MENLO TIMES

Liquid Compute, building a regulated exchange for compute: verification, clearing, settlement, and price discovery for neoclouds, AI companies, and traders, led by Ronit Jain and Aarav Patel, emerges from stealth with a $15 million seed round co-led by Chemistry and Firstmark. They are joined by K8 Capital, Night Capital, TrueBridge, Brainchild Holdings, UFO Holdings, Y Combinator, and angel investors such as Dmitry Balyasny. Alongside the launch, the company is announcing pe

Jack & Jill, an AI agent for your career, led by Matthew Wilson and Saaras Mehan, has raised a $40M Series A, led by Air Street Capital with participation from Creandum and Madrona, to move faster toward a job market where every person and company has an agent in their corner. Jack is an AI agent for candidates, while Jill is an AI agent for employers. When the two identify a potential match, they connect the candidate and company directly, removing the traditional applicatio

Nuance Labs, building a human foundation model with emotional intelligence, led by Fangchang Ma, Edward Zhang, and Karren Yang, has raised $50 million in Series A funding led by returning investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from returning investors Accel, South Park Commons, and new investors NVIDIA and Define Ventures. The company will open a research preview of its model to the public later this year. Nuance Labs is developing AI that perceives and resp

Temporal, which develops and distributes the world's leading open-source durable execution system, led by Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev, has raised a $550M Series E at a $12.55B valuation, co-led by Lightspeed, with Wellington Management, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, and Tiger Global, with strong participation from T. Rowe Price and SV Angel. Returning investors include a16z, Sequoia, Index, GIC, Sapphire Ventures, and Amplify. The Challenge of Building Reliabl

Archy, the AI platform for dental practice management, led by Jonathan Rat and the team, has raised $50 million in Series C funding led by JMI Equity, along with existing investors TCV, Entrée Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, CRV, and Alven. The funding will accelerate development of AI agents that help dental teams automate work across their practices. Archy’s System of Action for Dental Practices. Archy is an AI-powered platform designed to replace fragmented dental soft

Rime, the leading enterprise voice AI platform, led by Lily Clifford, Brooke Larson, and Ares Geovanos, has announced a strategic partnership with Dialpad, the AI platform for customer experience. Under the agreement, Rime will become the primary text-to-speech (TTS) provider for Dialpad’s agentic voice AI products, delivering natural, conversational audio across business communications worldwide. As businesses deploy autonomous AI systems, demand for human-like voice synthes

Positron AI, building the future of AI acceleration, led by Mitesh Agrawal, Thomas Sohmers, and the team, announced an $875 million Series C financing at a $5 billion post-money valuation. The round was co-led by NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, Dylan Patel's SemiAnalysis Capital, and Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape. As part of the financing, Forest Baskett of NEA, Gavin Baker of Atreides Management, Thomas Jermoluk from

Motive, building AI that makes your operations safer and more efficient, led by Shoaib Makani and the team, secured more than $1.3 billion in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF). Pranav Singhvi, Managing Director at General Catalyst, joins Motive’s Board of Directors. The funding will support further development of the AI platform, expansion of go-to-market teams, and growth across the world’s largest and most complex organizations. “Motive is b

Tavus, the human computing company, led by Hassaan Raza and Quinn Favret, has announced Phoenix-4.5, a new state-of-the-art in real-time human rendering. Phoenix-4.5: More Natural Human Rendering. Realism in digital humans goes beyond facial appearance. Natural movement, head motion, posture, shoulders, and reactions while listening is what make an interaction feel present. Over three years, Phoenix has evolved from 3D conversational avatars to real-time facial and emotional

Maven Robotics, an intelligent industrial robotics company, led by Hamza Derbas and Khalid Derbas, has announced its launch with $100 million in Series A funding from RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures, and XTX Ventures, among others. Maven designs, builds, and deploys intelligent robotics for logistics and manufacturing. Founded in 2024, the company has created the world's first general-purpose robotics system for industrial work. The Industrial Robotics Opportunity. US

Arlequin AI, an AI native platform for critical decision-making and action, led by Hugo Micheron and Antoine Jardin, raised €28 million in Series A funding to accelerate the development of a new AI architecture based on topological neural networks (TNN*) and expand the international deployment of its technology. The round is backed exclusively by European investors and co-led by redalpine and OTB Ventures, alongside Bpifrance’s Defence Innovation Fund. Existing investors Vsqu

