Fun\u00a0raised $72 million in a Series A funding round to expand its payments infrastructure that powers\u00a0Polymarket\u00a0and other internet-native capital markets.
The post Fun Secures $72 Million To Power Global Capital Markets appeared first on PYMNTS.com.
\n", "content_text": "Fun\u00a0raised $72 million in a Series A funding round to expand its payments infrastructure that powers\u00a0Polymarket\u00a0and other internet-native capital markets.\r\n\t\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\r\n\r\n\r\n\t\nThe company was founded in 2022, has operated in stealth, and now processes over\u00a0$18 billion\u00a0in transaction volume per year, delivering a 99.999% success rate and supporting millions of users across 100 countries, it said\u00a0in\u00a0a Friday (May 1)\u00a0press release.\nWith 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.\nFun Founder and CEO\u00a0Alex Fine\u00a0said in the release that the company is building a system for use behind financial markets that moves money instantly, globally and without friction.\n\u201cFinancial markets have driven global prosperity for decades, but the systems behind them have not kept pace,\u201d Fine said.\nPolymarket Vice President of Engineering\u00a0Josh Stevens\u00a0said in the release that Fun builds around real user behavior, catches edge cases that others miss, and is meticulous about every detail.\n\u201cAt our size, every percentage point of conversion is millions of dollars and millions of users, and every reliability failure becomes a public conversation,\u201d Stevens said. \u201cFun has built the highest-converting, most reliable deposit flow we\u2019ve ever had.\u201d\nIt was reported April 16 that Polymarket and rival\u00a0prediction market\u00a0platform Kalshi had seen combined year-to-date volumes of\u00a0$60 billion. Overall, prediction market volumes are on track to come to around\u00a0$240 billion\u00a0this year and hit $1 trillion by 2030.\nFun\u2019s Series A round was co-led by\u00a0Multicoin Capital\u00a0and\u00a0SignalFire, according to the company\u2019s Friday press release release.\nSignalFire said\u00a0in\u00a0a Friday\u00a0post\u00a0on LinkedIn that most payment infrastructure\u00a0can\u2019t\u00a0keep 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.\n\u201cAt the scale that global applications operate, payment performance isn\u2019t just a boring back-office thing; it makes or breaks user retention,\u201d SignalFire said in its post. \u201cFun engineered a custom, highly technical orchestration layer to handle that exact challenge.\u201d\n\r\n\r\nThe post Fun Secures $72 Million To Power Global Capital Markets appeared first on PYMNTS.com.", "date_published": "2026-05-01T13:57:52-04:00", "date_modified": "2026-05-01T15:13:30-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" } ], "author": { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" }, "image": "https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/05/Fun-digital-payments-investments.jpeg", "tags": [ "Fun", "Investments", "News", "payments infrastructure", "PYMNTS News", "What's Hot", "Investments" ] }, { "id": "https://www.pymnts.com/?p=3692213", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2026/rogo-raises-160-million-to-lessen-wall-street-workloads/", "title": "Rogo Raises $160 Million to Lessen Wall Street Workloads", "content_html": "Rogo has raised $160 million for an artificial intelligence (AI) product focused on the finance world.
The post Rogo Raises $160 Million to Lessen Wall Street Workloads appeared first on PYMNTS.com.
