MENLO TIMES

Hydrosat , providing irrigation and crop management solutions to help governments preserve water while increasing farmers’ crop yields, led by Pieter Fossel and others, has announced  the close of $60 million in new funding to accelerate growth across commercial, civil government, and defense markets led by Hartree Partners ,  Subutai Capital Partners , and  Space 4 Earth , with new investment from  Truffle Capital . The round includes follow-on investment from the Luxembourg

Parloa , the premier provider of AI agents elevating enterprise customer experience, led by Malte Kosub, Stefan Ostwald, Latane Conant, Csaba Tamas, Chris Silver, and Tino Mittelmeier, has announced  $350 million in Series D funding led by General Catalyst , with strong continued support from Parloa’s existing investors, including EQT Ventures , Altimeter Capital , Durable Capital Partners , and Mosaic Ventures , bringing its valuation to $3 billion. Closing just seven months

WitnessAI , a platform that helps enterprises protect and accelerate their AI journey across the rapidly evolving AI tech stacks, led by Rick Caccia, Gil Spencer, Stephanie Gilliam, and others, has secured  strategic funding of $58 million led by Sound Ventures , with participation from Fin Capital , Qualcomm Ventures , Samsung Ventures, and Forgepoint Capital Partners . The company also unveiled expanded agentic AI governance capabilities that bring observability to global e

Skene , automating onboarding, retention, and growth, so vibe-coders can focus on building, led by Teemu Kinos, Michele Boggia, and Teppo Hudsson, has closed  a €800,000 pre-seed round led by Superhero Capital  and with participation from NVIDIA executives. AI-driven development has created a $113B execution gap, where products ship faster than they achieve activation, adoption, or retention. With 42% of startups missing the market and over half of SaaS tools going unused, co

Aule Space , building the robotic workforce for the space economy, led by Jay Panchal, Nithyaa Giri, and Hrishit Tambi, has secured  $2 million in pre-seed funding led by pi Ventures , with participation from a clutch of angel investors, including Eash Sundaram, former Board Member of Intelsat and Founder of Utpata Ventures, and Arvind Lakshmikumar, CEO of defence tech company Tonbo Imaging , among others. Aule Space has been part of the Entrepreneurs First  accelerator progr

Aikido , securing your code, cloud, and runtime in one central system, led by Willem Delbare , Roeland Delrue , Felix Garriau , and others, has secured $60 million in Series B at a $1B valuation, led by Tom Stafford at DST Global , with participation from PSG Equity , Singular, Notion Capital , and others. Aikido was created to fix a core problem in security: developers were being burdened, not supported. Traditional tools generated noise instead of clarity and complexity ins

VoiceRun , building a secure, reliable voice infrastructure for enterprises, led by Derek Caneja and Nicholas Leonard, has secured  $5.5 million in funding.  In the near future, AI-powered voice agents will be able to communicate anytime, anywhere, and in any language, with billions expected to run on VoiceRun. Advances in real-time voice understanding and generation from companies like ElevenLabs, Deepgram, and Fish Audio, combined with intelligence from models by OpenAI, Ge

SkyFi , an AI-first Earth intelligence platform, led by Luke Fischer, Bill Perkins, and others, has raised  a $12.7 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round co-led by Buoyant Ventures  and IronGate Capital Advisors , with new participation from DNV Ventures , TFX Capital , Beyond Earth Ventures , Nova Threshold , and Chris Morisoli, and existing investors RSquared VC  and J2 Ventures . The investment will fuel faster product development and strengthen SkyFi’s techn

Cast AI , the leading Application Performance Automation platform, led by Yuri Frayman, Leon Kuperman, Laurent Gil, and others, has introduced OMNI Compute , a unified compute control plane that automatically discovers available resources across cloud providers and regions and transparently extends existing Kubernetes clusters to consume them. The company also announced a strategic investment from Pacific Alliance Ventures (PAV) , the U.S.-based corporate venture arm of Shins

Sandstone , the home for AI-native legal departments, led by Nick Fleisher , Liam Germain , and Jarryd Strydom , has announced its launch with a $10 million seed round led by Sequoia , with participation from an incredible group of additional investors as well as over 20 GCs, law firm partners, and customers. Experience in fast-growing B2B companies and legal tech consulting revealed a critical gap: in-house legal teams face inefficiencies from scattered knowledge and outdate