Cylake, the complete, AI-native cybersecurity platform that provides full visibility, sets fine-grained policy, and stops attacks in fully air-gapped sovereign environments, led by Nir Zuk, Udi Shamir, Wilson Xu, and the team, has closed $245 million through a convertible note, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Picture Capital, and Redpoint Ventures. This latest funding brings Cylake’s total raised to $290 million, following a $45 million seed round in Marc

Lightfield, the AI-native CRM, led by Keith Peiris, Pete Nichols, Henri Liriani, Jack Reed, and the team, has announced a $47M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. Since launching last November, Lightfield has signed up more than 5,000 companies and become the system of record for fast-growing businesses, with teams migrating entire Salesforce implementations to the platform. The funding will support further growth and expand the range of tasks Lightfield’s AI agent can perfo

Forus, accelerating medicine for the people, led by Sahir Jaggi and the team, has raised $150 million in Series C financing at a $3 billion valuation, led by Bain Capital Ventures, with every existing institutional investor reinvesting, including Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Redpoint, BoxGroup, Pear VC, Avra, Human Capital, Neo, Vast Ventures, and SV Angel. Forus has now raised more than $300 million in total funding to build the AI network for medicine. Medicine

Antioch, the simulation platform for robotics and autonomy, led by Harry Mellsop, Alex Langshur, Michael Calvey, and Collin Schlager, has raised $32 million to bring software speed to physical AI development. Together with the $8.5 million seed round announced earlier this year, this brings the total funding raised to $40.5 million. Greylock General Partner Saam Motamedi joins the company's board. “Software-speed innovation in the physical world will be the foundation of the

Cognition, developer of the first autonomous software engineer, led by Scott Wu, Steven Hao, and Walden Yan, has raised over $2B at a $48B valuation. The round was led by new investors Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, alongside existing investors Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Avenir. Other investors in the round include Benchmark, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock, Lightspeed, Altimeter, Bond Capital, Meritech, Atreides, Valor, T. Rowe Price, Lux, 8VC, D1, 137 Ventures

OpenAI says an internal AI system has produced a solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the Millennium Prize Problems. The proof argues that the three-dimensional Navier–Stokes equations can develop a singularity in finite time and includes both a written proof and a formalization in Lean. The problem, unresolved for roughly 90 years, asks whether smooth three-dimensional fluid motion can remain smooth indefinitely. OpenAI says the proof was pr

Mistral, the Paris-based AI company, led by Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample, and Timothee Lacroix, has raised €3 billion in a Series D funding round at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion, the largest equity fundraising round ever completed by a European technology company, three years after the company's launch. Samsung Electronics led the round, joined by co-leads Scaleup Europe Fund, managed by EQT, and existing investor PSG Equity. Advent, funds and accounts m

By Julia Maslennikova, founder & CEO of 25/8 PR, an international agency for startups & tech companies. This is an Op-Ed on Operators' Stack, Menlo Times. A startup can create an excellent product and successfully build its media presence, yet still go unnoticed when a potential customer asks an AI for information about it. I see this as a real business problem, since people are increasingly using ChatGPT and other LLMs to search companies, compare products, and decide who t

Gimlet Labs, an applied research lab dedicated to building next-generation AI infrastructure, led by Zain Asgar, Michelle Nguyen, Omid Azizi, Natalie Serrino, James Bartlett, and the team, has announced $300M Series B raise, led by Andreessen Horowitz and joined by Sapphire Ventures, Menlo Ventures, 645 Ventures, Arm, Eclipse, Emergence, Factory, Hudson River Trading, M12, OnePrime Capital, Prosperity7, QuantumLight, Samsung Ventures, Tiger Global Management, Triatomic, Wing

iPronics, a pioneer in silicon photonics-based optical circuit switching for AI infrastructure, led by Christian Dupont, Daniel Pérez-López, and the team, has announced $125 million in Series B funding co-led by Maverick Silicon and Light Street Capital. NVIDIA joined the round, with participation from new and existing investors including Triatomic Capital, Bosch Ventures, Catalight Capital, European Innovation Council Fund, The Tate Family Trust, Fine Structure Ventures, Ama

HiddenLayer, the most comprehensive security platform for AI, led by Chris Sestito, Tanner Burns, James Ballard, and the team, has announced a $100 million Series B funding round led by Delta-v Capital, with participation from Ten Eleven Ventures, Morgan Stanley, M12, Microsoft's Venture Fund, and Booz Allen Ventures. The company will use the funding to expand its enterprise platform, including Agentic Runtime Security and Agent Harness Security, a new solution designed to se

