MENLO TIMES

SwitchOn, an AI-powered quality inspection for manufacturers, led by Aniruddha Banerjee, Avra Banerjee, and Neil Lasrado, has raised $8M (Rs 78Cr) in a Pre-Series B funding round led by IvyCap Ventures, with participation from SIG Tattva and Trifecta Capital. The Bengaluru-based Physical AI startup will use the funding to accelerate global expansion and advance zero-defect manufacturing for Fortune 500 customers, including Unilever, Bosch, and Maruti Suzuki. Its AI-powered qu

Emergent, an AI app builder that turns your ideas into monetizable software, led by Mukund Jha and Madhav Jha, has closed a $130 million Series C. Creaegis led the round, with MNI Ventures - Claypond Capital and Sentinel Global as co-leads and participation from Khosla Ventures, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator. The round values Emergent at $1.5 billion and brings the total funding to $230 million. A year after its public launch, Emergent has grown its val

Rime, building voice models made for human conversation, led by Lily Clifford, Brooke Larson, and Ares Geovanos, has raised a $24M Series A led by M13, with participation from Corazon Capital, Unusual Ventures, Cadenza Ventures, and Twilio Ventures. As part of this milestone, Rime welcomes Morgan Blumberg, Partner at M13, to the Board of Directors. Rafael Valle has joined Rime as the Chief Scientist. For the first time, advanced language intelligence is becoming an accessible

Monumental, making construction autonomous, led by Salar al Khafaji and Sebastiaan Visser, has announced a $32 million Series B led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from existing investors Hummingbird, Plural, and others. The round will grow Monumental’s world-class team of hardware and software engineers, scale the number of robots it can deploy across Europe, launch the company in the US this year, and expand the range of construction tasks the robots can handle. The

Thinking Machines Lab, an artificial intelligence research and product company, has introduced Inkling - a Mixture-of-Experts transformer with 975B total parameters, 41B active. It supports a context window of up to 1M tokens. It was pretrained on 45 trillion tokens of text, images, audio, and video. It is the first in a family of models of different sizes: alongside it, the company is sharing a preview of Inkling-Small, a lighter-weight model with 12B active parameters, trai

Valarian, a British technology company building sovereign intelligence, led by Max Buchan, Josh McLaughlin, and the team, has raised a $50 million (£37 million) Series A investment, led by US venture capital firm New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Lightbank, XTX Ventures, Sequel and Litquidity VC, together with angel investors Gokul Rajaram and Nikesh Arora, also participated in the round. “AI is becoming a defining force in global influence and competitiveness, making it essen

Skalar, providing digital tax consulting for companies, led by Björn Goß, Niklas Wagener, Florian Lang, Martin Gugel, and Christian Pötter, has closed a pre-seed and seed funding round totaling €12 million. The round was led by Headline, with participation from futurepresent, QED Investors, Repeat, MS&AD, and Foreword, as well as several prominent angel investors. Founded in 2025 by former Stocard founder Björn Goß alongside Niklas Wagener, Florian Lang, Martin Gugel, and Chr

Promptwatch, the analytics platform that helps brands understand and improve how they appear in AI-driven searches and conversations, led by Klaas Foppen and Gijs de Groot, has raised a €6 million seed round led by Seed + Speed Ventures after surpassing €2 million in ARR in May 2026, just 12 months after its launch, demonstrating a rapid and capital-efficient growth with only €1.2 million in pre-seed funding. The round also included participation from Blum Ventures, while Arc

Ollama, providing the easiest way to build with open models, led by Jeffrey Morgan and Michael Chiang, has raised $88M from Peter Fenton at Benchmark, Tomasz Tunguz at Theory Ventures, Alex Kolicich at 8VC, along with Solomon Hykes (founder of Docker), Aaron Katz (CEO of ClickHouse), Spencer Kimball (co-creator of GIMP and co-founder of Cockroach Labs), Quinn Slack (CEO of Amp), Marianna Tessel (board of directors, Cisco), Michael Montano (former head of engineering at Twitt

Prime Intellect, making frontier AI training accessible to every company, led by Vincent Weisser and Johannes Hagemann, has raised $130M, led by Radical Ventures, with participation from NVIDIA Ventures, Intel Capital, Dell Technologies Capital, and existing investors, bringing the total funding to over $150M to build the open superintelligence stack. Reinforcement learning (RL) is reshaping how frontier AI systems are built. While pre-training concentrated advanced AI develo

