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How Smaller Funds Can Access Top Deals In A Competitive Market
By Andrew Gershfeld For a long time, smaller venture funds leaned on the same advantages: speed, flexibility and deep sector expertise. Conventional wisdom held that while big firms moved slowly, smaller ones could act swiftly, write early checks and provide highly targeted support in a narrow space. That story no longer holds up. Big funds have learned to play smallAndrew Gershfeld The largest firms now look less like monolithic institutions and more like multidisciplinary studios. They hire domain-specific advisers, create sector-focused practice groups, and develop detailed post-investment playbooks, offering the same “tailored” value propositions that once distinguished niche funds, and with more resources. The numbers underline the tilt. In 2024, 30 funds captured close to 75% of all venture dollars. Researchers also found that 74% of persistent VC success comes from better deal flow after early wins. Once a firm builds credibility, it gets preferential access to the most promising startups, and the cycle reinforces itself. Why early access matters more than expertise Money looks the same to every founder. Expertise can be purchased — whether through consultants, advisory boards or strategic hires. What cannot be replicated is the trust built before a round becomes competitive. That is where smaller funds still have an opening. The real advantage is not expertise but access — specifically, early access. By the time a startup is widely circulating its deck, the outcome already favors whoever has been in the room with the founder from the get-go. One clear example is Initialized Capital’s early bet on Coinbase. In 2012, out of a $7 million debut fund, the firm wrote a $300,000 check into the crypto exchange’s seed round, when most investors dismissed the sector as fringe. By the time of its IPO in 2021, that stake was worth $2.4 billion. What set Initialized apart was being in the room early before the deal became obvious. What successful small funds are doing differently Some smaller funds are already adapting. They no longer think of themselves as check-writers waiting for polished pieces. Instead, they operate as active participants in a founder’s journey well before the company raises institutional capital. That shift shows up in specific behaviors. Smaller funds are mapping relationships with accelerators, angels and operators months ahead of a raise. They spend time in communities where founders are still testing ideas. They make introductions — to customers, hires and partners — at a moment when those introductions can change a company’s trajectory. They also mobilize their portfolios. Founders are often the best scouts, and funds that cultivate reciprocal relationships expand their reach in a way no spreadsheet of leads can. Even in competitive areas like AI or biotech, smaller funds can differentiate by serving as a bridge to strategic players. A warm introduction to Nvidia, Microsoft or a top-tier research lab validates a startup long before an institutional round is announced. These are the kinds of moves that earn trust before the larger firms even notice the opportunity. The mindset shift What it comes down to is mindset. Smaller funds can no longer think of themselves as investors selling capital. They need to act as nodes in a network: connecting earlier, engaging more personally, and maintaining persistence long after a term sheet is signed. In today’s market, competition for quality deals has never been fiercer. The firms that succeed won’t be the ones who claim they are faster or more specialized. They will be the ones who build trust before capital is even on the table. Smaller funds can still win, but only by rewriting the playbook altogether. Andrew Gershfeld is a general partner at Flint Capital, a VC firm investing in early-stage startups in AI, cybersecurity and digital health, and helping them expand into the U.S. market.
