startup Archives - Crunchbase News /tag/startup/ Data-driven reporting on private markets, startups, founders, and investors Thu, 05 Mar 2026 16:51:46 +0000 en-US hourly 1 https://wordpress.org/?v=6.8.5 /wp-content/uploads/cb_news_favicon-150x150.png startup Archives - Crunchbase News /tag/startup/ 32 32 Exclusive: Founded By 2 Brothers In Their 20s, YC-Backed Denki Raises $4.1M To Automate Financial Audits /venture/yc-backed-denki-raise-financial-audit-automation-ai/ Thu, 05 Mar 2026 14:30:09 +0000 /?p=93204 , which has built AI-powered software for financial auditors at public companies, has raised $4.1 million in funding, the startup tells Crunchbase News exclusively.

Founded in 2025 by brothers (24) and (20), San Francisco-based Denki aims to build “modern” infrastructure for financial audits, which verify that financial statements are accurate and controls are functioning. The startup wants to help replace manual, “evidence-heavy” processes with software automation that makes audits run more like code.

David Jin Li and Felipe Jin Li, co-founders of Denki.
David Jin Li and Felipe Jin Li, co-founders of Denki. (Courtesy photo)

“Denki helps auditors review and prepare evidence more quickly, document their work more effectively, and test process controls more rigorously,” CEO Felipe told Crunchbase News. “With higher risk coverage and reduced costs, public companies can comply better with financial regulations.”

and co-led the raise, which included participation from , and others. Denki also participated in YC’s Fall 2025 cohort.

The raise comes amid a broader surge in funding to fintech startups, particularly those that apply AI in their offerings. Global funding to VC-backed financial technology startups totaled $52.9 billion in 2025, per Crunchbase . That’s a 27% increase from 2024’s total of $41.6 billion raised.

Interestingly, the most-active investor in the space by far all year, in terms of deal volume, was Denki backer Y Combinator, which participated in 151 fintech startup deals last year. That’s up 24.8% compared to the 121 deals it wrote checks into in 2024.

Landing on capital and an idea

The two brothers grew up in Spain and the U.K. Upon moving to London to study computer science, the pair participated in hackathons organized by , , and VC-sponsored programs, and won several competitions.

“That opened up opportunities, including being offered a $135,000 pre-seed check before we had an idea, which we declined,” Felipe recalls.

The brothers eventually accepted a small angel check from a former staff research scientist at , which gave them a few months of runway to explore ideas before being accepted into the Y Combinator Fall 2025 batch.

“We spent time digging into compliance and landed on audit. It is a technically rich problem, with large volumes of unstructured data, high regulatory stakes and very little modernization in tooling,” Felipe said. “It also connected naturally to what we had each been doing.”

David was building financial data pipelines at — a company trusted by top hedge funds — turning messy data into usable information. Felipe was working on his Ph.D. in explainable AI at , evaluating vision-language models and making black-box systems “interpretable.”

They discovered that a common approach to addressing all the manual work required by auditors was to build Excel extensions designed to make audit work faster.

“We believe it is worth changing the status quo by moving away from Excel as the primary workspace,” Felipe said.

Denki, he said, offers cleaner logs and less room for sample manipulation. Also, because the brothers have a research background, they are “constantly” staying on top of new concerns.

“One major audit risk today is AI fraud,” said Felipe. “There is promising research on detecting forged AI-generated receipts using invisible watermarks, and translating that research into something auditors can actually use is a big part of what we do.”

Denki makes money by offering a tiered SaaS annual contract that depends on the number of controls automated, team size and other integration factors. Its customers are pre-IPO and publicly traded companies.

Building for a ‘high-stress industry’ under scrutiny

Denki’s founders believe their solution is timely. Last year, the imposed the third-highest cumulative penalties in its 21-year enforcement history, totaling $17.7 million, to a report. That was after issuing a record $35.7 million in penalties in 2024. The Jin Li brothers believe those metrics signal that “scrutiny is intensifying even as traditional methods strain under complexity.”

For now, Denki is a two-person company, but it plans to hire engineers and auditors with its new capital.

, Base10 Partners co-founder and managing partner, told Crunchbase News that his firm was impressed by the brothers’ “passion for the industry” and their focus on automating “very discrete tasks” for auditors.

