Build mode for robots
What's Up Tech? #276
Welcome to our 276th newsletter, written with 🖤 by Annika Bautista, Sarah Luna Mongin, and Aris Sevastianos.
🔍 Topics we'll cover this weekGeneral news from the week: Walmart goes bargain-hunting in Europe 👀
Fundraising news from the week: war drones and game-trained robots for the real world ⚡
Up-and-coming ventures to watch: power chips for the AI boom, search built for machines, and agents that buy and sell on their own 🧠
Internship & Job offers of the week
Enjoy the read! 💛
🤑 Fundraising of the week🎖️ Stark Defence raises €500 million to scale AI-powered strike drones (🇩🇪)
Stark Defence just locked a €500 million Series B+ led by Sequoia Capital and Founders Fund, pushing its valuation past €3.5 billion. The company builds “loitering munitions,” aka drones that hover, find targets using autonomy, and then self-destruct on impact.
The new capital is going mostly (80%) into manufacturing and R&D scaling, because Europe’s defense procurement wave is hitting fast.
Stark’s Virtus system is already deployed in Ukraine and can be assembled in about ten minutes. The company is now one of Europe’s best-funded defense startups. 🚁
Stark Defense Raises €500M Led by Sequoia and Founders Fund at a Valuation Above €3.5B
🎮 General Intuition raises $320 million to turn video games into real-world robot brains (🇳🇱🇺🇸)
Are you ready, Player One? General Intuition just locked in a $320 million Series funding round at a $2.3 billion valuation, led by Khosla Ventures. The pitch is that video games are massive datasets for training AI agents that learn how to move, act, and “think” in space and time. 🧠
The core tech trains agents on gameplay data (think: Fortnite-style environments) where every move is tied to real player actions. That action-labeled dataset (pulled from Medal.TV, which is also part of General Intuition) lets the model learn causality (i.e., walls are walls, ladders are ladders, and physics actually matters), then transfer that learning into real robots like a roaming quadruped.
The new funding will mostly scale compute via a deal with CoreWeave and expand pre-training, while also opening up an API for external developers.
General Intuition’s $2.3B Bet that Video Games Can Train AI Agents for the Real World
🚑 Alan raises €480 million to scale AI-powered “prevention insurance” across Europe and beyond (🇫🇷)
Alan just snagged €480 million in a Series G led by Prosus at a €5.5 billion valuation. The idea is that you can use AI to predict, prevent, and intervene early through one app that bundles insurance, care navigation, and wellbeing tools.🧑⚕️
The timing is slightly unhinged (in a good way lol!): Alan raised money just months ago at €4 billion valuation, making this one of Europe’s faster late-stage re-ratings. Funds will go into expansion across markets like Spain, Belgium, and Canada, deeper AI-driven prevention tools, and potentially acquisitions to build out its care ecosystem.
The company is already doing €800 million+ ARR, growing 53% year-on-year, and is profitable in France.
🤖 Isometric raises €34 million Series A to automate industrial certification with AI (🇬🇧)
Isometric just locked in a €34 million Series A, led by AVP. The company aims to modernize the ancient, paperwork-heavy world of industrial certification using AI agents. The platform’s “Certify” system uses AI to chew through massive datasets to verify compliance faster and with fewer human bottlenecks.
Instead of replacing experts, it flags anomalies so humans only handle the tricky judgment calls. The company already claims dominance in carbon removal certification, having verified 16 million+ tons for clients like Microsoft, Anglo American, JPMorganChase, and Boeing. Now it’s expanding into the broader €305 billion industrial certification market, where it’s facing growing competition from AI compliance startups. The new capital will be used to scale its AI verification stack and push deeper into regulatory, safety, and sustainability certification. ⚙️
☁️ Tsuga Raises $35 Million Series A to kill legacy observability’s AI-era meltdown (🇫🇷)
Tsuga just pulled in $35 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Singular. The company believes legacy observability tools are getting cooked by AI. Every agent loop, token, and deployment explodes telemetry volume, which breaks old systems built for “normal” cloud apps. Tsuga flips the model by running inside the customer’s own cloud, so data never leaves. 🥷
The platform also adds root-cause analysis, prompt and token tracking, and agent call graphs, all on unsampled data. Pricing is simple per GB, with costs designed to drop as the system gets optimized. Tsuga says it already hit “several million” in revenue in six months with six-figure contracts.
🤖 Prosper AI raises a $30 million Series A to build an AI workforce that hunts down insurers on hold (🇪🇸🇺🇸)
Prosper AI closed a $30 million Series A led by a16z, with Base10 joining and existing backers. The Madrid-and-New-York startup, founded in 2023 by Harvard/MIT alums raised a $5 million Seed just nine months ago.
Most of what makes US healthcare expensive happens before and after the actual appointment: scheduling, insurance verification, billing, chasing payers who won’t pick up. Prosper’s voice agents do all of it end to end, including the unglamorous part where an AI calls your insurer and sits on hold so a human doesn’t have to.
Since their Seed round, revenue is up 5x, customers have crossed 40 organizations, and the platform now touches 150,000+ providers and $1.3 billion in patient care.
