AI Funding News: Week Ending 09.19
Over $2.3B+ disclosed.
Feed The AI Team
September 19, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
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Happy Friday people.
Hardware heat and agent stacks stole the show: humanoid robots banked a billion, an ASIC challenger topped up big, and a string of workflow-first AI plays filled out the middle.
Lets dive in:
🔥 Biggest AI Funding Rounds This Week:
» Funding Roundup
Figure AI – $1.0B+ (Series C) – San Jose, CA
Humanoid robots for real-world work; funding at a ~$39B valuation to scale Helix and manufacturing via BotQ.
Groq – $750M (Growth) – Palo Alto, CA
Inference-first chips (LPU) aiming to undercut GPU cost/latency in production AI.
Lila Sciences – $235M (Series A) – Cambridge, UK/US
Autonomous “AI science factory” that designs, runs, and learns from experiments at scale.
Nothing – $200M (Series C) – London, UK
Consumer hardware brand shifting to an AI-native OS and device ecosystem.
🗓️ Upcoming Conferences:
🦄 Startups to Watch:
Ultralytics (Series A, $30M) - OSS gravity + edge deployments = defensible funnel; watch for enterprise tooling and paid support to scale.
Numeral (Series A, $35M) - Sales-tax automation is a hair-on-fire pain; a clean wedge into finance ops with measurable ROI.
Markup AI (Round undisclosed, $27.5M) - Brand/IP “content guardians” will ride the gen-AI flood; buyers want measurable takedowns and risk reduction.
Centari – $14M (Seed) - New York, NY - AI deal-insights copilot that mines pipelines and comms to surface what moves a sale.
Phia – $8M (Seed) - New York, NY - AI shopping agent services; founders tout agentic browse-to-buy flows for retailers.
📡 Signals – What This Week Tells Us:
Embodied AI is investable, now. Figure’s $1B+ round at ~$39B says robots aren’t a side quest—they’re next-gen labor infrastructure.
Inference economics matter. Groq’s $750M fuels the “cheaper, faster inference” thesis as AI moves from demos to margin-sensitive prod.
Agentic + workflow wins. Sales tax (Numeral), content IP defense (Markup), and deal intel (Centari) show narrow, ROI-proof use-cases still attract checks.
Open-source vision stays sticky. Ultralytics’ raise underscores the durability of OSS distribution when paired with edge use cases.
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions:
Workday → Sana ~$1.1B; adds AI-native knowledge and assistance into HCM.
Atlassian → DX ~$1B; folds a developer-productivity platform into the Jira/Bitbucket universe.
Thomson Reuters → Additive AI N/D; expands gen-AI content/workflow capabilities for legal and tax professionals.
M&A Pulse: Buyers targeted workflow leverage. Think AI assistants for HR, dev, and pro services where distribution is already owned.
Beyond The Feed:
Meme of the Week:
📬 Enjoyed the intel?
See you next Friday.
Until then: ship fast, raise smart, stay curious.
Feed The AI