MENLO TIMES

Stilta, Agentic AI for high-stakes patent work, led by Oskar Block, Petrus Werner, Tobias Estreen, and Oscar Adamsson, has raised $10.5 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Y Combinator and a group of founders and operators from leading AI companies, including Sana, Legora, OpenAI, Lovable, and Listen Labs. Patents are a highly underleveraged asset class in business. While over 90% of S&P 500 value is intangible, most patents are never enforc

Commure, the AI-native enterprise RCM & ambient platform, led by Tanay Tandon, Deepika Bodapati, and the team, has announced $70 million in financing at a $7 billion post-money valuation. The round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from Sequoia Capital, Morgan Stanley, and Kirkland & Ellis. Commure uses AI and agents to streamline administrative work in health systems, targeting one of healthcare’s largest cost centers, estimated at about $1 trillion annually in

Ocean, an agentic email security platform, led by Shay Shwartz and Oran Moyal, has announced its launch from stealth with $28 million in total funding, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from Picture Capital and Cerca Partners. Additional angel investors include Assaf Rappaport (Wiz), Yevgeny Dibrov and Nadir Izrael (Armis), and Dor Knafo (former CEO of Axis Security and General Partner at Cyberstarts), among other leading angel investors. Ocean is introdu

LawX, an AI-powered OS for notaries and law firms, led by Dr. Norman Koschmieder, Dr. Sara Brinkmann, and Torben Rabe, has closed a seed round led by Motive Partners, raising over €7 million in capital, alongside WENVEST Capital, xdeck, and SIVentures, as well as several prominent angels from the tech and legal sectors. The legal market is undergoing structural change, with rising demand for legal services and a growing shortage of administrative staff. Around half of law fir

Multiverse, an upskilling platform for AI adoption, led by Euan Blair and the team, has raised $70 million in primary funding to drive growth across Europe. The funding was led by Schroders Capital, with participation from existing investors including General Catalyst, Lightspeed Venture Partners, D1 Capital Partners, Index Ventures, Bond, and StepStone Group. The investment will accelerate Multiverse’s expansion across Europe, with a focus on helping workers adapt to AI rat

Ranger, the agentic revenue operations platform for industrial tendering, led by James Zhan, Sari Saadi, and Kyle Jordan, has emerged from stealth with $8.4 Million in seed funding led by Bonfire Ventures, along with 25madison, Inovia Capital, and Panache Ventures. The company’s platform connects fragmented systems and manual processes to automate critical workflows across industrial, manufacturing, and supply chain operations. Industry’s Problem: Bureaucratic Bottlenecks Sl

Recursive, building self-improving superintelligence to automate knowledge discovery, led by Richard Socher, Yuandong Tian, and Caiming Xiong, has emerged from stealth and raised $650M led by GV (Google Ventures) and Greycroft, with major participation from AMD Ventures and NVIDIA at a $4.65 billion valuation to create AI that conducts experiments on how to safely improve itself, in an open-ended process of automated scientific discovery. Open-ended evolution, both Darwinian

Origin Lab, a platform and technology company that captures, creates, and delivers premium, rights-cleared multimodal content for AI training, led by Anne-Margot Rodde, Antoine Gargot, and Colin Carrier, has raised $8M seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Eniac Ventures, FPV Ventures, Seven Stars, and SV Angel, along with angels from robotics, AI, gaming, and Google, including Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt. For decad

Fractile, the AI inference hardware company, led by Walter Goodwin and the team, has raised $220M to accelerate the path to getting its first chips and systems into customers’ hands, in a financing round led by Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund, with participation from Conviction, Gigascale, O1A, Felicis, Buckley Ventures, and 8VC, investing alongside its brilliant existing backers. Fractile, founded in 2022, was built on the belief that frontier AI is ultimately con

Isomorphic Labs, reimagining the drug discovery process with AI, led by Demis Hassabis and the team, has raised $2.1 Billion in Series B funding led by Thrive Capital, and includes participation from existing backers Alphabet and GV alongside new investors MGX, Temasek, CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, significantly expanding Isomorphic Labs’ global capital base. The new capital will advance Isomorphic Labs’ AI drug design engine (IsoDDE), accelerating its therapeutic