AI Is Gorging On Venture Capital. This Is Why ‘Physical AI’ Is Next
By Alberto Onetti From venture capital to AI capital? Silicon Valley continues to set the pace for global innovation. In 2025, scaleup investments reached $111 billion. Of that, a staggering $103.5 billion — 93% of the total — went into AI. In a nutshell, “VC investments” in Silicon Valley now essentially mean “AI investments.” For every dollar invested in technology, 93 cents flow into AI. The artificial intelligence sector is literally gorging on venture capital. These are just some of the findings of our latest report, “Physical AI. Shaping the Market of the New Possible,” created by Mind the Bridge alongside Crunchbase and unveiled at our latest Scaleup Summit in San Francisco earlier this month. Whether this proves to be a bubble or a long-term global trend is still unclear. As Crunchbase News Senior Data Editor Gené Teare pointed out at the opening of the summit: “We are two to three years into a new investment cycle. Despite the billions raised by foundation model companies, we are still in the early stages of funding to AI, which will shape the next two decades.” What is clear is that Silicon Valley is betting everything on AI. And when the world’s biggest “casino” goes all in, it’s hard to imagine the game ending any other way. Physical AI: The next leap in the AI revolution But within AI, there are multiple waves. The first major wave was generative AI. After the billion-dollar rounds of OpenAI, Anthropic and Inflection AI in 2023, capital concentrated around just a handful of foundational model players. By 2025, OpenAI ($40 billion) and Anthropic ($13 billion) alone absorbed the lion’s share of the $80 billion invested in the sector. The lower figures of 2024 did not mark a slowdown, but rather a physiological pause after these gargantuan rounds, with players focused on scaling operations and deploying the capital already raised while waiting for the next big wave. And that new wave already has a name: physical AI. Robots that can think, rather than simply execute preprogrammed commands, are becoming reality. The ambition is clear: to move AI beyond the screen and into the physical world. In just nine months of 2025, scaleups in this field have already raised more than $16 billion. Leading the way are Meta’s large-scale investment in Scale AI — a platform focused on training data for real-world applications in autonomous mobility, AR/VR and robotics — as well as Figure AI’s new $1 billion round for humanoid robotics, and Neuralink’s $650 million raise for brain-computer interfaces. This new physical AI wave — born from the convergence of generative AI, autonomous agents and the real world — opens up an almost limitless range of industrial applications. With tens of billions of dollars already flowing into the sector, physical AI carries the promise of revolutionizing manufacturing and beyond. If the trend holds, as I believe it will, Silicon Valley may be at the center of a new transformative cycle: from thinking machines (generative AI) to acting machines (physical AI). AI’s heavy hitters Generative AI scaleups account for 15% of companies but 45% of the capital invested historically in AI scaleups. Meanwhile, the emerging physical AI vertical seems to be following a similar trajectory: 254 scaleups (9% of the total) have already absorbed 18% of all AI funding. These dynamics highlight two key points: Silicon Valley: A century of reinvention Once again, Silicon Valley confirms itself as the undisputed epicenter of global innovation. Over the past century — starting with early defense-related investments in the 1930s and 1940s — it has been the cradle of groundbreaking technological transformations that reshaped the global economy: from integrated circuits and personal computers to the internet, mobile, cloud computing, social media and nowadays AI. Brace yourself for disruption. For more insights on Silicon Valley and physical AI, see Mind the Bridge’s reports, available for free download here. Alberto Onetti Alberto Onetti is chairman of Mind the Bridge and a professor at University of Insubria. He is a serial entrepreneur who has started three startups in his career, the last of which is Funambol, among the five Italian scaleups that have raised the largest amount of capital. He is recognized among the leading international experts in open innovation and has wide experience in setting up and managing open innovation projects — venture clients, venture builders, intrapreneurship, CVCs — with large multinational companies, as well as advising and training on this subject. Onetti has a column on Sifted (Financial Times) and several other tech blogs. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
Legal Tech Investment Hits All-Time High With Filevine Funding
Funding to legal tech startups has hit a record high in 2025, driven by investor enthusiasm for AI’s potential to bring more automation to the legal profession. Per Crunchbase data, companies in the legal and legal technology sectors have raised just over $2.4 billion so far in 2025 in seed through growth-stage funding. With over three months left in the year, it’s already the highest annual total on record. Filevine snags $400M A giant funding announcement this week played a big role in pushing the totals higher. Filevine, a provider of legal practice management software, announced Tuesday that it closed on two previously undisclosed rounds totaling $400 million 1. Insight Partners led the first round and joined Accel and Halo Experience Co. to co-lead the second. Founded in 2014, Salt Lake City-based Filevine has expanded its platform over the years to cover more tasks for legal practices. Use cases touted on its website include time tracking, billing, case management software and secure document management, among others. Filevine plans to use the funds in part to continue expanding its AI capabilities. The company said it counts nearly 6,000 customers and 100,000 