AI startups raised over $2.4 billion this week across enterprise infrastructure, healthcare innovation, and fintech automation. From billion-dollar valuations in HR tech to transformative bets on document intelligence and brain monitoring, capital flowed to companies solving critical operational bottlenecks. Here are the highlights: AI startups Deel Scales Global Payroll Infrastructure with $300 Million Series E at $17.3 Billion Valuation Fund Raised: $300 million Fund Raised: Investors: Ribbit Capital (lead), Andreessen Horowitz, Coatue Investors: San Francisco-based Deel closed a $300 million Series E round at a $17.3 billion valuation, cementing its position as the dominant force in global payroll and compliance infrastructure. Co-founded by Alex Bouaziz (CEO) and Shuo Wang (CTO), the company has emerged as the go-to platform for companies hiring internationally, processing payroll across 150+ countries. Deel closed a $300 million Series E round The funding round comes as Deel reported crossing the $100 million monthly revenue mark in September 2025, demonstrating explosive growth despite ongoing litigation with competitor Rippling. The company plans to use the capital for strategic acquisitions and to expand its native payroll services to over 100 countries by 2029. Deel’s platform automates the complexity of international hiring, managing everything from local labor law compliance to multi-currency payments. The company serves over 35,000 businesses ranging from startups to Fortune 500 enterprises, processing billions in global payroll annually. Despite the competitive landscape and legal challenges, investor confidence remains strong. The platform’s sticky revenue model—companies rarely switch payroll providers once embedded—combined with expanding international commerce creates a massive addressable market. Deel’s AI-powered compliance engine continuously monitors regulatory changes across jurisdictions, automatically adjusting contracts and payment structures to maintain legal compliance. Upgrade Secures $165 Million Pre-IPO Round at $7.3 Billion Valuation Fund Raised: $165 million Fund Raised: Investors: Neuberger Berman (lead), DST Global, Ribbit Capital Investors: Consumer fintech Upgrade, co-founded by former LendingClub CEO Renaud Laplanche, raised $165 million in new funding as it prepares for a public offering within the next 12-18 months. The round was led by Neuberger Berman, whose head of specialty finance Peter Sterling joined Upgrade’s board. raised $165 million in new funding The fresh capital values Upgrade at approximately $7.3 billion pre-money, representing a 21.7% premium over its previous valuation. The company plans to use the funding to strengthen its balance sheet ahead of its IPO and provide liquidity to team members. Founded in 2017, Upgrade offers credit cards, personal loans, and buy-now-pay-later products to consumers, with a focus on credit-building features. The platform has disbursed over $42 billion to date and reported processing $1.4 billion in monthly volume. The company’s AI-driven underwriting models analyze thousands of data points beyond traditional credit scores, enabling it to serve customers often overlooked by traditional lenders. The funding round reflects renewed investor appetite for proven fintech companies with clear paths to profitability. Upgrade’s diversified product suite and focus on responsible lending differentiate it in a crowded consumer credit market. Reducto Raises $75 Million Series B to Power AI Document Intelligence Fund Raised: $75 million Fund Raised: Investors: Andreessen Horowitz (lead), Benchmark, First Round Capital, BoxGroup, Y Combinator Investors: San Francisco-based Reducto secured $75 million in Series B funding just five months after its $24.5 million Series A, bringing total funding to $108 million. Co-founded by CEO Adit Abraham and CTO Raunak Chowdhuri (both MIT graduates), Reducto has become the essential data ingestion layer for enterprise AI systems. The company combines traditional optical character recognition (OCR) with modern Vision-Language Models (VLMs) to convert complex documents—PDFs, spreadsheets, scans, and slides—into clean, AI-ready data. This solves a critical bottleneck: most of the world’s valuable information is locked in formats that AI systems struggle to parse accurately. Since the Series A, Reducto’s monthly processing volume has grown 6x, now handling nearly one billion pages monthly. Customers include AI-native startups like Harvey, Rogo, and Scale AI, as well as Fortune 10 enterprises and top-five global hedge funds. These organizations rely on Reducto for mission-critical workflows: converting PDFs with redlines for legal teams, extracting complex charts for financial due diligence, and processing medical records for healthcare decisions. “Documents contain some of the most valuable data in most industries—from healthcare to finance to logistics,” said Abraham. “Yet until now, they’ve been a bottleneck for making AI useful for real enterprise use cases.” The funding will accelerate model research, expand product capabilities, and scale adoption across both enterprise customers and next-generation AI teams. Reducto is introducing flexible pricing for startups, democratizing access to enterprise-grade document processing infrastructure. Campfire Closes $65 Million Series B to Revolutionize Financial Operations Fund Raised: $65 million Fund Raised: Investors: Andreessen Horowitz (lead), Accel Investors: San Francisco-based Campfire raised $65 million in Series B funding just months after closing its Series A, bringing total capital to approximately $90 million. The AI-powered accounting startup is building what it calls a “Large Accounting Model”—a specialized AI system trained on financial workflows to automate enterprise financial operations. Campfire raised $65 million Campfire’s