“It was unusual to see such young people so strongly empathetic to issues in auditing but it was clear they were determined to build something great for this industry,” he wrote via email.
“But also it’s a large market that is burdened with labor supply constraints (which is not getting any better), in a high-stress industry with ever increasing scrutiny.”

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Eight Sleep Raises $50M At $1.5B Valuation To Expand Into ‘Predictive, AI-Driven Health’ /venture/unicorn-eight-sleep-funding-ai-driven-health/ Wed, 04 Mar 2026 11:00:55 +0000 /?p=93197 , a startup developing sleep technology products, announced Wednesday that it has raised $50 million at a $1.5 billion valuation.

led the “strategic” investment in the New York-based startup, which has now raised more than $250 million in total funding.

Eight Sleep raised $100 million last August, so this financing marks its second round in a year’s time. At the time of that raise, the company was valued at $1 billion, up from its approximately $500 million valuation at the time of its in August 2021.

Eight sleep co-founders: (L-R): CTO Massimo Andreasi Bassi, CEO Matteo Franceschetti, and VP of Brand and Marketing Alex Zatarain.
Eight sleep co-founders: Massimo Andreasi Bassi, Matteo Franceschetti and Alex Zatarain. (Courtesy photo)

Founded in 2014, Eight Sleep describes itself as a “sleep technology” company that combines technology, physiology and data “to unlock deeper sleep and better health.”

The company started out selling a smart mattress, or Pod, that uses embedded sensors to collect data to study trends about how people sleep. One could say the company was ahead of its time — in 2018, it launched an AI-powered sleep coach that tells users things like: “Last night, you slept 40 minutes less than your average this month” or “This week, your REM sleep is lower than average. Try going to bed 30 minutes earlier tonight.”

The new capital will fund its expansion from sleep optimization into “predictive, AI-driven health,” it said.

Executives described 2025 as a “milestone” year in which Eight Sleep achieved free cash flow positivity and launched three new products: Pod 5, Pod Pillow Cover and Thermal Blanket.

“Sleep was just the beginning,” said , co-founder and CEO of Eight Sleep, in a release. “We’ve built the most advanced AI-powered health sensing system in the world — one that learns your body better every night and acts on that knowledge. This investment gives us the resources to take that intelligence beyond the bedroom and into every dimension of personal health. … Our goal is to build the defining health technology company of this generation.”

Eight Sleep is not the only sleep-focused company to raise capital lately. Over the past few years, investors have poured hundreds of millions into an array of companies working on treatments for sleep-related ailments and technology to help improve sleep quality. , maker of the popular wearable rings that record and analyze biometric data, is the largest investment recipient in this area. It’s raised $1.25 billion in equity funding to date, including a at an $11 billion valuation in October 2025.

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OpenAI’s New $110B Raise At A $840B Valuation Marks The Largest Venture Deal Ever /venture/openai-raise-largest-ai-venture-deal-ever/ Fri, 27 Feb 2026 17:39:46 +0000 /?p=93188 The AI rounds just keep getting bigger and bigger.

announced Friday that it has closed on a staggering $110 billion fundraise at an $840 billion post-money valuation. The financing marks the largest raise ever, according to .

The money comes from three sources, with and each ponying up $30 billion. is contributing the biggest share, with a $50 billion investment. However, OpenAI says additional investors are expected to join as the round progresses.

The next-largest raise ever, per Crunchbase, was also raised by OpenAI in a $40 billion funding round in 2025. The third-largest was raised by rival — a $30 billion Series G haul at a $380 billion post-money valuation that was announced on Feb. 12.

The new valuation for OpenAI increases the value of the OpenAI Foundation’s stake in OpenAI group to over $180 billion, according to the company.

Subscriber growth

The company says it’s also inked a strategic partnership with Amazon and “secured next generation inference compute” with Nvidia as part of an expansion of its partnership with the chip giant.

OpenAI claims that it now has more than 900 million weekly active users and over 50 million consumer subscribers. Subscriber momentum has picked up significantly so far in 2026, according to CEO and co-founder , with January and February on track to be the company’s largest months for new subscribers in its history.

