Newsletter #64

This Week's Good Reads

The New Yorker - Are Humanoid Robots Ready to Be Deployed? - A close look at 1X's Neo and the wider humanoid race argues that mechanical design is moving faster than reliable physical AI, with teleoperation, scarce robot-motion data, safety, privacy, and task-specific tradeoffs still defining near-term deployment. The New Yorker
WIRED - This Humanoid Robot Is a Terrifyingly Competent Office Intern - Flexion's demo shows a Unitree humanoid completing multi-step office chores by combining simulation-trained skills with a higher-level AI planner, underscoring why programmable robot intelligence may be more valuable than the humanoid hardware itself. WIRED
IEEE Spectrum - How Liquid Cooling Let a Humanoid Robot Shatter Half Marathon Records - Honor's record half-marathon robot looks less like a general humanoid breakthrough and more like a lesson in engineering tradeoffs: task-specific gearing, motor sizing, and liquid cooling made the run possible but may make the same design less efficient for ordinary walking work. IEEE Spectrum

Robotics and AI Companies Funding

Pre-seed / Seed

Aseon Labs - $10 million, Seed round led by Crane Venture Partners with Y Combinator, Expa, Robin Hood Ventures, Founders Capital, Adrian Aoun, Immad Akhund, Rajat Suri, and others. Aseon Labs builds robotic pit stops that inspect, clean, and charge autonomous vehicles inside operating zones so robotaxi fleets can recover utilization between rides.
Mirendil - $200 million, Seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz and Kleiner Perkins with NVIDIA participating. Mirendil is building self-accelerating AI R&D systems that help design, test, and improve other AI systems.
Sazabi - $8 million, Seed round led by J2 Ventures, Village Global, and Y Combinator with Orange Collective and more than 60 angels participating. Sazabi builds AI-native observability for engineering teams shipping with coding agents, focusing on monitoring, incident response, and automated root-cause workflows.
Storika - Undisclosed, Seed round backed by AMOREPACIFIC, Schmidt, Hustle Fund, BonAngels Venture Partners, and Krew Capital. Storika uses AI to analyze creator profiles, match brands with micro and nano influencers, automate outreach, and manage influencer marketing campaigns.
Kalipso - $3.2 million, Seed round led by Varsity with Lanai Ventures, Plug and Play Tech Center, Kima Ventures, and Vento. Kalipso monitors regulatory sources, maps obligations against policies and controls, and generates implementation-ready compliance fixes with source traceability.
Orthogonal (YC W26) - $4.3 million, Seed round led by Pantera Capital with Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Decasonic, Blast, and Outbound Capital. Orthogonal gives AI agents a way to discover services, call APIs, and pay per use inside production workflows.
Acumino - $11.7 million, Seed round led by Radar Ventures with Schaeffler, Big Pi Ventures, MegaChips Corporation, LDV Partners, and Bulent Celebi. Acumino builds physical AI for dexterous industrial robot work, using robot-interaction data to make factory manipulation tasks more deployable.
Hang Ten Systems - $32 million, Seed round led by Mayfield with Aramco Ventures. Hang Ten Systems is building an AI-native services layer for enterprise software, combining agentic code generation, reusable AI skills, and domain expertise for operational deployments.