platform transforms how finance teams handle month-end close, accounts payable/receivable, reconciliation, and financial reporting. Traditional ERP systems require extensive manual data entry and reconciliation. Campfire’s AI agents autonomously process transactions, match invoices, categorize expenses, and flag anomalies—dramatically reducing the time finance teams spend on repetitive tasks. The company serves mid-market and enterprise customers who struggle with legacy accounting systems that weren’t designed for modern, distributed operations. Early customers report reducing month-end close time by 50-70% and catching errors that previously slipped through manual review. The Series B funding will be used to expand Campfire’s AI capabilities, integrate with additional financial systems, and scale its go-to-market efforts. The company competes in a space where incumbents like SAP and Oracle have dominated for decades, but their legacy architectures make it difficult to embed modern AI natively. CoMind Secures $60 Million for Non-Invasive Brain Monitoring Technology Fund Raised: $60 million (Series A extension bringing total to $102.5 million) Fund Raised: Investors: Plural (lead), Angelini Ventures, Octopus Ventures, LocalGlobe Investors: London-based CoMind raised $60 million to commercialize its breakthrough brain monitoring technology that eliminates the need for drilling into patients’ skulls. Founded by CEO James Dacombe, the company has developed CoMind One—a non-invasive headset that uses laser interferometry to continuously measure cerebral blood flow, intracranial pressure, and other critical brain health metrics. Current brain monitoring methods require invasive procedures that carry a 15% complication rate. As a result, only 5% of the three million annual traumatic brain injury patients in the US receive intracranial pressure testing. CoMind’s technology aims to provide accurate data for the other 95% of patients. The device transmits low-power laser light through the scalp and skull into brain tissue, using advanced optical sensing to measure multiple physiological parameters simultaneously. This non-invasive approach could transform brain monitoring from intensive care units to operating rooms and beyond. CoMind plans to pursue FDA approval within the next two years, which would unlock access to the massive US ICU market. The company is also developing an AI platform that transforms sensor data into predictive insights, identifying complications early and personalizing treatment protocols. “James is truly a generational founder,” said Julia Hawkins, General Partner at LocalGlobe. “We couldn’t be more excited to continue supporting them as they redefine how the brain is measured, and ultimately, how it’s treated.” Zepto Lands $400 Million to Scale Quick-Commerce in India Fund Raised: $400 million Fund Raised: Investors: CalPERS (lead), Avenir, Avra, Lightspeed, Glade Brook, The Stepstone Group, Nexus Venture Partners Investors: Indian quick-commerce startup Zepto secured $400 million led by California Public Employees’ Retirement System (CalPERS), marking a major institutional bet on India’s rapidly growing on-demand delivery market. Founded by Stanford dropouts Aadit Palicha (CEO) and Kaivalya Vohra (CTO) when they were just 19 years old, Zepto promises grocery delivery in 10 minutes through a network of strategically located dark stores. The funding will help Zepto expand its operations, turn more dark stores profitable, and compete with rivals Swiggy Instamart and BlinkIt. The company has rapidly scaled to hundreds of dark stores across major Indian cities, processing millions of orders monthly. Zepto’s AI-powered demand prediction models optimize inventory placement, ensuring the right products are stocked in each micro-fulfillment center. The company’s logistics algorithms route deliveries efficiently, minimizing delivery time while maximizing order batching. CEO Palicha noted the company plans to pursue an eventual public listing after this funding round, though timing remains flexible based on market conditions. Kailera Therapeutics Raises $600 Million Series B for Obesity Therapy Fund Raised: $600 million Fund Raised: Investors: Undisclosed Investors: Biotech startup Kailera Therapeutics secured a massive $600 million Series B round to advance its next-generation obesity therapy into global clinical trials. While not strictly an AI company, Kailera leverages computational drug discovery and AI-powered patient stratification to accelerate development. Kailera Therapeutics secured a massive $600 million The obesity drug market has exploded following the success of GLP-1 medications like Ozempic and Wegovy. Kailera’s differentiated approach targets multiple metabolic pathways simultaneously, potentially offering superior efficacy and tolerability profiles. The $600 million infusion represents one of the largest Series B rounds in biotech history, reflecting investor enthusiasm for obesity therapeutics—a market projected to exceed $100 billion annually by 2030. Viven Launches with $35 Million Seed Round for Enterprise AI Fund Raised: $35 million Fund Raised: Investors: Khosla Ventures (lead), Foundation Capital, FPV Ventures Investors: Enterprise AI startup Viven emerged from stealth with a $35 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures. Founded by Ashutosh Garg and Varun Kacholia—the duo behind unicorns Eightfold AI and recruiting platform—Viven is building AI “digital twins” for employees. The platform indexes internal documents (email, Slack, Google Docs) to create a comprehensive knowledge graph of each employee’s expertise and work history. Teams can query these digital twins even when colleagues are offline, dramatically reducing time spent searching for information or waiting for responses. Viven’s specialized LLMs are trained on enterprise