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31 issues
Maven Robotics raises $100.0M Series A for industrial robots
Maven Robotics raised a $100.0M Series A for the general-purpose robotics system it builds for logistics and manufacturing work. Archy raised $50.0M in a Series C for its all-in-one cloud platform for dental practices, and Impossible Objects raised $40.0M in a Series B for its composite 3D printing systems.
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Bulwark Dynamics raises $6.8M for autonomous landing craft
Bulwark Dynamics raised a $6.8M seed for its Caravel uncrewed landing craft, which deliver cargo to shore without a port or pier, and signed an MOU with new investor Onomichi Dockyard to build in Japan. Onix raised a $5.0M pre-seed led by Alpha Edison for an assistant trained on licensed knowledge from named health practitioners.
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Cognition raises $2.0B at a $48B valuation
Cognition, maker of Devin, raised a $2.0B Series E at a $48B valuation, roughly double its May 2026 mark, against a revenue run rate approaching $900M. Stoke Space raised $1.0B for reusable rockets, and Celero Communications raised a $275.0M Series C for coherent DSPs in AI data center optics.
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Halmos Labs joins YC Fall 2026 with experiment design AI
Halmos Labs, founded this year in Lund, Sweden by Mattias Akke and Linus von Ekensteen Lofgren, launched out of Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch with software that picks which experiment would cut uncertainty most. The company says it runs parallel analyses under many possible assumptions, with early work in wet-lab design and cancer vaccine manufacturing.
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Dreamscale Labs launches at YC, claims 40-50% lower latency
Dreamscale Labs launched out of Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch with a cloud inference platform for robotics, letting teams offload physical AI models too large for on-robot GPUs and serving them back at real-time latency. The company says it is hitting 40-50% lower latency than existing neoclouds, and its first product is Dropbear.
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Medici Brands raises $250.0M Series B
Medici Brands, the consumer group behind the high-protein food brand David Protein and the confectionery brand HallPass, raised a $250.0M Series B. Ollie, a privacy-first household AI assistant that runs over group chat, raised a $7.5M seed led by Khosla Ventures with AI House.
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Lyte raises $165.0M Series C for robotics perception
Lyte raised a $165.0M Series C for LyteVision, its integrated 4D sensing platform for robotics, built by founders who worked on Apple Face ID and Microsoft Kinect. Aslan Protects, a Washington, D.C. defense startup founded in 2025, raised a $20.8M seed for a cyber intelligence platform run by human-supervised autonomous AI operatives.
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Owner.com raises $240.0M Series D for restaurant software
Owner.com raised a $240.0M Series D for software that helps independent restaurants grow online. Physical Superintelligence raised a $58.0M seed to build a physics research lab run by AI-driven virtual physicists, and says it is the founding technical partner for the first privately funded interstellar space mission.
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Odyssey Energy raises $74.0M for solar financing
Odyssey Energy Solutions raised a $74.0M round for its platform connecting solar companies with financiers across origination, due diligence, credit underwriting, procurement and asset management. Reframe Systems raised $40.0M for robotic microfactories that the Boston company says can manufacture five single-family homes per week.
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Three startups launch out of YC's Fall 2026 batch
Three companies launched out of Y Combinator's Fall 2026 batch: Nodus, an intelligent execution layer for AI workloads; Workers IO, selling deterministic virtual machines; and The Subvocal Company, which lets users talk to a computer without talking. Dwarkesh Patel published "The Rise and Fall of Agent Civilizations," an account of the OpenAI/Hugging Face story.
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REGENT raises $240.0M Series B for electric seagliders
REGENT raised a $240.0M Series B for its all-electric seagliders, wing-in-ground-effect craft the company says will serve routes up to 180 miles on existing battery technology using current dock infrastructure. Cyclic Materials raised $75.0M for critical metals recycling, and Pollen Robotics opened pre-orders at $399 for Microduck, a 25 cm open-source biped.
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Instinct raises $250.0M at a $2.5B valuation
Instinct, an AI assistant that connects a user's apps and devices and takes instructions by text message and phone call, raised a $250.0M Series B led by Index Ventures and Benchmark at a $2.5B valuation, taking total funding to $350M. 3D-printing construction company ICON raised $115.0M.
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Gatik raises $200.0M Series D for driverless trucking
Gatik raised a $200.0M Series D for its autonomous middle-mile trucking fleet, which runs short-haul B2B deliveries for customers including Kroger, Walmart, Loblaw and Tyson Foods. Bengaluru-based Airbound raised a $37.0M Series A for its vertical-takeoff cargo aircraft, funding a three-city drone delivery network in Andhra Pradesh after more than 13,000 autonomous flights.
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Greyparrot raises $27.0M for AI waste sorting
Greyparrot, a London-based AI waste intelligence company whose camera units sit above recycling sorting belts and identify materials in real time, raised a $27.0M Series B led by Omar Mir, bringing total funding to $60M. Mantel raised $18.3M for molten-salt carbon capture, and Shipyard said its IPFS funding was cancelled.