Lumenai - Undisclosed, Pre-seed round backed by Corpora.ai. Lumenai builds Human Capability Indexing to turn workplace behaviors, judgment, collaboration, adaptability, and other human signals into structured data for AI-era teams.
Revora - formerly MyAlice - $2 million, Seed round co-led by i2i Ventures and Oraseya Capital. Revora builds AI agents for e-commerce merchants that recommend products, recover carts, take payments, and structure product catalogs across WhatsApp, Instagram, and brand sites.
Seltz - $12.5 million, Seed round led by Speedinvest and B Capital with Italian Founders Fund, United Ventures, and Future Back Ventures by Bain & Company. Seltz is building web search infrastructure for AI agents that need fresh passages, tables, images, and cited source URLs rather than ranked links for humans.
SuperPlane - EUR 2.28 million, Pre-seed round led by Credo Ventures with First Momentum Ventures and several angels. SuperPlane builds an open-source control plane where AI agents and engineers run deployments, incident response, infrastructure changes, approvals, and observability workflows together.
Kyrok - EUR 3.1 million, Pre-seed round led by Speedinvest with Arve Capital, helloworld, and angels. Kyrok builds an AI operating system for pharma and chemical supply-chain teams that sits on top of existing ERP systems and automates recurring workflows while keeping humans in control.
Valence AI - $5 million, Seed round led by Differential Ventures with Difference Partners, WillowTree Ventures, Change Paradox Ventures, and SRI. Valence AI builds real-time emotional detection from live speech, giving voice AI systems signals from tone, pacing, pitch, and other vocal cues beyond transcripts.
neubond - GBP 1.5 million, Seed round led by WASEDA University Ventures with SFC Capital and New Wave Ventures LLP. neubond is developing an at-home stroke rehabilitation wristband that reads faint muscle signals and gives patients and clinicians real-time feedback on recovery effort.
Ora Computing - EUR 3.5 million, Seed round co-led by Constructor Capital and Greencode Ventures with XISTA Science Ventures returning. Ora Computing compresses large AI models so they use less memory, run faster, and fit more practical cloud, edge, automotive, and silicon constraints.
HaloBraid - $7 million, Seed round led by Seven Seven Six with AlleyCorp and Bling Capital. HaloBraid builds a braid-assist device for professional stylists, targeting repetitive mid-length-to-end braiding work while keeping the stylist in control of the craft.
Fika Jobs - $4 million, Pre-seed round led by Luminar Ventures with Alliance VC, Wave Ventures, Sebastian Knutsson, and Riccardo Zacconi. Fika Jobs creates AI video interview profiles that help candidates show motivation, communication style, and personality beyond a static CV.
Concord.ad - $3 million, Seed round backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Drysdale Ventures, Motier Ventures, Better Angle, and adtech operators. Concord.ad builds agentic execution for media buying, turning briefs into live campaigns and managing pacing, optimization, and reporting across major ad platforms.
ChemT Biotechnology - US$5 million, Seed round led by Wavemaker Partners with SEEDS, Wavemaker Three-Sixty Health, DraperU Ventures, and Temasek Life Sciences Accelerator. ChemT Biotechnology builds CelMo, a virtual-cell platform that helps biomanufacturers understand how cells respond to production conditions, genetic changes, and stress.

