🧠 Dopamine Dealflow

🌱Seed & Early Rounds

• Cascala Health (Boston, MA) – $8.6M seed co-led by Flare Capital & Eniac — AI for post-acute care.

• SRE.ai (London, UK) – $7.2M seed led by Salesforce Ventures & Crane — AI DevOps agents.

• Fluence Technology (Warsaw, Poland) – €6.6M (~$7.1M) seed from Vinci, Radix, JR Holding & more — femtosecond lasers.

• Dex (New York, NY) – $4.8M seed with ClayVC, EmbeddingVC, Parable, UpscaleX, Pinterest’s Ben Silbermann & Curated’s Eduardo Vivas — AI learning cameras for kids.

• Halo (Boston, MA) – $1M seed led by Pillar VC — AI smart glasses.

• RedMimicry (Berlin, Germany) – ~$1M seed led by High-Tech Gründerfonds — cyberattack emulation.

• ChatBlu (London, UK) – $500K pre-seed led by Matador VC — AI inventory mgmt for e-commerce.

• Meshed (London, UK) – £950K Pre-Seed led by Haatch, with Aviva/Founders Factory, Exponential Science Foundation & angels — AI-native broking platform.

• Innerworks (London, UK) – $4M Seed led by AlbionVC with DCG, Founders Capital, Firestreak, NVTBL, Metaversal, & execs from Checkout.com, Apple, Coinbase, Citi, UBS, Crypto.com — cybersecurity.

🚀 Series A

• Sola (Jersey City, NJ / New York, NY) – $17.5M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, following a $3.5M seed from Conviction (Sarah Guo), Y Combinator, and others. AI-native platform for back-office automation using agentic/LLM-powered bots.

• Bluefish (San Francisco, CA / NYC) – $20M Series A led by NEA with Salesforce, Crane, Swift, Bloomberg Beta — AI marketing for Fortune 500s.

• Develop Health (San Francisco, CA) – $14.3M Series A led by Wing — GenAI benefits verification.

• Garage (San Francisco, CA / NYC) – $13.5M Series A led by Infinity Ventures with YC, Initialized, Benchstrength, Wayfinder, FJ Labs — specialized equipment marketplace.

• SynergySuite (Salt Lake City, UT) – $12M round led by Oyster — AI restaurant ops.

• OneCrew (San Francisco, CA) – $7.5M Series A led by Stage 2 Capital — paving contractor digitization.

• Wisdom (San Francisco, CA) – $21M Series A — AI-powered dental RCM platform.

• Cointel (Abu Dhabi, UAE) – $7.4M funding led by Avalanche, Sugafam Inc. & others — AI-native crypto education + trading support.

• Rule (London, UK) – £800K Pre-Seed — fintech save-to-win app.

• Aircards (Newcastle, UK) – £3M growth capital from Foresight Group — immersive studio.

• Embargo (UK) – $3.5M — hospitality tech.

🌳 Series B+ & Growth

• Pylon (San Francisco, CA) – $31M Series B led by Bain Capital Ventures and Andreessen Horowitz — post-sales B2B support platform (modern alternative to Zendesk, Intercom, etc.).

• Nuro (Mountain View, CA) – $97M Series E extension (bringing total to $203M in the round) at a $6B valuation; investors include Uber, Nvidia, T. Rowe Price, Fidelity, Tiger Global, Greylock, and XN.
  (Also, earlier in 2025 it raised $106M as part of the same Series E.)

• Group14 Technologies (Woodinville, WA) – $463M Series D led by SK, with Porsche, Microsoft Climate Fund & more — silicon battery materials.

• Overhaul (Austin, TX) – $105M Series C led by Springcoast & Edison — supply chain risk mgmt.

• Seemplicity (Palo Alto, CA / Tel Aviv) – $50M Series B led by Sienna VC with Essentia, Glilot, NTTVC, S Capital — exposure mgmt automation.

• Upstage AI (San Jose, CA / Seoul) – $45M Series B bridge from KDB, Amazon, AMD — enterprise GenAI.

• Zed Industries (Boulder, CO / San Francisco, CA) – $32M Series B led by Sequoia — open-source code editor / AI-powered dev platform.

• SpinLaunch (Long Beach, CA) – $30M round led by ATW Partners with Kongsberg — satellite broadband constellation.

• TinyFish (Palo Alto, CA) – $47M led by ICONIQ with USVP, Mango, MongoDB Ventures, ASG, Sandberg Bernthal — web agent infra.