\n", "content_text": "Rogo has raised $160 million for an artificial intelligence (AI) product focused on the finance world.\r\n\t\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\r\n\r\n\r\n\t\nThe 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.\n\u201cFinance runs on judgment, relationships, and insight,\u201d Gabe Stengel, co-founder and CEO, wrote in the announcement.\u00a0\u201cOver the last few decades, it\u2019s 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.\u201d\nIn 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.\n\u201cA lot of the analytical work is done by a 21-year-old in tools from 40 years ago at 2 a.m.,\u201d Stengel told Bloomberg, describing a thought that haunted him early in his career: \u201cWhy do I have to use Excel? Why do I have to present it in PowerPoint?\u201d\nThe report, citing sources familiar with the matter, said Rogo\u2019s client base includes Lazard\u2014Stengel\u2019s former employer\u2014JP Morgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and Singapore sovereign wealth fund GIC.\nWhile 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.\nIn related news, PYMNTS wrote earlier this week about the way agentic AI has begun moving \u201cfrom conference-room promise to operating-room reality in financial services,\u201d with banks, insurers and asset managers all testing software agents on the type of manual work that can hinder decisions.\nThat 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.\n\u201cThe larger shift is not simply faster automation,\u201d PYMNTS wrote. \u201cIt 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.\u201d\n\r\n\r\nThe post Rogo Raises $160 Million to Lessen Wall Street Workloads appeared first on PYMNTS.com.", "date_published": "2026-04-29T13:24:59-04:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-29T22:55:32-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" } ], "author": { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" }, "image": "https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Rogo-AI-automation.jpeg", "tags": [ "AI", "automation", "B2B", "B2B Payments", "funding", "News", "PYMNTS News", "Rogo", "What's Hot", "What's Hot In B2B", "Investments" ] }, { "id": "https://www.pymnts.com/?p=3691751", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2026/hightouch-valued-at-2-75-billion-as-ai-agents-transform-enterprise-marketing/", "title": "Hightouch Valued at $2.75 Billion as AI Agents Transform Enterprise Marketing", "content_html": "Hightouch raised $150 million in a Series D funding round to continue expanding the capabilities of its agentic AI marketing platform.
The post Hightouch Valued at $2.75 Billion as AI Agents Transform Enterprise Marketing appeared first on PYMNTS.com.
\n", "content_text": "Hightouch raised $150 million in a Series D funding round to continue expanding the capabilities of its agentic AI marketing platform.\r\n\t\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\r\n\r\n\r\n\t\nThe round valued the company at $2.75 billion, Hightouch said in a Wednesday (April 29) press release.\nThat is up from the $1.2 billion valuation the company achieved in a February 2025 Series C round, in which it raised $80 million.\nHightouch\u2019s 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.\nWith 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.\nThe company will use the new funding to expand its platform\u2019s capabilities in AI-driven campaign orchestration, decisioning and cross-channel execution, per the release.\n\u201cWe 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,\u201d Hightouch Co-founder and Co-CEO Kashish Gupta said in the release.\nDarren 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.\n\u201cHightouch has built a platform that enables companies to deploy AI agents directly on top of their most trusted data systems,\u201d Cohen said. \u201cWe believe that approach positions them to define the next category of marketing infrastructure.\u201d\nHightouch 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.\n\u201cIt\u2019s like going into a bank and meeting a teller who knows you,\u201d Manohar said. \u201cThey\u2019re not just going to minute-one tell you about offer X and keep repeating it. But that\u2019s what it feels like receiving marketing communications from a lot of brands today.\u201d\n\r\n\r\nThe post Hightouch Valued at $2.75 Billion as AI Agents Transform Enterprise Marketing appeared first on PYMNTS.com.", "date_published": "2026-04-29T10:46:20-04:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-29T22:55:11-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" } ], "author": { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" }, "image": "https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/funding.jpg", "tags": [ "advertising", "AI", "B2B", "B2B Payments", "funding", "Hightouch", "Investments", "News", "PYMNTS News", "What's Hot", "What's Hot In B2B", "Investments" ] }, { "id": "https://www.pymnts.com/?p=3689248", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2026/from-plumbers-to-moonshots-ai-investors-left-nothing-unfunded/", "title": "From Plumbers to Moonshots, AI Investors Left Nothing Unfunded\u00a0", "content_html": "The money is moving into artificial intelligence (AI) built around specific problems, and the amounts keep growing. The biggest check this week went to a research lab that has not shipped anything yet.
The post From Plumbers to Moonshots, AI Investors Left Nothing Unfunded\u00a0 appeared first on PYMNTS.com.