users. Other big fundraisers, and plenty of seed deals too Several other startups have also closed on sizable funding this year, including: Notably, however, the boom in legal tech venture funding isn’t only about big rounds for prominent unicorns. The intersection of AI and legal work is one of the more active areas for seed funding, a trend we first observed last year and that has continued into 2025 as well. Nothing mysterious here For those seeking an explanation for why legal tech funding is on the rise, there is an obvious one that comes to the fore. In essence: Much legal work is boring and repetitive, which makes it well-suited to offload more tasks to AI. In fact, among all professions impacted by artificial intelligence, legal work is expected to be one of the most affected by automation. In one oft-cited Goldman Sachs report, analysts estimated that an astounding 44% of legal work could eventually be automated. AI-enabled software will be taking on much of this workload. On another side note, in addition to being repetitive, legal work also tends to be expensive, as anyone who has hired a lawyer can probably attest. While it remains to be seen whether AI will reduce the cost of legal services, it should at least free up time for lawyers and support staff to put their billable hours to the most productive use. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
VCs Put Customer Service AI On Speed Dial
Most people who’ve ever called customer service share the experience of navigating endless automated prompts in the hopes of getting to a human. For years, it’s been a familiar process for more complex questions and issues. As AI technology advances, however, there are successively fewer cases that demand this. AI chatbots, using voice or text, can handle much of what used to require a person. If startup investors have their way, expect AI agents to be taking on a lot more. In recent months, investors have poured hundreds of millions of dollars into an assortment of companies developing tools to automate customer service-related tasks, Crunchbase data shows. Big rounds on the rise They’re apparently not slowing down either. One of the most highly valued startups in the space — Sierra — just closed a $350 million financing at a $10 billion valuation The 2-year-old company offers tools for organizations to build AI agents to perform customer support tasks. Sierra’s appeal stems in part from its founding team: former Salesforce 1 co-CEO and current OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor and former Google executive Clay Bavor. The company raised $175 million less than a year ago at a $4.5 billion valuation. However, it’s not the only startup in the space attracting investor interest. Rather, San Francisco-based Sierra is one of a growing roster of startups at the intersection of AI and customer service that have secured sizable rounds in recent months. Using Crunchbase data, we put together a sample list of 11 such companies. Taking on repetitive language tasks Rising investor interest around customer service tech is one manifestation of a growing theme: AI taking on tasks that previously resisted automation because they require a sophisticated grasp of language. “Every job is going to be impacted in some way by these language models,” Kent Bennett, a partner at Bessemer Venture Partners and a heavy investor in enterprise AI, told Crunchbase News. For customer service in particular, he sees benefits for employers, including enabling workers to be more productive by offloading mundane tasks to AI. Certainly startups are making this argument. Sierra’s website points to a case involving a headgear brand that built a voice-capable AI agent in a couple weeks to handle product questions. It claims that: “Within 30 days, the agent resolved nearly half of incoming questions that would normally require human input.” Capacity, which offers an automation platform for contact centers, sees a strong use case in tech support, with the ability to auto-respond to common questions and prioritize which issues merit the fastest response. And Forethought, a provider of generative AI tools for customer support, lists several prominent companies that have deployed its offerings, including Grammarly and Upwork. Broad impacts Of course what’s good for startups isn’t always good for the broader job market. As AI tools automate more aspects of customer service, it’s not hard to predict that the end result will be fewer jobs in the space. That is already happening at Salesforce, which CEO Marc Benioff said has cut about 4,000 customer service roles since AI agents now do more of the work. Expect similar announcements to come from early adopters. For those of us who are receiving rather than providing customer support services, meanwhile, it’s still early days for forming opinions on how well AI agents perform in these roles. Probably one sign of success is if we don’t really notice the role of AI and simply manage to get an accurate response without having to wait. Related Crunchbase query: Illustration: Dom Guzman
5 Companies Kick Off IPO Roadshow
After the U.S. government’s tariffs plan scared off several companies earlier this year, a flurry of startups announced Tuesday that they plan to take the IPO plunge. Five companies in total kicked off their roadshows: Klarna, Figure, Gemini, Legence and Black Rock Coffee Bar. Their plans come as the IPO market shows signs of warming up in the second half of 2025. Perhaps the most eagerly anticipated of the bunch is Klarna, which started out offering buy now, pay later services and has since expanded its business model. The company, founded in 2005, has raised nearly $6.2 billion in funding from investors such as Sequoia Capital, General Atlantic and Silver Lake, with Santander adding $1.63 billion to that total in a debt financing in August. Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman
The IPO Market Is Opening Up. These 14 Companies Could Be Next.
