financing

According to Forbes, AI data infrastructure company Databricks announced the completion of a $5 billion strategic financing round, led by Coatue, with participation from Blackstone, MGX, and T. Rowe Price. Sixth Street Growth joined as a new investor, bringing the post-financing valuation of the company to $190 billion, higher than the previously disclosed valuation plan of $188 billion. The funds will be used to advance AI infrastructure layout, product development, and potential acquisitions.Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi stated that the company's current annual revenue run rate has exceeded $7 billion, with a year-on-year growth of over 80%. In terms of AI Agent infrastructure, Databricks believes that the scale of AI-generated software will significantly increase in the future, and each AI application will require database support.

According to Finsmes, AI architecture development company Pathway announced the completion of a $30 million seed round financing, with participation from Id4 Ventures, TQ Ventures, Red Bridge Ventures, Kadmos Capital, and WS Investment, an investment institution under Wilson Sonsini. Databricks Chief AI Scientist Jonathan Frankle also joined as an angel investor.Pathway is developing the "Post-Transformer" architecture called BDH (Biologically-inspired Dynamic Hierarchy), aiming to address the limitations of current Transformer models that continuously rely on more data, GPUs, energy, and capital expansion. Unlike traditional large models that require periodic retraining, BDH can continuously learn with less data and achieve ongoing adaptation.It is reported that the company has appointed former Google DeepMind Gemini product head Adam Kurzrok as Chief Product Officer, responsible for the product direction based on the BDH model, including model packaging, evaluation systems, and commercial deployment.

AI security startup Mindgard announced the completion of a $30 million Series A funding round, led by Album VC, with participation from Karma Ventures, .406 Ventures, Atlantic Bridge, IQ Capital, and Lakestar.Mindgard was founded by Dr. Peter Garraghan in 2022 and incubated at Lancaster University in the UK, with headquarters in Boston and London. The company's platform offers Shadow AI discovery, AI red team testing, and runtime AI protection capabilities, having helped disclose over 150 high-impact AI security vulnerabilities, including issues such as the Cursor IDE zero-day code execution vulnerability, Google Antigravity trusted workspace defects, and ChatGPT image generation protection failures.

AI code verification startup Blacksmith announced the completion of a $45 million Series B financing, led by Peak XV Partners, with follow-on investments from GV and Y Combinator, bringing the company's valuation to $550 million.

According to the Science and Technology Innovation Board Daily, deep-sea robotics company Deep Sea Intelligent has announced the completion of over 500 million yuan in Series A financing. New shareholders include Guanghe Venture Capital, Dacheng Financial Intelligence, Jiyuan Capital, Yida Capital, Zhongbao Investment, China Electronics Technology Group Investment, and Total Energy as the funding entity of the energy technology fund managed by Kaihui Fund Management.At the same time, a number of existing shareholders, including Zhengxuan Investment, Yunze Capital, Yunshi Capital, Gaojie Capital, and Xingzhi Capital, have significantly increased their investments.

According to informed sources, AI startup Discovery Loop, founded by former Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, is in talks to raise $1 billion, corresponding to a valuation of approximately $10 billion, with specific financing terms still subject to change.Discovery Loop aims to accelerate discoveries in the fields of science and engineering through automated machine learning, science and engineering, and the parallel execution of thousands of experiments. Its initial funding is led by Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, and Doerr Capital, while Alphabet serves as the founding investor and cloud services partner. The founding team of Discovery Loop also includes former core researchers from Google such as Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals.

According to Bloomberg, the AI code review platform CodeRabbit announced the completion of a $143 million financing round, with a valuation of $1.5 billion. This round of financing was co-led by Atomico and Smash Capital, with participation from institutions such as BMW i Ventures and Datadog. So far, CodeRabbit has raised over $200 million in total financing.CodeRabbit primarily utilizes artificial intelligence to automatically review software code, helping developers identify code defects, security risks, and potential issues. Its product can automatically review both AI-generated and manually written code during the development process, providing developers with feedback on problems and suggestions for improvement.

