – Implementation Manager
Handtevy – Director of Engineering
Iru – Sr Software Engineer
Material – Staff Battery Applications Engineer
Nubank – Sr Software Engineer
Opendoor – Machine Learning Engineer
Opendoor – Portfolio Manager
Vultr – Frontend Engineer
Vultr – Sr Product Manager
Find more jobs on Refresh Miami’s job board here.
8-PLUS
Opportunity knocks
- Are you Miami curious? Maybe you’re ready for more sunshine or tired of state income taxes.
Maybe you’re just looking for your next adventure. The challenge usually isn’t the city, it’s figuring out how to make the move make sense – the right role, the right company, the right connections. If you’ve been thinking about Miami, check out moveto.miami, powered by Refresh Miami. We’re here to help.. - Applications are now open for the Cade Prize for Inventivity, a national competition awarding over $100K in cash and in-kind support to early-stage inventors and entrepreneurs. Apply here by July 10.
ICYMI – Catch up!
What started as a sleepy June turned more newsy the past two weeks with Anti Fund’s fund news, six startup fundraises, and a third top 25 global ranking for the Miami metro.
- Latest fund news: Anti Fund closes oversubscribed $100M Growth I fund
- Latest startup fundraises: Interchecks raises $50M as the race to make money move instantly heats up
- Construction-tech startup SubBase raises $7M Series A
- Karta raises $140M to bring U.S. credit cards to global travelers
- Hydra Host raises $100M to turn overlooked data centers into AI powerhouses
- Hallandale-based Lexful raises $7M seed round to reinvent IT documentation for the AI era
- DermaSensor is expanding internationally with its skin-cancer detection device, receives $5M investment
- More big news: Miami again ranks in top 25 in the world in Startup Genome’s GSER ranking
- With Minu acquisition, Miami-based unicorn Betterfly doubles down on U.S. growth
- In the spotlight: As the World Cup arrives, Plei wants to get more people off the couch and onto the pitch
- Founders Rise Miami launches free workshops for women and minority founders
- From tech to crunchy macaronis, Rodolfo Saccoman exemplifies today’s ‘compound founder’
- Bookit wants to make loyalty points useful again
- Inside MOBY Robotics, the Miami startup rethinking how we get critical minerals
- PositivEnergy wants to solve EV charging’s reliability problem
- AI security startup Penti thinks vibe coding needs a bodyguard
- Don’t miss this one: Why ‘know any good VCs?’ is the wrong question
- Latest guest post: FIU club helps build next generation of aerospace engineers
- And much more paywall-free #MiamiTech news here.
Have news to report? Email Nancy Dahlberg at [email protected] and follow her on X @ndahlberg and on LinkedIn. Subscribe to Refresh Miami’s free weekly newsletter here featuring startup news, tech job opportunities and events.
