Menlo Ventures
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5 days ago
Cheiron, a startup building a software platform for drug development, raised $8 million in seed funding led by Menlo Ventures with backing from industry figures including Moderna co-founder Robert Langer and former Pfizer CMO Freda Lewis-Hall. The platform uses a Lifesciences Knowledge Graph to integrate biomedical, clinical, regulatory, and commercial data into a queryable system that helps drug teams track program state across multiple functions simultaneously. Cheiron has already secured seven of Korea's top 10 biopharma companies as customers in less than six months and is now expanding into the U.S. market.
TechCrunch AI
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5 days ago
Yope, a startup building a private social network without algorithms or ads, raised $12.3 million in a seed round led by Northzone. The app has nearly 15 million registered users sharing 10–20 million pieces of content daily, with over 50% of users opening it at least five days per week. The funding will support product development, team expansion to the US, and the company's mission to offer young people a privacy-focused alternative to mainstream social platforms.
TechCrunch AI
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5 days ago
● 3 sources
Menlo Ventures' Matt Murphy discusses his investment in Anthropic, which grew from pre-revenue to a $47 billion revenue run rate by May—growth Murphy says exceeds anything he's seen in 25 years across internet, mobile, and cloud. Anthropic's valuation was $4 billion at the Series D despite having no revenue, and success came from building a full platform with Claude Code, MCP, and Claude Skills rather than relying solely on the underlying model. Founders competing in AI must move faster and broader to match the pace of companies like Lovable and Legora, which are scaling quicker than any startups Murphy has previously encountered.
Tech.eu
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5 days ago
Arrakis, a London-based startup helping industrial companies deploy AI agents for business operations, raised $38 million in Series A funding led by Blossom Capital with backing from OpenAI and Datadog executives. The company, founded in January 2024, completed its fundraising in just over three months and has already secured customers among NYSE-listed enterprises in energy, logistics, and industrial sectors. Arrakis plans to expand to New York and the Middle East while developing its platform to help companies move AI from experimentation to operational deployment across aerospace, manufacturing, and telecommunications.
TechCrunch AI
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5 days ago
Glow, a cybersecurity startup founded by former Meta and Snowflake executives, raised $180 million in Series A funding at a $1.2 billion valuation to build endpoint security tools for the AI era. The company uses AI models from Anthropic and Google to monitor and control software and AI agents running on employee devices, with deployments spanning tens of thousands of devices across healthcare, retail, and financial services customers. Glow positions itself differently from incumbent endpoint detection tools by focusing on prevention of risky software and AI agents rather than threat detection after compromise.
Sifted
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5 days ago
● 3 sources
Samsung is in talks to invest up to €1 billion in French AI startup Mistral as part of its €3 billion Series D funding round at a €20 billion valuation. The round values Mistral at €20bn and aims to raise €3bn total, with Swedish firm EQT also in discussions to lead or co-lead. Samsung's investment would be strategic, providing access to memory chips crucial for AI model training, though Mistral remains substantially smaller than US competitors OpenAI and Anthropic.
Tech.eu
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6 days ago
Microagi, a robotics AI startup founded in 2025, announced a partnership with Google Cloud and NVIDIA to train customized embodied AI models for industrial robots using the Blackwell GPU platform. The company raised $55 million in seed funding—Germany's largest seed round—after only five days of fundraising, with Google Cloud engineers helping optimize computational efficiency by roughly doubling it while reducing energy consumption. The partnership enables microagi to deploy task-specific robotics systems faster and expands its ability to serve European manufacturers with on-premises compute infrastructure under GDPR compliance.
