Today's Venture Capital Pulse
Clip secures $500M to accelerate consumer wallet rollout
Mexican fintech Clip raised $500 million, pushing its valuation above $2.5 billion. The new capital will fund the rollout of a consumer‑focused wallet and broaden its financial‑services platform. Investors were not disclosed and the round remains under review.
Also developing:
By the numbers: Francisco Partners raises $18B for new tech funds
Vast Data CEO Renen Hallak On AI, Growth And A $30 Billion Valuation
Vast Data announced a $1 billion Series F funding round that lifts its valuation to $30 billion, positioning the company as a leading AI operating system provider. CEO Renen Hallak emphasized the shift from pure storage to a full‑stack platform that integrates databases, compute orchestration, and tools for agentic workloads, all built on its proprietary disaggregated architecture. The company reported over $4 billion in cumulative sales and more than $0.5 billion in annual recurring revenue, while remaining cash‑flow positive and profitable. Hallak outlined plans to triple growth in 2026, expand globally, and move further up the AI stack.
Capital Q Ventures Funds Nutrition Brand Nur to ‘Redefine’ Protein Category
Capital Q Ventures, through its accelerator Capital Q Velocity, is backing nutrition startup Nur to scale its hydration‑based protein platform that uses fermented beta‑lactoglobulin (BLG). The undisclosed investment will secure co‑investors for current and future rounds, enabling Nur to commercialize...
Esther and Anne Wojcicki Back New Healthcare Accelerator, Fund
Mary Minno launched Treehub, a six‑month residency‑venture program, and the AI Health Fund, a $10 million early‑stage venture vehicle, to back AI‑driven healthcare startups. The fund, seeded with $1.5 million—including a $1 million check from Tim Draper—has already invested in 12 companies and...
Former Startup TNT Leader Launches Coalition for Canada’s Early-Stage Investors
Jesse Wiebe, former head of Startup TNT, has launched the Canadian Startup Capital Association (CSCA), a nonprofit coalition aimed at unifying Canada’s fragmented early‑stage investment community. The CSCA starts with 19 founding members that together represent more than 3,500 active...
Treehub Launches Stanford-Adjacent AI Health Residency for Early-Stage Academic Founders
Treehub, a boutique residency in Los Altos near Stanford, launches to fund early‑stage academic founders in AI‑driven healthcare. Backed by the AI Health Fund, the program provides a “first check” before incorporation and runs quarterly cohorts of up to 10...
Alibaba & Tencent Seeking DeepSeek
Alibaba and Tencent are backing AI startup DeepSeek in a fresh financing round that values the company at roughly $20 billion. The news lifted Alibaba’s U.S.‑listed shares and sparked a $624 million net buy of Hong Kong‑listed stocks via Southbound Stock Connect....
Flora Fertility Raises $5M to Build Customer-Owned Reproductive Insurance
Flora Fertility announced a $5 million Series A round to expand its customer‑owned reproductive insurance platform. The funding will accelerate product development, grow the provider network, and increase user acquisition. By letting patients pool contributions and tying payouts to treatment outcomes, the...
Humble Raises $24 M Seed to Launch Cab‑less Autonomous Freight Truck
San Francisco‑based Humble announced a $24 million seed round led by Eclipse and Energy Impact Partners and unveiled its cab‑less electric autonomous freight vehicle, the Humble Hauler. The startup aims to capture a slice of the $906 billion U.S. truck freight market...
Exergy3 Secures $13.5 Million Seed Round to Convert Surplus Renewable Power Into Industrial Heat
Exergy3, a University of Edinburgh spin‑out, raised $13.5 million in a seed round led by Axeleo Capital to scale its modular ultra‑high‑temperature storage that converts curtailed renewable electricity into industrial process heat. The funding will fund manufacturing expansion, a new Munich...
AI Is Spitting Out More Potential Drugs than Ever. This Start-Up Wants to Figure Out Which Ones Matter.
10x Science, a biotech AI startup founded by former Stanford researchers, announced a $4.8 million seed round led by Initialized Capital. The company’s platform combines deterministic chemistry algorithms with AI agents to automatically interpret mass‑spectrometry data, turning raw spectra into actionable...
Keebler Health Raises $16M to Advance AI in Healthcare
Keebler Health announced a $16 million Series A round to expand its AI-driven platform for clinical and operational decision‑making. The solution uses machine learning to surface hidden risk patterns, enabling earlier interventions and cost reductions. CEO Isaac Park says the funds will...
