Breaking News
Hugging Face is reportedly evaluating acquisition approaches valuing the AI infrastructure company at $13 billion or more, nearly triple its $4.5 billion valuation from 2023. A potential deal would be significant given Hugging Face’s position at the center of the open-source AI ecosystem, though CEO Clem Delangue has previously resisted investments that could give a single company too much influence.
Chinese humanoid robot Tiangong Ultra reportedly ran 100 meters in 9.39 seconds at the World Humanoid Robot Games, beating Usain Bolt’s 9.58-second world record. Another robot finished in 9.47 seconds, highlighting how quickly humanoid robotics is progressing, although both machines struggled to remain under control after crossing the finish line.
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STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS
💰 Startup Funding Updates
PRE-SEED
KAZIMI, a Berlin, Germany-based provider of a security solution for mobile apps, raised €2.2M in Pre-Seed funding. The round was led by Market One Capital, with participation from IBB Ventures, Petri Hyökyranta, Janne Peltola, and Erik Massmann.
Dirac Labs, a Madison, WI-based provider of quantum-enabled navigation systems, raised $1.8M in Pre-Seed funding. The round was led by TitletownTech, with participation from Automotive Ventures, Riceberg Ventures, quantumEDGE Ventures, Jude Gomila, and Balaji Srinivasan.
Mafix, a Seattle, WA-based provider of carbon-negative silicon fertilizers and mineral products, raised $5.4M in Pre-Seed funding. The round was led by Azolla Ventures, with participation from Counteract VC, Astera Institute, Plug and Play Ventures, Impact Science Ventures, and a Dutch family office.
Pouchers, a Lagos, Nigeria-based digital fintech platform, raised $500K in Pre-Seed funding. The round was led by Stack Directory, with participation from a syndicate of African fintech angel investors.
SEED
EULER, a San Diego, CA-based provider of an agentic partner relationship management platform, raised $4.3M in Seed funding. The round was led by Channel Equity Partners.
Veeda AI, a Toronto, Canada-based foundation AI research lab, raised over $90M in Seed funding. Backers included Khosla Ventures and Radical Ventures.
Twyne, a decentralized finance lending and credit delegation protocol developer, raised $2.5M in Seed funding. The round was co-led by cyber Fund and Ethereal Ventures, with participation from Euler, Daedalus, and web3 fintech angel investors.
Zaydn, a New Delhi, India-based sneaker and lifestyle brand, raised approximately $680K in Seed funding. The round was led by Inflection Point Ventures (IPV), with participation from BeyondSeed and private consumer-tech angel investors.
GROWTH
SweGaN, a Linköping, Sweden-based provider of GaN-on-SiC epitaxial wafers, raised $14M in Series B financing. The round was led by Thisbe AB and North Ventures, with participation from existing investors.
Computomics, a Tübingen, Germany-based provider of a climate-smart plant breeding platform, raised €6.3M in Series B funding. The round was led by Convent Capital Agri Food Fund, with participation from High-Tech Gründerfonds, MBG Baden-Württemberg, Amathaon Capital, founders, and scientific advisors.
Atravelq, a Chandigarh, India-based provider of a customized outbound travel platform, raised an undisclosed amount at an approximately $1.2M equity valuation. Backers included existing seed investors and founding stakeholders, including Dhruv Anand and Kapil Malhotra.
Boldr, a London, UK-based smart climate technology and automated energy hardware startup, raised $5M in funding. The round was led by Unconventional Ventures, with participation from Ada Ventures, Tetrad Ventures, Davidovs Venture Collective, Roxbury Asset Management, Inclimo Climate Tech Fund, Prosegur, Techstars, S20 Fund, PropelX, and strategic HVAC partners.
Quintessent, a Santa Barbara, CA-based provider of AI data center optical interconnect products, raised $40M in Series A funding. The round was led by Cycle Capital, with participation from Goldman Sachs XIG-Industry Ventures, Hina Liberty Capital, Susquehanna International Group, InterVest, Safar Partners, Ciena, Foothill Ventures, M Ventures, Osage University Partners, and Sierra Ventures.
PayRewards, a Dallas, TX-based provider of a rewards-first platform for small business payments, raised $28M in Series E funding. Backers were not disclosed.
Oshen, a Plymouth, UK-based maritime technology and autonomous ocean robotics startup, raised $5M in funding. The round was led by Lunar Ventures, with participation from AlbionVC, Twin Track, Concept Ventures, and maritime technology angels.
Thea Energy, a Kearny, NJ-based provider of planar coil stellarator fusion energy technology, raised an undisclosed amount in a Series B extension. Backers included Brevan Howard Macro Venture, Aloniq, ALJ Investments, Beyond Earth Ventures, and other strategic investors.
Botanika, a developer of a Solana-driven decentralized physical infrastructure network, raised $1.5M in funding. Backers included CRIT Ventures, Baboon VC, Marblex, Daedalus, and web3 infrastructure angels.
Beldex, a Victoria, Mahé, Seychelles-based privacy-focused blockchain infrastructure provider, raised $8M in funding. Backers included Sigma Capital, NTC, Nxgen, Digital Consensus Fund, and EAK Ventures.
NeoSoul, a decentralized AI and web3 infrastructure platform provider, raised $11M in Pre-Series A funding. Backers included MH Ventures, Amber Group, ArkStream Capital, 0G Foundation, Kirin Capital, CatcherVC, and New Oak International.
