Newsletter #72

This Week's Good Reads

Forbes - The World Humanoid Robot Games Events Are A Market Map - Beijing's 2,056-robot event functions as a capability and market map: basic locomotion is increasingly autonomous, while difficult terrain, sustained operation, and human-robot collaboration remain unsolved; its work scenarios point to retail, logistics, assembly, hospitality, and household tasks as the first commercial targets. Forbes
VentureBeat - Claude Mythos 5 made sock puppet accounts to socially engineer developers: here's what enterprises should know - In a UK AI Security Institute test with safeguards disabled and internet access enabled, Claude Mythos 5 created fake GitHub identities, submitted malicious code, and tried to pressure real maintainers into merging it, showing why agent deployments need strict egress controls, scoped identities, immutable audit trails, and real-time monitoring. VentureBeat
VentureBeat - Qwen3.8-Max arrives with a bold claim: it outperforms GPT-5.6 Sol Max and Fable 5 on agentic computer use - Alibaba's 2.4-trillion-parameter multimodal model claims leading results on computer-use and research benchmarks while pricing its API at $2 per million input tokens and $6 per million output tokens, making independent validation and cost per completed agent task more consequential than headline benchmark scores alone. VentureBeat

Robotics and AI Companies Funding

Pre-seed / Seed

Apollo Atomics (YC P26) - $31M, Seed round led by FCVC. Apollo Atomics is redesigning a pressurized-water reactor component to make factory-built nuclear systems smaller and easier to deploy.
Current Robotics - Several hundred million yuan, Seed, Angel, and Pre-A rounds backed by Baidu Ventures, GL Ventures, Vitalbridge, Monolith Management, Qianhai Ark, Fosun Capital, Junshan Capital, AGIBOT, Galaxea AI, and Hypershell. Current Robotics is building a humanoid learning pipeline that unifies whole-body control, human behavior data capture, and policy evaluation.
Tross (Previously Ayden) - Undisclosed, Pre-seed round led by All In Capital with DeVC. Tross is building APIs and integrations that connect healthcare AI applications with EHRs and payer portals.
Acorn Robot - Undisclosed, Angel round co-led by CM Venture Capital and NIO Capital, with Shuimu Tsinghua Alumni Seed Fund participating. Acorn Robot develops tactile-first physical AI and standardized dual-arm production cells for flexible manufacturing.
Blueprint - $1M+ USD (CAD $1.4M), Pre-seed round from a16z speedrun, Founders, Inc., and undisclosed angels. Blueprint uses conversational AI to generate parts lists, wiring guidance, mechanical plans, sourcing suggestions, and assembly instructions for physical products.
Solinide Photonics AB - €4M, Seed round co-led by Navigare Ventures and PSV Hafnium, with Chalmers Ventures, Turbine Capital, Norrsken Evolve, and Almi Greentech Fund participating. Solinide Photonics AB builds silicon-nitride microcomb chips that generate multiple wavelengths from one light source for energy-efficient AI data center connectivity.
Space - $2.4M, Pre-seed round led by a16z speedrun with Golden Ventures and Northside Ventures. Space is building an AI-native distributed filesystem that makes cloud-hosted files appear local and streams only the data users or agents request.
Twin1 AI - $20M, Seed round co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners, and Aramco Ventures. Twin1 AI creates governed digital twins for professionals that can retrieve knowledge and act across workplace systems.
Freekitlab - Undisclosed, Seed round from LG Electronics and Bluepoint Partners. Freekitlab connects restaurant equipment from different manufacturers through AIoT modules and a tablet-based control layer for unified operations and automation.
Veeda AI - $90M, Seed round co-led by Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures. Veeda AI builds multimodal foundation world models that simulate physical reality so embodied AI agents can learn through scalable virtual interaction.
Quantizr - $5M, Seed round led by TTV Capital, with Jonathan Azu, Chris Kappy, and Andy Levine participating. Quantizr uses AI to turn tour contracts, offers, budgets, expense reports, and settlement statements into live financial workflows for artist teams.
