Newsletter #60

This Week's Good Reads

Ai2 - MolmoAct 2: An open foundation for robots that work in the real world - Ai2 released MolmoAct 2 as an open robotics foundation model with weights, data, code, a bimanual manipulation dataset, and faster 3D action reasoning, giving researchers a more inspectable base for real-world robot manipulation. Ai2
NVIDIA Blog - NVIDIA Research Advances Robotics From Simulation to the Real World - NVIDIA highlights eight ICRA papers that push sim-to-real robotics across multi-arm scheduling, embodiment-general navigation, grasping, deformable-object handling, and precise assembly, showing how simulation is becoming a full-stack development loop for deployable robots. NVIDIA Blog
IEEE Spectrum - Hello Robot Sets the Standard for Practical, Safe Home Robots - IEEE Spectrum argues that Hello Robot's Stretch 4 is a pragmatic alternative to home humanoids, combining a wheeled mobile manipulator, richer sensing, human-in-the-loop autonomy, and in-home pilots for users with mobility impairments. IEEE Spectrum
Autonomous Robots - Vision-based manipulation from single human video with open-world object graphs - The paper introduces ORION, an object-centric method that turns one RGB or RGB-D human demonstration video into robot manipulation policies that generalize across backgrounds, camera views, layouts, and new object instances. Autonomous Robots

