Newsletter #67

This Week's Good Reads

Ars Technica - Fear of humanoid robots spurs human workers to strike at Hyundai auto factory - Hyundai workers launched the auto industry's first factory stoppage over humanoid robots as the company plans to deploy more than 25,000 Atlas units, starting in U.S. factories in 2028. The dispute shows that physical AI adoption will depend as much on labor agreements and job protections as on robot economics. Ars Technica
VentureBeat - The agent evaluation gap: Enterprise AI organizations have a reality-alignment problem, not a coverage problem - and most are shipping to production anyway - In a survey of 157 enterprises, 50% had shipped an agent that passed internal evaluations and then failed a customer, while only 5% fully trusted automated evaluation. Even so, 66% already allow or are building toward zero-human deployment, exposing a widening gap between agent autonomy and production assurance. VentureBeat
VentureBeat - Google's TabFM skips per-dataset training - Google's TabFM makes zero-shot predictions on unseen tables without training a separate model for each dataset, potentially turning weeks of feature engineering and tuning into a single API call. Its heavier inference cost, latency limits, and non-commercial model weights make it most useful today for rapid prototyping and smaller, changing datasets rather than low-latency production systems. VentureBeat

Robotics and AI Companies Funding

Pre-seed / Seed

Apaluma - $5.55 million, Seed round led by Crosslink Capital and Kickstart, with Haven Ventures and Overwater Ventures as co-leads and participation from Orange DAO and NM Vintage Fund. Apaluma makes fragmented government records searchable and connected while preserving source traceability and agency control over data storage.
KuhlTherm - $1.1 million, Seed round led by Arkam Ventures. KuhlTherm builds direct-to-chip cold plates, rear-door heat exchangers, and predictive thermal-control software for dense AI infrastructure.
Mandrake Bio - INR 16 crore (about $1.8 million), Pre-seed round co-led by Activate and Antler. Mandrake Bio combines protein language models, proprietary metagenomic data, and wet-lab validation to design gene-editing enzymes.
Svolgo - more than EUR 400,000, Pre-seed round from undisclosed tax, legal, financial, and technology professionals and operators. Svolgo turns Italian tax notices and debt files into guided, auditable workflows ready for professional review and signature.
logcat.ai - $2.55 million, Pre-seed round led by Founders Co-op with Act One Ventures, TheFounderVC, Shorewind Capital, Clayoquot Capital, and Alumni Ventures. logcat.ai develops an engine that diagnoses failures across device systems and maps their root causes to code.
pQCee - $3.9 million, Seed round co-led by SGInnovate and Lotus One Investment with In Group Holdings, Wavemaker Partners, SUTD Venture Holdings, and Apsara Investments. pQCee builds interoperable post-quantum encryption, key management, digital signing, and migration tooling.
Cytronic - $13.5 million, Seed round led by Slow Ventures, with participation from Geek Ventures, Failup Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Spacecadet, Weekend Fund, Mana Ventures, Rice Capital, Script Capital, Adam Nash, and Gokul Rajaram. Cytronic provides robotic fulfillment as a service by combining proven hardware with software for inventory, picking, packing, and shipping.
Pulse Security AI, Inc. - $8 million, Seed round led by Foundation Capital with Zetta Venture Partners. Pulse Security AI builds a system of record that connects security tools, policies, assessments, and business context so AI agents can execute auditable CISO procedures.
BlueNexusAI - A$2 million, Seed round led by M31 Capital with Antler, Eastend Ventures, and inSilico One. BlueNexusAI provides a no-code platform that turns plain-language briefs into deployable AI agents with persistent knowledge, connectors, and billing.
Runta - $20 million, Seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz with Google DeepMind, World Labs, Databricks, Hugging Face, Jeff Dean, Fei-Fei Li, Ali Ghodsi, Ram Shriram, and Thomas Wolf. Runta gives each AI agent a stateful computer with isolation, secret protection, governed network access, policy controls, and tool-output compression.
Beacon Security - $13 million, Seed round led by Notable Capital with Holly Ventures, AlphaDrive Ventures, SVCI - Silicon Valley CISO Investments, and Jefferies Family Office. Beacon Security normalizes and links security telemetry for AI agents used in detection, investigation, and posture management.
Sightera Biosciences - EUR 3 million, Pre-seed round from Entourage Ventures, Anacura, and Qbic Fund. Sightera Biosciences builds drug-response datasets from patient-derived organoids and trains AI to design small molecules based on patient biology.
Aina - $5.5 million, Seed round led by Redstart Labs and 360 ONE Asset, with participation from MIXI Global Investments, Antler, Blume Founders Fund, Kunal Shah, Harshil Mathur, Shashank Kumar, Tikhon Bernstam, and Vaibhav Domkundwar. Aina is building a physical, context-aware general-purpose interface for AI beyond keyboards and touchscreens.
Mio - $2.2 million, Pre-seed round backed by Casey Caruso and Thomas Crow. Mio provides an AI colleague in Slack that learns company context, connects to more than 3,000 integrations, and executes cross-functional work.
Oak - Identity Security OS - $60 million, Seed round co-led by Accel, Greylock Partners, and CRV, with participation from Hetz Ventures, AlphaDrive Ventures, and Startpoint Capital. Oak builds a live control plane for human, machine, and AI-agent identities.
Walden Robotics - $300M, Seed round co-led by Toyota Motor Corporation, Toyota Invention Partners, Toyota Ventures, and Deviation Capital. Walden Robotics deploys general-purpose robots for manufacturing tasks.
EverSettled - $5 million, Seed round led by Emergence Capital with Seedcamp, Bridge Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Entrepreneurs First, and Transpose Platform. EverSettled combines an adaptive checklist, a specialist, and an AI probate assistant to help families settle estates.
microagi - $55 million, Seed round led by Hummingbird Ventures with Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global, and redalpine. microagi develops a platform that captures factory data, expands it in simulation, and fine-tunes robot control policies.
Prolo - GBP 4.2 million, Seed round led by Triple Point, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Anamcara, Concrete Ventures, Foundation Ventures, Haatch, Koro Capital, Love Ventures, and Portfolio Ventures. Prolo provides an AI procurement service for construction with supplier comparison, order coordination, and credit.
Skalar - EUR 12 million, Pre-seed and Seed round led by Headline, with participation from futurepresent, QED Investors, Repeat Ventures, MS&AD Ventures, and Foreword Fund. Skalar rebuilds tax advisory around AI agents, standardized workflows, and human tax experts.
Thira - $21M, Seed round led by Madrona with FUSE. Thira builds secure self-learning AI agents that execute back-office processes across enterprise tools, starting with IT workflows.
Guthrie AI - $4M, Seed round led by Chicago Ventures. Guthrie AI provides a Virtual Bid Assistant that handles construction bid intake, scope identification, quote requests, and vendor pricing.
think - over $8 million, Pre-seed round co-led by RAED Ventures and Wa'ed Ventures with Dhahran Techno Valley. think builds liquid-cooled multi-GPU nodes with bare-metal orchestration software.

