The AI Arms Race Heats Up — Who’s Really Winning?

• Emmeline Ventures participated in Prickly Pear Health’s follow-on pre-seed round, helping bring the company’s total funding to more than $600,000 alongside existing backers Bayless Ventures and AZ Venture Capital Inc. Prickly Pear said it will use the new capital to accelerate user growth and expand deployments of its AI-powered women’s brain health platform with mental health practices, beginning in Arizona, after surpassing 2,000 active users since launching in 2024. - learn more

• Riot Ventures participated in Shield AI’s new financing round, which values the defense tech company at $12.7B and accompanies its planned acquisition of software simulation company Aechelon. Shield AI said the capital will support growth across its autonomy software and broader defense platform, while the Aechelon deal is meant to strengthen its simulation and training capabilities as it scales AI-powered systems for military customers. - learn more

• Starshot Capital participated in Rumin8’s latest funding round, which added a new $3M commitment from AgriZeroNZ as the company pushes toward commercializing its methane-reducing livestock feed additives in New Zealand. Rumin8 said the new backing will help support pivotal trials and move it toward final registration, with first commercial sales in New Zealand targeted for 2027. - learn more

• Compa Capital participated in Kairos Labs’ $2.4M seed round, which was led by 6th Man Ventures and also included Lattice and Advancit Capital. The company said the funding follows a beta that generated more than $300M in notional swap volume and will help support the launch of its permissionless, non-custodial interest rate swap protocol on Ethereum mainnet and Base in the coming weeks. - learn more

• Morpheus Ventures co-led Applied Atomics’ oversubscribed $8.3M seed round, backing the company alongside Transition as it works to deploy full-stack nuclear power plants for industrial infrastructure customers. Applied Atomics said the funding will help bring test and integration stands online, strengthen its supply chain, and move toward deployment, with plans over the next 12 months to secure first host sites and customer agreements, advance NRC Part 50 licensing engagement, and push toward first commercial construction. - learn more

• Upfront Ventures participated in Neon’s financing round, which brought in more than $25M in combined equity and credit from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Upper90, and other investors. The company said the new capital brings total funding to nearly $27M following a $1.5M pre-seed led by Upfront, as Neon scales its platform for paying users for anonymized conversation data and supplying that audio and video data to AI labs. - learn more

• Helios&Partners participated in WhatIsMyAEO.com’s strategic investment round, backing the platform as it builds free AI-driven brand visibility diagnostics for answer engines like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Perplexity. The company said the funding will help scale its open-source efforts and expand access to tools that measure brand citations, sentiment, trust signals, and technical AI-readiness as zero-click search becomes more common. - learn more

• WndrCo participated in Moda’s $7.5M seed round, which was led by General Catalyst and also included Pear VC, as the company publicly launched its AI design platform. Moda said its product gives professionals a brand-aware design agent that can generate fully editable presentations, social posts, and other visual assets, and that thousands of beta users are already using it for materials like investor decks and marketing collateral. - learn more

• Clocktower Technology Ventures participated in Bliss’s R$ 57 million, or about $11M USD, Series A round, which was co-led by Kfund and Grupo Bradesco and also included Actyus. Bliss said the funding will help expand its AI-powered platform for health insurance brokers beyond São Paulo into cities including Rio de Janeiro and Brasília, while adding to its product and technology teams as it works to modernize health-plan sales for SMEs in Brazil. - learn more

• MAGIC Fund participated in Guangzhou Weixiao Technology’s new strategic financing round, joining IDG Capital, 37 Interactive Entertainment, and miHoYo in the investment. The company said the new capital will be used to accelerate product development and market expansion, though it did not disclose the size of the round. - learn more

• Mantis Venture Capital participated in Doctronic’s $40M Series B, which was co-led by Abstract and Lightspeed Venture Partners and also included Union Square Ventures, Seven Stars, and Tusk Ventures. The company said the new funding follows rapid growth to more than 300,000 weekly users and eight-figure annualized revenue, and will help it expand its AI-powered care platform after becoming the first AI-native system authorized to autonomously renew prescriptions under Utah’s AI Learning Lab. - learn more

LA Exits

• RezyFi is being acquired by ECGI Holdings in a $25M transaction that would bring a 29-state licensed mortgage origination platform and about $140M in annual mortgage funding onto ECGI’s platform. ECGI said the deal is meant to pair RezyFi’s lending infrastructure with its mortgage tokenization strategy, following a pilot program to tokenize up to $10M of residential mortgage loans and as it prepares to launch an investor portal. - learn more

• Salt & Stone is being acquired by Advent, which signed a deal to buy a majority stake in the Los Angeles premium body care brand. The company said the partnership will help fuel its next phase of global growth after surpassing $165M in revenue in 2025, with founder and CEO Nima Jalali staying on as an equity holder and remaining in leadership alongside President Meagan Rosson and CMO Abby Tellam. - learn more

