MENLO TIMES

Kraken Technology, a British-founded maritime defence company led by Mal Crease and the team, has announced the closure of its Series B funding round led by DTCP and supported by other British and European backers, including the British Business Bank, NATO Innovation Fund (NIF), Rheinmetall, Inocea Group, as well as Venture Capital (VC) firms HICO, Thesiger Capital Group, BOKA Capital, Supernova Invest and Hakluyt Capital. Early investors in the company such as NIF, the UK’s

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

QuantumDiamonds, the world's first commercially available quantum sensing system for semiconductor inspection, led by Dr. Fleming Bruckmaier and Kevin Berghoff, has announced the close of a €91 million funding round to scale production of its quantum-based semiconductor inspection technology. The financing combines an €15 million equity round led by World Fund with €76 million in non-dilutive funding approved at the EU level under the European Chips Act. The non-dilutive fund

SambaNova, the fastest AI inference platform, led by Rodrigo Liang, Kunle Olukotun, Christopher Re, and Lip-Bu Tan, has announced it has completed the first close of $1 billion in strategic financing as part of a Series F round, valuing the company at $11 billion post-money. This latest financing round was led by General Atlantic, a leading global investor, with significant investment from Seligman Ventures, T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., and Capital Group. New and existing

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

Proxima Fusion, building stellarators to power the future, led by Francesco Sciortino, Lucio Milanese, Jorrit Lion, Jonathan Schilling, and Martin Kubie, has raised a €411 million ($468 million) financing round, bringing the company’s valuation to €2.4 billion ($2.7 billion) and establishing Proxima as the best-funded fusion company in Europe. The round was led by XTX Ventures and East X Ventures, with RWE and Google as strategic investors. KfW Capital, SPRIND and Burda Princ

TaiSan, building next-gen sodium batteries for micromobility, led by Sanzhar Taizhan and the team, has raised £4.65M co-led by Eos Advisory, and the Midlands Engine Investment Fund II through fund manager Mercia Ventures, with participation from AFI Ventures, EverQuest Capital Partners, Adeline Arts & Science, Techmind, angel François Badelon, and existing investors InnoEnergy, TSP Ventures, Exergon, and Heartfelt. Of the total raised, £700,000 came from Innovate UK, which pr

CurifyLabs, powering a new generation of personalized therapies, led by Charlotta Topelius, Niklas Sandler, and the team, has announced the closing of a $14 million Series A funding round. The round was co-led by Sandwater and HealthCap, with participation from Tesi (Finnish Industry Investment Ltd.) and existing investors, including Lifeline Ventures. US customers and employees also participated in the round. The funding will support CurifyLabs' expansion in the U.S., streng

EquiLibre Technologies, building the next generation of algorithmic trading, led by Martin Schmid, Ph.D., Matej Moravcik, Ph.D., and Rudolf Kadlec, Ph.D., has raised Series A, now valued at $500 Million. The round was led by Creandum, and, although the VC also declined to disclose the size of the round, vice president Cameron Sellers confirmed that it was the largest single investment the firm “has ever made in one go into a company,” he told TechCrunch. Reinforcement Learni

Realta Fusion, decarbonizing industrial heat and power with compact, scalable, modular – CoSMo fusion™ – energy systems, led by Kieran Furlong, MBA, Cary Forest, PhD., Jay Anderson, PhD., Ben Lindley, PhD., Oliver Schmitz, PhD., and the team, in collaboration with partners at the University of Wisconsin-Madison demonstrated direct energy conversion (DEC) on the Wisconsin HTS Axisymmetric Mirror (WHAM) prototype fusion device. This is the first time a commercial fusion company

Six Robotics, an Oslo-based company developing swarm autonomy as a force multiplier, led by Christian Fredrik Eggesbø, Mathias Nedrebø, Cecilie Hammer, Ole Jørgen Seeland, Oscar Heyden, and Kristine Angeltvedt, has raised a €12 million equity financing round led by DTCP, with participation from EIFO (Export and Investment Fund of Denmark) and Scale Capital, alongside other private investors. The funding will accelerate product development, expand customer deployments across E

