MENLO TIMES

Vitalize, transforming how health systems optimize labor, led by Veeraj Shah and Sanketh Andhavarapu, has raised a $31M Series A led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from Norwest Ventures, Y Combinator, .406 Ventures, Constellation Ventures, and the MemorialCare Innovation Fund. Healthcare staffing faces a real-time coordination challenge similar to air traffic control, yet hospitals lack a centralized system to manage it. Staffing coordinators often rely on spreadsheets, pho

Rivercell, building the AI virtual cell to decipher biology and disease, led by Yann Fleureau and Éric Durand, has announced a $25 million seed round led by HV. HCVC, Alven, and Bpifrance Digital Venture also participated in the round, which will fund the scale-up of Rivercell’s proprietary data generation platform, the expansion of its wet lab in Paris (a lab working with chemicals and biological samples), and the launch of its AI Virtual Cell program. As an indication-agnos

Arena, the official AI ranking and LLM leaderboard, led by Anastasios Angelopoulos, Wei-Lin Chiang, and Ion Stoica, has announced a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation to continue on its mission to measure and advance the AI frontier for real-world use. In parallel, arena is announcing the release of its Alignment Index, which measures how AI can deviate from human values in the real world. Arena’s Series B, co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventu

Preference Model, a superintelligence data research company, led by Jennifer Zhou and Ning Cao, has open-sourced Karotte, a framework for building RL environments. Karotte, used internally for the past year, is the first component of the company’s RL environment development stack being released publicly. Designed with secure defaults and built-in primitives, it aims to simplify the creation of robust reinforcement learning environments and support safer, more aligned AI train

Vesta, an AI-native mortgage loan origination system, led by Mike Yu and Devon Yang, has announced a $30 million Series B, led by Conversion Capital, with strategic participation from Pennymac, New American Funding, Citi Ventures, NBKC Bank, First American, and FirstKey Mortgage, as well as participation from a16z, Zigg, and Navitas, bringing the total funding to $85 million. Vesta’s revenue has grown more than 12x in the past year, while customer numbers and headcount have i

Universal Quantum, the company building large-scale quantum computing systems for real-world use, led by Sebastian Weidt and Winfried Hensinger, has announced it has secured over $100 million in Series A funding - marking the largest Series A ever raised by a quantum firm headquartered in the UK. The round was co-led by DCVC and Firgun Ventures, with participation from EDBI, Artal (advised by Invus), Integral GlobalTech, Main Sequence, Hostplus, NGS Super, IAG Capital, EdenBa

Mecka, the data and deployment layer for physical AI, led by Josh Gao, Jason Chong, Mogen Cheng, and Duy Nguyen, has raised a $60 million Series B led by Sequoia Capital, backed by new investors including NVIDIA, M12 — Microsoft’s Venture Fund, Qualcomm Ventures, and Samsung, with continued support from Kindred, Framework Ventures, and Neo. The Physical World Was Never Recorded. The internet captures information, but not how humans interact with the physical world. Robots

Healthleap, a clinical AI platform that screens patients for conditions that often go undiagnosed, led by Josiah Meyer and Jemima Meyer, has raised $38 million in combined seed and Series A funding from Sequoia Capital, First Round Capital, and Hummingbird Ventures. Healthleap helps care teams identify at-risk patients earlier by reviewing their complete medical records daily. The funding will support expansion into more conditions and team growth across key functions. The Pr

Startup Policy Forum, a vital bridge between the startup community and policymakers, led by Shweta Rajpal Kohli, Avantika Gode, and Shubhangi Poddar, has launched DeepVerse, its centre for deeptech Innovation, bringing together investors, deeptech founders, policymakers, global technology companies, and academia to support the development of India’s deeptech ecosystem. DeepVerse will focus on policy, research and collaboration across 10 deeptech sectors, from semiconductors a

Sante, a leading fintech and AI platform for the wine and spirits industry, led by Darren Fike, has raised a $15 million Series A funding led by FINTOP alongside returning investors Bonfire Ventures, Operator Collective, Y Combinator, and Veridical Ventures. The funding comes 6 months after Santé announced its $7.6M seed, and during a period of immense growth where the business grew by 500%, serving nearly 1,000 retailers processing $2B in annual GMV. The Problem: Regulatory

