MENLO TIMES

Blacksmith, the fastest way to run your GitHub Actions, led by Aditya (JP) Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru, has raised a $45M Series B led by Peak XV, with existing investors YC and GV tripling down. The round valued Blacksmith at $550M. The release of Claude Opus 4.5 in December significantly changed how developers write software. Since the start of the year, CI jobs on Blacksmith have grown 5–10% week over week as AI coding tools drive more code generation. As cod

FriskAI, the runtime intelligence platform for AI agents, led by Neel Palrecha and the team, has announced its official launch and a $3.6 million pre-seed funding round led by MaC Venture Capital, with participation from Wischoff Ventures, NEA partner Rick Yang, and a group of strategic angel investors. FriskAI sits between AI agents and the tools they use, capturing every action taken by an agent. The platform gives organizations visibility into agent behavior, enabling team

Axle, building AI agents to automate insurance workflows led by Cameron Duncan, Nihar Parikh, and Armaan Sikand, has announced $17.5M in Series A funding led by Base10 Partners, with continued investment from Y Combinator and Gradient Ventures, and participation from Stage2 Capital, Chris Bayley (Co-Founder and CEO of Cover Genius), and other industry angel investors, joined by existing investors, including the early team at Plaid. Over the past six months, Axle has tripled t

River AI, building a new stack for personal AI led by Igor Babuschkin and the team, has announced $1.1 billion in funding across Series Seed and Series A, led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with strategic investment from NVIDIA and AMD Ventures and participation from Y Combinator and Temasek. The round accelerates the development of powerful personal AI that understands users and works on their behalf, while putting ownership of that intelligence in the hands of the people

Discovered Materials, building AI agents that discover new materials for semiconductor chips, led by Advaith Sridhar and Akash Ramdas, has raised a $9M seed round led by Lightspeed, with participation from Y Combinator and Peak XV, and angels like Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram and Thariq Shihipar. Intelligence Has a Heat Problem. AI chips face a growing thermal challenge. Modern GPUs can generate heat fluxes of around 140 W/cm², exceeding the heat experienced by a space shuttle

Lumilens, the connectivity platform for AI infrastructure led by Ankur Singla, Ritesh Kapahi, Samuel Liu, Dave Friedman, Ted Schmidt, and the team, has emerged from stealth, having been founded to solve the growing networking bottlenecks limiting AI scale. In just two years after its founding, the company is commercially shipping its first product into production AI data centers under a multi-billion-dollar customer agreement, and announced more than $700 million in new fundi

Naive, a Palo Alto-based AI lab building the infrastructure AI agents need to run entire businesses, led by Sean Dorje and Dennis Zax, has announced a $28.5 million Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, Zetta, Liquid 2, and angel investors including Gokul Rajaram, Tim Zheng (Apollo), JD Sherman (former HubSpot), Gert Lanckriet (Amazon), Robert Chatwani (Docusign), and Zachary Sims (Codecademy). The Problem: Apps Ship in an Afternoon, Bu

Malachyte, the first e-commerce AI Platform that adapts in real time, responding to consumer behavior instantly, led by Ian Anderson, Siddharth Motwani, and Shivaditya Sinha, has raised $10M in seed funding, co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Gradient Ventures, with participation from Harpoon Ventures, to bring this vision to life. Before founding Malachyte, co-founders Ian Anderson and his co-founder spent a decade at Spotify working on personalization. Their work inclu

Mirendil, democratizing frontier AI R&D to accelerate science and technology, led by Behnam Neyshabur, Harsh Mehta, Shayan Salehian, and Tara Rezaei, announced a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud to power the next generation of self-accelerating AI. Mirendil will scale its training, inference, and AI research workloads on Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer, drawing on both Google Cloud TPUs and full-stack NVIDIA AI infrastructure. Removing the Bottleneck in AI Progress. A

Andromeda Surgical, building the intelligence layer for surgery, led by Nick Damiano and Kartik Tiwari, has raised a $15 million Series A led by Standard Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Vox Capital, Lingotto Innovation, Alumni Ventures, WestWave Capital, and others. Pioneer Fund has backed the company twice, starting at seed. Urologists in three countries have used the company’s system to perform holmium laser enucleation of the prostate (HoLEP) in more than 40

