The next phase of AI is starting to look less like software and more like ownership.
Thrive is using OpenAI to reshape a $15.3B traditional business. Amazon is betting AWS can become a $1T revenue engine. Mistral is pushing frontier models into environments companies can fully control. And DoorDash is buying Instacart for $17B to own more of the local commerce stack.
At the same time, early-stage venture funds are clustering around the infrastructure and control layers behind AI, from cybersecurity and identity to engineering tools and physical systems.
Five signals worth watching today:
Thrive Holdings is acquiring ADT in a $15.3B deal.
Amazon says AWS could become a $1T revenue business.
Mistral released the weights for its 1T-parameter model.
DoorDash agreed to acquire Instacart for $17B.
More than $92M + €180M closed across AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, and deep tech funds.
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STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS
💰 Startup Funding Updates
At least $1.33B + €7.15M disclosed across today’s startup financings
The three biggest rounds:
FuriosaAI: $620M Series D
Serval: $150M Series C
Solink: $100M+
Together, those three companies accounted for roughly two-thirds of today’s disclosed dollar funding.
$0 RAISED
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PRE-SEED
Bleu Robotics: Paris-based developer of software and AI models for industrial humanoid robots raised €5M co-led by Contrarian Ventures and OVNI Capital, with participation from Kvanted, WEPA Ventures, Motier Ventures, and Charlie Songhurst.
Urologic Design: Branford-based medical device company developing solutions for urinary incontinence raised $1.2M led by Angel Investor Forum, with participation from HBS Alumni Angels of Boston, Haven Founders Fund, Connecticut Innovations, Yale Angels, and others.
KineDB: Copenhagen-based database technology company raised €850K led by Superhero Capital, with participation from NGL Ventures and angel investors.
SEED
Dream: San Francisco-based product and research company automating design and engineering through built-world models raised $17M from Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel, XYZ, Zigg Capital, and others.
Ravical: Ghent and London-based AI platform for accounting and tax firms raised $17M led by MMC Ventures, with participation from Lakestar, Pitchdrive, and Shapers.
Allox: Barcelona-based allosteric drug discovery company raised $10.5M led by Asabys, with participation from CDTI and Institut Català de Finances.
Mochatrade: New York-based trading platform founded by Indian entrepreneurs raised $5.5M led by CoinFund, with participation from Coinbase Ventures and Zero Knowledge Ventures.
SpendRule: Dallas-based AI contract enforcement platform for health systems raised $4M led by Mark Cuban’s Radical Investments, with participation from Zeal Capital Partners.
GROWTH
FuriosaAI: Seoul-based developer of AI accelerators for data center inference raised $620M Series D from investors including Infinitum, QUDA Capital Partners, Cisco Investments, South Korea’s National Growth Fund, Korea Development Bank, NAVER, Kakao Investment, and others.
Serval: San Francisco-based enterprise service management and automation platform raised $150M Series C at a $3B valuation. The round was led by Sequoia, with participation from Elad Gil, First Round, General Catalyst, Redpoint, Conviction, Headline, and others.
Solink: Ottawa-based AI vision intelligence platform raised more than $100M led by Vertu Capital, with participation from Goldman Sachs Alternatives, Golub Growth, and Comcast Ventures.
Collective: San Francisco-based AI-native financial operating system raised $100M, including a $40M Series B led by General Catalyst, QED, and Gradient Ventures, alongside a $60M growth facility from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund.
Casap: New York-based AI agent platform for financial services raised $56M Series B led by Base10 Partners, with strategic participation from Experian and Synchrony, alongside Emergence Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
Wabi: San Francisco-based personal AI assistant company raised $55M at a $1.25B valuation. The round was led by IVP, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Forerunner, Amazon Alexa Fund, and angels including Tobi Lütke, Marc Benioff, Marissa Mayer, and Dick Costolo.
GoodMood Holdings: Beijing-based AI-powered mental healthcare company raised nearly $45M from Imeik Technology, CSC Financial Capital, Wuxi Binhu Industrial Group, Shandong Development, and Unifuture Capital.
Opentrons Labworks: New York-based AI-native laboratory automation company raised $40M Series E led by Avego, with participation from BroadOak Capital Partners.
StimCardio: Los Angeles-based medical device company developing wearable therapeutics for atrial fibrillation raised $30M Series A led by Metis Medtech, with participation from Catalyst Health Ventures and strategic investors.