Robotics and AI Companies Funding

Pre-seed / Seed

Atheni.ai - GBP 350K, Funding round backed by Alex Chesterman OBE and Innovate UK. Atheni.ai builds a browser-based AI adoption platform that helps teams turn access to AI tools into measurable work behavior change.
Drafted - $16M, Seed round backed by Buckley Ventures, Y Combinator, Ben Silbermann, and Ryan Tedder. Drafted lets users describe homes and constraints to generate editable floor plans and 3D layouts before formal design work begins.
Luel - $31M, Seed round backed by General Catalyst, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator. Luel operates a marketplace for rights-cleared human-generated AI training data across image, video, voice, transcription, and other multimodal tasks.
Asteromorph - KRW 47B cumulative, Seed round led by BonAngels Venture Partners with FuturePlay, Mirae Asset Capital, IMM Investment Corp., Korea Development Bank, KDB Capital Corp., SV Investment, STIC Ventures, and Premier Partners. Asteromorph builds scientific superintelligence infrastructure for AI-assisted research and discovery workflows.
Inherent - $50M, Seed round led by Index Ventures and Radical Ventures. Inherent is building Faraday, an AI research environment for human-led science and faster human-machine research loops.
Crimson - $2.5M, Seed round led by Y Combinator with Symphony Ventures, Twenty Two Ventures, Amino Capital, Eight Capital Management, SAV, and Progressive Ventures. Crimson builds litigation and arbitration software that turns evidence records into chronologies, factual propositions, deadlines, and cited drafts.
Sychedelic - $3.5M, Seed round led by Cultadvisors, Turbostart, and Ideabaaz. Sychedelic builds closed-loop neurostimulation headphones that combine music, tDCS, binaural audio, and HRV biofeedback for adaptive wellness.
Modiqo - $3M, Pre-seed round co-led by Heavybit and Seligman with Irregular Expressions. Modiqo builds Rote, a local execution layer that records successful AI-agent runs and converts them into deterministic reusable workflows.
mafer AI - EUR 2M, Pre-seed round backed by Kfund, 4Founders Capital, Masia, Lavanda Ventures, and angels. mafer AI builds an AI operating system for R&D teams in formulation-heavy industries such as chemicals, food, beauty, and fragrances.
Cloudgeni - $1M, Funding round backed by byFounders, Startuplab, Antler, Vegard Gullaksen Veiteberg, and Nicolaj Hojer Nielsen. Cloudgeni builds AI agents for cloud infrastructure operations, security, compliance, and deterministic remediation workflows.
Cypher AI - $2M, Seed round led by MaC Venture Capital with Epsilon Ventures, Connecticut Innovations, Sparta Group LLC, and LiquidMetal Ventures. Cypher AI builds AI-native infrastructure for life-science experiment design, lab execution, workflow orchestration, and data management.
kopa.ai - EUR 2M, Seed round co-led by XTX Markets and Practica Capital with Inovia Capital and Etan Ilfeld. kopa.ai builds agentic AI copilots for e-commerce operators across product, campaign, inventory, site, and customer workflows.
SOND - $7M, Funding round backed by E14 Fund, Crosslink Capital, Ubiquity Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Meach Cove Capital, and John Abele. SOND builds Dreambuds, a closed-loop in-ear sleep system that senses physiology and adapts audio interventions in real time.
bitBiome, Inc. - Over $45M, Seed extension round backed by IQT, IT-Farm Corporation, Valuence Ventures, and Darwin Venture Management. bitBiome uses single-cell microbial sequencing and AI to discover enzymes, pathways, and strains for biomanufacturing.
Handshaik - GBP 1.7M, Pre-seed round from undisclosed angel investors. Handshaik builds an AI-native deal origination platform that profiles UK companies, enriches targets, and explains fit for private-market workflows.
ATOM - JPY 3B, Seed round led by ANRI, Beyond Next Ventures Inc., and JAFCO Group. ATOM develops humanoid robots, physical AI systems, world models, data-collection infrastructure, and supply-chain capabilities for Japan's industrial base.
CodeIntegrity - $5M, Seed round led by SYN Ventures with Antler and Boost VC. CodeIntegrity builds runtime controls that constrain AI agents before they touch enterprise tools, data, and production systems.
NavigateAI - $25M, Seed round led by Elad Gil with Khosla Ventures, Fifth Wall, Lennar, Tishman Speyer, and Helix Electric. NavigateAI builds a camera-based AI copilot for construction, maintenance, and field work in the built world.
Tensormesh - $24.5M total, Seed extension round backed by AMD, CoreWeave, NVIDIA, Valley Capital Partners, and Laude Ventures. Tensormesh builds inference infrastructure around KV-cache reuse to reduce latency and GPU spend for long-context agentic systems.
Perceptic - $12M, Seed round led by Accel with Air Street Capital and Elder Gull. Perceptic builds an AI operating system for drug development, linking asset scouting, scientific evaluation, indication selection, and clinical data analysis.
Didit - $7.5M, Seed round backed by Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Orange Collective, Founders Future, Phosphor Capital, SaaSholic, and Rebel Fund. Didit builds AI-native identity and fraud infrastructure across KYC, KYB, biometrics, deepfake detection, and monitoring.
Voxmind - GBP 546K, Pre-seed round backed by Ascension, Mark McDermott, and Russell Hart. Voxmind builds physics-based voice biometrics designed for on-device authentication and deepfake detection.
NanoCo - $12M, Seed round backed by Valley Capital Partners, Docker, Vercel, monday.com, and Clem Delangue. NanoCo builds sandboxed enterprise AI assistants with human approvals, vault-backed security, and agent controls.
Human Archive - $8.2M, Seed round backed by Wing Venture Capital, NVP Capital, and Y Combinator. Human Archive collects egocentric video, RGB-D, motion, tactile, and force data from real service environments for physical-AI training.
Canyon Code - $5M, Pre-seed round backed by Cota Capital, NewBuild Venture Capital, and Blackhorn Ventures. Canyon Code builds a workflow intelligence layer for observing and governing multi-agent AI applications across cost, accuracy, access, latency, and security.
Avrea - $4.7M, Pre-seed round backed by Earlybird Venture Capital. Avrea builds AI-assisted CI infrastructure that finds weak tests, stuck builds, and delivery bottlenecks as AI-generated code increases software volume.
Tribal - $10M, Funding round backed by Team8, DYDX Capital, and Efi Cohen. Tribal maps metadata across enterprise systems so AI agents can understand permissions, dependencies, business rules, and production context.
Tequipy - Over EUR 3M, Funding round backed by Smedvig Ventures, Manta Ray, and Unfold.vc. Tequipy automates device procurement, configuration, delivery, servicing, offboarding, redeployment, and recovery for distributed-company IT teams.
PerPlant - EUR 1M, Funding round backed by Jytte Rosenmaj, Kraen Ostergaard Nielsen, EIFO, the European Space Agency, and Innovation Fund Denmark. PerPlant equips tractors with edge-AI cameras for real-time field scanning, precision spraying, and agricultural compliance documentation.
Flexprice - $1.5M, Seed round led by Shastra VC with TDV Partners and Anupam Mittal. Flexprice builds billing infrastructure for AI-native and usage-based software companies pricing around tokens, API calls, GPU hours, and other metered events.
Certo - $4M, Seed round led by daphni with Entrepreneur First, Motier Ventures, and Transpose Platform. Certo builds auditable product-compliance workflows for beauty and CPG teams managing formulas, labels, claims, and market-entry documents.

