The round was led by Google Ventures , with participation from existing investors, underscoring continued appetite for applied AI products that have already found a clear commercial use. Synthesia builds generative AI tools that let companies create videos using AI-generated avatars instead of cameras, studios, or presenters. The technology has found a strong foothold in corporate training, internal communications, and product explainers, areas where speed, scale, and consistency often matter more than production gloss.
Founded in 2021 and based in Boston and Tel Aviv, Memcyco has built an agentless platform that proactively prevents brand impersonation and account takeover (ATO) attacks. Amid an increase in ATO attacks and AI-driven deception such as phishing, Memcyco aims to improve protections by infiltrating the attack timeline as it unfolds. It relies on covert, agentless anti-impersonation technology that provides organizations with visibility into both victim and attack behavior, to stop attacks before credential theft or fraud.
A British AI startup that makes realistic video avatars has almost doubled its valuation to $4bn (3bn), in a boost for the UK technology sector. Synthesia was valued at $2.1bn last year and moved into new offices in central London, marking the moment with a ceremony attended by the Sadiq Khan, the city's mayor, and Peter Kyle, then technology secretary. On Monday, it announced its latest funding round, led by an existing investor, Google Ventures, had raised $200m and valued the British company at $4bn.
Even before he'd graduated from the University of Bath in 2024, Arnau Ayerbe landed a highly coveted role as an AI engineer with JP Morgan - yet he felt limited and uninspired. "I realised very quickly that the person to my right and to my left were going to be me in 20 years, and I didn't want to become that," recalls London-based Ayerbe.
The company, which is based in San Francisco and has an office in Pune, India, is targeting up to $35 million this year as it builds a royalty-driven on-device AI business. That growth has buoyed the company, which now has post-money valuation of between $270 million and $300 million, up from around $100 million in its 2022 Series B, Kheterpal said.
Y Combinator rejected the application from Bolna, a voice orchestration startup built by Maitreya Wagh and Prateek Sachan, five times before finally accepting it into the fall 2025 batch, skeptical that the founders could turn interest into revenue. "When we were applying for Y-Combinator, the feedback we got was, 'great to see that you have a product that can create realistic voice agents, but Indian enterprises are not going to pay, and you are not going to make money out of this,'" Wagh told TechCrunch.
Specifically, the technology that helped retail brands sell unsold or excess products (off-channel inventory) wasn't as sophisticated as it could have been. Brands sell their excess inventory at discount retailers like Nordstrom Rack, but often lose money because managing unsold inventory is difficult. Products are spread across warehouses, and teams are left guessing the value of an item and when the best time to sell it is.
"Human-generated content is quickly becoming the most valuable driver of brand discovery, but influencer- marketing solutions weren't built to scale for the enterprise," said Kristen Wiley, chief executive officer and founder of Statusphere, who began her career as a creator.
Rain - $250M Series C Rain, an infrastructure platform for stablecoin payments, has raised $250M in Series C funding led by ICONIQ Capital. Founded by Charles Yoo-Naut and Farooq Malik in 2021, Rain has now raised a total of $332.5M in reported equity funding. Proxima - $80M Seed Proxima, an AI-powered drug discovery platform for proximity-based therapeutics, has raised $80M in seed funding led by DCVC. Proxima was founded by Luca Naef and Zachary Carpenter in 2019.
Armed with some data from our friends at CrunchBase, I broke down the largest US startup funding rounds from December 2025. I have included some additional information such as industry, company description, round type, founders, and total equity funding raised to further the analysis. AlleyWatch is NYC's leading source of tech and startup news, reaching the city's most active founders, investors, and tech leaders. Learn More →
Aikido's core proposition is rooted in the conviction that traditional application security tools have not kept pace with the rapid evolution of software development. Modern engineering teams ship code more frequently, and the widespread adoption of AI tools for coding has heightened both velocity and risk. Legacy scanners and point solutions can generate noise and distract developers, rather than offering actionable insights at the right moment.
Mark Zuckerberg has struck again. Meta Platforms is acquiring Manus, a Singapore-based AI startup that's become the talk of Silicon Valley since it materialized this spring with a demo video so slick it went instantly viral. The clip showed an AI agent that could do things like screen job candidates, plan vacations, and analyze stock portfolios. Manus claimed at the time that it outperformed OpenAI's Deep Research.