\n", "content_text": "The money is moving into artificial intelligence (AI) built around specific problems, and the amounts keep growing. The biggest check this week went to a research lab that has not shipped anything yet.\r\n\t\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\r\n\r\n\r\n\t\nIneffable 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\u2019s Sovereign AI Fund and the British Business Bank co-invested, marking the fund\u2019s second direct equity deal since its April launch. The round is the largest seed round in European history.\nSilver\u2019s 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\u2019s standing in the field.\nAgentic Workflows Find Their Verticals\nBelow 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.\nAvoca 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.\nSereact, 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\u2019s 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.\nOrkes secured $60 million in a Series B led by AVP. The company, built by the original architects of Netflix\u2019s 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.\nInfrastructure Bets Follow the Agent Wave\nAs agentic AI moves into production, the supporting infrastructure is attracting its own capital.\nCloudsmith, 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.\n\r\n\r\nThe post From Plumbers to Moonshots, AI Investors Left Nothing Unfunded\u00a0 appeared first on PYMNTS.com.", "date_published": "2026-04-28T16:06:11-04:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-28T16:06:11-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" } ], "author": { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" }, "image": "https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/07/This-Week-in-AI-funding-investments.jpg", "tags": [ "AI investments", "AI startups", "funding", "News", "PYMNTS News", "Investments" ] }, { "id": "https://www.pymnts.com/?p=3688806", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2026/manifest-raises-60-million-in-record-legal-ai-funding-round/", "title": "Manifest Raises $60 Million in Record Legal AI Funding Round", "content_html": "Manifest OS has raised $60 million for its AI-driven campaign to end lawyers\u2019 billable hours.
The post Manifest Raises $60 Million in Record Legal AI Funding Round appeared first on PYMNTS.com.
\n", "content_text": "Manifest OS has raised $60 million for its AI-driven campaign to end lawyers\u2019 billable hours.\r\n\t\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\r\n\r\n\r\n\t\nThe startup\u2019s new round\u2014which it said is the largest Series A ever for a legal tech company\u2014values Manifest at $750 million, the company announced in a news release Tuesday (April 28).\n\u201cTo 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,\u201d Dan Mishin, Manifest\u2019s founder and CEO.\n\u201cWe 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,\u201d Mishin added. \u201cInstead, 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.\u201d\nManifest said its platform serves as a \u201csingle end-to-end solution\u201d for client communications, attorney and client collaboration, research, document drafting, reporting and billing.\n\u201cHuman-supervised\u201d AI agents are woven into legal workflows, doing away with non-legal administrative work and giving attorneys more time to focus on clients.\nThe company also provides a \u201ccentralized operational infrastructure,\u201d 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.\nFirms working with Manifest operate \u201cunder the unified Manifest Law brand, creating a consistent standard\u201d for pricing, service and client experience, the release added.\nOther 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.\nAlso in March, Harvey raised $200 million in new funding\u2014at an $11 billion valuation\u2014for its legal infrastructure for law firms and in-house teams. The company\u2019s products streamline workflows in contract analysis, due diligence, compliance and litigation.\nPYMNTS 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.\n\u201cLegal AI is moving from experimentation to embedded infrastructure, reshaping how services are priced and delivered,\u201d that report said, while adding that not every offering would have staying power. \u201cThe winners will be those who become indispensable to how the profession actually works.\u201d\n\r\n\r\nThe post Manifest Raises $60 Million in Record Legal AI Funding Round appeared first on PYMNTS.com.", "date_published": "2026-04-28T14:12:50-04:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-28T14:12:50-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" } ], "author": { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" }, "image": "https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Manifest-Legal-AI-funding.png", "tags": [ "AI", "AI investments", "funding", "legal tech", "Manifest", "News", "PYMNTS News", "What's Hot", "Investments" ] }, { "id": "https://www.pymnts.com/?p=3687368", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2026/kashable-raises-60-million-for-financial-wellness-platform/", "title": "Kashable Raises $60 Million for Financial Wellness Platform", "content_html": "Lending and financial wellness FinTech\u00a0Kashable\u00a0has reportedly raised $60 million in new funding.
The post Kashable Raises $60 Million for Financial Wellness Platform appeared first on PYMNTS.com.