After a prolonged winter, the IPO market in 2025 has finally thawed, with companies from Chime to Figma to CoreWeave launching big debuts in the first eight months of the year. So, who’s next? To help answer that question, we used Crunchbase’s predictive intelligence tools to curate a list of 14 venture-backed companies in sectors ranging from AI to fintech to consumer goods that could be on tap as IPO candidates in the foreseeable future. Some of them are known IPO hopefuls; others, more under-the-radar picks that nonetheless have strong credentials for a public-market launch. Let’s take a closer look. Fintech Stripe There is perhaps no IPO more anticipated than that of payments giant Stripe. And, unsurprisingly, the fintech is “very likely” to go public, according to Crunchbase predictions. However, Stripe seems to be doing so well as a private company that some people speculate it has no reason to take to the public markets. Stripe, which has dual headquarters in San Francisco and Ireland, is not only the most-valuable fintech in the world, it’s one of the most-valuable private companies, period. But instead of going public, it’s thus far been offering early investors and employees liquidity through secondary sales. In February, for example, Stripe announced a tender offer in which investors would buy up shares from current and former employees at a valuation of $91.5 billion. Stripe passed the $1.4 trillion total payment volume threshold in 2024. Says F-Prime: “There are no perfectly reliable sources for Stripe’s revenue, but some sources estimate they surpassed $16B in 2023.” Since its 2010 inception, Stripe has raised more than $9 billion in funding from investors such as General Catalyst, Y Combinator, Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital and Khosla Ventures. Whether it finally decides to take the plunge into the public markets remains to be seen, but if it does, there is no doubt its filing will be devoured by media and fintech enthusiasts alike. Airwallex Airwallex, a Singapore-based global payments and financial platform, is also “very likely” to go public, per Crunchbase predictions. CEO Jack Zhang has stated that the plan is to have Airwallex make its public market debut by the end of 2026, although the company is reportedly “not in a rush” to list. Interestingly, Airwallex rejected a $1.2 billion acquisition offer from Stripe in 2018. And that probably wasn’t a bad move. Founded in 2015 in Melbourne, Australia, the Stripe competitor has raised more than $1.2 billion in funding and was valued at over $6.2 billion as of its last raise — a $300 million Series F in May 2025 that included $150 million in secondary share transfers. Investors include Sequoia Capital, HSG, Blackbird Ventures, Hillhouse Investment and Salesforce Ventures 1, among others. In August 2024, CNBC reported that Airwallex had reached an annual revenue run rate of $500 million after seeing major growth in its North American and European businesses. In announcing its Series F, the company projected that it was “on track to hit $1 billion in annualized revenue in 2025, as businesses of all sizes look to expand globally without friction.” That follows its achievement of $720 million in annualized revenue in March, up 90% year over year, according to the company. It touts more than 150,000 customers globally, including Bill, Bird, Brex, Deel, Rippling, Navan, Qantas and ZipHQ. — Mary Ann Azevedo Enterprise tech and AI Cerebras Systems We know that AI chip company Cerebras, founded in 2016 by Andrew Feldman, has been gearing up to go public. The Sunnyvale, California-based company filed with the SEC to go public at the end of 2024. It then delayed its offering due to regulatory scrutiny over its ties to UAE-based G42, which has since been cleared by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. The company is considered a “probable” IPO candidate by Crunchbase. In its filing, Cerebras noted its dependence on a single customer, Group 42, a subsidiary of its investor G42, responsible for more than 80% of revenue in 2023 and the first half of 2024. Cerebras has built a larger chip that is 10x faster for AI training and inference compared to leading GPU solutions, according to the company. Its customers include Mistral AI, Perplexity and the Mayo Clinic. Cerebras is reported to be raising $1 billion in funding which could delay its plans to go public. Still, the market conditions are good for an AI chip company. Nvidia has topped $4 trillion in value and Astera Labs, which went public in March 2024 at $36 per share, has doubled its price from mid-July to mid-August to over $180. Databricks Databricks, at the center of AI and data, is a strong candidate to go public in the next year. The San Francisco-based company is one of the 10 most-valuable private companies in the world, with a reported $3 billion in revenue run rate as of Jan. 31, and on track to deliver positive free cash flow. In December, Databricks raised a $10 billion funding, the largest round in 2024, which valued it at $62 billion. The 12-year-old company has also been on a buying spree, notably purchasing AI infrastructure builder MosaicML in 2023, data management service Tabular in 2024, and sql database solution developer Neon in 2025, each at $1 billion or more. Crunchbase indicates