🚀 Modal Labs eyes $2.5B valuation doubling in 5 months, Naboo raises $70M to own corporate event procurement, and Simile lands $100M to predict human behavior. AI agents infiltrate manufacturing, energy markets, and treasury management.
Mega funding rounds and AI breakaways
Didero lands $30M to put manufacturing procurement on 'agentic' autopilot
Didero raised a $30 million Series A co-led by Chemistry and Headline, with participation from Microsoft's venture fund M12. Until the advent of generative AI, fragmented procurement pieces had to be tracked by humans who spent their days chasing suppliers and manually updating systems of record. Didero claims its platform can ingest that communication, putting a significant portion of the procurement workflow on autopilot.
Kirill Lazarev, CEO and Founder at Lazarev.agency: "Didero's agentic procurement platform targets one of enterprise's most painful manual workflows. Procurement involves hundreds of supplier conversations, quote comparisons, order tracking, and system updates – all currently done by humans copying data between emails and spreadsheets. AI agents that ingest supplier communications and update records autonomously eliminate this coordination overhead. Microsoft M12's participation signals Azure integration plans: procurement agents that live inside Teams and Outlook reduce adoption friction."
AI inference startup Modal Labs in talks to raise at $2.5B valuation
Modal Labs, a startup specializing in AI inference infrastructure, is talking to VCs about a new round at a valuation of about $2.5 billion, according to National Today. Should the deal close at these terms, the funding round would more than double the company's valuation of $1.1 billion announced less than five months ago, when it announced an $87 million Series B round. General Catalyst is in talks to lead the round. Modal's annualized revenue run rate is approximately $50 million.
Oleksandr Koshytskyi, Lead Designer at Lazarev.agency: "Modal Labs doubling valuation to $2.5B in five months on $50M ARR reflects inference infrastructure premium. The math: $2.5B on $50M ARR is 50x revenue multiple, reserved for hypergrowth companies. Modal provides serverless GPU infrastructure – developers run AI models without managing servers, paying per compute second. The serverless model lowers the barrier for AI deployment: small teams access enterprise-grade inference without DevOps complexity."
Call centre monitoring startup Operata dials in $11M Series A
Melbourne and US-based call centre analysis startup Operata has raised $11 million in a Series A that values the business at more than $100 million. The round was led by Tidal Ventures, supported by existing investors Ghost VC, Black Nova, and Flying Fox Ventures, with Glitch Capital joining the cap table. Operata secured the round to enhance AI-driven contact centre monitoring in the era of voice agents.
Danylo Dubrovsky, Senior UX/UI designer at Lazarev.agency: "Operata's timing is precise: as AI voice agents replace human agents in call centers, monitoring infrastructure becomes critical. Human agents can self-report issues; AI agents can't. Operata provides observability: call quality, conversation success rates, escalation patterns, compliance flags, that operations teams need to manage AI-driven contact centers at scale."
Former Canva exec's product mapping startup Adora designs $9.9M Seed round
Adora raised US$7 million in Seed funding. The round for Adora was led by Blackbird Ventures, supported by Designer Fund, Skip Capital, Co Ventures and Garuda Ventures. Adora, founded by Omar Salem and Nathan Scully, has already launched with product teams from Canva, Notion, Replit, Granola and Chess.com using it in private beta, with another 2,000 companies on Adora's waitlist.
Kirill Lazarev, CEO and Founder at Lazarev.agency: "Adora's 2,000-company waitlist before public launch shows product-led growth strategy working. Journey mapping is currently done in Miro, Figma, or spreadsheets, fragmented across tools that don't connect user behavior data to visual maps. Adora likely unifies behavioral analytics with journey visualization, letting PMs see where users drop off within the journey map rather than switching between analytics dashboards and static diagrams."
Deeptech IoT startup Datoms to raise Rs 25 Cr in Series A
Indian industrial deeptech IoT startup Datoms raised $2.77 million in a Series A funding round led by BIG Global Investments JSC, with participation from existing investors YourNest Innovative Products VC Fund and IvyCap Ventures. Datoms focuses on industrial automation, offering IoT infrastructure for manufacturing and industrial operations.
Qantas and Airbus back $10M Series A for methanol startup
Australian low-carbon liquid fuels company HAMR Energy raised $10 million in Series A funding round backed by Airbus, Qantas and industrial firm Thyssenkrupp Uhde. The round will support the Victorian startup converting plantation forestry residues into low-carbon fuels for hard-to-abate transport sectors, such as aviation and shipping. The investment from Qantas and Airbus has been made through their joint Australian Sustainable Aviation Fuel investment fund.
