The wire

The new funding brings Index's total available investing capital to $3.5 billion.

Add another member to the fast-and-furious AI unicorn club: Simile.

The Series A was led by Khosla Ventures, with participation from Allianz, Rebel Fund, Brick and Mortar Ventures’ Darren Bechtel, and Y Combinator’s Garry Tan.

Polar has come out with an AI-first browser aimed at knowledge workers, and it has now raised a $5.7 million seed round led by Madrona.

The startup analyzes calls, messages, and CRM data to identify effective sales techniques and turn them into playbooks for AI agents.

Pangram has raised $9 million to scale its AI detection software. The startup has also released a new AI text detection model, Pangram 4, and an AI image detection model in research preview.

Spur Intelligence has raised a $200 million round from Insight Partners for its tech that can identify legit human traffic from bots.

Since launching last year, the startup today has more than 8 million people using the open source or hosted version of its models, and now generates annual recurring revenue of $21 million.

Anduril is said to be raising a new round of funding that may push its valuation up to about $100 billion, per Reuters.

In the AI-funding frenzy, many startups are raising back-to-back rounds at ever-increasing valuations — but even by those standards, Corgi stands out.

Yope, a fast-growing social app focused on private groups of friends and family, has raised $12.3 million in seed funding. Instead of chasing creators and algorithmic feeds, the startup is betting that the future of social networking lies in small, private communities powered by messaging, photo sharing, and AI features designed to strengthen real-world relationships.

a16z Speedrun, Ada Ventures, and Snowball VC have invested in Cascade's $3.5 million seed round.

Passionfroot, a German startup building a marketplace connecting B2B creators with brands, has raised $15M in a Series A round led by Insight Partners.

Gritt is coming out of stealth with $34 million and plans to automate the hardest tasks on construction sites.

Databricks has remade its image into an AI company and has published research on the cost savings of open-weight AI models for coding.

It’s not just you: AI startups are taking in a huge amount of seed funding, and in the process making things harder for anyone looking for funding even at a pre-seed stage. We’ve covered the trend in detail, and at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt event, we want to help pre-seed founders now being held to seed-stage […]

Travel agency Fora announced a $60 million Series D round led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures, valuing the company at $1 billion.

The startup, founded in 2021, lets enterprise customers use smartphones to scan and spot vehicle damage.

Syntetica, a French startup that has developed a novel approach to recycling nylon, has already obtained big-name partners and investors.

Applied Computing has raised a $20M Series A to build a foundation AI model for the oil, gas and petrochemical industry.