Deepgram, enabling human-machine interactions with voice AI, led by Scott Stephenson , Adam Sypniewski , Shadi Baqleh , and others, has secured $130 million in Series C funding at a $1.3 billion valuation, led by AVP . All major existing investors joined the round, including Alkeon , In-Q-Tel, Madrona , Tiger, Wing , Y Combinator , and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock. Several new investors, including Alumni Ventures  and Princeville Capital , participated in the round

Nuclera , the biotechnology company accelerating drug discovery by providing rapid, easy access to functional proteins through its benchtop eProtein Discovery™ System, led by Michael Chen, Gordon Mcinroy, and others, announced  a USD $12 million financing extension, bringing the Company’s total Series C funding to USD $87 million, led by  Elevage Medical Technologies  and Jonathan Milner, joined by existing investors British Business Bank  and GK Goh . The investment will acc

Avenue Biosciences , the protein engineering platform enhancing production yield and the quality of your end product, led by Tero-Pekka Alastalo, Katja Rosti, Veli-Pekka Jaakola, Juulia Simonen, and Anton Klavus, has secured  $5.7M in seed extension funding round co-led by Balnord  and  Tesi , with support from existing investors  Voima Ventures , Inventure ,  University of Helsinki , and Dimerent, to scale a high-throughput protein engineering technology that accelerates the

Bluecopa , the unified finance operations management platform, led by Satya Prakash, Nilotpal Chanda, and Raghavendra Reddy, has secured  $7.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Singapore-based Analog Partners , with participation from existing investors Blume Ventures  and Dallas Venture Capital , bringing the total funding to $11.6 million. “This funding fast-tracks our vision of autonomous finance, where routine processes run themselves, and teams focus on strategy

Boltz , helping every scientist reshape biology, led by Gabriele Corso, Jeremy Wohlwend, and Saro Passaro, announced  its launch with $28 Million Seed Round from Zetta , Amplify , a16z , and strategic angels, including Clement Delangue (CEO of Hugging Face), Factorial Capital , and Obvious Ventures . AI-powered molecular modeling is advancing rapidly, offering the potential to make biology programmable, digitize experiments, and accelerate drug development. However, emerging

Protege , building the data layer for AI training, led by Bobby Samuels, Travis May, Engy Ziedan, and Richard Ho, has announced a $30 million Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz ( a16z ). The financing expands the company’s $25 million Series A from August 2025 and brings total funding to $65 million since the company’s founding in 2024. Returning investors include Footwork , CRV , Bloomberg Beta , Flex Capital, Shaper Capital , and more. Bobby Samuels, CEO and co-found

Lux Capital , a Venture Capital Firm, started in 2000, investing in opportunities at the frontier of science and technology that others find too hard, too early, or too confusing, led by Peter Hebert, Josh Wolfe, and others, has announced  its largest fund to date, Lux Ventures IX, a $1.5B commitment to investing in the people turning sci-fi into sci-fact.  Entire sectors, from aerospace and biotech to defense and industrials, are being rebuilt by a bold new generation of sci

Biographica , developing cutting-edge deep learning and knowledge graph technology to identify and prioritise high-value targets for crop gene-editing, led by Cecily Price and Dominic Hall, PhD, has raised £7 million in a funding round led by  Faber VC , with participation from SuperSeed , Cardumen Capital , The Helm , EQT Foundation , and Sie Ventures . The round also included existing investors Chalfen Ventures , Entrepreneurs First , Nucleus Capital , Dhyan Ventures , Sara

Unusual , surveys AI models to discover how they see your brand, and then creates content to shape their view, led by Will Jack and Keller Maloney, has secured  $3.6 million seed round, led by BoxGroup , Long Journey Ventures , Y Combinator , Instacart co-founder Max Mullen, and Phosphor Capital . AI models now influence a significant share of buying decisions, yet most brands have little insight into how these systems describe them, or how to correct inaccuracies. Gartner es

Even Healthcare , a healthcare company based out of Bengaluru that offers comprehensive health covers for individuals and businesses, led by Mayank Banerjee, Matilde Giglio, and Alessandro Ialongo, has secured  $20 Mn (INR 180.5 Cr) in a fresh funding round from existing investors like Lachy Groom and Alpha Wave , as well as new investor Sharrp Ventures , among others. The startup plans to use the new capital to expand its hospital presence in Bengaluru following the launch o