Newsletter #58

This Week's Good Reads

Roland Berger - Humanoid robots 2026: The convergence moment - Roland Berger argues humanoids are moving from prototypes toward industrial scale as AI, actuators, compute, power systems and labor shortages converge, with a baseline OEM market forecast of $300B by 2035 and a much larger component opportunity around actuators, structures and end effectors. Roland Berger
McKinsey & Company - The robotics tipping point: Physical AI and the race to scale - McKinsey's interview with Neura Robotics CEO David Reger frames robotics scale as a data, sensing and platform problem: useful autonomy will require tactile, visual and audio inputs, physical training environments and a marketplace-like layer for deployable robot skills. McKinsey & Company
Axios - What's next in robotaxis: an infrastructure roadblock - Axios highlights the less visible constraint on robotaxi expansion: depot real estate, charging, maintenance and local infrastructure may become as important as autonomy software as fleets move from pilots to scaled urban operations. Axios

Robotics and AI Companies Funding

Pre-seed / Seed

Hint - $10M, Seed round led by Slow Ventures, with Montauk Capital, Tusk Venture Partners, Amplo, Energy Impact Partners, Hannah Grey VC, and Brian Kelly joining. Hint starts with a user's address and uses property, weather, soil, air quality, and document signals to guide maintenance, insurance, utility, and repair decisions.
DesignVerse - more than $5.5M, Seed round co-led by Begin Capital and GapMinder VC, with Underline Ventures and strategic angels from Adobe, LSEG, and UiPath participating. DesignVerse builds AI infrastructure that uses enterprise design systems, component libraries, documentation, and internal rules to generate software that fits existing architectures.
Sprouts - $9M, Pre-Series A round led by True Global Ventures and Accel. Sprouts builds AI-native revenue agents for enterprise GTM teams, spanning account discovery, enrichment, buyer mapping, relationship networks, product heatmaps, and autonomous outreach.
Shyld AI - $13.4M, Seed round led by Aulis Capital with Asset Management Ventures, Camford Capital, and others. Shyld AI combines edge AI, multimodal room sensing, and targeted UV-C disinfection to monitor hospital rooms and automate disinfection for clinical and environmental services teams.
Mongoose AI - Undisclosed, Seed extension round backed by Vertical Venture Partners, Overstory Partners, and Connecticut Innovations. Mongoose AI builds a governed AI Experience Layer for health plans that executes payer workflows across member, provider, call-center, and back-office operations.
Graphon AI - $8.3M, Seed round led by Arvind Gupta of Novera Ventures with Perplexity Fund, Samsung Next, GS Futures, Hitachi Ventures, Gaia Ventures, B37 Ventures, and Aurum Partners. Graphon AI builds a pre-model intelligence layer that maps relationships across multimodal enterprise data before foundation models use it.
Atech - $800,000, Pre-seed round backed by Lovable, Nordic Makers, Emblem, scout capital tied to Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, and Anton Osika. Atech turns hardware ideas into suggested kits, generated firmware, and browser-uploadable prototype workflows.
Secludy AI - $4M, Seed round led by Impression Ventures with LAUNCH, The Syndicate, Wedbush Ventures, Precursor Ventures, Hustle Fund, Script Capital, Mana Ventures, and Chispa VC. Secludy AI builds privacy-guaranteed synthetic data infrastructure for regulated teams training, fine-tuning, and evaluating AI models.
Hacktron AI - $2.9M, Pre-seed round led by Crane Venture Partners with Project Europe, Vercel Ventures, Plug and Play Tech Center, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, strategic partners, and angels. Hacktron AI builds an AI security engineer that tests every code change like an attacker and helps developers remediate findings in pull requests.
Origin Lab - $8M, Seed round led by Lightspeed with SV Angel, Eniac Ventures, Seven Stars, FPV Ventures, Kevin Lin, and Kyle Vogt. Origin Lab turns licensed video game worlds into structured, rights-cleared training data for world models.
Config - $27M, Seed round led by Samsung Venture Investment. Config is industrializing high-quality motion data for robotics models through operations in Seoul and Hanoi.
Zerops - $2M, Seed round led by Gi21 with Presto Ventures. Zerops is building a cloud platform that keeps development, testing, and deployment inside one production-like project environment.
DDD Invoices - EUR1.31 million, Seed round led by Fil Rouge Capital and 500 Global. DDD Invoices provides one API for global e-invoicing compliance across SaaS, ERP, POS, PMS, marketplace, and payment platforms.
Enhanced Radar - $7 million, Seed round led by Initialized Capital with United Airlines Ventures, Y Combinator, Decisive Point, Lombardstreet Ventures, Multimodal Ventures, Anomaly Fund, and operators. Enhanced Radar builds aviation-specific AI for live air traffic operations, trained on messy ATC audio and geospatial context.
White Circle - $11M, Seed round backed by Romain Huet, Durk Kingma, Guillaume Lample, Thomas Wolf, Olivier Pomel, Francois Chollet, Mehdi Ghissassi, Paige Bailey, and David Cramer. White Circle provides a real-time AI control platform that monitors model inputs and outputs against customer policies.
Pillar - EUR12M, Seed round led by Earlybird Venture Capital and Base10 Partners, with Italian Founders Fund participating. Pillar builds an AI-powered operating system for construction that absorbs accounting, bank feeds, site messages, quotes, workforce updates, and margin data into one operational view.
Dishio - $2.5M, Seed round from undisclosed investors. Dishio connects restaurant guest data from QR codes, ads, reservations, online ordering, POS systems, and loyalty programs, then turns it into automated marketing tied to actual behavior.
NanoStruct - EUR2.6M, Seed round led by HTGF, Bayern Kapital, and Auxxo Female Catalyst Fund. NanoStruct combines nanostructured sensor chips, optical measurement technology, biotechnology, and AI to identify foodborne pathogens like Listeria and Salmonella in hours.
Driive - Undisclosed, Pre-seed round backed by Nebraska Angels, Nelnet, MOVE Venture Capital, and Luke Hansen. Driive builds Dot, an AI booking agent for home service trades that answers leads, checks drive-time availability, and books appointments.
Ciridae - $20 million, Seed round led by Accel with Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst, Sunflower Capital, and Backcountry Ventures. Ciridae builds AI operating systems for real workflows in mid-market businesses across restoration, logistics, industrial services, healthcare, construction, and PE-backed operations.
Lyrie.ai - $2 million, Pre-seed round from undisclosed investors. Lyrie.ai is building security infrastructure for AI agents, including a royalty-free Agent Trust Protocol for identity, scope, attestation, delegation, and revocation.
Holmes - EUR1.1M, Pre-seed round led by Syndicate One with NewSchool.vc, RDY.VC, 100IN, and angel investors. Holmes builds autonomous QA software that observes user flows, generates tests, and keeps them running as products change.
Dessn - $6M, Seed and pre-seed funding led by Connect Ventures with betaworks and N49P. Dessn lets designers and product teams design, prototype, and explore directly inside their actual app using real components, states, and production context.
Tolemy Bio - EUR1.4M, Pre-seed round led by Norrsken Evolve with Big Sur Ventures, JME Ventures, Masia, Redbus Ventures, and angel investors. Tolemy Bio builds Orbit, an AI-native control panel that connects lab instruments, experimental data, virtual cell models, and AI research agents for cell biology teams.