Exaforce, an agentic SOC platform and MDR, led by Ankur Singla and the team, has raised $125M in Series B from Mayfield, Khosla Ventures, HarbourVest, Peak XV, Seligman Ventures, and AICONIC Ventures, taking the total funding to $200M. A year ago, emergence from stealth followed a $75M Series A and a clear thesis: SOCs cannot scale by hiring more analysts or engineers, nor by continuously adding SIEM rules. Scale comes from combining human expertise with task-specific AI agen

Nscale, the engine of superintelligence, led by Josh Payne and the team, has announced an additional $790 million in financing, committed by ABN AMRO, DNB, Eksfin, Nordea, and SEB, to reinforce the continued development of the AI data center in Narvik, Norway. This data center project is the largest AI infrastructure investment in Norway. The committed financing includes an additional $790 million uncommitted accordion feature to fund a further 115MW expansion at the Narvik

By Helena Rebane, CEO of AddSearch For years, companies built websites for a browsing-based path to conversion. The assumption was simple: attract visitors, help them explore, guide them toward the right information, and move them gradually toward action. But that logic belongs to an earlier web. At AddSearch, what we increasingly see is that visitors arrive with far less patience and far more context, often shaped by AI tools before they ever reach the site. They are not loo

Fazeshift, your AI agents for accounts receivable, led by Caitlin Leksana, Timmy Galvin, and the team, has announced Series A, bringing the total funding to $22 million. The Problem Fazeshift is Solving Accounts receivable remains one of the most manual and fragmented workflows in modern businesses, spread across spreadsheets, email threads, and disconnected systems. This slows payments, restricts working capital, and forces finance teams to focus on collections rather than s

Scale AI, building reliable AI systems for the world's most important decisions, led by Alexandr Wang and the team, has announced that the U.S. Department of War's (DoW) Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) has expanded its enterprise agreement with Scale AI, increasing the total potential value from $100 million to $500 million. The five-fold ceiling increase follows strong demand for the Production OTA agreement, with projects across computer vision, gene

Pit, learning your workflows and building them for you, led by Adam Jafer and Fredrik Hjelm, has announced its launch alongside $16 million in funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The round includes participation from Lakestar, the Pit founders, and executives from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Deel, and Revolut, as well as the Stena and Lundin families. Pit is launching as an “AI product team as a service,” enabling companies to build and deploy custom, production-grade s

Altara, building scientific intelligence for the physical world, led by Catherine Yeo and Eva Tuecke, has announced its launch. The company has raised a $7M seed round from Greylock Partners, Neo, BoxGroup, Liquid 2 Ventures, and angel investors, including Jeff Dean and leadership from OpenAI and AMD. The first wave of AI has accelerated digital work across writing, coding, and customer support, while progress in the physical world has lagged. A new era is now emerging, drive

CopilotKit, the enterprise agentic frontend stack, led by Atai Barkai, Uli Barkai, and the team, has raised a $27 Million Series A funding led by Glilot Capital, NfX, and SignalFire, with participation from Discovery Ventures, Vermilion Cliffs Ventures, DVC, Abstraction Capital, 97212 Ventures, Deep Acre, J-Ventures, Gurtin Ventures, and Fresh Fund. CopilotKit is now used by a majority of Fortune 500 companies, powering millions of daily agent-user interactions in production.

Corvera, building AI supply chain management for fast-growing brands, led by Christopher Kong, Dirk Breeuwer, Matthew Collins, and Berk Güngör, has raised $4.2M in Seed funding, led by 6 Degrees Capital, with participation from 20VC, Rebel Fund, Duke Capital Partners, Multimodal Ventures, Y Combinator, and a group of exceptional angels and operators, including Jake Heller (Casetext), Christian Mathiesen (Frigade), and Dom Maskell (Runna). The funding round marks the close of

Auryx, turning ordinary earbuds into health sensors through the power of cutting-edge artificial intelligence, led by Erika Bondareva, Kayla-Jade Butkow, and Cecilia Mascolo, has raised $2M in pre-seed funding to build a platform that turns everyday devices, such as earbuds, into continuous health monitors using sound. The round is led by Celero Ventures, with participation from EWOR, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, Vento, PurposeTech, and additional institutional and angel in

