The company was founded in 2022, has operated in stealth, and now processes over $18 billion in transaction volume per year, delivering a 99.999% success rate and supporting millions of users across 100 countries, it said in a Friday (May 1) press release.

With the new capital, Fun plans to continue investing in engineering, expand into the Asia-Pacific region with a new office in Singapore, and make acquisitions to deepen its infrastructure stack, according to the release.

Fun Founder and CEO Alex Fine said in the release that the company is building a system for use behind financial markets that moves money instantly, globally and without friction.

“Financial markets have driven global prosperity for decades, but the systems behind them have not kept pace,” Fine said.

Polymarket Vice President of Engineering Josh Stevens said in the release that Fun builds around real user behavior, catches edge cases that others miss, and is meticulous about every detail.

“At our size, every percentage point of conversion is millions of dollars and millions of users, and every reliability failure becomes a public conversation,” Stevens said. “Fun has built the highest-converting, most reliable deposit flow we’ve ever had.”

It was reported April 16 that Polymarket and rival prediction market platform Kalshi had seen combined year-to-date volumes of $60 billion. Overall, prediction market volumes are on track to come to around $240 billion this year and hit $1 trillion by 2030.

Fun’s Series A round was co-led by Multicoin Capital and SignalFire, according to the company’s Friday press release release.

SignalFire said in a Friday post on LinkedIn that most payment infrastructure can’t keep up with modern capital and that Fun is rebuilding the system from the ground up rather than trying to put a better user interface on top of old rails.

“At the scale that global applications operate, payment performance isn’t just a boring back-office thing; it makes or breaks user retention,” SignalFire said in its post. “Fun engineered a custom, highly technical orchestration layer to handle that exact challenge.”

The startup said its Series D round, announced Wednesday (April 29), will allow it to further integrate its product to new clients and expand to new regions.

“Finance runs on judgment, relationships, and insight,” Gabe Stengel, co-founder and CEO, wrote in the announcement. “Over the last few decades, it’s also become an industry where some of the best people spend their time assembling decks and rebuilding models instead of talking to clients. AI changes that. It democratizes access to high finance, gives bankers their time back to do higher-leverage work, and helps our partners transform into the institutions they want to be.”

In an interview with Bloomberg News, Stengel described the origins of the company, with him and fellow Princeton University computer science graduate John Willett, a former JPMorgan Chase banker, teaming to create an AI tool designed to take some of the gruntwork out of dealmaking.

“A lot of the analytical work is done by a 21-year-old in tools from 40 years ago at 2 a.m.,” Stengel told Bloomberg, describing a thought that haunted him early in his career: “Why do I have to use Excel? Why do I have to present it in PowerPoint?”

The report, citing sources familiar with the matter, said Rogo’s client base includes Lazard—Stengel’s former employer—JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC.

While the Rogo platform lets banks lessen their workloads, the Bloomberg report added that some industry players worry it might cut down on the number of junior bankers.

In related news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about the way agentic AI has begun moving “from conference-room promise to operating-room reality in financial services,” with banks, insurers and asset managers all testing software agents on the type of manual work that can hinder decisions.

That report cited recent articles from Snowflake, KPMG and The Economist centered around the same theme: the first major gains are likely to come from tasking agents with tightly-controlled duties such as gathering data, checking documents, monitoring signals, routing approvals and preparing recommendations.

“The larger shift is not simply faster automation,” PYMNTS wrote. “It is a new model for financial work, one in which firms use stronger data foundations, clearer governance and human oversight to turn fragmented processes into more continuous workflows.”

The round valued the company at $2.75 billion, Hightouch said in a Wednesday (April 29) press release.

That is up from the $1.2 billion valuation the company achieved in a February 2025 Series C round, in which it raised $80 million.

Hightouch’s platform combines customer data, brand context and marketing orchestration to enable artificial intelligence (AI) agents to research audiences, generate on-brand creative and execute campaigns across advertising, email, SMS and web, according to the Wednesday press release.

With enterprises adopting AI to automate and execute marketing workflows, Hightouch has seen greater than 100% growth in each of the past two years, the release said.

The company will use the new funding to expand its platform’s capabilities in AI-driven campaign orchestration, decisioning and cross-channel execution, per the release.

“We built Hightouch to rethink marketing end-to-end, so AI agents can operate directly on trusted data, find opportunities 24/7, and then generate and execute high-quality campaigns across channels,” Hightouch Co-founder and Co-CEO Kashish Gupta said in the release.

Darren Cohen, partner at Goldman Sachs, which co-led the funding round along with Bain Capital Ventures, said in the release that marketing is poised to be transformed by AI.

“Hightouch has built a platform that enables companies to deploy AI agents directly on top of their most trusted data systems,” Cohen said. “We believe that approach positions them to define the next category of marketing infrastructure.”

