The artificial intelligence revolution isn’t just knocking; it’s bursting through the doors, and venture capital is fueling its relentless charge. From senior care to AI-powered social media, from London to San Francisco, and across various sectors, investors continue to pour billions into AI startups week after week, betting on the transformative power of algorithms and machine learning.
Large-Scale Funding Rounds Spotlight AI’s Expanding Horizons
Recent high-profile funding rounds highlight how both emerging startups and established players are channeling significant capital into AI infrastructure, solutions for aging populations, and enterprise transformation.
AI Infrastructure startup Nscale Raises $1.1 billion in Series B funding
A $1.1 billion in Series B funding was raised by Nscale, a London-based startup specializing in AI infrastructure technology. Norwegian industrial investment group Aker led the funding round, which also featured Blue Owl Capital, Fidelity Investments and Nvidia, among others. This funding milestone underscores strong belief in the company’s AI-native infrastructure platform, offering vertically integrated compute, networking, storage, managed software and AI services delivered in Nscale-owned and colocated data centers.
This funding round follows closely on the heels of my AI Infrastructure Investment Playbook and marks the largest venture capital deal to close in the UK so far this year.
Inspiren’s AI-Powered Solutions For Senior Living
The demand for senior living solutions is accelerating as baby boomers reach retirement age. By 2030, more than 73 million Americans will be over 65, creating unprecedented pressure on senior housing and care systems.
Source: USA Facts
To address this need, Brooklyn, New York-based Inspiren has developed a single AI-powered platform that unifies resident safety, care planning, staffing, and emergency response into a complete senior living ecosystem. The company secured $100 million in a Series B round led by global software investor Insight Partners, with participation from Avenir, Primary Venture Partners, Scale Venture Partners, Story Ventures, Third Prime, and Studio VC.
AI-Native Enterprises of the Future with Distyl AI
San Francisco’s Distyl AI raised a hefty $175 million funding round at a $1.8 billion valuation, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, DST Global, Coatue, and Dell Technologies Capital. The company works with enterprises in the healthcare, telecommunications, insurance, manufacturing, and financial services sectors to help them re-architect their business models for the AI era beyond their legacy IT architecture constraints.
Mid-Size Rounds Show Diversity in AI Applications
The funding landscape also featured several mid-size rounds that highlight the diversity of AI applications attracting investor attention.
AmplifAI and Next-Gen Call Center Intelligence
AmplifAI, a Plano, Texas–based AI-powered platform for contact center performance analytics, generated $33.7 million in Series B funding from investors including CVS Health Ventures, LiveOak Ventures, and Dallas Venture Partners. The company provides an AI-powered platform for contact center performance analytics that helps organizations optimize their workforce by ensuring agents focus on complex, high-value interactions while AI seamlessly manages simpler contacts. AmplifAI integrates customer surveys, voice recordings, chat interactions, and chatbot conversations with performance data to uncover pain points, tailor coaching, and automate workflows.
Smarter Job Candidate Sourcing with Juicebox
San Francisco-based Juicebox appears twice in recent funding announcements, with an initial $6 million round that included Y Combinator, followed by a more substantial $30 million Series A investment led by BOND Capital and Coatue, along with four other investors. The company’s AI-powered search engine uses natural language to analyze professional profiles, personal websites, and other publicly available information to identify the most qualified job candidates.
Early-Stage Funding Shows Continued Innovation Pipeline
Source: AI-Generated by Andre Bourque
Several early-stage companies secured funding ranging from single to double-digit levels, indicating a healthy pipeline of innovation in the AI sector.
Trainable Tabletop Robots by Microfactory
San Francisco-based MicroFactory, a robotics startup redefining how manual labor gets automated, raised $1.5 million in pre-seed funding from a set of visionary backers, including Clement Delangue, the founder of Hugging Face, and Naval Ravikant, early investor in Uber and Twitter, giving the company a post-money cap of $30 million. The company’s general-purpose, tabletop manufacturing kit that’s about the size of a large dog crate includes two robotic arms and can be trained by human demonstration, as well as through AI, to automate manual tasks.
