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Tech News
Simplismart, a four-year-old Bengaluru-based startup, raised $14 million in a Series B round led by Dallas Venture Capital, with participation from Nvidia, Accel, Shastra VC, and Micromax. The all-primary round values the company at roughly $100 million and will support its software that helps businesses run AI models more efficiently on existing computing infrastructure.
Town, an AI agent startup led by CEO Jean-Denis Greze, announced a $108 million Series B funding round on October 19, co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures. The round values the company at $1 billion. Greze also spoke publicly about why most people struggle to use AI agents effectively, citing what he calls the 'empty-box problem' and objecting to the term 'assistant' to describe such tools.
Daytona Platforms said Friday it closed a $60 million Series B led by FirstMark Growth at a $1 billion valuation, bringing its total funding to $91 million. The round drew a roster of tech executives including Stripe's Patrick Collison, Shopify's Tobi Lütke, Perplexity's Aravind Srinivas, Zoom's Eric Yuan, Datadog's Olivier Pomel, Quora's Adam D'Angelo, and Mercor's Brendan Foody, alongside Qualcomm Ventures, Samsung Next, and Okta Ventures. The three-year-old New York startup builds cloud infrastructure tailored to AI agents, which founder Ivan Burazin says require sandboxed, short-lived computing environments rather than the long-running services traditional cloud platforms were built for.
AI assistant startup Town announced a $108 million Series B round co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures, pushing its valuation past $1 billion. The San Francisco company, founded by former Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze, has now raised at least $160 million total after a $55 million Series A in June, and says it reached millions in annual recurring revenue within weeks of its public launch. Andreessen Horowitz, Serena Ventures, and First Round Capital also joined the round, alongside a new shared workflow feature that updates all employees' AI assistants, called Townies, with company-wide information automatically.
Stripe has agreed to acquire OpenRouter, a startup whose API routes developer requests across more than 400 AI models, in a deal reported by The New York Times at $7.5 billion. Of that, $1.5 billion is allocated to OpenRouter's founders and the remainder to investors; neither company has confirmed the price publicly. OpenRouter, founded in 2023 by CEO Alex Atallah, says it processes over 10 trillion tokens daily for more than 10 million developers, with customers including Nvidia, Zoom, and Lovable.
Indian health startup Even Healthcare has closed a $50 million all-equity Series B round led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Alpha Wave, valuing the company at $300 million—triple its valuation 18 months ago. The round brings Even's total funding to over $120 million, and the company has opened two hospitals in Bengaluru as it shifts from partnering with hospitals to operating its own.
Christina Qi, who built and later shut down MIT-founded hedge fund Domeyard after a losing 2020, now runs market data startup Databento as CEO. The company, which serves 70,000 customers including Nvidia and OpenAI, raised a $97 million Series B round in July, bringing total disclosed funding to about $127 million, and reports eight-figure annual recurring revenue.
Arena, the crowdsourced AI model ranking platform that began as a UC Berkeley research project in 2023, announced a $200 million Series B funding round at a $3.1 billion valuation. The raise follows a $150 million Series A in January at a $1.7 billion valuation, when annualized revenue stood at $30 million; the company says that figure has since hit $100 million. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Dell Technologies Capital, a16z and others, and Arena also introduced a new alignment category to its leaderboard.
Oratomic, a quantum computing company, secured $475 million in its Series B funding round, significantly increasing its valuation to $5.4 billion. This comes only three months after its previous funding round, highlighting strong investor confidence in the emerging technology sector.
Nous Research announced a $90 million Series B funding round, valuing the startup at $1.5 billion. The funding was led by Robot Ventures, with participation from Nvidia, Union Square Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Samsung, and 1789 Capital, bringing total funding to $158 million. The company plans to develop enterprise-focused AI agents called 'Hermes for Businesses' to support secure, multi-step workflows for corporate clients.
Knoxville-based startup Type One Energy announced it has raised $200 million in a Series B funding round. The company plans to use the funds to build a 400-megawatt fusion power plant, aiming for completion by 2034. Their approach involves designing the plant and sourcing components from a network of specialized suppliers to reduce costs.
Kevin Mandia's new security startup Armadin has closed a $255.5 million Series B round at a valuation exceeding $2.5 billion, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel with participation from Bain Capital Ventures, Redpoint, 8VC, Ballistic Ventures, Google Ventures, In-Q-Tel, Kleiner Perkins, and Menlo Ventures. The round follows a $190 million Series A just six months earlier, bringing Armadin's total funding to over $445 million. The company builds always-on 'agentic swarms' that continuously probe enterprise systems for vulnerabilities, chaining weaknesses together in a manner meant to replicate how attackers might exploit them.