Kevin Bambrough Is 'All In' On Hydrograph Clean Energy
Kevin Bambrough, the former Sprott asset‑manager who oversaw roughly $10 billion, sat down for a marathon interview to discuss Hydrograph Clean Energy (CSE:HG). He argues the company’s yet‑to‑be‑commercialized graphene technology could generate "billions and billions" of revenue. The hour‑long video has...
MSD-Backed Ray Locks in $125m to Back Eye Drug Pipeline
Ray Therapeutics announced a $125 million Series B round, led by Janus Henderson Investors with participation from Merck’s venture arm, MRL Ventures and Novo Holdings. The capital will fund late‑stage clinical work and commercial preparation for RTX‑015, its lead gene‑therapy candidate for...
What The Record Venture Funding Quarter Actually Means For Your Startup’s Fundraise
Crunchbase reported a record $300 billion poured into startups in Q1 2026, with four mega‑unicorns accounting for 65% of the total. Despite the headline concentration, early‑stage funding jumped 41% year‑over‑year and AI/ML deal count rose to 6,678 in 2025. Redpoint’s data shows...
Join Webinar: Deep Tech Post Series A
Beyond Earth Ventures is hosting a closed‑format webinar on April 23 titled “Beyond the VC Playbook: Corporate Strategy for Deep Tech Post Series A.” The session, led by founding partner Alexandra Vidyuk and advisor Nick Dimitriou, will explore how deep‑tech founders and...
Redwood Materials Lays Off 10% of Staff to Speed Energy‑Storage Development
Redwood Materials announced it is cutting roughly 135 employees – about 10% of its workforce – as part of a restructuring aimed at accelerating its energy‑storage product line. The move follows a $425 million financing round that lifted the company’s valuation...
ActionAI Secures $10M Seed Funding to Fix AI’s Trust Problem
ActionAI announced a $10 million seed round led by UAE investors to build a reliability stack for enterprise AI. The startup, founded by Stanford‑trained engineer and Netflix personality Miriam Haart, aims to curb hallucinations that can reach 79% in current models....
C-Infinity Raises $16M to Close the Gap Between Product Design and Production
C-Infinity, an AI-driven manufacturing process‑planning startup, closed a $16 million Series A led by Canaan Partners, with participation from Inventus Capital, Bee Partners and Radius Capital. Its AutoAssembler platform automates the translation of CAD models into factory‑ready assembly plans, cutting weeks‑long manual...
Realm Secures €3.8M Seed to Deploy AI Agents in Enterprise Sales, Plans Triple‑Headcount
Realm, the Helsinki AI‑sales startup, closed a €3.8 million ($4.5 million) seed round led by Frontline Ventures with participation from HubSpot Ventures, Slack co‑founder Cal Henderson and Deel co‑founder Alex Bouaziz. The funding will fund a three‑fold headcount increase and a push...
SpaceX to Acquire AI Coding Startup Cursor in $60 B Deal
SpaceX disclosed a deal to acquire AI coding startup Cursor for $60 billion, or to pay $10 billion for its services if the acquisition does not close. The transaction ties the space‑flight giant’s massive compute power to a fast‑growing AI‑assisted development platform,...
Schematic Secures $6.5M Seed Round to Accelerate AI‑Era Pricing for SaaS Firms
Schematic, a Boulder‑based startup that builds entitlement and pricing infrastructure for SaaS and AI companies, announced a $6.5 million seed round led by S3 Ventures. The funding will fund a public launch of its Stripe‑integrated app, promising to cut pricing‑change cycles...
Locai Raises £1m to Develop Its Off-Cloud AI Infrastructure
Locai, a deep‑tech startup, announced a £1 million (~$1.28 million) pre‑seed round to build its off‑cloud AI inference platform. The solution moves AI processing from cloud APIs onto users’ devices, converting variable usage fees into predictable fixed costs. By eliminating reliance on...
SEA Tech Funding Surges to US$2.8B in Q1 2026, More than Doubling Year-on-Year
Southeast Asia tech funding jumped to $2.8 billion in Q1 2026, more than double the $1.3 billion a year earlier and up 146 % from Q4 2025. Late‑stage deals drove the surge, delivering $2.2 billion, while enterprise applications and infrastructure attracted $2.4 billion and $2.2 billion...