“We are entering a new phase where frontier AI moves from research into daily use at global scale,” he wrote in a blog post. “Leadership will be defined by who can scale infrastructure fast enough to meet demand, and turn that capacity into products people rely on. This funding and these partnerships let us do both.”

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Next-Gen Nuclear Funding Looks Livelier Than Ever Following Inertia’s $450M Raise /clean-tech-and-energy/next-gen-nuclear-funding-lively-inertia-seriesa/ Thu, 12 Feb 2026 20:15:33 +0000 /?p=93135 As global energy demand continues to , driven by both rising household consumption and fast-expanding AI infrastructure, startup investors are increasingly turning to nuclear fusion and fission startups to supply our power-hungry era.

They’re not afraid to write big checks either. The latest evidence of this was a $450 million Series A that Livermore, California-based fusion power startup Wednesday.

led the round for the 2-year-old company, joined by , and other backers. Inertia plans to use the funds toward a fusion pilot at , which will involve building the world’s most powerful laser and a production line to mass manufacture .

The financing is the latest in a string of recent, very large deals around both fusion and nuclear fission. Per Crunchbase data, both funding and deal volume for the space hit a high last year, and 2026 is off to a promising start as well.

Headline deals, leading fundraisers

It’s mostly funding announcements, but not exclusively. On the fusion front, the highest profile recently proposed deal was ’s surprising announcement in December that it plans to combine with fusion company in what TMTG called a stock transaction valued at more than $6 billion.

The deal is a long time coming for TAE, which was founded in 1998 and is the oldest operating venture-backed fusion energy company in the Crunchbase dataset. The company has seen at least $1.5 billion in prior known funding to date.

Other fusion companies have also been prodigious fundraisers. The leader is , with $2.86 billion in equity funding, while other standouts include ($1 billion), ($900 million) and ($357 million).

Nuclear fission is another hot area for investment, with over $2.5 billion in funding last year, per Crunchbase. The largest deal was a $700 million Series D in late November for , a developer of advanced nuclear reactor and fuel technology.

Activity looks to be accelerating further this year, with more than $270 million in funding, including a $140 million round two weeks ago for Tennessee-based , which manufactures advanced nuclear fuel for new reactors.

Public markets too

Public investors also appear receptive. , which develops nuclear reactors, went public in 2024 through a merger with a SPAC launched by . It’s down quite a bit from the height scaled late last year, but still had a recent market cap around $10 billion.

Other SPAC deals have also popped up, including , which wants to develop energy parks with small modular reactors to meet data center demand, and , a developer of light-water micro-modular reactors. Meanwhile , a developer of small modular nuclear plants, completed a SPAC merger in October.

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Amid Record Robotics Funding, Apptronik Raises $520M Series A Extension To Boost Production Of Humanoid Robot Apollo /venture/ai-humanoid-robot-funding-apptronik/ Wed, 11 Feb 2026 14:00:28 +0000 /?p=93119 AI-powered robotics company announced Wednesday that it has raised $520 million in an extension of its $415 million Series A raise in February 2025, bringing the total round to over $935 million.

Existing backers , , and joined new investors including and manufacturing giant participating in the extension.

The Austin-based company says that after its initial Series A announcement, it received “substantial inbound investor interest,” which led it to open the new extension of the round “at a 3x multiple of the Series A valuation.”

It did not reveal its new valuation. However, the reported in November that Apptronik after raising $331 million earlier that month, according to with the . The company confirmed that the $331 million raised is a part of this Series A extension round.

With the latest funding, Apptronik has now raised nearly $1 billion since its 2016 inception.

Robotics startup funding hit a record high last year, . Startups in the sector raised nearly $14 billion in funding in 2025, up from $8.2 billion in 2024, even topping the $13.1 billion raised in the peak venture funding year of 2021.

So far, that momentum appears to be continuing in 2026. Besides this raise, , a robotics company building an “omni-bodied” brain to operate any robot for any task, announced in January that it had raised $1.4 billion, tripling its valuation to more than $14 billion.

Human connections

Apptronik co-founders: Nicholas Paine (CTO), Jeff Cardenas (CEO).
Apptronik co-founders Nicholas Paine and Jeff Cardenas with Apollo. (Courtesy photo.)