According to Thrive Holdings, the AI investment platform Thrive Holdings announced the completion of a $2 billion financing round, with the company's valuation reaching $12 billion, with participation from SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital.Thrive Holdings was founded in 2025 by Thrive Capital founder Joshua Kushner. Unlike traditional investment firms, it does not directly invest in AI large model research and development companies, but primarily acquires traditional service companies and integrates AI technology into business processes to achieve efficiency improvements. Its goal is to build platforms and products that bring cutting-edge artificial intelligence into key industries that millions of businesses and individuals rely on daily. The company had previously secured approximately $1 billion in initial funding.

Swedish Stockholm AI programming startup Lovable announced the completion of a $400 million Series C funding round, bringing its post-funding valuation to $13.3 billion. This round of financing was co-led by Menlo Ventures and the EU-backed investment institution Scaleup Europe Fund (managed by EQT AB), with several venture capital firms participating, as well as new investors from Latin America and Asia, including Tencent Holdings.Lovable is dedicated to the field of AI-assisted programming and is accelerating its expansion to compete with larger rivals such as Anthropic.

British cybersecurity startup Cytix announced the completion of a $7 million Series A funding round, led by UK venture capital firm Northern Gritstone, with existing investors Auriga Cyber Ventures and NPIF II -- PXN Equity Finance participating.Founded in 2020, Cytix focuses on addressing the security risks of software changes brought about by AI-assisted development, agent workflows, and continuous delivery. Its change risk management platform helps enterprises identify high-risk changes and take appropriate measures.

According to Tech Funding News, the crypto travel platform Entravel has completed a $7.5 million financing round, led by Ethereal Ventures and Finality Capital, with participation from GSR, Varrock, G1 Ventures, Seier Capital, Veris Ventures, Funfair Ventures, and WTG Ventures.Entravel provides travel booking systems for over 40 brands, including Kraken and MetaMask, covering 300 million users, with an average booking conversion rate exceeding 10%. Founded in 2026, Entravel operates three interconnected businesses: MocatravelX directly collaborates with hotels to obtain inventory and pricing; RateStellar integrates supply from other channels, using AI to match hotels and room types from different suppliers, covering over 2.2 million hotels; on this basis, Entravel offers a white-label booking layer for partners, allowing them to provide hotel booking services to users without needing to build their own supplier network.

According to market news, GAC Group's humanoid robot company, Huilun Technology, announced the completion of over 100 million yuan in financing, jointly invested by CRRC Guochuang Fund, CMB International, Sichuan Science and Technology Innovation, and other institutions.The funds raised in this round of financing will be used for continuous optimization of vertical models, expansion of automotive production lines and comprehensive service scenarios, promoting the large-scale commercialization of humanoid robot systems and core components. GAC Group began laying out the humanoid robot track in early 2022 and incubated Huilun Technology in February 2026, establishing it as an independent industrialization entity to fully undertake GAC's humanoid robot research and development and commercialization business, successively launching four embodied robot products including GoMate and GoMate Mini.

AI security startup Attestable has officially announced its establishment and completed a $20 million seed round financing. This round of financing was led by Jamin Ball of Altimeter Capital and Yonatan Mandelbaum of TLV Partners, with participation from institutions such as Halcyon Futures, Cerca Partners, and several investors.Attestable founder Yogi stated that as AI gradually enters critical infrastructure, national security, and large enterprise systems, how to verify the credibility of AI operations has become an important issue faced globally. The company aims to build a universal verification layer for cutting-edge AI laboratories, critical infrastructure, and national-level applications.According to reports, Attestable uses Zero-Knowledge Proof technology to shift trust in AI systems from data centers to mathematical verification mechanisms. This technology can prove that a certain approved model, model weights, input data, and operational strategies indeed generated specific outputs, while not disclosing model parameters or user privacy data, and without needing to rerun the model for verification.Attestable stated that its technology has currently achieved verification inference of the Meta Muse Glimmer 30B model on a single NVIDIA H100 GPU, reaching a speed of 85 tokens per second. The generated proof documents are small and possess quantum-resistant characteristics, allowing for rapid verification.In response, Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin commented, stating that this achievement means the performance loss of Zero-Knowledge Proofs for large language models is approaching single-digit levels. He noted that the next challenge is to further reduce the performance overhead of technologies such as Fully Homomorphic Encryption (FHE).