Conveo, a qualitative research platform that conducts in-depth, AI-moderated interviews, led by Dieter De Mesmaeker and Hendrik Van Hove, has announced a $50 million Series A funding round from DST Global Partners, Balderton Capital, Visionaries, 6 Degrees Capital, and Y Combinator. The round brings total funding to $55.8 million and will drive its U.S. expansion as Conveo evolves from a research tool into infrastructure the entire enterprise runs on. More than 400 enterprise

Wonderful, building applied AI for the enterprise, led by Bar Winkler, Roey Lalazar, and the team, has announced the closing of a $550 million Series C funding round at a $5B valuation. The round was led by Insight Partners, with participation from Salesforce and existing investors Index Ventures, IVP, Vine Ventures, 9Yards, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Since its Series B in March 2026, Wonderful has expanded to 35+ markets, grown to 650 employees, and evolved its platform

Empirik, making agents system-aware, led by Kartik Chandrayana, Sudheer Dhurjati, and Avon Puri, has emerged out of stealth with $21 million in funding from Sequoia, S32, Canapi & Alumni Ventures. Software Is Becoming Autonomous. Infrastructure Is Still Manual. Coding agents are already writing, refactoring, and shipping software at machine speed, driving an explosion in infrastructure changes, from deployments and permissions to configuration updates and shifting dependenci

Wafer, building the fastest open-source LLMs for enterprise, at the lowest cost per token, led by Steven Arellano, Emilio Andere, and the team, has raised a $40 million Series A, co-led by Marathon and Chemistry, with participation from Wing, AMD Ventures, and Outset Capital. Existing investors Fifty Years and Y Combinator are also doubling down on Wafer. AI That Optimizes AI. Most inference optimization remains manual, service-heavy, and largely static after deployment. Wafe

Perceptron, a foundation model company building physical intelligence, led by Armen Aghajanyan and Akshat Shrivastava, has released Isaac 0.5, its new open-source embodied foundation model. To their knowledge, it is the first open model at the frontier of multimodal video understanding, embodied reasoning, and robot control. Isaac also establishes a scaling law for balancing general video, egocentric, UMI, and teleoperation data. It provides a framework for selecting the righ

SeatPin, the ticket marketplace built for fans, led by Galin Ananiev, has introduced PinAI, an AI-powered assistant that turns the search for any ticket into a simple conversation. Sold-out doesn’t have to mean out of luck. PinAI lets fans describe the event they’re looking for, by text or voice, and searches for relevant ticket options. Instead of scrolling through social media, websites, and ticket listings, users can simply ask for what they want, whether it’s two tickets

Runable, a platform that can think and execute any task for you, led by Umesh Kumar and Saksham Sarda, has announced $21 million in funding, co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, along with continued participation from its first believers, Together Fund and Array VC. Why Runable is Doing it. Businesses are built for customers, revenue, and sustainable operations, not just websites and landing pages. AI can now automate software development and webs

Onos Health, turning behavioral health noise into clarity and action, led by Akshay Agrawal, Josh Levitan, Suhaas Prasad, and the team, has raised a $17 million Series A financing round led by Costanoa, with participation from Flare Capital Partners and strategic investment from CVS Health Ventures. The financing follows strong commercial momentum, with leading U.S. health plans such as Aetna using Onos’ AI platform to improve behavioral health outcomes while reducing overal

Arga Labs, building real-world sandboxes for testing and training AI agents, led by Phillip Li and Akira Tong, has raised a $10 million seed round led by General Catalyst, joined by BoxGroup, Emergence, Gradient, and SV Angel. As AI agents become more capable, traditional software testing is becoming insufficient. Traditional software is largely deterministic: given an input, developers can define the expected output and test against it. Agents are different. Their non-determ

Standard Metrics, an AI‑driven portfolio management platform, led by John Melas-Kyriazi and Deny Khoung, has raised a $20M Series B led by 8VC. Other investors in this round include Salesforce Ventures, Spark Capital, January Capital, First Trust Capital Partners, Socii Capital, Kindergarten Ventures, Calm Ventures, Gaingels, and more. The company has raised roughly $50M to date, and most of that capital has come from its customers. Why Standard Metrics Exists. Founded in 202