Wordsmith, an AI for in-house legal teams led by Ross McNairn, Robbie Falkenthal, and Volodymyr Giginiak, has announced a $14 million extension to their Series B, led by new investment from Intact Private Capital alongside existing investors Highland Europe and Index Ventures. FT Ventures has also become a shareholder in Wordsmith. The additional investment follows a period of rapid growth for Wordsmith, with revenue increasing 14x year over year and the platform now used by

Neuraspace, leading the way for Space Domain Awareness, AI, and Safety, led by Chiara Manfletti and the team, has announced €15.6 million in new financing, combining strategic private investment from Lince Capital, Explorer Investments, and Armilar Venture Partners together with funding awarded under Portugal's Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRRP), reflecting strong private and public confidence in the company's growth strategy. The funding will accelerate Neuraspace’s expansi

HappyRobot, powering the systems that run the world, led by Pablo Palafox, Luis Paarup, and Javier Palafox, has raised $150 million in Series C funding, led by Prysm Capital and co-led by Eurazeo. Existing investors a16z, Base10, and Y Combinator are doubling down, joined by strategics including Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), Kfund, Orange, T.Capital (Deutsche Telekom), Bankinter, Endeavor Catalyst, and Wave-X. The round values the company at $1.2 billion post-money, bri

Made, the AI platform developed by RHEI to amplify human creativity and scale content production, led by Shahrzad Rafati and Lewis Ball, is publicly debuting Made for Music, an agentic platform designed for artists, labels, and distributors. Built for the realities of today’s music industry, Made for Music enables teams to create, package, distribute, and promote releases across relevant platforms, providing a faster and more scalable way to turn a single track into a full-sc

OLIX, building the infrastructure for frontier AI, led by James Dacombe and the team, has raised a $312m Series B financing round at a $3.3bn valuation, two years after it was founded. The round included Fundomo, Arm and Hudson River Trading, alongside angel investors including Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, with existing investors all increasing their commitments. Existing investors Hummingbird Ventures, Crane, Plural, Creandum, Phoenix Court, and Transition all i

Rebellions, a global leader in AI inference infrastructure led by Sunghyun Park and the team, has successfully run SK Telecom’s sovereign AI foundation model ‘A.X K1’ (hereinafter K1) on its own server infrastructure and demonstrated an agent service capable of handling concurrent requests from multiple users on top of it. The milestone demonstrates how a domestic large language model paired with a high-performance Korean NPU can power real-world AI services, advancing the c

Ellis, the AI-native operations platform for private credit, led by Ryan Williams, has launched today with more than $10 million in seed funding closed. First Round Capital led the financing with participation from a group of prominent operators and investors, including Kearny Jackson, 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Khosla Ventures, Slow Ventures, Wilshire Lane, Westbound, Collide Capital, Gallery Ventures, Ariel Alternatives CEO Mellody Hobson, Thrive Capital Founder Josh Kus

Intropy, the AI-native platform automating inventory, led by Franziska Kirschner and YihKai Teh, has announced that it has raised $11 million in seed financing. The seed round was led by Felix Capital, with participation from Quiet Capital and early investors General Catalyst and firstminute capital. Applying AI to Spare Parts Operations. Founded in 2024 by Franziska Kirschner and YihKai Teh, Intropy is developing AI-powered tools to help spare parts distributors, manufacture

inforcer, a unified Microsoft security and AI management platform built for Managed Service Providers (MSPs), led by Jamie Daum and the team, has announced a $50 million Series C funding round led by global software investor Insight Partners. Rising Demand Drives Rapid Growth. Inforcer has experienced rapid growth over the past two years as managed service providers (MSPs) increasingly seek scalable tools to manage Microsoft 365 security, compliance, and AI services. The comp

Xsight Labs, a fabless semiconductor company providing intelligent connectivity solutions for next-generation hyperscale, edge, and AI data center networks led by Yossi Meyouhas, Gal Malach, and the team, has announced the closing of a $300+ million funding round, establishing a $2.8 billion post-money valuation. The round was led by Fidelity Management & Research Company with participation from Aliya Capital Partners, Atreides Management, Artisan Partners, Battery Ventures,