Healthcare admin waste runs into the hundreds of billions, so there’s plenty of room to grow. Assuming hospital systems and EHR giants don’t eventually decide they’d rather build this themselves. 👀
a16z Backs Prosper AI With $30M as Healthcare Providers Seek Fewer Admin Tools
🔥 Up-and-coming startups ⚡ AlpSemi locks in €17 million Seed to build the chips that’ll let your circuit breaker think for itself (🇫🇷)
AlpSemi, based in Grenoble, closed a €17 million Seed round led by Yotta Capital.
The money funds industrialization and commercial scale-up of its semiconductor power switches built for solid-state circuit breakers (SSCBs), the digital, chip-based successor to the clunky electromechanical breaker that’s been doing the job since your grandparents’ era. 👵
SSCBs react in microseconds instead of milliseconds, which matters a lot once you’re routing power into 800V DC architectures for AI data centers, where a slow fault response means frying multi-million-dollar servers rather than just flickering the lights. AlpSemi already shipped its first product, the AS800, for 110V/230V residential and commercial use, and the new capital pushes the roadmap toward higher-voltage systems for buildings, industrial electrification, EVs, and the AI infrastructure boom.
It’s the kind of unglamorous, deep-tech bet that only matters once everyone else’s AI compute buildout hits a literal power wall.
🤖 Seltz raises $12.5 million Seed to build the web search Google never had to design for machines (🇺🇸🇮🇹)
Seltz closed a $12.5 million Seed led by Speedinvest and B Capital. Founder and CEO Antonio Mallia, an Italian information-retrieval researcher is building the whole stack himself: crawler, index, retrieval models and ranking, rather than wrapping Google or Bing like most “AI search” products do.
His bet is that agents search nothing like humans. They fire long, parallel, never-misspelled queries and need the table or passage buried in a page, not a clickable snippet. Seltz already crawls hundreds of millions of pages a day and returns results in under 200 milliseconds, with nine people and nine months of work on a Rust-built pipeline behind it.
The field is brutal and better-capitalized but Seltz is betting the whole game still comes down to who owns the index, not who wraps it. 🫂
Seltz, A Startup Trying to Reinvent Web Search for AI Agents, Raises $12.5M Seed Round
🧾 Causa Prima raises $10 million in Pre-Seed funding to let AI agents settle B2B invoices on their own (🇪🇸🇩🇪)
Yes, we keep receipts…maybe far too many. 👀
The invoice back-and-forth between buyers and suppliers has barely changed in centuries, and the software running it was built for humans, not the AI agents companies are now wiring into finance.
Causa Prima just came out of stealth with a $10 million Pre-Seed round led by Creandum. It’s the largest pre-seed Spain has ever seen.
They’re building the first agent-to-agent network for B2B finance: one shared system where AI agents on both sides resolve disputes, negotiate payment terms, and grab early-pay discounts in real time, no humans chasing inboxes.
Co-founder Maex Ament invented dynamic discounting and built Taulia, the rails most of the world’s suppliers use to get paid, before SAP bought it. 💸
📉 WaniWani raises $8 million in Seed funding to sell financial products straight inside your chatbot (🇫🇷🇺🇸)
Remember when an insurance app inside ChatGPT wiped billions off broker stocks back in February? That was Waniwani’s tech under the hood. 📉
Waniwani just raised an $8M Seed round led by Seedcamp to scale an open-source software development kit (SDK) that lets any quote-based vendor (insurance, mortgage, software, home services) drop their products directly into AI assistants plus channels like WhatsApp.
The SDK is free. The money is in the paid layer underneath: compliance monitoring, pricing optimization, anti-scraping, the unglamorous plumbing regulated industries can’t skip. It’s Stripe’s playbook, but for selling financial products to whatever AI becomes your next broker.
Bank of America reckons $15 billion of insurance broker revenue is now at risk from AI distribution. Waniwani’s bet is that the storefront is moving from the web form into the conversation. The catch? If OpenAI or Google build a native version, that infrastructure layer gets squeezed fast.
📰 Tech news of the week📺 Walmart snaps up French-founded Vibe.co for a reported $1.4 billion (🇫🇷🇺🇸)
Retail media is the new battleground, and Walmart wants the whole pie.
Walmart has agreed to acquire Vibe.co, the self-serve connected-TV ad platform founded by French entrepreneur Arthur Querou. Terms weren’t disclosed, but the Wall Street Journal pegs the price at a reported $1.4 billion. 💸
Vibe.co lets smaller brands run streaming TV ads the way they’d run paid social: fast, measurable, self-serve. It already counts more than 10,000 advertisers.
Vibe.co gives Walmart a way to court the small and mid-sized sellers crowding its marketplace, following a shopper from first impression all the way to checkout. Another European-built company exiting into a US giant. 👏
Walmart to Acquire Vibe.co to Expand Access to Connected TV Advertising
👔 Internships & job offersInternships
Stage d’analyste Venture Capital - Turenne Group (Paris)
VC Investment Analyst - Allocator One (Vienna)
Jobs
Investment Associate - Summa Equity (Oslo)
Investment Associate - Eneco (Rotterdam)
Investment Manager - Samaipata (Madrid)
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