#startup-funding

#startup-funding

Parento addresses this critical gap by providing the first-ever insurance product specifically designed for paid parental leave, offering companies a three-in-one solution that combines customized insurance coverage, streamlined leave management, and personalized parent coaching. The platform serves both birthing and non-birthing parents, achieving a remarkable 95% return-to-work rate compared to the industry standard of 60%. With its comprehensive approach, Parento helps employers control expenses while supporting employees through one of life's most significant transitions, targeting the $43B total addressable market for parental leave solutions.

Koi closed a $10 million seed round in December and a $38 million Series A in August. Picture Capital and NFX led the seed, while Battery Ventures and Team8 led the Series A. Cerca Partners participated in both rounds. The Washington, DC-headquartered startup was cofounded last year by Assaraf and two other former Israel Defense Forces members who served in intelligence Unit 8200: CTO Idan Dardikman and CPO Itay Kruk. Both Dardikman and Kruk previously worked together at cybersecurity company Sygnia.

Our goal is to reduce emissions, promote healthy soils and help farmers improve yields," said Nicolas Pinkowski, co-founder and chief executive officer. "There's a lot of concern right now in the US about chemicals in and on foods. More and more people care not just about getting enough calories every day, but about making sure what they eat is healthy and safe.

As AI is increasingly helping hackers to launch mass-scale email attacks, former Google security leaders have joined forces to build autonomous AI agents that aim to stop phishing, malware, and business email compromise threats before they ever reach user inboxes. That is the mission behind AegisAI, a new email security startup that has just emerged from stealth with $13 million in seed funding co-led by Accel and Foundation Capital.

The Weekly Notable Startup Funding Report takes us on a trip across various ecosystems in the US, highlighting some of the notable funding activity in the various markets that we track. The notable startup funding rounds for the week ending 9/5/25 featuring funding details for Lead, Lendistry, and Baseten, and seventeen other deals representing $14.4B (not a typo) in new funding that you need to know about.

Sierra, which helps enterprises build customer service AI agents, announced it raised a $350 million funding round on Thursday. The round, led by earlier investor Greenoaks Capital, values the startup at $10 billion, according to a company blog post that confirmed an earlier report from Axios on Wednesday. Sierra was founded in early 2024 by Taylor and longtime Google alum Clay Bavor. The company claims to have landed hundreds of customers, including SoFi, Ramp, and Brex, among others, in its 18 months of operation.

"Today's browsers weren't built for work; they were built for browsing. This deal is a bold step forward in reimagining the browser for knowledge work in the AI era," Mike Cannon-Brookes, Atlassian's CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. "Together, we'll create an AI-powered browser optimized for the many SaaS applications living in tabs - one that knowledge workers will love to use every day," he added.

Amogh Chaturvedi is running on little sleep but plenty of conviction at 6 a.m. He's groggy, apologetic for rescheduling, and still reeling from a recent scare involving a family member and an electric scooter. Within minutes, though, the 20-year-old Stanford dropout snaps into focus, walking me through how he and his co-founders sold one startup at 19, landed in Y Combinator, and raised $5 million for their next company, Human Behavior.

"The fax machine still exists, but only in healthcare," said Dr. Kaushal Kulkarni, a neuro-ophthalmologist. "Someone goes out and retrieves records from the hospital basement and proceeds to put 1,000 pages-basically fax records-on my desk. ' Here you go, doctor. Have fun. ' And now it's my job, in the middle of a busy clinic where patients are already waiting half an hour or more, to flip through 1,000 pages and try to figure out what's going on with the person in front of me who needs help."

The Weekly Notable Startup Funding Report takes us on a trip across various ecosystems in the US, highlighting some of the notable funding activity in the various markets that we track. The notable startup funding rounds for the week ending 8/30/25 featuring funding details for Atomic, Eyebot, Barti, and sixteen other deals representing $1.3B in new funding that you need to know about.

"Solo.io is a cloud connectivity company. Its main cloud products are Gloo Gateway, a cloud-native API gateway built on Envoy, and Gloo Mesh, which aims to simplify Istio service mesh management for Kubernetes. And, of course, there are the inevitable AI-related products. When we spoke to Levine, Solo.io had just announced an MCP gateway for kgateway (described by the company as "the ecosystem's most mature and widely deployed cloud-native API gateway"). Most recently, the company announced that it had donated agentgateway to the Linux Foundation."

The tool works across documents from contracts to slide decks, offering translations in over 120 languages while keeping every table, chart, image, and layout intact. Founder Daphne Tay said she came up with the idea after spending "countless hours" at Bain reformatting translated documents for international projects. "I was doing exactly what our clients do now - copying and pasting text from translation tools, fixing formatting, and losing hours that should have been spent on actual consulting work," she said.

A nearby school's carpool line was constantly blocking the parking lot of one of Aurelian's hair salon clients. The salon owner called the city's non-emergency line and was put on hold for 45 minutes before reaching a dispatcher. "She called me into her office afterwards, and was like, 'Max, do you want to help me out?'" Keenan told TechCrunch. When he started to research how municipal non-emergency response call centers work,

Mako, a startup co-founded by Cornell Tech assistant professor Mohamed Abdelfattah, has raised $8.5 million in seed funding to tackle one of artificial intelligence's most pressing infrastructure challenges: optimizing the computing efficiency of graphics processing units, or GPUs. The $8.5 million round was led by M13, with participation from Neo, Flybridge, and others. The company plans to use the funding to grow its engineering team and accelerate product development.

We are not a 100x case. Our strength lies in lower risk and more stable growth - and that requires investors who understand that,

General Fusion, a Canadian nuclear fusion energy startup, announced today that it had been thrown a lifeline in the form of $22 million in fresh funding. The company had laid off at least 25% of its employees in May in a bid to shore up its stretched finances. At the same time, CEO Greg Twinney wrote an open letter pleading for funding. The additional cash will give General Fusion some breathing room, though not much.

Nominal plugs into a company's existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) system and helps CFOs and controllers automate tasks to reduce manual work and errors.

Venture capital seeks massive bets with the hope of high rewards, focusing on companies with the potential for a 10x return, despite a high failure rate.

Newton Research, co-founded in 2023, secured $9 million in Series A funding to enhance advertising analytics using specialized AI agents for media planning and measurement.

Ambience Healthcare has developed an AI operating system for documentation, coding, and clinical workflows, aiming to enhance administrative processes in healthcare organizations. With a total of $319.3M in funding, it is supported by notable investors including Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI Startup Fund.

Hypernatural has raised a total of $9.2 million to simplify video creation for creators and everyday people through their generative AI platform.

I found inspiration during the pandemic, as olive bars in grocery stores shut down, and I was forced to get my olive fix from the traditional olive aisle.

"There was an abundance of consumer and market-level data for places like the U.S., UK, and a few parts of Western Europe, maybe some traces in Canada and Australia. But when it came to international markets, including economic giants like India, Brazil, Mexico, Japan, Turkey, and China, there was nothing usable."

"Traditional market research is broken. It's slow, it's expensive, and, most importantly, it's disconnected from how modern enterprises build products and connect with their customers," says Casper Henningsen, co-founder and CEO of GetWhy.

The updates to Qualified Small Business Stock rules expand the definition of a small business to include companies with less than $75 million in gross assets, up from the previous $50 million cap. This change allows founders and investors to benefit from tax-free profits much sooner.

Solence develops tools for managing chronic conditions linked to PCOS, using lifestyle programs and AI systems to support patients and improve care access.

Brand value isn’t just a by-product of good execution. It’s a measurable asset only if it checks the boxes that make it defensible, durable, and differentiated.