#startup-funding

#startup-funding

Take2 - $14M Series A Take2, an AI agent network that automates end-to-end healthcare recruiting tasks, has raised $14M in Series A funding led by Human Capital. Founded by Yaniv Shimoni and Kaushik Narasimhan in 2023, Take2 has now raised a total of $14M in reported equity funding. AlleyWatch is NYC's leading source of tech and startup news, reaching the city's most active founders, investors, and tech leaders. Advertise today →

John Conafay, a veteran of the US Air Force, has spent most of his career leading business development at public and private aerospace companies, including Spire, Astranis, and ABL Space Systems. At each company, Conafay ran into the same software hurdle: collaborating on government contracts was a logistical mess that forced his teams and their federal counterparts to rely on a tedious back-and-forth of PDFs and Excel files.

Wizard, an AI-native shopping agent cofounded by Marc Lore and CEO Melissa Bridgeford, is coming out of a nearly 5-year private beta with an ambitious promise: to end the era of endless scrolling in ecommerce and replace it with a personalized and streamlined shopping experience. Launched publicly on Feb. 11, the New York-based startup is betting that the next wave of online retail will be driven not by bigger marketplaces,

While entrepreneurship can be challenging, Black founders often face additional barriers in accessing funding, mentorship, and networks, barriers that can also create psychological hurdles. In fact, a 2025 BDC study found that 72% of Black entrepreneurs shared that the fear of racial stereotypes almost stopped them from starting a business. To support founders on every stage of their journey, we've updated our guide to highlight programs, funding, mentorship, and community resources specifically for Black entrepreneurs across Canada!

Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan initially defended the choice on X. YC-backed Canadian startups that reincorporated in the US had twice the average valuation as those that didn't, he wrote. "There are lots of reasons to build great companies in Canada, and there are lots of great YC and non-YC startups that thrive and are making the Canadian tech scene great," he wrote a few hours later. "Where you are incorporated increases your access to capital. That's it."

The round was led by Google Ventures , with participation from existing investors, underscoring continued appetite for applied AI products that have already found a clear commercial use. Synthesia builds generative AI tools that let companies create videos using AI-generated avatars instead of cameras, studios, or presenters. The technology has found a strong foothold in corporate training, internal communications, and product explainers, areas where speed, scale, and consistency often matter more than production gloss.

Three years ago, we would spend hours asking ourselves if we were heading in the right direction, and 80% of the time, it felt like we weren't,

Founded in 2021 and based in Boston and Tel Aviv, Memcyco has built an agentless platform that proactively prevents brand impersonation and account takeover (ATO) attacks. Amid an increase in ATO attacks and AI-driven deception such as phishing, Memcyco aims to improve protections by infiltrating the attack timeline as it unfolds. It relies on covert, agentless anti-impersonation technology that provides organizations with visibility into both victim and attack behavior, to stop attacks before credential theft or fraud.

A British AI startup that makes realistic video avatars has almost doubled its valuation to $4bn (3bn), in a boost for the UK technology sector. Synthesia was valued at $2.1bn last year and moved into new offices in central London, marking the moment with a ceremony attended by the Sadiq Khan, the city's mayor, and Peter Kyle, then technology secretary. On Monday, it announced its latest funding round, led by an existing investor, Google Ventures, had raised $200m and valued the British company at $4bn.

Even before he'd graduated from the University of Bath in 2024, Arnau Ayerbe landed a highly coveted role as an AI engineer with JP Morgan - yet he felt limited and uninspired. "I realised very quickly that the person to my right and to my left were going to be me in 20 years, and I didn't want to become that," recalls London-based Ayerbe.

The company, which is based in San Francisco and has an office in Pune, India, is targeting up to $35 million this year as it builds a royalty-driven on-device AI business. That growth has buoyed the company, which now has post-money valuation of between $270 million and $300 million, up from around $100 million in its 2022 Series B, Kheterpal said.

