Funding News on LinkedIn

Proud to have backed Helicon early as they build the factories that will bring composite manufacturing to industrial scale. Congrats to Alex Niehaus and Edmundo Sanz-Gadea on the $16.5M seed round!

Asymptote Labs, a startup developing security and monitoring technology for AI agents, has raised $5.5 million in an oversubscribed seed funding round led by Tower Research Ventures. The round also included Lytical Ventures, 1984 Ventures, and South Park Commons. Justin D. | Shukan Shah News link in the comments 👇

It’s been a big week for HapWare (Techstars '25)! On top of being named one of TIME’s Best Inventions, we are excited to share that we’ve closed our oversubscribed $1.5 million pre-seed round, led by Adaptation Ventures, with participation from Sidecut Ventures, Mines Venture Fund, The Pitch, Peranaut, Avesta Fund, and others. This is a huge milestone as we head toward our 2027 launch of ALEYE and work to get this technology into the hands of the people across the World! Super proud of this team. There’s so much work behind the scenes that goes into moments like this. Pumped for what’s ahead. Let’s go! https://lnkd.in/giTXRxD3

AIsa Surpasses $9M in Funding to Build Trusted Infrastructure for Enterprise AI Agents AIsa has surpassed $9 million in total funding after completing a new Seed Extension round with Tether and HIVEN joining as strategic investors. The latest round follows AIsa’s $6.5 million funding milestone announced in July, which was co-led by Alibaba Group and Tribe Capital. The specific size and valuation of the new extension were not disclosed. Founded by Jordan Liu, AIsa is building what it describes as a Trusted Resource and Transaction Network for Enterprise AI Agents. Its infrastructure allows AI agents to discover and access external data, AI models, APIs, software tools and other digital services while supporting usage metering, billing and settlement. The company is targeting a major gap in enterprise AI. Agents may increasingly be able to perform tasks autonomously, but they still need controlled access to information, tools and financial resources. AIsa aims to give enterprises visibility over permissions, spending, transactions and resource access, helping move agentic AI from experimentation toward production deployment. Its existing backers include Alibaba, Tribe Capital, Sumitomo Corporation, Draper Associates and Saison Capital, while the company says it has begun strategic enterprise pilots across areas including financial intelligence, market research, supply-chain management and commerce. AIsa is betting that the next generation of AI agents will need not just intelligence, but a trusted infrastructure layer to access resources and transact independently. #AIsa #AI #ArtificialIntelligence #AIInfrastructure #AIAgents #EnterpriseAI #AgenticAI #Tether #Fintech #StartupNews

Big news from Stellios Technologies! 🚀 Stellios Technologies has officially emerged from stealth with a $5 million pre-seed funding round and $2 million in signed customer orders. The team is doing some exciting work in high-power microwave systems, directed energy, and next-generation power technologies. We're proud to partner with Stellios as they grow. They've been an absolute pleasure to work with, and we're excited to help them build their team! Interested in being part of what's next? STEM Boomerang is recruiting for several Stellios positions, including: ⚡ High Power Microwave Engineer ⚡ Power Systems Engineer (High Voltage) ⚡ RF & Plasma Research Engineer ⚡ Chief of Staff ⚡ Government/Defense Sales Lead Read the announcement: https://lnkd.in/gBeFCBhF Congratulations to the entire Stellios team! #StelliosTechnologies #STEMBoomerang #NewMexico #STEMCareers #DirectedEnergy University of New Mexico School of Engineering, Edl Schamiloglu, NM Tech Talks, New Mexico Technology Council

10 early-stage startups have secured fresh seed and pre-seed funding this autumn. Solvera raised $6.3M pre-seed to automate construction engineering workflows, while OlsAro secured 5M euros to develop climate-resilient crops using AI genetics. O-ID raised $1.2M to build modular humanoid robots for industrial labour alongside teams advancing quantum photonics. How will these early-stage technologies shape your industry strategy? Read it: https://lnkd.in/e9EUtDAJ #Startups #VentureCapital