• Convoke (San Francisco, CA) – $8.6M led by Kleiner Perkins & Dimension, with ACME, Comma, Liquid2, Not Boring, Audacious, Lux, Qasar Younis, Erik Torenberg & angels — AI-native OS for biopharma.

• Iantrek, Inc. (White Plains, NY) – $42M Series C led by USVP, with aMoon, Visionary, Sectoral, Radius, Civilization — ophthalmic BIOS surgery.

• KnowledgeLake (St. Louis, MO) – $65M Growth from Edison Partners — AI-powered workflow automation.

• Loft Dynamics (Zurich, Switzerland) – $24M Series B — VR flight training.

• OSW (Sydney, Australia) – $5.5M — solar wholesaler/distributor.

🤝 Strategic & Undisclosed

• Quantinuum (Broomfield, CO) – exploring an $11B valuation raise with Honeywell, Nvidia & more — quantum computing.

• Somite.ai (Cambridge, MA) – strategic from AMD Ventures, previously raised $47M Series A from Khosla — stem cell data generation.

• Astro Mechanica (Chicago, IL) – strategic from United Airlines Ventures — aerospace propulsion.

• Highway (Dallas, TX) – growth equity from FTV Capital & Lead Edge — carrier identity platform for logistics.

• MedMe Health (Toronto, Canada) – growth financing from CIBC Innovation Banking with Microsoft M12, Graphite, MaRS, YC — digital pharmacy ops.

• Kromatid (Longmont, CO) – $8M Series C led by BroadOak — genomic structural analysis.

• Palladio AI (San Francisco, CA) – investment from Griffin Gaming Partners — product-led team platform.

💸 VC Funds Raised & Raising

• Veteran Ventures Capital (McLean, VA) – closed Veterans Fund II at $60M with support from VA Innovation Partnership, State of Tennessee, endowments, Hersh Family, family offices.

• BDC Capital – launched Industrial Innovation Venture Fund II (I2VF II) with $200M commitment.

• Curewell Capital (Los Angeles, CA) – closed Curewell Capital I, LP at $535M — middle-market healthcare PE.

• Monroe Capital – plans to raise $350M in its second CFO, backed by cash flows from fund stakes.

• Bluefront Equity – raised $100M for Fund II, targeting sustainable seafood.

• Neuberger Berman – launched first interval fund for private asset-based credit.

• Thoma Bravo – secured LP approval to reallocate equity across its three latest funds ($34B AUM).

Founders: Want to be featured on @tradedvc? → traded.co/submit/vc

📚 Read of the Day

Halo X: Harvard Dropouts Launch $249 “Always-On” AI Glasses 👓🤖

Backed by Pillar VC, the stealthy wearable records and transcribes every conversation—raising both investor hype and privacy alarms.

Two former Harvard students are betting big on wearable AI, unveiling Halo X, a pair of $249 smart glasses that listen to, record, and transcribe every conversation while displaying real-time prompts and answers to the wearer. Backed by $1M in seed funding from Pillar VC, Soma Capital, Village Global, and Morningside Venture, the founders claim the glasses give users “infinite memory.”

The Product Pitch

Halo X promises to act like a personal AI assistant on your face. Using Google’s Gemini for reasoning and Perplexity for live web pulls, the glasses can surface definitions, perform calculations, or feed contextual responses instantly—without ever pulling out a phone.

Controversy Baked In

Unlike Meta’s smart Ray-Bans, Halo X ships without an external indicator light, raising red flags from privacy advocates about covert recording. The startup says all audio is transcribed, then deleted, and pledges to pursue SOC 2 compliance. Still, skeptics warn the product risks normalizing constant surveillance and may violate consent laws in some states.

Why It Matters

Halo X represents the first real attempt to commercialize always-on, discreet AI eyewear at scale—positioning itself as an early rival to Meta while leaning into its ability to take bigger risks as a startup. If it works, Halo could spark a new arms race in wearable AI; if it backfires, it could become another cautionary tale of tech moving faster than society’s comfort with surveillance.

👉 Read The Whole Story Here

📰 News You Don’t Want To Miss

🪄 Google unveils Pixel 10 as an “AI phone” (Magic Cue, Visual Overlays, Tensor G5)

👓 Halo X launches $249 AI glasses (always-on transcription/assist)

🤖 FieldAI raises $405M for risk-aware robotics models

💰 OpenAI logs $1B in monthly revenue

🛡️ Anthropic launches Claude Code in enterprise bundle to rival GitHub Copilot