Series A

Sable - $45 million, Series A round led by Sequoia Capital and 8VC. Sable develops Aidan, an AI employee that joins customer calls, sees product interfaces, answers questions, and navigates software in real time.
Reo.Dev - $11.3 million, Series A round led by Elevation Capital with Heavybit, IndiaQuotient, Foster Ventures, and Uncorrelated Ventures. Reo.Dev captures developer buying signals from GitHub, CLI use, packages, documentation, product interactions, and agent MCP interactions.
E3 Electric.Ai - INR 100 crore (about $10.5 million), Series A round led by BluVenture Holdings. E3 Electric.Ai is building an AI-enabled electric scooter with predictive maintenance, battery monitoring, routing, and safety alerts.
DeweyLearn, Inc. - $5 million, Series A round led by SJF Ventures with Catalysis Capital Management, Morningside, and Owl Ventures. DeweyLearn combines audio, video, learning data, curriculum, and domain expertise to assess real-world performance and produce expert-level feedback.
Xynova - 500 million yuan (US$73.9 million), Series A+ round led by Meituan with NIO Capital, China Merchants Capital, Xiaomi Technology, and an unnamed internet company. Xynova builds dexterous robotic hands and actuators.
Rime - $24 million, Series A round led by M13, with participation from Twilio, Corazon Capital, Unusual Ventures, and Cadenza. Rime develops low-latency, controllable speech models for enterprises.
Meticulous - $15M, Series A round led by Chemistry with Menlo Ventures and eight operators and founders. Meticulous automates software testing by building edge-case checklists and simulating user flows before and after code changes.
Applied Computing - $20M, Series A round led by KBR with Databricks. Applied Computing develops Orbital, a physics-grounded foundation model for energy operations.
Hadrius - $27M, Seed and Series A rounds led by CRV with Y Combinator and Pathlight. Hadrius provides an AI-native compliance system for marketing review, communications archiving, trade surveillance, employee oversight, and program management.
Feathery - $30 million, Series A round backed by Portage, Index Ventures, Allstate Strategic Ventures, Clocktower Ventures, Erie Insurance Group, and Bain Capital Ventures. Feathery provides an AI operating and decisioning layer for financial services workflows.
TerraFirma - $100 million, Series A round led by Kleiner Perkins with Bain Capital Ventures, Glade Brook Capital Partners, BANNER VC, Saga Ventures, Trust Ventures, Definition, PEAK6, Magnetar, and Ravelin. TerraFirma combines AI pre-construction software, remote command-and-control systems, and retrofitted semi-autonomous excavators and dozers.