Your plant is literally sending SOS signals. Nobody was listening — until now. Electric Plant is building an AI that translates the electrical language plants use to communicate their needs. Founded on a wild idea — a cyborg houseplant that wheeled itself toward light by sending electrical signals through its own tissue — the startup spent three years collecting data to train Bombadil, a large language model capable of reading the subtle microvolts flowing through a plant's stem across roughly 125 different species. Here's the kicker: most tools farmers and growers use today — soil probes, satellite imagery, handheld spectroscopes — read the environment around the plant. Bombadil reads the plant itself. Real-time. From the inside. The sensors are the size of an iPhone folded lengthwise. They attach via stainless steel screws that penetrate just beneath the bark to tap into living tissue. Data travels wirelessly to a base station. Cost? Tens of dollars — versus the thousands existing diagnostic tools command. The idea is to move from reacting to what plants show on the outside to understanding what they're signalling from within. Founded by Justin Mast and Lee von Kraus (a neuroscientist with DARPA roots). Electric Plant just closed an $11.2M seed round led by Onto Ventures and Climactic. #AgriTech #Climatetech #AIStartup #Foodtech #StartupFunding

Occasionally as a VC, I get the chance to invest in a company solving a problem I live with every day. Rosie is one such company. Every parent of young kids knows the drill. Getting them washed up, fed, and ready for school at 7am. Scrambling to cover childcare because both parents have a work event on the same evening. Emerging from the kids' bedtime and realizing you still have laundry, dishes, and tidying up to do. All the while, feeling like you're not fully present even when you're with your family, because you're stretched so thin. With Rosie's membership-based flexible childcare and household support, it's all handled. Plus, their AI Family Brain remembers your family's needs and preferences — kids' allergies, what goes where, how you like your laundry done, etc. — and briefs every Pro before they arrive, so even a Pro you've never met walks in already knowing your home. I had the privilege of leading Rosie's seed round and joining the board earlier this year. It's been a joy to support Mitra Raman and Karthika Shankar as they build and scale a company that is clearly resonating with parents: over 17,000 hours of support delivered so far, with a 4.9 out of 5 average rating. They're operating in Seattle today, with Austin and (most excitingly for me) SF Bay Area next. More on why we invested here: https://lnkd.in/gUndmNhu Sign up for the waitlist in Austin and SF here: https://lnkd.in/g49cufrx Shout out to my fellow investors Kyle Lui (Bling Capital), Allison Stern (Mother Ventures), Andrew Blachman (Marketplace Capital), Anna Mason & Mira Kaufman (Ingeborg Investments), Charles Hudson (Precursor Ventures).

🚀 XRlabs Raises $8.4 Million to Advance AI-Powered Surgical Intelligence On October 19, 2026, London-based XRlabs announced an $8.4 million seed funding round, led by Playground Global, with participation from Eka Ventures. 🧠 What Makes XRlabs Innovative? Founded by neurosurgeon Dr. Ali Haddad, XRlabs is developing SurgicalOS, an AI-powered surgical intelligence platform that integrates live surgical video, navigation data, and patient-specific 3D imaging into a unified operative view. Its key advantage is a device-agnostic approach, designed to bring real-time AI assistance into existing operating rooms without requiring entirely new surgical hardware. 💡 Why It Matters: This investment highlights growing momentum in Physical AI and AI-assisted surgery, with potential to transform neurosurgical visualization, surgical precision, and clinical workflows. At BCIC, we are excited to see the convergence of AI, neuroscience, and medical technology creating new opportunities for healthcare innovation. #BCIC #XRlabs #PlaygroundGlobal #EkaVentures #SurgicalAI #Neurosurgery #PhysicalAI #MedTech #HealthcareInnovation #VentureCapital

