Happy Monday,

Welcome to your weekly dose of AI funding and investment stories and insights—where we decode the deals shaping tomorrow's tech empires.

First off, quick heads-up on upcoming AI conferences to network and stay ahead: 📅

In today's edition:

This week’s robust $3.8 billion across 63 deals underscores a maturing market, with heavyweight infrastructure bets counterbalanced by a surge in agentic enterprise tools and vertical applications. 

Infrastructure captured over 70% of capital, fueled by chip and data center giants, while healthcare and dev platforms showed resilient deal volume amid valuation scrutiny from top VCs.

Hardware Challengers Accelerate: Billion-dollar plays like Cerebras ($1.1B processors), Rebellions ($250M chips), and Nscale ($433M data centers) challenge Nvidia's grip, with photonics (SCINTIL $58M) and novel silicon eyeing efficiency gains.

Agentic AI Takes Center Stage: Bets on autonomous agents exploded, from DRUID ($31M workflows), Gain ($12M procurement), Alex ($17M recruiting), Assort ($76M healthcare calls), to Flai ($4.5M dealership leads)—signaling ROI in task automation.

Security Fortifications Build Up: Amid rising threats, Mondoo ($17.5M vulnerability mgmt), Oneleet ($33M compliance), and TrustNXT (~$1.9M deepfake protection) highlight defenses for agentic systems.

Dev Ecosystem Speeds Ahead: Tools like Supabase ($100M vectors), Dash0 ($35M observability), and Anything ($11M no-code) focus on faster AI builds, with Podonos ($2.4M voice eval) ensuring real-world quality.

AI chipmaker Cerebras Systems has closed a $1.1 billion Series G round at an $8.1 billion valuation, nearly doubling its value since 2021.

Why it matters: The deal positions Cerebras as a formidable challenger to NVIDIA's dominance, capitalizing on the exploding demand for high-speed, efficient AI inference.

By the numbers:

Go deeper: The new capital will be used to expand U.S. manufacturing and build out more data centers. The company plans to increase its stateside packaging capacity by another 4x in the next 6-8 months to meet demand.

The big picture: Cerebras is carving out a niche with its massive "wafer-scale" processors, which excel at inference. It's winning major clients like AWS, Meta, and Hugging Face, where it's now the #1 inference provider.

The bottom line: While NVIDIA dominates the AI training market, Cerebras is betting that the future is in inference, where its specialized hardware offers a powerful combination of speed and efficiency that general-purpose GPUs can't match.

AI developer platform Vercel has secured a $300 million Series F round, nearly tripling its valuation to $9.3 billion.

Why it matters: The deal marks a massive bet on Vercel's pivot from a frontend web host to a full-stack AI Cloud, positioning it to become the essential platform for building and scaling AI-native applications and agents.

By the numbers:

Go deeper: The new capital will be used to scale Vercel's AI Cloud, enhancing its security features to protect against risks from AI-generated code, and to launch its upcoming mobile development agent, v0 Mobile.

The big picture: Vercel is competing in a crowded market against frontend clouds like Netlify, AI coding tools like Replit and GitHub Copilot, and big tech platforms from AWS and Google. Its key differentiator is its unified, security-first platform built on the wildly popular Next.js framework.

The bottom line: Vercel is betting that as the web evolves "from pixels to tokens," the winning platform won't just help developers build websites, but will provide the secure, scalable infrastructure needed to build, deploy, and manage an entire new generation of AI agents.

Periodic Labs, a startup building autonomous labs to automate scientific discovery, has emerged from stealth with a massive $300 million seed round at a pre-money valuation of up to $1.5 billion.

Why it matters: The deal is a massive bet that the next frontier for AI is not analyzing the internet, but generating new, proprietary data from real-world physical experiments. The startup was founded by AI experts from OpenAI and Google DeepMind to address a key problem: today's AI models are reaching a limit in the physical sciences.

By the numbers:

Go deeper: Periodic is building "AI scientists" paired with robotic labs to create a closed loop: AI generates a hypothesis, robots conduct the experiment, and the results feed back into the model. The initial focus is on materials science, like creating higher-temperature superconductors.

The big picture: While other AI-for-science efforts exist, Periodic differentiates itself by owning the entire stack—from AI models to physical labs that generate the data—creating a powerful proprietary feedback loop.

The bottom line: Periodic is betting that the key to unlocking the next wave of scientific breakthroughs lies in teaching AI to interact with the physical world, not just read about it online.

South Korean AI chip startup Rebellions has closed a $250 million Series C round, more than doubling its valuation to $1.4 billion.

Why it matters: The deal is a significant move in South Korea's bid to disrupt the global AI chip market, positioning Rebellions as a key challenger to NVIDIA's dominance in the booming AI inference space.

By the numbers:

Go deeper: The new capital will be used to fund the mass production of Rebellions' new "Rebel-Quad" chip, which uses an innovative chiplet design to deliver high performance and power efficiency for large language models. Mass production is slated for mid-2026.

