#seed-funding

#seed-funding

Icarus Robotics cofounders Ethan Barajas and Jamie Palmer spent hours interviewing astronauts about what it was like working in space as they homed in on their startup idea. Their big takeaway: the work was often more cargo logistics than cutting-edge science. "We're Amazon warehouse workers with PhDs," one astronaut said. If an experiment takes two hours on station, the person continued, the first ninety minutes are spent just moving around cargo and preparing tools.

Scalekit 's authentication stack, purpose-built for agentic apps, is tailored for Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers, allowing security teams to easily add an OAuth 2.1 authorization server. According to the startup, its solution enables developers to rapidly add an encrypted token vault, along with a tool-calling layer, so that AI agents can act on a user's behalf in popular services such as Gmail, HubSpot, Notion, and Slack.

Two former Google DeepMind researchers who worked on the company's Nobel Prize-winning AlphaFold protein structure prediction AI as well as its AlphaEvolve code generation system have launched a new company, with the mission of democratizing access to advanced algorithms. The company, which is called Hiverge, emerged from stealth today with $5 million in seed funding, led by Flying Fish Ventures with participation from Ahren Innovation Capital and Alpha Intelligence Capital.

AMP acts as a centralised "marketing brain," blending human expertise with AI-powered insights to deliver faster decision-making, scaled campaign execution and measurable outcomes linked directly to business performance.

It's because of the talent war that was started by Mark Zuckerberg. I used to work at Meta, and I speak with my former colleagues often about this. When I heard about their compensation packages, I was shocked - it's really in the tens of millions range. But it shows that in this age, AI researchers who make the best models and stand at the frontier of technology are really worth this amount of money.

startup, which launched in 2024, has developed a platform that generates AI personas that help companies test how their product, marketing, branding, and other content might be perceived. "We primarily use AI agents that chat with each other, mimicking how real humans influence each other," cofounder and CEO James He told Business Insider. "We try to capture that artificial society, and how it will respond to any input. It can be a marketing message or a product proposition, and we produce analysis for our customers."

King's College, Cambridge has revealed the 24 startups selected for its first-ever incubator programme, SPARK 1.0, an initiative designed to turn research-backed ideas from students and alumni into investable companies. The new scheme, created by King's Entrepreneurship Lab (King's E-Lab) in partnership with Founders at the University of Cambridge, aims to support the next generation of entrepreneurs tackling global challenges ranging from disease prevention to climate resilience and fertility support.

"Kiku is solving one of the most painful and under-invested challenges in hiring. Eric and Rasmus bring deep operational experience, product insight, and urgency to this problem. We believe Kiku will define the category for AI in frontline recruitment."

Thinking Machines Lab has raised a historic $2 billion seed round, valuing the firm at $12 billion and underscoring intense competition for AI talent and technology.

Cequence's AI-powered platform automates the entire contract lifecycle, significantly improving productivity while reducing errors and approval times by utilizing advanced AI technologies.