American venture firm shaping seed to growth-stage tech bets
The Boring Company has raised $3 billion in a funding round led by the United Arab Emirates, valuing the company at $23 billion. The round boosts plans to dig more than 150 kilometers of tunnels in the UAE, with other investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, and Baron Capital. The funding follows recent activity in Las Vegas and Nashville as the company pushes to turn Musk’s tunneling vision into a global transit network.
Major moves in autonomous mobility involve Bolt and Lucid, May Mobility, and Lyft-Waymo partnerships, with deals aimed at scaling fleets, public listings, and international expansion.
A wave of new AI-focused funding signals a shift toward enterprise-ready solutions. BAG Ventures raises a new fund to back AI-native startups, Dorm Room Fund expands with a $50 million AI-aligned pool, and Ema secures growth funding to expand multi-agent workflows. Spellbook appoints a new CMO as the legal AI space grows. Together, these moves indicate a push toward integrated, outcome-driven AI in businesses.
Instinct has expanded its AI assistant with features like Trusted Person, enabling agents to coordinate plans with others. While adoption has grown, users raise privacy concerns and some observers say the policy updates may not fully resolve issues. Competition from Meta’s Muse is intensifying as it dominates app stores.
Meta’s Muse and OpenAI’s Dots are pushing a rapid race in consumer and enterprise AI agents. The industry is racing to define standards, address safety, and monetize usage as practical adoption expands across platforms, shopping, and business tools.
Factory AI and Cognition remain at odds over confidential information and board-level conflicts. Vinod Khosla has publicly criticized Factory while investors debate the implications for valuations and competitive dynamics in AI coding tools.
A Texas-based startup, Warhound, backed by investors including In-Q-Tel and Sequoia, has raised $200 million to develop genetically engineered military working dogs. Led by Palmer Luckey and Ben Lamm, the project aims to reduce Europe’s role as a supplier of combat dogs and create domestically bred, enhanced canines equipped with protective gear and sensor tech. The effort covers cloning, gene editing to improve health and performance, and integration with Anduril systems. The first batch is planned to enter service within two years.
Anthropic’s S-1 reveals billionaire-backed stakes and a 5% public-benefit pledge. Co-founders hold large portions, Amazon’s convertible notes could convert to billions, and a $100 billion public-benefit fund is planned as the company targets a multi-trillion-dollar IPO. Founders pledge 80% of equity to philanthropy, while strategic investors loom large in governance and control.
OpenAI has trimmed its latest funding target to $20 billion, with a post-money valuation of about $1.25 trillion. The round is led by UAE investors, with participation from Coatue, Sequoia, and others; first close could be below $20B as allocations are reduced. Markets have responded to AI spending worries amid a tech stock sell-off.
AI-driven post-training, embodied AI, and robotics research are accelerating investment and development globally. Startups and legacy players are racing to enable robots to learn tasks from minimal demonstrations, while women’s leadership and regional policies shape the adoption and governance of these technologies.
Fal has secured a new funding round at a $16 billion valuation, doubling from April’s $8 billion mark. The Series E & F rounds total $1.65 billion, led by Sequoia previously and now backed by Nvidia, Sound Ventures and T. Rowe Price. Fal’s infrastructure supports AI inference, with revenue surpassing $800 million annually; margins remain thin due to compute costs, as peers in the space race to scale.