GoKawiil
Tech News
Bessemer Venture Partners announced it has closed $5.75 billion across two new funds aimed at investing across the AI stack, splitting the capital into $1.75 billion for seed and early-stage deals and $4 billion for growth-stage startups. The firm says it has already deployed $3 billion into more than 260 AI-native companies since 2022, spanning compute, infrastructure, foundation models, dev tools and agentic technology.
Enveda, a biotech startup using AI to identify drugs from plants and microbes, closed a $311 million Series E funding round at a $2 billion valuation. Catalio Capital Management led the round, with Iconiq and other investors participating. The valuation doubles what the company achieved a year earlier.
Ema, which builds coordinated AI agent systems it calls 'AI employees' to automate HR, IT, and finance workflows, has closed a $77 million Series B funding round. The round, led by Creaegis with participation from existing backers Accel, Section 32, and Prosus, was all-primary equity and pushes Ema's total funding to $140 million while more than quadrupling its valuation from 2024.
Snorkel AI, a company that builds AI training data sets and simulated environments, closed a $350 million Series E at a $3.5 billion valuation, nearly triple its $1.3 billion valuation from 17 months earlier. The round included existing backers Addition, Lightspeed, Greylock, GV, and Wells Fargo, alongside new leads Insight Partners and S32. Snorkel reports an annualized revenue run-rate of $375 million, up 18-fold over the past year.
Verda, a Finland-based AI cloud infrastructure company, closed an oversubscribed $189 million Series B round led by Emergence Capital, with backing from MUFG Innovation Partners, Supermicro, Varma Mutual Pension Insurance, Lifeline Ventures, 6 Degrees Capital, byFounders, Tesi, and several angel investors. The round pushes Verda's total funding past $450 million in combined equity and debt, and values the company at unicorn status, making it one of Europe's newest billion-dollar startups.
According to reports from The Washington Post, New York Times and Politico, the White House is drafting an executive order that would let OMB Director Russell Vought approve or reject every grant awarded by the NIH. The move follows a meeting in which NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya reportedly failed to stop the effort, marking the latest attempt by Vought to steer the agency's funding decisions after earlier attempts to cut its budget and impose political criteria on grants were blocked by Congress and the courts.
Benchmark's entire current partnership—Jack Altman, Peter Fenton, Chetan Puttagunta, Everett Randle and Eric Vishria—will join a single main-stage panel at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 in San Francisco, marking the first time the full team has appeared together on the Disrupt Stage. The session, titled 'What We Believe Now,' will focus on where future startups may emerge and which founder assumptions deserve rethinking. The panel follows Benchmark's recent expansion, having raised roughly $2 billion this year across a new flagship fund and its first growth fund.
A university president outlines six principles meant to help institutions resist political pressure on research funding, peer review and academic autonomy, citing examples from the United States and Hungary. The piece traces how funding cuts, shifting grant priorities and legal campaigns against institutions like Central European University have already eroded independent scholarship in some countries.
A widely shared essay contends that open-source software will never be reliably funded because it behaves like the 'dove' strategy in an evolutionary game theory model, always losing ground to proprietary 'hawk' competitors who withhold code for profit. The author, after years of mulling the problem, proposes creating registries that could compel companies benefiting from free software to pay into it, rather than relying on voluntary donations or goodwill.
Vals, a startup founded in 2024 by former Palantir intern and Stanford student Rayan Krishnan, has raised a $40 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, following an earlier seed round from 8VC and Bloomberg Beta. The company aims to replace outdated academic AI benchmarks, which it says fail to keep pace with rapidly improving models, with more rigorous evaluation methods.
California faces pressure from the Trump administration, which is withholding Bipartisan Infrastructure Law broadband funds from states unless they agree not to enforce net neutrality rules. California and Illinois remain the only states yet to finalize their BEAD funding agreements, and California is weighing whether to accept the federal money and abandon enforcement of its own net neutrality law or fight the condition in court. Nearly 30 advocacy groups have urged state leaders to defend the law rather than trade it away for funding.
Mazama Energy closed an oversubscribed $135 million Series B round led by Centaurus Capital and Doerr Capital, with Vinod Khosla among earlier backers. The funds will support horizontal drilling into super-hot rock formations in Oregon, where each well could generate up to 15 megawatts, and the company now estimates the site could ultimately yield 10 gigawatts of power, double last year's projection.