it’s a “probable” IPO candidate. — Gené Teare Clay Clay sits at the red-hot intersection of AI and marketing and is a “probable” IPO candidate, per Crunchbase predictions. Its growth metrics and scale seem to support that outlook, with the company projecting $100 million in 2025 revenue — triple its 2024 figure. It has likewise tripled its valuation in just over a year from $500 million to $3.1 billion in a $100 million Series C raise last month. The New York-based startup, founded in 2017, is reportedly nearing profitability. It’s backed by IPO-savvy investors including CapitalG, Meritech Capital Partners and Sequoia Capital, further bolstering its public-market credentials. The company claims to have invented the “GTM (go-to-market) engineering role,” which CEO and co-founder Kareem Amin has described as “the first true AI-native profession.” — Marlize van Romburgh Cybersecurity Ledger Crypto wallet startup Ledger is “very likely” to IPO, according to Crunchbase predictions. That makes sense, as the French startup, founded in 2014, is well-positioned at the intersection of two currently hot industries: cybersecurity and blockchain. Paris-based Ledger offers a hardware wallet to secure crypto private keys. It has raised some $577 million from venture investors including Molten Ventures and Samsung Ventures, per Crunchbase. CEO Pascal Gauthier told European tech publication Sifted in June that Ledger is actively thinking about a U.S. stock market debut, likely within the next three years. It also has plans to expand beyond crypto security into cybersecurity more broadly. While he didn’t disclose revenue figures, Gauthier said Ledger has sold 8 million of its devices to date and estimated that 20% of the world’s crypto assets are protected via the company’s wallets. “Our size is compatible with an IPO,” he said. “That’s a short-medium term vision.” 1Password It’s “probable” that security startup 1Password will go public, according to Crunchbase’s prediction model. That makes sense, given the Toronto-based startup’s disclosed financials. The company was founded in 2005 and bootstrapped for its first 14 years before receiving its first outside investment from Accel in 2019. It’s gone on to raise $920.1 million total from venture investors, per Crunchbase. Its most recent raise was in 2022, when it landed a $6.2 billion valuation in a $620 million Iconiq Growth-led round. While 1Password hasn’t raised since then, it likely hasn’t needed to: Co-CEO David Faugno told CRN in February that the company has been profitable since the get-go and now has more than 150,000 customers, with 75% of its business selling to enterprises. While the company hasn’t made any formal moves toward an IPO, Faugno told CRN that “we do believe that this platform and this company can be a very large, standalone business. And we do believe that public markets are a likely stop on that journey, and an accelerator of that journey.” Tanium Tanium, founded in 2007, is a frequent guest on IPO predictions lists, our own included. That’s likely because the endpoint management startup has raised a whopping $1 billion from private-market investors including Franklin Templeton, Andreessen Horowitz, TPG, Wellington Management and IVP. It has also disclosed big revenue numbers to boot, telling Forbes that ARR topped $700 million in 2024 and that it had free cash flow margins north of 10%, making it profitable on an EBITDA basis. The company’s most recent funding-round valuation is $9 billion, though that dates to 2021. But trading on secondary-market platforms including Forge has reportedly valued the company lower — around $4 billion — more recently. Kirkland, Washington-based Tanium hasn’t disclosed going-public plans, and CEO Dan Streetman — brought on last year to take over from co-founder Orion Hindawi — told Forbes “we feel very comfortable as a private company.” Still, if it were to pursue an IPO, Tanium may see a receptive market following data security platform Rubrik’s successful IPO last year. — Marlize van Romburgh Consumer startups Madison Reed Founded in 2013, hair-color brand Madison Reed has had quite some time to build up a following, and it continues to expand its reach. Launched as an online brand, it also currently sells in brick-and-mortar stores and operates a network of hair color bars. Co-founded and led by Amy Errett, a longtime consumer-focused partner at VC firm True Ventures, the San Francisco-headquartered company has raised over $220 million in equity funding as well as $50 million in debt financing. Crunchbase grades it as a “probable” IPO candidate. Skims Skims, the shapewear brand co-founded by Kim Kardashian in 2019, has expanded its way into a host of product lines including sleepwear and activewear in addition to its core shapewear offerings. Funding has followed. The company has raised more than $700 million in seed and venture investment and attracted a host of well-known backers, including Thrive Capital and Wellington Management. It also has a knack for staying in the news, boosted of late by a controversial sculpting face wrap. Could an IPO be next? Crunchbase predicts that move is “probable.” — Joanna Glasner Quince It’s unusual, to say the least, for a D2C clothing retailer to land on an IPO watch list like this one in the year 2025, but Quince is