Hightouch was founded to combat the pervasive sense of impersonal, misfired marketing by betting on an AI decisioning model that pairs every customer with a personalized agent capable of interpreting intent, timing and content preferences, Hightouch Co-founder and Co-CEO Tejas Manohar told PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster in an interview posted in June 2025.

“It’s like going into a bank and meeting a teller who knows you,” Manohar said. “They’re not just going to minute-one tell you about offer X and keep repeating it. But that’s what it feels like receiving marketing communications from a lot of brands today.”

Ineffable Intelligence, a London-based startup founded in late 2025 by David Silver, former head of reinforcement learning at Google DeepMind, raised $1.1 billion in a seed round at a $5.1 billion valuation. Sequoia and Lightspeed co-led the round, with Nvidia, Google, Index Ventures and DST Global among the participants. The U.K. government’s Sovereign AI Fund and the British Business Bank co-invested, marking the fund’s second direct equity deal since its April launch. The round is the largest seed round in European history.

Silver’s pitch is a departure from large language models trained on internet text. Ineffable is building what it calls a superlearner, an AI system that generates knowledge by interacting with environments and learning from experience, applying reinforcement learning at a scale Silver believes can reach superintelligence. The company has no product, no revenue and no published roadmap. The check size reflects Silver’s standing in the field.

Agentic Workflows Find Their Verticals

Below the frontier research tier, a separate class of companies raised capital this week by applying AI to industries where the workflows are well-defined and the inefficiency is expensive.

Avoca closed a Series B at a $1 billion valuation, bringing total raised to more than $125 million. The company builds AI agents for home services businesses like HVAC, plumbing and electrical to handle inbound calls, scheduling and lead follow-up for contractors. Backers include Kleiner Perkins, Meritech, General Catalyst and Y Combinator. The company said it is on track to book $1 billion in jobs through its platform.

Sereact, a Stuttgart, Germany-based robotics AI company, raised $110 million in a Series B led by Headline to scale its Cortex 2.0 model and open its first U.S. office in Boston. Sereact’s AI operates picking robots in warehouses for customers including BMW, Mercedes-Benz and PepsiCo. More than 200 systems are live across Europe. The company said its robots have completed more than a billion real production picks, with one in roughly 53,000 requiring human intervention.

Orkes secured $60 million in a Series B led by AVP. The company, built by the original architects of Netflix’s microservices orchestration platform, helps developers run AI agents in production environments. Its open-source foundation, Conductor, is in use at Netflix, JPMorgan Chase, Atlassian and Tesla. Orkes has tripled its customer base since its Series A in 2024 and now counts United Wholesale Mortgage and Quest Diagnostics among its enterprise accounts.

Infrastructure Bets Follow the Agent Wave

As agentic AI moves into production, the supporting infrastructure is attracting its own capital.

Cloudsmith, an artifact management platform, announced a $72 million Series C led by TCV and Insight Partners one year after its Series B. The company helps engineering teams manage, secure and govern the software packages and dependencies that AI coding agents produce. As AI tools generate code, the software they ship creates a growing security surface that many enterprise teams are not equipped to manage. Cloudsmith positions itself as the governance layer for that output.

The startup’s new round—which it said is the largest Series A ever for a legal tech company—values Manifest at $750 million, the company announced in a news release Tuesday (April 28).

“To truly shift the market to outcomes-based pricing and to democratize access to high-quality legal services for clients, we needed to rethink the entire business model of a law firm from the ground up,” Dan Mishin, Manifest’s founder and CEO.

“We made the hard choice to not sell our AI software to existing law firms who are often beholden to billing customers more hours as a means to better compensation,” Mishin added. “Instead, we partner with forward-thinking lawyers to help them become market leaders in their respective practice areas, with AI at their core from day zero.”

Manifest said its platform serves as a “single end-to-end solution” for client communications, attorney and client collaboration, research, document drafting, reporting and billing.

“Human-supervised” AI agents are woven into legal workflows, doing away with non-legal administrative work and giving attorneys more time to focus on clients.

The company also provides a “centralized operational infrastructure,” recruiting paralegals, admins and legal writers, and training them to become proficient in AI while dealing with things like client intake, business development, quality assurance, billing and collections.

Firms working with Manifest operate “under the unified Manifest Law brand, creating a consistent standard” for pricing, service and client experience, the release added.

Other companies raising funds in this space include Legora, which was valued at $5.6 billion last month after raising $550 million in a Series D funding round.

Also in March, Harvey raised $200 million in new funding—at an $11 billion valuation—for its legal infrastructure for law firms and in-house teams. The company’s products streamline workflows in contract analysis, due diligence, compliance and litigation.