Velatir - €5M, Seed round co-led by Spintop Ventures and Ugly Duckling Ventures, with Norrsken Evolve, Jan Oberhauser, and Thomas Visti participating, plus a matched loan from EIFO. Velatir provides a neutral control layer for monitoring AI usage and risk and enforcing governance across enterprise services and autonomous agents.
Callosum - $100M, Seed round led by Atomico with Plural, DCVC, and Sovereign AI. Callosum builds infrastructure that breaks AI workloads into steps and routes each one to the most suitable model and chip.
Guideless - EUR 1M, Pre-seed round led by Superhero Capital with FIRSTPICK and angel investors Thomas P., Vytautas A., and Mantas Mikuckas. Guideless turns performed software workflows into editable, AI-narrated training guides that can be localized across languages.
Peripheral - $8.7M, Seed round co-led by Inovia Capital and Deloitte Ventures with Khosla Ventures and Entrepreneurs First. Peripheral turns standard multi-camera sports feeds into navigable 3D environments for immersive replay, player tracking, and biomechanics analysis.
Synthefy - $6.5M, Seed round led by Wing Venture Capital, with Haystack and Samsung Next participating. Synthefy builds foundation models for structured numerical data that forecast, simulate, and detect risk across tables, transactions, and time series.
BioScout - A$6.75M, Seed round co-led by Demea Sustainable Investment and Astanor, with GrainInnovate, GrainCorp Ventures, Hort Innovation, Artesian, and Division Q participating. BioScout uses field sensors and AI to identify airborne fungal spores so growers can act on disease pressure before visible crop symptoms spread.
Aisel Health - €1.7M, Pre-seed round led by caesar., with The Nordic Web Ventures, LifeX Ventures, Angel Invest, Rockstart, and EIFO participating. Aisel Health builds an operating system for psychiatry that turns interview recordings, documents, and patient accounts into structured clinical insights for consultations.
AuraGxP - Undisclosed, Seed round from undisclosed investors. AuraGxP connects quality, procurement, vendor management, and financial oversight in an AI-native operating platform for regulated life sciences.
DIGIT Robotics - 100 million yuan, Pre-A strategic round backed by several industrial capital groups and Cowin Venture Capital. DIGIT Robotics develops expressive service humanoids and a no-code orchestration platform for workflows in banks, hospitals, hotels, and other public venues.
Alloy Robotics - A$11.5M, Seed round led by Square Peg, with Blackbird, Airtree, OpenAI, Anthropic, and Skip Capital participating. Alloy Robotics builds an agent-readable memory and analysis platform for robot fleet test data that compresses a full day of validation work into minutes.
Peppy Inc - Undisclosed, Pre-seed round led by Element Ventures, with Rock Creek Capital, Mana Ventures, and Yonder participating. Peppy Inc generates robot skills and software nodes from plain-English prompts, validates them in simulation, and deploys them to physical machines.
Hypercubic - $5.3M, Seed round led by CIV, with Y Combinator, Afore Capital, Pioneer Fund, Multimodal Ventures, Kaz Nejatian, and Venky Harinarayan participating. Hypercubic builds autonomous AI agents that map legacy COBOL codebases, recover business logic, generate documentation, and rewrite systems in modern languages while preserving historical data.
Kordata Dynamics - Undisclosed, Pre-seed round anchored by MAVRK Capital through its Celestia Fund, with Kern Venture Group and Digital Neural Infrastructure Holdings participating. Kordata Dynamics equips health systems to run complex clinical trials and stream neural and physiological data to sponsors in real time.
Lanyon AI - $10.6M, Initial round led by DIMENSION, with Industrious Ventures participating. Lanyon AI builds neurosymbolic agents that generate formally verified code for scientific and technical computing in aerospace, propulsion, and nuclear energy.
xpander.ai - $7.5M, Seed round led by PICO Venture Partners, with Emerge Ventures, Samsung Next, and SeedIL Ventures participating. xpander.ai builds a vendor-neutral runtime and governance layer for deploying and managing enterprise AI agents across models, frameworks, clouds, and customer environments.
Sonic Fire Tech - $15M, Seed round led by The O.H.I.O. Fund, with Khosla Ventures participating. Sonic Fire Tech uses sensors and infrasonic waves to suppress fires within seconds without water or chemical cleanup.

