Hi there and welcome to Funded, where we spotlight the early-stage bets on the future of tech. This week, we’re looking at AI that skips the draft phase entirely, moving straight from idea to finished output, with measurable time savings to back it up. Beautiful.ai secured $45M in non-dilutive capital from General Catalyst’s CVF fund […]
“AI agents are actually the contrary of a black box. They are more auditable than a human being.” – Eléonore Crespo When Eléonore Crespo says she would rather study AI than watch Netflix, she is only half joking. That curiosity has turned into Pigment, a Paris?born business planning platform that wants to use artificial intelligence […]
I’ve been organizing fintech conferences for more than 13 years. Even after we sold our events business, I continue to dedicate my career to this space because I love it. I’ve watched fintech events grow from intimate gatherings of a few hundred people into week-long ecosystems that transform entire cities. And after all that time, […]
Hi there and welcome to Funded, where we spotlight the early-stage bets on the future of tech. This week: an $11M Series A for a startup taking a safety-first approach to AI in healthcare. Amigo AI is building patient-facing agents, but with a training model that looks a lot more like medical school than traditional […]
“As an Oura employee, you wake up in the morning and you know you’re doing work that’s going to affect a lot of people’s lives in a positive way.” – Tom Hale, CEO, Oura Labs For most of his life, Tom Hale considered himself a “championship sleeper.”? “I can fall asleep at a moment’s notice […]
“We want to break finance free from behind the desk work, connect all the stakeholders in a business so they become a trust advisor, and turn the CFO into the Chief Performance Officer driving performance in the business and making better decisions.” — Julio Martinez, co-founder and CEO of Abacum Abacum co-founder and CEO Julio […]
Arpan Bhattacharya is CEO of The Intelligent Search Company, a startup building AI for adversarial environments. He describes what it takes to build “noise cancellation for decision-making.” When shopping online, context is everything. You either know exactly what to look for, or you find yourself browsing endlessly or typing vague queries into a search bar, […]
This week, we saw a major vote of confidence in vertical AI. Basis just raised a nine-figure Series B as accounting firms lean into end-to-end agents across tax, audit, and client services. Basis has raised $100 million in Series B funding at a $1.15 billion valuation, led by Accel, with participation from GV and Lloyd […]
“You have to make your organization legible to AI.” – Jennifer Smith, co-founder and CEO, Scribe When Jennifer Smith and Aaron Podolny set out to build Scribe, they didn’t start with a product idea. They started with a question: How is work actually getting done inside organizations? To find out, they interviewed around 1,200 executives. […]
Most compliance software adds visibility. Sphinx wants to do the work. The San Francisco–based fintech startup just raised a $7.1 million seed round led by Cherry Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Deel Ventures, and Singularity Capital Its pitch is simple: compliance isn’t primarily a technology problem, it’s an operations problem, and AI […]