Avrea emerged from stealth on Tuesday with $4.7m in pre-seed funding led by Earlybird, pitching itself as a faster, AI-aware alternative to GitHub Actions for engineering teams that have started generating code faster than their build systems can ship it. The company was founded by Hannu Valtonen, a co-founder of the Finnish cloud database firm Aiven (which reached a $3bn valuation in its 2022 Series D), and Juha Valvanne, a co-founder of the Helsinki commerce-personalisation platform Nosto.
Quanscient pitches its platform as code-driven, cloud-scalable, and built to generate the volume of multiphysics data that machine-learning models will need to learn from. The Series A is earmarked for international expansion and for what the company describes as the market's first platform to unify simulation, quantum algorithms and AI integration. The funding lands at a moment when hardware engineering is, as Quanscient's own 2025 study argues, stuck.
Ken had just graduated high school. Henry Rudzewick, a New York City firefighter, was determined to see him get a job. "You're not going to be hanging around the house all the time," Ken, who is 88, recalled his father saying. Henry called his friend, Franklin Frontera, president of the depositor-owned Maspeth Federal Savings. Ken started as a teller the next day. "I had my shirt and tie on, and I walked to the bank," he told American Banker. "I lived four blocks away."
Lucra announced last month that it raised a $20 million Series B, led by the ARK fund, with participation from several other VCs. Robbins attracted ARK even though the fund had previously gotten badly burned on a similar eSports company: Skillz, a skill-based gaming platform in which the fund invested heavily before divesting at a loss. On top of that, Dylan landed this big fish as an investor even though his company is not in the one area that all VCs are currently chasing: AI.
His name is Antonio Gracias, a handsome private equity investor from Detroit. The two met through the Silicon Valley web at the turn of the century, and soon Gracias-at 55, just one year older than Musk-lent Musk $1 million in his early days at Tesla, when the company was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. The two have been best friends ever since. Gracias was a groomsman at Kimbal Musk's wedding, the families have vacationed together, spent the holidays together, and even traveled to David Copperfield's private island in the Bahamas.
Anthropic, the maker of Claude and last publicly valued at a now-quaint $380 billion, is raising a new round of funding-the company's reportedly looking to rake in as much as $50 billion at a valuation in the $900 billion ballpark. And talking to brokers, investors, and founders about it, they all had the same, clear message: This is not normal.
We have been generally positive about Oura and its various smart rings. We called the Ring 4 a "technological marvel" that's "out ahead of its rivals." The company manages to pack a lot of tech into its rings, despite the inherent limitations of the form factor.
