Newsletter #61

This Week's Good Reads

TechCrunch - Physical Intelligence, a hot robotics startup, says its new robot brain can figure out tasks it was never taught - Physical Intelligence's pi0.7 model shows early compositional generalization, using sparse prior examples, web pretraining, and step-by-step language coaching to perform manipulation tasks it was not directly trained on. The useful signal is not a flashy demo but a shift toward robot models whose capabilities may scale more like vision and language systems. TechCrunch
AGIBOT Finch - tau0-WM: A Unified Video-Action World Model for Robotic Manipulation - AgiBot's tau0-WM unifies action generation, video prediction, and action-conditioned future evaluation so robots can propose, simulate, rank, and revise manipulation actions before execution. The model points toward predictive manipulation systems trained on mixed robot, UMI, and human-video data instead of purely reactive policies. AGIBOT Finch
Tech Xplore - 'Touch dreaming' helps humanoid robots handle five tricky tasks with 90.9% higher success - Researchers at CMU and Bosch showed that humanoids can improve contact-rich manipulation by predicting future tactile representations alongside actions, producing a 90.9% relative success-rate gain over a strong imitation-learning baseline across five real-world tasks. The work is a reminder that practical humanoid capability depends on touch-aware whole-body control, not only better vision models. Tech Xplore