Series B

Groyyo - INR 90 crore (about $9.3 million), First close of Series B led by Cornerstone Ventures. Groyyo connects fashion brands with manufacturers and manages design, costing, production, quality checks, and delivery with AI-supported software.
Bunkerhill Health - $25 million, Series B round led by Khosla Ventures with Sequoia Capital, Felicis, Optum Ventures, and Y Combinator. Bunkerhill Health provides a platform that lets hospitals build and run clinical and operational AI agents.
Monumental - $32 million, Series B round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Plural and Hummingbird Ventures. Monumental combines construction robots, machine vision, and software that turns architectural drawings into executable 3D plans.
Sabanto - Undisclosed, Series B round led by Leaps by Bayer, with participation from Sustainable Forward Capital, InnoVenture Iowa, Fulcrum Global Capital, DCVC, and Yara International. Sabanto develops retrofittable autonomy kits that turn existing tractors into autonomous machines.
InstaLILY AI - $60M, Series B round led by Energize Capital with Insight Partners, Home Depot Ventures, and United Rentals. InstaLILY AI provides an AI forward-deployed engineer that builds and operates software for business workflows.

Series C and beyond

Fora Travel - $60 million, Series D round led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures with Thrive Capital, Insight Partners, and Heartcore Capital. Fora Travel gives independent travel advisors modern AI-powered infrastructure for itineraries, training, supplier access, bookings, commissions, and back-office work.
Fireworks AI - $1.505 billion, Series D round led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures, and TCV, with participation from Evantic Capital, Lightspeed, NVIDIA, 20VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Menlo Ventures. Fireworks AI provides infrastructure to train, serve, evaluate, and improve open models on proprietary data.
Whale - $40 million, Series C3 extension led by CMB International and SMBC Asia Rising Fund. Whale provides an AI operating system that interprets camera, sensor, and audio signals for spatial analytics, voice intelligence, agents, and workflow execution.
Emergent - $130 million, Series C round led by Creaegis, with participation from Sentinel Global, Khosla Ventures, SoftBank Investment Advisers, Lightspeed, and Y Combinator. Emergent develops autonomous agents that build, test, debug, host, and deploy software.
Neko Health - $700 million, Series C round led by Lightspeed and co-led by O.G. Venture Partners, with participation from Atomico, General Catalyst, Lakestar, Liberty City Ventures, Positive Sum, and BDT & MSD Partners. Neko Health provides preventive care through an integrated scanning hardware, software, and clinical service.
Quadric - $46 million, Series C second close led by IFC with Pear VC, Uncork Capital, BEENEXT, and Offline Ventures. Quadric licenses programmable processor IP for edge AI inference.

