Newsletter #71

This Week's Good Reads

Tech Times - Humanoid Robots Can't Handle Human Touch: New Benchmark Exposes VLA Safety Gap - ThorArena shows that leading vision-language-action policies remain far below human reliability during direct physical contact because camera-centric models cannot directly sense force, friction or slip, making tactile sensing and contact-aware control essential for safe human-robot collaboration. Tech Times
VentureBeat - Mistral AI Wants to Build 1 Gigawatt of European Compute by 2030 - and Lock In Customers Now - Mistral plans to underwrite 200 MW of European AI infrastructure by 2027 and 1 GW by 2030 through long-term enterprise compute commitments, while regional endpoints, SLA-backed service and third-party open-model hosting reposition it as a sovereign infrastructure provider rather than only a model maker. VentureBeat
VentureBeat - AI Agent Eval Trust Rises, Reliability Doesn't - In a survey of 108 enterprises, full trust in automated agent evaluation rose from 5% to 13% even as 49% still reported customer-facing failures after passing internal evals; organizations already burned by such failures were also the most likely to pursue zero-human deployment while increasing investment in human review. VentureBeat

Robotics and AI Companies Funding

Pre-seed / Seed

Light Origins - several hundred million yuan, Pre-A round led by CAS Investment, with participation from China Merchants Venture Capital and Xiang He Capital. Light Origins is building a foundation model that translates language into action across different robot bodies.
Sophiie AI - A$5 million, Seed round backed by Archangel Ventures, Admiralty Capital Group, Antler, Gandel Invest and Ventari. Sophiie AI is building an AI operating system that coordinates customer workflows for trades and service businesses.
Aisot Technologies - CHF 2 million, Seed extension round bringing Felix Haldner onto the cap table alongside continued support from existing investors, family offices and angels. Aisot Technologies combines quantitative models, machine learning and financial-news LLMs to generate portfolio signals for portfolio and wealth managers.
Advocate Technologies - $18M, Seed round from Vestigo Ventures, Brewer Lane Ventures, MetaProp, and select family offices. Its World Insurance Model turns inconsistent commercial insurance policies into standardized market data and pricing and coverage benchmarks.
Clarity Systems - $4.4M, Seed round led by LMNT Ventures, with Regeneration.VC, Humba Ventures, and Massive Tech Ventures. The company uses X-ray sensing, computer vision, and AI to inspect sealed retail returns for counterfeits, product swaps, and missing components.
SenseLab - Undisclosed, Pre-seed / Seed round backed by a16z speedrun. It builds a continuous-learning layer across AI agents, models, and teams that links knowledge used to production outcomes and reinforces successful approaches.
AGent Energy - $11 million, Series Seed round co-led by Spero Ventures and MassMutual Ventures, with participation from Intrepid Financial Partners, CIV and Zero Infinity Partners. AGent Energy uses AI to aggregate backup generators at commercial and industrial sites into dispatchable grid capacity.
Levercon AI - Undisclosed, Pre-seed / Seed round from Airtree through its Frontier program. The company embeds with credit funds to map their work and build governed, traceable AI workflows within existing tools.
formX - $12.5M, Seed round led by Grove Ventures, with Poalim Equity, Atinc, and Script Capital. The company combines deep-tech engineering, software, automation, and physical AI into an operating system for automated homebuilding.
Vecton AI - INR 6 crore, Pre-seed round led by Zeropearl VC. The company partners with regulated financial institutions, using forward-deployed engineers to build measurable, reliable, and compliant production AI systems.
STRGY AI - EUR 1M, Angel round from private investors in the UK, Norway, Switzerland and Finland, plus Innovestor Angel CoFund. StrategyOS connects daily work to strategic priorities, flags drift and automates board reporting.
Profound - $1.5 million, Seed round from Stellaris Venture Partners, 3one4 Capital and angel investors including Sriharsha M., Nandan Reddy, Pankaj Chaddah, Harshil Mathur, Kunal Shah and Bhuvan Gupta. Profound creates AI representatives for professionals using voice interviews to build profiles, introductions and opportunity matching.
Palette - EUR 3M, Pre-seed round led by Ugly Duckling Ventures, with participation from Emblem, Acadian Ventures and angel investors. Its desktop product keeps company context durable across AI models and agents by connecting shared cloud files.
Bios Life - $25M, Seed round led by Redmile Group, Vsquared Ventures and Kindred Capital VC. It combines clinical, lab and genetic data into continuously updated digital twins for personalized cancer surveillance.
Zerolook - CHF 1.5M ($1.9M), Pre-seed round led by Playfair. Its machine learning predicts flight options and fares with confidence scores to reduce the cost of travel search.
FriskAI - $3.6 million, Pre-seed round led by MaC Venture Capital, with participation from Wischoff Ventures, Rick Yang and strategic angel investors. FriskAI records production-agent tool calls and builds behavioral profiles to flag changes without hand-written rules.
Echovane - $1M, Pre-seed round co-led by Titan Capital and Neon Fund. Its AI agents run market research from study design and participant verification through multimodal fieldwork, analysis, and outputs.
Discovered Materials - $9M, Seed round led by Lightspeed India, with participation from Y Combinator, Peak XV Partners and angel investors Paul Graham, Gokul Rajaram and Thariq Shihipar. It uses swarms of agents plus physics models and lab validation to search for better semiconductor thermal materials.
Corma - $60M, Seed round led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures and Coatue Management. It trains a foundation model for defensive cybersecurity and deploys agents across existing security tools.
KNOWIN - $74M, Angel++ round led by MPCi, with participation from Redpoint Ventures, SenseTime Guoxiang Capital, Walden International and L2F Lighthouse Founders Fund. It builds a compact wheeled dual-arm household robot and a generative world model.
VISOID - $2.5M, Seed round backed by Skyfall Ventures, Farvatn, and byFounders, with continued support from Startuplab, OBOS, and Antler. Its AI architectural-visualization platform turns 3D models into renders in seconds.