Robotics and AI Companies Funding

Pre-seed / Seed

Clear Robotics - $1.75M, pre-Series A round led by ShipsFocus Ventures with Katapult Ocean, SGInnovate, M7 Holdings MGS Ventures, and strategic partners. Clear Robotics builds AI-enabled electric vessels for ports, governments, and marine operators, with use cases including waterway cleanup, pollution recovery, port surveying, bathymetric survey, and civil maritime monitoring.
Imiron - JPY 140M, pre-Series A round led by DG Daiwa Ventures with Mitsubishi UFJ Capital and Gougin Capital. Imiron develops SpecForge, a formal-specification platform that turns ambiguous requirements into mathematically rigorous specifications for verification, monitoring, and safety arguments in autonomous driving, robotics, and other mission-critical systems.
Wassist - $1.1M, pre-seed round led by Playfair with Charlie Songhurst, Paul Forster, and Barney Hussey-Yeo. Wassist turns WhatsApp into a commerce layer for Shopify brands by creating brand-trained agents that answer product questions, retrieve order updates, recommend products, and keep checkout tied to the existing website flow.
Estro Tech Robotics - INR 1 crore, Seed round led by Genrobotics. Estro Tech Robotics builds automation and intelligent systems, including UV sterilising robots, interactive in-store advertising robots, and infrastructure inspection robotics for underground networks and sewer-line monitoring.
Sensie - EUR 500k, Pre-seed round led by Division Q with NewSchool.vc and Percival Participations. Sensie builds wireless plant-health sensors for professional greenhouses that measure growth, water status, stress, and recovery signals from crops.
Oscorp Energy - A$1.3M, Pre-seed round led by Atlas Sgr with Antler and Antipodean Capital. Oscorp Energy builds AI vision, edge computing, and robotic removal systems for fast-moving waste streams, starting with lithium-ion battery detection and removal.
AethexAI - $3M, Pre-seed round led by 4DX Ventures with Enza Capital, Dorm Room Fund, Mojo Ventures, and Stanford GSB 26 Fund. AethexAI builds localized voice AI models and orchestration for enterprise calls across support, customer activation, debt collection, and KYC workflows.
OFFROAD - $7M, Seed round led by Ibex Investors and Skywell Capital Partners. OFFROAD builds an agentic identity security platform for human users, machine identities, OAuth apps, and AI agents.
Willow - $7M, Seed round led by Hetz Ventures with Avishai Abrahami and Nir Zohar. Willow builds an access and governance layer that connects AI agents to internal systems with scoped tools, authorizations, audit trails, shadow-agent discovery, and controls.
Upstream - $3M, Pre-seed round backed by Y Combinator, Connect Ventures, Roosh Ventures, Kima Ventures, Xavier Niel, and more than 30 founders and operators. Upstream builds an AI-native collaborative inbox where agents can sort messages, draft replies, prepare follow-ups, schedule meetings, retrieve receipts, and organize work into shared channels.
Kodesage - $6.6M, Seed round led by VentureFriends with Portfolion, Christian Szegedy, and Mario Gotze. Kodesage helps enterprises document, test, maintain, migrate, and support legacy applications by extracting knowledge from source code and documentation inside private, on-premise, or air-gapped environments.
AtomBite.AI - tens of millions of yuan, Seed round led by Inno-Capital with Tsinghua Alumni Seed Fund and individual investors. AtomBite.AI builds embodied AI robots for food-delivery packing, sealing, sorting, and courier handoff using vision and touch.
General Compute - $15M, Seed round led by FUSE with Carya and Village Global. General Compute builds an ASIC-first AI inference cloud for workloads such as coding agents, voice AI, and autonomous systems.
Plot - $10M, Follow-on seed round co-led by XYZ Venture Capital and Mischief with Seven Seven Six and ACME Capital. Plot builds AI social video intelligence that analyzes TikTok, Instagram Stories, Reels, and YouTube Shorts across audio, visuals, and captions to detect product and brand mentions.
ConeLabs - $1.5M, Pre-seed round led by Spatial Capital with Techstars, Ontario Centre of Innovation, Team Ignite Ventures, Exitfund, and other investors. ConeLabs turns field imagery into 3D condition models, detects structural defects, and generates structured engineering reports for bridges, roads, and waterways.
Oplane - EUR 4.5M, Seed round led by Seed Capital with Icebreaker.vc and several angels. Oplane is building an agentic security platform for teams using AI-assisted development tools.
Archestra.AI - $10M, Seed round led by 20VC with Visible Ventures and Tenacity Capital. Archestra.AI builds an open-source platform that lets companies connect AI agents to sensitive data securely, with guardrails for workflows that touch legal, HR, and external counterparties.
INXM - EUR 5.7M, Pre-seed round led by Cherry Ventures and Redstone with Angel Invest and Linden Capital GmbH participating. INXM is building an AI process execution engine for enterprise and Mittelstand operations.
MODELIA - EUR 1.03M, Seed round led by Next Tier Ventures with Rapid Scale and Archipelago Next participating. MODELIA builds AI tools for fashion teams to turn product images into campaign-ready visuals, model shots, videos, and localized assets while preserving brand and garment consistency.
Poindexter Labs - GBP 2M, Seed round led by Episode 1 Ventures. Poindexter Labs builds expert-generated training data workflows for advanced AI models, focused on complex reasoning and domain-specific knowledge.
ZeroDrift - $10M, Seed round backed by Andreessen Horowitz's speedrun program. ZeroDrift builds an inline compliance layer that checks AI-generated messages, calls, video, chatbots, and agents before enterprise communications are sent.
Invisix - EUR 20M, Seed round backed by Hitachi Ventures, Transition Ventures, imec.xpand, Doosan Investment, and a tier-1 semiconductor manufacturer. Invisix is developing soft x-ray metrology technology that lets chipmakers inspect advanced 3D device structures without destroying them.
Bayshore AI - EUR 6.9M, Seed round led by Earlybird Venture Capital with Lucid Capital, BOOOM, and Heliad. Bayshore AI turns regulations, company policies, and expert know-how into governed AI agents for legal and compliance workflows.