• Victory Holdings signed a definitive agreement to acquire Dunn & Groux Beverage Holdings, marking its move into the functional beverage market. The company said the deal will make DGBH a wholly owned subsidiary and give it a platform to build and scale multiple beverage products around patented fulvic acid formulations and a distribution-first model, with initial expansion focused on California, Arizona, and Texas. - learn more

• Anthos Capital participated in Bluesky’s $100M Series B, which was led by Bain Capital Crypto and also included Alumni Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, Knight Foundation, and True Ventures. The company said the round gave it the resources to scale both the Bluesky app and the broader AT Protocol ecosystem, which it says has grown to more than 43 million users and now supports a fast-expanding network of third-party apps and developers. - learn more

• Navigate Ventures participated in VerbaFlo’s oversubscribed $7M seed round, which was led by Pi Labs and also included Haatch and Old College Capital. VerbaFlo said it plans to use the funding to scale its conversational AI platform for real estate operators, building on traction across more than 200,000 units and expanding further into markets including the U.S., Middle East, and Australia. - learn more

• March Capital participated in Xage Security’s $15M equity financing round, which was led by Piva Capital as the company posted 81% year-over-year revenue growth and expanded its Zero Trust platform for AI and critical infrastructure. Xage said the funding, which closed in December 2025, will support go-to-market expansion and continued product innovation, including new AI security capabilities, as demand grows across sectors such as energy, manufacturing, utilities, transportation, and defense. - learn more

• B Capital led Knox Systems’ $25M Series A, backing the company’s push to scale what it says is the largest AI-managed federal cloud and dramatically shorten the FedRAMP authorization process for software vendors. Knox said the new funding will help accelerate growth after its June 2025 seed round, with the goal of helping customers achieve FedRAMP authorization in as little as 90 days at roughly 90% lower first-year cost, while expanding adoption across both government and commercial environments. - learn more

• WndrCo participated in Tenkara’s $7M round, which was led by True Ventures as the company builds AI-powered operations agents for American manufacturers. Tenkara said it is creating tooling to help factories handle sourcing and operational work more efficiently at a time of rising supply-chain pressure, with backing from a broader investor group that also included Articulate Capital, Night Capital, HF0, SF1, and Transpose Platform. - learn more

• Aurora Capital participated in Niv-AI’s $12M seed round, backing the startup alongside Glilot Capital, Grove Ventures, Arc VC, Encoded VC, and Leap Forward as it emerged from stealth. Niv-AI is building sensors and software to measure millisecond-scale GPU power surges and help data centers use electricity more efficiently, with plans to deploy its system in a handful of U.S. facilities within the next six to eight months. - learn more

• Clocktower Technology Ventures participated in Fuse’s $25M Series A, which TechCrunch reported was led by Footwork, Primary Venture Partners, NextView Ventures, and Commerce Ventures, with Fuse also naming Clocktower Ventures among its backers. The company said it plans to use the funding to expand its AI-native loan origination and account opening platform for credit unions, building on traction with more than 100 customers and a $5M “rescue fund” aimed at helping institutions switch off legacy systems. - learn more

• Kairos Ventures participated in Alomana’s €4M seed round, which was led by CDP Venture Capital and also included Founders Factory, Italian Angels for Growth, Club degli Investitori, and others. Alomana said it will use the funding to strengthen its enterprise AI platform, add more capabilities for autonomous workflow automation, and support larger deployments across Europe as demand grows in sectors like finance, manufacturing, and pharma. - learn more

LA Exits

• Optimal’s Entertainment Media division is being acquired by Capstone Point Holdings, with the business set to operate under its legacy name, Optimad Media, following the deal. The transaction keeps founder Kevin Weisberg in place to lead the company from Los Angeles, while giving Optimad more backing to expand its entertainment media planning, buying, and prints-and-advertising investment capabilities across theatrical, streaming, and broadcast campaigns. - learn more

• B Capital participated in ORO Labs’ $100M Series C, which was led by Brighton Park Capital and Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, as the company pushes deeper into what it calls agentic procurement orchestration. ORO said the new funding follows 300% revenue growth over the past year and will be used to speed up product development, expand go-to-market and customer teams globally, and broaden enterprise use cases across procurement, finance, legal, and supply chain workflows. - learn more

• Aliment Capital participated in Tropic’s oversubscribed $105M Series C, which was co-led by Forbion’s Bioeconomy Fund and Corteva as the company scales the commercial rollout of its gene-edited tropical crops. Tropic said the funding will help expand production of its banana portfolio, accelerate its banana and rice pipelines, and support entry into additional climate-resilient crops, following the 2025 launch of its first new banana varieties in more than 75 years and demand that is already outpacing supply. - learn more

