Issue #33September 17, 20264 links

Nuance Labs raises $50.0M Series A for audiovisual model

Seattle research lab Nuance Labs raised a $50.0M Series A led by returning investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, with NVIDIA and Define Ventures joining, to build a full-duplex audiovisual foundation model that generates speech, facial expression and body language from one system. BoomerangHR raised a $12.7M seed co-led by Kalos Ventures and Album Ventures.

Cool Company Raises

YC F26

Papaya launches at YC (Fall 2026)

Papaya tunes AI agents that are already in production. You connect traces with a one-line SDK or hand over raw data, and it runs 200+ research-backed analyses across thousands of runs to find what is recurring — prompt and caching inefficiency, tool schema drift, context bloat and retrieval strategy, model selection and routing, retry loops and wasted API calls. Findings come back ranked by impact, each with the specific runs affected, an estimated effect on quality, latency and cost, and a confidence level, delivered into Slack, a dashboard or a PR. The company cites cost reductions up to 52%, latency improvements up to 61% and quality gains of +11%, and offers a free 24-hour audit. Founded in 2026 by Macy Mody, Niyaz Puzhikkunnath and Faiz Vadakkumpadath, Papaya has 3 employees in San Francisco.

Aiops B2B Enterprise-Software YC Infrastructure AI

YC F26

Agent 37 launches at YC (Fall 2026)

Agent 37 runs coding agents as always-on hosted sandboxes, so you host neither the machine nor the state. One POST to /v1/instances provisions an isolated environment with its own URL that you can message across sessions; files, memory and connected tools stay put until you delete it. It runs Hermes, OpenClaw, Claude Code, Codex or a custom harness, in 2-8 vCPU / 4-16 GB sizes, with gVisor kernel-level isolation, encryption at rest and in transit, and SOC 2 Type I. There is no plan fee — compute meters by the minute at $0.0011 per vCPU-hour and $0.00096 per GB-hour of RAM, which puts a continuously running 2 vCPU / 4 GB sandbox near $4.76 a month. Founded in 2026 by Vishnu Krishnaprasad, based in New York City.

Developer-Tools SAAS B2B YC AI

$12.7M

BoomerangHR raises a $12.7M Seed round

BoomerangHR turns the people who leave a company into its next hires. The platform automates offboarding — exit compliance, COBRA, 401k rollovers, equipment returns — then keeps the relationship alive: verified alumni profiles, role matching, network engagement, and reporting on talent migration, re-engagement signals and sales opportunities. It plugs into existing HCM and ATS systems rather than replacing them. Founded and led by Jeff Wald in New York, BoomerangHR says hundreds of companies representing millions of alumni use it, with Warby Parker among the named customers. The $12.7M seed was co-led by Kalos Ventures and Album Ventures, with Monta Vista Capital, Capital Eleven and the Strada Education Foundation participating.

Information-Technology Software Artificial-Intelligence Strada Education Foundation Capital Eleven Monta Vista Capital+5 more

$50.0M

Nuance Labs raises a $50.0M Series A round

Nuance Labs is a Seattle AI research lab building a full-duplex audiovisual foundation model for human conversation. Instead of chaining transcription, a language model, voice synthesis and animation together, a single unified system perceives and generates speech, facial expression and body language at the same time — so it reads the non-verbal cues in a live conversation and responds in the moment rather than after the turn ends. Founded by former Apple PhD researchers Fangchang Ma (CEO), Edward Zhang (CTO) and Karren Yang (Chief Scientist), with Yaser Sheikh advising. Target uses are sales, customer service, coaching, professional training and education, with a research preview due later in 2026. The $50M Series A was led by returning investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, with Accel and South Park Commons also returning and NVIDIA and Define Ventures joining.

Biotechnology Artificial-Intelligence Machine-Learning Define Ventures Nvidia South Park Commons+4 more

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