Polysense, enabling food lines to catch quality drift before it becomes waste, led by Jarne Bogaert, Yarne De Munck, and Lucas Van Dijck, has closed an oversubscribed seed round of $10.7 million led by Felix Capital, with participation from Fortino Ventures and angel investors including Syndicate One and 100IN. The Belgian technology company helps food manufacturers reduce waste by automating in-line quality control with real-time imaging and synthetic data models. Its platfo

Norm AI, setting the norms of agentic law, led by John Nay and the team, has raised a $120 million Series C at a $1.2 billion valuation, led by Khosla Ventures, the first institutional investor in OpenAI. Blackstone, Bain Capital Ventures (BCV), Craft Ventures, Coatue, Vanguard, New York Life, TIAA, Tony James (former President, Chief Operating Officer, and Executive Vice Chairman of Blackstone), Jeff Hammes (former Chairman of Kirkland & Ellis), and Fenwick LLP also particip

Tangos, building investigation intelligence for risk and financial crime, led by Eyal Azoulay and the team, has raised a $20 million seed financing round led by Red Dot Capital Partners, with participation from Leaders Fund, Clarim Ventures, Ventureisrael, Signal Fire, Clutch Capital, and Selah Ventures, and a strategic investment by Bright Data. Founded in 2025 by serial entrepreneur Eyal Azoulay, Tangos brings together expertise across financial crime investigations, sancti

Agave, building AI financial operations for contractors, led by Tom Reno, Pooria Azimi, and John Zucchi, has announced a $15M Series A led by Accel, with continued participation from Y Combinator, bringing the total funding to over $20M. With 500+ customers, 2+ years of profitability, and nearly 3x year-over-year recurring revenue growth, Agave is scaling AI for construction financials, deeply integrated with the systems contractors use today. Construction Runs on Decades-Old

Bespoke Labs, creating AI tools for data curation and post-training LLMs, led by Mahesh Sathiamoorthy and Alex Dimakis, has announced its Seed and Series A. Series A round was led by Wing VC, with participation from Mayfield, The House Fund, dbt Labs CEO Tristan Handy, and angels from Anthropic, OpenAI, Meta, and others. The $8.25 million seed round was led by 8VC, with participation from Jeff Dean, Resolve AI CEO Spiros Xanthos, DevRev CEO Dheeraj Pandey, and others. Why Bes

Katalyze AI, the agentic operating system for pharmaceutical companies, led by Reza Farahani, Shreyas Becker, has raised $10.5 million in seed funding led by Bonfire Ventures, along with Inovia Capital, Ripple Ventures, Alumni Ventures, and leading angel investors including Gokul Rajaram and Farzad Soleimani. Katalyze’s platform lets any scientist, engineer, or analyst in a biopharma company build teams of agents that take on real engineering, scientific, and manufacturing wo

Alqem, a German-Portuguese deep-tech start-up revolutionizing the discovery of high-impact materials through advanced AI and intelligent synthesis, led by Hanh Nguyen, Tiago Cerqueira, and Milan Allan, has raised €8 million in pre-seed funding co-led by UVC Partners and Union Square Ventures. Founded by the team behind Alexandria, one of the world's leading open materials databases, alqem is building an AI-powered materials discovery platform on two proprietary assets: a vas

StirlingX, a sovereign intelligence platform turning multi-sensor data into critical insight, led by Dean Jones and the team, has announced a $20m Series A led by Ventura Capital and RCM Private Markets Master Fund managed by Rokos Capital Management US (LP). Chaired by the former Director of GCHQ, StirlingX is tackling one of modern national security's most pressing challenges: enabling the secure capture and rapid use of high-value data across complex and contested environm

OXMIQ, a GPU and AI architecture company with expertise spanning every layer of the AI stack, led by Raja Koduri and the team, has closed its $35 million Series A financing, bringing the company's total capital raised to $60 million. The round was co-led by Fundomo and Samsung Catalyst Fund, with participation from MediaTek, AM Intelligence Labs, Pegatron Venture Capital, CDIB-TEN, Darwin Ventures, and Morgan Creek Digital, among other financial and strategic investors. OXMIQ

LinqAlpha, an AI-powered investment research firm that turns fragmented data from global markets into a real edge, led by Jacob Chanyeol Choi, Subeen Pang, Yongjin Kim, and Hojun Choi, has announced $22 million in Series A funding. The round was anchored by AVP, Atinum Investment, and GFT Ventures, with participation from a global syndicate of strategic financial institutions and venture platforms. Founded by Jacob Choi, Subeen Pang, Jin Kim, and Hojun Choi, LinqAlpha combine