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Cash kept chasing atoms and infra: a billion for autonomy, nine-figure checks for factory robotics and European SMB bots, plus a crop of scrappy seeds arming finance, insurance, and warehouses.
Also for some companies this is the end of their fiscal year so happy end of the year.
Lets dive in..
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🔥 Biggest AI Funding Rounds This Week
Waabi – $1B (Series C) – Toronto, ON
Autonomous driving software at commercial scale; capital fuels robotaxi deployments and OEM partnerships.
Ricursive Intelligence – $300M (Series A) – San Francisco, CA
Enterprise AI platform that fuses structured and unstructured data to power copilots and agents across the stack.
PaleBlueDot AI – $150M (—) – Palo Alto, CA
Private inference infra to cut latency and cloud costs for custom models.
Vention – $110M (Series D) – Montréal, QC
“Physical AI” for factories: modular robotics plus AI design tools to accelerate automation on real shop floors.
RobCo – $100M (Series C) – Munich, Germany
Autonomous modular robots for SMB manufacturers; expansion capital to scale in Europe and the U.S.
Flora – $42M (Series A) – San Francisco, CA
AI product-design suite that compresses research, wireframes, and prototyping into one workflow.
🦄 Startups to Watch:
Concourse – $12M (Seed) – New York, NY
Finance AI agents for FP&A and ops that plug into existing enterprise systems. FP&A agents are a wedge with fast ROI; integrations will determine speed of adoption.CVector - $5M (Seed) – Boston, MA
Better perception/control is the unlock for non-perfect warehouses; strong fit for 3PLs.
Pace - $10M (Seed) – New York, NY
Insurance ops automation using agentic workflows across intake, underwriting, and service.
🗓️ Upcoming Conferences:
For a full list of upcoming conferences check out our full list here!
📡 Signals – What This Week Tells Us:
Hard tech isn’t just back, it’s leading: autonomy and factory automation sucked up the majority of disclosed dollars.
Inference economics matter: multiple raises explicitly pitch lower latency and lower cost for enterprise-grade serving.
SMB manufacturing is an AI beachhead: modular bots for smaller plants are getting growth-stage fuel.
Seeds are getting specialized: finance, insurance, and warehouse stacks all saw targeted agentic plays.
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions:
Handshake → Cleanlab - adds data-quality and auditing to labeling workflow for enterprise AI.
IonQ → Seed Innovations (asset/team deal) - AI/ML R&D to optimize quantum infrastructure pipelines.
M&A Pulse: Platforms are buying data/quality moats and domain expertise while strategic buyers tuck in teams to speed roadmaps.
Beyond the Feed: Thinking Robots Smaller Than a Grain of Salt
Researchers at the University of Pennsylvania and University of Michigan just created something straight out of science fiction: autonomous robots measuring roughly 200 by 300 by 50 micrometers. That is smaller than a grain of salt. This that can think, sense, and act completely independently.
The Wild Part: These microscopic machines don't swim like fish. Instead, they generate an electrical field that pushes charged particles in the surrounding liquid, which drag water molecules with them. Think of it as the robot creating its own current to ride. They can follow programmed paths, detect temperature changes down to one-third of a degree Celsius, and even "dance" to communicate their findings back to researchers through a microscope.
The Breakthrough: This marks the first truly autonomous robots at the microscopic scale. Powered entirely by light (producing only 75 nanowatts—over 100,000 times less than a smartwatch), each unit costs about a penny to produce and can survive for months. The team had to completely redesign computer instructions to fit a processor, memory, and sensors onto something barely visible to the human eye.
Why It Matters: Future applications could include monitoring individual cells in the human body or assembling microscopic components for advanced manufacturing. The research, published in Science Robotics and PNAS, represents a 10,000x reduction in autonomous robot size.
Meme of the Week:
📬 Enjoyed the intel?
See you next week.
Until then: ship fast, raise smart, stay curious.
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