The infrastructure race is starting to reshape everything around it.
Microsoft plans to deploy more than 1 million of its own AI chips. Anthropic may get a dedicated $6.3B data center in Japan. AI spending is now large enough for the IMF to say it is helping support global growth. And Nvidia’s grip on China is weakening as Huawei and other domestic chipmakers gain ground.
At the same time, venture capital is following the same direction, with more money moving into deep tech, robotics, spacetech, and government-backed technology ecosystems.
Five signals worth watching today:
Microsoft plans to deploy more than 1 million Maia 300 AI chips.
Meta launched Muse Wonder, its first frontier-class AI model.
Nvidia’s China AI-chip share fell as Huawei closed the gap.
AI infrastructure spending is now influencing global economic growth.
More than $287M is being positioned across European deep tech and UAE-backed venture capital.
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STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS
💰 Startup Funding Updates
At least $2.54B + €84.6M disclosed across today’s startup financings
The biggest rounds:
Ramp: ~$1.85B
Oxide Computer Company: $445M Series D
Scarlet, Ultra Robotics, and Sabi: $50M each
Ramp and Oxide alone accounted for roughly 90% of today’s disclosed dollar funding.
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PRE-SEED
Finches: Munich-based AI platform for agricultural procurement raised €2M led by HTGF and Vanagon Ventures, with participation from Bayern Kapital, UnternehmerTUM Funding for Innovators, and strategic angels.
CureMeAbroad: Pune-based medical tourism and healthcare discovery platform raised $1.1M led by SteerX Ventures, with participation from existing investor AIRA.
TailBlaze Longevity: Ahmedabad-based canine nutrition and longevity company raised $300K led by Comma Capital.
SEED
Sabi: San Francisco-based company developing a non-invasive brain-AI interface for everyday wear raised $50M led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Accel, Initialized Capital, DST Global, Collaborative Fund, Ascend, and Kevin Weil.
Skopos Bio: Melbourne-based biotechnology company developing nuclear-science-backed oncology therapies raised $12M from Tenmile, Tin Alley Ventures, and Yosemite.
Gudea: Minneapolis-based AI-powered narrative intelligence platform raised $7M co-led by Mudita Ventures and Collide Capital.
Verso: Paris-based AI-powered consumer intelligence platform raised $6M led by Angular Ventures, with participation from 100in, Kima Ventures, Olympe Capital, Sharpstone Capital, Hexa, and angel investors.
Phinity Labs: San Francisco-based applied research lab for autonomous chip design raised $5.2M led by Uncork Capital, with participation from Moxxie and angels including Google Chief Scientist Jeff Dean.
Golbriak Space: Tallinn-based space laser communications startup raised €4M co-led by JOIN Capital and PhotonVentures, with participation from Takeoff Accelerator.
Today: Copenhagen and Berlin-based AI platform for financial and insurance advisors raised €2.8M co-led by HTGF and Insurtech Gateway, with participation from SeedX, Lucid Capital, and angel investors.
Credfix: Bengaluru-based AI-first debt resolution platform raised $1.66M led by Tanglin Venture Partners, with participation from Stargazer.
The Dough Therapy: Mumbai-based gourmet pizza and quick-service restaurant company raised $625K at a $4.16M valuation. The round was led by Michigan Capital Advisors with participation from Equiglobe Investment.
GROWTH
Ramp: New York-based corporate spend management and payments company reportedly raised approximately $1.85B at a $60B pre-money valuation. The round was co-led by Dragoneer Investment Group and Thrive Capital, with participation from Founders Fund.
Oxide Computer Company: Emeryville-based on-premises cloud computing company raised $445M Series D led by Eclipse, with participation from U.S. Innovative Technology Fund, Riot Ventures, Jane Street, Atreides Management, AMD Ventures, and others.
Scarlet: London-based company specializing in AI and software medical devices raised $50M Series B led by Headline, with participation from Notion Capital, Atomico, Creandum, Kindred Capital, and Entrepreneur First.
Ultra Robotics: New York-based automated warehouse robotics company raised $50M Series A led by Framework Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator. The round brought total funding to $62M.