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Ethos launches at YC to make solar silicon on the Moon
Ethos Space Resources launched out of Y Combinator's Summer 2026 batch to make solar-grade silicon on the Moon, melting, electrolysing and purifying lunar regolith in hard vacuum. Spectre Intelligence, in the same batch, is a multi-strategy trading firm that trains AI traders instead of hiring human ones and trades semiconductor and biotechnology sectors.
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Muon Space raises $250.0M Series C for satellites
Muon Space raised a $250.0M Series C to build and operate mission-optimized satellite constellations on its Halo platform, serving commercial and national security customers from production facilities in Silicon Valley. MIT spinoff Apollo Atomics raised a $31.0M Seed for factory-built pressurized water reactors, and says it has signed letters of intent covering over 20 gigawatts.
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Ramp raises $750.0M for spend management
Ramp, which sells corporate cards and spend management software, raised $750.0M. Hybrid-electric aircraft startup Ampaire raised a $19.0M Series B, and router.com launched Ramp Router, an LLM gateway across OpenAI, Anthropic and open models that is free through 2026 and that the company says cuts inference costs by 40% on average.
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Deepgram raises $130.0M Series C for speech AI
Deepgram raised a $130.0M Series C for its speech AI platform, which the company says has transcribed over one trillion words since inception. Antares Nuclear raised $60.0M for compact microreactors aimed at remote military bases and austere industrial sites, and Resolve AI raised a $40.0M Series A to automate production troubleshooting.
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Lovable Labs raises $382.0M, Wispr raises $280.0M
Lovable Labs disclosed $382.0M raised in an initial filing from a $400 Million offering. Wispr raised a $280.0M Series B for its voice-first Flow product, and Cursor released Origin, a git forge the company describes as built for the agentic era.
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ConnectDER raises $35.0M Series D for meter adapters
ConnectDER raised a $35.0M Series D for its meter socket adapter, which the company says cuts the cost and interconnection time for residential solar, EV charging and home battery storage. Daring Fireball published a critique of watermark text adulteration in Claude, calling the practice a perversion of writing.
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DeepSeek ships agent harness in developer preview
DeepSeek released its Harness agent framework in developer preview, publishing the source code at the same time and implementing every agent capability as a swappable plugin. Recurrent Energy raised $695.0M, which the company says gives it flexibility to accelerate its shift to a develop-to-own model in North America and Europe.
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CodeRabbit raises $143.0M Series C for AI code review
CodeRabbit raised a $143.0M Series C for its AI code review tool, which provides line-by-line suggestions and Q&A inside the code. Skan AI raised $63.0M for enterprise process intelligence, and Blacksmith, founded in 2024 by engineers from Faire and Cockroach Labs, raised a $45.0M Series B to run GitHub Actions on gaming-grade CPUs.
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River AI raises $1.1bn for user-owned models
Igor Babuschkin's River AI has $1.1bn to hand model ownership back to users, and it lands the same day xAI ships Grok Bot — agents with their own computers, working your tools around the clock. The bet on both sides is that the scarce thing is no longer the model but the labour it replaces.
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Skild AI raises $1.4bn for robotics foundation model
Skild's $1.4bn Series C bets that robot foundation models will scale the way language models did, while the day's tooling concedes that agents mostly don't behave: Docker is now selling microVM isolation for Claude Code and Codex, and Meta's open 30B is explicitly tuned for failure recovery. Cheap robots, expensive containment.
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Niron Magnetics raises $150m for rare-earth-free magnets
Iron nitride magnets, micro data centres built for orbit, a sovereign Starlink and embodiment-agnostic robot brains: four of today's five raises need a factory, and Niron's $150m is the only cheque large enough to buy one. The lone software company in the batch collects debts.
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LMArena raises $150m to benchmark AI models
A $150m Series A for a leaderboard is a bet that nobody trusts their own evals, and Uber open-sourcing the agent security tooling it runs in production makes the same point from the other end. Models ship freely now; knowing whether they behaved is the scarce part.
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Aurelius raises $40m for anti-drone laser weapons
Most of today's raises buy instruments rather than software: smart balloons in the stratosphere, radar satellites, subsurface models for geothermal drilling, and a scanner that photographs your entire skin. Meanwhile YC's newest cohort shipped two more trading terminals, which suggests the contested frontier is measurement, not the transaction layer built on top of it.
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Anthropic raises $36bn in single round
Anthropic's $36bn is underwritten by the thesis the day's reading spells out — Karpathy's autoresearch agents, Lilian Weng on harness engineering — that a model can improve the pipeline producing its successor. The $2.1bn going to Base Power, Beta and Sunrun is the same bet, placed on the power supply.
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K2 Space raises $500m Series D for large satellites
$810m went to satellites and critical minerals today; $1.5m went to helping brands rank inside ChatGPT's answers. The ratio is the point — with wind and solar now outrunning fossil fuels in Germany, the marginal AI dollar has moved to the power, metal and orbit the models will eventually sit on.
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Seven YC startups launch, including air defense as a service
Four of today's seven YC launches sell into things that fail loudly: air defense, chip design environments, federal case backlogs, hosting you'd rather not have hacked. The trading-card investment platform is the batch's lone consumer holdout, and the only priced round goes to Density, $17m to count people in offices.
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