PYMNTS wrote last year about the way AI has made inroads into the legal world, becoming embedded infrastructure in these law firms as it carried out tasks in research, contracting, compliance and billing.

“Legal AI is moving from experimentation to embedded infrastructure, reshaping how services are priced and delivered,” that report said, while adding that not every offering would have staying power. “The winners will be those who become indispensable to how the profession actually works.”

As Crunchbase reported Monday (April 27), the company’s Series C round was led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives’ Sustainable Investing, which has committed up to $50 million.

Kashable provides employer-facilitated loans that it says offer better rates than might be found with a traditional bank, thus making it a more attractive alternative to payday loans or high-interest credit cards.

Aside from its loans, Kashable works with employers to give their workers financial wellness services like credit monitoring and financial coaching, the report added.

Kashable Co-founder and Co-CEO Rishi Kumar told Crunchbase the company has grown more than 40% year over year thus far in 2026.

“Timely repayments [of loans] through payroll reduce default rates, giving Kashable better unit economics that it can then pass on to its customers as lower-cost loans,” Kumar told Crunchbase News.

The firm’s revenue model is based around interest and fees paid on loans and administrative fees from employers.

The company has funded nearly $2 billion in loans to date and expects to exceed $500 million in volume this year. Co-founder and co-CEO Einat Steklov said Kashable is profitable, and has been “for several years.” Kashable raised $25.6 million from its Series B funding round in 2024.

Its newest funding round comes at a time when borrowing has gotten harder for many American workers, as PYMNTS Intelligence research has shown.

The March 2026 “Wage to Wallet Index,” a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence, WorkWhile and Ingo Payments, found a divide between salaries employees and those in the Labor Economy. These are workers such as warehouse associates, delivery drivers, caregivers, cooks and retail staff.

“The findings are striking. When a shortfall hits, higher earners reach for a credit card and move on,” PYMNTS wrote last month.

“Labor workers reach for a shorter, harder list: a loan from a family member, a deferred utility bill, a pawned possession, an extra shift picked up on a weekend. Nine percent report having no option at all. And across both groups, nearly half say the method they used to bridge today’s gap made the next paycheck harder, setting off a cycle that resets every few weeks.”

At the same time, on-demand pay — a tool built to address this problem — remains largely unused despite being available to around 80% of workers, “pointing to a significant and addressable gap in awareness and product design,” the report continued.

The company announced the Series B funding round Sunday (April 26), saying it would help Sereact expand into the U.S. and scale Cortex 2.0, its “robotic brain” that it says “augments a vision-language-action (VLA) model with a world model.”

Most work involving world models, Sereact’s announcement said, happens in research labs using synthetic data, while Cortex 2.0 is trained on more than a billion “picks” of real production.

“We bet early that you can’t build real robotics AI in a lab,” Sereact co-founder and CEO Dr. Ralf Gulde said.

“You build it with a data flywheel fed by real deployments – shipping into production, living with the failures, and letting the model learn from what actually happens on the floor. The numbers show it worked. Two hundred systems. One billion picks. One intervention per 53,000. Nobody else is close.”

Sereact’s customers include companies such as Active Ants, Austrian Post, BMW, Daimler Truck, Mercedes-Benz and PepsiCo.

The company said it first deployed its technology to warehouses as no other environment offers the same mix of data points: “billions of real interactions, every object shape imaginable, hard throughput constraints, and consequences when the robot gets it wrong.”

Sereact is part of the “physical AI” field, or AI models that simulate the behavior of things in the physical world.

As PYMNTS wrote last month, the recent focus on this field “reflects a shift in the AI startup landscape away from general-purpose tools toward systems that can perform defined tasks in sectors such as robotics, healthcare, logistics and enterprise software.”

Interest in physical AI has risen in the midst of a broader debate about the role robotics could play in furthering artificial intelligence.

Tesla CEO Elon Musk has contended that humanoid robots could pave the way for artificial general intelligence (AGI), suggesting that machines that can interact with the physical world could lead to greater progress in autonomy and reasoning.

“While the claim remains speculative, funding patterns suggest investors are betting that AI systems connected to real-world environments could become a major frontier of innovation,” that report added.

In related news, last week saw a report that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos was working on a $10 billion funding deal for his physical AI effort, code-named “Project Prometheus.”

 

Google invested $10 billion Friday at Anthropic’s current valuation and plans to invest another $30 billion in the future, contingent upon meeting performance milestones, Anthropic told PYMNTS.

Google has been a strategic partner and minority investor in Anthropic for several years, and Anthropic recently expanded its use of TPU chips and Google Cloud services, with 5GW of capacity to come online starting in 2027, according to Anthropic.

Bloomberg reported earlier Friday that Google invested the initial $10 billion announced Friday at a $350 billionvaluation, which is the same valuation it achieved in a funding round in February.