Elastics, building AI agents for prediction markets, led by Szymon Pawica and Mateusz Brodowicz, has raised $2 million in an oversubscribed pre-seed round led by Frst with participation from angels from across the AI and crypto world, among them the co-founders of ElevenLabs, partners from XBTO, an a16z scout, and a co-founder of RedStone. Elastics has secured funding to democratize quantitative trading by equipping individual traders with AI-powered tools for automated resea

Sierra, helping businesses build better, more human customer experiences with AI, led by Bret Taylor and Clay Bavor, has raised $950 million from new and existing investors, led by Tiger Global and GV, at a valuation of over $15 billion. Sierra now has more than $1 billion to invest in becoming the global standard for companies wanting to transform their customer experiences with AI. Confidence in the opportunity for Sierra and its customers has grown significantly. From ju

DeepInfra, helping you accelerate your AI with developer-friendly APIs designed for performance and cost-efficiency, led by Nikola Borisov, Georgios Papoutsis, and Yessenzhar Kanapin, has raised $107 million in Series B funding to scale DeepInfra's inference cloud and expand its global capacity, co-led by 500 Global and Georges Harik, with participation from A.Capital Ventures, Crescent Cove, Felicis, NVIDIA, Peak6, Samsung Next, Supermicro, and Upper90. Inference is becoming

Pixxel, reimagining earth observation for a new era, led by Awais Ahmed and Kshitij Khandelwal, has announced a strategic partnership with Sarvam, led by Pratyush Kumar, to develop and build India’s first orbital data centre satellite. Under the partnership, Pixxel will design, build, launch, and operate the Pathfinder satellite, while Sarvam AI will provide the AI backbone, enabling both training and inference directly in orbit with full-stack language models running onboard

Nebius, the ultimate cloud for AI innovators, led by Arkady Volozh, and the team, has agreed to acquire Eigen AI, a leading inference and model optimization company, led by Ryan Wang, Wei-Chen Wang, Di Jin, and the team. The acquisition strengthens Nebius Token Factory by combining its optimization stack with Nebius’s global compute and AI cloud, while adding advanced inference research talent. Following the closing, Eigen AI’s inference and optimization layers will be integr

1X, building a truly abundant society through general-purpose robots capable of performing any kind of work autonomously, led by Bernt Børnich, has opened a 58,000-square-foot factory in Hayward, California. The company describes the facility as the first vertically integrated humanoid robot manufacturing operation in the United States. The facility is designed to produce 10,000 NEO robots in its first year, with consumer shipments expected before the end of 2026 and a targe

Featherless AI, enabling serverless inference via GPU orchestration and a model load-balancing system, led by Eugene Cheah and the team, has raised a $20 million Series A financing round co-led by AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures, with participation from BMW i Ventures, Kickstart Ventures, Panache Ventures, and Wavemaker Ventures. AI is entering a new phase focused less on capability and more on control, how models are run, where they are deployed, and who governs them. Today

Encord, the data layer behind the world's leading AI, led by Eric Landau and Ulrik Stig Hansen, has raised $60 million in Series C funding led by Wellington Management to scale its AI-native data infrastructure as physical AI hits an inflection point. The round also included participation from existing investors Y Combinator, CRV, N47, and Crane Venture Partners, and new investors Bright Pixel and Isomer Capital, bringing the total funding to $110 Million. In the coming years

DVC, a San Francisco–based VC focused on AI startups, led by Marina Davidova, Nick Davidov, and the team, has released its State of AI Report — a living, continuously updated analysis of the artificial intelligence landscape. According to the report, the market is mispricing AI. The State of AI report is based on a framework developed by DVC co-founders Nick Davidov and Marina Davidova over more than a decade of AI investing. It combines meta-analysis of leading industry rese

Hightouch, reinventing marketing with AI, led by Tejas Manohar, Josh Curl, and Kashish Gupta, has raised $150M at a $2.75B valuation, led by Goldman Sachs and Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from Amplify Partners, ICONIQ Capital, Sapphire Ventures, and TD7, the venture capital arm of The Trade Desk. While the funding marks an important milestone, the primary focus remains on building products that solve real customer problems. At its core, the plan is straightforwar