\n", "content_text": "Lending and financial wellness FinTech\u00a0Kashable\u00a0has reportedly raised $60 million in new funding.\r\n\t\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\r\n\r\n\r\n\t\nAs Crunchbase\u00a0reported\u00a0Monday (April 27), the company\u2019s Series C round was led by Goldman Sachs Alternatives\u2019 Sustainable Investing, which has committed up to $50 million.\nKashable 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.\nAside from its loans, Kashable works with employers to give their workers financial wellness services like credit monitoring and financial coaching, the report added.\nKashable Co-founder and Co-CEO Rishi Kumar told Crunchbase the company has grown more than 40% year over year thus far in 2026.\n\u201cTimely 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,\u201d Kumar told Crunchbase News.\nThe firm\u2019s revenue model is based around interest and fees paid on loans and administrative fees from employers.\nThe 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\u00a0Einat Steklov\u00a0said Kashable is profitable, and has been \u201cfor several years.\u201d Kashable\u00a0raised $25.6 million\u00a0from its Series B funding round in 2024.\nIts newest funding round comes at a time when borrowing has gotten harder for many American workers, as PYMNTS Intelligence research has shown.\nThe March 2026\u00a0\u201cWage to Wallet Index,\u201d\u00a0a collaboration between PYMNTS Intelligence,\u00a0WorkWhile\u00a0and\u00a0Ingo Payments, found a divide between salaries employees and those in the\u00a0Labor Economy. These are workers such as warehouse associates, delivery drivers, caregivers, cooks and retail staff.\n\u201cThe findings are striking. When a\u00a0shortfall hits, higher earners reach for a credit card and move on,\u201d PYMNTS wrote last month.\n\u201cLabor workers reach for a shorter, harder list: a\u00a0loan 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\u2019s gap made the next paycheck harder, setting off a cycle that resets every few weeks.\u201d\nAt the same time,\u00a0on-demand pay\u00a0\u2014 a tool built to address this problem \u2014 remains largely unused despite being available to around 80% of workers, \u201cpointing to a significant and addressable gap in awareness and product design,\u201d the report continued.\n\r\n\r\nThe post Kashable Raises $60 Million for Financial Wellness Platform appeared first on PYMNTS.com.", "date_published": "2026-04-28T09:46:29-04:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-29T08:17:27-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" } ], "author": { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" }, "image": "https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/08/funding.jpg", "tags": [ "FinTech", "funding", "Goldman Sachs", "Kashable", "Lending", "loans", "News", "PYMNTS News", "What's Hot", "Investments" ] }, { "id": "https://www.pymnts.com/?p=3682922", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2026/sereact-raises-110-million-to-scale-ai-robotic-brain/", "title": "Sereact Raises $110 Million to Scale AI Robotic Brain", "content_html": "German startup\u00a0Sereact\u00a0has raised $110 million to develop its AI robotics model.
The post Sereact Raises $110 Million to Scale AI Robotic Brain appeared first on PYMNTS.com.
\n", "content_text": "German startup\u00a0Sereact\u00a0has raised $110 million to develop its AI robotics model.\r\n\t\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\r\n\r\n\r\n\t\nThe company\u00a0announced\u00a0the Series B funding round Sunday (April 26), saying it would help Sereact expand into the U.S. and scale Cortex 2.0, its \u201crobotic brain\u201d that it says \u201caugments a vision-language-action (VLA) model with a world model.\u201d\nMost work involving world models, Sereact\u2019s announcement said, happens in research labs using synthetic data, while Cortex 2.0 is trained on more than a billion \u201cpicks\u201d of real production.\n\u201cWe bet early that you can\u2019t build real\u00a0robotics\u00a0AI in a lab,\u201d Sereact co-founder and CEO Dr. Ralf Gulde said.\n\u201cYou 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.\u201d\nSereact\u2019s customers include companies such as\u00a0Active Ants,\u00a0Austrian Post,\u00a0BMW,\u00a0Daimler Truck,\u00a0Mercedes-Benz and\u00a0PepsiCo.\nThe company said it first deployed its technology to warehouses as no other environment offers the same mix of data points: \u201cbillions of real interactions, every object shape imaginable, hard throughput constraints, and consequences when the robot gets it wrong.