Series A

Xynova - Nearly RMB 1B total, Series A round backed by Li Auto, China Securities Company Limited, Xiaomi Technology, Caitong Securities Asset Management, China Electronics Technology Group Corporation, Yangtze River Delta Digital Culture Group, and Yuanjia Fund. Xynova builds dexterous robotic hands, arm-hand coordination systems, and motion-control algorithms for embodied AI systems.
Olyzon - $10M, Series A round led by S4S Ventures with Eurazeo. Olyzon builds an agentic decisioning layer for connected-TV advertising across supply qualification, planning, activation, and measurement.
Solstice - $21M, Series A round led by Transformation Capital with Twelve Below and Virtue. Solstice builds an AI-native platform for pharma commercialization and medical, legal, and regulatory review readiness.
C2i Semiconductors - $16.7M, Series A extension round backed by Peak XV Partners, Yali Capital, and TDK Ventures. C2i Semiconductors builds power-management semiconductors for AI data centers and cloud infrastructure.
Saris AI - $28.8M, Series A round led by 8VC with Audacious Ventures, Homebrew, Btech Consortium, and Service Ventures. Saris AI builds agentic workflows for banks and credit unions across lending, compliance, document review, and operations.
Gray Swan - $40M, Series A round co-led by Wing Venture Capital and Madrona with Obvious Ventures, Snowflake Ventures, Hudson River Trading, Samsung Next, and Magarac Venture Partners. Gray Swan builds model and agent security infrastructure for real-time protection, adversarial testing, and red-teaming data.
Reactor - $59M, Series A round led by Lightspeed with WndrCo, Amplify Partners, Sky9 Capital, and FPV Ventures. Reactor builds SDK and API infrastructure for real-time AI video and world models that can respond while applications are running.
Geordie AI - $36.5M total, Series A round led by Balderton Capital with Crosspoint Capital Partners, General Catalyst, and Ten Eleven Ventures. Geordie AI builds runtime governance and remediation controls for enterprise AI agents.
allO - EUR 12M, Series A round led by Zigg Capital with LifeX Ventures, Aperture Venture Capital, Wecken & Cie. - Care4 AG, 20VC, and Keen Venture Partners. allO builds an AI operating system for restaurants across POS, payments, reservations, kiosks, delivery, webshop, and back office.
LightTable - $22M, Series A round led by Innovation Endeavors with Blackhorn Ventures, DivcoWest, 9Yards Capital, Primary Venture Partners, MetaProp, and Banter Capital. LightTable builds AI QA/QC software that reviews architectural and engineering drawings before construction errors reach the jobsite.
v4c.ai - Undisclosed, Series A strategic investment from Databricks Ventures and tquila. v4c.ai is a Databricks-focused data and AI services partner that helps enterprises implement Lakehouse and AI platforms.
Lucis - $20M, Series A round led by Singular with General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Celine Lazorthes, and Manu Lecomte. Lucis combines blood biomarkers, physician review, and an AI health companion for longitudinal preventive-health workflows.

Series B

XCENA - $135M, Series B round co-led by Atinum Investment, IMM Investment Corp., and Corstone Asia with SBI Investment and Mirae Asset Capital. XCENA develops CXL-connected memory-side AI infrastructure for preprocessing, caching, and KV-cache management.
Orbital Industries - $50M, Series B round led by Plural with NVIDIA, Radical Ventures, Compound, and Fly Ventures. Orbital Industries uses AI for science and engineering to design data-center cooling, dielectric fluids, and modular compute infrastructure.
Pace - At least $56M total, Series B round co-led by Thrive Capital and Sequoia Capital with Emergence Capital and Pruven Capital. Pace builds AI agents for insurance submission intake, servicing, claims, document reasoning, internal applications, and phone workflows.
OpenRouter - At least $153M total, Series B round led by CapitalG with NVIDIA, ServiceNow, MongoDB, Snowflake, Databricks, Andreessen Horowitz, and Menlo Ventures. OpenRouter provides model-routing infrastructure across hundreds of AI models with controls for cost, latency, reliability, policy, and reporting.

