MENLO TIMES

Optivian , an AI sales execution platform, led by Roope Heinila, Visa-Pekka Laurila, Jesse Haka, Johanna Rauhala, and Duy Duong, has emerged  out of stealth, backed by a $2M pre-seed round led by  Failup Ventures  and Tero Ojanperä, former Executive Chair and co-founder of Silo AI, which was acquired by AMD in Europe's largest AI exit. Ojanperä joins the board alongside Topias Soininen, General Partner at Failup Ventures. Enterprise sales have long scaled by adding headcount,

Arbor , the AI research platform for enterprise operations, led by Veronica Ma, Kelly Zhou, and Ashish Dsa, has raised  $6.3 million in combined seed and pre-seed funding. The seed round was led by  645 Ventures , with participation from  Next Play Ventures  (led by LinkedIn Executive Chairman and former CEO Jeff Weiner),  Chaac Ventures ,  Comma Capital , and notable angel investors, along with a previously unannounced pre-seed round. Those closest to enterprise operations h

Polaron , harnessing the power of AI to accelerate the development of the materials that are critical to modern life, led by Dr Isaac Squires, Dr Steve Kench, and Dr Sam Cooper, has raised  $8 million led by Racine2 , an impact focused fund led by Serena and Makesense, with co-investment from  Speedinvest  and  Futurepresent , plus angel backing from senior figures across the Industrial AI ecosystem.  The capital will support the expansion of Polaron’s engineering team, accel

Day AI , reimagining CRM for the AI age, led by Christopher O'Donnell, has raised  $20M Series A, led by Sequoia Capital  with participation from Sound Ventures , Permanent Capital , Conviction, and Greenoaks . Pat Grady from Sequoia will join the company's board. Legacy CRM systems prioritize safety over speed, often turning simple questions into slow, complex projects. A new cohort of companies is adopting a different foundation, resolving the long-standing tradeoff between

RobCo , the Robot Company centered on Software and AI, led by Roman Hölzl, Paul Maroldt, and Constantin Dresel, has raised  $100 million, co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners  and Lingotto Innovation s, alongside Sequoia Capital , Greenfield Partners , Kindred Capital , Leitmotif , and The Friedkin Group . The venture capital investors contribute experience in building category-defining technology companies, while the industrial investors provide deep industry connections to

BottleCap AI , making LLMs radically more efficient, led by Tomas Mikolov, Jaroslav Beck, and David Herel, has secured  a $7.5M seed round led by 20VC  alongside an incredible group of founders (Canva, ElevenLabs, Datadog, Huggingface, Lovable, Synthesia, Pigment, and many more). Large language models continue to advance rapidly but remain inefficient, with progress largely driven by increasing compute rather than meaningful gains in reasoning. BottleCapAI focuses on architec

Lucend , building a future where all data center organizations in the world are transformed into intelligent ecosystems, led by Rene Gompel and Jasper De Vries, has secured  $3.3M in Seed funding led by Remarkable Ventures Climate (RVC) and was joined by Mitsubishi Electric Innovation Fund , New Climate Ventures , Avesta  and Stepchange with support from their current investor, 4impact capital . Lucend is expanding its transparent data center optimization to the U.S., enablin

Sakana AI , a Tokyo-based R&D company, led by David Ha, Llion Jones, and Ren Ito, has announced  a strategic partnership with Google, following its Series B  funding. Google is making a financial investment in Sakana AI, deepening its partnership and signaling confidence in Sakana’s technical capabilities and mission to advance AI in Japan. The collaboration will focus on improving AI product quality and deploying reliable AI systems in mission-critical industrial and scienti

TetraxAI , an AI-powered B2B SaaS platform transforming due diligence and risk management in clean-energy infrastructure, led by Marta Vizcaíno Martín, Arnau Tibau Puig, PhD, and Ekaterina Filina, has announced the closing of its pre-seed round of €1.2 million, led by The Footprint Firm , with participation from Norrsken Evolve  and Carbon13 , taking the total funding raised to date to €1.5 million, including non-dilutive funding from NEOTEC, Spain’s national deep-tech presti

Arctis AI , the contract operating system for construction professionals, turning complex documents into clarity, alignment, and control, led by Leon Stawowiak, Duc-Trung Nguyen, Dila Ekrem, and Simon Paul, has raised  $1M+ led by PT1  (Berlin/London), with participation from  EWOR , and a prominent group of angels, including Alexander Schwörer (Owner of PERI), Sebastian Johnston (Founding Partner at La Famiglia), Christian Vollmann (Founder of C1 Green Chemicals), Daniel Bro