Mundo, building the data layer for perceptual intelligence, led by Jason Liao, Naijide Anwaer, Garreth Lee, and Kenneth Wu, has raised a $20 million Series A led by GreatPoint Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Next Frontier Ventures, and E12 Ventures. Together with its previously unannounced $4 million seed round, Mundo has now raised $24 million. The Missing Half of Intelligence. AI has made extraordinary progress in recent years. Models can write software, sol

Callosum, building the infrastructure where heterogeneous chips & intelligence co-evolve to solve the world's hardest problem, led by Jascha Achterberg, Danyal Akarca, and the team, has announced a $100M seed round to redefine how humanity computes for AI’s next chapter. The round is led by Atomico with significant participation from Plural, DCVC, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, alongside other world-class investors and angels. AI is entering a “Cambrian explosion” of models an

Silicon Data, providing GPU performance data for companies, led by Carmen Li, and the team, has announced a $30.5 million initial closing of its Series A, led by the Valor Atreides AI Fund, with additional investment from CME Ventures, DRW, F-Prime, Samsung Next, VanEck, Further, Jump, Tectonic, and Wintermute. Breed, Hack, Blank VC, Sancus Ventures, and SoGal Ventures also participated. The Series A will support expansion across four areas: benchmark pricing, performance mea

Thunder Compute, building a new way to virtualize GPUs, led by Carl Peterson and Brian Model, has raised a $13 million Series A round led by Matrix Partners, with participation from Y Combinator and CEAS Investments. The capital will be deployed to address the GPU capacity shortage by eliminating the estimated $200 billion in wasted compute currently sitting idle, while building toward a future in which every GPU is virtualized. Enterprises currently underutilize GPUs, with a

Etched, building frontier inference clusters, led by Gavin Uberti, Robert Wachen, and Chris Zhu, has shipped its first rack to Jane Street. The company has raised $700M at a $21B valuation, led by Jane Street, joined by Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Peter Thiel, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Neo, Stripes, Primary, Positive Sum, Diffusion, Argo, and Blackstone. Less than 1% of the world has access to frontier AI models, creating a need for new

Groq, the premier neocloud for fast inference, led by Adam Winter and the team, announced a $350 million Series A fundraise, and the round was led by Disruptive, with planned participation from NVIDIA. The fundraise values the company at $3.5 billion. This latest round, together with $650 million raised in June 2026, brings recent funding in the company to $1 billion. Groq operates 13 data centers across North America, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia Pacific, serving more t

Gravis Robotics, a Zurich-based robotics company turning any earthmoving machine into a robot, led by Ryan Luke Johns, Dr. Dominic Jud, Burak Cizmeci, and Marco Tranzatto, has raised $200 million in Series A from Softbank. As the largest Series A in construction robotics history, the funding accelerates Gravis’s mission to advance physical AI and scale autonomous heavy machinery across jobsites worldwide. Global infrastructure is undergoing a massive expansion, driven by dema

Maneva, the vision AI solution for manufacturers, led by Rae Jeong and Kelvin Chan, has launched Orchestration, an AI brain for factory floor management that gets smarter with every shift. Large manufacturers lose an estimated $1.4 trillion annually to unplanned downtime. More than half experienced disruptions last year, with downtime costing an average of $400,000 per hour, and up to $1.7 million in severe cases. Orchestration is built on four layers of intelligence, percept

Parasma, enabling biological compute with living neurons, led by Sean Cole, announced its public launch. The company is developing the algorithms and infrastructure for compute powered by human brain cells as an energy-efficient alternative to GPUs. The work behind Parasma first entered public view earlier this year. In a project unveiled in late February, founder Sean Cole collaborated with Cortical Labs to train a culture of human neurons to play Doom. Token Prediction. Par

Vals AI, the independent evaluator of artificial intelligence, led by Rayan Krishnan and Langston Nashold, has announced a $40M Series A at a $400M valuation, led by a16z, with participation from existing investors 8VC and Bloomberg Beta and new investors HRT Ventures and NextLadder Ventures. AI progress has long followed a “hill-climbing” process: define measurable goals, identify weaknesses, and improve against them. But model development is now outpacing the creation of re

CodeRabbit, helping teams review, prioritize, understand, and secure agent outputs, led by Harjot Gill and Gur Singh, has raised $143 million in a Series C funding round at a $1.5 billion valuation. Atomico and Smash Capital co-led the round, with participation from new investors, including BMW i Ventures, Datadog, Hirtle Callaghan, SineWave Ventures, Scenic Management, and existing investors, including CRV, Scale Venture Partners, Flex Capital, Pelion Venture Partners, Harmo

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