Series C and beyond

Omniscient Neurotechnology (o8t) - $27.2M, Series D round co-led by OIF Ventures and National Reconstruction Fund Corporation with Will Vicars and Gina Rinehart AO. Omniscient Neurotechnology builds Quicktome, an AI and connectomics platform for patient-specific brain network mapping.
Utilidata - $100M, Series C round led by Renown Capital Partners with Keyframe. Utilidata builds Karman, an NVIDIA co-developed platform for real-time power orchestration and rack-level electrical control in AI data centers.
Fonoa - $110M, Series C round led by Headline with Eurazeo, Forestay Capital, Index Ventures, OMERS Ventures, Coatue Management, and Dawn Capital. Fonoa builds global tax compliance infrastructure for tax determination, ID validation, e-invoicing, reporting, filing, and AI-assisted audit workflows.
Anthropic - $65B, Series H round led by Altimeter Capital, Dragoneer, Greenoaks, Sequoia Capital, Capital Group, Coatue, D1 Capital Partners, GIC, ICONIQ, XN, Amazon, Micron, Samsung, and SK hynix. Anthropic builds Claude and frontier AI systems for enterprise, developer, safety, and infrastructure use cases.
Daloopa - $47M, Series C round led by Brighton Park Capital with Squarepoint, Touring Capital, and Nexus Venture Partners. Daloopa builds source-linked financial data infrastructure for investment firms deploying AI into research, modeling, and portfolio workflows.

Growth / Strategic / Other

Eddy Grid - EUR 7.5M, Funding round backed by Graduate Ventures and Volve Capital. Eddy Grid optimizes solar farms, wind turbines, and battery systems by trading energy output in real time across electricity markets.
Blulabs - $7M, Investment led by Lodestone Capital. Blulabs manages sourcing, manufacturing, freight coordination, inventory planning, and customer commitments across global supply chains.
DeepTree - EUR 2M, Funding round led by CDP Venture Capital SGR with strategic international private investors. DeepTree builds AI-powered financial intelligence for private-market analysis across corporate data, financial information, and workflow tools.
WhiteFiber - $100M, Facility from Bit Digital and B. Riley Securities. WhiteFiber builds AI infrastructure across high-performance computing data centers, colocation, hosting, and cloud services.
Pure Data Centres Group - $2.7B, Financing package backed by SMBC Group, ABN AMRO Bank N.V., and Allianz Global Investors. Pure Data Centres Group develops hyperscale and AI data-center campuses across Europe and the Middle East.
Rep AI - $6.2M, Strategic follow-on funding led by Silicon Road Ventures with Osage Venture Partners, Flashpoint, and Zendesk. Rep AI builds an AI platform for ecommerce brands that connects product discovery, conversion, support, returns, and retention.
Capchase - $200M, Debt and equity financing led by 01 Advisors with Caffeinated Capital, Thomvest, SciFi VC, Bling Capital, Invesco, and others. Capchase provides B2B buy-now-pay-later infrastructure for enterprise software, hardware, and cybersecurity vendors.
Slamcore - $40M total, Funding round backed by Rockwell Automation, Toyota Ventures, Interwoven Ventures, MMC Ventures, Amadeus Capital Partners, and IP Group plc. Slamcore builds visual AI for spatial intelligence, vehicle tracking, and safety visibility inside warehouses and factories.
ReVision Implant - EUR 4M, Capital round from undisclosed new and existing investors. ReVision Implant develops ultra-flexible cortical implants and stimulation algorithms for vision restoration in people with severe blindness.
Cognition - More than $1B, Funding round led by Lux Capital and General Catalyst with Founders Fund, 8VC, Ribbit Capital, Atreides Management, LP, Layer Global, and others. Cognition builds Devin and autonomous software-engineering agents for enterprise development workflows.
Mercury - $200M, Funding round backed by TCV, Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue, CRV, Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital. Mercury provides banking and finance workflows for startups, including AI-driven visibility, MCP access, payroll, and natural-language banking plans.
LSPedia - Undisclosed, Strategic growth investment from Bregal Sagemount. LSPedia builds pharmaceutical supply-chain intelligence, serialized product traceability, compliance workflows, and AI-driven operational decision support.
Oli - $6.5M, Funding round backed by Scale Investors Pty Ltd, Clare Ventures, and The University of Sydney. Oli develops a wireless wearable platform for predictive maternal and fetal monitoring across pregnancy and birth conditions.
Stord - $250M, Funding round backed by Strike Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Founders Fund, Franklin Templeton, Baillie Gifford, G Squared, BOND, and Lux Capital. Stord builds commerce infrastructure for brands across fulfillment, software, data, robotics, automation, and logistics operations.
K25.ai - $2M initial, Strategic investment from NewGenIVF Group Limited with an option up to $10M. K25.ai builds an AI-powered live-streaming prediction market platform for event discovery, market generation, analysis, and resolution.
Polsia - $30M, Funding round backed by Sound Ventures, True Ventures, Offline Ventures, Adjacent, Tekton Ventures, Drysdale Ventures, and Vaynerfund. Polsia builds an AI operations system for coding, research, outreach, ads, support, diligence, and company workflows.
Cyient Semiconductors - $30M, Financing from EAAA India Alternatives. Cyient Semiconductors builds custom silicon and power semiconductor IP for AI infrastructure, product R&D, validation, and large customer programs.
Quanscient - EUR 10M, Funding round backed by 55 North, B&C Group, Maki.vc, Crowberry Capital, QAI Ventures, and First Fellow Partners. Quanscient builds cloud-native multiphysics simulation software that generates physics data for AI-enabled hardware engineering.