Polar, the AI browser that actually does work for you, led by Kevin Jiang and Howard Zhong, has announced its launch with a $5.7 million seed round led by Madrona, with support from angels, including Thomas Dohmke (former CEO of GitHub), Erik Bernhardsson (Modal), Robert Yang (Fundamental), Nico (Fundamental), and many more. Building an AI Browser for Autonomous Workflows. Modern work is often divided between tasks that require human expertise, such as decision-making, creati

ChipAgents, the category leader in agentic AI platforms for semiconductor design, led by William Wang and the team, has announced an additional $60 million in Series A2 financing, bringing the expanded round to $134 million just six months after its initial Series A close. The financing reflects continued investor confidence in the company’s commercial momentum, with new investor B Capital joining Bessemer Venture Partners, Micron, MediaTek, Ericsson, ScOp, and other existing

Qureight, developing enterprise-grade imaging and precision endpoints for clinical trials, led by Dr Muhunthan Thillai and the team, has raised $20 million in a Series B financing, led by Molten Ventures. Existing investors Hargreave Hale AIM VCT, XTX Ventures, Guinness Ventures, Meltwind, and Ascension also participated in the round. The new funding will support the expansion of the company’s 3D deep learning imaging platform and accelerate commercial growth across new thera

Fish Audio, the most expressive, emotionally controllable real-time voice model, led by Rissa Cao, Shijia Liao, and Jiahua Liu, has announced $52 million in seed funding on its first anniversary, led by Coreline Ventures and Capital Today with participation from 359 Capital, Play Time, HF0, 645 Ventures, Parable, Carya Venture Partners, Alphaist Partners, and angels. Traditional text-to-speech systems have focused on generating accurate words but often fail to capture natural

Spur Intelligence, transforming obfuscation into evidence so you can stop threats hiding behind VPNs, proxies, and other anonymization infrastructure, led by Kevin Hickey, Ethan Smith, Riley Kilmer, and the team, has raised a $200 million investment from Insight Partners. The investment highlights Insight’s confidence in the growing IP Intelligence market and Spur’s position as a leading platform in the space. The funding will support expansion across the business, helping ac

Perceptual Robotics, revolutionising Predictive Maintenance with AI-Powered Technology, led by Kostas Karachalios, Dimitris Nikolaidis, and Kevin Driscoll-Lind, has raised over £4 million in funding so far this year. The funding combines investment from new and existing shareholders (Investing for Purpose, Loggerhead Ventures and One Planet Capital) alongside support co-funded by Innovate UK, part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI). The new funding will support Perceptual R

Weave, the engineering-intelligence layer for the AI era, led by Adam Cohen and Andrew Churchill, has raised a $13.5 million Series A led by Standard Capital, along with Y Combinator, Moonfire, Burst Capital, IrregEx, and the Agent Fund. Weave develops machine learning and reinforcement learning models that analyze engineering workflows, helping organizations optimize the use of both AI and human effort. The new funding will support its goal of becoming the system of record f

Multiverse Computing, the global leader in efficient AI, led by Enrique Lizaso, Román Orús, Samuel Mugel, and the team, has announced a $570 million (€500M) Series C funding round at a $1.7 billion (€1.5B) pre-money valuation, a 5x step-up from its Series B. The round is co-led by Forgepoint Capital International, BNPP SIVF, and Bullhound Capital, with additional commitments to date from investors including Santander Alternative Investments, Tikehau Capital, HP Inc., Orange V

Limitless Labs, the world’s first Agentic Physical AI platform for CAD/CAM (Computer-Aided Design and Computer-Aided Manufacturing) in mechanical manufacturing, led by David Priev, Shahaf Finder, Assaf Peleg, and the team, has raised a $20 million Series A round co-led by Dell Technologies Capital and Square Peg, with participation from Grove Ventures, Meron Capital, and Kinetica. The AI agent integrates directly into existing CAD/CAM systems, enabling manufacturers to captur

Etched, building frontier inference clusters, led by Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen, and Chris Zhu, has raised $300M at a $10.3B valuation, led by Sequoia Capital alongside Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Diffusion, Argo, and SK Hynix. The mission is to build the infrastructure that powers the world’s AI inference. Frontier models require a new generation of computing systems, from custom chips and advanced packaging to optimized interconnects and cooling, designed end-to-end

