recent company Raises, Mergers & Acquisitions + memes • https://xitter.cf/t.co/YQYkzAlEcP VC intel for those who don't have time

Palo Alto, CA
Joined May 2020
Mach9 is an AI-powered CAD software company that converts reality-capture data into centimeter-accurate CAD drawings, helping surveyors and civil engineers complete infrastructure projects faster. The company raised $34 million in a Series A round co-led by First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Prudence and Quiet Capital. Mach9 has supported nearly 100 organizations across more than 2,500 projects spanning 100,000 miles of infrastructure in all 50 states. FOUNDERS: Alex Baikovitz, Haowen Shi, Michael Mong & Zachary Sussman INVESTORS: First Round Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, Prudence & Quiet Capital ROUND: Series A AMOUNT: $34,000,000 HQ: San Francisco, California #VentureCapital #Mach9 #AlexBaikovitz #TradedVC
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Blacksmith, a San Francisco-based infrastructure platform that helps companies build and test code faster and at lower costs, raised $66 million in Series C funding at a $1 billion valuation, bringing its total funding to $125 million. The round was led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Premji Invest, Peak XV Partners, GV, and Y Combinator. Led by co-founders and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah, and Aditya Maru, Blacksmith plans to use the funds to expand its team and computing infrastructure. Its continuous integration platform enables builds and tests to run twice as fast at an average of 60% lower cost, serving more than 10,000 companies. FOUNDERS: Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah & Aditya Maru INVESTORS: Sequoia Capital, Premji Invest, Peak XV Partners, GV & Y Combinator ROUND: Series C AMOUNT: $66,000,000 VALUATION: $1,000,000,000 HQ: San Francisco, California #VentureCapital #Blacksmith #AdityaJayaprakash #SequoiaCapital #TradedVC
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Vintage Investment Partners, an Israeli-founded investment firm that backs venture funds, acquires secondary stakes and co-invests in growth rounds, raised $920 million in new capital, pushing its assets under management above $4.8 billion. The firm cited longer private-company lifespans as a key driver of demand for venture exposure and liquidity. Founded in 2003, Vintage has offices in Tel Aviv, London and New York. FOUNDERS: Alan Feld, Aharon Dovrat & Shlomo Dovrat AMOUNT: $920,000,000 HQ: Herzliya Pituach, Israel #VentureCapital #VintageInvestmentPartners #AlanFeld #TradedVC
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Elon Musk Reportedly Invests $1 Billion in Skydance. (Finally Gets Final Cut on His Own Biopic.)
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DeepSeek, the Hangzhou-based AI startup founded by Liang Wenfeng, has reportedly raised $15 billion (100 billion yuan) in one of China’s largest funding rounds, just days after the U.S. ordered federal civilian agencies to remove its AI technology from their systems over security concerns. Potential investors include Chinese battery maker CATL and tech giant Tencent. The reported raise follows a $7 billion-plus round in June at a $50 billion valuation, as DeepSeek ramps up investment in AI infrastructure and open-weight models to compete with leading U.S. AI companies and strengthen its position in the global AI race. FOUNDER: Liang Wenfeng INVESTORS: CATL & Tencent AMOUNT: $15,000,000,000 HQ: Hangzhou, China #VentureCapital #DeepSeek #LiangWenfeng #TradedVC
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Firstwork, co-founded by CEO Vardhan Kapoor and Shubham Choudhary, is an AI-powered platform focused on improving hiring, onboarding, and ongoing support for frontline workers. The company raised $15 million in a Series A round led by Earlybird Venture Capital, with participation from existing investors Gradient and Y Combinator, alongside new investors Legion VC and Deel Ventures. The funding will support product expansion, AI research, and the establishment of its EMEA headquarters in London. FOUNDERS: Vardhan Kapoor & Shubham Choudhary INVESTORS: Earlybird Venture Capital, Gradient, Y Combinator, Legion VC & Deel Ventures ROUND: Series A AMOUNT: $15,000,000 HQ: San Francisco, California #VentureCapital #Firstwork #VardhanKapoor #ShubhamChoudhary #TradedVC
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JUST IN: @warpsciences raised a $215M Series A at an $865M valuation Led by @lightspeedvp • AI + robotic labs to speed up drug discovery • Founded by ex-OpenAI CPO @kevinweil and @dpatil
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Backers in Warp Sciences' $215M Series A: • @lightspeedvp: led • IVP, Premji Invest, @Lux_Capital: joined • Angels: Sarah Friar, Fidji Simo, Brian Armstrong, Shyam Sankar, Reid Hoffman Out of stealth today. Powered by @harmonic_ai
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JUST IN: Watchtower Labs raised a $35M seed co-led by Shield Capital and @conviction • AI decision tools for military planners • @foundersfund and In-Q-Tel joined
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Backers in Watchtower Labs' $35M seed: • Shield Capital + @conviction: co-led • @foundersfund, In-Q-Tel: joined First outside money for a startup incubated inside Shield. Powered by @harmonic_ai
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Coherence Neuro raised a $45 million Series A round co-led by Founders Fund and the OpenAI Startup Fund to develop cancer therapies that continuously learn and improve. The company is building neurotechnology and brain-computer interface (BCI) platforms designed to monitor cancer in real time and feed data into treatment systems, enabling faster adjustments and more adaptive therapies. Founder Ben Woodington said the goal is to create a new approach to medicine that learns from patient data to improve treatment over time. FOUNDERS: Ben Woodington & Elise Jenkins INVESTORS: Founders Fund, OpenAI Startup Fund ROUND: Series A AMOUNT: $45,000,000 HQ: San Francisco, California #VentureCapital #CoherenceNeuro #BenWoodington #EliseJenkins #TradedVC
