AI Funding News: Week Ending 09.26
From infra giants to agentic seed rounds: $682M+ disclosed and 0 slowdown..
Feed The AI Team
September 26, 2025 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
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Welcome to Feed The AI
Discover the measurable impacts of AI agents for customer support
How Did Papaya Slash Support Costs Without Adding Headcount?
When Papaya saw support tickets surge, they faced a tough choice: hire more agents or risk slower service. Instead, they found a third option—one that scaled their support without scaling their team.
The secret? An AI-powered support agent from Maven AGI that started resolving customer inquiries on day one.
With Maven AGI, Papaya now handles 90% of inquiries automatically - cutting costs in half while improving response times and customer satisfaction. No more rigid decision trees. No more endless manual upkeep. Just fast, accurate answers at scale.
The best part? Their human team is free to focus on the complex, high-value issues that matter most.
👉 Curious how they did it? Read the full case study to learn how Papaya transformed their customer support
Happy Friday
NVIDIA lit the fuse: a planned $100B investment into OpenAI reset the ceiling on AI infrastructure, while a stack of fresh rounds flowed into tooling, cooling, and agentic apps. This week was all about powering, deploying, and governing the AI layer.
Lets dive in:
🔥 Biggest AI Funding Rounds This Week:
Modular – $250M (Growth) – U.S.
“Switzerland” software layer to run AI across chips without CUDA lock-in; aims to ease training + inference portability.
Distyl AI – $175M (Round undisclosed) – San Francisco, CA
Operator-grade AI platform to make enterprises “AI-native”; raises at ~$1.8B valuation. Founded by ex-Palantir employees.
Signal AI – $165M – London, UK
Risk & reputation intelligence platform using AI to parse global news/signals for enterprises.
Corintis – $24M (Series A) – Lausanne, CH
Micro-channel liquid cooling inside/onto chips to cut AI data-center power + water use.
Emergent – $23M – U.S.
Consumer “build-an-app” platform; lets non-devs assemble full apps with AI.
Synthesized – $20M (Series A) – London, UK
Agentic test-infra + synthetic test data to ship safer enterprise AI faster.
🗓️ Upcoming Conferences:
For a full list of upcoming conferences check out our full list here!
🦄 Startups to Watch:
Emergent (Round, $23M) - If “apps from prompts” sticks beyond demos, Emergent could be the Canva-moment for software creation; watch activation → retention.
Synthesized (Series A, $20M) - Testing & synthetic data are the compliance throttle on AI rollouts; they’re selling speed and risk control.
Rocket.new (Seed, $15M) - Backed by Salesforce Ventures to chase vibe-coding; a credible shot at SMBs and internal tools at scale.
Superpanel (Seed, $5.3M) - Legal intake is messy, repeatable, and pricey. Exactly the kind of workflow AI can eat. However, competition is heating up in this application layer (think Harvey, Legora, etc)
📡 Signals – What This Week Tells Us:
Capex gravity shifts to infra: NVIDIA’s up-to-$100B plan with OpenAI formalizes the “chips + gigawatts” era. Compute is strategy, not a cost center.
Abstraction is investable: Modular’s raise shows buyers want portability across accelerators. Less vendor lock-in, faster time-to-prod.
Thermals are the new TAM: Corintis’ Series A highlights cooling as core to AI P&L and grid constraints, not an afterthought.
Agentic build tools climb the stack: Emergent and Rocket.new lean into “app-from-prompt,” pushing non-dev creation toward real workflows.
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions:
Alchemer → Chatmeter - N/D; adds AI-powered reputation + local reviews to unify customer-feedback intelligence.
Platforms are continuing to bundle via M&A.
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