Apptronik was founded on the belief that for humanoid robots to reach mass adoption, the industry had to solve for intuitive, safe human-robot interaction, and improve the cost and ease of manufacturing these robots.

The company claims its flagship robot, Apollo, is designed with “approachability at its forefront.”

“Its friendly head and face, eye-level cameras, and natural color palette are engineered to make human interactions feel engaging and more natural,” a spokesperson told Crunchbase News.

Apollo is designed to “revolutionize” human-robot interaction, initially in industries such as logistics and manufacturing, with future planned expansion into retail, healthcare, and eventually, the home, according to the company.

It’s designed to take on physically demanding work and labor-intensive operational processes in manufacturing and logistics and to work alongside human counterparts to transport components, sort and kit, among other tasks.

Apptronik has commercial agreements with companies across several industries such as automotive manufacturing, logistics and consumer packaged goods, including Mercedes-Benz, and . It also has a strategic partnership with “to build the next generation of humanoid robots, powered by Gemini Robotics.”

The company says it will use the capital to ramp up production of Apollo and expand its global network of commercial and pilot deployments. Apptronik has worked on developing 15 robotic systems, including ’s humanoid robot Valkyrie.

Apptronik’s business is built on a Robotics as a Service model, which includes the robot hardware, software updates, service and support. The company started out of the Human Centered Robotics Lab at the and has nearly 300 employees, double its size a year ago.

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Exclusive: Winn.ai Raises $18M Series A For AI-Powered Real-Time Sales Assistant /venture/startup-winn-ai-seriesa-real-time-assistant/ Wed, 11 Feb 2026 11:45:21 +0000 /?p=93118 , which has built an artificial intelligence-powered sales assistant, has raised $18 million in a Series A funding round, the company tells Crunchbase News exclusively.

The company provides sales reps with a real-time AI assistant that “guides” them during a prospect call while integrating with enterprise CRM and business intelligence systems. It also aims to eliminate administrative tasks before and after the call.

The Tel Aviv-based startup was co-founded by CEO and CTO .

The biggest difference between Winn and other startups in the space is timing, according to Postan-Koren.

Winn.ai co-founders Eldad Postan-Koren and Bar Haleva
Winn.ai co-founders Eldad Postan-Koren and Bar Haleva. (Courtesy photo.)

“Most players in the market are passive and retrospective — they record calls to analyze after the fact why a deal was lost — a ‘post-mortem’ approach,” he told Crunchbase News. “Winn is proactive and real-time. We don’t just analyze history — we help the rep navigate the conversation while it’s happening to ensure the right questions are asked.”

The focus, compared to other conversation intelligence tools, is execution vs. analytics, according to Winn’s co-founders.

“Coaching is hard to apply when the feedback comes a week later,” Postan-Koren said. “Instead of telling a rep what they should have done, we guide them on what to do right now.”

, and co-led the Series A raise, which included participation from , , , and . In total, the startup has raised $35 million since its 2022 inception.

Companies at the intersection of AI and sales and marketing raised close to $4 billion in venture capital last year, That represents a sizable increase over the $3.4 billion raised by such startups in 2024, though remains lower than the $6.9 billion raised in the peak venture funding year of 2021 or the $5 billion raised in 2022.

Growth and expansion

Postan-Koren declined to provide hard financial figures for Winn, saying only that it tripled its annual recurring revenue in 2025 and that it has achieved 30x growth over the past two years.

Winn has dozens of customers, including HR and payroll company , IT management platform , and data security startup . The company’s revenue model is a standard SaaS per-seat subscription.

The company is not yet profitable. It plans to use its new capital to expand its U.S. go-to-market team, while continuing to invest “heavily” in R&D. Presently, Winn has over 40 employees.

Its primary market is the U.S., although Postan-Koren said it is seeing “strong organic traction” in the United Kingdom and Europe. It is also expanding its target user, he said.

“We started with a laser focus on account executives,” Postan-Koren explained. “However, the demand quickly pulled us into other departments.”

The company now also works with sales development representatives, account managers, solutions engineers and customer success. Interestingly, he said that Winn is also starting to see demand from nonsales teams, such as support and HR.

