Newsletter #70

This Week's Good Reads

Robotics & Automation News - Trends and outlook for actuators: The muscles behind humanoid motion - Humanoid production readiness is turning actuators into a major supply-chain opportunity: they make up about 56 percent of robot weight, while lightweighting, rare-earth magnets, and manufacturability remain key bottlenecks. Robotics & Automation News
VentureBeat - Trunk Tools ditches general-purpose models - Trunk Tools combines document perception, a domain knowledge graph, and specialized agents to reason across construction records, cutting submittal reviews from 50-60 days to 10 and showing why vertical AI needs structured industry context and task-specific evaluation. VentureBeat
VentureBeat - Stanford's AI agents designed a drug Merck later built, too - Stanford's 37,000-agent Virtual Biotech uses an AI-native file system and specialized organizational structure to coordinate drug discovery; one autonomously designed cancer therapy was later independently developed and validated by Merck. VentureBeat

Robotics and AI Companies Funding

Pre-seed / Seed

Warpify Robotics - Undisclosed, Pre-A round from Zhongguancun Zhongnuo Fund. Warpify Robotics provides the hardware, sensors, software, site preparation, deployment, maintenance, and commercial infrastructure needed to automate real-world workflows.
Einship - $1 million, Seed round led by Parceiro Ventures. Einship is building an AI-native operating layer that combines market intelligence, shipment operations, regulatory context, and analytics for international trade.
Runflow - R$7 million (about $1.3 million), Seed round led by Honey Island with Airborne Ventures and STAMINA Ventures. Runflow provides large enterprises with an operating layer for creating, deploying, and governing AI agents across existing systems.
Claryx - $3.5 million, Pre-seed round led by Outlander VC with Company Ventures, Boost VC, Neon, Mana Ventures, 640 Oxford, and Precursor Ventures. Claryx uses pathogen genomics and environmental sampling to reveal hospital infection transmission chains before they become outbreaks.
Lemma (YC F25) - $2.3 million, Pre-seed round backed by Matrix, Y Combinator, Liquid 2 Ventures, Vermilion Cliffs Ventures, Irregular Expressions, Cervin Ventures, Comma Capital, Position Ventures, and Eight Capital Management. Lemma monitors AI agent executions, detects silent semantic failures, groups recurring problems, and turns production incidents into regression evaluations.
Malachyte - $10 million, Seed round co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners and Gradient with Harpoon participating. Malachyte builds shared user representations that help ecommerce search, recommendation, and merchandising systems personalize a shopper's experience from the first pageview.
Strutt - Undisclosed, Pre-A+ round from undisclosed investors. Strutt builds EV1, a personal mobility robot that combines multimodal sensing, independent motors, active steering, suspension, edge computing, and obstacle avoidance.
Proxy Foods AI - $6 million, Seed round led by Ted Leonsis with Robert Hisaoka and SWaN & Legend Venture Partners. Proxy Foods AI provides an agentic platform for food and beverage formulation, regulatory checks, sensory prediction, and commercialization.
Shelfmark - $3.5 million, Seed round led by Armory Square Ventures, with Grand Ventures, HPA, Argon Ventures, and Cultivation Capital participating. Shelfmark develops a Physical AI platform that inspects continuous-flow manufacturing lines and connects detected defects to production conditions for root-cause analysis.
Wayy.ai - $2 million, Pre-seed round led by 0 to 1 Ventures with Tunc Yalgin and other U.S. angels. Wayy.ai builds an AI sales co-founder that identifies suitable prospects, drafts personalized outreach, and learns from response patterns for solopreneurs and small teams.