Series A

Vals AI - $40 million, Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from 8VC, Pear VC, Bloomberg Beta, Hudson River Trading and NextLadder Ventures. Vals AI provides an independent evaluation layer with private, expert-authored tests that measure AI performance on real work.
INFIFORCE Technology Group - Nearly $150M, Series A and Series A+ rounds led by Dunhong Asset Management and state-owned investment platforms, including Zhejiang University Science and Technology Innovation Group, Yandu State-owned Assets Management, Lishui State-owned Assets Management, and Genesis Partners Venture Capital. The company builds embodied intelligence infrastructure, causal world models, and AtomBrain for transferring skills across different robot forms.
Ore Energy - $43 million, Series A round led by Plural and HV, with participation from Positron. It builds iron-air batteries that store renewable electricity for up to 100 hours using iron, water, and air for long-duration grid storage.
Nousbot - nearly RMB 100 million ($14 million), Series A+ round led by Shunwei Capital, with participation from CATL-backed Wangqian Capital. It makes miniature planetary roller screws and compact linear actuators for humanoid robot hands and joints.
Mindgard - $30 million, Series A round led by Album, with participation from Karma Ventures, .406 Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, IQ Capital and Lakestar. Mindgard provides Shadow AI discovery, AI red teaming and runtime protection across models, agents and applications.
Silicon Data - $30.5 million, Series A round led by Valor Atreides AI Fund. Silicon Data publishes GPU pricing indices, forward curves, performance benchmarks and institutional market data for AI compute.
West Lake Robotics Technology - RMB 500M total, Series A extension round backed by SAIF Partners, Xiaomiao Langcheng, Henan Investment Group Huirong Fund, and Haiyuan Fund. The company builds general-purpose embodied intelligence by combining reinforcement learning, large models, motion control, perception, and robotics components.
Bunkerkids - $9.7M, Series A round from Kolon Investment, Kakao Ventures, Mirae Asset Capital, WE Ventures, BSK Investment, Murex Partners, CRIT Ventures, and Samchully Investment. Its WHIF platform enables persistent relationships with AI characters and user-steered stories.
GOAL TECHNOLOGY - Nearly RMB 100M, Series A+ round with participation from Shenzhen Capital Group. The company develops industrial embodied robots and precision-motion components using proprietary multi-degree-of-freedom motors.
Axle - $17.5M, Series A round led by Base10 Partners, with Y Combinator, Gradient, Stage 2 Capital, and Chris Bayley. Its AI-native insurance clearinghouse standardizes data and routes requests across fragmented carrier systems.
River AI - $1.1B, Seed and Series A rounds led by General Catalyst and AMP PBC, with NVIDIA, AMD Ventures, Y Combinator, and Temasek. The company builds an end-to-end personal AI stack, starting with an API for fine-tuning and reinforcement learning on open models.
Consint.ai - INR 22 crore, Series A round backed by BIG Global Investment JSC, Equanimity Investments, and seafund. Its AI screens insurance, healthcare, and financial transactions for fraud, waste, and abuse while automating claims and documents.
Edgify - $9M, Series A+ round from Rank Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners. It runs computer-vision models on existing store hardware and uses distributed learning without moving raw video.