, operating partner at Insight Partners, believes that Winn “transforms the process” of scaling a sales team.

“It helps leaders to standardize excellence across every rep, delivering higher playbook adoption,” he said in a statement. “For a sales leader, this  shift can bring teams closer to delivering consistency.”

, managing partner and general partner at Mangusta Capital, described Winn’s offering as an AI co-pilot that can “empower revenue teams in real time to sell more effectively and consistently in the future.”

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Exclusive: Zocks Raises $45M Series B From Lightspeed, QED For AI Assistant To Financial Advisers /fintech/zocks-raises-seriesb-ai-assistant-financial-advisers/ Mon, 26 Jan 2026 14:00:15 +0000 /?p=93062 , which has built an AI assistant for financial advisers, has raised $45 million in a Series B funding co-led by and , the startup told Crunchbase News exclusively.

All existing backers, including and , also participated in the financing. The raise comes less than one year after San Francisco-based Zocks raised a $13.8 million Series A. In total, Zocks has raised $65 million since its 2022 inception.

Prior to co-founding Zocks, CEO spent more than a decade at and more than three years as vice president of product management at . While at Twilio, Gilbert oversaw compliance and was struck by the amount of information and insights that companies were able to extract from their communications.

Akos Ratku and Mark Gilbert, co-founders of Zocks
Akos Ratku and Mark Gilbert, co-founders of Zocks.

After leaving the company, he teamed up with to start Zocks, using artificial intelligence to glean information from discussions by organizing meeting notes.

“We were focused on very high security privacy areas, and that’s why we started with, and are 100% focused on, financial services,” Gilbert told Crunchbase News in an interview. “And what we found was the conversations advisers were having with clients had very, very valuable information for them.”

The industry as a whole, he said, is understaffed and deals with “a huge amount of manual work.”

The goal of Zocks is to combine the communications and AI pieces “to help accelerate and grow financial advisers and financial advisory firms.”

The raise is yet another example of the fintech sector’s rebound. Global funding to VC-backed financial technology startups totaled $51.8 billion in 2025, per Crunchbase . That’s a fairly significant increase of 27% from 2024’s total of $40.8 billion raised.

Personalized intelligence

Zocks launched its offering in February 2024. Today, its software is used by 5,000 financial firms, including , and . The startup typically charges per adviser under a SaaS model, both selling directly to advisers and through enterprise contracts. It has seen 8x year-over-year growth in revenue, according to Gilbert.

Agentic AI doesn’t just help pull information from conversations with clients, Gilbert said. It also assists them with follow-up, opening accounts, filling out forms and drafting replies to emails “while still having all of the compliance and privacy that financial services needs,” he added.

For example, Zocks doesn’t create recordings of the conversations by default. But its agent listens to the conversations and builds tables of information. So if an adviser says, “tell me all my clients who have children that are coming up on college age but have no 529 plan,” the agent can do so. Or an adviser can ask in Zocks: “find me clients with old 401(k)s held outside our management.”

“Zocks will surface that list and suggest what to do next that’s personalized to each of those clients,” Gilbert said. “Then the adviser can take that action with one click.”

Proactive AI

Gilbert believes that Zocks stands out from other offerings in that it uses agents to do a variety of proactive tasks.

“There are a lot of systems out there that are called note takers and that’s very helpful for people,” he said. “The big difference for us is that we’re able to do that as well and take this information to help the advisers get more out of it. We’re trying to anticipate their needs.”

Put even more simply, the company wants to help advisers identify new financial planning opportunities across their entire client base and act faster by suggesting what to do next based on the data Zocks gets from all the systems it’s integrated with.

Currently, Zocks operates primarily in the U.S. and Canada, but has plans to expand to Europe soon.

“There’s a shortage of financial advisers and that seems to be getting worse,” Gilbert said. “I think that’s one of the reasons that we’ve seen such a fast uptake.”

Investor attraction

, partner at Lightspeed, told Crunchbase News via email that his firm was initially attracted to Zocks’ founding team.

“Mark and Akos are naturally customer-centric and they deeply understand how to build enterprise-grade products that are delightful to use, while scalable, secure and extensible,” he said. “Their product vision started with a hero-product, but rapidly expanded into platform capabilities that address the complex requirements of mid to larger enterprises while also scaling down to smaller companies and individual users.”

