Startups

Apptronik Robotics Venture Capital Startups

Industrial Giants Back Apptronik's Humanoid Robot Vision with Expanded $403M Series A

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Chris McKay• March 19, 2025 • 3 min read

Apptronik has secured an additional $53 million from Mercedes-Benz, Japan Post Capital, and others, bringing their Series A round to $403 million as the humanoid robotics company prioritizes practical industrial applications before consumer markets.

Google Startups

Google Acquires Wiz for $32B in Record-Breaking Cloud Security Deal

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Chris McKay• March 19, 2025 • 1 min read

Google has agreed to acquire the cloud security firm Wiz for $32 billion, aiming to enhance its cloud security capabilities and expand multicloud protection.

Video AI Startups

xAI Buys Hotshot, a Startup Working on AI-Generated Video

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Chris McKay• March 17, 2025 • 2 min read

Elon Musk’s xAI has acquired Hotshot, a startup developing AI-powered video generation models, indicating that xAI may soon add video capabilities to its Grok chatbot.

Venture Capital Startups

Cartesia Raises $64M to Advance Real-Time Voice AI with Sonic 2.0

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Chris McKay• March 11, 2025 • 2 min read

Cartesia, a real-time voice AI company, has secured $64 million in Series A funding led by Kleiner Perkins, fueling the development of Sonic 2.0, a low-latency voice model with superior voice cloning and real-time capabilities.

Venture Capital Startups

Ceramic.ai Emerges from Stealth with $12M to Accelerate AI Model Training

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Chris McKay• March 5, 2025 • 3 min read

Ceramic.ai, founded by former Google VP Anna Patterson, has exited stealth with $12 million in funding to make AI model training 2.5x faster and more cost-effective for enterprises.

Startups

CoreWeave Acquires Weights & Biases in a $1.7 Billion AI Cloud Play

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Chris McKay• March 4, 2025 • 2 min read

CoreWeave, the NVIDIA-backed AI cloud provider, has acquired Weights & Biases, a leading AI developer platform, for approximately $1.7 billion, strengthening its position in AI infrastructure and software.

Venture Capital Startups Fintech

Unique Raises $30M to Expand Its AI Agents for Financial Services

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Chris McKay• February 27, 2025 • 1 min read

Swiss AI startup Unique has raised $30 million in a Series A round to expand its AI-powered financial compliance and research agents, with a focus on the U.S. market.

Startups

Inception Labs Launches Mercury, the First Commercial Diffusion-Based Language Model

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Chris McKay• February 26, 2025 • 2 min read

Inception Labs has launched Mercury Coder, the first commercial diffusion-based large language model (dLLM), promising up to 10x faster text generation and lower computational costs than traditional autoregressive models.

Venture Capital Startups

Together AI Raises $305M to Expand Its AI Acceleration Cloud

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Chris McKay• February 20, 2025 • 1 min read

Together AI has raised $305 million in a Series B funding round led by General Catalyst, bringing its valuation to $3.3 billion as it scales its AI Acceleration Cloud for open-source and enterprise AI.

Venture Capital Startups Healthcare

OpenEvidence Raises $75M to Scale AI for Doctors, Hits $1B Valuation

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Chris McKay• February 19, 2025 • 2 min read

AI-powered medical assistant OpenEvidence has raised $75 million in a Sequoia-led round, pushing its valuation to over $1 billion as it expands its AI copilot for physicians.

Startups

Ex-OpenAI CTO Mira Murati Launches Thinking Machines Lab with AI Veterans

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Chris McKay• February 18, 2025 • 2 min read

Thinking Machines Lab is focused on making AI systems more customizable, advancing foundational AI technologies, and promoting open science.

Venture Capital Startups

Can Tofu Solve Martech Bloat? Investors Bet $12M on It

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Chris McKay• February 13, 2025 • 2 min read

San Francisco-based AI marketing platform Tofu has raised a $12 million Series A round led by SignalFire to expand its unified AI-driven solution, addressing the growing challenge of martech bloat for go-to-market (GTM) teams.

Venture Capital Startups Chips

EnCharge AI Raises $100M to Bring Energy-Efficient AI Chips to Market

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Chris McKay• February 13, 2025 • 2 min read

The company is developing analog in-memory computing chips designed to significantly lower the energy consumption of AI inference workloads.

Venture Capital Startups Biotech & Health

Latent Labs Raises $50M to Bring AI-Designed Proteins to Drug Discovery

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Chris McKay• February 12, 2025 • 2 min read

The biotech startup founded by former DeepMind researcher Simon Kohl, has raised $50 million to develop AI models that design synthetic proteins from scratch, aiming to accelerate drug discovery and development.

France Venture Capital Startups

France’s Bpifrance Commits $10.3 Billion to AI Ecosystem Ahead of Global Summit

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Chris McKay• February 7, 2025 • 2 min read

This new commitment will focus on three areas: foundation models, AI infrastructure, and AI-specialized chips.

Venture Capital Startups

Self Inspection Raises $3M to Scale AI-Powered Vehicle Inspections

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Chris McKay• February 7, 2025 • 1 min read

The system automatically detects damage, assesses severity, and generates a detailed repair estimate, producing a report comparable to those from professional body shops.

SSI Venture Capital Startups

Safe Superintelligence in Talks for $20 Billion Valuation Despite No Revenue

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Chris McKay• February 7, 2025 • 3 min read

The figure represents a fourfold increase from its $5 billion valuation last September, despite the company having yet to generate any revenue.

Venture Capital Startups

Composo Secures $2M to Help Enterprises Evaluate AI Applications

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Chris McKay• February 7, 2025 • 1 min read

Composo's platform combines custom-built evaluation models with a flexible set of criteria to help companies assess their AI applications.

Google Startups

Google X Spins Off Heritable Agriculture to Transform Crop Development Using AI

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Chris McKay• February 3, 2025 • 2 min read

The company combines AI and advanced plant breeding techniques to develop more resilient and productive crops.

Venture Capital Startups

Tana Raises $14M to Transform Knowledge Work with AI-Native Workspace

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Chris McKay• February 3, 2025 • 2 min read

The startup’s core philosophy revolves around reducing “manual computing,” where humans manually move information between systems.

ElevenLabs Venture Capital Startups

ElevenLabs Raises $180M Series C, Triples Valuation to $3.3B

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Chris McKay• January 30, 2025 • 2 min read

The company's technology powers voice features for major platforms including Perplexity, Chess.com, ESPN, and The Atlantic.

OpenAI SoftBank Venture Capital Startups

OpenAI in Talks to Raise $40 Billion at $300B Valuation

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Chris McKay• January 29, 2025 • 3 min read

If completed, the deal would be one of the largest private funding rounds in history, making OpenAI the world’s second-most valuable startup after SpaceX.

Venture Capital Startups Cybersecurity

AI Security Startup Conifers.ai Secures $25M to Enhance SOC Operations with AI

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Chris McKay• January 29, 2025 • 1 min read

Its patent-pending architecture optimizes AI techniques for different types of security incidents while keeping costs predictable.

Venture Capital Startups

Clutch Security Raises $20M Series A to Tackle Machine Identity Protection

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Chris McKay• January 29, 2025 • 2 min read

The round was led by SignalFire, with participation from existing investors Lightspeed Venture Partners and Merlin Ventures, bringing the company's total funding to $28.5 million.