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,