Y Combinator rejected the application from Bolna, a voice orchestration startup built by Maitreya Wagh and Prateek Sachan, five times before finally accepting it into the fall 2025 batch, skeptical that the founders could turn interest into revenue. "When we were applying for Y-Combinator, the feedback we got was, 'great to see that you have a product that can create realistic voice agents, but Indian enterprises are not going to pay, and you are not going to make money out of this,'" Wagh told TechCrunch.

Specifically, the technology that helped retail brands sell unsold or excess products (off-channel inventory) wasn't as sophisticated as it could have been. Brands sell their excess inventory at discount retailers like Nordstrom Rack, but often lose money because managing unsold inventory is difficult. Products are spread across warehouses, and teams are left guessing the value of an item and when the best time to sell it is.

"Human-generated content is quickly becoming the most valuable driver of brand discovery, but influencer- marketing solutions weren't built to scale for the enterprise," said Kristen Wiley, chief executive officer and founder of Statusphere, who began her career as a creator.

Rain - $250M Series C Rain, an infrastructure platform for stablecoin payments, has raised $250M in Series C funding led by ICONIQ Capital. Founded by Charles Yoo-Naut and Farooq Malik in 2021, Rain has now raised a total of $332.5M in reported equity funding. Proxima - $80M Seed Proxima, an AI-powered drug discovery platform for proximity-based therapeutics, has raised $80M in seed funding led by DCVC. Proxima was founded by Luca Naef and Zachary Carpenter in 2019.

Armed with some data from our friends at CrunchBase, I broke down the largest US startup funding rounds from December 2025. I have included some additional information such as industry, company description, round type, founders, and total equity funding raised to further the analysis. AlleyWatch is NYC's leading source of tech and startup news, reaching the city's most active founders, investors, and tech leaders. Learn More →

Aikido's core proposition is rooted in the conviction that traditional application security tools have not kept pace with the rapid evolution of software development. Modern engineering teams ship code more frequently, and the widespread adoption of AI tools for coding has heightened both velocity and risk. Legacy scanners and point solutions can generate noise and distract developers, rather than offering actionable insights at the right moment.

Mark Zuckerberg has struck again. Meta Platforms is acquiring Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup that's become the talk of Silicon Valley since it materialized this spring with a demo video so slick it went instantly viral. The clip showed an AI agent that could do things like screen job candidates, plan vacations, and analyze stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI's Deep Research.

In 2024, they launched Sauron - named after the sinister, all-seeing eye from "The Lord of the Rings" - to build what they envisioned as a military-grade home security system for tech elites. The concept resonated in Bay Area circles, where crime had become a constant topic during and after the pandemic, despite San Francisco Police Department statistics showing property crime and homicide rates declining last year.

"AI can't improve what it can't see," Smith said.

'Clean ingredients' are gaining traction internationally.

ScrubMarine is developing autonomous hull-cleaning and inspection robots that target biofouling - the build-up of algae, barnacles and slime on ships' hulls. This growth increases drag, driving up fuel consumption and emissions. Devanathan estimates biofouling adds more than $100 billion a year to global shipping costs. "Biofouling is a hidden problem, but it's a massive one," he said. "It increases drag on the vessel, which increases fuel burn. That's a huge cost for operators, and it's also bad for the environment."

In a civil complaint, the SEC has charged Luckey with violating securities laws for using millions of dollars of company funds to pay for her home, Super Bowl tickets, and a destination wedding in the Caribbean. The SEC alleges she painted a rosy picture of the company's booming revenue when ComplYant never brought in more than $620 in monthly revenue.

Stroma, which made headlines in 2011 for a still-not-released device that the company said could safely turn brown eyes blue, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Monday. That's the variety that allows a business to reorganize and pause litigation in hopes of staying alive. The once-buzzy California tech company has raised $70 million since its 2009 founding and is still hoping to run a clinical study in Germany this coming year, according to its chairman.

Helsingborg-based proptech AI startup Proplab continues to build momentum. After opening up their platform for residential real estate this fall, the company has seen rapid growth, now with 100+ broker offices connected across Sweden, on top of their existing commercial property clients. Over the past months, Proplab has established a collaboration with a major brokerage chain and another one is now on the way in. Their traction is clear, revenues more than doubled from October to November this year.