Series A

NewOrbit Space - $18.5M, Series A round led by Voyager Ventures with Atlantic, Lifeline Ventures, Illusian, LGF, David Kirk, and Lawrence Leuschner. NewOrbit Space builds satellites for very low Earth orbit, targeting Earth observation, direct-to-device connectivity, and live HD video from altitudes conventional satellites cannot use.
TrueFan AI - $10M, Series A round led by Baring Private Equity Partners India and Z3Partners with IAN Group and 3Lines Venture Capital. TrueFan AI lets businesses generate personalized AI videos at scale from a single recording, with language support across more than 175 languages.
Scotch - $20M, Series A round led by VMG Partners with First Round Capital, Lerer Hippeau, and Toba Capital. Scotch builds an all-in-one operating system for liquor stores, covering POS, payments, inventory, ordering, invoice reconciliation, cost-change detection, SKU normalization, deal-sheet matching, and analytics.
Scispot - $8M, Series A round led by Avenue Growth Partners. Scispot helps life sciences labs connect samples, instruments, workflows, approvals, audit trails, and AI agents into one governed system.
Terra AI - $20M, Series A round led by Khosla Ventures with strategic investment from BHP Ventures. Terra AI builds AI-native subsurface modeling software that fuses exploration data into probabilistic 3D models for minerals, reservoirs, geothermal, and carbon storage.
Airspeed - EUR 17.2M ($20M), Series A round led by DN Capital with Vi Partners, Framework Venture Partners, and Atlassian Ventures. Airspeed builds AI agents that work across calls, emails, tickets, and CRM context to update systems, flag deal risks, generate follow-ups, and turn customer conversations into actions for revenue teams.
Lassie - $35M, Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz with Night Capital and domain expert angels. Lassie builds AI agents that handle dental-practice back-office workflows including insurance claims, payment reconciliation, payment posting, ledger updates, and claims follow-up.
Freshflow - $10M, Series A round led by Reimann Investors Venture Capital with Capnamic, caesar., World Fund, Venture Stars, Catatumbo Capital, and IBB Ventures. Freshflow builds AI for fresh grocery departments, helping retailers model demand, infer inventory, predict spoilage, route suppliers, and automate store-level ordering.
Town - $55M, Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz with Forerunner, First Round Capital, Alt Capital, and Conviction participating. Town builds a personal AI assistant that connects to email, calendar, Slack, docs, messaging, and other work tools to learn a user's context and handle delegated work with approvals and an audit log.
Apoha - $36M, Series A round led by Singular with Draper Associates, Redalpine, Seedcamp, Wilbe, and Nucleus Capital. Apoha is building AI models for substances including proteins, food products, paints, drugs, and materials.
Quobly - EUR 115M, Series A round led by Bpifrance, SEALSQ, and STMicroelectronics with EIC - European Innovation Council, Blast Club, ALIAD (Air Liquide Venture Capital), and INNOVACOM participating. Quobly builds quantum computers around FD-SOI technology on 300 mm wafers, using semiconductor manufacturing processes to improve scalability, yield, and reproducibility.
Flok Health - $12.5M, Series A round led by AlbionVC with Eka Ventures, Form Ventures, and Mercia Asset Management PLC participating. Flok Health operates an AI physiotherapy clinic that can diagnose, triage, treat, and discharge MSK patients through a regulated digital pathway.
Gigaton - $26M, Series A round led by Plural with 2150, Semapa Next, Planet A Ventures, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, UCL Technology Fund, and Clean Growth Fund. Gigaton builds AI-powered autonomous control software that simulates plant behavior and adjusts industrial operating parameters in real time for cement, steel, glass, and chemical plants.
Sekai - $26M, Seed and Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures and Connect Ventures with Mayfield participating. Sekai lets users generate playable mini-apps from natural-language prompts and share and remix them inside a social feed.
Phia - $35.5M, Series A round led by Notable Capital, Khosla Ventures, and Kleiner Perkins. Phia is building an AI-powered shopping app and browser extension that compares prices across the internet and aims to become a personalized shopping agent.
Tripo AI - nearly $200M, Series A+ and Series A++ financing from undisclosed investors. Tripo AI is building AI 3D foundation models and creator tools for generating assets and persistent interactive worlds.
Gradient Labs - $26M, Series A round backed by Octopus Ventures, CommerzVentures, Redpoint Ventures, and Exceptional Capital. Gradient Labs builds AI agents for regulated financial-services operations including support, KYC, lending, disputes, and voice calls.
Mecka - $60M, Series A and follow-on investment led by Framework Ventures with Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, Kindred Ventures, and Ted Xiao. Mecka collects real human motion data through sensors, iPhones, and field operations to help robotics companies train and deploy physical AI.
Endra - $50M, Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Endra automates mechanical, electrical, and plumbing design work for building engineers by ingesting building model files, integrating with Revit, reconstructing buildings in 3D, and optimizing repetitive design tasks.

Series B

701x - $10M, Series B round backed by individual investors, local community members, and rancher-users. 701x builds a technology ecosystem for beef cattle, including on-ranch software, breed association software, smart wearables, DNA tools, and GPS smart ear tags with direct-to-satellite connectivity.
Wordsmith AI - $70M, Series B round backed by Highland Europe and Index Ventures. Wordsmith AI builds an AI legal operations platform that routes legal requests, automates routine work against approved playbooks, and escalates higher-risk matters to lawyers.