Infinitum Partners led a Series E Round: $100M+ (equity + credit facility) into Labelbox, a USA company in the AI Infrastructure industry. Labelbox is the company training 90% of America’s frontier AI labs that just hit a $1.25B valuation. Labelbox builds the infrastructure that AI labs use to train and improve frontier models, providing reinforcement learning environments, expert human feedback pipelines, and evaluation tools through its Horizon platform across a network of 4 million+ domain experts. Labelbox has scaled through a series of fast rounds — from a $3.3M Seed Round in Jul 2019, to $39M Series A in Feb 2020, $40M Series C in Feb 2021, and $110M Series D in Jan 2022 — reaching $100M+ at Series E in Oct 2026, now serving 400+ customers across frontier AI labs, hyperscalers, startups, and Fortune 500 companies, with 5x+ revenue growth year over year. Infinitum Partners led the round, backed by Wipro Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), B Capital, Tao Ventures, and Snowpoint Ventures. Labelbox, Series E $100M+ #VentureCapital #StartUp #AIInfrastructure

Big day for Gradient 🚀 Super excited to finally share our investment in their $4M pre-seed round as they emerge from stealth! Accounting sucks, IYKYK (hope everyone survived last week's IRS tax deadline 😉). For founders juggling a million other things, it shouldn't mean spending hours managing accountants and paying a fortune for what should be a straightforward service. Gradient is changing that. Instead of building another AI tool for accountants, they're rebuilding the accounting firm itself. AI agents handle the heavy lifting, experienced CPAs provide the expertise, and founders get proactive, fully managed accounting at a fixed monthly price. If you're a European founders expanding to the US: get to know Gradient: Reach out to Rohan Krishan, Alex Sauvage and Arthur Himmel !These guys know firsthand the complexities of operating stateside. Proud to back them alongside VentureFriends and Kima Ventures 🚀 Huge congrats team!

US-based accounting startup Gradient has emerged from stealth after securing $4 million in a pre-seed funding round to pioneer an AI-native professional services firm for high-growth startups. The oversubscribed tranche was led by European venture capital firm VentureFriends, with participation from Acadian Ventures, TinyVC, Heartfelt, and Kima Ventures. Co-founded in 2026 by Rohan Krishan, Alex Sauvage (former early employee at Remote), and CTO Arthur Himmel (formerly of insurtech unicorn Alan), the early-stage startup will deploy the fresh injection to build its custom operating infrastructure and expand its customer acquisition pipeline. The platform directly targets a massive friction point in the professional services sector by shifting away from standard software tools to operate as a full-service, human-accountable accounting firm. While generic bookkeeping tools leave founders to fix bugs or navigate complex tax codes alone, Gradient pairs autonomous backend AI execution with licensed US CPAs who remain the sole point of contact for clients. The system continuously matches and reconciles transactions behind the scenes, allowing it to close corporate books same-day, answer accounting queries in under five minutes, and deliver CPA-signed tax returns within 48 hours. Already trusted by early startups backed by a16z and Y Combinator, the platform has successfully processed more than $40 million in transaction volume. #Startupnews #funding #PreSeed #Fintech #AccountingAI #AIAgents #EnterpriseSoftware #VentureFriends #Gradient

Enterprises buying AI through hyperscalers overpay by up to 10x, and have to trust the host with every prompt.   We just raised a $6M seed round, led by @Sierra Ventures, to fix both with the New York Token Exchange.   How it works: → You set the rules: approved providers, privacy minimums, spend limits. → Approved providers compete on price for your tokens. → Your prompts stay confidential. On end-to-end encrypted routes, neither TrustedRouter nor the data center running the model can read them.   Thanks also to Slow Ventures, Bill Tai, Linea Avey and George Xing for backing us, and to @JD Capeluto at SEMAFOR for breaking the story.   Our CEO Joseph Perla wrote about why AI needs an exchange, and what this round lets us build: https://lnkd.in/dD5yY7ua   Buying AI for a company? Message Joseph to plan a pilot.