Rysen School Operator AITS Raises $4 Mn in Pre-Series A Round
AITS, the parent of Rysen School, secured a $4 million pre‑Series A round led by Big Capital and Redbrook Fund, with participation from Udaan co‑founder Sujeet Kumar and others. The capital will fund rapid campus expansion across emerging Indian cities, upgrade technology‑led...
East Africa: Bayer Foundation and UNCDF Back Omia and SokoFresh
The Bayer Foundation, in partnership with the United Nations Capital Development Fund (UNCDF), has launched the Food Systems Innovation Finance Facility, deploying its first two concessional loans of roughly $500,000 each to African agribusinesses. The loans go to Uganda’s Omia...
Jeff Bezos’ Project Prometheus Nears $38 Billion Valuation, Targets Industrial AI and ERP-Linked Execution
Jeff Bezos’ Project Prometheus, a "physical AI" lab co‑led with former Google X scientist Vik Bajaj, is nearing a $10 billion funding round that values the venture at roughly $38 billion. Launched in November 2025 with $6.2 billion of initial capital, the startup...
Global RegTech Investments Fell by 29% YoY as Deals over $100m Dropped in Q1 2026
Global RegTech funding slipped 29% year‑over‑year to $1.6 billion in Q1 2026, with total deal count falling to 144. Transactions above $100 million collapsed by 70%, driving the average deal size down to $11.3 million. Despite the downturn, smaller‑ticket deals rose 17%, and AI‑native...
$4.5M Seed for Realm to Advance AI in Enterprise Sales
Realm announced a $4.5 million seed round led by Frontline Ventures, with participation from HubSpot Ventures, Cal Henderson and Alex Bouaziz. The funding will accelerate the startup’s AI platform that structures fragmented revenue data to automate deal‑critical documents such as RFP responses...
Bybit Invests US$8M in Hata to Crack Malaysia’s Regulated Crypto Market
Bybit led an $8 million Series A round in Hata, Malaysia’s only dual‑licensed digital‑asset exchange, raising the startup’s total funding to $12.2 million. The partnership gives Bybit a compliant foothold in a market tightly overseen by the Securities Commission and Bank Negara, while...
Linexa Closes €2M Pre-Seed to Advance AI-Driven Manufacturing
Munich‑based Linexa announced a €2 million (≈$2.2 million) pre‑seed round led by Project A, with several angel investors joining. The startup is building an AI‑driven platform that decodes legacy industrial automation across multiple vendors, turning opaque machine‑control logic into a unified data...
Ajinkya Rahane Joins Chupps Footwear as Investor and Advisor
Chupps Footwear, the Delhi‑based D2C open‑footwear brand, has brought Indian cricketer Ajinkya Rahane on board as an equity investor and strategic advisor in its pre‑Series B round. While the exact amount was not disclosed, the capital will fund product innovation, offline...
OpenGradient Receives $9.5M in Funding
OpenGradient, a decentralized compute layer for verifiable AI, announced a $9.5 million funding round to scale its network of GPU and Trusted Execution Environment (TEE) nodes. The round was led by a16z crypto with participation from Coinbase Ventures, SV Angel, and...
AuX Labs Nabs $4M to Commercialise Cheese Made From Animal-Free Milk Protein
Toronto‑based AuX Labs secured $4 million in a round led by NYA Ventures and Nàdarra Ventures to commercialise its precision‑fermented recombinant casein. The funding will accelerate a brewing‑capacity‑leveraged platform that produces animal‑free, melt‑and‑stretch cheese at price points viable for pizzerias and...
OpenAI's $1.5B DeployCo Bet Signals AI‑PE Shift
OpenAI plans up to $1.5B into DeployCo JV (initial $500M equity; $10B valuation). Macro: AI capital shifts into PE. Key factor: equity leverages deal flow. Trading insight: overweight AI infrastructure/PE-linked names. — Viktor Kopylov, PhD, CFA. More insights: t.me/si14Kopylov
Public Venture Fund Opens to $500 Investors
Announcing my new thing: I'm launching a new public venture fund USVC is built by AngelList with @naval shaping our investment strategy in the technology companies building our future And unlike traditional venture funds, everyone can invest along with just $500:
Funding Dip for Alt Protein Fermentation Signals Shift From Promise to Proof
Funding for alternative‑protein fermentation startups dropped from $651 million in 2024 to $357 million in 2025, a 45% decline, according to the Good Food Institute. The contraction follows high‑profile exits such as Meati, Motif Foodworks and Arkeon, which forced investors to reassess...
