AI Funding News: Week Ending 1.16
$2.4 Billion disclosed + a competitor to Neuralink gets backed by OpenAI
Feed The AI Team
January 17, 2026 • Estimated Reading Time: 5 minutes
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New model mania met real-world deployment: a mega-round for robot training, nine-figure checks for agentic ops and safety, and defense-tech quietly went shopping.
The capital spigot is open again.
Lets roll..
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🔥 Biggest AI Funding Rounds This Week
Skild AI – $1.4B (Series C) – Pittsburgh, PA
Foundation models for robot learning; funding fuels “physical AI” data+compute pipeline at industrial scale.
Onebrief – $200M (Series D) – Washington, DC
AI-assisted operational planning for defense; fresh capital plus wargaming tech positions it as a modern C2 stack.
Harmattan – $200M (Series B) – San Francisco, CA
Data-infrastructure and training stack to shrink AI compute waste; B-round to scale optimization across AI factories.
Deepgram – $130M (Series C) – San Francisco, CA
Enterprise speech AI (ASR, translation, synthesis) with custom inference; raises to chase global voice workloads.
Mytra – $120M (Series C) – Bengaluru, India
Autonomous agents for enterprise ops; capital doubles down on India’s agentic-AI deployment wave.
Higgsfield – $80M (—) – San Francisco, CA
AI video generation platform; scale-up round to push model quality and inference throughput.
WitnessAI – $58M (Series A) – San Jose, CA
AI safety/guardrails for enterprise LLMs; demand surge as regulated industries move from pilots to production.
🦄 Startups to Watch:
Merge – $252M (Seed) – Tel Aviv, Israel
Brain-computer interface platform to “read” intent and control systems; outsized seed signals long-horizon bet on neuro-AI. Backed by OpenAI and squarely aimed at Neuralink.WitnessAI – $58M (Series A) – San Jose, CA
AI safety/guardrails for enterprise LLMs; demand surge as regulated industries move from pilots to production.
🗓️ Upcoming Conferences:
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📡 Signals – What This Week Tells Us:
Physical AI gets its poster child: Skild’s $1.4B puts massive capital behind robot-learning models and datasets—expect more “AI for atoms,” not just tokens.
Defense stack consolidation: Onebrief paired a $200M raise with a wargaming acquisition, C2 planners are becoming simulation-first platforms.
Safety and governance budgets are real: WitnessAI’s A-round reflects boards asking for controls before company-wide rollouts.
Neuro-interfaces re-enter prime time: Merge’s quarter-billion seed shows BCI is moving from lab curiosity to venture core—albeit with long timelines.
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions:
AstraZeneca → Modella AI - terms undisclosed; adds AI pathology/biomarker muscle to oncology R&D.
Cloudflare → Human Native - terms undisclosed; builds a licensed-data marketplace for AI developers on Cloudflare’s network.
Teamworks → Sportlogiq - terms undisclosed; computer-vision hockey analytics folded into sports “OS” data stack.
M&A Pulse: Platforms are buying specialized data/model assets to tighten moats. Think health, licensed content, and domain CV top the list.
Beyond the Feed:
OpenAI tapped Cerebras for up to 750MW of inference capacity—evidence that alternative compute paths are scaling alongside GPUs.
Meme of the Week:
📬 Enjoyed the intel?
See you next week.
Until then: ship fast, raise smart, stay curious.
Feed The AI