the exception. The San Francisco-based startup is a “probable” IPO candidate, per Crunchbase, a prediction likely fueled by its reportedly fast revenue growth, back-to-back funding deals, and strong brand appeal among Gen Z and millennials. The company has raised more than $260 million from investors to date, not yet including an in-the-works $200 million Iconiq Capital-led Series D that would reportedly value the company at more than $4.5 billion — double its year-earlier valuation. Quince bucks the trend when it comes to fashion startups, which have seen venture investment fall off precipitously since the peak year of 2023. — Marlize van Romburgh Health/biotech Commure Mountain View, California-based Commure, a provider of AI-enabled software for health systems and clinicians, has raised more than $800 million in venture funding to date, including a $200 million June round led by General Catalyst, per Crunchbase data. The company also touts that its ARR, in the hundreds of millions, has doubled for three consecutive years. Those sound like the kind of metrics that IPO investors like, and Crunchbase says a listing is a probable outcome. Inari Inari is hoping to pioneer technology for seeds that will enable plants to make the most efficient use of land, water and fertilizer. Founded in 2016, the Cambridge, Massachusetts-based company has raised more than $720 million in equity funding to date, including a $144 million January financing. In terms of IPO potential, it helps that the company is employing two hot technologies: AI-powered predictive design and multiplex gene editing. Inari is another probable IPO candidate according to Crunchbase. — Joanna Glasner Defense/spach tech Sierra Space Sierra Space is firmly on the IPO radar. The company, named a “very likely” IPO candidate by Crunchbase, commands more than $3.4 billion in contracts (including with NASA) and has raised $1.7 billion in total venture investment at a $5.3 billion valuation from heavyweights including General Atlantic and BlackRock. The company has several marquee projects advancing, which include its Dream Chaser spaceplane and Orbital Reef commercial station. It also enjoys the benefit of an increasingly bullish market for space and defense startups, which have raised robust venture investment this year. The sector has already seen a successful 2025 IPO in the form of Firefly Aerospace’s August public-market debut — could Sierra be next? — Marlize van Romburgh Related Crunchbase query: Related reading: Methodology Crunchbase’s IPO predictions utilize Crunchbase data — including funding and valuation, and milestones such as financial growth, key leadership hires, market share expansion and headcount growth — to forecast the likelihood of a private company launching an IPO, providing a probability score and its supporting evidence. Read more about Crunchbase’s Predictions & Insights and its methodology for IPO predictions here. Illustration: Dom Guzman
The Week’s 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: Commonwealth Fusion’s Giant Financing Leads Otherwise Slow Week For Big Deals
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 rounds here. Hoping to be the first company to commercialize fusion power, Commonwealth Fusion Systems led the pack by a long shot for funding this week, pulling in $863 million for its latest round. Beyond that deal, however, it was a rather slow week for large startup funding rounds, although we did see some good-sized financings for the fintech, biotech and vertical AI sectors. 1. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, $863M, fusion energy: Devens, Massachusetts-based Commonwealth Fusion Systems, a developer of commercial fusion energy systems, announced that it raised $863 million in what it described as Series B2 financing from a long list of investors including Nvidia’s NVentures. Commonwealth said it is moving closer to being the first in the world to commercialize fusion power. 2. Wugen, $115M, oncology: St. Louis-based Wugen, a developer of CAR-T cell therapies to treat T-cell cancers, picked up $115 million in equity financing led by Fidelity. Seven-year-old Wugen plans to use the financing in part to fund clinical trials. 3. Rain, $58M, fintech: Rain, a developer of infrastructure for stablecoin payments, announced that it secured $58 million in a Series B funding round led by Sapphire Ventures. The raise comes five months after New York-based Rain’s Series A and brings total funding to $88.5 million. 4. Blue Water Autonomy, $50M, autonomous ships: Boston-based Blue Water Autonomy, a startup designing and building unmanned ships for the U.S. Navy, closed on $50 million in Series A funding led by Google’s GV. Blue Water said it plans to use the funding to build and deploy its first long-range, full-sized autonomous ship next year. 5. Assort Health, $50M, health care AI: Assort Health, a San Francisco-based provider of AI patient communication tools for specialty healthcare providers, reportedly raised about $50 million in a Series B round at a valuation of $750 million. 6. OpenLight, $34M, photonics: OpenLight, based in Goleta, California, is a developer of a silicon photonics platform for semiconductor design which landed $34 million in a Series A co-led by Xora Innovation and Capricorn Investment Group. 