Top News | Meta has reorg’d its AI division again, carving it into four groups and exploring the use of outside LLMs as Zuckerberg bets billions on superintelligence while insiders grumble, rivals poach talent, and the open-source ethos looks increasingly expendable. The New York Times has more here. | The U.K. has quietly dropped its demand for a backdoor into Apple’s iCloud after talks with the Trump administration, a rare win for privacy advocates that also spares Apple from gutting its own security features. TechCrunch has more here. | | | |
AI is no longer theoretical, it's actively reshaping private capital. Some firms are adopting it to streamline workflows and uncover new insights, while others are still assessing where it fits. | Join Affinity on August 28 for a live conversation featuring experts from BlackRock and OpenAI. They’ll share what they’re seeing in the market, how AI is influencing decision-making, and what tools are emerging for deal teams. Tune in for insights tailored to private capital investors. | | Databricks CEO Says Fresh $1B Will Help Him Attack a New AI Database Market |  | Image Credits: Databricks |
| By Julie Bort | Databricks is in the process of closing a fresh round at a $100 billion valuation, sources confirmed to TechCrunch. The round was originally reported by the Wall Street Journal. | A source familiar with the deal tells TechCrunch exclusively that the new round is about $1 billion and was wildly oversubscribed. Databricks, best known for its data analytics products, refrained from selling even more equity because it didn’t need cash for operations after its once record-breaking $10 billion raise at a $62 billion valuation in January, according to the source. (OpenAI has since squashed the record with a $40 billion raise in March.) | The round was co-led by both Thrive and one of Databricks’ early investors, Insight Partners, TechCrunch has learned. These two firms led the last round as well. The company has now raised about $20 billion since it was founded in 2013. | This was a primary round, meaning it didn’t include employees selling their shares. However, sources close to the company say Databricks has already had two secondary rounds for employees in 2025. Those offers allowed employees to sell up to 40%, 50%, or 60% of their shares, depending on the size of their holdings. | In both cases, the source said, the full funds available for the secondary round were not maxed out, meaning employees held on to more shares than they could have sold. While Databricks clearly isn’t in a hurry to IPO, employees have had two recent chances to cash out shares. | This new round, however, was raised to pursue two specific projects — a database for AI agents and its AI agent platform — Databricks co-founder and CEO Ali Ghodsi told TechCrunch in an interview. | The company will invest heavily in its database for AI agents, making it generally available to all customers. It launched the product, known as Lakebase, in June at its annual tech conference. Lakebase, which is based on the open source database Postgres, is enterprise grade and supports corporate developers’ vibe-coding projects. This makes it a competitor to Supabase. | | | Massive Fundings | Aalo Atomics, a three-year-old Austin startup that is developing small modular nuclear reactors to power data centers with low-cost, scalable electricity, raised a $100 million Series B round led by Valor Equity Partners, with 50Y, Alumni Ventures, Crescent Enterprises, Crosscut, Fine Structure Ventures, Gaingels, Harpoon Ventures, Hitachi Ventures, Kindred Ventures, MCJ, NRG Energy, Nucleation Capital, Perpetual VC, Tishman Speyer, and VamosVentures also piling on. TechCrunch has more here. | Eight Sleep, an 11-year-old New York company that makes AI-powered smart mattresses to track and improve sleep, raised a $100 million round. Investors included HSG, Valor Equity Partners, Founders Fund, and Y Combinator. The company has raised a total of approximately $260 million. TechCrunch has more here. | | Big-But-Not-Crazy-Big Fundings | Firecrawl, a four-year-old San Francisco startup that offers an open source and API-based web crawler used by developers, AI agents, and enterprises like Shopify and hedge funds to collect and search web data, raised a $15.5 million Series A round led by Nexus Venture Partners, with Shopify CEO Tobias Lütke and previous investor Y Combinator also pitching in. TechCrunch has more here. | Functionize, a 10-year-old San Francisco company whose AI-powered cloud platform automates software testing for large enterprises like GE Healthcare and ServiceNow, raised a $41 million Series B round co-led by Mumford Investments and LHH Investments, with previous investors Canvas Ventures and Wipro Ventures also contributing. SiliconANGLE has more here. | Kasa, a nine-year-old San Francisco startup that manages short-term rentals and hotel properties on behalf of real estate owners using an