Cityblock Health, a New York City-based technology-driven healthcare provider specializing in value-based care for government-funded programs, raised $116M in Series E funding. The round was led by General Catalyst.
Starcloud, a Redmond, WA-based provider of orbital data centers and space-based GPU infrastructure, raised $250M in a Series A extension at a $2.3B valuation. The round was led by Manhattan West, with participation from Benchmark, EQT, Soma, NFX, 776, NVIDIA, Cisco Investments, Cedar Capital, Goanna Capital, Standard Capital, and others.
Fasset, a Dubai, UAE-based provider of an AI-powered stablecoin neobanking platform, raised $68M in Series C funding. The round was led by SBI Group, with participation from Speedinvest and others.
DAILY PICKS
🗞️ Must read post
How is your seed valuation actually decided? (It has almost nothing to do with your company): Most founders think valuation comes down to traction, market size, or the strength of the pitch. This piece shows why the real ceiling often comes from a VC’s fund size, check size, and ownership target. It gives founders a simple way to understand which funds can actually lead their round, avoid wasting weeks with structurally wrong investors, and negotiate the option pool before it quietly costs more than the pre-money.
How do you build a seed deck that actually raises money? (We analysed 50+ Y-Combinator decks): Most founders build decks by copying templates or old examples. This piece shows the repeatable nine-slide structure that appears across real YC startup decks. It breaks down how to present your problem, solution, traction, market, business model, team, and raise clearly - so investors can understand the opportunity in the order they naturally scan for it.
NEW VCs IN THE MARKET
🏦 Venture Capital Updates.
Third Mind, a Menlo Park, CA-based newly formed venture capital firm, is raising its first fund. According to a SEC form, Third Mind I, LP, has a target of $25m with $5.7m already raised. The document lists Antoine Nivard (formerly at Blank Ventures) as the person related to the raise.
Makers Fund, a San Francisco, CA-based venture capital firm focused on interactive entertainment, closed its Fund IV, at $250M. The new fund, whose closing brought total assets under management by the company to $1.5 billion, will back founders building across gaming and interactive entertainment.
KEY STORIES IN TECH
📜 Latest In Tech
OpenAI is building AI agents for everything.
OpenAI is betting on ChatGPT Work to bring autonomous AI agents beyond developers and into everyday white-collar work.
Adoption remains the big challenge. While 98% of OpenAI employees reportedly used Codex in June, only 17% of organizational subscribers and less than 1% of individual subscribers did.
The bigger battle may be who owns the layer between AI models and users. OpenAI and Anthropic are building their own agent platforms, while model-agnostic and open-source alternatives can switch between models.
Most Americans oppose nearby data centers
Three-quarters of Americans say they don’t want a data center built near them, according to a new poll from Heatmap, with 64% strongly opposed and only 15% in favor of a nearby facility.
The turn against data centers spans age, gender, income, party, and the rural-urban split, with the facilities running 43 points underwater with Republicans, 65 with independents, and 75 with Democrats.
Opposition has swung 33 points in a year across four surveys using the same wording, rising from 42% last August to 75% now, and a July Redfin poll found similar results, with 53% opposed.
Anonymous AI coding model wows devs
A mysterious AI coding model called Ox Alpha has shown up on OpenRouter as an anonymous, free-to-use release, and developers testing it have been impressed by its performance on programming and agent tasks.
The model offers a context window of just over a million tokens, and the open-source agent OpenCode said it would be free for a week with its provider handling up to 100 trillion tokens a day.
Nobody knows who made it, with guesses ranging from China’s Z.ai to Microsoft’s MAI family, and OpenRouter warns that prompts and completions are kept by the unnamed provider, a problem for European firms under data protection law.
Nvidia hikes AI server prices over 15%
Nvidia has warned its biggest customers that servers built around its AI chips will cost more than 15% extra, with the higher prices hitting Grace Blackwell and Vera Rubin systems shipping early next year.
The exact increase depends on the chip generation and memory setup, and it stems from soaring DRAM prices, with contract makers building servers for Microsoft, Google, and Oracle already telling their customers about the coming jumps.
A 15% rise on rack-scale systems costing several million dollars each adds hundreds of thousands per rack, and with TSMC unable to meet demand, buyers have little room to push back against Nvidia’s roughly 75% margins.
DeepSeek launches experimental AI model
DeepSeek has launched DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp, an experimental multimodal model that reads images and screenshots and acts on them, and says its agent performance comes close to Anthropic’s Opus-4.8 on its own published benchmarks.
On the eleven benchmarks DeepSeek published, the new model beats Opus-4.8 on only three, winning DeepSWE, Agents’ Last Exam and ZeroBench by narrow margins, while trailing on the other eight, including a 12-point gap on the repository task NL2Repo.
The main selling point is price, since DeepSeek runs at about 87 cents per million words against roughly $50 from Anthropic, though the vision model’s scores all come from DeepSeek’s own testing and it was not measured against Anthropic’s newer Opus 5.
LAST COFFEE SIP
☕ Other News
Apple revamps stores for smart home push
Apple is redesigning its retail stores this fall, rearranging sections and adding accessory bays, to prepare for a wave of new home devices arriving later this year.
The lineup includes an upgraded Apple TV set-top box, a new HomePod mini, and a long-rumored home hub with a display that runs a fresh system and interface for controlling smart home gadgets.
The store changes let shoppers try the home hub in person, a useful move since it enters new territory for Apple at a time when prices across its product range are climbing.
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