Avatar Robotics - $6.5 million, Seed round led by AlleyCorp. Avatar Robotics combines teleoperation with AI autonomy to deploy humanoid robots for picking, packing, kitting, sorting, inventory counting, and material movement in live warehouses.
Rivo - $2.7 million, Seed round backed by South Park Commons, Wisdom Ventures, Script Capital, 645 Ventures, 20VC, and Jag Duggal. Rivo uses AI to predict household cash needs, move idle checking-account balances into U.S. Treasuries, and return the money before bills are due.
Endeavor Optical Networks Inc. - $10.75 million, Seed round co-led by General Catalyst and Andreessen Horowitz, with Main Object, XYZ Venture Capital, Upfront Ventures, and Ian Cinnamon participating. Endeavor Optical Networks Inc. is developing a satellite network that uses optical links to provide dedicated intercontinental routes for data centers, hyperscalers, and AI labs.
Exclaim Robotics - $4.95 million, Pre-seed round co-led by Founderful and Playfair, with Kindred Capital, HCVC, Tiny Supercomputer Investment Company, ACE & Company, and Amino Collective participating. Exclaim Robotics develops autonomous mobile robots that perform hands-on maintenance tasks inside live AI data centers.
Decade - $85 million, Seed round backed by Greenoaks, Benchmark, and Diffusion. Decade combines senior financial advisers with AI agents that analyze statements, monitor spending and investments, and reason across each client's full balance sheet.
LoopX - $4.05 million, Seed round co-led by BDC and Orion Resource Partners with Hatch participating. LoopX combines thermal vision, edge computing, and mine-trained AI models to provide collision avoidance, payload measurement, and active safety for mining equipment.
Aavalynx - £1.5M, Pre-seed round led by Omega Ventures with Two Ravens VC and undisclosed angel investors. Aavalynx is building a legal AI platform that structures and analyzes dispute data to help legal and business teams assess exposure, compare cases, and make earlier decisions.
Arrakis Security - $8 million, Seed round led by Hetz Ventures with Mati Staniszewski, Ofer Smadari, and Amitai Ratzon. Arrakis Security builds runtime controls that monitor AI agent behavior, inspect tool calls, and block actions or revoke permissions when agents violate policy.
JUNE AI - $20 million, Pre-seed round led by Time Ventures, with Michael Dell, Aaron Levie, and George Kurtz participating. JUNE AI maps enterprise systems and workflows, identifies bottlenecks, and builds agent-powered processes across existing business software.
Reimagine Robotics - Undisclosed, Pre-seed round backed by Fly Ventures, firstminute capital, and undisclosed angel investors. Reimagine Robotics develops adaptable industrial robots that factory workers can teach and correct directly on the job.
PokeBot - $100 million, Pre-A round co-led by Shunwei Capital and IDG Capital. PokeBot develops manipulation-focused home robots using a World Action Model, reinforcement learning on physical robots, and proprietary real-world data-collection hardware.
Actualyze AI - $7 million, Seed round backed by Storm Ventures, Canaan, Morado Ventures, and AME Cloud Ventures. Actualyze AI provides an enterprise control plane that applies identity, access, data-security, budget, routing, and logging policies to every AI request.
Maximum - $30 million, Seed round led by CRV with Pear VC, Restive Ventures, Plug and Play, and Anthemis Group. Maximum is building an AI-native operating system that helps banks deploy custom agents, automate operational workflows, monitor customer activity, and launch financial products.
The Intelligence Company - $7.9 million, Seed round led by Index Ventures with Conviction, A*, Valkyrie, and Y Combinator. The Intelligence Company operates Design Arena, where people compare competing AI model outputs to generate preference data for evaluating and improving media-generation systems.