Oleksandr Koshytskyi, Lead Designer at Lazarev.agency: "HAMR Energy's strategic investor mix: airline operator plus aircraft manufacturer, creates captive customer relationships alongside capital. Qantas needs sustainable aviation fuel to meet net zero commitments; Airbus needs SAF supply to sell fuel-flexible aircraft. Both benefit from HAMR succeeding."
Naboo raises $70M to turn AI event planning into corporate procurement platform
Paris-headquartered Naboo has raised $70M in Series B as it accelerates its ambition to become the operating layer for how large companies plan, book, and control corporate events. The round is led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, the same investor that backed Mistral AI in 2023, and lands just a year after Naboo closed a €20m Series A. Naboo positions itself as an AI-powered procurement platform for corporate events, covering everything from venue booking and travel to supplier coordination and budget control.
Danylo Dubrovsky, Senior UX/UI designer at Lazarev.agency: "Naboo's $70M Series B shows events-as-procurement is a real category. Corporate events generate enormous tail spend, small transactions across hundreds of suppliers that procurement teams can't efficiently manage. Naboo centralizes vendor relationships, budget controls, and approval workflows that currently happen across email, spreadsheets, and personal relationships. Lightspeed backing both Mistral and Naboo signals conviction in the French AI ecosystem."
The AI infrastructure shake-up
CynLr is building robots that learn like babies
CynLr aims to teach robots to learn like babies, enabling real-time adaptation and accelerating the shift from rigid automation to cognitive robotics. Bengaluru-based founder Gokul NA believes that by using a sensorimotor approach that lets machines see, touch, and interpret objects in real time, CynLr is bridging the gap between robots that merely execute tasks and those that can truly reason.
Oleksandr Koshytskyi, Lead Designer at Lazarev.agency: "CynLr's baby-learning approach solves robotics' brittleness problem. Traditional robots follow programmed rules: change the object slightly and they fail. Sensorimotor learning through vision and touch enables adaptation: robots handle new objects without reprogramming. CynLr bets that sensorimotor intelligence is the path to generalization."
Red Sea Global and Bunat VC to launch AI venture fund
Red Sea Global partners with Bunat Ventures Limited to launch a venture fund focused on AI-driven startups in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The AI Venture Fund will invest in early- and growth-stage startups that are either AI-native or leverage AI as a core enabler. Over the next three years, the Fund aims to support approximately 25 startups through both pre-seed and growth-stage investments.
What this shows: Saudi Arabia accelerating AI investment through sovereign-adjacent capital reflects Vision 2030 technology diversification. Real estate and tourism operators investing in AI creates unique advantages: portfolio startups get real-world deployment environments within RSG's properties and operations, generating data and validation that pure VC backing can't provide.
Generative AI at an entirely new level
AI startup nabs $100M to help firms predict human behavior
Artificial intelligence startup Simile raised $100 million in a new round of funding to help companies predict human behavior, including by guessing items customers might purchase and questions that might get asked on earnings calls. The financing was led by Index Ventures, with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, A* and Hanabi Capital. Notable AI figures including Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy also contributed to the round.
Kirill Lazarev, CEO and Founder at Lazarev.agency: "Simile's $100M for human behavior prediction covers two distinct use cases: consumer (purchase prediction) and financial (earnings call question prediction). Both are pattern recognition on human communication data. Fei-Fei Li and Andrej Karpathy investing adds technical credibility, these are researchers who understand model capabilities and limitations."
Tem raises $75M to automate energy markets with AI-first platform
London-based energy software company Tem raised $75 million in Series B round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with additional funding from AlbionVC, Atomico, Hitachi Ventures, Schroders Capital, Voyager Ventures, Allianz, and others. The round reportedly values the company at more than $300 million and will fund its expansion into the United States and Australia. Tem builds an AI-native energy platform designed to automate the pricing, matching, and execution of electricity transactions, a market that has long relied on manual processes and legacy infrastructure.
Kirill Lazarev, CEO and Founder at Lazarev.agency: "Tem automating electricity trading addresses energy markets' manual operations problem. Power trading involves continuous pricing, counterparty matching, and contract execution across volatile markets: work currently done by traders using screens, phones, and spreadsheets. AI-native platforms execute transactions at machine speed with lower error rates. Allianz and Schroders investing alongside VCs signals institutional energy market validation: when insurance and asset management firms back energy infrastructure, compliance and risk management are likely strong."
