AI Funding News: Week Ending 08.22

$1.2B+ disclosed. Hard tech is on a roll.

Author

Feed The AI Team
August 22, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Welcome to Feed The AI

Happy Friday, friends!

AI hype is free, but building the future costs real money. This week over $1.2B poured into companies wiring up data centers, retooling factories, and sending drones to work.

Skim the deals, steal the insights, get back to building.

Let’s unpack it.

🔥 Biggest AI Funding Rounds This Week:

» Funding Roundup

  • FieldAI – $314 M (Series B) – Irvine, CA
    Robotics-AI platform powering industrial autonomy; Nvidia-backed and built to be the “one brain” for machines.

  • Celestial AI – $255 M (Series C1) – Santa Clara, CA
    Photonic Fabric chips to supercharge AI datacenter interconnects; compute bottlenecks, meet your match.

  • Nuro – $203 M (Series E) – Mountain View, CA
    Autonomous last-mile delivery vehicles; scaling partnerships with Uber and NVIDIA.

  • METiS Technologies – ~$55 M (Series D) – Beijing, China
    AI-driven nano-delivery biotech; fusing machine learning with next-gen drug delivery systems.

  • Twin Health – $53 M (Series E) – Mountain View, CA
    AI “digital twin” for metabolic health; helping clinicians reverse chronic conditions.

Takeaway:

Capital clustered at the deep-tech edge, robotics autonomy, photonics, and AI health infra, while Nvidia kept shaping cap tables (FieldAI, Nuro).

🗓️ Upcoming Conferences:

  • Hubspot Inbound – September 3–5, 2025 | San Francisco, CA | More Info

  • AI Infra Summit 2025 – September 9–11, 2025 | San Francisco, CA | More Info

  • Content Marketing World – September 15–17, 2025 | San Diego, CA | More Info

🦄 Startups to Watch:

  • Firecrawl  - Series A - Infra that turns the open web into structured fuel for LLMs; growing demand from RAG & agentic stacks.

  • Keychain - Series B - “AI OS” for CPG manufacturing workflows; practical AI in plants (real spend, real pain).

  • Pantomath - Series B - “AI DRE” agents that fix data issues, not just alert; reduces MTTR and keeps analytics trustworthy.

  • SRE.ai - Seed - Agentic “virtual employees” across Salesforce/DevOps; early but aligned with agent-ops tailwinds.

📡 Signals – What This Week Tells Us:

  1. Industrial autonomy is hot. FieldAI’s mega-B and Nuro’s E show investors backing embodied AI that touches the real world. Think factories, logistics, urban ops.

  2. Compute plumbing keeps winning. Celestial AI’s photonics round underscores continued appetite to squeeze more performance per watt per rack.

  3. Healthcare AI resilience. Twin Health (E) and METiS (D) suggest durable support for AI-enabled health delivery and platforms, even late-stage.

  4. Strategics still shape outcomes. Nvidia popped up on multiple cap tables (Nuro; FieldAI via NVentures).

🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions:

  • Salesforce → Regrello (definitive agreement; agentic workflow automation to bolster Agentforce/Slack).

  • Comply365 → Beams (aviation Safety-AI; accelerates AI platform strategy).

  • Visage ↔ Rolebot (merger) (AI recruiting platforms combine).

M&A Pulse: Platform players are vacuuming agentic workflow and domain AI to widen moats.

🤖 Beyond The Feed

AI Privacy: What It Means, Why It Matters, and Where It’s Going Wrong

What is AI privacy, and why is everyone worried about it? Let's breaks down the definition, key concerns, and real-world examples of AI privacy issues, plus how it connects to broader AI governance.

Meme of the Week:

📬 Enjoyed the intel?

See you next Friday.

Until then: ship fast, raise smart, stay curious.

Feed The AI