The big picture: While NVIDIA dominates the AI hardware market, a new wave of well-funded startups such as Rebellions, Cerebras, and Groq are carving out niches by creating specialized chips that promise to run AI models faster and more cheaply than traditional GPUs.

The bottom line: Rebellions is betting that its power-efficient, chiplet-based design—backed by strategic partners Arm and Samsung—can win a significant share of the data center market by offering a compelling alternative to expensive, power-hungry hardware.

Eve has raised a $103 million Series B round at a $1 billion valuation.

Why it matters: The deal highlights a massive, untapped opportunity in legal tech. While most AI tools have focused on corporate and defense law, Eve is proving that AI can deliver huge efficiencies for high-volume plaintiff firms.

By the numbers:

Go deeper: Eve's platform acts as a trainable AI assistant that automates the full case lifecycle, from client intake and document analysis to drafting demand letters and discovery responses.

The big picture: Eve is carving out a niche in a crowded legal AI market. While competitors like Harvey AI focus on general legal queries and Filevine tackles workflow, Eve's singular focus on the plaintiff side gives it a powerful advantage in a specific, high-need vertical.

The bottom line: Eve is betting that the future of plaintiff law isn't just about better software, but about creating an "AI-native" law firm where intelligent agents handle the repetitive work, allowing attorneys to scale their practices and deliver justice more efficiently.

Nscale (AI Data Center Infrastructure; London, UK): $433M (pre-Series C) to support its role as a key partner for OpenAI's "Stargate" data centers in Norway and the UK.

Supabase (Developer Database Platform; San Francisco, CA): $100M (Series E) to scale its platform and enterprise tools for AI applications.

DualEntry (AI Financial Automation; San Francisco, CA): $90M (Series A) to automate key financial tasks for mid-sized businesses and disrupt the legacy ERP market.

Modal (AI Infrastructure Provider; New York, NY): $87M (Series B) to scale its platform for running generative AI models and large-scale batch jobs.

Assort Health (Healthcare Voice AI; New York, NY): $76M (Series B) to expand its platform of specialty-specific voice AI agents that automate patient interactions

Workday acquires AI-powered learning platform SANA Labs for $1.1 billion to integrate personalized learning into its enterprise software suite.

Uber acquires data labeling startup Segments.ai to bolster its AI data annotation capabilities and better compete with rivals like Scale AI.

Rose Rocket acquires Centro to accelerate its AI capabilities in converting unstructured emails into structured data for supply chain workflows.

Perplexity acquires the team behind AI design startup Visual Electric in an acqui-hire to form a new "Agent Experiences" product group.

OpenAI acqui-hires the CEO of Roi, an AI-powered personal finance app, to build out its team for personalized consumer AI products.

Phaidra (Series B, $50M)
AI agents optimize data center energy; tackles the massive power consumption problem of the AI boom. DeepMind alumni-led startup backed by Collaborative Fund to make AI infrastructure run "smarter, not just harder."

Paid (Seed, $21M)
Building the Stripe for AI agents; creates a "results-based" billing layer for the agent economy. Lightspeed bets on new monetization models as agents move from usage-based fees to value-based outcomes.

Notch.cx (Seed, $7M)
Autonomous support agent resolves 87% of tickets; a practical showcase of AI replacing entire workflows. Lightspeed backs a tangible shift from human-in-the-loop assistance to fully autonomous enterprise agents.

Composite (Seed, $5.6M)
Cross-browser agent automates tedious professional tasks; makes any website an API. Nat Friedman & Daniel Gross back a vision where the browser becomes the universal platform for agentic AI.

Clarifeye (Pre-seed, ~$4.3M)
"Knowledge server" lets experts encode tacit knowledge for AI; aims to fix the enterprise context gap. Ex-Dataiku leaders backed by EQT Ventures to build systems that allow AI to reason with deep domain expertise.

MAI (Seed, $25M)
AI agents autonomously run Google Ads for businesses; Kleiner Perkins backs a practical agentic platform delivering a clear 40% average sales lift for clients.

Better Tomorrow Ventures ($140M Fund III): An early-stage fintech fund focused on the application of AI in labor-intensive areas like accounting, underwriting, and compliance.

Notion Capital (€114M Growth Fund): A new growth fund targeting scale-stage, AI-driven B2B software and FinTech companies across Europe.

May Ventures (€50M Target Fund): A new German VC with an "AI-native" mission to invest in early-stage AI startups in the DACH region.

Wave Function Ventures ($15.1M Fund I): An early-stage deep tech fund making seed and pre-seed investments in hardware-intensive sectors like humanoid robotics and aerospace.

Toyota ($1.5B+ Initiative): Committed over $1.5B to its startup investment ecosystem, including a new strategic investment subsidiary and a second growth-stage fund targeting startups in AI and automation.