Enterprise AI and vertical solutions
Clinician-led health AI Anterior bags $40M from NEA, Sequoia
Anterior announced a $40 million funding round, bringing total capital raised to $64 million. The raise saw continued backing from NEA and Sequoia Capital, alongside new investors FPV and Kinnevik. The new capital will support continued expansion of Anterior's production deployments, new clinical and operational use cases, ecosystem integrations, and further acceleration of the company's rapid five-day average deployment model.
Oleksandr Koshytskyi, Lead Designer at Lazarev.agency: "Anterior's five-day deployment model is the real differentiator in health AI. Healthcare IT typically takes 18-24 months to deploy enterprise software: compliance reviews, EHR integrations, clinical validation, staff training. Five-day deployment suggests Anterior built against existing health plan infrastructure without requiring custom integrations. Clinician-led positioning matters for procurement: when clinical staff are involved in building the product, compliance officers and medical directors trust deployment faster."
MCP infra startup Manufact scoops $6.3M to power ChatGPT and AI agents
As more AI agents and ChatGPT-style apps are used in real-world settings, developers encounter problems such as scattered integrations, weak tool connections, and no standard way to deploy or manage them. Manufact builds MCP infrastructure to connect AI systems to external tools, solving the fragmentation problem for developers building production AI applications.
Danylo Dubrovsky, Senior UX/UI designer at Lazarev.agency: "Manufact's MCP infrastructure bet is timing-dependent. Model Context Protocol is emerging as a standard for connecting AI agents to external tools, if MCP wins, Manufact builds on a growing foundation. Scattered integrations are real developer pain: connecting AI agents to databases, APIs, and services currently requires custom code per integration. Standardized infrastructure reduces this to configuration."
$7M to finally ditch spreadsheets? Meet Bracket, the fintech on a mission to end manual treasury with AI
Mid-market businesses need better treasury tools, but many still rely on spreadsheets, manual FX tasks, and disconnected bank systems. This leaves finance teams exposed to currency risks, without real-time cash visibility, and stuck with inefficient operations. Bracket solves these problems with an AI platform that connects bank accounts, automates FX tasks, and delivers real-time treasury insights. Bracket just raised a $7M seed round, led by Macquarie Group's Commodities and Global Markets and Blackfinch Ventures.
Kirill Lazarev, CEO and Founder at Lazarev.agency: "Bracket targeting mid-market treasury avoids enterprise complexity while escaping SMB's low willingness to pay. Large corporations use Bloomberg and SAP for treasury, switching costs are prohibitive. SMBs don't have treasury functions. Mid-market companies have FX exposure and multi-bank complexity but can't afford enterprise treasury software. Macquarie leading the round provides strategic distribution: one of the world's largest commodity trading operations has treasury expertise and customer relationships in Bracket's target segment."
Porters lands €2.7M for AI banking operations
Porters raised €2.7 million in pre-seed funding to accelerate development and expand its suite of mission-critical banking operations services. The round was led by Earlybird VC, with participation from Seedcamp, alongside angels from Qonto, Upvest, Penta, Integral, and Metaco.
Oleksandr Koshytskyi, Lead Designer at Lazarev.agency: "Porters' angel syndicate from Qonto, Upvest, and Penta is strategic intelligence. These are operators who built banking infrastructure and know exactly which operations problems are painful and unsolved. When the people who run neobank and embedded finance operations invest in your company, you get product validation, warm introductions to potential customers, and operational advice from people who've experienced the problem firsthand."
Zilo raises $15.3M in Series A funding led by Peak XV to scale fashion quick commerce
Fashion quick commerce startup Zilo raised $15.3 million in a Series A funding round led by Peak XV Partners. Existing investors InfoEdge Ventures and Chiratae Ventures doubled down, while Alteria Capital, Stride Ventures and angel investors also participated. The company will use the fresh capital to scale operations, invest in technology, step up brand building, expand to new markets and build a more elevated customer experience. Over the next 12-14 months, it plans to deepen its capabilities and expand from Mumbai to additional cities.
Danylo Dubrovsky, Senior UX/UI designer at Lazarev.agency: "Zilo's fashion quick commerce bet extends rapid delivery from groceries to apparel. Last-minute outfit needs, same-day gift purchases, and instant replacement of damaged clothing are real use cases. The Mumbai-first strategy is correct: fashion quick commerce requires dense inventory positioning, so city-by-city expansion builds density before breadth."
What's coming next week
More AI infrastructure plays in solving compute and power constraints, more vertical AI solutions targeting trillion-dollar inefficiencies, and probably another YC batch company with unconventional founding stories landing multi-million seed rounds.
We'll keep tracking where AI meets real-world business models and we can help you build the next newsworthy project with:
🔥 Stay sharp. Stay with Lazarev.agency, your AI design agency for startups.
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