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Synthesia AI Startup Nearly Doubles Valuation to $4 Billion with $200M Series E Funding

British AI startup Synthesia has raised $200 million in Series E funding, nearly doubling its valuation to $4 billion from $2.1 billion a year ago. The London-based company, which creates AI-generated avatars for corporate training videos, crossed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in April 2025. Led by Google Ventures, the funding round includes participation from NVentures, Accel, and other existing investors, while Synthesia facilitates an employee secondary sale through Nasdaq.

8 Sources

23 Jan 2026

Ex-Google VP Peeyush Ranjan Launches AI EdTech Startup Fermi.ai for High-School STEM Learning

Peeyush Ranjan, former Google executive and Flipkart CTO, has launched Fermi.ai—an AI edtech startup focused on transforming high-school STEM education. Built around the concept of productive struggle, the platform guides students through reasoning rather than providing quick answers, with early pilots showing significant student performance improvement.

2 Sources

Railway raises $100M to challenge AWS with AI-native cloud built for instant deployments

Railway announced $100 million in Series B funding led by TQ Ventures to expand its AI-native cloud infrastructure. The San Francisco startup has attracted two million developers with deployment speeds under one second and cost savings up to 65% compared to AWS and Google Cloud. Railway built its own data centers to eliminate bottlenecks in AI-driven software development.

2 Sources

Inferact raises $150M to commercialize vLLM and build next-gen AI inference infrastructure

The creators of vLLM have launched Inferact with $150 million in seed funding at an $800 million valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners. As AI shifts from training to deployment, technologies that make AI inference faster and more affordable are attracting significant investor attention. The startup plans to enhance the open-source project while building commercial infrastructure.

3 Sources

22 Jan 2026

LiveKit reaches $1 billion valuation as voice AI infrastructure demand surges across industries

LiveKit, the infrastructure company behind ChatGPT's voice mode, has raised $100 million at a $1 billion valuation just ten months after its previous funding round. The startup powers real-time AI voice and video applications for over 200,000 developers, including OpenAI, xAI, Tesla, and Salesforce. As enterprises rush to deploy voice agents across customer service, healthcare, and robotics, LiveKit's open-source roots and developer-first approach position it at the center of the AI infrastructure stack.

4 Sources

Neurophos Raises $110M to Build Optical AI Chips That Challenge Nvidia's GPU Dominance

Austin-based Neurophos has raised $110 million in Series A funding led by Bill Gates' Gates Frontier to develop optical processing units that promise 100x better performance than current AI chips. The startup's breakthrough uses metamaterial optical transistors 10,000 times smaller than existing photonic elements, aiming to address AI's mounting energy and compute challenges.

5 Sources

Barret Zoph fired from $12B AI startup Thinking Machines as internal turmoil triggers exodus to OpenAI

Thinking Machines, the AI startup cofounded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, has faced internal turmoil as top executives Barret Zoph, Luke Metz and Sam Schoenholz left for OpenAI amid disagreements over strategy and funding. Meta also lured some staff with offers worth hundreds of millions of dollars. The startup, valued at $12 billion, continues independently under Murati.

3 Sources

Upscale AI Hits $1 Billion Valuation With $200M Funding to Challenge Nvidia and Broadcom

AI networking startup Upscale AI raised $200 million in Series A funding led by Tiger Global, Premji Invest, and Xora Innovation, pushing its valuation past $1 billion. The company is developing SkyHammer chips designed specifically for scale-up AI networking to compete with Nvidia's NVSwitch and tackle network congestion plaguing AI data centers.

3 Sources

21 Jan 2026

Zanskar Raises $115M to Unlock Terawatt-Scale Geothermal Energy Using AI

Zanskar, a clean energy startup, secured $115 million in Series C funding to scale its AI-driven approach to discovering conventional geothermal sites. The company has already revived a power plant in New Mexico and identified two new sites with over 100 megawatts of combined potential, challenging the Department of Energy's conservative projections for geothermal power.

2 Sources

OpenEvidence raises $250 million, doubles valuation to $12 billion as healthcare AI heats up

OpenEvidence, dubbed 'ChatGPT for doctors,' closed a $250 million funding round that doubled its valuation to $12 billion in less than three months. The AI startup is now used by 40% of U.S. physicians and surpassed $100 million in annual revenue. With tech giants like OpenAI and Anthropic launching competing health products, the race to dominate clinical AI is intensifying.

5 Sources

Serve Robotics acquires Diligent Robotics for $29M, expanding AI platform into hospitals

Serve Robotics announced a $29 million acquisition of Diligent Robotics, marking its first expansion beyond sidewalk delivery robots into indoor healthcare environments. The deal brings Moxi hospital delivery robots, deployed in over 25 U.S. facilities with 1.25 million autonomous deliveries completed, into Serve's growing Physical AI platform.

5 Sources

Cloover Secures $1.2 Billion to Build AI Platform Accelerating Europe's Energy Transition

Berlin-based climate fintech Cloover has secured over $1.2 billion in total capital commitments, combining $22 million in Series A equity and a massive debt facility to scale its AI-powered platform across Europe. The energy tech startup aims to streamline operations for installers while providing accessible financing for homeowners seeking decentralized energy technologies like solar panels and heat pumps.

2 Sources

Bengaluru's Bolna Raises $6.3M to Scale Voice AI for Vernacular Calls Across India

Bengaluru-based voice AI startup Bolna has secured $6.3 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst, with participation from Y Combinator and Blume Ventures. The company scaled from 1,500 to over 200,000 daily calls since May 2025, serving 1,050+ paying customers across e-commerce, BFSI, and logistics sectors with multilingual voice AI solutions.

2 Sources

Sensesemi raises ₹25 crore seed funding to build edge AI chips for IoT and medical devices

Bengaluru-based fabless semiconductor startup Sensesemi has secured ₹25 crore in seed funding led by Piper Serica to develop edge AI chips that integrate AI inferencing, wireless connectivity, and analog signal processing on a single chip. The startup targets industrial IoT, automotive systems, and medical devices with its ultra-low power consumption architecture.

3 Sources

Nvidia invests $150 million in Baseten as AI industry shifts from training to inference

Nvidia has invested $150 million in AI inference startup Baseten, which raised $300 million at a $5 billion valuation—more than double its previous worth. The deal signals a strategic pivot as the AI industry shifts focus from model training to large-scale deployment, with Baseten helping companies like Cursor and Notion run AI models efficiently in production.

4 Sources

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