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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.
AI investors showed up this week with an insane amount of money.
Etched raised $700M. Groq added another $350M. Starcloud raised $250M to put AI compute in orbit because apparently data centers being on Earth was getting boring.
The bigger pattern is hard to miss. Chips, inference, compute efficiency, and Physical AI pulled in some of the fattest checks of the week.
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🔥 Biggest AI Funding Rounds This Week
Etched – $700M (Funding) – San Jose, CA
AI chip startup building specialized inference systems raised another $700M at a $21B valuation.
Groq – $350M (Series A) – San Francisco, CA
AI inference cloud company raised $350M as it scales its global compute footprint.
Wispr Flow – $280M (Series B) – San Francisco, CA
AI voice-to-text startup reached a $2B valuation as voice interfaces continue moving into everyday workflows.
Starcloud – $250M (Series A Extension) – Redmond, WA
Orbital data center startup raised $250M to build AI compute infrastructure in space.
Gravis Robotics – $200M (Series A) – Zurich, Switzerland
Physical AI startup is turning heavy construction equipment into increasingly autonomous machines.
Velaura AI – $110M (Series A) – Santa Clara, CA
AI compute company is developing ultra-low-power silicon and software for data centers, robotics, and autonomous systems.
Callosum – $100M (Seed) – London, UK
AI infrastructure startup is building a routing layer that matches workloads with the most efficient models and chips.
Rillet – $100M (Series C) – New York, NY
AI-native accounting platform is automating financial operations and back-office workflows.
Veeda AI – $90M+ (Seed) – Toronto, Canada
Physical AI startup is building world models and simulated environments for training robots and embodied agents.
Arintra – $25M (Series B) – Austin, TX
Healthcare AI company is using generative AI to automate medical coding and revenue-cycle workflows.
Prevalent AI – $22M (Growth Investment) – London, UK
Enterprise AI company is building trusted data and context infrastructure for enterprise AI systems.
Palona AI – $20M (Series A) – Palo Alto, CA
AI agent platform is automating operations for restaurants and other physical businesses.
Twin1 AI – $20M (Seed) – San Mateo, CA
AI platform is creating persistent digital twins that carry workers’ knowledge, context, and judgment.
Astromech – $20M (Funding) – Dallas, TX
AI biology startup is building predictive models of biological and evolutionary change.
Thunder Compute – $13M (Series A) – San Francisco, CA
GPU infrastructure startup is virtualizing underused GPUs to increase compute utilization inside data centers.
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🦄 Startups to Watch:
Gravis Robotics — Construction is a strong fit for Physical AI because the economics are already obvious: expensive machines, labor shortages, repetitive tasks, and huge infrastructure budgets. Gravis is positioning itself as the autonomy layer for heavy equipment rather than trying to build the machinery from scratch.
Veeda AI — Robotics may eventually hit a training-data bottleneck similar to the one language models faced. Veeda is building world models and simulated environments where embodied AI systems can generate experience before they ever touch the physical world.
Callosum — AI infrastructure is getting increasingly fragmented across models, GPUs, custom chips, and inference providers. Callosum is positioning itself as the routing layer that decides where each workload should run based on cost, speed, and efficiency.
Twin1 AI — Enterprise AI may become much more useful once agents can carry an individual worker’s context, judgment, and institutional knowledge. Twin1 is building persistent digital twins that can answer questions and perform approved work on behalf of employees.
🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions
Stripe → OpenRouter – reported at $8B+
Stripe agreed to acquire AI model gateway OpenRouter, giving it infrastructure that routes and optimizes token usage across more than 400 models from 80+ providers. Stripe already handles the money. Now it wants a seat closer to the tokens too.
Francisco Partners → Weave – ~$650M
Francisco Partners agreed to acquire AI-powered healthcare engagement and payments platform Weave in an all-cash transaction valued at approximately $650M.
Datavault AI → CyberCatch – $94.5M
Datavault AI signed a definitive agreement to acquire CyberCatch, which operates an AI-enabled continuous-compliance and cyber-risk platform, in an all-cash deal.
Fortinet → Virtue AI
Fortinet acquired Virtue AI to add AI runtime protection, automated validation, agent red teaming, and security controls for autonomous AI systems. AI security consolidation has entered the chat.
Vena → Morpheo AI
Vena completed its acquisition of Morpheo AI, adding technology for preparing and structuring fragmented enterprise data for advanced AI systems inside finance workflows.
Stigg → Received.ai
Stigg acquired Received.ai to combine AI-era usage pricing, contract management, entitlements, and invoicing inside a single infrastructure platform. AI companies still have to send invoices eventually.
Elevate → Lupl
Elevate acquired AI-native legal project management platform Lupl, which integrates legal workflows with Claude, Harvey, and Copilot.
Cribl → Radiant Security AI SOC Assets
Cribl acquired Radiant Security’s AI SOC technology assets, including software that autonomously triages, investigates, and resolves security alerts.
📡 Signals – What This Week Tells Us:
Infrastructure ate very well this week. Etched, Groq, Starcloud, Velaura, Callosum, and Thunder Compute pulled in more than $1.5B across chips, inference, orbital compute, GPU virtualization, and workload routing. Investors continue to pay up for anything that makes AI compute faster, cheaper, or easier to deploy.
Physical AI is getting real money. Gravis raised $200M for autonomous construction equipment. Veeda raised $90M+ for world models. Velaura is explicitly targeting robotics alongside data centers. Oshen raised $5M for autonomous ocean robots. Software is starting to grow arms, wheels, excavator buckets, and apparently tiny sailboats.
The inference stack is filling out fast. Etched attacks the silicon. Groq sells the compute. Callosum decides where workloads should run. Thunder Compute tries to get more work out of GPUs already installed. There are now venture-backed companies fighting over nearly every inch between a prompt and the electricity bill.
Seed has become a surprisingly flexible word. Callosum raised $100M. Veeda raised more than $90M. These companies are funding serious technical roadmaps right out of the gate, especially when the product sits on a perceived bottleneck in the AI stack.
AI-native back-office software keeps moving upstream. Rillet reached a $1B valuation with AI accounting, while Palona and Twin1 are building agents that increasingly sit inside everyday business operations. The agent story is slowly becoming an operating-software story.
Meme of the Week:
📬 Enjoyed the intel?
See you next week.
Until then: ship fast, raise smart, stay curious.
Feed The AI