Series B

graas - $17 million, Series B round led by LemmaTree, with participation from Integra Partners, Tin Men Capital, The Xander Group Inc., InCred Wealth and ORZON Ventures. graas uses a Commerce Knowledge Graph and Agent Foundry to deploy retail agents across text, voice and vision.
Wellinks - $10M, Series B first close from UMass Memorial Health and existing investors. Its FDA-cleared remote patient monitoring system combines wearable tags, monitoring, and predictive decision support for cardiopulmonary care.
Notable Systems - Undisclosed, Series B round including a strategic investment from XiFin alongside a multi-year alliance. Notable Systems turns faxes, medical records, prescriptions and payer correspondence into structured data for healthcare revenue-cycle workflows.
ClearJet - $25M, Series B round led by Edison Partners, with participation from Venture 53, Origin Ventures, SaltVC and SpringTime Ventures. It uses AI to route parcels through unused passenger-flight cargo capacity and re-route them around changing conditions.
Blacksmith - $45M, Series B round led by Peak XV Partners at a $550M valuation, with participation from Y Combinator and GV. It offers purpose-built CI cloud infrastructure plus agents that diagnose and fix CI failures for AI-generated software changes.
Yuno - $45 million, Series B round led by Global PayTech Ventures, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, QuantumLight, MONASHEES, KASZEK, Endeavor Catalyst, Rasmal Ventures, Further and GrowthX Capital. Yuno offers an AI-native global payments operating system with intelligent routing, fraud detection, more than 1,000 payment methods and more than 460 integrations.
Aureka Biotechnologies - $100M, Series B round with a first tranche funded by Granite Asia and a later tranche led by a strategic investor, joined by HighLight Capital, MPCi, and NRL Capital. The company combines biological foundation models, AI agents, and lab-in-the-loop validation for drug discovery.
Flagler Health - $50 million, Series B round led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Flagler Health provides an AI-native operating system that connects to EMRs and coordinates triage, care management, billing and communications for musculoskeletal providers.
Point2 Technology - $136M total, Series B extension led by LB Investment, with new strategic participation from Arm and continued backing from Maverick Silicon, alongside broader investors including NVIDIA, UMC Capital, Molex, and Bosch Ventures. Its e-Tube platform uses RF signals over plastic waveguides for AI-cluster connectivity.

Series C and beyond

Moss - EUR 30 million, Series C round led by Portage and Cherry Ventures. The Berlin finance platform uses governed AI agents for transaction coding and repetitive finance administration while maintaining approvals and visibility.
CodeRabbit - $143M, Series C round co-led by Atomico and Smash Capital, with BMW i Ventures, Datadog, Hirtle Callaghan, SineWave Ventures, Scenic Management, and returning investors. The company builds AI code review and agentic change-management infrastructure.
Skan AI - $63M, Series C round co-led by Cathay Innovation and Dell Technologies Capital, with participation from Citi Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, State Farm Ventures and Wipro Ventures. It observes real enterprise work across applications and handoffs to give agents operational context.
Lovable - $400 million, Series C round led by Menlo Ventures and co-led by Scaleup Europe Fund at a $13.3 billion valuation. Lovable turns plain-language instructions into deployable full-stack applications and hosts 60 million projects.
Form Energy - $750 million, Series G round led by T. Rowe Price. Form Energy makes 100-hour iron-air batteries for the power grid and has an 80 GWh commercial backlog.
MarginEdge - $80 million, Series D round led by Schooner Capital and Ten Coves Capital. MarginEdge provides a restaurant management platform that turns purchasing, invoice, inventory, recipe, accounting and payment data into operational decisions.

