AI Funding News: Week Ending 08.15
Deals on deals, billions on billions. AI just keeps eating.
Feed The AI Team
August 15, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
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Happy Friday, friends!
GPUs are still on back-order, ChatGPT just called me “dude,” and investors are shoveling cash into anything that breathes transformer dust.
Some of the usual suspects are writing big checks Founders Fund, OpenAI Startup Fund, etc
Let’s ride. 🚀.
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🔥 Biggest AI Funding Rounds This Week:
» Funding Roundup
Cohere raised a massive $500M mega-round, solidifying the enterprise LLM space as a multi-horse race and arming itself to win over the Fortune 500.
Cognition closed a $500M Series C led by Founders Fund. Cue the AI built by AI arms race.
Decart secured $100M for real-time video generation tech aimed at gaming and shopping. Similar to Midjourney, but moving.
Titan brought in $74M in growth funding to roll up underperforming IT-services companies, inject them with AI capabilities, and resell at SaaS-level valuations.
Takeaway:
Investors are throwing monster money at “heavy-duty, enterprise-ready” AI this week. VCs want moat-building infrastructure plays that slot directly into enterprise workflows and soak up compute like it’s free. Is the “cute chatbot” era is over? Maybe so. It’s all about heavy metal models, ai tooling, and system-level integrations that make CFOs see cost savings (or new revenue) on a single slide.
🗓️ Upcoming Conferences:
🦄 Startups to Watch:
Endex – Seed-stage Excel copilot making analysts 10× faster Led by OpenAI Startup Fund.
Protege – Secure, on-chain data-exchange marketplace feeding models without leaking IP.
Continua – Agentic group-chat copilots turning Slack into your biz-ops intern.
Evertune – GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) so brands stop getting weird AI answers.
These are the ones your boss will ask you about in Q4. Beat them to it.
📡 Signals – What This Week Tells Us:
LLM Arms Build Moats, Not Walls – Two half-billion rounds in 48 hours say investors still believe bigger models + enterprise controls = defensible cashflows.
Agents Eat Workflows – From Excel-embedded Endex to Titan’s IT roll-ups, “hands-off ops” is the narrative founders are pitching.
Video = The Next Tokenizer Frontier – Decart’s splashy $100 M bet joins Runway and Pika; expect a GPU land-grab to follow.
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions:
Acquirer → Target | Deal Size | Rationale |
|---|---|---|
Destinus → Daedalean | ~$180 M | Marrying hypersonic drones with AI flight autonomy. |
Landbase → Adauris | Undisc. | Adds inbound-marketing agents to Landbase’s GTM stack. |
Workday → Flowise | Undisc. | Open-source agent builder becomes “Workday AI” accelerant. |
🤖 Beyond The Feed
Talent Wars, 2025 Edition – Meta’s latest job posting lists total comp “up to $1.1 B” for engineers. Yup, still billions for brains.
Meme of the Week:
📬 Enjoyed the intel?
That’s a wrap! Hit Reply to tell us what you loved (or hated), forward to your smartest friend, and we’ll see you next Friday with another funding frenzy.
See you next Friday.
Until then: ship fast, raise smart, stay curious.
Feed The AI