Windmill, building the context graph for your people, led by Brian Distelburger, Mark Tanner, Max Shaw, and the team, has announced a $12M fundraise led by Inspired Capital, with participation from Primary Venture Partners, Founder Collective, and Oceans Ventures. The company has grown to over 100 customers, including Kalshi, Rho, and Merge, since launching its performance reviews product in November 2025. “There’s no question that AI tools will transform how work gets done,”

Haladir, the operational AI layer for logistics, led by Jibran Hutchins, Quan Huynh, Preston Schmittou, and Joseph Tso, has raised seed round, bringing the total funding to $4.3M, led by BoxGroup and Susa Ventures, with participation from Sunflower Capital, Valkyrie Ventures, XPRESS Ventures, and various angel investors, following earlier backing from Y Combinator, SV Angel, and Josh Browder. Building Operational Superintelligence “Superintelligence” in logistics and supply c

Atech, an AI hardware startup, led by Tomas Harmer, David Stålmarck, Vladimir Baran, and the team, has raised a pre-seed round with participation from Nordic Makers, Emblem, Lovable, Sequoia Scout Fund (Sequoia), and Andreessen Horowitz Scout Fund (A16z). Atech is building a platform that makes hardware development accessible to everyone, removing one of tech’s highest knowledge barriers. The Problem Building a hardware prototype has traditionally required years of specialise

Scriptbee, an AI coworkers platform for revenue teams, led by Narayanan and Valentino, has pivoted to a platform where B2B companies can deploy agents for their revenue teams, i.e., sales, marketing, GTM, and outbound teams. What emerged from the pivot is not another tool, but a coordinated layer of AI agents operating across the entire revenue lifecycle. Scriptbee structures this into three motions: attract, nurture, and convert, each handled by autonomous agents rather than

Cleo Labs, building an automated product compliance for global brands, led by Anaelle Guez, Naomie Halioua, and Alexandre Bloch, has raised a €1.5 million funding round led by Larry Berger, with participation from Kima Ventures, Financière Saint-James, and several prominent figures from the tech ecosystem, alongside additional funding from Deel. The round will support technology development, drive European expansion, and prepare for entry into the U.S. market. A growing cha

Marloo, building AI for financial advisers, led by Hardy Michel, Shakeel Lala, and Ben Robertson, has raised a $10 M USD seed round led by Blackbird Ventures, with participation from Icehouse Ventures. Blackbird is doubling down on its pre-seed investment from six months ago, bringing the total funding to $12.7 M USD in twelve months. “Every advisory firm stands to benefit from a partner like Marloo. Early adoption is already translating into greater capacity, stronger compli

Avoca AI, re-engineering the services industry with AI, led by Apurva Shrivastava, Tyson Chen, and the team, has raised Series B at a $1 billion valuation, bringing the total raise to more than $125 million across Seed, Series A, and Series B. The company is backed by Meritech, General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, Amplify Partners, Nexus Venture Partners, and Y Combinator. The services economy is entering its software moment. Even large local service businesses still run on fra

Kemaro, building autonomous cleaning for industrial spaces, led by Martin Gadient, Armin Koller, Thomas Oberholzer, Nadja Gerber, and the team, has raised $5 million in an initial pre-closing of its Series B financing round led by Spicehaus Partner AG. The capital will support international expansion, with a focus on scaling operations in the United States and broadening the product portfolio. Founded in 2016, KEMARO has established itself as a leader in autonomous industrial

Sereact, physical AI that works where it matters the most, led by Ralf Gulde, Marc Tuscher, and the team, has raised a $110 million Series B round led by Headline, with participation from Bullhound Capital, Daphni, and Felix Capital. Existing investors Air Street Capital, Creandum (lead of Sereact's 2025 Series A), and Point Nine all returned for this round. The round supports two strategic priorities: scaling Cortex 2.0, the next generation of Sereact’s robotic brain, and ex

Verda, the full-stack AI cloud of tomorrow, led by Ruben Bryon and the team, has raised $117 million. The round combines equity funding led by Lifeline Ventures with participation from byFounders, Tesi, Varma, and other investors, alongside debt financing from a group of Nordic financial institutions. “We’re building next-generation AI cloud infrastructure for teams globally,” said Ruben Bryon, Founder and CEO of Verda. “This funding enables accelerated development and expans

