AI infrastructure is getting paid today — and Founders Fund just walked in with a fresh $6 billion war chest.
This is Startup Fundraising. Today, we’re tracking big checks for AI engineering, data labeling, open-source infrastructure, credit tech, and the VC megafund setting the tempo.
Big money Monday.
Exactly. Let’s start with the builders.
From Mike Wheatley at SiliconANGLE:
JuliaHub Inc., an industrial engineering startup, has raised $65 million in Series B funding to develop an AI agent platform called Dyad 3.0, designed to help engineers design, test and maintain complex hardware such as semiconductors, satellites, lithium batteries and more.
This is the expensive end of AI agents: satellites, chips, batteries, industrial systems. If JuliaHub can speed up simulation and testing without turning safety-critical engineering into a hallucination factory, that’s a serious wedge.
Next up, from Menlotimes:
Encord, the data layer behind the world's leading AI, led by Eric Landau and Ulrik Stig Hansen, has raised$60 million in Series C funding led by Wellington Management to scale its AI-native data infrastructure as physical AI hits an inflection point.
The bet here is that the next AI bottleneck sits in the data layer: cleaner data, governed data, data that keeps getting refreshed. Once AI moves into cars, drones, robots, and the physical world, “good enough” training data becomes a safety problem.
Staying with Menlotimes:
Featherless AI, enabling serverless inference via GPU orchestration and a model load-balancing system, led by Eugene Cheah and the team, has raised a $20 million Series A financing round co-led by AMD Ventures and Airbus Ventures, with participation from BMW i Ventures, Kickstart Ventures, Panache Ventures, and Wavemaker Ventures.
This check is chasing a very specific opening: open-source AI needs infrastructure that doesn’t depend entirely on the same few hyperscalers. If Featherless makes open models easier to run at scale, that becomes a pressure point in who controls the AI stack.
From NervNow:
With the fresh funding, Oolka plans to deepen its AI capabilities and expand across financial services, building on its early traction in consumer credit. Oolka, a Bengaluru-based startup building AI agents for consumer credit, said it has closed a $14 million Series A round led by Accel, with participation from existing backers Lightspeed and Z47.
AI agents for credit sounds narrow, but in India’s financial services market, narrow can get big fast. The question for Oolka is whether it becomes a useful money co-pilot — or just another layer between consumers and lenders.
And from Natasha Mascarenhas at Bloomberg:
Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund has raised $6 billion for a new fund to invest in later-stage companies, according to people familiar with the matter, marking the firm’s largest haul ever. The majority of the capital — $4.5 billion — comes from limited partners, including sovereign wealth funds, according to one of the people, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss private information.
That’s a huge vote of confidence in late-stage private tech, especially after valuation resets and all that IPO drought anxiety. Founders Fund is saying the next winners are already out there, and it wants in before Wall Street gets another look.
We’ve got links to all of today’s stories in the show notes, so if one of them is useful for your next raise, you can dig in from there.
That’s Startup Fundraising for today. Thanks for listening, and have a strong start to the week. This is a Lantern Podcast.