🚀 University of Michigan graduates raised $5.3M for AI sales tool, college dropouts built AI dating with $9.2M, and ex-Waymo engineers landed $270M to automate construction. Meanwhile, AI infrastructure startups solve power constraints and credit intelligence gaps.
Mega funding rounds and AI breakaways
Bollywood dance teammates raised $5.3 million for their Y Combinator AI startup
According to Business Insider, two University of Michigan graduates who met on a Bollywood dance team have emerged from Y Combinator with $5.3 million in seed funding. Vihaar Nandigala and Kishan Sripada, both 23, cofounded sales product Orange Slice, which uses AI to generate prospecting spreadsheets using salespeople's prompts and real-time data from across the web.
They said the company was born of the idea that the larger problem in sales isn't messaging, but identifying who's worth reaching out to. 1984 Ventures and Moxxie Ventures co-led the seed round, and Paul Graham participated as an angel investor.
Kirill Lazarev, CEO and Founder at Lazarev.agency: "Orange Slice solves sales' targeting problem. Most sales AI writes emails; Orange Slice identifies who to contact. The insight is correct: bad targeting wastes time regardless of message quality. Real-time web data creates competitive advantage: knowing which companies just raised funding, hired specific roles, or announced products enables timely outreach."
Ditto uses AI to get you on a date fast and raised $9.2 million
Allen Wang and Eric Liu, two UC Berkeley dropouts, think they can help college students find love using AI. Their startup Ditto uses AI to match people based on the data users input into the service. It then plans the date for them.
After users make a profile, they directly message Ditto's AI chatbot via text about their type and dating preferences. On Wednesdays, users get a text about a potential match. After each date, Ditto follows up for feedback and uses that information as additional data for future matches.
Oleksandr Koshytskyi, Lead Designer at Lazarev.agency: "Ditto's SMS-first approach reduces friction in dating apps. Traditional apps require constant swiping and messaging; Ditto does one match per week via text. This constraint forces intentionality: users can't endlessly browse options, they must commit to dates. The AI learns from feedback, improving matches over time."
Gruve raises $50 million to solve what its CEO calls AI's biggest problem: power
Gruve partners with data center and colocation providers like Lineage and OpenColo to tap their unused power and space. The company says it now has access to roughly 500 megawatts of power across a network of data centers in major US cities. "The biggest challenge today in AI is we don't have enough power," said Tarun Raisoni, Gruve's CEO and cofounder. "We have found the stranded power, and we are bringing the software to stitch it together."
Danylo Dubrovsky, Senior UX/UI designer at Lazarev.agency: "Gruve's stranded power aggregation is infrastructure arbitrage. Data centers often have contracted power capacity they don't fully utilize. Gruve finds this slack capacity and resells it for AI training workloads. The $50M validates that compute scarcity is really power scarcity: GPUs sit idle without sufficient electricity."
Kembara closes €750M first close to fuel growth of European deep tech startups
According to The Next Web, this new fund aims to back later-stage science and engineering companies that struggle to scale in Europe.
What this shows: European deep tech companies face growth capital gaps. Early-stage funding exists, but scaling from Series B to IPO requires hundreds of millions. US funds dominate late-stage rounds, forcing European startups to relocate or accept unfavorable terms.
Kembara's €750M addresses this: European capital for European scale-ups. For founders, this matters strategically, local investors understand regulatory environments and don't require US entity formation.
Business identity startup Duna raises €30 million
Duna has raised €30 million in a Series A funding round led by Alphabet's independent growth fund CapitalG.
Kirill Lazarev, CEO and Founder at Lazarev.agency: "Duna's business identity platform tackles B2B onboarding friction. Companies verify business legitimacy manually: checking incorporation docs, tax IDs, beneficial ownership. This takes days and blocks revenue. Duna likely automates verification through APIs accessing company registries, creating instant business identity validation. Former Stripe employees understand payment onboarding pain: merchants abandon applications when verification is slow."
The AI infrastructure shake-up
Pluto launches AI-powered lending platform to unlock liquidity in private markets
Pluto Financial Technologies raised $8.6 million in seed funding to build AI-powered credit infrastructure that enables financial advisors and their high-net-worth clients to borrow against private equity, venture, and alternative assets without selling.
Oleksandr Koshytskyi, Lead Designer at Lazarev.agency: "Pluto's private asset lending solves illiquidity for wealthy individuals. High-net-worth portfolios include private equity and venture capital, which can't be sold quickly. Traditional lenders won't accept these as collateral because valuation is subjective and liquidity is uncertain. Pluto's AI values private assets using comparable transactions, revenue multiples, and market conditions, enabling collateralized lending."
AIR raises $6.1m to modernise private credit ratings with AI
AI-powered credit intelligence platform AIR raised $6.1 million in a seed funding round co-led by Work-Bench Ventures and Lerer Hippeau. Built by industry veterans from Moody's, DataRobot, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley, AIR is working to replace the century-old, legacy credit ratings with an autonomous, AI-powered system that evaluates every company's financial health, whether it's public or private, every day.
Private credit now exceeds $2 trillion globally. Yet, the startup argues, for more than 100 years, credit ratings have been shaped by antiquated methodologies and static statistical models, making the process subjective, backward-looking, and slow to react.
