MENLO TIMES

OLIX, building the infrastructure for frontier AI, led by James Dacombe and the team, has raised a $312m Series B financing round at a $3.3bn valuation, two years after it was founded. The round included Fundomo, Arm and Hudson River Trading, alongside angel investors including Reed Hastings, the co-founder of Netflix, with existing investors all increasing their commitments. Existing investors Hummingbird Ventures, Crane, Plural, Creandum, Phoenix Court, and Transition all i

Commonwealth Fusion Systems, the world's largest and leading commercial fusion energy company led by Bob Mumgaard, Brandon Sorbom, Steve Renter, and others, has announced that it raised $1 billion of additional equity financing. This capital raise is the single largest funding round among fusion energy companies worldwide since CFS announced its $1.8 billion Series B round in 2021. With this capital, and the $863 million the company raised last year, CFS has now raised a tota

ChipAgents, the category leader in agentic AI platforms for semiconductor design, led by William Wang and the team, has announced an additional $60 million in Series A2 financing, bringing the expanded round to $134 million just six months after its initial Series A close. The financing reflects continued investor confidence in the company’s commercial momentum, with new investor B Capital joining Bessemer Venture Partners, Micron, MediaTek, Ericsson, ScOp, and other existing

Array Labs, designing, building, and operating the world’s most advanced radar satellites, led by Andrew Peterson and Jose Isaac Robledo, has raised $21 million in an oversubscribed strategic investment round, anchored by Mitsubishi Electric Corporation, one of Japan's largest defense and aerospace companies, with continued participation from Catapult Ventures, Kompas VC, and Y Combinator. As part of the financing, Array Labs and Mitsubishi Electric have entered into a partne

Antares, building compact nuclear microreactors to deliver reliable, mobile energy where it’s needed most: remote military bases, austere industrial sites, and, one day, deep space and underwater missions, led by Jordan Bramble and the team, has raised $470 million in Series C funding, co-led by Paradigm and Caffeinated Capital, with participation from Point72 Ventures, Shine Capital, Industrious Ventures, and others. The funding will accelerate Antares’ transition from a pro

Limitless Labs, the world’s first Agentic Physical AI platform for CAD/CAM (Computer-Aided Design and Computer-Aided Manufacturing) in mechanical manufacturing, led by David Priev, Shahaf Finder, Assaf Peleg, and the team, has raised a $20 million Series A round co-led by Dell Technologies Capital and Square Peg, with participation from Grove Ventures, Meron Capital, and Kinetica. The AI agent integrates directly into existing CAD/CAM systems, enabling manufacturers to captur

Science Corp, a clinical-stage medical technology company led by Max Hodak and the team, has announced the European commercial launch of PRIMA, the first and only treatment shown in clinical trials to restore functional central vision to patients with geographic atrophy (GA) caused by age-related macular degeneration (AMD), a leading cause of blindness. PRIMA has received a CE (Conformité Européenne) mark under the European Union Medical Device Regulation from DEKRA, authoriz

Humanoid, a UK-based AI and robotics company building industrial humanoid robots led by Artem Sokolov and the team, announced a $152 million Series A financing at a $1.35 billion post-money valuation. This funding brings the total amount raised to date to $270 million. The round was led by Prime Movers Lab with participation from Schaeffler, Bosch, Fubon Financial Holding Venture Capital, and Aglaé Ventures. The investment marks a significant milestone for the European techn

Neo, building real-time protection for the agentic enterprise, led by Nicholas Warner, Shlomi Salem, and Eran Shirazi, has emerged from stealth with $100M in funding from Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Craft Ventures and Merlin Ventures. Neo was founded by former executives and engineers from SentinelOne, Wiz and Palo Alto Networks. The company's platform provides security operations (SecOps) teams with inventory management, posture

General Compute, building the world's fastest AI cloud, led by Finn Puklowski and Jason Goodison, has announced a committed debt facility of up to $400 million from Upper90 Capital Management, LP (“Upper90”). The financing begins at $100 million and scales with customer demand, allowing General Compute to quickly build one of the world’s largest inference neoclouds to deliver AI results 16x faster than current GPUs. $400M Debt Facility to Expand AI Compute Infrastructure. Ge

Fireworks, the frontier platform for training and inference on open-weight models at scale, led by Lin Qiao, Benny Chen, Chenyu Zhao, Dmytro Dzhulgakov, Dmytro Ivchenko, James Reed, and Pawel Garbacki, has announced a $1.505 billion Series D at a $17.5 billion valuation, led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from Evantic Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nvidia, 20VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, and others. This milestone c

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

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

Singularity, the defence tech startup building a safer world, led by Jack Oswald and the team, has emerged from stealth with an $80M Series A led by Khosla Ventures and Felicis, a $400M valuation, and a mission to deploy “low-cost air defence systems at scale.” Seed investors AE Ventures and NEA participated in the round, alongside Harpoon, Menlo Ventures, New Vista, Decisive Point, Y Combinator, Long Journey, and others. Like many next-generation defense startups, Singularit

Flexell Space, leading innovations in space solar cells, focusing on improving cost, delivery, design, and power efficiency, led by Taehun(Tim) Ahn, PMP, Dr. Shinyoung Noh, and Keosan Lee, has completed a $20 million Series A funding round. Existing investors InterVest, L&S Venture Capital, and QUAD Ventures made significant follow-on investments. New investors included Mirae Asset Venture Investment, Mirae Asset Capital, Industrial Bank of Korea, NH Venture Investment, IBK S

Helsing, providing Artificial Intelligence to protect its democracies, led by Dr. Gundbert Scherf, Niklas Köhler, and Torsten Reil, has raised $1.8bn in a Series E, valuing the company at US$18bn. New and existing investors participated in the round, including Dragoneer Investment Group, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Disruptive, Iconiq, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, JPMorgan Chase, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board (CPP Investments), General Catalyst, Plural,

Pixel-Flo, reinventing MicroLED production with continuous-Flo™, led by Rick Smith, Suneal Ghataora, Simon Jones, and Sanger Hsu, has raised £5.25 million in seed funding led by Northern Gritstone, with additional investment from SCVC, the Parkwalk Northern Universities Venture Fund, and German investment firm HTGF. Pixel-Flo is developing a scalable manufacturing technology designed to reduce the cost of MicroLED display production. Its proprietary fluidic self-assembly proc

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