MENLO TIMES

Lumilens, the connectivity platform for AI infrastructure led by Ankur Singla, Ritesh Kapahi, Samuel Liu, Dave Friedman, Ted Schmidt, and the team, has emerged from stealth, having been founded to solve the growing networking bottlenecks limiting AI scale. In just two years after its founding, the company is commercially shipping its first product into production AI data centers under a multi-billion-dollar customer agreement, and announced more than $700 million in new fundi

Build -1 -> 0: Your chance to get on the ground floor with the founding team of a pre-seed or seed-stage startup. 1) EON - Charlie Horowitz & Tyler Presser are hiring engineers. Apply At: https://jobs.ashbyhq.com/EON 2) Westmag: Jordan Sanders and David Hansen are hiring a Sales & BD Lead in SF. Apply At: https://www.westmag.com/careers/7AD2EEFBCE 3) Mirendil: They're hiring a Technical Chief of Staff, GTM & Operations for up to $400K in SF. Apply At: https://jobs.ashbyhq.co

Alps2Alps, a tech-driven Alpine transfer company led by Artjoms Fokejevs and the team, has released a public API that allows tools like ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and Perplexity to assist users in booking last-mile transfers across more than 1,000 Alpine destinations. Until now, Alps2Alps has not offered a public API or supported price parsing. The launch is part of the company’s business-to-agent strategy, making its travel services accessible to AI agents as the market shifts

Hadrian, the advanced manufacturing company building highly automated factories for America, led by Chris Power and the team, has announced $1.37 billion in new equity financing co-led by WCM Investment Management, Washington Harbour Partners, Valor Equity Partners, 137 Ventures, and Baillie Gifford. JPMorganChase's Strategic Investment Group joined as anchor co-lead, investing through the firm's Security and Resiliency Initiative, a program dedicated to strengthening the ind

Naive, a Palo Alto-based AI lab building the infrastructure AI agents need to run entire businesses, led by Sean Dorje and Dennis Zax, has announced a $28.5 million Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, Zetta, Liquid 2, and angel investors including Gokul Rajaram, Tim Zheng (Apollo), JD Sherman (former HubSpot), Gert Lanckriet (Amazon), Robert Chatwani (Docusign), and Zachary Sims (Codecademy). The Problem: Apps Ship in an Afternoon, Bu

Malachyte, the first e-commerce AI Platform that adapts in real time, responding to consumer behavior instantly, led by Ian Anderson, Siddharth Motwani, and Shivaditya Sinha, has raised $10M in seed funding, co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Gradient Ventures, with participation from Harpoon Ventures, to bring this vision to life. Before founding Malachyte, co-founders Ian Anderson and his co-founder spent a decade at Spotify working on personalization. Their work inclu

Mirendil, democratizing frontier AI R&D to accelerate science and technology, led by Behnam Neyshabur, Harsh Mehta, Shayan Salehian, and Tara Rezaei, announced a multi-year partnership with Google Cloud to power the next generation of self-accelerating AI. Mirendil will scale its training, inference, and AI research workloads on Google Cloud’s AI Hypercomputer, drawing on both Google Cloud TPUs and full-stack NVIDIA AI infrastructure. Removing the Bottleneck in AI Progress. A

South Park Commons, helping the world's most talented technologists discover and build their life's work, announced $575M Fund IV. Since 2016, the firm’s thesis has been that exceptional outcomes emerge when high talent density meets innate curiosity. Its approach focuses on identifying intensely curious builders, bringing them together at the earliest and often most isolating stage of the startup journey, and supporting them through the uncertainty of company building. The f

Andromeda Surgical, building the intelligence layer for surgery, led by Nick Damiano and Kartik Tiwari, has raised a $15 million Series A led by Standard Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Vox Capital, Lingotto Innovation, Alumni Ventures, WestWave Capital, and others. Pioneer Fund has backed the company twice, starting at seed. Urologists in three countries have used the company’s system to perform holmium laser enucleation of the prostate (HoLEP) in more than 40