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Mirendil says one researcher directing AI agents pretrained its base coding model in 3.5 months. • Under $10M of compute, research included • Public data only • Independent evals not out yet The team slide in your Series A deck just got shorter. xitter.cf/bneyshabur/status/2112…
We formally announced Mirendil less than 4 months ago. Today, I'm excited to share an important milestone for: Pretraining at scale without a pretraining team. Mirendil's mission is to solve Recursive Self-Improvement (RSI) and use it to democratize frontier AI development, ultimately accelerating science and technology. At Mirendil, when we think about RSI, we think holistically about the company as an intelligent entity that self-improves toward its goal. From that perspective, the most powerful notion of acceleration is reducing the time and resources (number of human experts, compute, and other costs) needed to achieve ambitious goals. Given that pretraining is perhaps the most important yet most challenging part of frontier AI development, we decided to run an ambitious controlled experiment: Starting fully from scratch, can we significantly reduce the time, number of human experts, and compute resources needed to go all the way to successfully pretraining a strong coding model at scale? Mirendil-Base is the result of this experiment. Our first pretrained model was built by one researcher in 3.5 months, with less than $10M in compute. This includes all the research and small-scale experiments it took to get there, as well as the final training run. The recipe holds up as the models get bigger. For reference, Mirendil-Base is in the 100B-500B parameter range, Mirendil-Base-Large in the 500B-2T range, and Mirendil-Base-XL in the 2T-10T range. We're beginning to see a world where a single researcher, empowered by AI, can take on work that once required an entire research organization. As these systems improve, the bottleneck shifts from the size of a team to the ambition and judgment of the people directing them. This has profound implications for who gets to build AI and, ultimately, who gets to push the frontiers of science and technology forward. We’ll share independent evaluations, post-training benchmarks and API-access sooner than you think so stay tuned!
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Meow, founded in 2021 by CEO Brandon Arvanaghi and CTO Bryce Crawford, provides business banking and treasury software for startups and investment funds, including payments, expense management and stablecoin transactions. The company raised a $31.6 million Series B led by Stifel Financial, with participation from Archetype, bringing total funding to more than $60 million. As part of the deal, Stifel Bank will white-label Meow’s platform for its venture and fund banking clients, with onboarding expected to begin in early 2027. FOUNDERS: Brandon Arvanaghi & Bryce Crawford INVESTORS: Stifel Financial Corp., & Archetype ROUND: Series B AMOUNT: $31,600,000 HQ: New York City, New York #VentureCapital #Meow #BrandonArvanaghi #BryceCrawford #TradedVC
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Dan-O’s Seasoning, founded by Dan Oliver, raised $25 million from consumer-focused private equity firm The Newcastle Network. Oliver built the Louisville-based spice brand from farmers market sales into a fast-growing business after a 2020 TikTok video went viral, with revenue reaching $38 million in 2024. The deal marks Newcastle’s entry into the food sector. FOUNDER: Dan Oliver INVESTOR: The Newcastle Network AMOUNT: $25,000,000 HQ: Louisville, Kentucky #VentureCapital #DanOsSeasoning #TheNewcastleNetwork #TradedVC
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JUST IN: @XonaSpace raised $250M at a $2.45B valuation Led by @FutureJurvetson's Future Ventures • Building a commercial GPS rival in low orbit • Founded by ex-SpaceX engineer @FoundTheSpace
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Early backers in Xona before the $250M round: • Seraphim Space + @MaCVentureCap: co-led $8M seed (Sep 2021) • Toyota Ventures, @1517fund: seed • Future Ventures + Seraphim: led $19M Series A (May 2024) Series A to $2.45B in 2.5 years. Powered by @harmonic_ai
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Blacksmith Went From $60M to $1B in 12 Months. (Seed Investors Now Taking Credit on LinkedIn.) xitter.cf/useblacksmith/status/2…
Replying to @sequoia
@sequoia is leading our Series C at a $1B valuation. Since January, we’ve gone from running 5M CI jobs a week to over 90M. Agents are writing an order of magnitude more code, and all of it still needs to be built and tested before it ships.
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OpenAI Is Now Selling Its Models on Google Cloud. (Google Still Can't Get Anyone to Use Gemini.) xitter.cf/OpenAI/status/21129881…
OpenAI models are coming to Google Cloud. We're bringing our frontier models and Codex agentic workflows to Google Cloud's Model Garden, so enterprises can use our technology where they already build. openai.com/index/openai-mode…
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Demis Hassabis Says AGI Is 2 to 3 Years Away. (Same Timeline Every Founder Gives for Profitability.) xitter.cf/MTSlive/status/2112955…
SITUATION DETECTED: Demis Hassabis told the WSJ that his AGI timelines have shortened from three to five years away to within the next two to three years.
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FTX put $500M into Anthropic. The bankruptcy estate had to sell the stake in 2024 for $1.3B. A 2.7x return. Anthropic's last private mark: $965B. Best return FTX ever made. Still the worst trade on the cap table.
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Who got into Anthropic early: Series A (2021, $124M) • Jaan Tallinn (lead) • @moskov • @ericschmidt • James McClave Series B (2022, $580M) • FTX (lead) Google: ~$300M for ~10% (2022) Series C (2023, $450M at ~$4.1B) • @sparkcapital (lead) • Sound Ventures (@guyoseary) • Google, @SalesforceVC, Zoom, @MenloVentures Then SK Telecom ($100M) and Amazon (up to $4B) in 2023. Now reportedly filing to go public as early as Friday.
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