Waabi , revolutionizing how humanity moves and connects, led by Raquel Urtasun, has closed  its oversubscribed $750M USD Series C round co-led by Khosla Ventures  and G2 Venture Partners , with participation from strategic investors, such as Uber, NVentures (NVIDIA’s venture capital arm), Volvo Group Venture Capital, and Porsche Automobil Holding SE, as well as financial investors: funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, Radical Ventures, HarbourVest Partners, a wholly owned

Nomagic , transforming the logistics industry through intelligent automation, led by Kacper Nowicki, Dr. Tristan d’Orgeval, Prof. Marek Cygan, and Pano Papamanoglou, has announced  a USD 10 million Series B extension round led by Cogito Capital Partners . With the newly added funding, Nomagic’s total funding now exceeds USD 84 million. Nomagic’s robots learn from large-scale real-world operational data, training a Physical AI platform to handle diverse warehouse workflows. Ph

Decagon , the AI concierge for every customer, led by Jesse Zhang and Ashwin Sreenivas, has secured   $250 million in funding, led by new investors Coatue Management  and Index Ventures , with participation from new investors ChemistryVC , Definition Capital , and Starwood Capital,  and continued support from existing investors including a16z , A* , Accel , Avra , Bain Capital Ventures , Elad Gil, Forerunner , Ribbit Capital , and T.Capital . Decagon’s latest funding follows

Rogo , the AI-platform purpose-built for finance, led by Gabriel Stengel, John Willett, and Tumas Rackaitis, has raised  a $75 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital , with participation from Henry Kravis and Wells Fargo , and continued support from previous investors Thrive Capital , Khosla Ventures , Tiger Global , and J.P. Morgan , bringing the total funding to more than $165 million. The funding will be deployed to scale the world’s first fully agentic end-to-end AI plat

Dragonfly AI , a leader in AI-powered creative testing, led by Steve King, David Mitchell, James Harvey, Hamit Soyel, Miranda Mapleton, Shelley Martin, and others, has raised  £5 million in new investment led by 24Haymarket  with participation from Guinness Ventures , and Foresight. The company has appointed Fiona Dent to the board. The funding will accelerate Dragonfly AI’s growth and advance its neuroscience-driven, training-data-free technology, which avoids bias common in

Fulcrum , building best-in-class AI tools & agents for insurance brokerages, led by Arjun Mangla and Sambhav Anand, has raised $25 million in combined Seed and Series A funding led by CRV , alongside South Park Commons , Foundation Capital , and a group of angels from both insurance and technology. Insurance enables people and businesses to take bold risks by making loss survivable and innovation possible through shared risk. It underwrites much of modern economic activity, m

Pace , the AI operations partner for insurance, led by Jamie Cuffe, has raised  $10 million in funding led by Sequoia Capital . The company welcomes Bryan Schreier and Lauren Reeder as partners on this journey, representing Sequoia on the board. Insurance carriers shoulder risk to protect homes, businesses, and future planning, but operational friction, submissions, policy servicing, claims, and compliance remain manual and resource-intensive. This friction slows product laun

Concourse , AI agents for corporate finance teams, led by Matthieu Hafemeister and Ted Michaels, has raised  a $12M Series A led by Standard Capital , with participation from Andreessen Horowitz , CRV , Y Combinator , SV Angel , FOG Ventures , and Ritual Capital ; CFOs from companies like Cursor, Vercel, and Carta, 1Password; and executives at OpenAI, Brex, Mercury, Color, and more. A year after emerging from stealth, Concourse AI agents are deployed at Fortune 500 companies,

Twin , the AI company builder, led by Hugo Mercier & Joao Justi, has announced its launch with a $10M seed round led by LocalGlobe . Recent tools like Cursor, Claude, and Lovable demonstrate AI’s potential to write software, but most businesses rely on operations, sales, customer management, finances, marketing, and logistics, rather than code. Twin enables users to execute complex workflows in minutes without coding, with some building fully autonomous businesses entirely on

Flora , your creative environment to go from idea to production faster with generative workflows, led by Weber Wong, has raised  a $42M Series A led by Alex Bard and Jordan Segall at Redpoint Ventures , with participation from the CEOs of Vercel (Guillermo Rauch), Frame.io (Emery Wells), and Fal (Burkay, Gorkem, and Batuhan). This brings the total capital raised to $52M, alongside existing investors including Mike Volpi at Hanabi, Menlo Ventures , a16z Speedrun , Long Journe