Base44, helping you build apps with AI in minutes, led by Maor Shlomo and the team, has announced a major milestone: its own model, Base1. Engineering Philosophy. Base44 believes that modern software companies are defined by the engineering challenges they choose to solve and the technologies they are willing to build in-house. Since its inception, the company has focused on taking on ambitious engineering projects, with a long-term commitment to owning the core technologies

GATE Space, the Austrian space company, led by Moritz Novak, Fabian Duschel, and the team, has won €6.3 million in funding through the European Commission’s EIC Accelerator program. The financing consists of a combination of research and development grants and equity investment implemented by the European Investment Bank (EIB) and is considered one of Europe’s most competitive technology funding instruments. Funding Utilization. GATE Space was the only company from the space,

OpenAI and Broadcom (NASDAQ: AVGO) have unveiled Jalapeño, OpenAI’s first Intelligence Processor: an accelerator architected around OpenAI’s vision for the future of LLM inference, and the first AI accelerator in a multi-generation compute platform the companies are building together to make advanced AI faster, more reliable, and more accessible to more people. Building the AI Stack In-House. OpenAI has taken delivery of its first custom AI chip, Jalapeño, from partners Broad

NaukNauk, helping you animate your world, led by Daniel Liu, has recently raised $20M in venture capital to advance its vision of establishing a creative community that celebrates the fandoms and collectibles people love. Building an AI-First Social Network for Collectors. The new funding will support NaukNauk’s vision of creating an AI-first social network for collectors, hobbyists, and fandom communities. Designed by enthusiasts for enthusiasts, the platform aims to connect

STARK, delivering the defence systems that Europe and NATO need now, led by Uwe Horstmann and the team, has announced a €500 million financing round to accelerate defence research, development, and manufacturing across Europe. The financing brings together investors from across the defence, technology, and institutional finance sectors, including Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, the NATO Innovation Fund, Project A, Air Street Capital, 201 Ventures, Advent, and Döpfner Capital.

Menlo Ventures, an early-stage VC firm, marked its 50th anniversary and announced $3 billion in new capital, the largest raise in Menlo’s history, to back the next generation of AI leaders, from infrastructure and frontier models to AI-native applications across enterprise, healthcare, and consumer markets. Two Funds to Go All In on AI. Menlo Ventures XVII focuses on Seed and Series A investments, backing founders at the earliest stages as they develop breakthrough technologi

Nearfield Instruments, a semiconductor metrology equipment company developing and delivering ground-breaking process control metrology solutions for the worldwide advanced semiconductor I.C. manufacturing industry, led by Roland van Vliet and Hamed Sadeghian, has announced the successful closure of a $380 million Series D funding round led by new investor Fidelity Management & Research Company, along with Temasek, Walden Catalyst Ventures, Innovation Industries, M&G Investmen

NeuralTrust, the platform for AI & agent security, led by Joan Vendrell and Victor García, has announced a $20 million seed round led by Alstin Capital, with participation from VentureFriends, Seaya, Kibo Ventures, Banc Sabadell, EA Ventures Plug and Play Fund, and Finaves, the venture capital fund of IESE Business School. NeuralTrust is also backed by public funding from the European Innovation Council and Spain's State Research Agency (AEI). The round will fund engineering,

Dawn Aerospace, building a scalable, sustainable space transportation network, with the frequency and reliability of aviation to seamlessly connect the Earth and space economies, led by Stefan Powell, Jeroen Wink, James Powell, Robert Werner, and Tobias Knop, has announced the close of its Series B funding round, raising $25 million at a $195 million post-money valuation. The round was led by US-based VC Balerion Space Ventures. Participants include Mana Ventures (US), ANA Fu