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Amid Record Robotics Funding, Apptronik Raises $520M Series A Extension To Boost Production Of Humanoid Robot Apollo
AI-powered robotics company Apptronik announced Wednesday that it has raised $520 million in an extension of its $415 million Series A raise in February 2025, bringing the total round to over $935 million. Existing backers B Capital, Google, Mercedes-Benz and Peak6 joined new investors including AT&T Ventures and manufacturing giant John Deere participating in the extension. The Austin-based company says that after its initial Series A announcement, it received “substantial inbound investor interest,” which led it to open the new extension of the round “at a 3x multiple of the Series A valuation.” It did not reveal its new valuation. However, the Austin-American Statesman reported in November that Apptronik had reached a valuation of $5 billion after raising $331 million earlier that month, according to a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission. The company confirmed that the $331 million raised is a part of this Series A extension round. With the latest funding, Apptronik has now raised nearly $1 billion since its 2016 inception. Robotics startup funding hit a record high last year, per Crunchbase data. Startups in the sector raised nearly $14 billion in funding in 2025, up from $8.2 billion in 2024, even topping the $13.1 billion raised in the peak venture funding year of 2021. So far, that momentum appears to be continuing in 2026. Besides this raise, Skild AI, a robotics company building an “omni-bodied” brain to operate any robot for any task, announced in January that it had raised $1.4 billion, tripling its valuation to more than $14 billion. Human connectionsApptronik co-founders Nicholas Paine and Jeff Cardenas with Apollo. (Courtesy photo.) Apptronik was founded on the belief that for humanoid robots to reach mass adoption, the industry had to solve for intuitive, safe human-robot interaction, and improve the cost and ease of manufacturing these robots. The company claims its flagship robot, Apollo, is designed with “approachability at its forefront.” “Its friendly head and face, eye-level cameras, and natural color palette are engineered to make human interactions feel engaging and more natural,” a spokesperson told Crunchbase News. Apollo is designed to “revolutionize” human-robot interaction, initially in industries such as logistics and manufacturing, with future planned expansion into retail, healthcare, and eventually, the home, according to the company. It’s designed to take on physically demanding work and labor-intensive operational processes in manufacturing and logistics and to work alongside human counterparts to transport components, sort and kit, among other tasks. Apptronik has commercial agreements with companies across several industries such as automotive manufacturing, logistics and consumer packaged goods, including Mercedes-Benz, GXO Logistics and Jabil. It also has a strategic partnership with Google DeepMind “to build the next generation of humanoid robots, powered by Gemini Robotics.” The company says it will use the capital to ramp up production of Apollo and expand its global network of commercial and pilot deployments. Apptronik has worked on developing 15 robotic systems, including NASA’s humanoid robot Valkyrie. Apptronik’s business is built on a Robotics as a Service model, which includes the robot hardware, software updates, service and support. The company started out of the Human Centered Robotics Lab at the The University of Texas at Austin and has nearly 300 employees, double its size a year ago. Related Crunchbase queries: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
AI Lab Ricursive Intelligence Lands $300M Series A At $4B Valuation Less than Two Months After Launch
Another day, another AI mega raise. Ricursive Intelligence, a frontier AI lab, announced on Monday that it has raised $300 million in a Series A round of funding at a $4 billion valuation. Notably, the financing comes just two months after the Palo Alto, California-based company’s launch. Ricursive just raised its seed round — a $35 million haul at a $750 million valuation in early December. Lightspeed Venture Partners led the latest round, which included participation from DST Global, NVentures (Nvidia’s venture capital arm), Felicis Ventures 1, 49 Palms, Radical AI and Sequoia Capital. Sequoia led Ricursive’s seed financing. Ricursive co-founders Anna Goldie and Azalia Mirhoseini. [Photo courtesy of Finn Baker.] Goldie and Mirhoseini also created AlphaChip, which they claim has been deployed across four generations of Google’s TPU and by external semiconductor companies. “Ricursive is building toward a future where rapid AI and hardware co-evolution becomes reality, unlocking significant gains in performance and energy efficiency,” said Mirhoseini in a statement. Guru Chahal, partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, said in a release: “Anna and Azalia pioneered a new approach to chip design with AlphaChip. At Ricursive, they’re building a full-stack platform that creates a continuous improvement cycle between AI models and the hardware that powers them. On Jan. 20, Humans&, a new AI lab founded by top researchers from Google, Anthropic, xAI, OpenAI and Meta, among others, announced it had raised a massive $480 million seed round at a staggering $4.48 billion valuation. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Exclusive: Zocks Raises $45M Series B From Lightspeed, QED For AI Assistant To Financial Advisers
