AI Funding News: Week Ending 12.19

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Big models got mega-money, while vertical AI (insurance, biotech, creator tools) quietly stacked wins. The week’s other drumbeat: incumbents snapped up niche AI to round out product gap-fill.

Lets roll…

🔥 Biggest AI Funding Rounds This Week:

Databricks – $4B+ (Series L) – San Francisco, CA
Data+AI platform raised over $4B at a ~$134B valuation to accelerate model serving and enterprise AI workloads.

Lovable – $330M (Growth) – Stockholm, Sweden
AI coding assistant at 8M MAU tripled valuation to $6.6B, expanding product and U.S. footprint (Accel, Khosla).

Chai Discovery – $130M (Series A) – San Francisco, CA
Wet-lab + AI drug discovery; cash fuels in-house target ID and faster bench-to-clinic loops.

Nirvana Insurance – $100M (Series D) – San Francisco, CA
Usage-based commercial insurance with AI risk models; capital supports scaling across trucking + fleet.

FINNY AI – $17M (Series A) – New York, NY
Advisor-first AI copilots for financial planning/compliance; aims to automate workflows across RIAs.

🗓️ Upcoming Conferences:

• CES 2026 – Jan 6–9, 2026 | Las Vegas, NV | More Info CES

• World AI Cannes Festival – Feb 12–13, 2026 | Cannes, France | More Info

For a full list of upcoming conferences check out our full list here!

🦄 Startups to Watch:

• Mirelo (Seed – $41M) – Generative audio-to-video for creators and studios; big seed suggests heavy model/inference lift is coming in media tooling.

• First Voyage (Seed – $2.5M) – Habit-forming AI companion with strong distribution hooks (gamification + mobile); early category experiments to watch.

📡 Signals – What This Week Tells Us:

• Platform gravity still warps the market. Databricks’ multi-billion round shows enterprises are doubling down on unified data+AI stacks over piecemeal tooling.

• Coding assistants aren’t slowing. Lovable’s $330M at a $6.6B val says “GitHub Copilot isn’t a monopoly” - developer tools remain a land-grab.

• Applied AI is maturing. Insurance (Nirvana) and drug discovery (Chai) picked up sizable checks, with clearer ROI stories than last year’s experiments.

• Consumer agents creep in from the edges. Wellness companion apps (First Voyage) hint at a broader agentic-AI wave beyond chatbots.

🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions

• NVIDIA → SchedMD (Slurm) - Adds the de facto HPC job-scheduler to its AI stack; closes loop from GPUs to cluster orchestration.

• Cursor (Anysphere) → Graphite - AI IDE acquires code-review platform to tighten dev-workflow loop from editor to PR.

• Zendesk → Unleash - Customer-experience giant picks up AI personalization engine to deepen proactive support and targeting.

• Flipkart → Minivet AI - Indian ecommerce leader buys generative-AI chatbot startup to bolster conversational commerce.

• Dell (reported) → Dataloop AI - Rumored $200–300M price tag for data-annotation platform to feed Dell’s AI solutions unit.

M&A Pulse: Incumbents are stitching in workflow-critical AI - schedulers, review, personalization, and chat - to make suites stickier and upsell AI SKUs.

Meme of the Week:

📬 Enjoyed the intel?

See you next week.

Until then: ship fast, raise smart, stay curious.

Feed The AI