MENLO TIMES

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