, a partner at QED Investors, said her firm was impressed by Zocks’ ability to break into the enterprise segment early, the depth of its technology, and how “seamlessly” it fits into existing workflows.

“They’ve earned the trust of several of the largest RIAs in the country and expanded successfully into adjacent verticals like insurance,” she said, “which is difficult to do without a product that truly works in regulated environments.”

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Capital One To Buy Fintech Startup Brex At Less Than Half Its Peak Valuation In $5.15B Deal /ma/capital-one-acquisition-fintech-startup-brex/ Fri, 23 Jan 2026 15:50:42 +0000 /?p=93056 Banking giant on Thursday that it is acquiring fintech startup for $5.15 billion in a cash and stock deal.

The news was big in the fintech world with Brex claiming the pairing would represent “the largest bank-fintech deal in history.” ( had planned to buy in 2020 for $5.3 billion until that deal fell apart a year later due to regulatory concerns.)

In a joint statement, Capital One founder, chairman and CEO said it’s always been a goal of the bank “to build a payments company at the frontier of the technology revolution.”

“Acquiring Brex accelerates this journey, especially in the business payments marketplace,” he said. “Brex invented the integrated combination of corporate credit cards, spend management software and banking together in a single platform. They have taken the rarest of journeys for a fintech, building a vertically integrated platform from the bottom of the tech stack to the top.”

While $5 billion is no small sum, it is less than half the that San Francisco-based Brex was valued at in October 2021. In total, the company has raised $1.7 billion in equity and debt since its 2017 inception — with about $1.2 billion of that being venture funding.

Early investors such as , which led Brex’s in 2017, are likely quite pleased with the outcome. Investors who wrote checks at its later stages are likely less so.

Other early backers include , and 1.

The company has 1,100 employees, according to a Brex spokesperson who also told Crunchbase News that its business is growing 40% year over year and is profitable. Customers include , , , , and , among others.

Pedro Franceschi, CEO of Brex
Pedro Franceschi, CEO of Brex. [Courtesy photo]
Brex will continue to operate largely independently with co-founder continuing to lead as CEO.

Close friends Franceschi and , who co-founded Brex, started working together when they founded another company, Brazilian payment processing startup , in 2012 at the wee age of 16. That company ended up getting acquired by Stone Pagamentos for “tens of millions of dollars” — before the two had even gone to college.

A change of plans

Brex began its life as a buzzy startup that served mostly other startups. But in June 2022 — three months after announcing it would make a into software and enterprise — Brex confirmed that it was apparently it started to serve: small to medium-sized businesses.

The abrupt news didn’t sit well with many of the SMBs it served.

Over time, Brex began to seemingly fall behind its largest rival, , when it came to fundraising and revenue generation. Ramp as of last November was valued at $32 billion, having raised a total of $2.3 billion in equity.

By joining Capital One, Brex says it will accelerate Capital One’s presence in corporate cards and spend management, complementing its existing leadership in SMB banking.

Capital One’s purchase of Brex is slated to close midyear.

Fintech M&A expected to pick up

On the heels of a strong year for venture funding to fintech startups, sources who spoke with Crunchbase News said they expect exits — both M&A deals and IPOs — in the sector to gain steam in 2026.

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Humans& Raises Huge $480M Seed Round At $4.48B Valuation For ‘Human-Centric AI Lab’ /ai/humans-raises-huge-seed-round-unicorn-valuation/ Tue, 20 Jan 2026 19:48:19 +0000 /?p=93038 , a new company founded by top researchers from , , , and , among others, announced Tuesday that it has raised a massive $480 million seed round at a staggering $4.48 billion valuation.

So far, not much is known about the company, founded in September 2025, which says its mission is to design an AI tool “around how people connect and work together, where collaboration and human insight remain central.”

humans& co-founders from left: Noah Goodman, Andi Peng, Georges Harik, Yuchen He and Eric Zelikman. [Courtesy photo]
The co-founders are former Anthropic researcher , xAI researcher , early Google employee , Yuchen He and .

