AI Funding News: Week Ending 08.29

Over $430M+ huge acquisitions + the most used AI App is...

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Feed The AI Team
August 29, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 4 minutes

Welcome to Feed The AI

Happy Friday people

On one side: billion-dollar bets on security and threat intel.

On the other: scrappy seeds building CRMs, freight stacks, and micro-course bots. Together? $430M+ wired into AI’s bloodstream this week.

Let’s unpack it.

🔥 Biggest AI Funding Rounds This Week:

» Funding Roundup

Ontic – $230 M (Series C) – Austin, TX
Threat-intel and physical-security platform turbo-charging with gen-AI; this week’s monster round.

Attio – $52 M (Series B) – San Francisco, CA (P.S. incase you missed our inside the round, check out out here)
AI-native CRM that gives GTM teams workflow Lego bricks.

GoodShip – $25 M (Series B) – Bellevue, WA
AI freight-orchestration platform already moving goods for Tropicana and Kellanova.

🗓️ 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:

  • Maisa AI (Seed) - Bold “chain-of-work” approach to keep enterprise pilots from flopping.

  • Definite (Seed) - Data stack consolidation play that could shake Snowflake’s moat.

  • Bluefish (Series A) - CMOs can see exactly how their brand shows up across AI assistants

  • Artificial Societies (Seed) - Test Your Product in a Simulated World

  • FriendliAI (Seed Ext) - 90% cheaper inference = instant developer pull.

  • Aurelian (Series A) - Tackling public safety dispatch with agentic AI; civic AI use-cases are rare and risky but needed.

📡 Signals – What This Week Tells Us:

  1. Security and safety are in the spotlight: Ontic’s $230M C-round shows physical + digital threats are an AI opportunity.

  2. CRM is getting rebuilt: Attio + Aurasell signal VCs want new AI-native sales stacks.

  3. Infra is still hot: Definite and FriendliAI raise to make AI data + compute cheaper, faster, more reliable.

  4. AI agents are creeping into the enterprise: Maisa AI and Aurelian push agentic AI into workflows from pilots to 911 calls.

🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions:

  • Accenture → NeuraFlash - N/D
    Adds 500+ Salesforce/Gen-AI specialists; strengthens mid-market agentic solutions.

  • Sumitomo Rubber → Viaduct (Aug 29) -$104 M
    Predictive-maintenance AI for “smart tire” strategy in fleets.

  • CrowdStrike → Onum (Aug 28) - ~$290 M
    Real-time telemetry pipelines fuel Falcon Next-Gen SIEM to stop breaches at “AI speed.”

  • Tempus AI → Paige - $81 M
    Oncology data moat expands with 7M digital pathology slides.

  • Uniphore → Orby AI (+ intent to buy Autonom8) (Aug 28) - N/D
    Grabs Large Action Model + neuro-symbolic AI talent for enterprise agent orchestration.

  • Strangeworks ↔ Quantagonia (Aug 29) - N/D
    Quantum optimization + AI solvers unite to expand HPC capabilities.

M&A Pulse: Buyers chased specialized capabilities, from Salesforce agents (Accenture) to quantum solvers (Strangeworks).

🤖 Beyond The Feed

a16z launched the top 100 Most Used AI Apps in 2025:

Meme of the Week:

📬 Enjoyed the intel?

See you next Friday.

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

Feed The AI