AI Funding News: Week Ending 07.19
Frontier models, rock scanners, and spinouts from Big Tech. Last week’s AI money moves in five minutes. Total disclosed funding: ≈ $2.4 B

Welcome to Feed The AI
Your lightning-fast recap of where the money and M&A cash flowed in AI this week.
Need proof the AI party’s still raging? Investors wrote $2.4 billion worth of checks this week. That’s enough to pay for 13,000 Nvidia H200 GPUs or one (1) really nice AI search bar with an $18 B valuation.
Let’s dive in.
🔥 Biggest AI Funding Rounds This Week:
» Funding Roundup
Thinking Machines Lab – $2 B seed (—) Ex‑OpenAI CTO Mira Murati’s new frontier-model lab building safer, more reliable foundation models.
OpenEvidence Raises $210M Series B
Perplexity AI – $100 M growth (San Francisco, CA)
Conversational AI search engine launches “Comet” browser; valuation hits $18 B.Moonvalley – $84 M growth (Los Angeles, CA)
Licensed-data generative video tools for Hollywood creators (“Marey”).GeologicAI – $44 M Series B (Calgary, Canada)
ML + sensors scan drill cores to accelerate discovery of critical minerals.Unify – $40 M Series B (New York, NY)
AI agents that automate outbound and go-to-market motions for SaaS sales teams.
Takeaway: Frontier models got seed checks the size of IPOs. Domain-specific copilots (like OpenEvidence) are proving trust = traction. And the war for AI SDRs heats up.
🦄 Startups to Watch:
Confident Security – Seed round for encrypted, provably private inference. Keeps prompts out of training data.
Billee Technologies – AI agents for utility billing in multifamily housing.
Anadyr Horizon – Building a “Minority Report” for geopolitical instability using early-warning AI.
Heron Data – $16.6 M Series A for AI document intelligence in lending workflows
🗓️ Upcoming Conferences:
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions:
Meta → Play AI – Zuckerberg snaps up the voice-synthesis upstart to bolster Meta’s GenAI audio stack.
Cognition AI → Windsurf – After OpenAI's $3 B offer fizzled, Cognition scooped up the AI-powered coding IDE.
GE Vernova → Alteia – AI-powered visual inspection for utilities joins GE’s GridOS portfolio.
M&A Pulse: Meta’s hunting niche AI infra to juice GenAI features. And Windsurf’s rescue by Cognition hints at growing consolidation in the AI devtools space. Infra and energy remain hot targets for legacy giants.
📡 Signals – What This Week Tells Us:
Frontier model funding is alive and well.
A $2B seed round says capital still wants a seat at the next-gen foundation table.AI infrastructure is hot. Above and below ground.
GeologicAI scans rocks, GigaIO wires chips—both raised solid rounds in physical AI stack layers.Privacy and compliance are crossing the chasm.
Confident Security and Zip Security each landed funding to bring encrypted or compliant-by-default AI to market.Hollywood wants in.
Moonvalley shows creative AI isn’t just for text prompts—video gen is finding its way into big-budget studios.
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