Skoka: Austin-based nicotine pouch company raised $21.5M from a group of private investors.
Midstream Health: San Francisco-based autonomous financial operations platform for health systems raised $20M Series A led by Valtruis, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Foundry, and CommonSpirit Ventures.
Rocker: San Francisco-based context-aware AI assistant and corporate intelligence platform raised $12.85M led by Greycroft, with participation from Anthropic and Menlo Ventures’ Anthology Fund, Matchstick Ventures, Stripe, and technology operators.
TrashLab: San Francisco-based AI-native operating system for waste haulers raised $12M led by Ventana, with participation from Bienville Capital, Harlem Capital, and CreativeCo.
Venttup: Bengaluru-based B2B precision manufacturing platform raised $3M in Pre-Series A funding led by Rainmatter by Zerodha and Unicorn India Ventures.
FitnessKPI: Barcelona-based intelligence platform for fitness operators raised €1.3M led by Encomenda Capital and Angels Capital, with participation from existing investors.
Crux Labs: New York-based platform helping enterprises improve AI agents using organizational judgment raised more than $6M co-led by Benchstrength and Misneach, with participation from Analog Ventures and Pareto Holdings.
NewEdge Power: Greenwich-based utility-scale and distributed power development platform raised an undisclosed round led by Strategic Value Partners, with participation from SJF Ventures, Segue Sustainable Infrastructure, and North Sky Capital.
📍 Funding Signal
Compute is becoming one of the clearest strategic bottlenecks in AI.
FuriosaAI’s $620M round alone accounted for nearly half of today’s disclosed dollar funding, reflecting the scale of capital now required to compete in inference hardware. At the same time, companies like Serval, Casap, Collective, Midstream Health, and Rocker show capital moving further up the stack into AI systems that control enterprise workflows.
The split is increasingly clear: enormous checks are funding scarce infrastructure, while smaller rounds are backing vertical AI applications where distribution, proprietary workflows, and customer data can create defensibility.
NEW VCs IN THE MARKET
🏦 Venture Capital Updates.
More than $92M + €180M closes across AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, and deep tech funds
Entourage closed its second fund at €100M, above its original €75M target.
The Brussels-based firm plans to back roughly 25 pre-seed and seed startups across Europe, with checks from €1M to €5M across AI, enterprise software, robotics, physical AI, and deep tech.
Auriga Partners secured €80M at an interim close for Auriga Cyber Ventures II, targeting €100M with a €120M hard cap.
The fund will invest from pre-seed through Series A in European cybersecurity startups focused on AI security, identity protection, and data security, with initial checks ranging from €500K to €5M.
BY Venture Partners closed its third fund at $60M and opened a Lisbon office as it expands further into Europe.
The Dubai-based firm will back pre-seed through Series A companies building AI-native enterprise products, with initial checks of up to $1M. The fund is anchored by Dubai Future District Fund.
U&I Ventures also closed its debut fund at $32.2M to back seed-stage founders building AI-native infrastructure across security, engineering, and IT.
📍 Capital signal
Early-stage funds are narrowing around the infrastructure and control layers of AI. Security, identity, engineering tools, enterprise workflows, and physical AI all appear repeatedly here, suggesting managers are betting that the strongest early-stage opportunities may sit behind AI adoption rather than in generic application software.
KEY STORIES IN TECH
📜 Latest In Tech
OpenAI-backed Thrive Holdings acquires ADT in $15.3B deal
Thrive Holdings is buying home security company ADT for $10 per share, valuing the deal at $7.6B in equity and $15.3B including debt.
Thrive plans to use ADT as the foundation of its smart home security business, with OpenAI supplying models, technology, and forward-deployed engineers across Thrive’s portfolio.
The deal comes as Apple, Amazon, and startups are also pushing deeper into AI-powered home security, making the category increasingly competitive.
Why it matters: This is one of the clearest examples yet of AI being used not just to build software startups, but to transform large traditional businesses through acquisition and operational integration.
Amazon says AWS could become a $1T revenue business
AWS is already running at about $184B in annualized revenue, and Andy Jassy says he believes it can grow more than 40% in both 2027 and 2028.
