MENLO TIMES

Jatter, building privacy-first AI browser, led by Juan Soberanis, announced an AI browser that provides answers tailored to each user’s online activities. Secure, Personalized Intelligence. Jatter keeps user data secure, encrypted, and fully under the user's control. By accessing information from authenticated sources that traditional AI assistants and browsers cannot safely reach, the platform transforms large volumes of information into personalized, actionable insights t

Taktile, the agentic decision platform for financial institutions, led by Maik Taro Wehmeyer and Maximilian Eber, has announced its $110M Series C fundraise, led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives. The Opportunity. Financial services are undergoing one of the most significant technological transformations in their history. Recent advances in AI have pushed model capabilities to a point where many of the decisions that drive banking and insurance operations can now

Bland, an enterprise voice AI platform for phone agents, led by Isaiah N. Granet, Sobhan Nejad, and the team, has raised an additional $50 million to keep going from Scale, Emergence, HubSpot, Dell Technologies Capital, Upfront (and more), bringing it past $100 million raised in under three years. Tackling Complex Voice Conversations. Most voice AI solutions are designed for simple, highly structured interactions. However, the conversations that drive meaningful business out

Made, the AI platform developed by RHEI, led by Shahrzad Rafati and Lewis Ball, to amplify human creativity and scale content production, has launched Made Multi-Platform. The AI-powered workflow helps creators turn one long-form video into platform-ready clips, vertical videos, and thumbnails across YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook. The Problem. For modern creators, a single piece of content rarely stays in a single format. One long-form video often needs to be trans

Tamarind Bio, building AI infrastructure for biotech R&D, led by Deniz Kavi, Sherry Liu, and the team, is integrating NVIDIA-optimized NIM microservices into the inference layer that powers the Tamarind platform. Building the Infrastructure for Agentic Biology. Advances in AI are rapidly transforming how new molecules, drug candidates, diagnostics, and biological tools are discovered and designed. Yet computational biology workflows often remain complex, requiring researchers

Probook, the AI operating system for home services, led by George Eliadis, Ben Cervantez, and Lewis Zhang, has announced $40M from Andreessen Horowitz and Sequoia Capital. Built by Operators. Probook was founded by a team with firsthand experience in the home services industry. Early experience in pressure washing, HVAC, plumbing, and electrical operations exposed the inefficiencies that service businesses face every day, inspiring the creation of a better solution. Founders

JustAI, which enables you to scale hyper-personalized messaging with AI, led by Neha Mittal, Jeff Hara, and the team, has raised $17.5M in Series A, led by Base10, with participation from PeakXV and Y-Combinator. Reaching this milestone reflects strong confidence from investors and partners in an increasingly competitive market. More importantly, the new funding creates an opportunity to accelerate the next phase of growth and execution. In reflecting on this moment, focus

Prosper AI, building AI phone agents for healthcare, led by Xavier de Gracia, Josep Mingot, and the team, has banked $30 million just nine months after announcing its seed funding round. Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the Series A round with participation from Base10 and continued support from Emergence Capital, Y Combinator, and Company Ventures. Prosper AI is building an AI workforce for healthcare operations. The platform handles patient calls, appointment scheduling, ins

Timefold, developing vehicle routing and shift scheduling APIs for field service and workforce management, led by Maarten Vandenbroucke, Geoffrey De Smet, and the team, has raised a $13M Series A funding round led by Alstin Capital, with co-investor Kompas VC, and continued backing from existing investors Lakestar and Smartfin. Timefold provides scheduling and optimization infrastructure for field service and workforce management software. Following 4x ARR growth in 2025, th

Groq, building fast, low-cost inference, has announced $650 million in new growth capital to accelerate the expansion of its AI inference cloud. The round was led by Disruptive and Infinitum, with participation from investors who elected to reinvest in the company. Groq’s current growth phase gained momentum following a licensing agreement with NVIDIA in late 2025 and the subsequent introduction of NVIDIA’s LPX platform, which incorporates Groq’s inference technology. These d