Series A

General Intuition - $320 million, Series A round led by Khosla Ventures with General Catalyst, Hillspire, and Jeff Bezos. General Intuition builds large action foundation models and world models trained on action-labeled gameplay data for systems that need to understand what people do, not only what they say.
Scaled Cognition - $100 million, Series A round led by Khosla Ventures with Genesys investing. Scaled Cognition builds APT, an agentic pretrained transformer and deployment platform for high-stakes customer experience workflows that need policy adherence and reliable action execution.
Almetra - EUR 16 million, Series A round led by blisce/ with NAP, Merantix Capital, Robin Capital, Underline Ventures, and Critical Ventures. Almetra mounts AI-powered cameras above production lines and turns shop-floor video into data on cycle times, output, utilization, stoppages, and improvement priorities.
Netris - $15 million, Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Netris automates network setup, configuration, tenant isolation, and operations for GPU cloud and neocloud operators running AI clusters.
Lama AI - $12 million, Series A round led by EJF Ventures with Fin Capital, 1st & Main Growth Partners, SixThirty Ventures, Viola Ventures, and Hetz Ventures. Lama AI builds AI agents for commercial lending teams, covering origination, credit-risk assessment, document extraction, underwriting prep, decisioning, closing, and monitoring.
Tsuga - $35 million, Series A round led by Singular with General Catalyst, DST Global, QuantumLight, Picus Capital, and Databricks. Tsuga builds an AI-native observability platform that keeps logs, metrics, traces, alerts, and AI workflows inside the customer's own cloud.
Runlayer - $30 million, Series A round led by Felicis with Khosla Ventures participating. Runlayer gives enterprises a control plane for AI clients, agents, MCPs, skills, and plugins across identity, permissions, audit logs, observability, and cost control.
Coval - $28 million, Series A round led by Norwest with Base10 Partners, Twilio Ventures, and Y Combinator. Coval builds the evaluation and observability layer for autonomous voice agents, including simulation, labeling, human review, regression checks, and production monitoring.
Prosper AI - $30 million, Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz with Base10 Partners, Emergence Capital, Y Combinator, and Company Ventures. Prosper AI builds healthcare voice agents for scheduling, insurance verification, billing, payer calls, and patient journey workflows that still run on phones.
Isometric - $40 million, Series A round led by AVP with Plural, Lowercarbon Capital, John Doerr, and Walter Kortschak. Isometric builds Certify, an agentic platform that reads and cross-checks evidence behind industrial claims across sensor data, satellite imagery, lab results, and supply-chain records.
Tetrix - $15 million, Series A round co-led by White Star Capital and Innovation Endeavors. Tetrix builds an AI-native operating layer for limited partners, turning fund reports, PDFs, diligence materials, monitoring data, and relationship context into a single private-markets system.
JustAI - $17 million, Series A round led by Base10 Partners with Y Combinator and Peak XV Partners. JustAI builds coordinated AI agents for enterprise marketing strategy, creative, decisioning, data, campaign execution, and performance reporting.
Probook - $40 million, Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz with Sequoia Capital also participating. Probook builds an AI dispatch and operations layer for home service businesses across intake, technician routing, customer messaging, data cleaning, and outbound workflows.
Upscale AI - $190 million, Series A-1 extension led by Premji Invest with NVIDIA, Salesforce Ventures, Seligman Ventures, Temasek, Maverick Silicon, Mayfield, Prosperity7 Ventures, StepStone Group, and Tiger Global. Upscale AI builds open-standard data-center fabric across silicon, systems, and software for lower-latency AI infrastructure.
H3 Zoom - USD 3.6 million, Series A round led by JRE Ventures with SGInnovate, M7 Holdings, AngelCentral, Moringa Ventures, and Lotus Singapore Group. H3 Zoom combines computer vision, vision-language models, drone and robotics-enabled capture, and workflow automation for building and asset inspection intelligence.

Series B

Warp - $60 million, Series B round led by Battery Ventures with Peak XV Partners, Sound Ventures, and Y Combinator. Warp builds an AI-native employee management platform for payroll, HR, compliance, benefits, IT, onboarding, offboarding, and workforce operations.
Attention - $30 million, Series B round led by RTP Global with AGLAE Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Alven, and customer angels. Attention builds an AI system for revenue teams, moving from meeting recording toward agents that run next steps and execute sales work.
Partly - $50 million, Series B round led by DST Global at a $500 million valuation. Partly builds Interpreter, an automotive parts foundation model for repair fitment decisions across vehicle, damage, trim, build plant, and model-year data.

Series C and beyond

Assort Health - $120 million, Series C round led by Menlo Ventures at a $1.2 billion valuation. Assort Health builds AI agents for the patient journey across calls, referrals, forms, eligibility checks, scheduling, intake, lab requests, refills, and payments.
Nearfield Instruments - $380 million, Series D round led by Fidelity Investments with Temasek, Walden Catalyst Ventures, Innovation Industries, M&G Investments, Invest-NL, and Qatar Investment Authority. Nearfield Instruments builds atomic-scale 3D metrology systems for advanced semiconductor manufacturing and AI-chip production.
Baseten - $1.5 billion, Series F round led by Altimeter, Conviction, and Spark Capital with Sands Capital and Wellington Management co-leading. Baseten provides the model-serving layer for running frontier, open, and post-trained AI models across clusters and clouds without locking teams into one provider.