\u201d\nSereact is part of the \u201cphysical AI\u201d field, or AI models that simulate the behavior of things in the physical world.\nAs PYMNTS wrote last month, the recent focus on this field \u201creflects a\u00a0shift in the AI startup landscape\u00a0away from general-purpose tools toward systems that can perform defined tasks in sectors such as robotics, healthcare, logistics and enterprise software.\u201d\nInterest in physical AI has risen in the midst of a broader debate about the role robotics could play in furthering artificial intelligence.\nTesla CEO Elon Musk has contended that humanoid robots could pave the way for\u00a0artificial general intelligence\u00a0(AGI), suggesting that machines that can interact with the physical world could lead to greater progress in autonomy and reasoning.\n\u201cWhile 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,\u201d that report added.\nIn 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\u00a0\u201cProject Prometheus.\u201d\n \n\r\n\r\nThe post Sereact Raises $110 Million to Scale AI Robotic Brain appeared first on PYMNTS.com.", "date_published": "2026-04-27T08:55:23-04:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-27T08:55:23-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" } ], "author": { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" }, "image": "https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Sereact-AI-robotics.png", "tags": [ "AI", "funding", "Investments", "News", "PYMNTS News", "robotics", "Sereact", "What's Hot", "Investments" ] }, { "id": "https://www.pymnts.com/?p=3680654", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2026/google-doubles-down-on-anthropic-with-new-40-billion-investment/", "title": "Google Doubles Down on Anthropic With New $40 Billion Investment", "content_html": "Anthropic and Google confirmed Friday (April 24) that Google is investing $40 billion in the artificial intelligence startup to support its continued growth.
The post Google Doubles Down on Anthropic With New $40 Billion Investment appeared first on PYMNTS.com.
\n", "content_text": "Anthropic and Google confirmed Friday (April 24) that Google is investing $40 billion in the artificial intelligence startup to support its continued growth.\r\n\t\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\r\n\r\n\r\n\t\nGoogle invested $10 billion Friday at Anthropic\u2019s current valuation and plans to invest another $30 billion in the future, contingent upon meeting performance milestones, Anthropic told PYMNTS.\nGoogle 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.\nBloomberg 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.\nReached by PYMNTS, Google confirmed the Bloomberg report.\nOn 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.\nThe 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.\nAnthropic 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.\n\u201cOur 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,\u201d Amodei said.\nOn 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.\nAnthropic said that deal marked a major expansion of the company\u2019s 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 \u201ckeep pace with our unprecedented growth.\u201d\n\r\n\r\nThe post Google Doubles Down on Anthropic With New $40 Billion Investment appeared first on PYMNTS.com.", "date_published": "2026-04-24T15:40:31-04:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-24T15:42:30-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" } ], "author": { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" }, "image": "https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Anthropic-hq.jpg", "tags": [ "AI", "Anthropic", "funding", "Google", "Investments", "News", "PYMNTS News", "What's Hot", "Investments" ] }, { "id": "https://www.pymnts.com/?p=3676916", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2026/cloudsmith-raises-72-million-to-secure-ai-driven-software-development/", "title": "Cloudsmith Raises $72 Million to Secure AI-Driven Software Development", "content_html": "Cloudsmith raised $72 million in a Series C funding round for its artifact management platform as it aims for \u201cmassive growth\u201d during the era of artificial intelligence-driven software development, the company said in a Wednesday (April 22) press release.
The post Cloudsmith Raises $72 Million to Secure AI-Driven Software Development appeared first on PYMNTS.com.
