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Welcome back to Feed The AI, your weekly briefing on the funding rounds, acquisitions, startups, and signals shaping the artificial-intelligence economy.
This week’s capital did not drift gently into AI. It arrived with a forklift.
Travis Kalanick returned with a $1.7 billion physical-AI platform. Meshy raised nearly $400 million for generative 3D. Etched doubled its valuation with another $300 million for inference chips. Meanwhile, humanoids, industrial robots, autonomous manufacturing systems, AI security agents, and compute orchestration platforms filled out one of the broadest funding weeks of the year.
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🔥 Biggest AI Funding Rounds This Week
Atoms – $1.7B – Los Angeles, CA — Travis Kalanick’s new physical-AI company raised an equity round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Uber, to build technology for automating industries including manufacturing, transportation, mining, construction, and food production.
Meshy – Nearly $400M (Series B) – Silicon Valley, CA — The generative-3D company raised the largest disclosed round in the AI 3D category at a $1.5 billion valuation, funding foundation models that generate 3D assets from text and images.
Etched – $300M (Series C) – San Jose, CA — The AI-chip company raised funding at a $10.3 billion valuation to commercialize inference systems designed around its custom prefill processors, memory architecture, and low-voltage computing technology.
Glow – $180M (Series A) – Palo Alto, CA — The AI-native endpoint-security company emerged from stealth at a $1.2 billion valuation with a platform designed to control software, developer tools, and autonomous agents operating across enterprise devices.
Humanoid – $152M (Series A) – London, UK — The industrial humanoid-robot company became a unicorn at a $1.35 billion post-money valuation as it prepares its wheeled and bipedal robots for commercial production and deployment.
Neo – $100M – San Francisco, CA — The infrastructure company raised funding to build technology supporting AI agents, AI-native applications, machine identities, browsers, and automated digital activity.
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🦄 Startups to Watch:
Ropedia — Physical AI may eventually face the same bottleneck language models did: access to large, well-structured training datasets. Ropedia is positioning itself inside that bottleneck rather than competing to manufacture the final robot.
Elio — Most existing cameras were designed to create images that look good to people. Elio is asking what a sensor should look like when the only viewer is a machine. That shift could create an entirely new category of perception hardware.
Natural — Agents cannot become meaningful economic actors unless they can safely purchase products and services. Natural is building the payments and permissions layer that could sit between autonomous software, users, merchants, and financial institutions.
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions
Tempus AI → Personalis — Approximately $1.5B
Tempus AI agreed to acquire precision-oncology company Personalis, adding personalized cancer-monitoring and minimal residual disease testing to its AI-powered healthcare platform. The transaction is expected to close in late 2026 or early 2027.
Progress Software → Domo’s AI and Data Platform Business — $400M
Progress Software agreed to acquire substantially all of Domo’s assets and certain liabilities, including its AI and data-platform business. This is an asset acquisition rather than a purchase of the entire publicly traded company. Domo will remain a separate public entity following the transaction.
Dassault Systèmes → ArisGlobal — Up to $2B
Dassault Systèmes agreed to acquire life-sciences software company ArisGlobal for $1.8 billion in cash, with another $200 million contingent on future AI-related revenue. Dassault plans to combine ArisGlobal with Medidata to create an AI-powered platform connecting drug development, patient data, regulatory operations, safety monitoring, and real-world outcomes.
Carrier → 75F — Undisclosed
Carrier acquired 75F, a cloud-native, AI-enabled building-automation company. The acquisition expands Carrier’s intelligent-building capabilities across HVAC optimization, energy management, occupancy monitoring, and autonomous building controls.
BlackRock, MGX and AIP Consortium → Aligned Data Centers — $40B
A consortium comprising the Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Partnership, MGX, and BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners completed its acquisition of Aligned Data Centers. The investors also committed an additional $5 billion to expand the company’s data-center capacity. Although Aligned is not an AI-software company, the transaction belongs in the broader AI-infrastructure category because it supplies hyperscalers and AI-compute customers with large-scale data-center capacity.
Together, the transactions announced or completed this week represent approximately $44 billion in disclosed deal value, although the overwhelming majority comes from the previously announced Aligned Data Centers acquisition closing this week.
📡 Signals – What This Week Tells Us:
Physical AI has become a platform thesis. Atoms is not presenting itself as a humanoid company, warehouse-robot company, or autonomous-vehicle company. It is treating industrial automation as a shared computing problem across mining, transportation, construction, manufacturing, and food production. That is a much larger canvas than a single robotic form factor.
AI infrastructure is fragmenting into specialized layers. Etched is redesigning inference silicon. SkyPilot is coordinating compute across providers. Infinity is optimizing model deployment. Elio is rebuilding sensors for machine perception. Ropedia is collecting physical-world training data. Investors are funding the entire pipeline from perception to compute to action.
The next cybersecurity battlefield is the AI-enabled endpoint. Glow and AegisAI raised a combined $216 million to secure devices and communications against increasingly autonomous threats. As agents gain access to browsers, inboxes, developer tools, and corporate systems, security products will need to govern software that can independently take action.
Generative AI is moving from pixels into spatial assets. Meshy’s nearly $400 million round suggests that 3D models are becoming foundational content for gaming, simulation, augmented reality, digital twins, robotics, and synthetic training environments. The market is beginning to treat generative 3D as infrastructure rather than a novelty feature.
Agent commerce is arriving before general-purpose agents are fully mature. Natural is building payments for autonomous software while Neo is developing identities and infrastructure for agents. The economic rails are being laid before the machines riding them have reached their final form.
Large seed rounds remain the new normal for infrastructure companies. Ropedia raised $30 million before Series A, Velocity raised $27 million at seed, Runta raised $20 million at seed, and Trooly raised nearly $20 million at seed. Investors continue to compress multiple traditional funding stages into one opening check when the perceived market is large enough.
Meme of the Week:
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See you next week.
Until then: ship fast, raise smart, stay curious.
Feed The AI