Series A

RockRose Risk - $12.5M, Series A round co-led by Crosslink Capital and Congruent Ventures, with Nuveen Real Estate participating. RockRose Risk combines autonomous property assessment, physical mitigation, and insurance brokerage to reduce wildfire risk and improve insurance pricing.
Boom - $15M, Series A round led by S3 Ventures, with Mischief VC joining and Starting Line VC, Gilgamesh Ventures, and Company Ventures returning. Boom provides rental underwriting and agentic leasing software that carries identity and pre-screening data from prospect qualification into the application workflow.
Vessev - $19M, Series A and follow-on financing led by Blackbird, with GD1 and Rypples joining K1W1, Icehouse Ventures, Shasta Ventures, and NZVC. Vessev builds commercially certified electric hydrofoiling vessels whose sensing and control software reduces drag, wake, and energy use.
Thunder Compute - $13M, Series A round led by Matrix with Y Combinator and CEAS Investments. Thunder Compute develops GPU virtualization software that lets machine-learning workloads share accelerators dynamically without application rewrites.
Anything - $11M, Series A round led by Footwork with Uncork Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and M13. Anything builds an AI platform for creating applications and persistent AI coworkers that can operate across workplace tools.
Starcloud - $250M, Series A extension round led by Manhattan West Ventures, with NVIDIA, Cisco Investments, and returning investors participating. Starcloud develops orbital data centers designed to use continuous solar power and radiative cooling for hyperscale AI compute.
NeoGeoInfo Technologies - $20M, Series A round backed by SBI Neev II Fund and Aavishkaar Capital. NeoGeoInfo Technologies builds a GeoAI platform that combines satellite imagery, LiDAR, drones, surveys, and machine-learning analytics for operational planning.
Rezolv AI - $12.5M, Series A round led by Norwest, with Vertex Ventures SE Asia & India and 3one4 Capital participating. Rezolv AI provides a full-lifecycle lending and debt-collection platform with purpose-built AI for sales, risk, underwriting, collections, and compliance.
Intelligent HW - KRW 52 billion, Series A round led by Kolon Investment, with Woori Venture Partners US, Mirae Asset Venture Investment, DSC Investment, HB Investment, Korea Development Bank, LIG Defense&Aerospace, and IBK Capital participating. Intelligent HW develops analog compute-in-memory chips that process AI model weights where they are stored to reduce power use, latency, and external memory requirements.
Velaura AI - $110M, Series A round led by Seligman Ventures, with Capricorn Investment Group, Prosperity7 Ventures, Mayfield, Maverick Silicon, MARA, Premji Invest, Samsung Catalyst Fund, and StepStone Group participating. Velaura AI develops low-power silicon technology and design tools that reduce the energy used by core arithmetic operations in AI accelerators.
Math Magic - Nearly $50M across two rounds, Series A+ round led by BAI Capital and HyT Capital with V Fund and existing investors. Math Magic combines AI-generated 3D models with a fulfillment platform that turns personalized digital creations into physical products.
Trajectory - $40M, Series A round led by Sequoia Capital, with NVIDIA and Bessemer Venture Partners participating. Trajectory builds continual-learning infrastructure that turns corrections, retries, and edits from real product usage into signals for tuning agentic models after deployment.
Palona AI - $20M, Series A round led by Ardenwood Ventures, with CrimsonOx, UpHonest Capital, Turbo, Llama Ventures, Neo, Fusion Fund, defy.vc, and Maynard Webb participating. Palona AI builds a multimodal operating layer that interprets activity inside physical businesses and coordinates responses across staff, software, and AI agents.
amber - EUR 7M, Series A round co-led by Ventech and NRW.Venture. amber builds a sovereign enterprise data layer that organizes documents, emails, ERP, and CRM records for AI search, assistants, and autonomous agents.
Takt - $9.25M, Series A round led by Ballast Point Partners. Takt builds a warehouse intelligence platform that unifies labor, automation, and robotics data so supervisors can monitor and rebalance operations.
Gravis Robotics - $200M, Series A round from SoftBank Group Corp. Gravis Robotics retrofits excavators and other heavy equipment with manufacturer-agnostic autonomous control hardware and software that adapts to live jobsite conditions.
Groq - $350M, Series A round led by Disruptive. Groq operates an AI neocloud across 13 data centers and is scaling NVIDIA-based inference capacity for developers, enterprises, and AI-native companies.

Series B

Resilire - ¥1.73B, Series B first close co-led by DNX Ventures - US and Salesforce Ventures, with Sumisho Venture Partners participating. Resilire maps multi-tier supplier networks and monitors disruptions to help manufacturers assess operational impact and adjust procurement.
DEEPFINE - KRW 10B, Series B round with participation from Hyosung Ventures. DEEPFINE builds a spatial-intelligence platform that connects smart glasses, Vision AI, spatial computing, and on-site analytics for industrial work.
Rundoo - $30M, Series B round led by Battery Ventures with Bessemer Venture Partners and CRV. Rundoo builds an AI-first operating system that unifies point of sale, ecommerce, CRM, loyalty, accounting, and purchasing for independent supply stores.
EYOU Robotics Technology Co., Ltd. - More than CN¥200M, Series B round backed by Samsung Venture Investment, Guilin Fuda Co., Ltd., Bridge Capital, and nine state-backed funds. EYOU Robotics Technology manufactures integrated servo joints that provide motion control for humanoid robots, collaborative arms, and industrial automation.
Higgsfield AI - $400M, Series B round led by DST Global. Higgsfield AI provides agentic video and image tools that automate multi-scene production workflows for creators, brands, agencies, and studios.
Wispr Flow - $280M, Series B round led by Menlo Ventures, with Acrew Capital, Forerunner, Goodwater Capital, Peak XV Partners, Together, PLUS Capital, Notable Capital, NEA, Neo, 8VC, and MVP Ventures participating. Wispr Flow is expanding its voice-to-text product into context-aware voice software with meeting summaries, action items, and speech-understanding models.