Vocca, the AI platform medical practitioners rely on to speak with their patients, led by Eliott Hoffenberg and Hugo Danet, has announced a $20 million Series A led by Norrsken VC, with participation from Heal Capital, Speedinvest and Firstminute Capital, and angel investors including the founders of Alan and Datadog. Total funding to date is $25 million. Vocca Leads with National Deployments as the Category Matures. Vocca’s AI phone assistant automates inbound calls for heal

SafeWorld, an AI lab building robot safety simulation technologies, led by Kyle Wong, Dr. Ding Zhao, and Simo Rachidi, emerged from stealth with $12.2M in seed funding co-led by Shine Capital and a16z Speedrun, along with Box Group, Carnegie Mellon University Endowment, Innovation Endeavors, SV Angel, and other leading VCs & angel investors. SafeWorld’s platform provides safety testing and simulation software to help enterprises evaluate and deploy robots safely and responsib

Graduate Ventures, the Netherlands’ largest nationwide university-affiliated venture fund, led by Auke van den Hout, and the team, has launched its second seed fund of €125 million, with €100 million already committed. Graduate Ventures now partners with eight universities and three university medical centres, giving it nationwide coverage to provide startups with capital and hands-on support from its network of investors, successful entrepreneurs and alumni of its partner un

Risotto, the AI-native autonomous help desk, has announced the launch of its Autonomous IT Engineer. The new co-pilot can handle complex Tier-2 requests by investigating unfamiliar issues, analyzing logs, and executing fixes with human approval. It also turns successful resolutions into reusable workflows, reducing the need for repeated manual intervention. Automated IT’s Problem: Low Solve Rate for Most Edge Cases. Traditional IT automation typically handles basic Tier-1 r

Spiko, the tokenized cash fund leader, led by Paul-Adrien Hyppolite and Antoine Michon, has announced a $90 million Series B led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from investors including Index Ventures, Bpifrance, Speedinvest, Flourish Ventures, Shapers, White Star Capital, Blockwall, Frst, EQNX, Mirana Ventures, and Wintermute Ventures. Prominent angels also joined, including Axel Weber, former president of the Bundesbank, and the founders of Qonto. The

Furientis, manufacturing interceptor missiles engineered from day one for high-rate production, led by Brody Franzen and Aris Simsarian, has annouced $25M seed round, led by Benchmark Capital. Designing for Production at Scale. Furientis was founded in May 2025 around a central concern: while the U.S. produces some of the world’s most advanced defense technology, production capacity remains far below the scale required by modern threats. The debate around cost asymmetry, such

Valon, the AI-native operating system for mortgage servicing, led by Andrew Wang, Linda Du, and the team, has raised $150 million in Series D funding at a $2.3 billion valuation. For six years, Valon operated its own mortgage servicing business on ValonOS, proving its technology in one of the most regulated industries in the U.S. Last year, Valon sold its servicing business and opened ValonOS to the broader mortgage industry. The platform quickly attracted major servicers in

Hadrian, the agentic AI offensive security platform, led by Rogier Fischer, Maurice Clin, and Olivier Beg, has announced a $40 million funding round co-led by Forgepoint Capital International and SmartFin, with participation from existing investors HV Capital, Motive Partners, Picus Capital, and Oetker Ventures, bringing the total funding to $65M. The funding comes as AI reshapes offensive security. AI agents are increasingly capable of conducting cyberattacks with limited hu

Volantis, a scalable solution to the memory bottleneck, enabling more than an order-of-magnitude increase in capacity and bandwidth, led by Tapa Ghosh and Roy Meade, has raised a Series A, led by Lachy Groom and Abstract, totalling $97M in funds raised to date, including from Sam Altman, Jeff Dean, Dylan Patel, John Doerr & others. Volantis is developing an optical interconnect technology designed to enable models with over 10 trillion parameters to run at speeds of up to 10,

Breye Therapeutics, a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing oral therapeutics for the early treatment of retinal diseases, led by Ulrik Mouritzen, MD, EMBA, and the team, has raised an oversubscribed €67.5 million Series A financing round. The round was co-led by new investor Mission BioCapital and existing investor Novo Holdings, with participation from existing investor Sound Bioventures and additional new investors including the Ljungström family office, Inno