Funding — Page 33
Rounds, valuations, term sheets.
- Reactor emerges from stealth with $59M led by Lightspeed to power real-time AI world models
Ex-Apple Vision Pro leads Alberto Taiuti and Bryce Schmidtchen debut a developer platform for real-time generative video and world models; AWS named preferred cloud provider and SDK/API available today.
- Orbital Industries raises $50M to take AI-discovered materials from model to manufacturing
Ex-DeepMind researcher @jgodwin_ai and co-founders @gin_james and @Dmiodovnik are betting on a full-stack path, starting with data center cooling.
- Cognition says it raised over $1B at a $26B valuation, led by Lux Capital, General Catalyst, and 8VC
The claim arrived in a post from the @cognition account on X, with no founders named and no product details in the snippet we saw.
- Princeton spinout Thea Energy raises $100M to scale planar-magnet fusion
The Series B, led by U.S. Innovative Technology Fund, will help Thea expand manufacturing as it advances Eos and de-risks its first power plant, Helios.
- Ronak Malde's Trajectory raises $15M to ship continual-learning agents
Co-founders Michael Elabd and @QuantumArjun are building a platform that turns user corrections into post-training for deployed models; backers include Conviction and Bessemer.
- CapitalG leads OpenRouter's $113M Series B with a16z, NVentures, Menlo
The round follows a six-month jump in weekly volume from 5T to 25T tokens, as OpenRouter pitches infrastructure for the multi-model AI era.
- Arc raises $10.76M seed led by a16z to put AI voice in the drive-thru
Ex-Block founders Michael MacLennan and Ali Hussain are rolling out an AI order-taking agent for quick-service drive-thrus; investor Olivia Moore says accuracy up 5-10%.
- Founders are raising bigger seed checks, but fewer are making Series A, Crunchbase finds
Crunchbase data shows U.S. seed medians near $3M while only 24-27% of 2024-23 seed cohorts have advanced and Series A traction bars have shifted to roughly $2-4M ARR.
- Swedish AirForestry secures SEK 28M pre-Series A for forestry electric drones
Founder-CEO Caroline Walerud is stepping up field validation and adding 12 technician and engineering roles as Northzone leads a convertible from existing backers.
- Ex-Apple autonomy lead's Maven Robotics is said to be raising $100M Series A
Less than two years in, the industrial robotics startup led by Apple alum Hamza Derbas is rumored to be pursuing a $100M Series A.
- Hark raises $700M Series A for a stealth bid at a universal AI interface
Founder Brett Adcock lands a $6B valuation as Hark readies multimodal models and dedicated hardware for a personal AI assistant.
- Zenly alumni raise $20m for Paris-based Prelude to rebuild digital onboarding
CEO Matias Berny and CPO/co-founder Quentin Le Bras founded Prelude in 2022 to turn the phone number from a one-time passcode into a continuous trust and fraud defense layer; its Auth and Intel APIs underpin a full-stack onboarding platform and ~40% lower verification costs.
- RADAR lands $170M Series B, tops $1B valuation, Hewett says
Hewett says Physical AI can transform in-store commerce; X post lists investors including @nimble_partners, @gideonstrategic, @AlignVentures, @sound_ventures_, and @ycombinator.
- Ocean launches from stealth with $28M to protect enterprises from AI-powered email attacks
Lightspeed leads; Picture Capital and Cerca join, with angels from Wiz, Armis, and Axis Security backing Shay Shwartz’s agentic email security platform built on autonomous investigation.
- Abstract, General Catalyst and USV lead $17M bet on Status social app
Seed and Series A led by Abstract, General Catalyst and USV; the social app says it hit 1M users 19 days after a quiet launch last year.
- Viktor raises $75M after hitting $15M ARR, per new X thread
Fryd Wiatrowski says Viktor hit a $15M run rate and raised $75M, with backers from Accel to Nat Friedman, as its AI coworkers monetize inside Slack and Teams.
- Physician-founded Kin Health raises $9M to put an AI notetaker in the patient’s pocket
Led by Maveron, the seed backs a free app that records clinic visits, turns them into clear summaries with next steps, and keeps family in the loop.
- Vita Dynamics raises about $70M in pre-A as China’s humanoid race shifts to production
The sizable pre-A round signals a push from R&D to manufacturing as Chinese humanoid startups aim to scale ahead of Western peers.
- Ciridae raises $20M seed from Accel and Andreessen Horowitz to push AI into the physical economy
Accel and Andreessen Horowitz are backing the early-stage startup as AI automation shifts focus from software workflows to real-world operations.
- After Bench's collapse, Ian Crosby raises $10M for Synthetic, an autonomous AI bookkeeper
Khosla Ventures leads the seed with Basis Set Ventures and Shopify CEO Tobias Lutke, backing a product Crosby says may not be possible yet.
- Avi Patel alleges General Catalyst co-led $31.5M seed into copycat of his startup Kled
In a thread on X, the Kled founder says he spoke with GC for months and claims the firm backed a startup that copied Kled’s designs, site, and app.
- Juan Andrade raises $2.7m seed for Caribou, an autonomous tax firm
Blue Wire Capital, Y Combinator, TinyVC, and Venture Together back Caribou's $2.7m seed; Andrade shares a park video on why companies like Hadrian, OpenFX, Vertice, and others need it.
- Furientis debuts with $5M to build low-cost interceptor missiles
Backers include Silent Ventures, Bessemer, SV Angel and others; Franzen says Furientis will target the gap between low-cost threats and the interceptors meant to stop them.