To support that expansion, Amazon expects roughly $220B in cash capex in 2026, mostly for AWS, and says spending will rise meaningfully again in 2027.
Jassy called AI a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity and said the current infrastructure buildout could permanently reshape Amazon’s revenue base.
Why it matters: Amazon is betting that enterprise AI demand will be large enough to justify one of the biggest infrastructure spending cycles in corporate history.
Mistral releases weights for its 1T-parameter model
Mistral has released the weights for Mistral Large 4, its trillion-parameter open model, allowing governments and enterprises to download, deploy, and control the system themselves.
The company is positioning ML4 heavily around cybersecurity, saying organizations can use it on-prem to detect, analyze, and respond to threats without depending on a closed AI provider.
Mistral also claims ML4 matches top open rivals like GLM-5.3 while using 47% fewer tokens per task and leading open models on agentic coding benchmarks.
Why it matters: Open-weight models are becoming a strategic option for governments and enterprises that want frontier AI capabilities without giving up control over sensitive data, infrastructure, or access.
DoorDash agrees to acquire Instacart for $17B
DoorDash will acquire Instacart for $17B, combining its restaurant delivery network with Instacart’s grocery technology, retailer relationships, and advertising business.
Instacart will keep its brand, app, and enterprise products, while DoorDash plans to use the combined network to expand fulfillment and online ordering tools for grocers.
The deal is expected to close in late 2027 or the first half of 2028, subject to regulatory approval.
Why it matters: The acquisition would give DoorDash a much stronger position in grocery and local commerce while creating a broader delivery platform spanning restaurants, retailers, fulfillment, and advertising.
Chinese intelligence reportedly targeted Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang
The New York Times reportedly found that Alice Huang, a senior Singapore AI executive with close ties to Jensen Huang, was acting as a Chinese intelligence asset and passing information to Beijing.
Huang ran Megaspeed, an Nvidia cloud partner previously accused of helping move roughly $2B worth of Nvidia chips to China through restricted channels.
U.S. intelligence reportedly tracked her for more than a year, while Jensen Huang had not yet been given a defensive briefing about the alleged activity.
Why it matters: Nvidia now sits at the center of both the AI boom and U.S.-China technology tensions, making its executives, partners, and supply chain increasingly important national-security targets.
Apple is losing leverage over memory chip suppliers
Apple reportedly spent years using its enormous purchasing power to force aggressive pricing from NAND and memory suppliers, including audits and “most favored customer” terms.
That leverage is now fading as Nvidia, AMD, Qualcomm, and other AI-focused buyers compete for the same high-end memory and are often willing to pay more.
Suppliers like SanDisk are also securing longer-term contracts with price floors, making it harder for Apple to push prices down the way it once could.
Why it matters: The AI boom is reshaping chip economics beyond data centers, and even Apple is finding it harder to control component costs as memory suppliers gain bargaining power.
LAST COFFEE SIP
🌎 Around The Ecosystem
Meta: Meta quietly launched Style Sketch in Indonesia, Singapore, and Thailand, an AI fashion app that builds a virtual closet from Instagram or uploaded photos, suggests outfits, offers virtual try-ons, and can plan looks for trips based on weather and itinerary.
MUST READ
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What is your startup actually worth in 2026? An analysis of 31 AI startup funding rounds reveals why companies with similar revenue can receive dramatically different valuations. This piece breaks down what drives valuation multiples, how investors price different revenue models, and includes a calculator to estimate your startup’s valuation and dilution.
HIRING ALERT: STARTUPS & VC ROLES
💼 Today’s VC & Startup Job Opportunities
Analyst - Pender Ventures | USA - Apply Here
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VC Fellow - V11 | Remote - Apply Here
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Check out 22+ VC job opportunities in “BREAK INTO VC” newsletter.
📍 Tips to Break Into VC
When do VC firms actually hire? The VC hiring calendar
Most aspiring VCs think hiring starts when a role appears on LinkedIn. In reality, the important part often happens earlier, when a fund closes new capital, someone leaves the team, or a partner gets approval to add leverage.
This deep dive maps VC hiring month by month, showing when to apply aggressively, when to focus on outreach, when to build relationships, and which periods are effectively dead zones.
It also explains the event-driven windows that can matter even more than the calendar, including the 90-day window after a fund close, the 7-day window after an associate leaves, and the 30-day window after a new partner joins.
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