#venture-funding

#venture-funding

A year ago, Redwood Materials didn't have an energy storage business. Now, it is the fastest-growing unit within the battery recycling and materials startup - a reflection of an AI data center building boom. The evidence of that growth, the company says, can be found at its R&D lab in San Francisco, which has expanded four-fold into a 55,000-square-foot facility and now employs nearly 100 people.

Code Metal, a Boston-based startup that uses AI to write code and translate it into other programming languages, just closed a $125 million Series B funding round from new and existing investors. The news comes just a few months after the startup raised $36 million in series A financing led by Accel. Code Metal is part of a new wave of startups aiming to modernize the tech industry by using AI to generate code and translate it across programming languages.

AI native,

Inertia Enterprises has raised $450 million to build one of the world's most powerful lasers, which it hopes will serve as the foundation of a grid-scale power plant the fusion startup intends to start construction on in 2030. Inertia Enterprises is building on technology developed at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory's National Ignition Facility. The NIF is the site of the world's only controlled fusion reactions that have reached scientific breakeven, in which the reaction releases more energy than it took to start.

Startup Lunar Energy is the latest example. The six-year-old company, which builds battery packs for homeowners in California, Georgia, and Washington, said Wednesday it has completed two large funding rounds. The startup shared it raised a previously unannounced $130 million Series C and a $102 million Series D. The Series C was led by Activate Capital, while the Series D was led by B Capital and Prelude Ventures.

In essence, Lotus is building an AI doctor that functions like a real medical practice, equipped with a license to operate in all 50 states, malpractice insurance, HIPAA-compliant systems, and full access to patient records. The key difference is that the majority of the work is done by AI, which is trained to ask the same questions a doctor would.

Fusion power promises to supply the world with large amounts of clean heat and electricity, if researchers and engineers can solve some vexing challenges. At its core, fusion power seeks to harness the power of the Sun. To do that, fusion startups must figure out how to heat and compress plasma for long enough that atoms inside the mix fuse, releasing energy in the process.

Brain implants are beginning to help people with severe disabilities to speak and even sing in near-real time. Now, a company wants to read people's minds and treat mental conditions without implanting electrodes deep into the brain by using ultrasound - high-frequency sound waves above the range of human hearing. Merge Labs, which launched last month with only a vague description of its goals, is one of many companies in a booming brain-computer interface (BCI) market.

Every January, millions take on Dry January , a ritual of restraint and resetting after the holiday season. If that's the benchmark for kicking off the year with moderation, Europe's startup ecosystem clearly didn't get the memo. In the opening weeks of 2026, the region saw five startups join the unicorn club, crossing the $1 billion valuation mark across sectors as varied as cybersecurity, cloud optimisation, defence tech, ESG software, and education technology.

Ricursive Intelligence, a startup building an AI system to design and automatically improve AI chips, has raised $300 million at a $4 billion valuation. The company said Monday the round was led by Lightspeed. Ricursive says the system will be able to create its own silicon substrate layer and speed up AI chip improvements. Rinse and repeat to get to AGI, the founders say.

The wings are lifting the valuation of Segev's startup too. In June, Cyera was valued at $6 billion in its seventh funding round. Now, just six months later, Cyera is worth $9 billion. Cyera raised $400 million in its recently closed Series F funding, the company exclusively confirmed to Fortune. Blackstone Growth led the round, with participation from existing investors including Accel, Coatue, Cyberstarts, Georgian, Greenoaks, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Redpoint, Sapphire Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark.

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Cisco is reportedly in advanced talks to acquire Israeli cybersecurity company Axonius for approximately $2 billion, according to sources speaking to Calcalist. The potential acquisition fits into Cisco's broader strategy of investing heavily in strengthening its enterprise security offering in recent years. However, Axonius denies that negotiations are actually taking place. Axonius was previously valued at $2.6 billion and operates in the field of cyber asset management, a market segment that is becoming increasingly important as organizations try to get a grip

"For the first half a decade that I was telling people I was doing nuclear, I had to convince them, 'Hey, here's why nuclear is important,'" Bret Kugelmass, founder and CEO of Last Energy, told TechCrunch. "Now everyone just comes to us saying, 'Oh yeah, of course nuclear is a key part of the solution.' I'm like, okay, great, I'm glad everyone's caught up now."

As AI accelerates code production, it is widening a bottleneck in the far larger "after-code" phase of software development - the testing, security checks, and deployment work that still consumes nearly 70% of engineering time. Harness's tools help automate this sprawling, error-prone layer, even as enterprises grapple with rising AI code volume and the risks of shipping even a single line of faulty software into production systems.

Aircraft startup Boom Supersonic said Tuesday it will start selling a version of its turbine engine as a stationary power plant, and that its first customer will be data center startup Crusoe. Crusoe will buy 29 of Boom's 42-megawatt turbines for $1.25 billion to generate 1.21 gigawatts for its data centers. Boom said it will announce more details about a turbine factory next year, with first deliveries occurring in 2027.

Since Slack's launch in early 2013, the company has raised more than $320 million in funding-its $160 million round in April boosted the San Francisco company's private valuation to nearly $3 billion. The workplace messaging software has amassed 2 million daily active users since the service officially launched in February 2014-that's almost double the tally from six months ago. And many Slack users stay connected to the service an average of 10 hours daily, Underwood said.

Interview Naveen Rao founded AI businesses and sold them to Intel and Databricks. He's now turned his attention to satisfying AI's thirst for power and believes his new company, Unconventional AI, can do it by building chips inspired by nature. On Monday, Rao revealed Unconventional AI raised $475 million in seed funding from Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Jeff Bezos, and others, to answer the question.

Julie Bornstein thought it would be a cinch to implement her idea for an AI startup. Her résumé in digital commerce is impeccable: VP of ecommerce at Nordstrom, COO of the startup Stitch Fix, and founder of a personalized shopping platform acquired by Pinterest. Fashion has been her obsession since she was a Syracuse high schooler inhaling spreads in Seventeen and hanging out in local malls. So she felt well-positioned to create a company for customers to discover the perfect garments using AI.

"The day the company collapses is the day we drink that beer," Ondracek said.

Countries like Indonesia and Vietnam have very low GDP per capita, which means the willingness to buy your product or service is still extremely challenging [and low],

Jeff Bezos is getting a new job. He'll reportedly become co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a new startup that he's partly funding. The company's exact plans are still unknown, but its focus is on AI that could improve manufacturing in fields including computing, automobiles, and aerospace. The New York Times reports that Project Prometheus is already one of the better funded early-stage start-ups in the world, with $6.2 billion in investment, in part from Bezos himself.

WisdomAI, the new AI data analytics startup from Rubrik co-founder Soham Mazumdar, has landed a fresh $50 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from new investor NVentures (Nvidia's venture capital arm). This round comes roughly six months after the startup announced a seed round of $23 million led by Coatue. WisdomAI offers AI-driven data analytics that can answer business questions from structured, unstructured, and even "dirty" data, meaning data that hasn't been cleaned of typos or errors.