Wordsmith, an AI for in-house legal teams led by Ross McNairn, Robbie Falkenthal, and Volodymyr Giginiak, has announced a $14 million extension to their Series B, led by new investment from Intact Private Capital alongside existing investors Highland Europe and Index Ventures. FT Ventures has also become a shareholder in Wordsmith. The additional investment follows a period of rapid growth for Wordsmith, with revenue increasing 14x year over year and the platform now used by

Neuraspace, leading the way for Space Domain Awareness, AI, and Safety, led by Chiara Manfletti and the team, has announced €15.6 million in new financing, combining strategic private investment from Lince Capital, Explorer Investments, and Armilar Venture Partners together with funding awarded under Portugal's Recovery and Resilience Plan (PRRP), reflecting strong private and public confidence in the company's growth strategy. The funding will accelerate Neuraspace’s expansi

HappyRobot, powering the systems that run the world, led by Pablo Palafox, Luis Paarup, and Javier Palafox, has raised $150 million in Series C funding, led by Prysm Capital and co-led by Eurazeo. Existing investors a16z, Base10, and Y Combinator are doubling down, joined by strategics including Koch Disruptive Technologies (KDT), Kfund, Orange, T.Capital (Deutsche Telekom), Bankinter, Endeavor Catalyst, and Wave-X. The round values the company at $1.2 billion post-money, bri

Mariana Minerals, a software-first, vertically integrated minerals company focused on supplying the minerals critical to modern energy, AI, and defense technologies, led by Turner Caldwell and the team, has announced its $310 million Series B financing, led by Khosla Ventures, with continued support from Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Breakthrough Energy Ventures, and new participation from Greenoaks, Halo Fund, Pax Ventures, StepStone Group, BHP Ventures, Washington Harbour

Made, the AI platform developed by RHEI to amplify human creativity and scale content production, led by Shahrzad Rafati and Lewis Ball, is publicly debuting Made for Music, an agentic platform designed for artists, labels, and distributors. Built for the realities of today’s music industry, Made for Music enables teams to create, package, distribute, and promote releases across relevant platforms, providing a faster and more scalable way to turn a single track into a full-sc

Valar Atomics, scaling nuclear energy for heavy industrial power and clean hydrocarbon fuel production, led by Isaiah Taylor, has announced the closing of a $1 billion Series B financing led by Sequoia Capital. As part of this new partnership, Valar welcomes Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire to Valar’s board of directors. Sequoia was joined in this round by Apandion, Atreides Management, Conviction, Dream Ventures, HOF Capital, Point72, Riot Ventures, Snowpoint Ventures, Valor Eq

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

Rebellions, a global leader in AI inference infrastructure led by Sunghyun Park and the team, has successfully run SK Telecom’s sovereign AI foundation model ‘A.X K1’ (hereinafter K1) on its own server infrastructure and demonstrated an agent service capable of handling concurrent requests from multiple users on top of it. The milestone demonstrates how a domestic large language model paired with a high-performance Korean NPU can power real-world AI services, advancing the c

Ellis, the AI-native operations platform for private credit, led by Ryan Williams, has launched today with more than $10 million in seed funding closed. First Round Capital led the financing with participation from a group of prominent operators and investors, including Kearny Jackson, 645 Ventures, Harlem Capital, Khosla Ventures, Slow Ventures, Wilshire Lane, Westbound, Collide Capital, Gallery Ventures, Ariel Alternatives CEO Mellody Hobson, Thrive Capital Founder Josh Kus

Highland Europe, a growth-stage specialist investor, has announced its sixth fund of €1.1B and promoted two new Partners, on the back of generating over €1 billion of liquidity in 2026. The firm will continue backing Europe’s next generation of technology leaders. Founded in 2012, Highland has raised €3.75 billion across six funds, backed more than 80 companies, and completed 30 exits. Notable outcomes include the $3 billion sale of Nexthink, Huel's agreed acquisition by Dano

Eliyan, a leader in foundational connectivity technologies enabling next-generation AI compute, memory, and networking systems, led by Ramin Farjadrad, Patrick Soheili, and Syrus Ziai, has announced it has completed its Series C with a total of $145 million at a $1 billion valuation. The oversubscribed round was led by Seligman Ventures, with participation from additional new and existing investors, including two new strategic investors: Cisco Investments and Lumentum. As par