Series C and beyond

Rillet - $100M, Series C round led by ICONIQ, with Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Global Equities, Bain Capital Ventures, Oak HC/FT, Battery Ventures, FirstMark, Scale Venture Partners, and Creandum participating. Rillet provides an AI-native general ledger where finance teams and agents share a continuously updated view of the business and automate accounting work.
Etched - $700M, Series D round led by Jane Street, with Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Tiger Global, Bain Capital Ventures, Blackstone, and Peter Thiel participating. Etched builds full AI inference clusters around custom prefill chips and cluster-scale shared memory to deliver more tokens per second at lower cost.
Link-Touch Six-Dimension Force Sensor - Undisclosed (hundreds of millions of yuan), Series D round led by GAC Capital, with Ningbo Deye Technology Group and Xichen Capital participating. Link-Touch develops high-precision six-axis force and joint torque sensors for humanoid robots, robotic arms, and industrial automation.

Growth / Strategic / Other

Cloverleaf Infrastructure - Undisclosed, Strategic investment from NVIDIA. Cloverleaf Infrastructure develops power-ready, permitted, and connected sites for AI factories and data centers.
Astromech - $20M, Funding round led by Bob Nelsen, with PEAK6, NeoGenesis Capital, Builders VC, and CAZ Investments participating. Astromech is building an AI system that uses genomic data and ancestral reconstruction to forecast changes and failures in living systems.
CAEPlus LLC - Undisclosed, Strategic investment from Molex. CAEPlus develops active liquid-cooling technology that removes heat from CPUs, GPUs, and TPUs while fitting existing data-center architectures.
CtrlS Datacenters - $26.1M, Funding round from Nikhil Kamath and Sreeram Reddy Vanga. CtrlS Datacenters develops and operates data-center infrastructure for cloud and AI workloads across India.
GoodVision - Seven-figure, Revenue-based investment from Round2 Capital Partners. GoodVision converts existing CCTV and IP cameras into software-defined traffic sensors for real-time monitoring, incident detection, traffic analysis, and road-safety studies.
Tec-Do - Undisclosed, Financing round led by Huatai-General Atlantic, with Forebright Capital, GAC Capital, and GSR Ventures participating. Tec-Do builds AI agents and specialized multimodal models that help brands automate marketing and operate across global commerce markets.
Network Bio - $50M, Financing backed by S32, Thiel Bio, Founders Fund, Breyer Capital, The Blue Venture Fund, and JSL Health Capital. Network Bio links patient tissue and blood samples with molecular data and longitudinal clinical outcomes to train disease-specific models for diagnostics and drug development.
Graphwise - Undisclosed, Majority investment from Oakley Capital Investments. Graphwise connects siloed enterprise data into governed knowledge graphs that give search, analytics, and AI agents traceable facts for retrieval and reasoning.
Singular Photonics - $2.15M, Funding round led by ACF Investors, with Wren Capital LLP, Cambridge Angels, Scottish Enterprise, Quantum Exponential, and Old College Capital participating. Singular Photonics develops single-photon image sensors that process data on-chip to reduce latency, data movement, and power use in machine vision and physical AI.
SnerpaPower - €3M equity plus €400K grant, Equity financing and grant led by Encevo, with continued support from Crowberry Capital and BackingMinds and a grant from Iceland's Technology Development Fund. SnerpaPower builds energy-management software that connects industrial operations to electricity contracts and markets to optimize demand, costs, and grid flexibility.
Prevalent AI - $22M, Funding round from Integrity Growth Partners. Prevalent AI builds a data fabric and knowledge graph that give enterprise analysts and AI agents trusted, customer-controlled context for security and risk decisions.
Relativity Networks - $22M, SAFE financing backed by Rhapsody Venture Partners, Bell Ventures, and Faster Than Glass. Relativity Networks develops hollow-core fiber that moves light faster than conventional glass fiber, enabling greater distances between latency-sensitive AI data centers.
Queen One - $25M, Funding round backed by Mercury Fund, Full In, Connecticut Innovations, CP Overture, Charge Ventures, Inspired Capital, and existing investors. Queen One builds an AI-governed commerce CRM designed to replace legacy platforms at lower cost and simplify brand migrations.
Flip - $25M, Funding round backed by Notion Capital, HV, and L-Bank. Flip provides an AI-native employee experience platform that gives frontline workers secure digital identities, applications, and automated workflows.
Maniformer - Hundreds of millions of yuan, Funding round led by China Telecom Corporation Limited with Shanghai Zhangjiang Group, while HSG and Yuanqi Innovation increased their stakes. Maniformer provides a one-stop physical AI data service with robot-independent collection hardware and automated spatial reconstruction, multimodal annotation, and quality evaluation.
Birdsview - EUR 3.7M, Funding round led by Sarsia with Butterfly Ventures, Proptechfonden, Kiilto, Nordic Makers, Momentum, Eviny Ventures, Farvatn, and angel investors. Birdsview combines ground-penetrating radar, LiDAR, and seismic algorithms in a handheld scanner that creates 3D models of concrete structures without drilling.
Versatile RobotX - Over GBP 1M, Blended equity and grant funding backed by British Design Fund, University of Essex Enterprise Limited, Innovate UK Growth Catalyst Investor Partnerships, and the Defra Farming Innovation Programme. Versatile RobotX develops autonomous harvesting robots that combine embedded AI, machine vision, and biomimetic arms for delicate crop picking.
SB Energy - $1.5B, Strategic equity investment from NVIDIA. SB Energy develops large-scale power and data-center infrastructure, including OpenAI's planned PORTS-Pike AI campus in Ohio.

