Operator

Castelion led the week’s U.S. startup funding with an $800 million Series C plus $250 million in debt at a $13 billion valuation, followed by Etched’s $700 million round at a $21 billion valuation and Higgsfield’s $400 million Series B at $5.4 billion. The top 10 skewed heavily toward AI infrastructure and tools, including Groq’s $350 million raise, Wispr Flow’s $280 million round, and Velaura AI’s $110 million Series A, alongside defense, satellites, micromobility, and enterprise software.

In June, 34 companies joined the Crunchbase Unicorn Board, including 10 AI labs collectively valued at $65 billion, led by Beijing-based open source model developer DeepSeek at $50 billion and followed by robotics, world-model, and AI-infrastructure startups across the U.S., China, India, Europe, and Saudi Arabia. It matters because the new entrants show frontier AI capital is spreading into robotics, physics, sovereign AI, and self-learning architectures, even as the board’s total value fell by more than $1 trillion after SpaceX went public and other large exits followed.

AI has lowered the cost of building startups but not the cost of scaling them, making fully funded seed rounds more important for Black founders trying to reach Series A. Crunchbase data cited in the piece says U.S. startups with a Black founder or co-founder took in $942 million in 2025, or 0.32% of all venture funding, versus $5.2 billion in 2021, and even 2026’s stronger pace of about $643 million by late May was driven by a few outsized deals including a $350 million AI round.

Fireworks AI raised $1.505 billion in a Series D led by Atreides Management, Index Ventures and TCV, making it the week’s largest round among several AI-heavy financings. The deal valued the enterprise AI tools startup at $17.5 billion and highlights how capital is still flowing into AI infrastructure, alongside big raises from Chai Discovery, Spectro Cloud and State Affairs.

NinjaOne led U.S. startup funding rounds with a $400 million Series C extension at a $12.3 billion valuation, followed by Digital Asset’s $355 million raise, TensorWave’s $350 million Series B, and several other large deals in biotech, robotics, and agentic AI. The week’s standout financings were actually in Europe, where Neura Robotics said it secured up to $1.4 billion and Iceye raised $520 million, underscoring that megadeals are still flowing across enterprise software, blockchain, AI infrastructure, and frontier hardware.

Vertical AI companies are seeing ACVs jump into the 6- and 7-figure range because their products now replace labor rather than just software, which is pushing go-to-market away from PLG and SDR-led motion and back toward direct sales. The piece says PE/portfolio-company networks and sector-specific conferences are becoming especially effective channels because one introduction can produce multiple qualified leads across industries like healthcare services, dental, MSP, accounting, legal, financial advisory, insurance brokerage, home services, and industrial.

AirTrunk plans to invest $30 billion to build 5GW of AI data center capacity in India. The scale is notable because 5GW is a massive power footprint for AI infrastructure, signaling a major expansion of compute capacity in one of the world’s fastest-growing digital markets.

SendCutSend raised $110 million led by Stripe founders John and Patrick Collison, Sequoia Capital and Paradigm at a reported $1 billion valuation for its on-demand custom metal manufacturing platform, and Nourish raised a $100 million Series C led by Menlo Ventures to expand its insurance-covered metabolic health clinic combining dietitians, AI tools and GLP-1 medication management. The deals show capital flowing into non-AI infrastructure and healthcare platforms tied to AI-driven demand and the GLP-1 boom, with SendCutSend’s first outside funding and Nourish’s scale to more than 10,000 registered dietitians standing out.