Vates: Grenoble-based open-source virtualization and infrastructure management company raised €30M in its first institutional funding round, co-led by IRIS and Bpifrance.
Konst: Taipei-based AI compute operator raised $30M Series B led by ADATA Technology, with strategic participation from M Mobility, Pegatron Venture Capital, and other corporate investors.
Kapta Space: Seattle-based spaceborne radar payload company raised $24M Series A led by Washington Harbour Partners and Bison Ventures, with participation from MetaVC, MYDA Capital, Entrada Ventures, Aurelia Foundry, and Fitz Gate Ventures.
Procuros: Hamburg-based AI-native supply chain connectivity platform raised €20M Series A led by XAnge, with participation from Point Nine, Creandum, b2venture, and angel investors.
finmid: Berlin-based fintech company raised €17M in a Series A extension, bringing total funding to €52M. Investors included Big Pi Ventures, Mainset, and Earlybird.
Sonilo: San Francisco-based AI-synchronized audio and sound effect generation company raised $11M in its first funding round led by B Capital, with participation from Redpoint.
Cleavr: Paris-based AI accounts receivable management platform raised €8M led by Varsity, with participation from Kima Ventures, Better Angle, Portfolio Ventures, Kerala Ventures, Financière Saint James, Station F, Clover, and others.
Jaca: Delray Beach-based consumer food company specializing in allulose raised a $1M strategic investment from Mercurius Media Capital.
Innercrowd: The Hague-based marketing technology platform for festivals raised €750K from investors including Hans Scheffer.
Flexcompute: Watertown-based physics simulation platform received an undisclosed strategic investment from Samsung Ventures, Applied Ventures, and other investors.
Primitive Labs: San Francisco-based AI research and product company developing models of human behavior received an undisclosed investment from Sony Innovation Fund.
OptimizeGEO: Los Altos-based generative engine optimization platform raised an undisclosed round from f7 Ventures, Micron Ventures, Shorooq Partners, Oceans, Neythri Futures Fund, Perot Jain, and a group of technology executives and investors.
📍 Funding Signal
Today’s headline funding total is almost entirely a Ramp and Oxide story.
Those two companies captured roughly 90% of disclosed dollar capital, while the rest of the board spans much smaller bets across robotics, AI compute, chip design, space communications, healthcare, supply chains, and financial infrastructure. It is another reminder that aggregate venture numbers can look extremely strong even when most companies are still raising relatively conventional rounds.
The more unusual signal sits at Seed. Sabi raised $50M to build a wearable brain-AI interface, while Skopos Bio raised $12M for nuclear-science-backed oncology. Investors are showing willingness to fund technically ambitious companies with unusually large early checks when the underlying technology could create a new category rather than simply improve an existing software workflow.
NEW VCs IN THE MARKET
🏦 Venture Capital Updates.
More than $287M is being positioned across European deep tech and UAE-backed venture capital
Oraseya Capital doubled its fund size to AED1B, roughly $272M, from AED500M at launch.
The Dubai-based investor will now back companies from pre-seed through growth, with maximum checks increasing from $3M to $6M. Its broader mandate covers AI, fintech and digital assets, healthcare and longevity, and other technologies considered strategically relevant to the UAE. The vehicle is fully backed by DIEZ.
Monte Carlo Capital reached a $15M first close for Fund II, targeting roughly $30M in total.
The fund will invest from pre-seed through Series A across deep tech, AI, spacetech, robotics, and industrial automation, with initial checks of roughly $350K to $500K and additional follow-on capacity through SPVs.
📍 Capital signal
These two funds highlight very different ways venture firms are expanding. Monte Carlo Capital is staying focused and specialist at the earliest stages, while Oraseya is broadening both check size and stage coverage to become a more strategic, multi-stage capital provider. The bigger shift is that government-backed venture platforms are increasingly being used not just to fund local startups, but to attract globally relevant technology into national ecosystems.
KEY STORIES IN TECH
📜 Latest In Tech
Meta launches its first frontier model, Muse Wonder
Meta released Muse Wonder and Muse Wonder Full, its first frontier-class models, claiming performance comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and Anthropic’s Fable 5.1 on major benchmarks.