• B Capital doubled down in Axiom’s $200M Series A, which valued the company at more than $1.6 billion and was led by Menlo Ventures. Axiom said the new funding will help it extend its lead from formal mathematics into what it calls “Verified AI,” with plans to apply its technology beyond mathematical discovery into software and hardware verification. - learn more

• WndrCo participated in Quince’s $500M Series E, a round led by ICONIQ that values the manufacturer-to-consumer retail platform at $10.1B post-money. Quince says it will use the fresh capital to accelerate growth and global expansion of its proprietary M2C operating system, which uses AI-driven demand forecasting and direct factory partnerships to cut traditional retail markups. Other investors in the round included Basis Set Ventures, Wellington Management, MarcyPen Capital Partners, Baillie Gifford, Notable Capital, and DST Global. - learn more

• Matter Venture Partners co-led Eridu’s oversubscribed Series A, part of $200M+ raised as the AI networking startup emerges from stealth to tackle what it calls the “network wall” bottleneck in AI data centers. - learn more

• Matter Venture Partners participated in Rhoda AI’s $450M Series A, backing the startup as it comes out of 18 months in stealth with FutureVision, a video-predictive control platform aimed at helping robots operate reliably in messy, real-world industrial environments. The round included a large syndicate of investors, including Capricorn Investment Group, Khosla Ventures, Leitmotif, Mayfield, Premji Invest, Prelude Ventures, Temasek, Xora, and John Doerr, and the company says the funding will accelerate development and industrial deployments. - learn more

• Halogen Ventures participated in Rasa Legal’s $5M late-seed round, backing the company’s push to scale its tech-enabled criminal record sealing and expungement service nationwide. The round was led by Rethink Education with participation from Social Finance and the Richard King Mellon Foundation, and Rasa says the funding will help it expand leadership, speed product development, and grow beyond its current footprint (Utah, Arizona, and Pennsylvania). - learn more

• Halogen Ventures participated in Nyad’s $1.3M oversubscribed pre-seed round, backing the Birmingham-based startup as it launches an AI decision-support tool for wastewater treatment operators. The round was led by Boost VC with participation from Draper Associates, Ollin Ventures, Apprentis, First Avenue Ventures, and strategic angel Troy Wallwork, and Nyad says it will use the funding to hire, grow customers, and keep building the product as retirements thin the wastewater workforce. - learn more

• MANTIS VC participated in Scanner’s $22M Series A, which was led by Sequoia Capital and also included CRV, as the company builds a high-speed security data layer for AI-driven threat investigation. Scanner said the funding comes as security teams at companies like Notion, Ramp, and BeyondTrust use its platform to search years of log data quickly and power agentic workflows that help hunt threats, triage alerts, and investigate incidents more efficiently. - learn more

• Chapter One participated in Zcash Open Development Lab’s $25M+ seed round, joining a syndicate that included Paradigm, a16z crypto, Winklevoss Capital, Coinbase Ventures, Cypherpunk Technologies, and Maelstrom. The new company, formed by former Electric Coin Company team members, said the funding will support continued development of privacy-focused infrastructure for the Zcash ecosystem, including its self-custodial wallet and broader shielded payments tooling. - learn more

• CIV participated in Isembard’s $50M Series A, which was led by Union Square Ventures and also included Tamarack Global, IQ Capital, and existing backer Notion Capital. Isembard said the new funding will help it open 25 AI-powered factories by the end of 2026, expand its engineering team, and enter Germany, France, and Ukraine as it scales software-driven component manufacturing for aerospace and defense customers. - learn more

• WndrCo participated in Crafting’s $5.5M seed round, which was led by Mischief as the startup launched general availability for Crafting for Agents. The company said the new capital will support its push to become core infrastructure for AI-driven engineering teams, giving agents secure access to production-like environments so they can validate, test, and ship code inside complex enterprise systems used by customers including Brex, Faire, and Webflow. - learn more

LA Exits

• Hireguide has been acquired by HireVue, which is buying Hireguide’s underlying technology and bringing the Hireguide team into HireVue’s product org. HireVue says the deal accelerates its agentic AI roadmap, starting with a voice-based AI interviewer designed to help employers qualify candidates earlier and run smarter, more conversational hiring workflows. - learn more

• Ultracor has been acquired by Applied Aerospace & Defense, bringing the California-based maker of specialized honeycomb core materials into Applied’s advanced composites platform. Applied says the deal supports its selective vertical integration strategy by strengthening supply chain control and boosting speed and capacity for space and defense programs, from satellites and missiles to antennas, radomes, and next-gen aircraft. - learn more