7. (tied) Atomic, $30M, fintech: New York-based Atomic, provider of an embedded investing platform for fintechs and financial institutions, snagged $30 million in a growth round led by Aquiline Capital Partners and Brewer Lane Ventures. 7. (tied) Aurasell, $30M, vertical AI: San Mateo, California-based Aurasell, developer of an AI-native CRM platform, locked up $20 million in seed funding backed by N47, Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures. 7. (tied) Leal Therapeutics, $30M, biotech: Leal Therapeutics, a Massachusetts-based developer of therapeutics for patients living with neuropsychiatric or neurodegenerative disorders, announced a $30 million Series A financing led by SV Health Investors‘ Dementia Discovery Fund. 10. Copper, $28M, appliances: Copper, a developer of appliances with integrated battery storage, scored $28 million in a Series A financing consisting of equity and debt that was led by Prelude Ventures. The Berkeley, California-based startup’s first product offering is a stainless steel range and oven called “Charlie.” Methodology We tracked the largest announced rounds in the Crunchbase database that were raised by U.S.-based companies for the period of Aug. 23-29. 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.
5 Interesting Startup Deals You May Have Missed In August: Sewing Robots, Rare Disease Advocacy And More
This is a monthly column that runs down five interesting startup funding deals every month that may have flown under the radar. Check out our July entry here. AI was yet again an inescapable theme this month as we looked for interesting startups that landed fresh investment. From a company using AI to help Alzheimer’s patients and their families better manage care, to another promising to streamline clothing production in the U.S. through advanced robotics, startups scooped up cash around a variety of AI-related businesses in August. Sewing robots stitch up new funding Atlanta-based SoftWear Automation — the company behind the Sewbot autonomous sewing robot — this month said it has raised $20 million in a Series B1 round. Its robotic sewing machines use machine vision, AI and machine learning to produce apparel that SoftWear claims is cost-competitive with importing garments to the U.S. from low-wage countries. The company says its robots support local production and allow garments to be made more efficiently, closer to their final destination and with less human labor. Its Sewbots also enable faster manufacturing, it says, meaning clothes are produced more in line with current fashion trends and demand. “SoftWear Automation is helping address some of the key challenges we face across the industry — from speed and flexibility to lowering environmental impact. We’re pleased to support their development and explore how this technology can help us move forward,” said Thomas Børglum Jensen, CFO at Danish fashion company Bestseller, which led the round as a strategic investment through its Invest FWD arm. Current investors including CTW Venture Partners, SRI Capital and MacDonald Ventures also participated in the round. SoftWear has now raised $45.6 million total, per Crunchbase data. Startups that incorporate artificial intelligence into the fashion industry have seen strong investor interest, Crunchbase data shows, raising around $100 million globally per year. Funded companies include those working on more efficient garment manufacturing, and others that aim to help consumers more easily shop for clothing online. Related Crunchbase query: Venture Funding To Fashion-Related AI Startups Better advocacy for rare disease patients A rare disease — one that affects only a small number of people relative to the general population — by definition doesn’t necessarily represent a massive addressable market for companies or health providers. But there are thousands of such diseases. Although each affects 200,000 or fewer Americans, altogether some 30 million people in the country are estimated to live with one of those conditions. For those diagnosed with conditions such as sickle cell disease — which affects around 200,000 Americans and is most prevalent among Black and Hispanic people — accessing the care and information they need can represent a major challenge. With that in mind, San Mateo, California-based Citizen Health this month raised a $30 million Series A. The startup aims to use a personalized “AI advocate” to help folks living with rare diseases better navigate the care and management of those conditions themselves. The company says its platform combines AI with community and longitudinal data “to help patients interpret medical records, track symptoms, learn from peers, manage appointments, and connect to the next best step in their health journey.” Its newest round was led by 8VC 1 , with participation from Transformation Capital and Headline. Citizen Health has raised $44 million since its December 2023 launch, per the company. The startup aims to launch the first version of its AI Advocate tool to select communities this quarter, along with a new product for patient advocacy groups. It says it will use the new capital to expand its AI engineering and product teams. “Today’s patients aren’t waiting — they’re searching, deciding, and expecting more,” Citizen Health CEO and co-founder Farid Vij, said