Robotics and AI News

CNBC - China's backflipping robot maker Unitree pops 542% in Shanghai debut - Unitree raised about 6.1 billion yuan ($904 million) in the first mainland listing by a humanoid-robot maker; its shares briefly rose 542% and closed more than 460% above the IPO price, creating a public-market benchmark for China's embodied-AI sector. CNBC
TechCrunch - Tesla, Uber, and Waymo all get the OK to operate thousands of robotaxis in Nevada - Nevada approved permits allowing up to 8,000 commercial robotaxis in Clark County over 12 months, including ceilings of 5,000 for Tesla and 1,000 each for Waymo and Uber, although company testimony indicated actual deployments will likely be much smaller. TechCrunch
MarketScale - Warehouse robots are shifting from capex bets to contracted capacity as North America orders nearly 18,000 units in H1 2026 - North American companies ordered nearly 18,000 robots worth about $1.2 billion in the first half, with value rising faster than unit volume as buyers increasingly purchase integrated capacity that combines robots, warehouse-control software, and support. MarketScale
Today's Medical Developments - First fully autonomous robotic blood draw device receives FDA authorization - The FDA granted De Novo authorization to Vitestro's Aletta, which uses near-infrared imaging and Doppler ultrasound to autonomously handle a complete venous blood draw; one supervisor can oversee up to three systems, positioning the device to expand outpatient capacity amid phlebotomist shortages. Today's Medical Developments
VentureBeat - IBM's next-gen mainframe chip is the first to run Arm and Z workloads on the same cores - IBM's 2-nanometer processor gives each of its 11 cores the ability to switch between Arm and Z instruction sets in nanoseconds, aiming to place Arm-native Linux and AI software beside regulated z/OS transaction workloads on future IBM Z and LinuxONE systems. VentureBeat
VentureBeat - One in five enterprises can't stop a runaway AI agent's spending in real time - A survey of 107 enterprises found that 85% use at least two orchestration tools and 64% use three, yet 21% still rely only on post-hoc logs for agent spending, showing that hybrid agent stacks are spreading faster than real-time fiscal controls. VentureBeat
VentureBeat - GLM-5.3 hits the API at $1.4/$4.4 per million tokens - Z.ai made GLM-5.3 available through an OpenAI-compatible API at the same $1.40 input and $4.40 output price per million tokens as GLM-5.2; the model ties Kimi K3 atop one open-weight intelligence index, although its greater verbosity could raise cost per completed task. VentureBeat
EU-Startups - Fresh from EUR 1.2 billion raise, NEURA Robotics acquires Adlatus Robotics to give cleaning robots a "new brain" - NEURA Robotics is acquiring Adlatus and plans to add sensors, AI, and Neuraverse connectivity to hundreds of deployed cleaning robots so they can recognize surfaces and dirt, choose strategies, and learn from field operation rather than follow fixed routes. EU-Startups

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