Zocks, which has built an AI assistant for financial advisers, has raised $45 million in a Series B funding co-led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and QED Investors, the startup told Crunchbase News exclusively. All existing backers, including Motive Ventures and 14Peaks Capital, also participated in the financing. The raise comes less than one year after San Francisco-based Zocks raised a $13.8 million Series A. In total, Zocks has raised $65 million since its 2022 inception. Prior to co-founding Zocks, CEO Mark Gilbert spent more than a decade at Microsoft and more than three years as vice president of product management at Twilio. While at Twilio, Gilbert oversaw compliance and was struck by the amount of information and insights that companies were able to extract from their communications. Akos Ratku and Mark Gilbert, co-founders of Zocks. After leaving the company, he teamed up with Akos Ratku to start Zocks, using artificial intelligence to glean information from discussions by organizing meeting notes. “We were focused on very high security privacy areas, and that’s why we started with, and are 100% focused on, financial services,” Gilbert told Crunchbase News in an interview. “And what we found was the conversations advisers were having with clients had very, very valuable information for them.” The industry as a whole, he said, is understaffed and deals with “a huge amount of manual work.” The goal of Zocks is to combine the communications and AI pieces “to help accelerate and grow financial advisers and financial advisory firms.” The raise is yet another example of the fintech sector’s rebound. Global funding to VC-backed financial technology startups totaled $51.8 billion in 2025, per Crunchbase data. That’s a fairly significant increase of 27% from 2024’s total of $40.8 billion raised. Personalized intelligence Zocks launched its offering in February 2024. Today, its software is used by 5,000 financial firms, including Ameritas Life Insurance, Cambridge Investment Research and Carson Group. The startup typically charges per adviser under a SaaS model, both selling directly to advisers and through enterprise contracts. It has seen 8x year-over-year growth in revenue, according to Gilbert. Agentic AI doesn’t just help pull information from conversations with clients, Gilbert said. It also assists them with follow-up, opening accounts, filling out forms and drafting replies to emails “while still having all of the compliance and privacy that financial services needs,” he added. For example, Zocks doesn’t create recordings of the conversations by default. But its agent listens to the conversations and builds tables of information. So if an adviser says, “tell me all my clients who have children that are coming up on college age but have no 529 plan,” the agent can do so. Or an adviser can ask in Zocks: “find me clients with old 401(k)s held outside our management.” “Zocks will surface that list and suggest what to do next that’s personalized to each of those clients,” Gilbert said. “Then the adviser can take that action with one click.” Proactive AI Gilbert believes that Zocks stands out from other offerings in that it uses agents to do a variety of proactive tasks. “There are a lot of systems out there that are called note takers and that’s very helpful for people,” he said. “The big difference for us is that we’re able to do that as well and take this information to help the advisers get more out of it. We’re trying to anticipate their needs.” Put even more simply, the company wants to help advisers identify new financial planning opportunities across their entire client base and act faster by suggesting what to do next based on the data Zocks gets from all the systems it’s integrated with. Currently, Zocks operates primarily in the U.S. and Canada, but has plans to expand to Europe soon. “There’s a shortage of financial advisers and that seems to be getting worse,” Gilbert said. “I think that’s one of the reasons that we’ve seen such a fast uptake.” Investor attraction Arif Janmohamed, partner at Lightspeed, told Crunchbase News via email that his firm was initially attracted to Zocks’ founding team. “Mark and Akos are naturally customer-centric and they deeply understand how to build enterprise-grade products that are delightful to use, while scalable, secure and extensible,” he said. “Their product vision started with a hero-product, but rapidly expanded into platform capabilities that address the complex requirements of mid to larger enterprises while also scaling down to smaller companies and individual users.” Laura Bock, a partner at QED Investors, said her firm was impressed by Zocks’ ability to break into the enterprise segment early, the depth of its technology, and how “seamlessly” it fits into existing workflows. “They’ve earned the trust of several of the largest RIAs in the country and expanded successfully into adjacent verticals like insurance,” she said, “which is difficult to do without a product that truly works in regulated environments.” Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: A Big Week For AI And Drone Delivery
Want to keep track of the largest startup funding deals in 2025 with our curated list of $100 million-plus venture deals to U.S.-based companies? Check out The Crunchbase Megadeals Board. This is a weekly feature that runs down the week’s top 10 announced funding rounds in the U.S. Check out last week’s biggest funding deal roundup here. Venture investors’ thirst for AI isn’t close to quenched yet. That’s the takeaway from this week’s lineup of large U.S. funding rounds, which was mostly a mix of AI pure-plays and companies with a heavy focus on the technology. The week’s largest round however, a $600 million financing for drone delivery provider Zipline, offered evidence that investors are also keen on platforms and technologies with applications in the physical world. The second-largest round, a $480 million seed deal for upstart AI lab Humans&, meanwhile, showed there’s also still appetite for ultra-ambitious newcomers. 1. Zipline, $600M, drones: Drone delivery unicorn Zipline says it closed on over $600 million at a $7.6 billion valuation from investors including Fidelity, Baillie Gifford, Valor Equity Partners and Tiger Global. South San Francisco, California-based Zipline also says it expects to expand into at least four new states this year, with initial plans to begin service in Houston and Phoenix. 2. Humans&, $480M, AI: Humans&, an AI lab working to apply the technology in ways that are centered “around people and their relationships with each other,” secured $480 million in seed funding. The company was founded in September by top researchers from Google, Anthropic, xAI, OpenAI and Meta. 3. Baseten, $300M, AI infrastructure: AI infrastructure startup Baseten reportedly raised $300 million with backing from IVP, CapitalG and Nvidia. The financing set a $5 billion valuation for the 7-year-old, San Francisco-based company. 4. OpenEvidence, $250M, medical AI: OpenEvidence, an AI platform for doctors, announced that it picked up $250 million in a Series D funding round that doubled its valuation to $12 billion. Thrive Capital and DST co-led the round, which marks the fourth fundraise for the Miami-based startup in less than a year. 5. Noveon Magnetics, $215M, rare earth magnets: San Marcos, Texas-based Noveon Magnetics, a manufacturer of sintered rare earth permanent magnets, says it secured $215 million in Series C funding, including $200 million from One Investment Management. The money will go toward expanding the company’s rare earth magnet manufacturing capacity. 6. Upscale AI, $200M, AI infrastructure: AI networking infrastructure startup Upscale AI landed $200 million in Series A funding led by Tiger Global, Premji Invest and Xora Innovation. The financing set a valuation of more than $1 billion for the Santa Clara, California-based company, which was founded less than two years ago. 7. (tied) Preply, $150M, online tutoring: Language learning marketplace Preply raised $150 million in Series D funding led by WestCap. The financing reportedly sets a $1.2 billion valuation for the 14-year-old, Brookline, Massachusetts-based company. 7. (tied) Inferact, $150M, AI inference: Inferact, a startup founded by creators and maintainers of open-source LLM inference engine vLLM, announced its launch along with $150 million in initial funding. Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners led the financing, which set an $800 million valuation for the company. 7. (tied) Claroty, $150M, cybersecurity: Security provider Claroty picked up $150 million in Series F funding led by Golub Growth. The 11-year-old company, founded in Israel and now headquartered in New York, has raised close to $900 million in equity funding to date, per Crunchbase data. 10. Zanskar, $115M, geothermal energy: Salt Lake City-based Zanskar, a startup applying AI to geothermal exploration, raised $115 million in Series C funding led by Spring Lane Capital and joined by a long list of new and existing investors. Methodology We tracked the largest announced rounds in the Crunchbase database that were raised by U.S.-based companies for the period of Jan. 17-23. Although most announced rounds are represented in the database, there could be a small time lag as some rounds are reported late in the week. Illustration: Dom Guzman