in a statement. “They deserve the same clarity, personalization, and intelligence in healthcare that they get in every other part of their lives.” Notably, Citizen Health is a relaunch of Ciitizen, the startup where Vij and co-founder Nasha Fitter met. Ciitizen had been acquired by genetic testing company Invitae in 2021, then sold off before Invitae filed for bankruptcy protection in early 2024. Delivering better Alzheimer’s care Of course, it’s not just people dealing with rare diseases who might struggle to navigate a complex and costly healthcare system. An estimated 7 million Americans suffer from Alzheimer’s disease, a figure that’s only slated to grow as the population ages further. At the same time, patients wait an average of 36 months for Alzheimer’s care appointments. New York-based startup Isaac Health sees a gap to provide better preventative care for cognitive decline. The company this month raised $10.5 million in a Flare Capital Partners-led Series A round for its platform, which offers AI screening technologies it says can help detect, diagnose and manage dementia from home. The company says its “predictive machine learning can quickly identify patients with different cognitive and brain health conditions and pair them with a team of specialists that offers center-of-excellence level care, resulting in 73 percent of patients with improved neurocognitive function over the course of six months, and an improvement against cognitive goals in only three weeks for 92 percent of patients.” New investors Industry Ventures and Black Opal Ventures, as well as investors Meridian Street Capital, B Capital and Primetime Partners, participated in the round for Isaac Health, which says it has raised $16.3 million to date. Overall, startups working on both healthcare and AI-related technologies attract strong investor interest, Crunchbase data shows, raising $5 billion globally last year, the highest total since 2021. Through the first half of 2025, such companies raised around $3.9 billion, a slight uptick compared to H1 2024. Related Crunchbase query: Venture Funding To Health And AI Startups Slashing vendor costs “Sorry, our AI says your product is too expensive.” That might just be the conversation many businesses are having soon with their vendors, as companies increasingly turn to AI tools to help them track, manage and even renegotiate expenses and contracts. Providing those tools is New York-based Infinity Loop, which this month raised a $5 million seed round for its AI-powered vendor contract management platform. The company says its platform is designed to replace the methods many enterprise teams use to manage their vendor spend — legacy tools such as spreadsheets and outside consultants — with AI-powered tools that “grade existing and proposed contracts, flag underperforming terms, and recommend specific, data-backed negotiation strategies tailored to each vendor and deal.” Every company using its platform has seen at least 12% in annual savings, according to Infinity Loop. The company’s seed round was led by Glasswing Ventures and TIAA Ventures, with participation from Plug and Play, Restive and unnamed angel investors. Related Crunchbase query: Rounds Raised By Startups Using AI Using AI to sniff out fraud Handling credit card and banking disputes is an increasingly costly part of doing business for banks and credit card companies. To help tackle the problem, New York-based Casap this month closed a $25 million Series A that brings its total funding to $33.6 million, per Crunchbase. The round was led by Emergence Capital, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Primary Venture Partners, SoFi and others. Notably, Casap’s customers are the financial institutions themselves, and its product aims to eliminate what’s known in the industry as “first-party fraud” — that is, when a bank or credit card company’s own customers fraudulently dispute legitimate transactions. Casap said its AI‑powered platform manages the entire dispute process — from intake to chargeback filing to customer communication — which can otherwise take as long as three months. Its AI agents evaluate evidence, forecast outcomes and automate steps such as issuing credits or responding to merchants. The company says it also has a proprietary fraud‑scoring engine that flags sketchy activity before it becomes a problem. “Disputes are one of the most broken and expensive workflows in financial services. What should be a simple resolution often turns into a slow, manual process — frustrating consumers, overloading teams, and bleeding revenue along the way,” Casap CEO and co-founder Shanthi Shanmugam wrote in a blog post announcing the funding. The company says its Series A is the largest investment for a startup catering to the issuer — rather than the consumer — side of the business. With the fresh capital, it plans to grow its engineering, GTM and product teams. Startups at the intersection of financial services and AI raised about $2 billion in venture funding in each of the past two years, Crunchbase data shows. Through the first half of 2025, such startups raised about $1.4 billion, up notably compared to the $907 million raised in H1 2024. Related Crunchbase query: Venture Funding To Financial Services And AI Startups Related reading: Illustration: Dom Guzman