🤖 Dream Labs raises $90 MILLION to give robots a reusable AI brain. What if a robot could learn a skill without being trained from scratch for every new machine? That's the vision behind Dream Labs, which launched Dream-1, a World Action Model designed to help robots perform unfamiliar tasks in unfamiliar environments. 🧠 How does it work? The AI learns from videos of people performing everyday tasks, then translates visual inputs and instructions into robot movements. 👨‍💻 Founders: Joel Jang , Scott Reed, You Liang Tan and Yunhao Ge are former NVIDIA robotics researchers. 💰 Investors: B Capital led the $90M seed round, joined by Kindred Ventures, A.Capital, Unusual Ventures, SV Angel, Wing VC, Scribble VC and others. If robot intelligence can transfer across different machines, businesses could potentially automate tasks faster and at lower integration costs. The technology is still in its research beta, but the direction is fascinating. The future of AI isn't just about generating text or images. It's about enabling machines to act in the physical world. Would you trust an AI powered robot to handle everyday tasks in your home? #ArtificialIntelligence #Robotics #PhysicalAI #Startups #Innovation

pmtbox Adds Coupons.com and CashStar Founder Steven Boal to Board Following $15 Million Seed Round https://lnkd.in/ek6h-RUz Your go-to for local business news. Follow citybiz Pete Kledaras

[ TRANSACTION ALERT: SOFTWARE & SAAS, REGTECH & WORKFORCE GOVERNANCE ] Macclesfield-based workforce compliance scale-up CoComply has raised a £1.9 million Seed funding round co-led by Mercia Ventures (via the Northern Powerhouse Investment Fund II) and Haatch, supported by high-profile SaaS angels. Transaction Details: Target: CoComply Lead Investors: NPIF II – Mercia Ventures and Haatch Advising Broker: Epiphany Capital Value: £1,900,000 Market Context: Enterprises increasingly rely on contingent workers and third-party contractors, yet responsibility for governing external headcount remains scattered across HR, procurement, legal, and finance departments. This fragmentation leaves major corporations unaware of who is actually delivering work inside supplier contracts - creating severe IR35, tax, Right to Work, and regulatory liabilities. Founded at Alderley Park by serial entrepreneur Michael Cleavely, CoComply solves this governance gap through an AI-native workforce compliance platform. By sitting at the entry point of procurement workflows, CoComply automatically categorizes worker engagement models, verifies compliance checks, and enforces regulatory standards from the outset. Having grown revenues by 240% in 2025 across clients including Aston Martin, Take-Two Interactive, and RS Group, this £1.9m funding will expand sales and engineering teams to accelerate international commercial growth. View the full deal details and verified track records at https://lnkd.in/eC7Q8J67 #RegTech #SaaS #VCFunding #SeedRound #CoComply #MerciaVentures #Haatch #Compliance #NorthernPowerhouse #WorkforceGovernance #UKTech

San Francisco-based physical AI startup Dream Labs has emerged from stealth after securing an outsized $90 million seed funding round to establish a universal, cross-manufacturer operating system for robotics. The record-setting early-stage tranche was co-led by B Capital and Kindred Ventures, with strong backing from a.capital, Unusual Ventures, and SV Angel. Founded by former leads of NVIDIA’s GR00T robotics research lab including Joel Jang (CEO), Yunhao Ge (CTO), and Scott Reed (Chief Scientist) the venture will deploy the capital to scale its engineering teams and secure high-performance computing infrastructure. The platform targets a primary industry bottleneck: while the price of robotic hardware has plummeted to that of a high-end laptop, programming it remains a slow, machine-restricted process requiring months of calibration. Dream Labs eliminates this friction by launching its Dream-1 foundation model and public Dream API, a zero-shot system billed at an accessible $3 per hour. The platform translates a robot's live camera feed and plain-English instructions into raw motor commands, allowing any machine costing under $10,000 to instantly execute tabletop tasks out of the box without machine-specific training. #Startupnews #funding #SeedRound #Robotics #PhysicalAI #AIAgents #WorldActionModel #BCapital #DreamLabs #NVIDIAGR00T

