AI infrastructure rounds are keeping the fundraising tape hot today, with investors still crowding into the tools behind the AI boom.
This is Startup Fundraising — a quick Saturday scan of the funding rounds and venture moves shaping tech’s next buildout.
Let’s follow the money.
Exactly. And we’re starting with the biggest checks on the board.
First up, from Karen Joy Bacudo at IT Brief Ireland:
Cloudsmith has raised USD $72 million in a Series C funding round led by TCV, with participation from Insight Partners and other existing investors.
The investment is among the largest funding rounds secured by a Northern Ireland technology company.
The Belfast-based software company said the new capital follows strong annual growth and comes a year after its Series B round. It plans to use the money for product development and to expand its sales and marketing operations.
Seventy-two million dollars — that is a serious vote of confidence, especially for a Belfast software infrastructure company. And you can see the bet here: AI coding is making software supply chains more complicated, so the cleanup tools start looking mission-critical.
Next, from Ekemini at Ventureburn:
Orkes, an industry leader in production-grade AI and workflow orchestration, has raised $60 million in Series B funding. The funding includes new investor Prosperity7 Ventures, existing investors Nexus Venture Partners, Battery Ventures, and Vertex Ventures US. The company is using this funding to increase its global presence and expand its suite of tools to transition AI pilots into mission-critical production.
AI pilots are easy to demo. Getting companies to trust them in production? Much harder. Orkes is betting that’s where the real budget lives.
And from Gate News:
Gate News message, April 25 — ComfyUI, an AI creator tools startup, has raised $30 million at a $500 million valuation in a funding round led by Craft Ventures. Pace Capital, Chemistry, and TruArrow also participated in the investment, following a $19 million Series A round in late 2024 backed by Chemistry Ventures, Cursor Capital, and Vercel founder Guillermo Rauch.
Open-source AI tooling is getting valued like core creative infrastructure now, not some hobbyist layer. A half-billion-dollar valuation says investors think the workflow around the model can be just as valuable as the model.
Now, from Robotwisser:
While the devices themselves were experimental, they all relied on Era’s core platform — a software layer designed to help hardware makers build AI agents and orchestrate intelligent features for connected devices. Rather than manufacturing hardware itself, Era aims to empower developers and device makers with tools for tasks such as custom voice creation and embedding AI capabilities into products like headphones and wearable devices.
This is probably the cleaner AI hardware bet: don’t try to become the next gadget darling — sell the picks and shovels to everyone building one. If Era becomes the software layer behind a wave of weird little AI devices, eleven million could end up looking very early.
And one more, from News:
Across regulated workflows, AI adoption is often blocked by fragmented systems, manual validation, and compliance processes that do not scale. Iridius is building a new class of enterprise infrastructure that embeds compliance directly into AI systems as executable logic, enabling continuous enforcement and automatic evidence generation across the full lifecycle. It is designed to complement existing enterprise systems and AI platforms, not replace them.
This is the kind of AI category that sounds boring right up until it becomes essential: audit trails, validation, and controls built straight into the workflow. In regulated industries, “prove it” is basically the product.
We’ve put links to all of today’s stories in the show notes, so if one of these rounds caught your attention, you can dig in there.
That’s Startup Fundraising for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.