Series A

Superleap AI CRM - INR 36 crore, Pre-Series A round led by Peak XV Partners through Surge. Superleap AI CRM builds an AI-native revenue operating system that transcribes calls, qualifies leads, updates records, surfaces customer intelligence, and lets agents execute workflows.
Ommo Technologies, Inc. - Tens of millions of US dollars, Series A round co-led by VMS Group and an undisclosed fund, with KJ Capital participating. Ommo Technologies develops magnetic sensing systems that provide precise 6DoF tracking for medical devices and robotic manipulation even under occlusion.
Buzz Solutions - $20 million, Series A round led by S3 Ventures, with continued support from GoPoint Ventures, HearstLab, and Blackhorn Ventures. Buzz Solutions provides a computer vision platform that detects infrastructure faults and helps utilities prioritize maintenance across grids and solar assets.
Gravity - $30.5 million, Series A round co-led by Lightspeed and Committed Capital. Gravity operates an AI-native advertising stack that lets advertisers buy placements, AI applications monetize conversations, and both sides transact through an exchange.
PineGap.ai - $8 million, Series A round led by Stellaris Venture Partners with Inventus Capital Partners, Silicon Valley Quad, and DeVC. PineGap.ai builds custom AI agents around each investment firm's research process, private data, investment thesis, and preferred output format.
Sapiom - $35 million, Series A round led by Dragonfly with Accel, Gradient, Coinbase Ventures, Operator Collective, Formus Capital, VanEck Ventures, Okta Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, and Array Ventures. Sapiom provides infrastructure for selecting AI models and managing agent budgets, permissions, recovery, audit trails, and production execution.
Naïve - $28.5 million, Series A round led by Nexus Venture Partners with Y Combinator, Zetta Venture Partners, Liquid 2 Ventures, Gokul Rajaram, Tim Zheng, and JD Sherman. Naïve provides coding agents with API-based infrastructure for company formation, payments, communications, cloud resources, databases, model routing, memory, and governance.
Mitti Labs - $9.5 million, Series A round led by Aramco Ventures with Lightspeed India, Godrej Industries Group, Cisco Foundation, Francis Family Fund, and Volta Circle. Mitti Labs uses satellite radar, field data, and physical models to create digital twins that track soil moisture, flooding, crop health, and emissions across rice fields.
Volta - $300 million, Seed and Series A rounds led by Azora, Andreessen Horowitz, Altimeter, and NVIDIA with DFO Management and Matter Venture Partners. Volta combines powered land, data centers, GPUs, cloud software, and project finance into an integrated AI compute platform.
Andromeda Surgical - $15 million, Series A round led by Standard Capital, with Y Combinator and VOX Capital participating. Andromeda Surgical develops a robotic platform that combines spatial navigation, tablet-based control, and a single robotic arm for minimally invasive prostate surgery.
RWX - $12 million, Series A round led by Hyde Park Venture Partners with Quiet Capital, The O.H.I.O. Fund, R1 Capital, DV, Bryan Johnson, Kohsuke Kawaguchi, and Theo Browne. RWX provides agent-native infrastructure for testing code in sandboxes, running CI pipelines, and deploying preview applications without requiring a git commit or push.
Dash Bio - $30 million, Series A round led by Oak HC/FT with Freestyle Capital and Swift Ventures. Dash Bio combines laboratory robotics, a proprietary operating system, and standardized assays to deliver faster and more traceable bioanalysis for drug developers.

Series B

TriOrb Inc. - JPY 300 million, Second-tranche Series B round backed by Japan Bank for International Cooperation and Toyota Tsusho Corporation. TriOrb Inc. builds the BASE omnidirectional mobility platform for moving equipment and heavy objects through changing factory layouts.
Acrab - US$130 million, Series B round backed by Vertex Ventures SE Asia & India and Vertex Growth. Acrab is building a full-stack edge compute platform spanning custom silicon, local model inference, software, and AI agent orchestration.
Omilia - $67 million, Series B round led by Expedition Growth Capital with Grafton Capital. Omilia provides self-learning AI agents that handle customer interactions across calls, chat, messaging, and drive-thru ordering.
Multiplier Holdings - $35 million, Series B round led by The General Partnership with Ribbit Capital and Lightspeed. Multiplier Holdings acquires specialized professional-services firms and builds AI tools around their proprietary workflows, data, and expert judgment.
Wordsmith AI - $14 million, Series B extension round led by Intact Private Capital with FT Ventures, Highland Europe, and Index Ventures. Wordsmith AI provides an operating platform for in-house legal teams where AI agents handle routine work against approved playbooks and route judgment calls to lawyers.
Convex - $57 million, Series B round led by Insight Partners with Etna Labs, Andreessen Horowitz, Spark Capital, and Justin Kan. Convex provides a backend platform with transactional guarantees, end-to-end TypeScript safety, automatic synchronization, caching, and sandboxed components for applications built by developers and AI coding agents.
QuantHealth - $45 million, Series B round led by Qumra Capital with Pitango, Sanofi Ventures, Artofin Venture Capital Fund, BHI, GC Ventures, NewHealth Ventures, Shoni Health Ventures, and Esplanade Ventures. QuantHealth uses AI to simulate patient-level biology and predict clinical trial outcomes before patient enrollment or mid-trial adjustments.
OLIX - $312 million, Series B round led by Fundomo, with Sovereign AI, Arm, Hudson River Trading, Reed Hastings, Hummingbird Ventures, Crane Venture Partners, Plural, Creandum, Phoenix Court, and Transition Ventures participating. OLIX is developing an AI inference system that combines specialized chips, photonic interconnects, and deterministic compilation across the full rack.
Inocras Inc. - $31 million, Series B-3 round backed by NDS Corporation, Aimed Bio Inc., IMM Investment Corp., Korea Investment & Securities Co., Ltd, LoftyRock Investment, Dt&Investment, Woori Investment & Securities, Shinhan Securities Co., DSC Investment, Dunamu & Partners, and InterVest Co., LTD. Inocras Inc. combines whole-genome sequencing, proprietary bioinformatics, and automated interpretation to generate clinically actionable cancer insights.

