MENLO TIMES

Recursive, building self-improving superintelligence to automate knowledge discovery, led by Richard Socher, Yuandong Tian, and Caiming Xiong, has emerged from stealth and raised $650M led by GV (Google Ventures) and Greycroft, with major participation from AMD Ventures and NVIDIA at a $4.65 billion valuation to create AI that conducts experiments on how to safely improve itself, in an open-ended process of automated scientific discovery. Open-ended evolution, both Darwinian

Origin Lab, a platform and technology company that captures, creates, and delivers premium, rights-cleared multimodal content for AI training, led by Anne-Margot Rodde, Antoine Gargot, and Colin Carrier, has raised $8M seed round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Eniac Ventures, FPV Ventures, Seven Stars, and SV Angel, along with angels from robotics, AI, gaming, and Google, including Twitch co-founder Kevin Lin and Cruise founder Kyle Vogt. For decad

Mantle8, unearthing natural hydrogen, led by Emmanuel Masini, has raised €31M in Series A funding led by Sandwater and includes Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Ecotechnologies 2 fund managed on behalf of the French government by Bpifrance, IP Group, Wind Capital, and Calderion (an Audacia-backed investment platform). This capital will fund the next two years of advanced natural hydrogen exploration and drilling. Mantle8 will deploy its technology platform to identify and rank p

Moment Energy, developing a new standard for commercial-scale energy storage, led by Edward Chiang and the team, announced it is building the world’s largest battery repurposing facility in Vancouver, British Columbia, over the next 6 weeks, marking a major step forward in scaling domestic energy storage infrastructure and the fastest in the world to scale battery manufacturing. The announcement follows the company’s $40M Series B, bringing total funding to over $100M and ref

Enhanced Radar, applied AI for aviation, led by Eric Button, has raised $7 million in funding, led by Initialized Capital, joined by investors such as United Airlines, Y Combinator, Decisive Point, and several individual founders and operators with a track record in aviation and elsewhere, including Tyson Weihs, Sky Dayton, Adrian Aoun, James Tamplin, Oliver Cameron, and other operators from top companies such as NVIDIA, OpenAI, and more. Enhanced Radar is building systems th

Fractile, the AI inference hardware company, led by Walter Goodwin and the team, has raised $220M to accelerate the path to getting its first chips and systems into customers’ hands, in a financing round led by Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund, with participation from Conviction, Gigascale, O1A, Felicis, Buckley Ventures, and 8VC, investing alongside its brilliant existing backers. Fractile, founded in 2022, was built on the belief that frontier AI is ultimately con

Proxima Fusion, building stellarators to power the future, led by Francesco Sciortino, Lucio Milanese, Jorrit Lion, Martin Kubie, and the team, has announced the creation of its Industrial Development Board (IDB), bringing together some of Europe's most experienced industrial and energy leaders to accelerate the shift from fusion science to large-scale industrial deployment. The IDB members include Luc Rémont, former CEO of EDF and Schneider Electric, Dr. Michael Bolle, forme

Isomorphic Labs, reimagining the drug discovery process with AI, led by Demis Hassabis and the team, has raised $2.1 Billion in Series B funding led by Thrive Capital, and includes participation from existing backers Alphabet and GV alongside new investors MGX, Temasek, CapitalG, and the UK Sovereign AI Fund, significantly expanding Isomorphic Labs’ global capital base. The new capital will advance Isomorphic Labs’ AI drug design engine (IsoDDE), accelerating its therapeutic

Star Catcher, powering the next industrial revolution, led by Andrew Rush, Michael Snyder, and Bryan Lyandvert, has raised $65 million in an oversubscribed Series A round. The new investment, led by B Capital and co-led by Shield Capital and Cerberus Ventures, the venture arm of Cerberus Capital Management, brings Star Catcher's total capital raised to $88 million. Cerberus’ General John W. “Jay” Raymond (Ret.), the first Chief of Space Operations of the United States Space F

Exaforce, an agentic SOC platform and MDR, led by Ankur Singla and the team, has raised $125M in Series B from Mayfield, Khosla Ventures, HarbourVest, Peak XV, Seligman Ventures, and AICONIC Ventures, taking the total funding to $200M. A year ago, emergence from stealth followed a $75M Series A and a clear thesis: SOCs cannot scale by hiring more analysts or engineers, nor by continuously adding SIEM rules. Scale comes from combining human expertise with task-specific AI agen

