19 Silicon Valley Startups Raised $770.4M Last Week
Cerebras Systems Went IPO Valued at $60 Billion
Happy Monday!
Founded in 2015 by Andrew Feldman, Jean-Philippe Fricker, Michael James, Gary Lauterbach and Sean Lie, Cerebras went IPO on the Nasdaq as one of the most closely watched AI chip listings, riding the surge in demand for AI compute.
Cerebras, whose name comes from the Latin word for “brain,” builds wafer-scale AI processors designed to challenge Nvidia’s GPU dominance. The company has raised more than $2.55 billion from investors including Benchmark and Foundation Capital, and was last valued at $23 billion.
Super interesting to see that Cerebras has reduced its reliance on G42 (UAE) from 87% of revenue in the first half of 2024 to 24%, while striking deals with Amazon and OpenAI. Cerebras (NASDAQ: CBRS) ended its first week of public trading at $279.72 per share.
Cowboy Space Corporation (aka Aetherflux)
Founded by Baiju Bhatt, cofounder of Robinhood, Cowboy Space raised a $275M Series B at a $2B valuation, betting that owning both the rocket and the data center is the only economically viable path to orbital AI compute.
Cowboy Space is building an orbital data center satellite that leverages solar power in space to help address AI’s growing energy needs. I do agree with their core thesis: energy is becoming one of the biggest bottlenecks to scaling AI. In the U.S., building a data center and securing the required power and water infrastructure can take up to five years. And, many cities around the States are pushing back against these projects.
The company is targeting Q1 2027 for its first commercial data center node.
Data is King 👑
In a world where one new Anthropic release can kill a handful of startups overnight, these companies realized their true moat is not the model, it’s the data.
Wirestock provides images, videos, design assets, and gaming and 3D content from 700K artists has raised $23M Series A
Origin Lab provides game worlds into multimodal training data has raised $8M Seed
Secludy provides financial transaction histories, fraud patterns, customer support logs, loan files for financial services has raised $4M Seed
Config provides human motion video for robotics foundation models has raised $27M Seed
Last week a total of 19 startups raised $770.4M in funding, 1 IPO:
$355.8M goes to 11 Enterprise startups
$14M goes to 2 FinTech startups
$17M goes to 1 InsurTech startup
$11.6M goes to 1 Healthcare startup
$275M goes to 1 SpaceTech startup
$27M goes to 1 Robotics startup
$64M goes to 1 Energy Tech startup
$6M goes to 1 Entertainment startup
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Edith
X, LinkedIn
Funding (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)
Enterprise
Exaforce (agentic security operations platform) raised $125M Series B from HarbourVest, Peak XV, Mayfield, Khosla Ventures, Seligman Ventures and AICONIC
Monaco (AI-native sales platform) raised $50M Series B led by Benchmark
Vapi (enterprise voice AI) raised $50M Series B led by Peak XV Partners
Judgment Labs (continuous improvement layer for AI agents) raised $32M Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners
Wirestock (creative multi-modal data supply to AI labs) raised $23M Series A led by Nava Ventures
Roadrunner (AI-native quote-to-cash platform) raised $22M Series A led by Kleiner Perkins and Founders Fund
Ciridae (AI-native operating system for business transformation) raised $20M Seed led by Accel
Sprouts (revenue agents for B2B enterprises) raised $9M Seed led by Accel, True Global Ventures
ChampAI (AI workflow automation for enterprise operations) raised $8.5M Seed led by Redpoint
Graphon AI (pre-model intelligence layer for enterprise AI) raised $8.3M Seed led by Novera Ventures
Origin Lab (multimodal training data for AI labs) raised $8M Seed led by Lightspeed Venture Partners
FinTech
Synthetic (autonomous AI bookkeeping service) raised $10M Seed led by Khosla Ventures
Secludy (proprietary data for GenAI in financial services) raised $4M Seed led by Impression Ventures
InsurTech
Outmarket AI (AI for insurance brokerages) raised $17M Series A led by Permanent Capital Partners
Health Care
Knit Health (clinical intelligence AI for healthcare) raised $11.6M Seed led by Uncork Capital
SpaceTech
Cowboy Space (vertically integrated orbital infrastructure for AI) raised $275M Series B led by Index Ventures
Robotics
Config (data layer for robotics foundation models) raised $27M Seed led by Samsung Ventures
Energy Tech
GridCARE (power acceleration system for AI) raised $64M Series A led by Sutter Hill Ventures
Entertainment
Flick (AI-native filmmaking platform) raised $6M Seed from True Ventures, GV (Google Ventures), and Y Combinator
IPO & M&A (300 miles radius from Silicon Valley)