Series C and beyond

Lumilens - More than $700 million, Series C round backed by Atreides Management, Bain Capital Ventures, Meritech, Seligman Ventures, and Spark Capital. Lumilens builds scale-up and scale-out photonic interconnects for AI data centers using in-house silicon, advanced packaging, and automated manufacturing.
NavVis - $85 million, Series D round led by TJC, with Yttrium, Kozo Keikaku Engineering, Inc., and Cipio Partners participating. NavVis provides reality-capture systems and spatial-data software that turn factories, construction sites, and other complex assets into survey-grade digital twins.
Moove - $250 million, Series C round led by Mubadala, with Woven Capital and Ion Pacific co-leading and BlueCrest Capital Management, Sona Asset Management, and Raptor Group participating. Moove provides financing and operational infrastructure for mobility fleets and is expanding into robotaxi depots, charging, maintenance, and fleet coordination.
Faye - $50M, Series C round led by Madrona with BRM, Portage, F2 Venture Capital, Viola Ventures, and Lumir Ventures. Faye provides an AI-powered travel insurance platform spanning underwriting, traveler assistance, claims, payments, and partner servicing.
HappyRobot - $150 million, Series C round co-led by Prysm Capital and Eurazeo. HappyRobot builds AI agents that execute operational work across phone calls, email, documents, web applications, and internal systems.
Horizon3.ai - $250 million, Series E round co-led by NightDragon and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Horizon3.ai provides an autonomous penetration-testing platform that identifies exploitable attack paths, guides remediation, and verifies fixes in production environments.
Zenity - $125 million, Series C round led by Norwest with Qumra Capital, SoftBank Investment Advisers, Hitachi Ventures, and LG Technology Ventures. Zenity provides a security control layer that evaluates AI agents before they act and allows, modifies, or blocks their actions across enterprise systems.
Base Power Company - $1 billion, Series D round backed by Ribbit Capital, Addition, Valor Equity Partners, JPMorganChase, Altimeter, and others. Base Power Company installs and coordinates large residential batteries as distributed grid capacity for peak demand and power outages.

