🧠 Dopamine Dealflow

💰🚀 IPO

• Figma (San Francisco, CA) - $1B IPO, offering 36M shares at $25–$28 to take Figma public at a ~$15.9B valuation—above its last $12.5B round.

💰 Massive Rounds (€50M+ / $50M+)

• Xelix (Wilmington, DE) – $160 M Series B, led by Insight Partners with Passion Capital & LocalGlobe, growing its AP automation platform.

• Perplexity AI (San Francisco, CA) – $100 M, backed by Nvidia, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, NEA & IVP, now valued at $18 B to boost its AI browser.

• NWTN (Dubai, UAE) – $100 M strategic investment by SEET (Medad Holding) in smart-mobility and clean‑energy manufacturing.

• Radical AI (New York, NY) – $55 M Series Seed+, led by RTX Ventures et al., to accelerate its AI‑enabled materials‑science platform.

• BrightAI (San Francisco, CA) – $51 M Series A, co-led by Khosla Ventures & Inspired Capital, to scale its "Physical AI" platform for infrastructure.

📈 Mid-Sized Rounds ($40M–$49M)

• GeologicAI (Calgary, Canada) – $44 M Series B, led by Blue Earth Capital with BHP Ventures & Rio Tinto, enhancing critical-minerals AI sensor tech.

Seed & Series A ($10M–$30M)

• Lucidya (Riyadh, Saudi Arabia) – $30 M Series B, led by Impact46 with regional VCs.

• iCOUNTER (New York, NY) – $30 M Series A, led by SYN Ventures to launch its precision cyber-risk intelligence platform.

• GigaIO (Carlsbad, CA) – $21 M Series B, to expand its SuperNODE & Gryf AI-infrastructure.

• BiomEdit (Durham, NC) – $18.4 M Series B (+ $1.7 M grants) for its BE‑101 poultry biotech.

• Fortuna Health (New York, NY) – $18 M Series A, led by a16z with YC, to modernize Medicaid navigation.

• H2Ok Innovations (Boston, MA) – $12.42 M Series A for AI-powered factory sensors.

• Billee Technologies (Salt Lake City, UT) – $9.15 M Seed, led by RET Ventures, for its multifamily utility billing AI.

• StrongestLayer (San Francisco, CA) – $5.2 M Seed, for AI-driven email security solutions.

• Nexxa.ai (Los Angeles, CA) – $4.4 M Pre‑seed, backed by a16z and others.

• Toduba (Milan, Italy) – €3.5 M, led by P101 SGR & CDP to scale its blockchain employee-welfare platform.

Strategic & Growth Investments

• Tandem PV (San Jose, CA) – $4 M grant from the California Energy Commission for perovskite‑silicon solar panels.

• Occupi (Birmingham, AL) – $3.105 M Seed, co-led by Fenway Summer & Assurant Ventures, for its AI property-management fintech.

• LeadStory (Minneapolis, MN) – $2.75 M Seed, to grow its AI news-streaming platform.

• Teletactica (Kyiv, Ukraine) – $1.5 M strategic, for jamming-resistant DefenseTech systems.

• Spacely AI (Bangkok, Thailand) – $1 M Seed, for generative-AI in design/real estate.

• Litero AI (Palo Alto, CA) – $800 K Pre‑seed, for its AI writing tutor.

• Aircap (Paris, France) – €500 K, funded by Bpifrance for its fintech risk/cash-flow platform.

💸 VC Funds Raised & Raising

• Pollen Street Capital raised $2.3 B for its fifth private equity fund, doubling down on its middle-market financial services and credit strategy.

• Qiming Venture Partners, Lightspeed China Partners, Monolith Management, INCE Capital, Source Code Capital, and BA Capital are collectively targeting $2 B in USD-denominated funds to expand their global venture portfolios.

• Apollo Global Management won the mandate to manage Singapore’s $780 M private credit fund targeting local high-growth enterprises, expanding its credit ecosystem in Asia.

  • Apollo is also exploring the establishment of a permanent capital vehicle to invest in sports, signaling strategic diversification into long-duration, thematic assets.

• Cherryrock Capital (founded by Stacy Brown‑Philpot) launched with a debut $172 M fund focused on supporting underrepresented founders in tech.

• Coller Capital launched a private credit secondaries fund targeting individual investors, tapping into rising demand for access to this asset class.

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

📖 Read of the Day

🤖 ChatGPT Is Apparently a Mathlete Too

OpenAI just casually announced their experimental LLM earned a gold medal at the International Math Olympiad—yes, the actual test for elite teenage math geniuses. The model solved 5 of 6 problems under real exam conditions (4.5 hours, no tools, pure brain), scoring 35/42 points and beating most human competitors.

So now ChatGPT can:
✔️ Crush your downloads
✔️ Build your pitch deck
✔️ Pass elite math contests
✔️ Take your job in Excel
✔️ Possibly build its own browser to do all of the above faster

ChatGPT isn’t just back—it’s bench-pressing mathletes, stealing enterprise clients, and casually prepping to become the homepage of the internet.

📰 News You Don’t Want To Miss

• OpenAI’s Reasoning LLM Hits Olympiad Gold – An experimental OpenAI model solved 5 of 6 International Math Olympiad problems, setting a new AI reasoning benchmark. GPT-5 is coming, but this math model’s abilities won’t hit the public for months.

• The Epic Battle for AI Talent – AI researchers are receiving $300M+ offers, with secret deals and poaching wars turning top AI talent into as prized as NBA superstars.

• A New Frontier in Fusion Technology – Marathon Fusion’s gold transmutation method could transform both energy and commodities, with 5,000kg of gold per gigawatt per year.

• Cancer DNA Detectable Years Before Diagnosis – Early tumor DNA detection could revolutionize cancer screening, allowing intervention years ahead of symptoms.

• Banks on High Alert About Stablecoins – The U.S. Genius Act sets 1:1 fiat backing rules for stablecoins, threatening to pull deposits from traditional banks while speeding up cross-border payments.

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