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LangChain announced a $300 million Series C funding round valuing the company at $3 billion, led by CapitalG with participation from GIC, DFJ Growth, IVP, and Sapphire Ventures. The valuation more than doubles the $1.25 billion mark it reached about a year ago in a $125 million round led by IVP. The company says its LangSmith platform now serves 7,000 customers, including Harvey, Rippling, Clay, NVIDIA, Toyota, and Salesforce.
British AI-chip startup Fractile closed a $720 million Series C backed by Britain's Sovereign AI Fund, Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint. The UK government put the valuation at over £5 billion, which reports from the Financial Times and Reuters peg at roughly $7 billion. CEO Walter Goodwin said the funds will help the company ship its first chips and systems next year.
Cloud security startup Upwind closed a $400 million Series C led by Bessemer Venture Partners at a $3.8 billion valuation, with Greylock Partners and Craft Ventures also participating. The round nearly collapsed after Datadog offered to acquire Upwind but declined to pay above the valuation VCs had already set, prompting Upwind to stay independent instead.
Blacksmith, which builds continuous integration tools for testing software including AI-generated code, raised a $66 million Series C led by Sequoia Capital at a $1 billion valuation, the company announced Wednesday. CEO Aditya Jayaprakash said annual recurring revenue has grown 17-fold and the platform has run over 90 million CI jobs, with customers including Mercury and Granola.
Estonia-based web security firm Blackwall announced a $100 million Series C round led by AVP, with existing investors Dawn Capital, MMC Ventures and Tera Ventures also participating. Executive chairman Roi Carthy said the raise quadruples the company's valuation to $2.2 billion since its 2025 round. Blackwall sells bot- and traffic-security tools to hosting and cloud providers, who rebrand and resell them to their own customers.
Parallel Systems, founded by former SpaceX engineers, has raised a $100 million Series C round led by AVP to scale production of its battery-powered, autonomous rail vehicles called Panther. The vehicles can haul several tons of freight up to 500 miles without an operator, traveling solo or in short platoons rather than traditional long trains. CEO Matt Soule says the technology lets railroads compete with trucking on shorter routes they've largely abandoned.
FedEx has placed an order for 2,000 electric medium-duty trucks from startup Harbinger, a deal valued at $300 million, with delivery expected by the end of next year. Harbinger confirmed the order to TechCrunch after Bloomberg News first reported it. This follows FedEx's earlier $160 million Series C investment in Harbinger and an initial order of 53 trucks already delivered.
Edge-AI chipmaker SiMa.ai closed a $150 million Series C round co-led by Fidelity Management & Research Company and Amplify, with Alter Venture Partners, Dell Technologies Capital, and StepStone Group also participating. The deal values the company at $1.45 billion, up from a $960 million valuation after its July 2025 Series B, and brings total funding raised to over $500 million.
The Exploration Company, led by CEO Hèlene Huby, closed a $450 million Series C funding round, the largest such raise by any European space firm and reportedly the biggest ever for a female-led company in Europe. Huby was also named an envoy at France's International Space Summit, appearing alongside astronaut Thomas Pesquet as a prominent voice in European space policy.