Silicon Data, a GPU market data infrastructure company, announced the completion of a $30.5 million Series A financing first closing, led by Valor Atreides AI Fund, with participation from CME Ventures, DRW, Samsung Next, VanEck, Jump Trading, Wintermute, and others. The funds will be used for GPU benchmark pricing, performance measurement, institutional and alternative data, as well as derivatives, insurance, and credit market risk infrastructure.Silicon Data currently collects data from approximately 100 GPU leasing platforms in over 40 countries worldwide, processing more than 150,000 verified price records daily. CME Group is planning to adopt Silicon Data's benchmark as the reference price for the proposed cash-settled GPU futures, pending regulatory approval.

NVIDIA announced a partnership with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to establish an independent financing platform.The platform aims to mobilize over $500 billion in third-party capital in the long term to support AI infrastructure development.

Qianwen's former technical director Lin Junyang announced the establishment of a new company, Pragmatic Technology, in Shanghai, focusing on the research direction of next-generation intelligent agents that span the digital and physical worlds.He also revealed that Gao Rong Venture Capital and HSG (Sequoia China) jointly led this round of financing, with support from Tencent and the Shanghai Future Industry Fund. According to informed sources, the "this round of financing" mentioned by Lin Junyang refers to the angel round financing of Pragmatic Technology, with a valuation of 2 billion dollars.

According to The Information, AI infrastructure startup Trajectory announced the completion of a $40 million financing round, with a post-money valuation of $300 million, co-invested by Sequoia Capital. The specific financing round and other investors have not been disclosed.Trajectory was founded by researchers from tech companies such as Google and Apple, and primarily helps businesses customize open-source AI models for specific business needs, as well as optimize the software toolchain that supports AI Agent operations (referred to as "Agent Harness"). As the costs of using closed-source large models continue to rise, more and more companies are looking for alternatives: on one hand, they are reducing costs by fine-tuning and customizing open-source models, and on the other hand, they are improving the Agent execution framework to enable AI models to more effectively call tools and execute tasks.This trend is driving a new wave of entrepreneurial enthusiasm around model adaptation and Agent infrastructure. Trajectory aims to address key issues faced by enterprises in deploying AI Agents, including model performance optimization, task execution reliability, and adaptation to enterprise scenarios. The company hopes to help businesses build more efficient and cost-effective AI applications by providing model customization and Agent operation infrastructure.Investors believe that as AI evolves from simple chatbots to Agents capable of autonomously executing complex tasks, a new layer of infrastructure around model optimization and Agent engineering will become an important market. In recent years, Sequoia has also continued to increase its investment in the AI infrastructure sector, including investments in AI Agents and enterprise AI applications.

According to Bloomberg, the U.S. defense technology startup Neros has completed a $250 million equity financing, raising its post-money valuation to $2.5 billion, led by Sequoia Capital and the American Strategic Technology Fund, with participation from existing investors such as Thiel Capital.Neros plans to accelerate the research and development and mass production of the attack drone Archer and the interceptor drone Bandit, and promote localized manufacturing among allies. The company's current annual production capacity is about 14,000 units, with a goal to increase Archer's annual production capacity to 1 million units by 2028.This round of funding will also be used to expand the employee count from about 200 to 350 and upgrade the handheld terminals used to control the drones and the Archer AI model, enabling it to maintain target lock in GPS-denied environments and coordinate with other drones.