Robotics and AI News

TechCrunch - Anthropic files to go public - Anthropic confidentially filed for an IPO shortly after a $65B Series H round, turning frontier AI into a public-market test of revenue growth, compute appetite, and enterprise model demand. TechCrunch
Forbes - Figure Humanoid Robots Get Jobs With JCPenney, Aeropostale, Brooks Brothers - Figure signed a commercial agreement with Catalyst Brands to deploy humanoid robots into retail distribution and logistics, widening the test from isolated pilots toward multi-brand warehouse operations. Forbes
BBC - BMW says humanoid robots are the future of car production - BMW plans to use two Hexagon Robotics Aeon humanoids at its Leipzig plant this summer, betting that human-shaped robots can fit existing automotive workflows without expensive line redesign. BBC
Computerworld - Intel stakes new claim in physical AI with robotics chips - Intel is reentering robotics through edge AI chips, saying its Series 3 processors are in 130 edge AI and robotics designs and can consolidate vision, control, and local AI inference into robot hardware. Computerworld
NVIDIA Newsroom - NVIDIA Launches Cosmos 3, the Open Frontier Foundation Model for Physical AI - NVIDIA launched Cosmos 3 as an open world foundation model for physical AI, combining vision reasoning, world generation, and action prediction for synthetic data and robot policy development. NVIDIA Newsroom
NVIDIA Newsroom - NVIDIA Announces NVIDIA Isaac GR00T Reference Humanoid Robot for Academic Research - NVIDIA introduced an open humanoid robot reference design built around Unitree H2 Plus hardware, Sharpa hands, Jetson Thor compute, and the Isaac GR00T development platform for academic humanoid research. NVIDIA Newsroom
The Robot Report - NIST proposes a baseline performance benchmark for humanoid robots - NIST proposed a low-footprint benchmark for humanoid mobility, manipulation, loco-manipulation, confined-space control, and minimal reasoning, aiming to replace marketing videos with comparable performance data. The Robot Report
FreightWaves - Torc Robotics and Mila team up on physical AI for autonomous trucks - Torc Robotics partnered with Mila to deepen autonomous-trucking research in generative world models, multi-agent behavior modeling, reinforcement learning, and foundation models for physical AI systems. FreightWaves
South China Morning Post - Alibaba, Tencent lead pivot from chatbots to embodied AI for robotics - SCMP reports that Alibaba and Tencent are pushing large models into embodied AI, with Qwen robotics tools and Tencent's OpenClaw framework pointing Chinese AI competition toward physical autonomous systems. South China Morning Post
CNBC - Mistral to explore designing own chips, CEO says, as it ramps up infrastructure build - Mistral CEO Arthur Mensch said the company is exploring custom chips while expanding inference data-center infrastructure in France, signaling that frontier AI companies are trying to control more of the compute stack. CNBC

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