Capital One To Buy Fintech Startup Brex At Less Than Half Its Peak Valuation In $5.15B Deal
Banking giant Capital One announced on Thursday that it is acquiring fintech startup Brex for $5.15 billion in a cash and stock deal. The news was big in the fintech world with Brex claiming the pairing would represent “the largest bank-fintech deal in history.” (Visa had planned to buy Plaid in 2020 for $5.3 billion until that deal fell apart a year later due to regulatory concerns.) In a joint statement, Capital One founder, chairman and CEO Richard Fairbank said it’s always been a goal of the bank “to build a payments company at the frontier of the technology revolution.” “Acquiring Brex accelerates this journey, especially in the business payments marketplace,” he said. “Brex invented the integrated combination of corporate credit cards, spend management software and banking together in a single platform. They have taken the rarest of journeys for a fintech, building a vertically integrated platform from the bottom of the tech stack to the top.” While $5 billion is no small sum, it is less than half the $12.3 billion that San Francisco-based Brex was valued at in October 2021. In total, the company has raised $1.7 billion in equity and debt since its 2017 inception — with about $1.2 billion of that being venture funding. Early investors such as Ribbit Capital, which led Brex’s $7 million Series A in 2017, are likely quite pleased with the outcome. Investors who wrote checks at its later stages are likely less so. Other early backers include Y Combinator, Max Levchin, Peter Thiel and SV Angel 1 . The company has 1,100 employees, according to a Brex spokesperson who also told Crunchbase News that its business is growing 40% year over year and is profitable. Customers include Anthropic, Robinhood, DoorDash, Toast, Zoom and Intel, among others. Pedro Franceschi, CEO of Brex. [Courtesy photo] Close friends Franceschi and Henrique Dubugras, who co-founded Brex, started working together when they founded another company, Brazilian payment processing startup Pagar.me, in 2012 at the wee age of 16. That company ended up getting acquired by Stone Pagamentos for “tens of millions of dollars” — before the two had even gone to college. A change of plans Brex began its life as a buzzy startup that served mostly other startups. But in June 2022 — three months after announcing it would make a big push into software and enterprise — Brex confirmed that it was apparently abandoning a segment it started to serve: small to medium-sized businesses. The abrupt news didn’t sit well with many of the SMBs it served. Over time, Brex began to seemingly fall behind its largest rival, Ramp, when it came to fundraising and revenue generation. Ramp as of last November was valued at $32 billion, having raised a total of $2.3 billion in equity. By joining Capital One, Brex says it will accelerate Capital One’s presence in corporate cards and spend management, complementing its existing leadership in SMB banking. Capital One’s purchase of Brex is slated to close midyear. Fintech M&A expected to pick up On the heels of a strong year for venture funding to fintech startups, sources who spoke with Crunchbase News said they expect exits — both M&A deals and IPOs — in the sector to gain steam in 2026. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Exclusive: Cambio Lands $18M At $100M Valuation For AI-Powered Commercial Real Estate Software
Cambio, a startup that has built AI-powered commercial real estate software for institutional investors, has raised $18 million in a Series A round at a $100 million valuation, it tells Crunchbase News exclusively. Maverick Ventures led the financing, which included participation from Y Combinator, Adverb and angel investors from OpenAI, Anthropic and Notion, among others. Founded in 2022 by former institutional commercial real estate operators Leia de Guzman and Stephanie Grayson, Cambio has now raised a total of $22 million. It participated in Y Combinator’s summer 2022 cohort and then went into “R&D mode.” The San Francisco-based company launched its offering at the end of 2023, and de Guzman claims it has since seen “rapid adoption” across enterprise customers and geographies — scaling to 35 countries and to more than 2 billion square feet in assets. It recently opened a London office to support EU and APAC growth. From ‘messy’ to investment-grade data Put simply, Cambio uses large language models and agentic artificial intelligence workflows to turn “messy building data into investor-grade decisions and reporting.” And it claims to do so within minutes. “Commercial real estate owners sit on thousands of pages of unstructured documents — spreadsheets, PDFs, invoices, energy audits, regulatory filings — that historically required months of manual analysis,” de Guzman told Crunchbase News. “Cambio applies large language models and agentic AI to ingest, reason over, and synthesize that data automatically, delivering