MENLO TIMES

Exa, an API Developer for LLM Search, led by Will Bryk and Jeff Wang, has introduced Snapshot, a new way to search the past. As AI models are tested on increasingly complex tasks, temporal evaluation is emerging as a way to measure whether models could have discovered information before it was published or predicted what happened next. Exa Snapshot enables this testing by providing access to more than 400 billion webpage snapshots spanning two decades, allowing searches of th

Magnetic, providing AI digital workers for operations at large industrial companies, led by Robin Van Aeken and Odhran O'Donoghue, has announced an $18 million Series A. The round was raised a year after launch and led by Felicis, alongside existing investors Sequoia Capital and The Westly Group. "The physical world is dealing with the biggest capex cycle in history, driven by AI demand, during a time of trade disruption and geopolitical challenges," said Robin Van Aeken, CE

Comp AI, an AI-native compliance and security company helping businesses navigate an increasingly complex security landscape, led by Lewis Carhart, Claudio Fuentes, and Mariano Fuentes, has announced a $34 million Series A led by Roo Capital and Grand Ventures. The raise follows a period of rapid growth since the company’s January 2025 founding, with Comp AI achieving 15x ARR growth year-over-year and now serving more than 1,000 customers. The funding will accelerate the com

EnduroSat, a space company building standardized, software-flexible satellites and a streamlined constellations-as-a-service model, led by Raycho Raychev, has raised $205 million in a round co-led by Riot Ventures and Atreides Management, with backing from the European Innovation Council, Google Ventures, Founders Fund, House Capital, Lux Capital, Omnes Capital, Giant Ventures, Emphatic Capital & Endeavor Catalyst. Scaling Serial Production. The funding will help EnduroSat ex

Sakana AI has released Fugu Max, which expands the Pareto Efficiency Frontier by orchestrating its largest pool of open and specialized models to date, and Fugu Ultra v2, which pushes peak performance higher than ever before, without the indispensable reliance on the frontier models it orchestrates. The Two-Dimensional AI Frontier. The AI industry has largely focused on one metric: building increasingly capable and expensive foundation models. But real-world AI has another cr

Integral, connecting accounting, tax, and payroll in one AI-native firm, led by Lukas Zörner and Anil Can Baykal, has announced an €18m Series A, co-led by Mosaic Ventures and Reid Hoffman, with its existing investors Cherry Ventures, General Catalyst, and Puzzle Ventures joining again. It brings the total capital raised by Integral to more than €30m. Where Integral Started. Before Integral, the founders spent years building banking and payments products for businesses and sp

By Ayush Yadav, Founder, AY Technologies. This is an Op-Ed on Operators' Stack, Menlo Times. There has probably never been a better time to build software. What once required weeks of engineering can increasingly be prototyped in days, sometimes hours. AI can generate code, debug problems, create interfaces, explain unfamiliar technologies, and help small teams experiment with ideas that previously required significant time and money. As someone building software products for

Periodic Labs, an AI research and deployment company creating models and autonomous labs to accelerate science, led by Liam Fedus, Dogus Cubuk, and the team, has introduced Periodic Neon, a 1T-parameter model that was post-trained to analyze experimental results and deployed to its physical labs. This is a step towards putting autonomous discovery into the hands of scientists. Building AI-Powered Materials Labs. Since launching last year, Periodic has built high-throughput la

Thatch, building a healthcare system people love, led by Chris Ellis and Adam Stevenson, has raised a $108 million Series C funding round, bringing Thatch's valuation to $1 billion. The funding comes from The General Partnership, Index Ventures, Scale Venture Partners, General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, Avid Ventures, Quiet Capital, SemperVirens, and QuantumLight, with strategic participation from Eli Lilly and Company, ADP Ventures, and Paychex. Putting Consumers in Cont

Liquid Compute, building a regulated exchange for compute: verification, clearing, settlement, and price discovery for neoclouds, AI companies, and traders, led by Ronit Jain and Aarav Patel, emerges from stealth with a $15 million seed round co-led by Chemistry and Firstmark. They are joined by K8 Capital, Night Capital, TrueBridge, Brainchild Holdings, UFO Holdings, Y Combinator, and angel investors such as Dmitry Balyasny. Alongside the launch, the company is announcing pe