Isometric, building agentic certification for the industrial economy, led by Eamon Jubbawy and the team, has announced a $40 million Series A round led by AVP, which counts global insurer AXA as an anchor investor. The round brought in every one of its existing institutional investors, including Plural and Lowercarbon Capital, as well as personal investment from John Doerr and Walter Kortschak. A tonne of green steel looks no different from a tonne of conventional steel. The

Sakana AI, building frontier AI in Japan, led by David Ha, Llion Jones, and Ren Ito, has introduced Sakana Fugu, a new product from Sakana AI that delivers a full multi-agent orchestration system as a single foundation model. Fugu dynamically orchestrates the world’s leading AI models to solve complex, multi-step tasks through a single API. This approach enables multi-agent intelligence to deliver frontier-level performance while eliminating single-vendor dependency and avoi

Copperlane, the AI-native platform for mortgage origination, led by Brianna Lin and Athan Zhang, has announced its $4.1 million seed round, led by TQ Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, US News Digital Ventures, Eight Capital, and angels from Mercor and others. Reimagining Mortgage Origination With AI. Copperlane was founded to address the inefficiencies and complexity that continue to define the mortgage process for both lenders and borrowers. The company is buil

Pramaana Labs, building the verification layer of AI for accelerated trust and super-intelligence, led by Ranjan Rajagopalan, Krishnan Raghavan, and Sanjay Ganapathy, has raised $27 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Accel, Boldcap, Nexus Venture Partners, Premji Invest, and Unbound. Closing AI's Trust Gap. AI can generate answers, but in high-stakes domains such as tax, law, healthcare, finance, and governance, accuracy alone is not enoug

Odyssey, an AI lab pioneering general world models, led by Oliver Cameron and Jeff Hawke, has announced its $310 million Series B at a $1.45 billion valuation, led by Natural Capital, with participation from Amazon, GV, AMD Ventures, EQT, IQT, and others. They join existing investors including Jeff Dean, Elad Gil, Qasar Younis, Kyle Vogt, Garry Tan, alongside researchers from OpenAI, DeepMind, MSL, Recursive, and Thinking Machines. Building the Foundation for World Models. Mo

Causa Prima, the agent-to-agent network for finance teams, led by Maex Ament, Henrik Gebbing, and Philip Stanislaus, has raised a $10M pre-seed round led by Creandum, with participation from Kfund and HelloWorld, Angel Invest, alongside angel investors from Qonto, Pennylane, SAP, ING, SoFi, LIDL, and DeepMind. On its network, the approvals, disputes, and payment terms that used to bounce between humans and inboxes are handled between AI agents. Building the Financial Network

Cortea, building AI audit agents for professional audit firms, led by Valentin Neumann and Philipp Hövelmann, has raised €12 million in seed funding led by Dawn Capital, with participation from Cherry Ventures, Mosaic Ventures, and angel investors including Larry Bradley, former Global Head of Audit at KPMG. Building Trust in AI-Powered Audits. This milestone reflects more than a funding achievement; it highlights a broader transformation underway across the audit profession.

Sakana AI, building frontier AI in Japan, led by David Ha, Llion Jones, and Ren Ito, has introduced Sakana Marlin, its first commercial product, an autonomous research assistant for business, built on long-horizon reasoning technology. Give it a research topic, and Marlin works autonomously for up to roughly eight hours, crafting a detailed strategy report up to a hundred pages long, along with executive summary slides. Automating Strategic Research. Sakana Marlin is designed

Waniwani, the leading revenue and compliance infrastructure for the agentic distribution of financial services, led by Maxime Antoine, Robin Diligent, Raphaël Vullierme, and Luiza Gusmao, has raised $8 million in seed funding led by Seedcamp, with participation from Redstone, Plug & Play, Zone II Ventures, OPRTRs Club, and Kima Ventures alongside a group of prominent angel investors. Waniwani has already become the infrastructure of choice for global financial institutions na

Capsa AI, building the AI intelligence layer private capital has been waiting for, led by Danyal Özdüzenciler and Callum Downie, has announced its $18M Series A, co-led by TX Ventures and Pivot Investment Partners, with participation from Bek Ventures and continued support from Outward VC, Antler, and Cornerstone VC, alongside angel investors, including Paul Forster, co-founder of Indeed. Building Institutional Intelligence For Private Capital. Capsa was founded to solve a