A*, guiding outliers from idea to IPO, led by Kevin Hartz, Bennett Siegel, Gautam Gupta, and the team, has announced A* III, a $450 million early-stage fund. A* was founded on a simple idea: becoming a founder’s first believer. Sector-agnostic but deeply specialized in seed investing, A* backs exceptional builders before consensus, traction, or even a product exists. The focus is driven not by market theses, but by conviction. As seed investing becomes increasingly crowded an

Adfin, the first platform designed from the ground up for the specific demands of invoice payments, led by Tom Pope & Ciprian Diaconasu, has raised Series A, bringing the total invested in Adfin to over $30M in less than two years. The long-time supporters, Index Ventures, have tripled down by leading the round, along with existing investors Visionaries Club. The company is delighted to welcome Stéphane Kurgan, one of Europe's best operators, and Andrey Khusid, founder of Mir

Nscale, the engine of superintelligence, led by Josh Payne and the team, has announced an additional $790 million in financing, committed by ABN AMRO, DNB, Eksfin, Nordea, and SEB, to reinforce the continued development of the AI data center in Narvik, Norway. This data center project is the largest AI infrastructure investment in Norway. The committed financing includes an additional $790 million uncommitted accordion feature to fund a further 115MW expansion at the Narvik

By Kevin Lausten, CEO, Morpheus Space - A leading innovator and manufacturer of advanced electric propulsion systems for in-space mobility. Electric propulsion is shifting satellites from fixed assets to mobile infrastructure. As orbital congestion rises, maneuverability is becoming a core driver of mission value. Access to Space Is Improving but Orbital Mobility Remains Constrained The “New Space” era has fundamentally changed launch economics. The cost per kilogram to orbit

Algorithmiq, bringing quantum to life, led by Sabrina Maniscalco, Guillermo García-Pérez, Matteo Rossi, and Boris Sokolov, has raised €18 million in funding led by United Ventures and Italian institutional investor Cassa Depositi e Prestiti (CDP), with continued participation from Inventure VC. This funding round brings Algorithmiq’s total funding raised to €36m, and represents Italy’s largest-ever venture capital investment in a quantum startup. While the quantum computing

Eyeo, building the future of imaging, led by Jeroen Hoet, Alden Carracillo, Gerd Van den Branden, and Jan Genoe, has raised €40 million in Series A funding, bringing eyeo’s total funding to €55 million. The round is led by Innovation Industries, with participation from existing investors imec.xpand, Invest-NL Deep Tech Fund, QBIC fund, High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), and Brabant Development Agency (BOM). eyeo has developed a nanophotonic color-splitting technology that enhance

By Helena Rebane, CEO of AddSearch For years, companies built websites for a browsing-based path to conversion. The assumption was simple: attract visitors, help them explore, guide them toward the right information, and move them gradually toward action. But that logic belongs to an earlier web. At AddSearch, what we increasingly see is that visitors arrive with far less patience and far more context, often shaped by AI tools before they ever reach the site. They are not loo

NanoStruct, developing high-performance biosensors to increase the quality of your products, led by Henriette Maaß, Kai Leibfried, Enno Schatz, and the team, has raised a seed funding round of €2.6 million led by High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF), Bayern Kapital, and the AUXXO Female Catalyst Fund. The funding builds on previous grants from the German Federal Ministry for Economic Affairs and Energy (BMWE) and the European Union. Molecular Fingerprint Instead of Days of Waiting D

By Andra Bagdonaitė, General Partner at FIRSTPICK Most early-stage investment decisions are made with almost no data. There's no revenue to analyze. No market share to defend. No proven team history at the specific problem they're now attacking. And yet capital gets deployed, at speed, in volume, based on frameworks built for a world that increasingly no longer exists. The question every serious early-stage investor should be asking right now: what is actually driving convict

Wisdom Ventures, a leading early-stage VC fund investing in tech-enabled wellbeing, led by Bradley Horowitz, Cecily Mak, Soren Gordhamer, and the team, announced the close of its oversubscribed $77.7M Fund II. The new raise comes after the successful deployment of its $10 million Fund I. With the new fundraise, Wisdom Ventures will deepen its investment in startups building technologies that advance human resilience and wellbeing at scale. “In an era where AI is reshaping eve