Jack & Jill, an AI agent for your career, led by Matthew Wilson and Saaras Mehan, has raised a $40M Series A, led by Air Street Capital with participation from Creandum and Madrona, to move faster toward a job market where every person and company has an agent in their corner. Jack is an AI agent for candidates, while Jill is an AI agent for employers. When the two identify a potential match, they connect the candidate and company directly, removing the traditional applicatio

Exein, a global leader in embedded IoT cybersecurity, Gianni Cuozzo, Giovanni Alberto Falcione, Gerardo Gagliardo, and Gary Walshe, has raised $270 million in new funding at a $1.7 billion valuation, led by Headline, with participation from Sofina, Goldman Sachs, EIB Group through the European Tech Champions Initiative (ETCI), KfW Capital and T.Capital, plus existing investors Balderton, HV, Intrepid Growth Partners, 33N Ventures, Lakestar, Supernova Invest, Blue Cloud Ventur

Nuance Labs, building a human foundation model with emotional intelligence, led by Fangchang Ma, Edward Zhang, and Karren Yang, has raised $50 million in Series A funding led by returning investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from returning investors Accel, South Park Commons, and new investors NVIDIA and Define Ventures. The company will open a research preview of its model to the public later this year. Nuance Labs is developing AI that perceives and resp

Temporal, which develops and distributes the world's leading open-source durable execution system, led by Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev, has raised a $550M Series E at a $12.55B valuation, co-led by Lightspeed, with Wellington Management, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, and Tiger Global, with strong participation from T. Rowe Price and SV Angel. Returning investors include a16z, Sequoia, Index, GIC, Sapphire Ventures, and Amplify. The Challenge of Building Reliabl

Buildots, building construction intelligence to power your whole operation, led by Roy Danon, Aviv Leibovici, and Yakir Sudry, has announced $130 million in new funding, led by O.G. Venture Partners, with Mohari Ventures, Qumra Capital, Human Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Avigdor Willenz, Intel Capital, Poalim Equity, and Viola Growth, bringing the total raised to $297 million. Construction leaders manage multi-billion-dollar projects with thousands of moving parts, o

Chift, building the agentic infrastructure for financial connectivity, led by Gauthier Henroz, Matthieu Hertoghe, and Henry Hertoghe, has raised a €10.5M Series A to solve Europe's financial connectivity problem. The round is led by BlackFin Capital Partners, the European fintech specialist, with its existing investors Entourage, Shapers, Seeder Fund, and Wallonie Entreprendre all doubling down. Chift’s latest milestone reflects the support of its investors, employees, and cu

Uplift Ventures, an independently operating venture platform investing in and building startups shaping the future of Physical AI, Energy, Enterprise AI, and Logistics, has announced the launch of its inaugural €100 million venture capital fund, dedicated to backing Europe's next generation of Deep Tech founders. Uplift Ventures plans to back up to 20 startups and selected Deep Tech funds from its €100 million fund, creating a unique global network that benefits founders long

Archy, the AI platform for dental practice management, led by Jonathan Rat and the team, has raised $50 million in Series C funding led by JMI Equity, along with existing investors TCV, Entrée Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, CRV, and Alven. The funding will accelerate development of AI agents that help dental teams automate work across their practices. Archy’s System of Action for Dental Practices. Archy is an AI-powered platform designed to replace fragmented dental soft

Rime, the leading enterprise voice AI platform, led by Lily Clifford, Brooke Larson, and Ares Geovanos, has announced a strategic partnership with Dialpad, the AI platform for customer experience. Under the agreement, Rime will become the primary text-to-speech (TTS) provider for Dialpad’s agentic voice AI products, delivering natural, conversational audio across business communications worldwide. As businesses deploy autonomous AI systems, demand for human-like voice synthes

Volition Capital, a Boston-based growth equity investment firm, led by Managing Partners Sean Cantwell, Larry Cheng, Roger Hurwitz, and the team, has announced the final closing of Volition Capital Fund VI, L.P. (“Fund VI”) at its hard cap of $950 million in limited partner capital commitments. Fund VI was oversubscribed, reflecting strong demand from both its existing and new limited partners. Fund VI is the largest fund raised by Volition to date, bringing its total assets