Series C and beyond

PhysicsX - $300M, Series C round led by Temasek with M&G Investments, Intrepid Growth Partners, Atomico, General Catalyst, NVIDIA, Siemens, Applied Materials, July Fund, NGP Capital, and Radius Capital Ventures. PhysicsX trains AI models that predict physical behavior in seconds so engineering teams can test more design variants across simulation, manufacturing, and real-time digital twins.
Helion - $465M, Series G round led by Thrive Capital with Alta Park Capital, LP, Anti Fund, BoxGroup, Lux Capital, Peak XV Partners, Bill Ford, Capricorn Investment Group, Lightspeed, Good Ventures, and SoftBank Investment Advisers. Helion is developing direct electricity generation from fusion using magnets to compress plasma and recover electricity directly from magnetic fields as the plasma expands.
Supabase - $500M, Series F round led by GIC with Accel, Y Combinator, Craft Ventures, Felicis, Peak XV Partners, Coatue Management, Stripe, and Salesforce Ventures. Supabase builds an open-source Postgres development platform with database, auth, storage, realtime, APIs, edge functions, and platform tooling for developer-native applications.
Suno - over $400M, Series D round led by BOND with IVP, Forerunner, Union Square Ventures, Alkeon Capital, Quiet Capital, Matrix, Lightspeed, Menlo Ventures, and Schroders Capital. Suno lets users turn prompts, lyrics, voice notes, and style directions into full songs with vocals and instrumentation.
Oxford Quantum Circuits (OQC) - GBP 260M, Series C round led by Bullhound Capital with British Business Bank, Oxford Science Enterprises, and Chevron. Oxford Quantum Circuits builds superconducting quantum systems for enterprise, cloud, and data-centre deployment.
Coralogix - $200M, Series F round co-led by Advent, CPP Investments, and Greenfield Partners with Brighton Park Capital participating. Coralogix provides observability infrastructure for logs, metrics, traces, security events, customer-owned storage, and real-time streaming analytics that can support automated investigation by AI agents.
Findigs, Inc. - $32M, Series C round led by RPM Ventures with Nyca Partners, Frontier Venture Capital, and Western Technology Investment. Findigs, Inc. provides automated leasing decisioning for residential operators, using application and post-lease performance data to decide rental applications.
Factorial - $150M, Series D round led by General Catalyst with Atomico and Four Rivers participating. Factorial builds workforce software for HR, finance, and IT, and is rebuilding its platform around AI agents that apply company policies and help employees execute tasks.
Centrical - $39M, Series D round led by Leeds Illuminate and Kingfisher Investment Advisors with JVP participating. Centrical builds Performance Intelligence software that turns frontline performance data into coaching, learning, simulations, and targeted interventions for customer service, sales, fraud operations, and hospitality teams.
DriveNets - $410M, Series D round led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Atreides Management, with AMD, Red Dot Capital Partners, Pitango, and D1 Capital Partners. DriveNets builds Ethernet-based AI networking fabric for large-scale clusters where network bottlenecks can leave GPUs underutilized.