Espoo-based quantum hardware startup Coherence Quantum has secured €2.78 million ($3.1 million) in a seed funding round to tackle the fundamental infrastructure bottlenecks holding back next-generation quantum computers. The financing tranche was led by Helsinki-based early-stage investor Lifeline Ventures, with strategic participation from prominent MySQL tech entrepreneur Mårten Mickos. Spun out of Aalto University's Quantum Computing and Devices (QCD) research group, the company was co-founded by CEO Aashish Sah, CTO Suman Kundu, CPO Erkki Soininen (former product leader at Bluefors), and founding advisor Mikko Möttönen. The seed capital will fund a new dedicated research, testing, and component manufacturing laboratory in Espoo. The platform eliminates a critical hardware constraint in the quantum computing boom: a severe wiring and thermal bottleneck inside dilution refrigerators. Moving from hundreds to a thousand qubits demands upwards of 3,000 control lines, yet standard cryogenic fridges can structurally accommodate only about a thousand lines while leaking disruptive thermal energy. Coherence Quantum resolves this by developing an integrated cryogenic signalling and control platform featuring well-thermalised filters and attenuators that attach close to the qubit processor. Backed by four initial patent applications, the system blocks ambient thermal noise and cuts control line heat to maintain stable low-temperature computing environments as physical systems scale up. #Startupnews #funding #SeedRound #QuantumComputing #DeepTech #Cryogenics #HardwareInfrastructure #RISCV #LifelineVentures #CoherenceQuantum

Exciting news for the Philadelphia tech and biotech ecosystem 🚀 Huge congratulations to BioLattice on closing a fantastic $1.75M Seed Round 👏 It is inspiring to see HiveBio.io | Inaugural Cohort 1 startups secure the capital needed to drive deep-tech innovation forward. This milestone is a testament to the teams hard work, vision, and the massive potential of their technology. Looking forward to watching BioLattice scale, innovate, and make a lasting impact right here from Philadelphia, PA. Check out the full story below👇 #BioTech #Startups #Philadelphia #SeedRound #Innovation #VentureCapital #PhillyTech #preclinical #seedstage #DiverseFounders #equitycantwait

An AI vendor promising to write back into a customer's desktop system has just made an integration promise. Somebody has to keep it after the sales call ends. Minicor (YC P26) is building a business around that somebody. CEO and co-founder Faizaan Chishtie and CTO and co-founder Saheed Akinbile turn workflows in legacy desktop software into API endpoints, giving AI products a way into systems their customers already use. The San Francisco company announced a $3.8M Seed round on October 14, led by Brad Gillespie at IA Ventures, with Y Combinator and Paul Graham participating. Pioneer Fund, Robinhood Ventures, Garage Capital, Rebel Fund, BLAST, Success Venture Partners, K5 Global, 20VC, Phosphor Capital and Metsu Capital also joined, alongside Austen Allred, 🏕️ Henri Stern, Matteo Franceschetti, Jeff Henriod and others. The founders arrived here through a buyer. Their YC launch account describes starting with observability and recovery for API integrations, then moving toward desktop automation after a prospect wanted help connecting to an on-prem electronic medical record system. The customer had already chosen the software. Minicor followed the work inside it. That changes the conversation for an AI company selling into healthcare, automotive, financial services or logistics. A prospect can want the new product and still need it to read or update an old application. Replacing that application can become a separate project, with its own decision-makers and calendar. Minicor's documented approach lets developers teach a job with sample API calls. A Windows service carries out the desktop steps, while logs and video replays preserve what happened. Human review can sit before selected writes. The interface gives developers something familiar to call while somebody else's screen continues to do the work underneath. Those operating details belong in the buying decision. When data fails to arrive, the AI vendor needs a usable account of the attempt, a route to recovery and a way to explain the interruption to its customer. A replay can become part of that customer conversation. The sample inputs also give the deployment a concrete definition of success. The developer can bring the customer's actual cases into the build before those calls carry live work. Minicor is hiring as it builds this layer. The founders now have a continuing relationship to support on both sides of each endpoint: the developer shipping a new AI product and the customer still opening the desktop application every morning. Deeper Analysis 👉https://lnkd.in/eRdJfCTq #EnterpriseAI #DesktopAutomation #VentureCapital #DevCuration