investment-grade capital and compliance decisions in minutes.” Cambio, she said, is architected around agentic AI software that can reason across unstructured data, run multi-step analyses, and “continuously adapt as regulations, assets, and market conditions change.” In a nutshell, it aims to help institutional investors figure out where to deploy capital, which assets to prioritize, and how to maximize returns. Customers include Oxford Properties, Nuveen, Principal, BGO and Beacon Capital, among others. The market opportunity, according to de Guzman, is enormous: commercial real estate is estimated to be a $20 trillion-plus industry in the U.S. alone. In 2025, global real estate-related startups pulled in about $10.5 billion in seed- through growth-stage financing, per Crunchbase data. That’s up about 17% from $9 billion in 2024. An industry track record Part of Cambio’s strategy is to have built a (largely female) leadership team that has directly worked in the space it is trying to serve. De Guzman and Grayson began their careers at large institutional firms such as KKR and Oxford Properties. The startup also recently hired Goldman Sachs alumna Lizzie Leon to serve as head of product innovation. Katerina Kaimakamis, formerly of Oxford Properties and CBRE, has been tapped to serve as lead of Cambio’s European and APAC business. The moves from institutions to a startup serving them reflect a broader shift happening in commercial real estate, noted Grayson — the choice “to step inside AI transformation, and not just observe it from the sidelines.” Cambio operates an enterprise SaaS revenue model. It plans to use its new capital primarily to scale product and engineering. Ryan Isono, managing director at Maverick Ventures, told Crunchbase News via email that his firm was impressed with the fact that Cambio’s founders had spent more than two decades running commercial real estate portfolios. “That lived experience matters,” he said. “It gave them an intuitive understanding that this wasn’t a tooling problem – it was a workflow problem.” Maverick was also impressed by the fact that Cambio wasn’t trying “to bolt AI onto existing processes.” ‘Re-architecting the workflow’ “Cambio isn’t automating around the edges, it’s re-architecting the workflow end to end in an AI-native way, with a deeply product-minded approach,” Isono said. “Knowing what to build, which workflow to wedge into, and how to sequence products requires having lived these workflows, which Leia and Steph have.” The investor also praised the startup’s technical team, noting that CTO Leon Chen was one of the earliest backend engineers at Faire, a marketplace and wholesale platform that was valued at nearly $13 billion in 2022. That technical team, he said, also includes Ph.D.s with “deep expertise” in building science. “That matters because commercial real estate is fundamentally tied to the physical world. Much of the data isn’t clean or fully digitized, and automating it is meaningfully harder than in purely digital domains,” Isono said. “Solving that unlocks a uniquely valuable dataset that compounds over time.” Related Crunchbase queries: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
The IPO Window Won’t Stay Open On Its Own
We like to talk about the IPO window as something that’s either open or closed. But as the occupant of an old house with windows once held up with pulleys, I’ve also encountered a third type: A window that opens easily and then proceeds to slam shut on your fingers if you don’t prop it up or get out of the way. This, unfortunately, could be the window type that most closely resembles the current IPO climate. It looked pretty open as the year commenced. But it also looks like it could be slamming down. Take some of last year’s IPO darlings. Remember Figma? The design software company soared to a $68 billion valuation after more than tripling in its July debut. Today it’s valued around $14 billion — well below what Adobe planned to pay in its ill-fated acquisition attempt three years ago. The biggest fintech and crypto offerings have also fallen. Stablecoin issuer Circle is down more than two-thirds from its peak in June. Buy now, pay later provider Klarna is near the lowest point since its September IPO. And online banking platform Chime is also well below its first-day price. Two other high-profile offerings late last year — StubHub and Navan — are also down from where they started. Now, these aren’t horrible underperformances, by IPO standards. It’s not like the 2022 SPAC meltdown, when companies went from multibillion-dollar valuations to practically worthless in a few quarters. And some of last year’s splashiest market newcomers have done well, like Coreweave, which is still well above its IPO price. But still, we were hoping to see the stage set for a boom in new offerings in 2026. Seeing last year’s most talked about new market entrants largely continue to underwhelm isn’t a great backdrop to prepare for some of the biggest offerings