The models are built for harder tasks like coding and long-term personal assistance, with Meta emphasizing an “active memory” system designed to retain useful context across days, weeks, and months.
Muse Wonder will be available through Meta’s API at premium pricing, while Wonder Full will be limited to Muse Code subscribers and will also power Meta’s Muse agent.
Why it matters: Meta is moving from lightweight and consumer-focused AI into direct competition at the frontier, giving it a stronger foundation for agents, coding tools, and its broader push toward personal superintelligence.
Microsoft plans to deploy more than 1 million of its own AI chips
Microsoft unveiled Maia 300 and says it could deploy more than 1 million of the custom AI chips next year across its internal AI services and Azure infrastructure.
The company claims Maia 300 delivers about 40% more useful AI computing per megawatt than leading GPU-based systems, helping reduce power and infrastructure costs.
Microsoft plans multi-gigawatt deployments starting in 2027 as it tries to reduce its dependence on Nvidia while spending more than $175B on infrastructure this year.
Why it matters: Microsoft is moving from experimenting with custom silicon to deploying it at massive scale, making in-house chips a core part of its strategy to control AI costs and infrastructure.
Russian bot traffic collapses after strikes hit Yandex data centers
Cloudflare reportedly saw bot requests from Yandex’s network fall to just 0.4% of their recent peak after Ukrainian strikes damaged two major Yandex data centers.
The decline began after a strike on a Sasovo facility and deepened after a larger Kaluga campus was knocked offline, disrupting dozens of Yandex Cloud services.
NetBlocks also recorded sharp drops in Yandex network traffic, suggesting the outages affected not just bots but broader cloud and internet services.
Why it matters: The incident shows how concentrated digital infrastructure can create a single point of failure, where physical attacks on data centers can quickly disrupt cloud services, automated traffic, and wider internet access.
IMF says AI spending is helping keep global growth near 3%
IMF chief Kristalina Georgieva says heavy investment in AI infrastructure is helping support global growth of around 3% despite pressure from high energy costs.
Asia could benefit most because of its role in producing AI hardware, with advanced economies potentially gaining 0.5 to 1 percentage point of growth and emerging economies gaining 0.2 to 0.8 points.
Major tech companies are expected to spend roughly $660B to $690B on AI this year, while AI-related hardware and products now account for more than 10% of global goods trade.
Why it matters: AI infrastructure spending is becoming large enough to influence national growth, global trade, and industrial policy, turning the AI boom into a broader macroeconomic force.
Nvidia’s China AI-chip share falls as Huawei closes the gap
Nvidia’s share of China’s data-center AI accelerator market fell to 34% in the first half of 2026, with shipments down 44% year over year to 678,000 units.
Huawei shipped 572,000 accelerators and reached 28% market share, while other Chinese chipmakers including T-Head, Cambricon, and Kunlunxin also gained ground.
Non-GPU accelerators overtook GPUs by shipment volume, showing that Chinese buyers are increasingly adopting domestic chips designed for specific AI workloads.
Why it matters: U.S. export controls are accelerating China’s shift toward homegrown AI hardware, and Huawei is emerging as Nvidia’s strongest local rival in a market Jensen Huang has described as worth roughly $50B.
Anthropic says new safeguards cut AI distillation attacks by up to 99%
Anthropic says new protections have reduced the amount of Claude reasoning data extracted in distillation attacks by roughly 90% to 99%.
The company has tightened access to protected reasoning, blocked proxy-based probing, and banned tens of thousands of accounts linked to large-scale extraction campaigns.
Anthropic says the system now has a false-positive rate below 0.1% and cited Z.ai as one company that allegedly tried to distill Claude capabilities while developing GLM-5.3.
Why it matters: As frontier models become more valuable, preventing rivals from cheaply copying their capabilities is turning into a core competitive and national-security issue.
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🌎 Around The Ecosystem
Anthropic + NTT Data: NTT Data is reportedly in final talks to build Anthropic’s first dedicated data center in Japan, a facility in Osaka that could cost up to $6.3B, support as much as 500 MW of power, and begin partial operations as early as 2028.
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