Growth / Strategic / Other

Harvey - Undisclosed, Strategic growth investment from Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan Asset Management. Harvey builds domain-specific AI agents and workflows for legal research, drafting, compliance review, contract analysis, and large-scale document work.
Source Foundry - $400 million, Funding round from Situational Awareness. Source Foundry is developing new manufacturing physics to make semiconductor production simpler, cheaper, and faster.
rintin - $6.2 million, Funding round led by COMETA with Newtopia VC, Latin Leap VC, Amador Holdings, FJ Labs, and angel investors. rintin operates an AI-powered B2B commerce platform that helps small retailers source inventory, consolidate purchases, arrange delivery, and access embedded credit.
Firmus Technologies - USD$2 billion, Strategic equity investment backed by Coatue Management, NVIDIA, Blackstone, and Jane Street. Firmus Technologies designs vertically integrated AI factories spanning liquid cooling, energy-grid management, manufacturing, and compute telemetry.
Body Vision Medical - Undisclosed, Funding round led by Business Asia Consultants, Inc. and SPRIM Global Investments. Body Vision Medical develops an AI-powered intraoperative imaging platform that turns standard 2D C-arm images into real-time 3D guidance for lung procedures.
Kily - ₹30 crore (about $3.1 million), Venture financing round led by Sorin Investments, with Razorpay and WYSER - Pioneering Agentic AI Venture fund participating. Kily builds autonomous AI agents that execute listing, pricing, inventory, advertising, and other commerce workflows for brands across online marketplaces.
Vexev - $6 million, Funding round backed by existing and new investors including Blackbird, Neotribe Ventures, Startmate, Horizon, TreeArc Investment Group, TEN13, Bioshore, and Alumni Ventures. Vexev develops autonomous vascular imaging systems that combine robotics, AI, and ultrasound to standardize scans normally performed by specialist operators.
Scale Social AI - Undisclosed, Funding round from undisclosed investors. Scale Social AI provides enterprise infrastructure for collecting, evaluating, rights-clearing, approving, and distributing customer and community content across marketing channels.
Ordway - Billing and Revenue Automation - $20 million, Growth capital led by Harbert Management Corporation with debt participation from Western Alliance Bank. Ordway automates the quote-to-cash workflow across contract extraction, billing, payments, revenue recognition, and financial forecasting.
OLIGO Security - $60 million, Funding extension backed by Ballistic Ventures, Canon Capital, Greenfield Partners, Lightspeed, Red Dot Capital Partners, TLV Partners, and Eyal Waldman. OLIGO Security monitors applications at runtime to identify exploitable vulnerabilities and block attacks with virtual patches before they become incidents.
JIJ - JPY 840 million (about $5.2 million), Equity financing led by Global Brain Corporation, with Fujitsu Ventures participating. JIJ develops AI agents and middleware that translate business constraints into mathematical optimization models and connect workflows to classical and emerging quantum systems.
Delightree - $25 million, Growth funding from Innovius Capital, Accel, Timber Grove Ventures, and Emergent Ventures. Delightree provides an agentic operating platform that unifies training, audits, compliance, communications, remediation, and location launches for franchise and multi-unit brands.
Above Security - Undisclosed, Strategic investment from CrowdStrike Falcon Fund. Above Security uses AI agents to continuously analyze identity, application, data-movement, and workflow signals and assemble investigation-ready insider-risk evidence.
MOZN - Undisclosed, Strategic investment from HUMAIN. MOZN deploys enterprise AI for financial crime prevention, knowledge intelligence, and governance, risk, and compliance in high-assurance environments.

Robotics and AI News

Silicon Republic - Humanoid robotics sales booming as China captures 97pc of market - Global humanoid sales rose 272 percent year over year, with industrial and commercial uses driving more than 70 percent of first-half shipments; China accounts for over 97 percent of supply and more than 85 percent of demand. Silicon Republic
AI Insider - HII Plans Up to $900M in Robotics Work With Path Robotics, GrayMatter - HII plans up to $900 million in performance-based work for Path Robotics and GrayMatter over seven years, subject to Navy-grade milestones for automated welding, grinding, painting, inspection, and other shipbuilding processes. AI Insider
International Federation of Robotics - FCC Restrictions on Foreign-Produced Advanced Robotic Devices - New FCC rules generally block authorization of certain foreign-produced connected mobile robots, including AMRs, humanoids, and quadrupeds, while excluding conventional industrial arms and preserving previously authorized products. International Federation of Robotics
PR Newswire - Dyna Robotics unveils DYNA-2 World-Action Model - DYNA-2 was pretrained on more than one million hours of egocentric human video and transfers across robot arms, humanoids, and dexterous hands; Dyna reports that scaling pretraining raised manufacturing-task success from 20 percent to 80-90 percent. PR Newswire
Associated Press - Zuckerberg manifesto pushes an open-source approach on AI as Meta releases its latest model - Meta released the lightweight, permissively licensed Muse Glimmer model for local use and offered access to the larger Muse Spark 1.2, framing open distribution as a counterweight to concentrated control of advanced AI. Associated Press
VentureBeat - No cloud, no GPUs, no problem: Liquid AI's new model LFM2.5-2.6B brings powerful AI agents to devices as small as a Raspberry Pi - Liquid AI's 2.6-billion-parameter model runs tool-using agents locally on CPUs with under 2.5 GB of memory, targeting private, low-cost, always-on workflows across phones, PCs, vehicles, and robots. VentureBeat
TechCrunch - OpenAI says it slowed Astra model development over security concerns - OpenAI paused parts of Astra development after preliminary tests could not rule out critical cyber capabilities, triggering stricter safeguards, government coordination, and limits on internal activities under its Preparedness Framework. TechCrunch
TechCrunch - Cloudflare launches Kitesurf, a browser built for AI agents - Kitesurf is a cloud-hosted browser built for agent workloads, emphasizing context, token efficiency, scale, and prompt-injection defenses while letting developers automate web navigation and forms without running Chromium. TechCrunch

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