of all time. That’s closer to understatement than exaggeration. SpaceX, which is reportedly looking to launch an IPO by this summer, was reportedly previously eyeing a valuation of $1.5 trillion, which would make it by far the most valuable new listing of all time. OpenAI and Anthropic are also considering the IPO path. OpenAI has reportedly contemplated filing this year, with a target valuation of up to $1 trillion. Anthropic, recently valued around $350 billion, is looking to potentially beat its rival to the public markets. Moreover, there’s a long list of other contenders in sectors from cybersecurity to health to defense tech. Fintech looks particularly poised for exits, with Plaid, Ramp, Monzo and Revolut among the favored pre-IPO names. One likely outcome in coming quarters is that startup backers and IPO underwriters will manage to keep the new offering window propped open long enough to get some bid deals to market. If you are a one-of-a-kind company like SpaceX, investor enthusiasm to own a piece of a category-defining player will likely be high enough to support valuations that might look crazy ambitious for anyone else. The same could apply to OpenAI. The more typical IPO candidate — say an enterprise software unicorn with a viable AI strategy and decently growing revenue — won’t have the same excitement generation capacity. So ordinary deals won’t likely be able to prop open a window. Hopefully they won’t be left in the worst position if it suddenly slams shut. Related Crunchbase queries: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Venture Capitalists Tap Out On Funding Our Fitness Goals
If you’ve been slogging through January on a mission to get in better shape, you’ve got company. Improving health and fitness is reliably the most popular New Year’s resolution. It’s no simple goal to achieve, of course. But these days there are almost infinite ways to spend money trying, including classes, gear, biometric trackers, supplements, and so on. Just don’t expect newly funded startups to get you to the finish line. Venture investment in the fitness and wellness space peaked about four years ago. It hit a cyclical low last year, with just over $5 billion in reported global funding. Where the money is going That said, it’s not as if investors have abandoned the space, and there are still companies securing big rounds. In recent months, the standout was Oura, maker of a smart ring that collects data on dozens of personal health and wellness metrics. In October, the 12-year-old Finnish company announced that it closed on more than $900 million at an impressive $11 billion valuation. Another longtime player in the space, fitness app Strava, reportedly reached a $2.2 billion valuation earlier this year after raising an undisclosed amount of new funding led by Sequoia Capital. And on the wellness front, LetsGetChecked, an at-home testing platform, picked up $165 million in a Series F early last year. Getting a good night’s rest is also fundamental for healthy living, and in this arena smart sleep system developer Eight Sleep was a standout. The 12-year-old company raised $100 million for its Series D last summer. Below, we put together a list of some of the larger funding recipients this past year. Outside the venture sphere, private equity and growth investors are also eyeing the intersection of fitness and AI. Last week, fitness and wellness brands Mindbody, Booker, ClassPass and EGYM announced they are merging under a parent company, Playlist. The transaction includes $785 million in new equity investment, led by Affinity Partners, and values the combined company at $7.5 billion. Where the money isn’t going Yet while investors are keen on some fitness startups strategies, others have fallen out of favor. So where is the money not going? Connected fitness equipment startups are one of the areas that have lost financial support in a big way. Shares of what used to be the sector’s most famous success story — Peloton — are down over 95% from the pandemic-era highs. Others that raised considerable capital have been mostly running on existing reserves. This includes rowing machine startup Hydrow, which raised more than $360 million between 2018 and 2022, but hasn’t had a reported financing since, per Crunchbase data. Another, smart home gym maker Tonal, secured $580 million but has not landed a fresh round in nearly three years. Prediction: More AI As we look ahead to contemplate what fitness and fitness-adjacent areas might be best primed to attract investment, it’s not quite obvious. For now, IPO activity in the space looks muted, though last week’s Playlist rollup offers a sign that acquirers see some value. Perhaps for now, the only thing one can be comfortable prognosticating is the same thing that applies to every sector on earth: that AI-enabled offerings will be more widespread and more heavily funded. Now, if only the AI could lift weights and go on runs for us too. Related Crunchbase queries: Illustration: Dom Guzman