1Ի co-founder Harik also led the round, which included participation from , , , , , , , , 2Ի , among “many others,” according to the company. The seed round was raised all cash unstructured.

The startup says its AI lab aims to set “the standard for how AI supports human connection.” Its tool, it adds, will act as a connective tissue to facilitate collaboration between people and intelligent systems.

In a blog post, the company : “No one changes the world alone. AI models are rapidly learning to reason better, code faster, and take actions in the world with increasing autonomy. But for humans, progress happens when we understand one another, build trust, make connections, and work together. That is where we believe the next chapter of AI should begin.”

Peng told Crunchbase News via email that humans& will spend the majority of the capital on compute for training models.

Huge seed rounds for AI

While huge funding rounds are not unusual in the artificial intelligence space, the Humans& raise is believed to be one of the largest seed rounds ever raised. The largest, however, was raised by last year. Launched and led by former OpenAI CTO , and joined by AI heavy hitters from Meta, OpenAI, Google and , the San Francisco-based company last year announced a -led financing at a $10 billion valuation. It was by far the largest seed round in the Crunchbase dataset.

Crunchbase data showed that seed investors poured money into AI startups in 2025 at an even more exuberant pace than in 2024, which was already record-setting. More than 41% of the $38.4 billion invested in global seed funding in 2025 went to companies in AI-focused industry categories, per Crunchbase data. That was up from 30% in 2024.

The numbers also got bigger. Just over $15 billion had gone to AI-focused seed rounds as of Dec. 12, per Crunchbase, up about 50% from 2024. Below, we take a look at AI investment total and share for the past six years.

It was also a record-setting year for really, really huge seed rounds. By this, we mean financings of $100 million or more — once unheard of, but now not that uncommon.

We kept the dataset of these deals to U.S. startups for simpler vetting. But even with this limit, the total was enormous — topping $3.6 billion in 2025, as of Dec. 12, a new record.

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Robotics Startup Skild AI Lands $1.4B, Tripling Valuation To $14B In Just 7 Months /venture/robotics-startup-skild-ai-triples-valuation/ Wed, 14 Jan 2026 18:08:45 +0000 /?p=93028 , a robotics company building an “omni-bodied” brain to operate any robot for any task, announced Wednesday that it has raised $1.4 billion, tripling its valuation to over $14 billion.

The fundraise comes just over seven months after Skild raised at a $4.5 billion valuation.

led the startup’s latest financing, which included participation from , ’s venture capital arm, entities administered by , , and . Several strategic investors also wrote checks into the round, including , , , , and 1.

Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, co-founders of Skild AI.
Deepak Pathak and Abhinav Gupta, co-founders of Skild AI. [Courtesy photo]
The raise brings Pittsburgh-based Skild AI’s total raised to over $1.83 billion, according to Crunchbase.

The company says it grew from zero to about $30 million revenue “in just a few months” in 2025, and “is growing exponentially.” It is deploying its technology in a variety of environments,  including security and facility inspection, last-mile and point-to-point delivery, warehouses, manufacturing, data centers, and construction tasks, among others.

Looking ahead, Skild AI plans to deploy robotics in consumers homes, with enterprise tasks as the first application.

Last year was a good year for robotic startup funding. Overall, robotics startups raised $13.8 billion in funding in 2025, up from $7.8 billion in 2024 and even topping the $13.1 billion raised in the peak venture funding year of 2021.

Another example of a company building a brain for robots that recently raised capital is . The Zurich-based startup, which says it’s “building the brain for humanoid and human-capable robots,” raised $50 million in funding in November.

Multipurposing intelligence

Skild AI claims to be building the industry’s “first unified robotics foundation model” called the Skild Brain. The company says its model differs from traditional ones that are tailored to specific robot designs in that it is omni-bodied and “can control any robot without prior knowledge of their exact body form,” including quadrupeds, humanoids, tabletop arms and mobile manipulators.

As such, Skild AI says its technology gives robots the ability to perform simpler tasks such as household chores like , and as well as more physically demanding activities such as .

“The Skild Brain can control robots it has never trained on, adapting in real time to extreme changes in form or environments. The model is forced to adapt rather than memorize — much like intelligence in nature,” said , CEO and co-founder of Skild AI, in a release.

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