Series A

Judgment Labs - $32M, Seed and Series A funding led by Lightspeed, with Nova Global, SV Angel, Valor Equity Partners, Dynamic Fund, and Christopher Manning backing the company. Judgment Labs turns production traces from AI agents into evals, alerts, and product improvements.
GridCARE - $64M, Series A round led by Sutter Hill Ventures, with John Doerr, utility strategics, and existing climate investors joining. GridCARE Energize models congestion, outages, weather, and demand variability to find usable capacity inside existing grid infrastructure for AI compute.
GovWell - $25M, Series A round led by Insight Partners, with Work-Bench, Bienville, David Reeves, Andreas Huber, and Chris Bullock participating. GovWell automates permitting, licensing, planning and zoning, and code enforcement workflows for local government agencies.
Novella - $21M, Series A round led by Brewer Lane Ventures with BoxGroup, Crystal Venture Partners, SV Angel, Avid Ventures, Verissimo Ventures, Blank Ventures, and Arch Capital Group Ltd. Novella is building an AI-native wholesale insurance brokerage platform for E&S placements and related back-office workflows.
Wirestock - $23M, Series A round led by Nava Ventures with Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners, Formula VC, I2BF Global Ventures, and other strategic and existing investors. Wirestock is a multimodal data platform that helps AI labs source rights-cleared creator content across images, video, 3D, design assets, music, and spatial data.
Nectar Social - $30M, Series A round led by Menlo Ventures and its Anthology Fund with True Ventures, GV, and Kinship Ventures. Nectar Social builds an agentic social operating system for comments, DMs, creator workflows, social listening, and commerce moments.
Outmarket AI - $17 million, Series A round led by Permanent Capital Ventures with SignalFire, Fika Ventures, TTV Capital, and Dash Fund. Outmarket AI turns fragmented insurance brokerage data into automation and analytics for policy checks, loss-run analysis, proposals, appetite search, and cross-sell insights.
Fangshi Tech - nearly 100 million yuan, Series A round from Beijing Kechuang Yizhuang Direct Investment Fund and AECC Fund. Fangshi Tech builds embodied-intelligence construction robots for concrete flooring, spraying, grinding, tile laying, and stone paving.
Greenboard - $20M total funding, Series A round led by Base10 Partners, with Y Combinator, General Catalyst, Wayfinder Ventures, Commerce Ventures, Transpose Platform, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Kulveer Taggar. Greenboard builds AI-native compliance software for financial institutions.
Star Catcher - $65M, Series A round led by B Capital with Shield Capital and Cerberus Ventures. Star Catcher is developing satellites that beam additional power to other spacecraft, turning orbital power into shared infrastructure for data centers, communications, and radar missions.
Roadrunner - $27M, Seed and Series A funding led by Kleiner Perkins and Founders Fund. Roadrunner builds an AI-native CPQ workflow that lets teams prompt, quote, and approve complex pricing for products with seats, usage, credits, services, and approvals.
Adfin - $18M, Series A round led by Index Ventures with Visionaries Club, Stephane Kurgan, and Andrey Khusid. Adfin builds agentic finance workflows on owned payment rails to automate payment follow-ups, credit control, and cashflow tasks for SMEs.
Embat - EUR14.7M, Series A round led by Creandum with Samaipata, 4Founders Capital, VentureFriends, and Martin Blessing. Embat centralizes treasury workflows across accounting, bank reconciliation, payments, collections, and cash forecasting for European finance teams.