\n", "content_text": "Cloudsmith raised $72 million in a Series C funding round for its artifact management platform as it aims for \u201cmassive growth\u201d during the era of artificial intelligence-driven software development, the company said in a Wednesday (April 22) press release.\r\n\t\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\r\n\r\n\r\n\t\nThe company will use the new funding to accelerate its product development and expand its go-to-market capabilities, according to the release.\nThis round came just over a year after a March 2025 Series B round in which Cloudsmith raised $23 million.\nCloudsmith 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.\nBecause AI coding agents generate code at unprecedented velocity and volume, enterprises need a platform that can manage the artifacts and dependencies they produce. Cloudsmith\u2019s platform enables engineering teams to govern every package, at every stage, so they can maintain security and control while moving fast, per the release.\n\u201cAI agents generate so much software, so fast, it\u2019s nearly impossible for humans to carefully review it all,\u201d Cloudsmith CEO Glenn Weinstein said in the release. \u201cCloudsmith 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.\u201d\nMorgan Gerlak, partner at TCV, which led the round, said in the release that Cloudsmith is \u201ca company we see as defining artifact management for the AI era.\u201d\n\u201cAs 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,\u201d Gerlak said.\nCloudsmith announced in November 2025 that it added a Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server that brings its platform\u2019s capabilities directly into the developer\u2019s AI-powered workflows.\nIn March, the company said it expanded its security capabilities to position its unified data and enforcement plane as \u201cthe critical defense against the evolving software supply chain threat landscape.\u201d\nPYMNTS reported in June 2025 that AI coding assistants enable businesses to slash their technology development expenses while maintaining competitive digital capabilities.\n\r\n\r\nThe post Cloudsmith Raises $72 Million to Secure AI-Driven Software Development appeared first on PYMNTS.com.", "date_published": "2026-04-23T12:46:16-04:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-23T12:48:48-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" } ], "author": { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" }, "image": "https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Cloudsmith-AI-software.png", "tags": [ "AI", "Cloudsmith", "funding", "Investments", "News", "PYMNTS News", "software", "What's Hot", "Investments" ] }, { "id": "https://www.pymnts.com/?p=3673932", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/news/investment-tracker/2026/jpmorganchase-extends-critical-industries-investment-program-to-continental-europe/", "title": "JPMorganChase Extends Critical Industries Investment Program to Continental Europe", "content_html": "JPMorganChase\u00a0is expanding its initiative that aims to strengthen supply chains and support critical industries to Continental Europe.
The post JPMorganChase Extends Critical Industries Investment Program to Continental Europe appeared first on PYMNTS.com.
\n", "content_text": "JPMorganChase\u00a0is expanding its initiative that aims to strengthen supply chains and support critical industries to Continental Europe.\r\n\t\r\n\t\t\r\n\t\r\n\r\n\r\n\t\nThe bank\u00a0launched\u00a0the\u00a0Security and Resilience Initiative (SRI) in the United States in October and announced in November that it would extend\u00a0the initiative to the United Kingdom in the following months.\nNow, JPMorganChase is expanding SRI across Europe, it\u00a0said in a\u00a0Tuesday (April 21)\u00a0press release.\n\u201cFor 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,\u201d JPMorganChase\u00a0Chairman\u00a0and CEO\u00a0Jamie Dimon\u00a0said in the release. \u201cNow, it is in our best interest to address these challenges together \u2014 because our security, freedom and economic growth depend on it.\u201d\nThis\u00a0$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.\nJPMorganChase is investing in talent to facilitate the activation of SRI in Europe, the release said.\nSRI will be led in the region by the bank\u2019s CEOs for Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA),\u00a0Conor Hillery\u00a0and\u00a0Matthieu Wiltz, in partnership with Global Banking\u2019s Head of SRI,\u00a0Jay Horine. Senior bankers\u00a0Chuka Umunna\u00a0and\u00a0Daniel Rudnicki Schlumberger\u00a0will help advances SRI initiatives in the U.K. and Continental Europe, respectively, per the release.\nIn addition, JPMorganChase intends to appoint Admiral Sir\u00a0Tony Radakin, former chief of the U.K. Defence Staff, to the\u00a0SRI 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\u2019s long-term strategy, according to the release.\n\u201cThe 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,\u201d Dimon said.\nWhen 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\u00a0strategic manufacturing.\n\r\n\r\nThe post JPMorganChase Extends Critical Industries Investment Program to Continental Europe appeared first on PYMNTS.com.", "date_published": "2026-04-22T14:19:55-04:00", "date_modified": "2026-04-22T14:19:55-04:00", "authors": [ { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" } ], "author": { "name": "PYMNTS", "url": "https://www.pymnts.com/author/pymnts/", "avatar": "https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/679fcf5c2ed5358e99e8e23b22e3b5d761e37bdb76fa7b0e13d8ecd9ff01bf88?s=512&d=blank&r=g" }, "image": "https://www.pymnts.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/05/JPMorganChase.jpg", "tags": [ "europe", "Investments", "JPMorganChase", "News", "PYMNTS News", "What's Hot", "Investments" ] } ] }