Growth / Strategic / Other

Nscale - Undisclosed, Equity investment backed by Pittco Management and Epping Forest Capital GP. Nscale owns and operates AI infrastructure across energy access, data centers, GPU compute, networking, storage, fleet operations, and AI services for AI-native companies, enterprises, and governments.
Reed Semiconductor Corp. - $100 million, Funding round to scale turnkey AI infrastructure power solutions. Reed Semiconductor builds power management semiconductors for servers, accelerator cards, data centers, networking, and high-performance computing.
Samepage.ai - $4.85 million, Funding round backed by Craft Ventures, Freestyle Capital, Glasswing Ventures, Justin Kan, and Matt Mullenweg. Samepage.ai builds Samepage Signals, an AI-powered product intelligence layer that connects Jira, Linear, Productboard, Slack, Notion, Gong, Salesforce, and customer feedback.
RoboCare - Six-figure investment, Funding round backed by 216 Capital Ventures. RoboCare combines satellite imagery, drone data, IoT sensors, weather signals, and field expertise to identify crop stress and support precision agriculture across Africa and the Middle East.
Engram - $98 million, Funding round backed by General Catalyst, Kleiner Perkins, and Sequoia Capital. Engram builds a learned memory layer that studies an organization's context in advance and compresses it into reusable model memory for enterprise AI agents.
EAIGLE - Undisclosed, Growth funding led by Noro-Moseley Partners with In Revenue Capital and Boreal Ventures. EAIGLE uses existing security cameras to automate gate and yard operations by identifying trucks, trailers, containers, plates, USDOT numbers, and yard assets.
Oversonic - Undisclosed, Strategic investment from STMicroelectronics, ENEA Tech e Biomedical, and SpotInvest. Oversonic builds certified humanoid robots for factories, logistics, and healthcare programs, with RoBee already used in industrial and experimental hospital settings.

Robotics and AI News

OpenAI - OpenAI and Broadcom unveil LLM-optimized inference chip - OpenAI and Broadcom introduced Jalapeno, a custom inference accelerator designed around OpenAI's LLM serving workloads, with early tests pointing to better performance per watt and a plan for gigawatt-scale deployment beginning in 2026. OpenAI
The Guardian - 'Who is going to pay us when we're replaced by robots?' The Indian factory workers told to film themselves for AI - The report shows how Indian factory and informal workers are being asked to wear cameras that collect egocentric data for robotics training, often without direct compensation, clear consent, or transparency about downstream use. The Guardian
BMW Group - BMW Group advances the use of Physical AI in production with Figure 03 project in Spartanburg - BMW says Figure 03 will move into a logistics sequencing use case at Plant Spartanburg after Figure 02 supported production of more than 30,000 BMW X3 vehicles, marking a shift from humanoid pilots toward repeatable factory workflows. BMW Group
UPI - AI, robots push South Korean plant near 100% on-time delivery - HD Hyundai Electric's Cheongju Power Distribution Campus combines AI production planning, autonomous mobile robots, automated logistics, machine vision, and flexible lines to approach 100% on-time delivery for power distribution equipment. UPI
AWS - Deploying industrial AI on AWS: Building the autonomous factory - AWS and SoftServe describe a Hannover Messe production line where a digital thread, simulation-first robot training, multi-vendor ROS2 orchestration, Bedrock agents, Nova quality inspection, AMRs, cobots, and a humanoid robot produced customized coasters end to end. AWS
Tech Briefs - Teradyne Advances Physical AI with UR AI Trainer, PolyScope X - Teradyne Robotics is positioning PolyScope X, UR AI Trainer, Generalist's GEN-1 model, Cambrian vision, and MiR automation as deployable physical AI infrastructure for factories, electronics manufacturing, and AI data center assembly. Tech Briefs
Data Center Knowledge - Qualcomm Lands Meta CPU Deal, Unveils AI Data Center Platform - Qualcomm announced a multigenerational Meta CPU deal, two hyperscale customer wins, an AI inference platform, and a target of more than $15 billion in annual data center revenue by fiscal 2029, pushing the company deeper into AI infrastructure. Data Center Knowledge
ByteDance Seed Team - Seed2.1 Officially Released: Advancing AI Productivity - ByteDance introduced Seed2.1 as an agent-capable model family with stronger cross-tool execution, end-to-end coding delivery, visual and video understanding, and real-world workflow performance across workplace, mobile, creative, and R&D tasks. ByteDance Seed Team
NBC News - Voters of both parties want tighter AI regulation, poll finds - An AI Policy Institute poll found broad bipartisan support for mandatory safety reviews of powerful AI systems, federal safety standards, and regulated data center expansion, suggesting AI oversight is becoming a mainstream political issue rather than a niche partisan debate. NBC News

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