Danylo Dubrovsky, Senior UX/UI designer at Lazarev.agency: "AIR disrupting Moody's/S&P with real-time AI ratings addresses fundamental credit market dysfunction. Traditional ratings react slowly, companies get downgraded after problems are obvious. AIR's daily re-rating using alternative data (social media sentiment, hiring trends, supplier payments) detects distress earlier. The Moody's veterans on the team matter, they understand incumbent weaknesses and regulatory requirements."
Mine raises $14m to launch AI money agent for Gen Z
Financial planning platform Mine raised $14 million to launch an AI money agent for Gen Z. The Series A round was led by 359 Capital with participation from Kleiner Perkins, FJ Labs, Y Combinator, and US News & World Report.
Mine, previously called Fizz, started as a credit building tool for young adults but is now aiming to offer a full platform to help users "overcome financial stress and build wealth". At the centre of this is MoneyGPT, a personal finance agent powered by Mine's proprietary data models.
Kirill Lazarev, CEO and Founder at Lazarev.agency: "Mine's pivot from credit building to AI financial agent shows platform expansion strategy. Credit cards are customer acquisition, low-margin products that establish banking relationships. The real value is financial advice: budgeting, investing, debt payoff strategies. MoneyGPT monetizes through premium subscriptions or affiliate revenue (recommending financial products). Gen Z specifically needs this because traditional financial advisors require $100K+ minimums."
Generative AI at an entirely new level
Limy built a platform that helps brands optimize for the era of AI agents and raised $10 million
Limy raised $10 million in seed funding led by venture capital firm Flybridge. Limy plugs into a brand's content delivery network, such as Cloudflare, to detect when an AI agent visits their website. It then analyzes which content the agent fetched and the prompt a user entered into a chatbot like ChatGPT or Gemini that triggered the visit.
Armed with that information, Limy produces insights for brands about the types of prompts that are surfacing their products in AI answers and whether the agent's visit to their website led to a purchase.
Oleksandr Koshytskyi, Lead Designer at Lazarev.agency: "Limy is SEO for the AI agent era. Google search drove web traffic; AI chatbots now answer queries without clicks. Brands lose visibility when ChatGPT summarizes product info instead of linking to websites. Limy shows which prompts trigger agent visits and whether visits convert to purchases."
Incard raises £10m to build 'financial OS' for digital entrepreneurs
According to Fintech Futures, Founders Capital, MountFund and angel investors joined the round for Incard which launched in 2024 to address a problem that co-founders Theo Cesarini, Soraya Tribouillois, Liam Seskis and Matteo Martino experienced first-hand as serial entrepreneurs. They found the banking system to be fragmented, leaving owner-founders having to juggle between various apps, systems and spreadsheets to keep track of their cashflow, invoicing and ad spending.
Danylo Dubrovsky, Senior UX/UI designer at Lazarev.agency: "Incard's financial OS consolidates founder banking workflows. Solo entrepreneurs and small teams use separate tools for business banking, invoicing, expense tracking, and ad spend management. Context-switching between five apps creates reconciliation errors and time waste. Incard unifies these into one platform, likely with automated categorization and cash flow forecasting."
Enterprise AI and vertical solutions
Ex-Waymo engineers' Bedrock Robotics raises $270M to automate construction sites
San Francisco–based Bedrock Robotics raised $270 million in Series B funding as it pushes to bring autonomous heavy machinery to large-scale construction sites across the US. The round was co-led by CapitalG and the Valor Atreides AI Fund. The new capital will be used to expand Bedrock's operations and accelerate the development of its autonomous construction platform, as demand grows for safer, more productive job sites.
Kirill Lazarev, CEO and Founder at Lazarev.agency: "Bedrock's $270M Series B shows autonomous construction has product-market fit. Construction faces labor shortages and safety risks: heavy equipment operation is dangerous and skilled operators are scarce. Autonomous machinery solves both: machines work 24/7 without breaks and eliminate human injury risk. The Ex-Waymo team brings self-driving expertise; construction is easier than urban driving because job sites are controlled environments with fewer variables."
Danaher co-founder backs Lawhive's $60M push into fragmented US legal market
According to Tech Funding News, the US consumer legal market brings in $200 billion each year, but research shows that up to $1 trillion in legal needs go unmet due to high costs, court delays, and inefficient systems. Many people avoid getting help with family law, landlord issues, or work disputes because services are slow and expensive.
Lawhive addresses these problems as the world's first AI-native law firm. With 450 lawyers in the US and UK, they use a custom AI system to reduce paperwork and provide faster, more affordable legal help. The company just raised $60 million in Series B funding, led by Mitch Rales, co-founder of Danaher.
Oleksandr Koshytskyi, Lead Designer at Lazarev.agency: "Lawhive's AI-native law firm model reduces legal costs by automating document generation. Family law, landlord disputes, and employment issues require human judgment but involve repetitive paperwork. AI handles intake forms, contract drafting, and filing preparation, letting lawyers focus on strategy and negotiation. The $1 trillion unmet legal need exists because traditional firms can't profitably serve middle-income clients: billable hours make small cases uneconomical."
What's coming next week
More AI infrastructure plays 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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