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A week of big checks for bots and the bits that power them: drones, inference stacks, and a mega‑seed lab stole the spotlight.
The tea leaves (and the money) say 2026 is about scaling real deployments instead of just splashy demos.
Lets dive in..
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🔥 Biggest AI Funding Rounds This Week
Zipline – $600M (Growth) – South San Francisco, CA
Autonomous drone‑delivery network for healthcare and retail; the raise fuels U.S. rollouts and manufacturing scale.
Humans& – $480M (Seed) – Redwood City, CA
Frontier AI lab building human‑centric, collaborative agents; a mega‑seed that underscores investor FOMO for new labs.
Baseten – $300M (Growth) – San Francisco, CA
Inference serving platform to deploy/scale LLMs efficiently; big check as inference spend eclipses training.
OpenEvidence – $250M – Miami, FL
Evidence‑grounded medical AI copilot for clinicians; capital to push deeper into hospital workflows.
Upscale AI – $200M – Santa Clara, CA
Networking stack for AI data centers, aiming to out‑throughput legacy players.
LiveKit – $100M (Series C) – San Jose, CA
Real‑time voice AI infrastructure for production‑grade agents and apps.
🦄 Startups to Watch:
Inferact $150M (Seed) - vLLM’s commercial push could become default open inference plumbing for enterprises; huge seed gives it runway to chase Baseten/Together.
Ivo (Series B) - Legal AI with sharp contract‑analysis focus; revenue traction and blue‑chip customers put it on an IPO‑track category within legaltech.
Emergent (Series B) - “Anyone can build software” pitch with explosive user/ARR growth; if retention holds, this could become a serious competitor to other videcoding tools.
🗓️ Upcoming Conferences:
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📡 Signals – What This Week Tells Us:
Inference infra is devouring capital: Baseten’s $300M and Inferact’s $150M show investors betting on the serving layer as AI usage shifts from training to production.
Voice AI as a platform play: LiveKit’s $100M points to real‑time, human‑like interfaces becoming core infra, not just features.
Lab vs. verticals: A mega‑seed for Humans& coexists with hefty vertical AI rounds (OpenEvidence in healthcare), signaling both frontier research and applied AI are bankable.
Robots to scale and consolidate: Zipline’s $600M funds nationwide operations while service‑robot M&A heats up.
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions:
Serve Robotics to acquire Diligent Robotics (service & hospital robots).
Procore to acquire Datagrid to infuse AI across construction workflows.
M&A Pulse: Service‑robot consolidation and AI tuck‑ins continue while distressed assets (iRobot) change hands under court oversight.
Beyond the Feed:
Meme of the Week:
📬 Enjoyed the intel?
See you next week.
Until then: ship fast, raise smart, stay curious.
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