Series B

Dust - $40M, Series B round co-led by Abstract and Sequoia Capital, with Snowflake Ventures and Datadog participating. Dust gives teams a shared workspace where humans and agents use the same company knowledge, tools, tasks, files, conversations, and governance layer.
WIRobotics Inc. - $68M, Series B round led by JB Investment, with prior backers including InterVest, Hana Ventures, Smilegate Investment, SBVA, NH Investment & Securities, Company K Partners, GU Investment, and FuturePlay. WIRobotics is moving from wearable assistive robots into humanoids and Physical AI, using real movement data from its WIM product and the ALLEX humanoid platform.
Iceotope - $26M, Series B round co-led by Two Seas Capital LP and Barclays Climate Ventures with Edinv, abcIMPACT, Northern Gritstone, and British Business Bank. Iceotope builds chassis-based precision liquid cooling that cools the full IT stack for dense AI infrastructure.
9amHealth - $26M, Series B round led by Define Ventures with SemperVirens VC, Catalio Capital Management, and NewHealth Ventures. 9amHealth is expanding an AI-enabled virtual specialty care platform for employers, health plans, and PBMs managing high-cost chronic conditions.
Fractile - $220M, Series B round led by Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund, with Conviction, Gigascale Capital, O1A, Felicis, Buckley Ventures, and 8VC. Fractile builds in-memory compute chips and systems to make AI inference faster and cheaper.
Isomorphic Labs - $2.1B, Series B round led by Thrive Capital, with Alphabet, GV, MGX, Temasek, CapitalG, and Sovereign AI. Isomorphic Labs builds an AI drug design engine across therapeutic areas and drug modalities.
Monaco - $50M, Series B round led by Benchmark, with Founders Fund, HUMAN CAPITAL, Alt Capital, Mantis Venture Capital, Saga Ventures, Garry Tan, Neil Mehta, John Collison, and Patrick Collison. Monaco builds an AI-native sales platform that handles TAM, outbound, interactions, pipeline, and revenue conversion.
gaiia - $40M, Series B round led by JMI Equity, with Inovia Capital participating. gaiia builds an AI-native operating layer for communications service providers across billing, provisioning, account management, field service, and workflows.
Exaforce - $125M, Series B round backed by HarbourVest Partners, Peak XV Partners, Mayfield, Khosla Ventures, Seligman Ventures, and AICONIC Ventures. Exaforce builds AI-native security operations software that uses a real-time knowledge graph to support investigations.
Vapi - $50M, Series B round led by Peak XV Partners, with M12, Kleiner Perkins, and Bessemer Venture Partners. Vapi builds a programmable voice AI platform for enterprise phone agents with monitoring, guardrails, and escalation paths.
Cinder - $41M, Series B round led by Radical Ventures with Accel, Y Combinator, M12, PSP Growth, and Outpost Ventures. Cinder builds an AI-native trust and safety layer that helps platforms detect abuse, automate enforcement, and route complex cases to human teams.
Cowboy Space Corporation - $275M, Series B round led by Index Ventures with IVP, Blossom Capital, SAIC, and existing backers. Cowboy Space Corporation is building orbital data centers that combine solar power, GPU compute, optical data transmission, and dedicated launch infrastructure.

Series C and beyond

Oishii - $150M, Series C round led by SPARX with Nomura Real Estate Development Co., Ltd., MISUMI Group Inc., and Mizuho. Oishii uses robotics, AI, and controlled-environment systems to grow premium strawberries and automate pollination, harvesting, and quality control.