Kausable, putting science at the core of AI, led by Johannes Haux, Dr. Benjamin Herdeanu, and Gregor Ramien, has raised €12 million in a seed funding round led by UVC Partners and Entourage, with follow-on from the German investors HTGF and Mätch VC. Kausable is also backed by various private angel investors from the AI industry and academia working at Black Forest Labs, OpenAI, Google DeepMind, Noxtua, and the European Laboratory for Learning and Intelligent Systems (ELLIS).

telli, an AI voice platform for agents that sell, support, and operate - across millions of calls led by Finn zur Mühlen, Philipp Baumanns, and Seb Hapte-Selassie, has raised $15M seed round led by redalpine with participation from strategic investors, Mutschler, and key angels like Marc Bitzer (CEO Whirlpool; supervisory board member BMW), Alexa von Bismarck (Adyen), Martin Koehler (Investor and former director at Flixbus & Lufthansa), Krischan von Moeller (Paragon Partners)

Augustus, the global dollar bank led by Ferdinand Dabitz, Joshua Becker, Simon Wimmer, Peter Mosebjane Lieck, announced a $180 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation. The round was led by Tiger Global, with participation from Hummingbird, QED, existing investors, and the founders of Nubank, Ramp, Circle, and Deel. The round also received backing from leading fintech and AI founders, including David Velez (Nubank), Karim Atiyeh (Ramp), Sean Neville (Circle), Alex Bouaziz (

Genius AI, building technology that makes every business the smartest version of itself, led by Danielle Cohen-Shohet & Leah Cohen-Shohet, has announced its Series D at a $1.15 billion valuation, bringing the total capital raised to more than $125 million. The round was led by Lux Capital, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, Imaginary Ventures, 2048 Ventures, L Catterton Growth Fund, and StepStone Private Ventures. The company is also introducing Genius AI as i

Atoms, building physical automation to transform industry and move the world, led by Travis Kalanick, has announced a $1.7B equity investment with lead investor a16z and Ben Horowitz joining the board. As part of this investment, the various businesses were consolidated into a single Atoms equity structure. Marc and Ben have shared a long-standing relationship, and a partnership at Uber came remarkably close in 2011. Responsibility for the missed opportunity has long been deb

Cascade, the AI pursuit platform for architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) firms led by Hannia Zia and Joana Ferreira, has raised $3.5 million from Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun, Ada Ventures, Blitzscaling Ventures, Indico Capital, shuckerVC, G2C Ventures, and Snowball VC. In construction, some of the biggest opportunities are often identified long before a formal request for proposals (RFP) is issued. By the time projects become publicly available, key decisions m

Gritt, AI that does the hardest work in the hardest places, led by Puneet Puri and Vishal Dugar, has launched with $32.4M in pre-seed and Series A funding. The $26M Series A was led by Obvious Ventures, with participation from Union Square Ventures and Active Impact Investments, and support from previous investors First Round Capital, Climactic, Congruent Ventures, and VSC Ventures. Gritt’s robotic arms and AI systems integrate with existing jobsite equipment, including skid

Humanoid, a UK-based AI and robotics company building industrial humanoid robots led by Artem Sokolov and the team, announced a $152 million Series A financing at a $1.35 billion post-money valuation. This funding brings the total amount raised to date to $270 million. The round was led by Prime Movers Lab with participation from Schaeffler, Bosch, Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital, and Aglaé Ventures. The investment marks a significant milestone for the European techn

Infinity, developing a generative optimization engine that automatically improves computational kernels to accelerate AI training and inference, led by Jeremy Nixon, has raised $15 million in seed funding at a $100 million post-money valuation. The round included significant participation from Touring Capital, along with Principal VC, executives at major chip companies, researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic, and other prominent angel investors. The funding will support the ex

Natural, powering agentic payments, led by Kahlil Lalji, Eric Wang, and Walt Leung, has raised a $30M Series A led by Kirsten Green at Forerunner, with continued participation by all major investors. The round was raised when the company was 193 days old and brings Natural’s total funding to over $40M. The round was supported by Human Capital, Abstract, Genius Ventures, Torch Capital, Restive, SV Angel, Darragh Buckley (CEO of Increase), Pablo Palafox (CEO of HappyRobot), Pau