Personalized Content for an Audience of One with Huxe
Huxe is an AI-powered content platform led by a former Google product manager for NotebookLM. The San Jose, California-based company raised $4.6 million in seed funding from Genius Ventures and Conviction VC. With Huxe’s platform, your emails and calendar become a morning audio update, 24/7 streams on any topic that never repeat content, and instant podcasts on any subject, tailored to your expertise. Huxe also enables interactive Intelligence with the ability to interrupt and redirect AI hosts mid-conversation.
End-to-End Humanless Commerce with Circuit & Chisel
Agentic commerce platform Circuit & Chisel secured $19.2 million in seed funding from investors including Polygon (polygon.technology) and Samsung Next. The New York-based startup is focused on building the fundamental technologies necessary to facilitate agentic payments and seamless movement across the internet with its ATXP product. The vision behind ATXP is to empower artificial intelligence agents to autonomously manage the entire commerce process, from initial product discovery to final payment, all without requiring human intervention.
Genstore AI’s Ecommerce Stores Built by Simple Conversations
AI-native ecommerce platform Genstore AI raised $10 million in a seed round, with funding from Lighthouse Capital Management and Chinese tech company Weimob. Centered around the concept of AI-native commerce, the Westlake Village, California-based company lets merchants launch and manage online stores through simple conversations with a suite of intelligent assistant agents.
AI-Powered Food Order Entry with Burnt
Within the logistics and supply chain sector, Burnt generated $3.8 million in seed funding led by Penny Jar Capital—the venture firm of NBA star Steph Curry—with participation from Scribble Ventures, Formation VC, and angel investors. The company aims to modernize the notoriously inefficient workflows in the U.S. food industry. Its inaugural agent, Ozai, is capable of automating up to 80% of order-entry processes that remain bogged down by legacy infrastructure. Since launching in January, Burnt has processed over $10 million in monthly orders and is already generating six-figure revenue.
AI Startups Seeing Seed Extensions
Last week’s funding scene saw a variety of seed extension rounds, covering everything from social media platforms to innovations in drug discovery technology.
Gigi: The Next Generation Professional Social Network
San Francisco-based Gigi raised $3 million in a seed extension from Khosla Ventures. Gigi, formerly a dating app, switched gears to compete with LinkedIn. The platform uses AI to match users based on skills and interests, and even access to people’s calendars, to understand who people are meeting with regularly and to determine someone’s degree of connection, all to generate more actionable, personalized connections.
Manas AI-powered Drug Development
Manas AI, a NYC-based AI-native drug discovery and development company, raised $26M in seed extension funding led by The General Partnership, Wisdom Ventures, Blitzscaling Ventures, Westbound Equity Partners, Mosaic Ventures, and a number of individuals. The company was founded to overcome the critical inefficiencies of traditional drug development by merging biomedical expertise and next-generation AI capabilities. This seed extension follows a $24.6M seed round announced in January of this year.
Geographic Distribution and Investment Trends
Source: AI-Generated by Andre Bourque
While the San Francisco Bay Area continues to dominate as the hub for AI startups, the geographic distribution of these investments shows some diversification. Two significant rounds went to London-based companies (Manas AI and Nscale), while New York City, Brooklyn, Plano, and Westlake Village, California, each had one company represented.
Sector Focus Reveals Market Priorities
The recent funding rounds reveal several priority areas for AI investment:
Enterprise AI solutions remain highly attractive, with companies like AmplifAI, Distyl AI, and Manas AI securing significant funding for their B2B applications.
Generative AI continues to draw substantial investment, as evidenced by Juicebox’s combined $36 million in funding.
AI infrastructure and information management platforms like Nscale and Genstore AI are attracting capital as businesses seek better ways to organize and leverage their data assets.
Specialized AI applications in healthcare (Inspiren), logistics (Burnt), and social networking (Gigi) demonstrate how AI is permeating diverse industries.
Feature Image: AI-Generated by Andre Bourque