AI-driven operating system to maximize occupancy and profitability, raised a $40 million round. Silver Lake Waterman was the deal lead. PhocusWire has more here. | Keychain, a two-year-old New York startup that helps consumer brands and retailers in categories like food, beverage, health, and beauty connect with third-party manufacturers, while also selling AI-powered software that manufacturers use to manage compliance, procurement, inventory, and production planning, raised a $30 million Series B round led by Wellington Management and including previous investor Box Group. The company has raised a total of $68 million. TechCrunch has more here. | Pylon, a two-year-old New York startup that uses AI to automate B2B customer service, raised a $31 million Series A round at a valuation in the hundreds of millions of dollars, according to The Information. The deal was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bain Capital. The Information has more here. | SpinLaunch, an 11-year-old company based in Long Beach, CA, that’s developing a network of satellites designed to provide broadband internet connectivity, raised a $30 million round led by ATW Partners, with Kongsberg Defence and Aerospace also stepping up. SpaceNews has more here. | | Smaller Fundings | ChemFinity, a three-year-old Brooklyn startup that develops sorbent-based filters that can selectively recover critical minerals like rare earths, platinum group metals, and copper from complex waste streams, raised a $7 million seed round co-led by Overture Ventures and At One Ventures, with additional participation from Closed Loop Ventures Group, Pace Ventures, WovenEarth Ventures, and Climate Capital. Recycling Today has more here. | Grid Aero, a two-year-old startup based in San Leandro, CA, that is building low-cost autonomous cargo planes to resupply U.S. forces in contested regions, raised a $6 million seed round co-led by Calibrate Ventures and Ubiquity Ventures. Forbes has more here. | Qunova Computing, a five-year-old South Korean startup that develops quantum software algorithms to help chemical, pharmaceutical, and industrial companies run complex simulations and optimization tasks more efficiently across multiple quantum hardware systems, raised a $10 million Series A round. Investors included GS Ventures, Korea Development Bank, GU Equity Partners, Company K, Quantum Ventures Korea, JB Investment, CKD Venture Capital, and Daesung Venture Capital. More here. | TensorZero, a two-year-old New York startup that is building open-source software to help companies develop, monitor, and improve large language model applications in production, raised a $7.3 million seed round led by FirstMark, with Bessemer Venture Partners, Bedrock Capital, DRW, and Coalition also joining in. More here. | Zipline AI, a one-year-old startup based in San Mateo, CA, that is developing open-source infrastructure designed to help enterprises create, manage, and deploy AI data pipelines and workflows more quickly and at lower cost, raised a $7 million seed round. Wing VC was the deal lead, with Stripe, Box Group, and Exceptional Capital also weighing in. More here. | | |
Harmonic | Back to back to back to back to back founder calls? With help from Scout, Harmonic’s AI agent, you can still show up prepared and win the deal. | Harmonic is the startup discovery platform trusted by 1000s of investors, including Insight, Pear, and 8VC. | Check it out! | | Going Public | Turns out Bullish pulled off a first in U.S. markets last week, raising its entire $1.15 billion IPO haul in stablecoins, a flex that cements tokens like USDC and PayPal’s PYUSD as mainstream settlement tools while signaling how quickly crypto rails are bleeding into traditional finance. CoinDesk has more here. | | People | OpenAI is pushing the talking point that we are currently in an AI bubble. First, Sam Altman opined on the subject to a table of rapt reporters, and now, it’s OpenAI chairman Bret Taylor’s turn. On a recent podcast, he likened today’s AI frenzy to the dot-com boom, warning of plenty of snake oil but also pointing to lasting winners that could reshape markets as dramatically as Amazon and Google did a generation ago. Business Insider has more here. | Peter Lenke, who previously ran Atlassian Ventures, has jumped to Microsoft’s M12 as managing partner, where he’ll zero in on AI and enterprise bets from seed through Series B. More here. | Ready to hear why someone's betting big on moon dust mining? Head over to this week's StrictlyVC Download where Connie chats with Seven Seven Six's Katelin Holloway, who's built a wildly diverse $1 billion portfolio spanning everything from lunar helium harvesting to stone-carving robots while figuring out how to keep human connection alive in an AI world. | | Essential Reads | A new Reuters/Ipsos poll shows Americans are spooked by AI, with 71% fearing permanent job losses, 77% wor |
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