Growth / Strategic / Other

ECARX - US$15 million, Convertible senior note from an existing undisclosed investor. ECARX builds automotive computing technology for software-defined and AI-defined vehicles, including custom silicon, operating systems, digital cockpits, ADAS, and embedded intelligence.
Poolhouse - $55 million, Growth investment led by Bluestone Equity Partners. Poolhouse operates social gaming venues and develops BillyQ, a vision-processing platform for automated pool-table scoring, analytics, and games.
Databricks - Undisclosed, Strategic round led by Coatue Management. Databricks develops a data and AI platform spanning model access, conversational analytics, operational databases, and AI research.
General Compute - up to $400 million, Debt financing from Upper90. General Compute is building inference infrastructure with specialized chips in air-cooled data centers.
American Growth Insurance - nearly $70 million, Committed capital from Rockbridge Growth Equity and Atomic. American Growth Insurance acquires independent insurance brokerages and embeds custom AI into their operations while preserving local relationships.
Proaction - $4.2 million, Funding round from GTMfund, Breakers, Aviso Ventures, InnoVenture Iowa, Holman, and Iowa Economic Development Authority. Proaction combines fleet-management software with AI agents for maintenance, registrations, claims, payments, and other workflows.
Self Inspection - $10 million, Funding round led by Sandberg Bernthal Venture Partners with U.S. AutoForce, Westlake Financial, Costanoa Ventures, Rebellion Ventures, BrightCap Ventures, and DVx Ventures. Self Inspection uses guided smartphone capture and computer vision to standardize vehicle inspections and repair-cost estimates.
BXI Robotics - Tens of millions of RMB, Funding round from Shanghai Suochen Information Technology and Feirongda. BXI Robotics provides full-stack humanoid robot ODM programs spanning joint motors, control modules, complete robots, motion algorithms, and application software.
InsideDesk - $12.6 million, Growth financing led by Pender Ventures with Round13 Capital and Graphite Ventures. InsideDesk helps dental service organizations automate revenue-cycle work, improve collections, and reduce administrative burden.
Hemispheric - $52M, Funding round backed by Hanaco Ventures, One Mind, Awareness Capital Management, Protocol Labs, L Catterton, Arkin Capital, and angel investors. Hemispheric develops Descartes NeuroAI, which uses EEG and behavioral data to quantify brain signals for clinicians and researchers.
Hyperion Robotics - EUR 6.4M, Growth funding co-led by Course Corrected and EIC with RE Ventures, Lifeline Ventures, Ubermorgen Ventures, and PC Rettig & Co Impact. Hyperion Robotics combines additive manufacturing with local robotic microfactories for infrastructure projects.
tyred - GBP 2.5 million, Funding round backed by Raw Ventures, Ada Ventures, and Anton Buzdalin. tyred uses IoT and AI for predictive bike maintenance while integrating maintenance, insurance, warranties, and finance.
Finto - $3.4 million, Funding round backed by Y Combinator, Gradient, Lightspeed, Lukas Deutsch, Jurgen Klopffer, and Michael Felix. Finto develops AI agents that check invoices, assess tax, match purchase orders, handle exceptions, and prepare ERP postings.
TYLsemi - $43 million, Early-stage round led by Matter Venture Partners, with participation from Viola Ventures, Global Hands-On VC, and Egis Technology. TYLsemi provides a full-stack chiplet platform for custom AI silicon spanning connectivity, power, memory, design, packaging, and supply-chain execution.

Robotics and AI News

The Independent - Fujitsu and leading Japanese robotics companies to use Nvidia technology in 'physical AI' - Fujitsu and Nvidia are bringing Fanuc, Yaskawa Electric, and Kawasaki Heavy Industries into a physical AI initiative aimed at combining Japan's industrial robotics base with Nvidia's computing stack. The first phase is due later this year, with the companies framing autonomous robots as a response to Japan's labor shortage. The Independent
AI Insider - Nvidia Introduces New Jetson Thor Computers for Robotics and Edge AI - Nvidia introduced the T3000 and T2000 modules with 865 and 400 FP4 teraflops respectively, targeting humanoids, autonomous mobile robots, industrial manipulators, and visual AI agents. The modules arrive in Q1 2027 alongside new memory-optimization tools and a 4-billion-parameter Cosmos 3 Edge world model designed for on-device inference. AI Insider
VentureBeat - China's Moonshot AI releases Kimi K3, the largest open-source model ever, rivaling top U.S. systems - Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model with a 1-million-token context window, native vision, and OpenAI-compatible APIs, with full weights scheduled for July 27. Its reported benchmark results place it near leading closed models on agentic work and information seeking, tightening competition between open and proprietary AI systems. VentureBeat
TechCrunch - New York State halts construction of all new data centers - New York temporarily stopped permitting data centers of 50 megawatts or more while it develops an environmental review process expected to take about a year. The first state-level moratorium of its kind could also lead to grid-support payments and fewer tax benefits for hyperscale projects, raising the infrastructure cost of expanding AI compute. TechCrunch
TechCrunch - Apple Intelligence approved for launch in China with Alibaba and Baidu - Chinese regulators approved Apple Intelligence after Apple integrated Alibaba's Qwen models across iOS, iPadOS, macOS, and visionOS, while Baidu is also developing features for Chinese users. The arrangement shows how global consumer AI products must increasingly combine local models, partners, and regulatory approval to enter major markets. TechCrunch
VentureBeat - Thinking Machines open sources first multimodal language model, Inkling, focused on low cost and 'resistance to censorship' - Thinking Machines released Inkling, a 975-billion-parameter multimodal mixture-of-experts model under Apache 2.0, with controllable reasoning effort that lets developers trade cost for performance. Its open weights, text-image-audio support, and strong but sub-frontier coding results position it as a customizable enterprise alternative to closed models. VentureBeat
ITIF - The U.S. Humanoid Robot Industry Is Falling Behind - ITIF estimates that major Chinese companies sold about 12,868 humanoid robots in 2025 versus roughly 450 from leading U.S. companies, reflecting China's manufacturing scale, lower prices, and national robotics strategy. The group argues that the United States needs coordinated support for research, domestic production, adoption, workforce training, and fair competition before scale and learning effects make the gap harder to close. ITIF

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