📌 10 AI Startups raise $150M+

TODAY’S FUNDING RECAP 🗓️

• Scout AI raises a $15M Seed — Robotic foundational model for defence

• Capsule raises a $12M Series A — Video editor

• Nexad raises a $6M Seed — Ad matching & generation

• Portia AI raises a $5.8M Seed — Agent development

• 6 more rounds caught by my funding tracker

Read time: 3 minutes

RAISED A $9M SEED

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Partner with Max to make A+ hires autonomously

TOP PICKS 📢

1/4

→ Scout AI

Amount: $15M 🎉

Round: Seed

Lead Investor: Align Ventures, Booz Allen Ventures

Scout AI is building “Fury,” a vision-language-action (VLA) model to be the general-purpose AI brain for autonomous defence robots.

Fury is an embodied AI system capable of perceiving the physical world, interpreting natural language, and issuing real-time motor commands even in communication and GPS-denied environments. Rather than building standalone robots from scratch, Scout AI is positioning Fury as a plug-and-play intelligence layer that can be embedded into any robotic platform. The company has already unveiled two prototypes powered by Fury: G01, a ground vehicle, and A01, an aerial drone.

Notably, the company has secured two DoD contracts to deploy Fury.

2/4

→ Capsule

Amount: $12M 🎉

Round: Series A

Lead Investor: Innovation Endeavors

Capsule is an AI video editing platform to assist marketing, sales, and media teams in creating professional-quality videos.

The platform features an AI co-producer that provides suggestions for footage, clip sequences, titles, and graphics. Users can input prompts like “Create a sizzle reel from our latest event,” and the AI agent recommends relevant content from the brand’s media library. Capsule also includes tools for automatic video transcription, summarization, image generation, text animations, and real-time collaborative editing.

3/4

→ Nexad

Amount: $6M 🎉

Round: Seed

Lead Investor: A16z Speedrun, Prosus Ventures

Nexad generates context-aware ads in real time, and put them into chatbots, AI search engines, and other AI apps.

The platform has two main arms: one that matches ads with the right audiences, and another that creates the ads themselves. User interactions with AI apps trigger the display of relevant text and image ads, and the resulting engagement data is used to refine future ad placements. The company collaborates with advertisers, affiliates, and third parties to offer various monetization models including pay-per-click, per-view, per-install, and per-purchase.

4/4

→ Portia AI

Amount: $5.8M 🎉

Round: Seed

Lead Investor: General Catalyst

Portia AI is an open-source SDK and cloud platform to build AI agents that are predictable, controllable, and secure.

The platform addresses key challenges in AI agent deployment, including planning, execution, and authentication.​ In the planning phase, it guides LLMs to generate explicit, multi-step plans that incorporate relevant tools, inputs, and outputs for each step. During execution, Portia's Execution Agents implement the approved plans while maintaining stateful tracking of progress so that they operate within defined parameters and allow for human oversight when necessary.​

Why General Catalyst invested in them

OTHER ROUNDS 🤏

ESSENTIAL INTRODUCTIONS

→ Hammerspace raises a $100M Series B — Data platform that can unify, organize, and deliver that data to AI pipelines for enterprises

→ Pillar Security raises a $9M Seed — Platform for managing security risks across the AI lifecycle

→ Brandlight raises a $5.75M Pre-Seed — Monitor and optimize your brand's visibility in real-time across AI search

→ Riza raises a $2.7M Seed — Secure, isolated, production-grade execution environment to run AI generated code

2 more rounds in the Funding Database →

UNANNOUNCED DEALS FROM ARFUR ROCK

→ Goodfire is raising a $50M Series A at a $250M post-money valuation led by Menlo Ventures & Anthropic (NEW)

→ Etched is raising a $85M Round at a $1.5B post-money valuation

→ Cursor is raising a $625M Round at a $9.6B post-money valuation led by Thrive Capital & a16z, $200M ARR

→ OpenArt is raising a Series A, $12M ARR

→ Interview Coder is raising a $5M Seed from Abstract & Susa Ventures

Arfur Rock →

BONUS 🔥

FOR CURIOUS MINDS

THAT’S IT FOR TODAY

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