Welcome back to Feed The AI Funding Insider. Your weekly map of where capital is moving across artificial intelligence, robotics, and the infrastructure underneath both.

This week we got billion-dollar bets on AI agents and infrastructure, and a broad bench of specialized tools for security, biotech, compliance, recruiting, industrial automation, and edge intelligence. Physical AI also had a real showing, with funding for robot vision, warehouse coordination, teleoperation, and autonomous defense systems.

Home furniture brand Blu Dot blew up on CTV with help from Roku Ads Manager. Here’s how:

After a test campaign reached 211,000 households and achieved 1,010% ROAS, the brand went all in to promote its annual sales event. It removed age and income constraints to expand reach and shifted budget to custom audiences and retargeting, where intent was strongest.

The results speak for themselves. As Blu Dot increased their investment by 10x, ROAS jumped to 2,308% and more page-view conversions surpassed 50,000.

“For CTV campaigns, Roku has been a top performer,” said Claire Folkestad, Paid Media Strategist, Blu Dot. “Comping to our other platforms, we have seen really strong ROAS… and highly efficient CPMs, lower than any other CTV partner we've worked with.”

Using Roku Ads Manager, the campaign moved from a pilot to a permanent performance engine for the brand.

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Instinct – $1B (Series C) – San Francisco, CA — The AI-agent company raised fresh capital to expand its autonomous enterprise-work platform; announced September 28.

GMI Cloud – $668M (Series B + Credit Facility) – Mountain View, CA / Taipei, Taiwan — The AI-infrastructure provider secured $223 million in equity and a $445 million credit facility to expand GPU-cloud capacity globally; announced September 30.

EliseAI – $350M (Funding) – New York, NY — The conversational-AI platform for housing and healthcare doubled its valuation to $4 billion as it scales automated customer operations; announced September 29.

Armadin – $255.5M (Series B) – Palo Alto, CA — The AI-native cybersecurity startup raised at a valuation above $2.5 billion to expand autonomous threat defense; announced October 1.

PaleBlueDot AI – $200M (Series C) – Palo Alto, CA — The company is building cloud infrastructure designed to lower the cost and complexity of training and serving AI models; announced October 1.

SiMa.ai – $150M (Series C) – San Jose, CA — The edge-AI semiconductor company raised at a $1.45 billion valuation to scale its platform across humanoids, vehicles, drones, and industrial systems; announced September 28.

CScale – $145M (Series C) – Palo Alto, CA — The AI-networking startup raised with backing from Nvidia and Intel to improve data movement inside large compute clusters; announced September 30.

🗓️ Upcoming Conferences:

Helix Digital Infrastructure – $1B (Strategic Investment) – United States — Samsung affiliates committed capital to the KKR-backed AI-infrastructure company to expand data-center capacity and related services; announced September 29.

Draganfly – $10M (Strategic Investment) – Saskatoon, Canada — Drone-components maker Unusual Machines and a U.S. asset manager invested in the Canadian drone and autonomous-systems company; announced September 28.

F2 AI – $5M (Strategic Investment) – New York, NY — Golub Capital invested in the enterprise-AI platform, which builds generative tools for private-capital workflows; announced September 28.

Unveilr AI – Undisclosed (Pre-Seed) – Mumbai, India — AJVC backed the startup’s AI system for interpreting and automating complex business documents; announced October 1. The reported ₹16.7 crore figure was the company’s valuation, not the investment amount.

Halluminate (Series A) — Healthcare administration offers a large, measurable target for agents, and the company’s focus on access workflows gives it a clear operational wedge.

Destro AI (Seed) — Mixed robot fleets need a common coordination layer; Destro is pursuing the software-control point above individual machines.

Zenithon AI (Seed) — Physics-grounded models could unlock reliable AI assistance in engineering domains where plausible-looking mistakes are unacceptable.

Beltic (Seed) — As agents gain authority over financial workflows, monitoring and permissioning become required infrastructure rather than optional governance.

Tangent Robotics (Pre-Seed) — Strategic backing from Toyota Ventures gives the manipulation startup a credible route from research to demanding industrial deployments.

AMD → World Labs – $8.2B (All-Stock) — AMD agreed to acquire Fei-Fei Li’s spatial-intelligence startup, adding world-model technology to its AI platform; announced September 28 and expected to close by year-end.

Salesforce → Listen Labs – Terms Undisclosed — Salesforce signed a definitive agreement to buy the AI customer-research platform and bring conversational market intelligence into its product stack; announced September 29, with closing expected in Salesforce’s fiscal fourth quarter.

Clio → Learned Hand – Terms Undisclosed — Legal-software company Clio disclosed its acquisition of the legal-AI startup, which builds tools for courts and judges; reported September 30, with no separate closing date specified.

HCLSoftware → Robotiq.ai – €9M Cash — HCLSoftware agreed to acquire the European intelligent-automation company to deepen its process-discovery and agentic-automation capabilities; announced September 28 and expected to close in November.

AIxCrypto Holdings → Faraday Future Robotics Business – Reported: about $200M Proposed Valuation (Non-Binding) — The parties signed a non-binding term sheet for an all-stock combination intended to create a separately listed robotics business; announced September 28 and not yet definitive.

NEURA Robotics → Bosch Rexroth ACTIVE Shuttle – Terms Undisclosed — NEURA completed its purchase of Bosch Rexroth’s autonomous mobile-robot system on October 1. The transaction was originally announced August 13, so it is listed as a completion rather than a new deal.

ElevenLabs opened a $300 million employee tender at a $22 billion valuation — The secondary transaction gives employees liquidity but does not put fresh capital on the company’s balance sheet, so it is excluded from this week’s deal count and disclosed total.

Most euro-area companies are still self-funding AI adoption — An ECB analysis found that 72% of surveyed companies finance AI investment from internal cash, while only 6% use equity or venture capital, highlighting the gap between headline startup rounds and how businesses fund deployment.

That’s the funding feed for the week.

If this issue helped you see where AI capital is moving, forward it to one builder, investor, or operator who should be tracking the same signals.

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