Skyfall AI, a neolab building systems for the first autonomous enterprise led by Sam Pasupalak, Kaheer Suleman, and Sumit Pasupalak, has emerged from stealth with an undisclosed amount of funding from Fidelity, Inovia Capital, Touring Capital, M13, NextView Ventures, and Garage Capital. Skyfall was founded by the team behind Maluuba, the deep learning research lab acquired by Microsoft in 2017. The company aims to move beyond the limitations of today's Large Language Models (

CuspAI, building AI-powered materials discovery, led by Dr Chad Edwards and Prof. Max Welling, has launched the ‘AI Materials Foundry’, a global network of data, labs, compute, and scientific expertise for the design of new materials, alongside announcing its $450 million fundraise led by Kleiner Perkins and NEA, with significant participation from Jeff Bezos’ Bezos Expeditions. The round values Cusp at $2.6 billion and will allow the company to move faster still across the U

General Compute, building the world's fastest AI cloud, led by Finn Puklowski and Jason Goodison, has announced a committed debt facility of up to $400 million from Upper90 Capital Management, LP (“Upper90”). The financing begins at $100 million and scales with customer demand, allowing General Compute to quickly build one of the world’s largest inference neoclouds to deliver AI results 16x faster than current GPUs. $400M Debt Facility to Expand AI Compute Infrastructure. Ge

Runta, building an agent execution layer for token efficiency, secret protection, and governed access, led by Guanlan Dai, has raised $20M in seed funding led by Martin Casado at Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Jeff Dean, Fei-Fei Li, Ali Ghodsi, Ram Shriram, and Thomas Wolf. The foundation of modern software infrastructure has long relied on systems that enforce security, reliability, and governance before applications execute. Technologies such as edge proxies,

microagi, deploying embodied intelligence into the operations that run the physical world, then turns what it learns there into research that compounds, led by Bercan Kilic, Nico Nußbaum, Yoan Iliev, and Anton Poletaev, has raised $55 million in seed funding, the largest seed round in German history. The round was led by Hummingbird, with participation from Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global, and redalpine. It comes roughly ten months after the company was founded by form

Fireworks, the frontier platform for training and inference on open-weight models at scale, led by Lin Qiao, Benny Chen, Chenyu Zhao, Dmytro Dzhulgakov, Dmytro Ivchenko, James Reed, and Pawel Garbacki, has announced a $1.505 billion Series D at a $17.5 billion valuation, led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from Evantic Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nvidia, 20VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, and others. This milestone c

Bunkerhill Health, empowering clinical and operational teams to build and deploy AI agents to bring their best ideas to life, led by Nishith Khandwala and David Eng, has announced the close of its Series B funding round, led by Khosla Ventures, with continued participation from Sequoia Capital, Felicis, Optum Ventures, and Y Combinator. The Series B brings Bunkerhill Health's total funding to date, including its Seed and Series A rounds, to $55 million, reflecting growing inv

Meticulous, radically accelerating the pace of software development for every company in the world, led by Gabriel Spencer-Harper and Quentin Spencer-Harper, has raised $15M in Series A funding led by Chemistry. Comprehensive testing is essential for shipping software rapidly with AI. Without high confidence in test coverage, development velocity is limited regardless of how quickly code can be generated. Achieving that level of confidence requires testing at a far greater sc

SwitchOn, an AI-powered quality inspection for manufacturers, led by Aniruddha Banerjee, Avra Banerjee, and Neil Lasrado, has raised $8M (Rs 78Cr) in a Pre-Series B funding round led by IvyCap Ventures, with participation from SIG Tattva and Trifecta Capital. The Bengaluru-based Physical AI startup will use the funding to accelerate global expansion and advance zero-defect manufacturing for Fortune 500 customers, including Unilever, Bosch, and Maruti Suzuki. Its AI-powered qu

Emergent, an AI app builder that turns your ideas into monetizable software, led by Mukund Jha and Madhav Jha, has closed a $130 million Series C. Creaegis led the round, with MNI Ventures - Claypond Capital and Sentinel Global as co-leads and participation from Khosla Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator. The round values Emergent at $1.5 billion and brings the total funding to $230 million. A year after its public launch, Emergent has grown its val