Growth / Strategic / Other

Flourish - $500M, Funding round anchored by Jeff Bezos with Lux Capital, GV (Google Ventures), and Catalio Capital Management. Flourish is building Cortex AI, a synthetic intelligence system designed to match the human brain's computational capacity, learning efficiency, and power budget.
Etronium AI - Undisclosed, Strategic SAFE investment from AMC Robotics. Etronium AI builds agentic frameworks for hardware-in-the-loop workflows, where AI agents write, deploy, test, and validate code directly against devices.
Opal Security - $23M, Funding round led by Greylock Partners and Battery Ventures with Cambium Capital Management. Opal Security builds an AI-native access governance platform that maps human, non-human, and agentic identities into the same access graph, reviews, ownership model, and policy-as-code controls.
AlphaSense - $350M, Funding round backed by Vitruvian Partners, Accenture Ventures, J.P. Morgan Asset Management, D. E. Shaw Ventures, Pinegrove Opportunity Partners, CapitalG, Goldman Sachs, and Viking Global Investors. AlphaSense combines domain-specific AI with a library of more than 500M premium business documents for financial and strategic market-intelligence workflows.
SensorUp Inc. - Undisclosed, Growth financing led by Pender Ventures with Climate Investment, Evok Innovations, and Oxy. SensorUp Inc. builds an agentic system of action for asset-heavy industries, coordinating emissions, methane, turnaround, well-performance, and compliance workflows on a shared asset model.
Magnetic - $5.2M, Funding round backed by Formus Capital, Orange Collective, Seguin Ventures, Amino Capital, Singularity Venture Partners, Y Combinator, Jeff Seibert, and Kaz Nejatian. Magnetic builds an agentic tax prep system that scans client documents, reasons through messy inputs, and enters data into existing tax software for CPA firms.
Generalist AI - $400M, Funding round led by Radical Ventures with 8VC, Union Square Ventures, Hanabi Capital, NVIDIA, and Bezos Expeditions. Generalist AI builds robotics foundation models that help robots learn physical work across different form factors and environments.
Ramp - $750M, Funding round led by ICONIQ, GIC, and Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan. Ramp provides finance automation software spanning corporate cards, expense management, bill pay, procurement, travel, treasury, accounting workflows, and AI agents.
Handshake - $3.2M, Funding round led by Triple Point with Future Back Ventures by Bain & Company and Octopus Ventures. Handshake is building an AI-powered platform for retailers, wholesalers, and suppliers to make, track, store, and execute commercial agreements in one shared system.
AxisCare - Undisclosed, Strategic investment from LLR Partners, with Frontier Growth remaining an investor and active partner. AxisCare provides software for home care agencies across scheduling, caregiver operations, electronic visit verification, client engagement, billing, and administrative workflows.
Trajectory - $15M, Funding round backed by Conviction, Bessemer Venture Partners, Radical Ventures, and other AI leaders. Trajectory builds a platform that helps companies continuously train large-scale agentic models from product usage signals such as corrections, retries, edits, and user interactions.
Canals - $35M, Funding round led by Base10 Partners. Canals builds AI workflow automation for wholesale distributors, handling orders, invoices, quote requests, supplier emails, and other repetitive supply-chain transactions.

Robotics and AI News

Bloomberg - Google Buying Computing From SpaceX in $920-Million-a-Month Deal - Google agreed to pay SpaceX $920M per month from October 2026 through June 2029 for computing power, a roughly $30B cloud services commitment that shows how AI infrastructure demand is reshaping hyperscaler capacity strategy. Bloomberg
NVIDIA Blog - NVIDIA Enables the Next Era Of Physical AI Research With Agent Skills For Autonomous Vehicles, Robotics And Vision AI - NVIDIA released open physical AI agent skills for AV, robotics, and vision workflows, pairing Cosmos, Isaac Sim, Omniverse, and simulation tooling to automate scene reconstruction, synthetic data generation, policy rollout, and evaluation. NVIDIA Blog
1X - 1X Launches World Model Lab to Scale Humanoid Intelligence - 1X launched a World Model Lab led by former Luma AI researcher Sam Sinha, arguing that humanoid autonomy requires pretraining on web-scale media, egocentric human video, simulation, teleoperated robot data, and on-policy NEO data in one closed learning loop. 1X
Global Times - China's first general-purpose humanoid robot undergoes real-home trials; room remains for robots to understand various needs, raise efficiency: expert - GigaAI's SeeLight S1 has entered real-home trials in China, completing chores such as preparing breakfast and folding clothes after on-site training, while experts note that household reasoning, speed, and manipulation remain major bottlenecks. Global Times
Interesting Engineering - New humanoid robot brings human-like dexterity for industrial roles - VinRobotics introduced the VR-H3 humanoid for industrial automation, combining 31+ actuators, dual edge computers, payload handling, in-house control systems, and VR teleoperation for material movement, assembly support, and hazardous remote work. Interesting Engineering
Interesting Engineering - Scientists find smarter way to teach robots complex skills - NYU Tandon and the Robotics and AI Institute found that consistent simulation-generated demonstrations can outperform highly variable RRT examples for dexterous imitation learning, transferring policies to real dual-arm and robotic-hand tasks without retraining. Interesting Engineering
Drives&Controls - Collaborative project puts humanoid to work in a warehouse - Accenture, Vodafone Procure & Connect, and SAP piloted a humanoid robot in a Duisburg warehouse, using SAP task integration, digital-twin training, and physical AI to inspect misplaced goods, pallet issues, storage utilization, and hazards. Drives&Controls
Splash247 - Hanwha Ocean to trial humanoid robots - Hanwha Ocean will test AeiROBOT's Alice humanoid at its Geoje shipyard after digital-twin training in Nvidia Omniverse and Isaac Sim, targeting heavy-load transport, uneven-terrain navigation, obstacle avoidance, tool handling, and hazardous inspection work. Splash247

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