In 2024, they launched Sauron - named after the sinister, all-seeing eye from "The Lord of the Rings" - to build what they envisioned as a military-grade home security system for tech elites. The concept resonated in Bay Area circles, where crime had become a constant topic during and after the pandemic, despite San Francisco Police Department statistics showing property crime and homicide rates declining last year.
ScrubMarine is developing autonomous hull-cleaning and inspection robots that target biofouling - the build-up of algae, barnacles and slime on ships' hulls. This growth increases drag, driving up fuel consumption and emissions. Devanathan estimates biofouling adds more than $100 billion a year to global shipping costs. "Biofouling is a hidden problem, but it's a massive one," he said. "It increases drag on the vessel, which increases fuel burn. That's a huge cost for operators, and it's also bad for the environment."
In a civil complaint, the SEC has charged Luckey with violating securities laws for using millions of dollars of company funds to pay for her home, Super Bowl tickets, and a destination wedding in the Caribbean. The SEC alleges she painted a rosy picture of the company's booming revenue when ComplYant never brought in more than $620 in monthly revenue.
Stroma, which made headlines in 2011 for a still-not-released device that the company said could safely turn brown eyes blue, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy Monday. That's the variety that allows a business to reorganize and pause litigation in hopes of staying alive. The once-buzzy California tech company has raised $70 million since its 2009 founding and is still hoping to run a clinical study in Germany this coming year, according to its chairman.
Helsingborg-based proptech AI startup Proplab continues to build momentum. After opening up their platform for residential real estate this fall, the company has seen rapid growth, now with 100+ broker offices connected across Sweden, on top of their existing commercial property clients. Over the past months, Proplab has established a collaboration with a major brokerage chain and another one is now on the way in. Their traction is clear, revenues more than doubled from October to November this year.
Ryan Li has long been steeped in the worlds of both AI and crypto. He started working with AI about ten years ago as an undergrad at UC Berkeley and has since built two crypto startups. That experience has led him to conclude that popular AI platforms like ChatGPT and Perplexity give rise to far too many hallucinations about crypto-and that those errors can cost traders millions, if not billions, of dollars.
Naveen Rao, the former head of AI at Databricks, has raised $475 million in seed capital at a $4.5 billion valuation for his new startup, Unconventional AI. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Ventures, with participation from Lux Capital and DCVC. The funding is a first installment towards the goal of up to $1 billion for the round, Rao told Bloomberg.
Intel has signed a term sheet to acquire the AI chip startup SambaNova Systems, two sources with direct knowledge of the agreement tell WIRED. The details of the term sheet are unknown. The agreement is non-binding, meaning the deal is not yet finalized and could be dissolved without penalty. It could take weeks or even months before regulatory approval, liability scrutiny, and financial due diligence are complete.
With initial seed rounds totalling around £10 million, these companies focused on creating real-time interactive experiences that blended television polish with social media immediacy. Fast forward to late 2025, and those early investments have ballooned into a collective valuation exceeding £2 billion, according to recent filings with Companies House and market analysts like PwC. This remarkable trajectory underscores Britain's role as a global leader in entertainment tech, where startups have harnessed 5G rollout and AI-driven production to redefine how audiences connect with content.
When Jeff Bezos started Amazon, Barnes & Noble wasn't pouring billions into machine learning or cloud infrastructure. This doesn't mean that it was easy for these entrepreneurs to change the face of whole industries. It was not. But it was at least possible. Back then, giants could be out-innovated because they were bureaucratic, cautious, and often blind to the potential of what the upstart start-ups were building.
One thing I heard from some of the top researchers and mathematicians I've recruited to Axiom is that solving for mathematical superintelligence will be their legacy,
RMFG was launched in July 2024 by Kenneth Cassel, a 32-year-old college dropout and Y Combinator graduate, as well as a father of four. Cassel grew up in a large, blue-collar family in Texas and taught himself to code while working maintenance at a gas station company. "We're in this kind of renaissance where there's a lot of renewed interest in manufacturing," Cassel told Business Insider.