Cloudsmith, a cloud-native artifact management platform, led by Glenn Weinstein, Lee Skillen, Alan Carson, and the team, has raised a $72M Series C financing led by TCV and with participation from Insight Partners, along with investments from other existing investors. The additional funding positions Cloudsmith for significant growth as it aims to power the next phase of AI-driven software development. The investment supports rapid growth at Cloudsmith, as enterprises shift t

Petual, delivering audit testing results from any dataset in minutes, with better than human precision, led by Snir Kodesh, Eliot Walker, and the team, has raised $20 million which includes a $17M round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and a $3.2M round led by First Round, with participation from Cowboy Ventures, Elad Gil, the founders of Lyft, Opendoor, and more. Efficiency in SOX Testing Audit is inherently a creative function, focused on understanding business risks and e

Realm, Agents for RFPs and sales deliverables, led by Johan Jern, Miika Huttunen, and Mikko Mäntylä, has raised a $4.5 million Seed round led by Frontline and joined by HubSpot Ventures, Lifeline, the founders of Slack and Deel, and many other incredible angels. Building Toward the “Cursor Moment” in Sales Software development workflows have rapidly evolved, with engineers now managing multiple AI agents simultaneously. A similar transformation is expected in revenue teams. P

NeoCognition , an Agent Lab for Specialized Intelligence, led by Yu Su, Xiang Deng, and Yu Gu, has announced its emergence from stealth with a $40 million seed funding round. The oversubscribed round was co-led by Cambium Capital and Walden Catalyst Ventures , with participation from Vista Equity Partners and others. Angel investors and founding advisors include Lip-Bu Tan, CEO of Intel, Ion Stoica, Co-Founder and Executive Chairman of Databricks, A&E Investments , Salien

Linexa , a Munich-based deep tech startup that decodes decades-old industrial automation code across vendors, making Europe's factories AI-ready, led by Viktor Stryczek, Alexandros Vassiliadis, Tobias Drees, and the team, has raised €2 million pre-seed round led by Project A , with Thomas Böck (CEO Festo), Bastian Nominacher (founder Celonis), and Christian Schlögel (former CTO/CDO Kuka & Körber) as angels. European manufacturing is facing mounting pressure, with Volkswagen c

inploi , an AI-powered candidate engagement platform, led by Matthew de la Hey and the team, has secured £3m funding in a round led by YFM Equity Partners , alongside support from existing investors. Following its 2021 pivot to enterprise SaaS, inploi integrates with existing systems to streamline candidate journeys, reduce drop-off, and improve hiring efficiency. The investment supports growth across product and commercial functions, including expansion of Talent Agents, AI-

VisioLab , building an AI self-checkout for high traffic venues, led by Tim Niekamp and the team, has raised $11 million Series A financing round co-led by eCAPITAL Entrepreneurial Partners and Simon Capital , with continued participation from existing investors High-Tech Gründerfonds  HTGF ), zwei.7 , and Heartfelt (formerly APX). The funding positions VisioLab for its next phase of global expansion, building on stadium-wide deployments at major venues while advancing a

Archil , the cloud filesystem for AI, led by Hunter Leath and the team, has raised $11M in new Series A capital led by Standard Capital with participation from Y Combinator , Felicis , Peak XV partners , Wayfinder Ventures , with participation from angel investors including Anurag Goel (Render), Richard Artoul (Warpstream), Andy Jefferson, and several individuals at Antithesis and Clay. This round, less than a year after the seed funding, brings Archil's total capital rais

This is a guest post by Daniel Liechtenstein, Co-Founder & CEO @ Hypercore. Private credit has grown into a $2+ trillion asset class. The capital is there. The deals are there. What hasn't kept pace is how firms actually run their operations once the money is deployed. That gap is becoming harder to ignore. The Hidden Operational Problem. Most private credit firms run loan servicing through a combination of spreadsheets, legacy systems, and manual workflows. Payment waterfall

Muse Group , creating the world’s most popular music apps and content, has published a survey conducted among 1,200 users across platforms like Ultimate Guitar, MuseScore, Audacity, and MuseHub, revealing a nuanced relationship between creators and AI. While adoption is already widespread, acceptance comes with strict conditions around control, authorship, and transparency. Artificial intelligence has rapidly entered the music creation workflow, but for most musicians, its ro