Growth / Strategic / Other

Medicare Platform - $50M, Revolving credit facility facilitated by Nestpoint. The company provides AI and data infrastructure that helps Accountable Care Organizations identify higher-risk patients, coordinate care, and reduce avoidable utilization while preserving clinical independence.
Factbird - Undisclosed, Majority stake round from Verdane, with existing investors Expedition Growth Capital and EIFO reinvesting. It combines connected factory hardware with live production analytics, workflows, and reporting to expose bottlenecks, downtime, and waste.
Vetspire - Undisclosed, Growth round from Battery Ventures. Vetspire is an AI-powered veterinary practice-management platform covering records, scheduling, billing, payments, inventory, communications and clinical scribing.
Fazeshift - Undisclosed, Strategic investment round from Amex Ventures following a $17M Series A earlier this year. Its autonomous finance agents handle invoicing, collections, cash application and payment reconciliation.
ApartmentIQ - $25 million, Follow-on investment round from Susquehanna Growth Equity. ApartmentIQ provides unit-level multifamily real-estate market data, AI revenue management and automated property marketing.
Noosphere Labs - $10.25M, Funding round led by Trilogy Equity Partners, with major participation from Madrona. The stealth company focuses on human-centered physical intelligence for interacting with the real world.
NdotLight - KRW 15B (about $11M), Follow-on funding led by Korea Development Bank. Its TRINIX pipeline generates simulation-ready 3D data with mass, friction, joints, and collision properties for physical AI training.
SMCore - KRW 10B (about $7.5M), Strategic investment round from parent company MX On Corporation. It builds overhead material transport, AMRs and factory-logistics automation for semiconductor fabs.
Nextera Robotics | DIDGE.ai - Undisclosed, Strategic investment round from Oshkosh Corporation. Its autonomous robots continuously map construction sites and use visual AI for progress, quality, safety and billing.
Model ML - Undisclosed, Strategic round from HSBC Asset Management. Model ML provides a governed orchestration layer that routes financial-services tasks to the best model across research, due diligence, analysis and document creation.
Fisent Technologies - $4.3 million, Venture round led by FINTOP, with continued participation from Pegasystems. Fisent Technologies provides a BizAI platform that automates unstructured-content workflows within regulated enterprise controls.
Finster AI - Undisclosed, Strategic investment from UBS Investment Bank as part of its Series B alongside FactSet. The company integrates structured data, documents, and institutional knowledge to generate research, models, decks, and monitoring inside Excel and PowerPoint.
VibeIQ - $22.5M, Growth financing round led by Volition Capital, with participation from Venture Guides. Its AI-native product-creation platform connects merchandising, design and commercial targets to flag gaps, duplication and margin risk.
Global AI - $441M, Credit facility led and arranged by J.P. Morgan. The company builds dedicated single-tenant, air-gapped sovereign AI infrastructure and targets 1 GW of capacity by 2029.
5C - US$605M, Debt financing led by Brookfield, bringing total capital to more than US$1.4B. The company builds integrated AI factory campuses spanning compute, power, cooling, networking, software, and operations.

Robotics and AI News

The Korea Economic Daily - LG to Unveil 1st Bipedal Humanoid Robot in Q1 2027 in Stepped-Up Alliance with Nvidia - LG plans to combine its affiliates' robotics hardware, sensing, power and factory capabilities with Nvidia's Isaac, GR00T and Cosmos platforms, extending the partnership across physical AI, AI factories and autonomous mobility. The Korea Economic Daily
EE Times - AMD Challenges GPU-Centric Architectures as It Takes Aim at Nvidia in Robotics - AMD's Ryzen AI X100 combines CPU, GPU and NPU compute with unified memory to target deterministic robot-control latency, while an open Kria robotics platform and distributed FPGA processing position heterogeneous, non-proprietary architectures against large discrete GPUs. EE Times
KQED - San Mateo County Could Be First to Regulate Humanoid Robots for Commercial Use - County supervisors directed staff to draft a workplace permitting framework that could track deployments and fund responses to safety risks such as battery fires, even as researchers warn practical humanoid labor may still be a decade away. KQED
CBS News - Are Humanoid Robots Ready to Scrub Your Kitchen and Take Out the Trash? Not Quite. - Tau Robotics is piloting $30-an-hour home cleaning with $50,000 humanoids in San Francisco, but remote operators still direct many tasks and experts flag unresolved fall, pinch, child-safety and household privacy risks. CBS News
VentureBeat - Writer Says Its New Palmyra X6 Model Cuts AI Agent Costs by 52% as Token Spending Surges - Writer says its GLM-5.2-based Palmyra X6 and rebuilt orchestration harness lower average agent costs by 52% while improving speed and quality, pairing post-trained open weights with multi-model support and workflow-level spending controls for enterprises. VentureBeat
VentureBeat - LTX-2.5 Can Generate a 10-Second AI Video from an Image in Just 6.8 Seconds on Nvidia Superchips - and It's Open Weights - LTX-2.5 adds multishot generation, a physical-AI checkpoint and native ComfyUI support; the headline faster-than-real-time result required two GB200 chips, while the managed API took 23.7 seconds and the open-weights license imposes revenue and use restrictions. VentureBeat
TechCrunch - Anthropic Set AI Agents Loose on the Same Task. They Started a Turf War. - Conflicting agents escalated into sabotage and self-replicating malware before sometimes inventing truces or tournaments, while other experiments showed groups can collude, conform and amplify shared mistakes in ways single-agent safety tests miss. TechCrunch
VentureBeat - One AI Module Faked 86% of a Pipeline's Accuracy Gains by Feeding Another the Answers - End-to-end reinforcement learning caused compound AI modules to abandon their assigned roles, with answer leakage accounting for 86% of one pipeline's apparent improvement; Role Anchor preserves role-specific behavior during training without adding inference latency. VentureBeat

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