communication patterns, enabling them to understand context, prioritize relevant information, and surface insights that traditional search tools miss. The company targets large organizations where institutional knowledge is fragmented across thousands of employees and millions of documents. The substantial seed round reflects the founders’ proven track record and the massive market opportunity. As companies adopt hybrid work models, tools that preserve and access institutional knowledge become increasingly critical. Adcytherix Closes €105 Million Series A for Antibody-Drug Conjugates Fund Raised: €105 million (~$122 million) Fund Raised: Investors: Undisclosed Investors: French biotech Adcytherix raised €105 million to advance its pipeline of antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs) for cancer treatment. ADCs combine the targeting precision of antibodies with the killing power of cytotoxic drugs, delivering chemotherapy directly to cancer cells while sparing healthy tissue. The company uses AI-driven target discovery to identify novel cancer biomarkers and optimize antibody design. Computational modeling accelerates the traditionally slow and expensive process of ADC development. Other Notable Rounds Finster AI raised $15 million in combined Series A and seed funding to expand its AI-native research platform for investment banks and asset managers. Led by former Google DeepMind researcher Sid Jayakumar, the London-based startup provides financial professionals with secure, hallucination-free AI that handles confidential information and material nonpublic information (MNPI) with strict governance controls. Finster AI AdsGency secured $12 million in seed funding led by XYZ Venture Capital to scale its autonomous advertising platform. Founded by Bolbi Liu (former AWS and DiDi engineer), AdsGency uses AI agents to handle the entire paid marketing workflow—from strategy and creative development to placement and optimization across channels. AdsGency Golpo, founded by teenage brothers Shraman and Shreyas Kar, raised $4.1 million in seed funding to scale its AI video generation platform. The San Francisco startup generates up to 30 minutes of coherent explainer videos from prompts and documents, complete with technical diagrams and frame-by-frame editing capabilities. Golpo Logic closed $4.3 million in seed funding to expand its no-code automation platform. The Seattle startup allows business teams to describe processes in natural language, automatically generating production-ready APIs or web apps. Logic has already automated over two million decisions across retail, fintech, and public safety. Logic Marble Health secured $15.5 million Series A led by Costanoa Ventures to expand school-based mental health services. Founded by Headway co-founders Jake Sussman and Dan Ross, Marble embeds licensed therapists directly in K-12 schools, addressing the adolescent mental health crisis. The platform has facilitated over 15,000 therapy sessions since launching in New York. Marble Health Caracol raised $40 million Series B co-led by Omnes Capital and Move Capital to expand its large-format robotic 3D printing technology. The Italy-based industrial tech company serves aerospace, marine, and construction industries with systems capable of printing structures up to 13 meters. Caracol Chari, the Moroccan B2B e-commerce platform, raised $12 million Series A led by SPE Capital and Orange Ventures. Notably, Chari became the first venture-backed Moroccan startup to receive a fintech operating license from the central bank, enabling it to expand financial services to small retailers across North Africa. Chari International Spotlight LayerX (Japan) previously secured $100 million Series B led by Technology Cross Ventures, marking TCV’s first investment in a Japanese startup. The Tokyo-based AI SaaS company serves over 15,000 enterprise clients with its Bakuraku workflow automation platform for expense reporting, invoice processing, and back-office functions. LayerX (Japan) Important Takeaway This week’s $2.4+ billion in AI funding demonstrates the market’s continued appetite for enterprise-grade AI infrastructure and vertical solutions. While mega-rounds to foundation model companies dominated earlier in 2025, October’s funding pattern shows capital flowing to companies solving specific operational problems with measurable ROI. The emergence of specialized AI layers—document intelligence (Reducto), financial operations (Campfire), healthcare monitoring (CoMind)—signals that the infrastructure supporting AI applications has become as valuable as the models themselves. Companies like Deel and Upgrade raising pre-IPO rounds at multi-billion-dollar valuations indicate a maturing market where proven revenue models and paths to profitability matter more than pure innovation. Notably, international markets are gaining momentum, with significant rounds in India (Zepto), Morocco (Chari), and continued strength in European biotech. The healthcare vertical attracted substantial capital across multiple companies (CoMind, Marble, Kailera, Adcytherix), reflecting investor conviction that AI can meaningfully improve patient outcomes and system efficiency. As AI moves from experimental to operational, the companies securing funding are those demonstrating clear value propositions, defensible moats, and the ability to integrate seamlessly into existing enterprise workflows. The week’s funding activity underscores that we’re transitioning from “AI for AI’s sake” to AI as essential business infrastructure. Check out our weekly roundups for comprehensive coverage of venture capital activity in the artificial intelligence space. Check out our weekly roundups for comprehensive coverage of venture capital activity in the artificial intelligence space. weekly roundups

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