Reached by PYMNTS, Google confirmed the Bloomberg report.

On Monday (April 20), Anthropic and Amazon announced that Amazon would invest another $5 billion in Anthropic on that day and up to an additional $20 billion in the future, depending upon certain commercial milestones. These investments join the $8 billion Amazon already invested in Anthropic.

The companies also announced an expanded partnership in which Anthropic has committed to spend over $100 billion over the next 10 years on Amazon Web Services (AWS) technologies, including Trainium and Graviton hardware, and AWS customers will be able to access the full Anthropic-native Claude console from within AWS.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said in a Monday press release that Anthropic needs to build infrastructure to keep up with growing demand for Claude as people find the platform increasingly essential to their work.

“Our collaboration with Amazon will allow us to continue advancing AI research while delivering Claude to our customers, including the more than 100,000 building on AWS,” Amodei said.

On April 6, Anthropic announced that it signed a new agreement with Google and Broadcom for multiple gigawatts of TPU capacity that the AI startup expects to start coming online in 2027.

Anthropic said that deal marked a major expansion of the company’s November 2025 commitment to invest $50 billion in American computing infrastructure. Chief Financial Officer Krishna Rao said in an April 6 press release that the agreement would help the AI startup “keep pace with our unprecedented growth.”

The company will use the new funding to accelerate its product development and expand its go-to-market capabilities, according to the release.

This round came just over a year after a March 2025 Series B round in which Cloudsmith raised $23 million.

Cloudsmith has found growing demand for its cloud-native platform as enterprises seek to replace their legacy tools with infrastructure that can keep up with the speed and scale of AI-generated software and provide the guardrails and governance required for AI coding agents, the company said in the Thursday press release.

Because AI coding agents generate code at unprecedented velocity and volume, enterprises need a platform that can manage the artifacts and dependencies they produce. Cloudsmith’s platform enables engineering teams to govern every package, at every stage, so they can maintain security and control while moving fast, per the release.

“AI agents generate so much software, so fast, it’s nearly impossible for humans to carefully review it all,” Cloudsmith CEO Glenn Weinstein said in the release. “Cloudsmith has the scale, and the broad view across the open-source ecosystem, to protect enterprises against the new kinds of threats that AI-driven development introduces.”

Morgan Gerlak, partner at TCV, which led the round, said in the release that Cloudsmith is “a company we see as defining artifact management for the AI era.”

“As AI shapes the software supply chain, we believe Cloudsmith is uniquely positioned to become a platform enterprises rely on for compliance, control and security at global scale,” Gerlak said.

Cloudsmith announced in November 2025 that it added a Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server that brings its platform’s capabilities directly into the developer’s AI-powered workflows.

In March, the company said it expanded its security capabilities to position its unified data and enforcement plane as “the critical defense against the evolving software supply chain threat landscape.”

PYMNTS reported in June 2025 that AI coding assistants enable businesses to slash their technology development expenses while maintaining competitive digital capabilities.

The bank launched the Security and Resilience Initiative (SRI) in the United States in October and announced in November that it would extend the initiative to the United Kingdom in the following months.

Now, JPMorganChase is expanding SRI across Europe, it said in a Tuesday (April 21) press release.

“For too long, the U.S. and Europe have relied on unpredictable sources for things like critical minerals that are essential to collective security and prosperity,” JPMorganChase Chairman and CEO Jamie Dimon said in the release. “Now, it is in our best interest to address these challenges together — because our security, freedom and economic growth depend on it.”

This $1.5 trillion, 10-year initiative aims to facilitate, finance and invest in five key verticals: supply chain and advanced manufacturing; defense and aerospace; energy independence and resilience; frontier and strategic technologies; and pharma and healthtech, according to the release.

JPMorganChase is investing in talent to facilitate the activation of SRI in Europe, the release said.

SRI will be led in the region by the bank’s CEOs for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA), Conor Hillery and Matthieu Wiltz, in partnership with Global Banking’s Head of SRI, Jay Horine. Senior bankers Chuka Umunna and Daniel Rudnicki Schlumberger will help advances SRI initiatives in the U.K. and Continental Europe, respectively, per the release.

In addition, JPMorganChase intends to appoint Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, former chief of the U.K. Defence Staff, to the SRI External Advisory Council, subject to regulatory approval. The Council is made up of a dozen leaders from the public and private sectors who help guide SRI’s long-term strategy, according to the release.

“The collective experience of our External Advisory Council is a real force multiplier for SRI and will help support our strategic financing of critical industries to deliver meaningful impact in an increasingly complex global environment,” Dimon said.

When launching SRI in October, JPMorganChase said that as part of the plan, it will make direct equity and venture capital investments of up to $10 billion in select companies to help them boost growth, innovation and strategic manufacturing.