Every venture round we've covered on Value Add Pulse -- seed through mega-rounds, with the VC take on each.
Volantis raised an $88 million Series A led by angel investor Lachy Groom and Abstract Ventures to commercialize a photonic chip architecture aimed at AI inference memory and bandwidth bottlenecks.
Brookfield's Oaktree closed its debut Asset-Backed Finance Fund at $2 billion, adding a dedicated vehicle to a broader asset-based lending platform that has already deployed more than $19 billion.
Hilbert raised a $28 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz in April 2026 to build AI-driven analytics for business-to-consumer brands.
doxx.net raised a $38 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz to build tighter authorization and oversight controls for autonomous AI agents acting on users' behalf.
Halluminate, a nine-person San Francisco startup building simulated environments to train AI agents for financial work, raised a $30 million Series A led by Oak HC/FT, bringing its total funding to $38.5 million.
Audax Private Debt closed its largest fund ever, a $10 billion direct-lending vehicle, the same week banks pulled back from some AI data-center loans.
Stride Consumer Partners closed an oversubscribed $550 million Fund II, pushing the consumer-focused growth equity firm's total AUM to roughly $1.3 billion.
Metaview Labs raised a $60 million Series C led by Insight Partners to expand its AI recruiting platform, betting that interview intelligence and hiring workflows are ready for heavy automation.
Novig, the sports-only prediction market backed by Sydney Sweeney, raised new funding at a $2 billion valuation, quadrupling its February mark in about seven months.
AI recruiting startup Metaview raised a $60M Series C led by Insight Partners, betting the hiring industry is ready for its own 'Claude Code moment.'
ElevenLabs closed a $300 million employee tender offer that doubled its valuation to $22 billion, without the company raising a dollar of primary capital.
CScale emerged from stealth with $145 million in Series C funding -- $188 million raised in total, including backing from Nvidia and Intel Capital -- to build optical interconnects for gigawatt-scale AI data centers.
TXSE Group, the Dallas-based parent of the Texas Stock Exchange, raised $155 million in its third funding round, bringing its total to $430 million a year after winning SEC approval to operate as a national securities exchange.
Miami-based Jeeves raised $110 million in equity funding led by CoinFund to scale its stablecoin-native banking platform and launch a wallet making payouts across 190 countries.
Flow Engineering raised a $50 million Series B at a $750 million valuation, co-led by Valor Equity Partners and Atreides Management, to speed up hardware design iteration with AI agents.
General Intuition closed a $220 million round at a $6.2 billion valuation, confirming the mark Pulse reported the company approaching earlier this month.
GMI Cloud raised $668 million in combined equity and debt, with Nvidia investing again in one of its designated Cloud Partners, as banks grow choosier about data-center debt elsewhere.
Austin-based Tiny Health raised a $33 million Series B led by B Capital, bringing its total funding to $46 million, to advance clinical research, expand education for healthcare practitioners and scale Powered by Tiny, its B2B platform.
EliseAI raised $350 million at a $4 billion valuation, doubling its mark from 13 months ago on the strength of $200M-plus in ARR from housing and healthcare operations automation.
OpenAI is in talks to raise at least $30 billion at roughly a $1.4 trillion valuation, a bridge round before a public listing now pushed to 2027.
Efficient Computer closed a $97 million round at a $650 million valuation for its energy-efficient dataflow chips, which are already shipping to battery-powered robots and drones.
Tiny Health raised a $33 million Series B led by B Capital to expand its gut and vaginal microbiome testing, alongside a new $5 million clinical research program.
Samsung is investing $1 billion in Helix, an AI infrastructure company backed by KKR, extending its push to capture value across the AI buildout beyond its own memory-chip business.
Peak XV Partners raised the maximum seed check in its Surge accelerator program to $5 million and unveiled an 18-startup cohort, raising the bar for what a competitive seed round now looks like.
SiMa.ai closed an oversubscribed $150 million Series C at a $1.45 billion valuation, led by Fidelity and Amplify, bringing its total capital raised to $500 million for its edge AI inference chips.
Inference provider Modal Labs is reportedly closing in on a $750 million round that would value it at $15.75 billion, the latest sign that managed AI-inference startups are re-pricing as fast as the model labs they serve.
Personal AI-agent startup Instinct has closed a $1 billion Series C at a $10 billion valuation, finalizing a round that had only been reported as a possibility at a similar size.
Motive's $1.3 billion from General Catalyst, re-reported by The SaaS News on Sep 28, is the growth financing from General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund that Motive announced on Sep 10: non-dilutive capital repaid from revenue, not an equity round, with no.
Maritime intelligence startup Quartermaster raised another $140 million Series B, led by Insight Partners and Overmatch Ventures, just months after an earlier, smaller round.
Khosla Ventures founder Vinod Khosla says valuations for most robotics startups will fall by 2030, arguing today's pricing assumes far more companies succeed than the physical-AI market can actually support.
A $2 billion New Mexico sovereign-wealth vehicle and a $3.36 billion pre-IPO raise landed in the same week Pulse also covered $250M rounds as routine -- the unit of a 'big' AI round has quietly moved up an order of magnitude.
