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Perplexity Offers $34.5B for Google Chrome, Periodic Labs Raises $200M, & NVIDIA Becomes a Professor (For Robots)

Perplexity Offers $34.5B for Google Chrome, Periodic Labs Raises $200M, & NVIDIA Becomes a Professor (For Robots)

Profound Lands $35M funding, Vulcan Elements $65M Series A, Gameto’s $44M Series C, here's your snapshot of the biggest tech and venture transactions shaping the market today

Traded: Venture Capital
August 13, 2025

Your dose of daily dealflow, essential VC & tech trends to know. The biggest moves in venture, all in one place. Celebrating startups, founders, and funders.

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🧑‍🍳 Let’s get right into it…

💻 Perplexity AI bids $34.5B for Google Chrome — Taking on Google in a bold antitrust-challenging move.
🧠 Jocasta Neuroscience raises $35M Series A — Fueling neurodegenerative disease therapies in Scottsdale.
🌱 Profound Lands pulls in $35M — Boosting sustainable growth and environmental innovation across the U.S.
🧲 Vulcan Elements closes $65M Series A — Scaling up domestic rare earth magnet production to reduce dependence on imports.
🧬 Gameto locks $44M Series C — Advancing stem cell-based therapies for reproductive health and late-stage fertility treatments.

🧠 Dopamine Dealflow

🚀 Seed & Early Rounds

Cuttable (Melbourne, Australia) – $4.5M seed extension led by Square Peg for its AI creative agency platform.
EDGX (Ghent, Belgium) – €2.3M Seed led by imec.istart future fund with the Flanders Future Tech Fund for AI edge computers for satellites.
Liquid (São Paulo, Brazil) – $2.1M seed led by SaaSholic with Flourish Ventures, Honey Island by 4UM, and Crivo Ventures for real-estate credit automation.
Swirltex (Calgary, Canada) – $1.2M seed led by the Central Texas Angel Network (CTAN) for wastewater treatment tech.

🌱 Series A

Periodic Labs (San Francisco, CA) – $200M Series A (~$1.2B val.) led by Andreessen Horowitz with OpenAI participating for AI-driven materials design.
Truemeds (Mumbai, India) – $85M Series A at $400M+ valuation led by Accel for generic drug e-pharmacy expansion.
Tahoe Therapeutics (San Francisco, CA) – $30M led by Amplify Partners (with Databricks Ventures, Wing, General Catalyst, Civilization, Conviction, Mubadala Capital Ventures, AIX) for AI models of the human cell.
Certivity (Munich, Germany) – €13.3M Series A led by Almaz Capital & UVC Partners for AI-powered RegTech compliance.
Novig (New York, NY, USA) – $18M Series A led by Forerunner with YC, NFX, Perceptive Ventures, and Gaingels for a commission-free P2P sports prediction market.
Tako (São Paulo, Brazil) – $18M Series A co-led by Ribbit Capital and Andreessen Horowitz for AI-powered payroll.
Chowdeck (Lagos, Nigeria) – $9M Series A led by Novastar Ventures with YC, AAIC Investment, Rebel Fund, GFR Fund, Kaleo, HoaQ, and others for its on-demand delivery platform.
Xpand (Tel Aviv, Israel) – $6M led by Ibex Investors and Emerge to build autonomous, AI-powered retail stores.

🌳 Series B+ & Growth

Aira (Stockholm, Sweden) – €150M (~$174M) equity from Altor, Kallskär, Kinnevik, Lingotto & Temasek to scale heat-pump rollout and manufacturing.
beatBread (Los Angeles, CA) – $124M in credit & equity from Citi, Deciens, Mucker & Advantage to expand flexible funding for artists & labels.
Vulcan Elements (Durham, NC, USA) – $65M Series A at a ~$250M valuation led by Altimeter to onshore rare-earth magnet production.
BinSentry (Kitchener, Ontario, Canada) – $50M Series C led by Lead Edge Capital for AI-powered feed-supply sensors and monitoring.
GoodShip (Bellevue, WA, USA) – $25M Series B led by Greenfield Partners (with Bessemer, Ironspring, Chicago Ventures, FUSE) for AI-driven freight orchestration.
Ultraviolette (Bengaluru, India) – ~$21M investment led by TDK Ventures to accelerate electric motorcycles & battery/sensor R&D.
SoftWear Automation (Atlanta, GA) – $20M Series B-1 led by BESTSELLER to advance autonomous sewing tech (SEWBOT®).
Datumo (Seoul, South Korea) – $15.5M from Salesforce Ventures, KB Investment, ACVC Partners & SBI to scale LLM evaluation and safety.
Inclined (San Francisco, CA, USA) – $8M Series B led by HSCM Ventures (with Northwestern Mutual) for iLOC credit against whole life policies.

💸 VC Funds Raised & Raising

Frictionless Capital (Miami, FL, USA) – Raising $60M for its third blockchain-focused fund; previously raised $20M.

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📚 Read of the Day

Nvidia Wants to Teach Robots How to Think

Meet Cosmos Reason — AI’s Brain for the Physical World
At SIGGRAPH 2025, Nvidia dropped Cosmos Reason, a 7-billion-parameter vision-language model built to give robots something they’ve never truly had before: the ability to “reason” about the physical world. With memory and an understanding of physics, it can plan an embodied agent’s next move, curate data, and even analyze video like it knows what it’s looking at.

From Simulation to Reality — Faster Than Ever
The launch also includes Cosmos Transfer-2 to supercharge synthetic data generation from 3D scenes and spatial controls, plus a distilled speed-optimized version for when milliseconds matter. Neural reconstruction libraries now let devs simulate the real world in 3D straight from sensor data—already hooked into CARLA, the go-to open-source simulator for self-driving and robotics.

Hardware Muscle Meets Cloud Scale
Nvidia isn’t just dropping models—it’s dropping an entire infrastructure stack. The RTX Pro Blackwell Server packs local horsepower for robotic workloads, while DGX Cloud handles orchestration and scaling in the cloud.

Why It Matters
With AI data centers already a cash cow, Nvidia’s clearly betting that robotics is the next trillion-dollar playground. Cosmos could be the backbone for the next wave of AI-powered machines—think warehouse bots that plan like humans, delivery drones that adapt mid-flight, and industrial robots that learn on the job.

Read The Whole Story Here