Growth / Strategic / Other

Coworked Harmony - $1.8M, Funding round co-led by Open Opportunity Fund and Two Ravens VC, with Underdog Labs and Techstars participating. Coworked Harmony works inside existing enterprise systems to chase updates, manage timelines, track actions and risks, schedule meetings, and generate status reports.
Elephant Company - more than EUR5M, Financing round led by EnBW New Ventures and WEPA, with Flix, home24 SE, SB21, Ventic Ventures, and topi participating. Elephant Company builds an AI-powered learning and knowledge platform for operational teams in production, logistics, and service environments.
Fresh People - EUR2.6M, Venture funding led by Inveready, with Archipelago Next, SUCCESSFUL FUND I FCRE, and Paloma Tejada Gasset participating. Fresh People is building an AI-powered leadership system that helps managers and HR teams make daily decisions and follow through with teams.
Rapido - $240M, Primary funding led by Prosus, with WestBridge Capital and Accel participating. Rapido operates across bike taxis, auto rickshaws, cabs, parcel deliveries, flight bookings, and food delivery in more than 400 Indian cities.
Multiverse - $70M, Primary funding led by Schroders Capital, with General Catalyst, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, D1 Capital Partners L.P., BOND, and StepStone Group participating. Multiverse helps enterprises diagnose AI skill gaps, map them to business goals, and combine AI with human coaching to drive measurable adoption.
Recursive - $650 million, Funding round led by GV and Greycroft with AMD and NVIDIA. Recursive is building AI systems that automate the research loop for improving AI itself.
Mind Robotics - $400M, New financing led by Kleiner Perkins, with Meritech Capital, Redpoint Ventures, SV Angel, Incharge Capital Partners, A*, Garuda Ventures, Accel, Andreessen Horowitz, Eclipse, Prysm Capital, Bain Capital Ventures, and Greenoaks. Mind Robotics builds a full-stack industrial robotics platform for manufacturing tasks that need dexterity, adaptation, and physical reasoning.
Webidoo - $25M, Fresh funding led by IXC3 within Azimut Group, with 8a+ Investimenti SGR and TIM Ventures. Webidoo builds AI platforms that connect marketing, sales, and operations workflows for small businesses.
Forus - over $160M, Funding round backed by Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Redpoint, BoxGroup, and Pear VC. Forus connects doctors, pharmacies, payers, and biopharma to move prescriptions through authorization, assistance, and fulfillment.
Govineer Solutions - Undisclosed, Strategic growth investment from TA Associates as Peterson Partners exits. Govineer Solutions provides software and payments infrastructure for municipalities, towns, and special districts.
n8n - Undisclosed, Strategic investment from SAP. n8n connects apps, databases, AI models, and business systems so teams can mix deterministic automations with agentic workflows under governance and auditability.
Algorithmiq - EUR18M, Strategic funding led by United Ventures with CDP Venture Capital and Inventure VC. Algorithmiq builds quantum algorithms and error-aware software for chemistry, materials science, and life sciences.
Ditto - EUR7.6M, Funding round led by Heal Capital with Optiverder and Rubio Impact Ventures. Ditto builds a patient support app that records consultations or ingests medical letters and turns them into AI summaries patients can revisit, simplify, translate, and share.

Robotics and AI News

Forbes - AI Chipmaker Cerebras' CEO Is Now Worth $3.4 Billion After Long-Awaited IPO - Cerebras raised $5.55B in its public offering, opened trading far above the offer price, and became a public-market test case for non-Nvidia AI inference hardware tied to major compute demand from labs and cloud partners. Forbes
Bloomberg - Apple-OpenAI Alliance Frays, Setting Up Possible Legal Fight - Bloomberg reports that OpenAI is weighing legal options against Apple after the ChatGPT integration delivered less visibility, subscription growth and revenue than expected, turning a marquee consumer AI distribution deal into a platform-risk case study. Bloomberg
Pulse 2.0 - Restive Ventures Closes $45 Million Fund III To Back AI-Native Financial Services Startups - Restive closed a $45M third fund to back early-stage AI-native fintech infrastructure, pointing to agentic payments, autonomous underwriting and AI-driven financial operations as core rebuild areas for financial services. Pulse 2.0
VentureBeat - Thinking Machines shows off preview of near-realtime AI voice and video conversation with new 'interaction models' - Thinking Machines previewed full-duplex multimodal interaction models that process 200ms input and output streams simultaneously, targeting lower-latency, time-aware AI systems for live voice, video, industrial monitoring and enterprise support workflows. VentureBeat
PR Newswire - Top Down Ventures Closes US$28M Founders Fund I, Exceeding Target - Top Down Ventures closed a $28M fund focused on AI-native software for managed service providers, a channel that increasingly matters as SMB IT, security and AI operations become more automated and platformized. PR Newswire

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