OpenEvidence, Precision Neuroscience and Rightway alone pulled in more than $655 million in late-September rounds, underscoring how much AI capital is now flowing into healthcare specifically.
Two fresh, small raises this weekend -- a PIPE for physical-AI systems and a seed extension for edge battery intelligence -- show early capital still forming around AI's physical and power-constrained edges.
Fireworks AI and Fal are both in talks for new funding rounds that could value the AI-inference startups at up to $30 billion and $20 billion respectively, as enterprise demand for managed inference outside the hyperscalers surges.
New Mexico's state investment fund has committed $1.8 billion to venture funds over three years, using oil and gas royalties to seed a fusion, defense and advanced-manufacturing bet meant to outlast its own commodity cycle.
DensityAI, an AI chip and data center startup founded by former leaders of Tesla's Dojo supercomputer program, is in advanced talks for a round that would value the year-old company at $10 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz.
OpenEvidence, the Miami-based clinical search platform for physicians, raised a new $250 million round led by hospital systems and Andreessen Horowitz.
Rightway raised $155 million in Series E funding led by Francisco Partners as the pharmacy-benefits startup takes aim at the CVS Caremark, Express Scripts and Optum Rx oligopoly.
Precision Neuroscience raised $250 million to advance its brain-computer interface technology, backed by Bill Ackman's Pershing Square and the Ackman Oxman Institute.
This issue's three reported funding deals total roughly $625 million, while AI infrastructure, robotics and digital health keep pulling a disproportionate share of the month's largest checks.
Six financings of $1 billion or more have closed in the past 30 days alone, per Pulse's own funding tracker -- a concentration of mega-checks that rivals 2021's zero-rate peak, just with real revenue attached this time.
Digital health raised $7.4 billion in H1 2026 after two lean years, and Pulse's own tracker shows the pace hasn't slowed since -- roughly $1.85 billion more across nine disclosed rounds in just the past 30 days.
Lightspeed Venture Partners is targeting $250 million for a new fund dedicated to early-stage AI startups in India, a distinct bet on the country's AI ecosystem.
Island, Cyera and BigHat Biosciences alone raised more than $1.1 billion this week to build the layer that governs what AI agents can access and do -- evidence the market has already priced in the exact failure mode this issue's lead story just demonstrated.
HIFI, a stablecoin and tokenized-markets infrastructure company processing roughly $7 billion in annualized volume, raised a $37 million Series A led by Left Lane Capital -- its first priced funding round.
PicoJool raised a $27.5 million Series A led by Socratic Partners to scale its VCSEL-based optical connectivity products for AI data centers, taking total funding to $39.5 million.
BigHat Biosciences closed a $75 million Series C co-led by DFJ Growth and Premji Invest, taking total funding to $223 million as its AI-designed antibody-drug conjugate enters a Phase 1 trial for gastric cancer.
MyComplianceOffice, a compliance management software provider for financial services firms, secured more than $100 million in growth debt financing from Accel-KKR Credit Partners to expand AI features and push into new markets.
Precision Neuroscience closed an oversubscribed $250 million Series D co-led by Bill Ackman's Pershing Square and his new Ackman Oxman Institute, valuing the brain-computer interface company at just over $1 billion.
Precision Neuroscience closed an oversubscribed $250 million Series D co-led by Bill Ackman's Pershing Square, valuing the brain-computer interface company at just over $1 billion as it scales past 100 patient procedures.
Island, the enterprise browser security company, raised a $400 million Series F at a $6.4 billion valuation, more than doubling since 2024 as it expands beyond browsers into governing AI agent activity.
Four venture-backed companies repriced at two to five times their own prior valuation marks in six weeks, and only one of them trains foundation models -- evidence investors are underwriting growth speed broadly, not just an AI-label premium.
Three AI-driven biotech rounds and Anthropic's own life-sciences lab landed in a single week, part of a funding pace that has already pushed 2026 startup investment past 2025's full-year total.
Ema raised a $77 million Series B led by Creaegis to expand its 'Universal AI Employee' platform, which automates HR, IT and finance workflows for enterprise customers including Wipro and ADP.
Brahma AI raised $150 million led by Multiples Alternate Asset Management at a $2 billion valuation, building AI tools for enterprise audiovisual content with customers including Warner Bros. and the NBA.
Numeral raised a $100 million Series C led by Insight Partners, its second large raise in about a year, taking total funding to $157.5 million as it expands its AI-driven sales-tax compliance platform for e-commerce and SaaS companies.
European defense-tech startup Tekever raised $580 million in the first close of a Series D round at a $6.4 billion valuation, as Europe ramps up autonomous-systems defense spending.
Ema raised a $77 million Series B led by Creaegis, more than quadrupling its valuation since 2024, as its AI agent teams for HR, IT and finance report 180% net dollar retention and 50-fold revenue growth in two years.
Basecamp Research raised a $140 million Series C led by Bill Maris's S32, with Nvidia and Menlo Ventures' Anthology Fund among the backers, to train a new generation of its EDEN foundation models and push AI-designed therapeutics into clinical development.
More than 40% of seed and Series A investment in 2026 has gone into rounds of $100 million or more, led by AI infrastructure, chip and robotics startups including River AI's $1.2 billion round and Xpeng Robotics' $900 million raise.