Newo Appoints Jason Luo as CEO to Drive Partner‑led Voice AI Growth After $25M Series A
Newo announced Jason Luo as its new chief executive officer, tasking him with scaling the company’s voice AI platform through managed service providers, VoIP firms and software partners. The move follows a $25 million Series A funding round that lifts total...
Cursor AI Secures First Backer, VerdictCap’s Michael Fertik
Congratulations to @cursor_ai for landing the 🚀. And to @VerdictCap MD @michaelfertik for being their very first backer. 🦄
Rapid Revenue Doubling Justifies Sky‑high Valuation Multiples
Paying 30x revenue for a company growing this quickly doesn't strike me as crazy Cursor is doubling its revenue every three months For example $SNOW flake went public in late 2020 at ~80x sales while growing "only" 120% annually
Tava Health Secures $40 Million Series C to Scale AI‑Powered Behavioral Health Platform
Tava Health announced a $40 million Series C round led by Centana Growth Partners, bringing its total funding to $73 million since 2020. The capital will fund three new AI‑enabled products—Overture, Symphony, and Tempo—and deepen support for clinicians, clinics, and health plans....
General Catalyst Publishes First Quarterly Review, Highlights $43B Portfolio and $5B India Bet
General Catalyst released its first‑ever quarterly review, laying out the health of its $43 billion ecosystem, a $5 billion commitment to India, and a $380 billion valuation for Anthropic’s Series G round. The review also flags a broken software‑buyout model, discusses a potential Summa...
VCs Should Admit Their Founder Preference Types
A good q. for VCs that needs to be asked more: Do you have a type? I mean, ofc, related to founders. Every VC has one or several. It's a real bias, but oftentimes based on experience. Anyone willing to share...
SpaceX Eyes $60B Acquisition After $50B Raise
Interesting. @mntruell raises money at $50B valuation (reported) Friday. Agrees deal to work with SpaceX with option to be acquired by them for $60B, Tuesday.
ANU Spinout Raises $36 Million Series A to Make AI Chips
Australian National University spin‑out Syenta announced a AU$36 million (≈US$26 million) Series A round, led by Playground Global and the National Reconstruction Fund. The capital will accelerate commercialisation of its lithography‑free Localized Electrochemical Manufacturing (LEM) process, which promises 40% fewer steps and higher...
Firstpoint VC Announces €50 Million Fund to Support AI-Driven Gaming and Entertainment Startups
Firstpoint VC has launched a €50 million ($55 million) venture fund dedicated to AI‑driven gaming and entertainment startups. The fund targets emerging markets, including Türkiye, Eastern Europe, Southeast Asia and Central Asia. It is led by Burak Yılmaz and Mike Fischer, veterans...
Jeff Bezos Nears $10 B Funding for Project Prometheus Valued at $38 B
Jeff Bezos is on the verge of securing almost $10 B for his AI venture Project Prometheus, pushing its valuation to roughly $38 B. The round, still pending final signatures, includes major investors JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock and builds on a prior...
Was the AI in the Code? Or Just in the Valuation? AI-Washing in Venture Fundraising
Venture capital’s AI hype has spawned a wave of “AI‑washing,” where startups overstate or fabricate artificial‑intelligence capabilities to boost valuations. The SEC and DOJ recently charged two founders—Albert Saniger of Nate and Ramil Palafox of PGI Global—for misrepresenting AI‑driven products,...
Reliable Robotics Scoops Up $160M
Reliable Robotics announced $160 million in new financing to speed deployment of its Reliable Autonomy System (RAS), the first FAA‑certifiable solution for fully automated aircraft operation. The round, led by Nimble Partners, includes existing backers and a slate of new investors...
Italy’s VC Market Hits $1.7 B in 2025, Q1 2026 Surge Signals European Shift
Italy’s venture capital ecosystem raised $1.7 billion in 2025 and deployed $249 million in the first quarter of 2026, the strongest performance since records began. The surge reflects deeper AI investment, larger seed rounds and a maturing tech landscape that is attracting...
Tava Health Receives $40M Series C
Tava Health, a Utah‑based mental‑health technology firm, secured a $40 million Series C round led by Centana Growth Partners, with participation from Catalyst Investors, Blue Heron Ventures, Peterson Ventures, and Springtide Ventures. The funding propels the company from a provider‑focused network to...