AI agents are wandering into insurance, ERP, and app security — and somebody wrote a very large check for each one. Welcome to Startup Fundraising. I'm Cassidy, that's Devin, and today we go from a unicorn insurance play to a $4 million acqui-hire trying very hard to look like a funding round. Five deals, and three of them slapped "AI agent" onto something that existed before ChatGPT. Let's see which ones actually have a business under the hood. Corgi at a $1.3 billion valuation — that's our first stop. This one's from SiliconANGLE:
Corgi Insurance Inc., an artificial intelligence-native insurance carrier built for startups, revealed today that it has raised $160 million in new funding at a $1.3 billion valuation to expand its startup insurance products, develop its technology further and move into new verticals.
Corgi Insurance was founded in 2024, came out of YC Summer '24, and had a carrier license by July 2025. Now it's closed $160 million at a $1.3 billion valuation. SiliconANGLE had it. The pitch is full-stack, AI-native insurance for startups, with underwriting, policy management, and claims all handled in-house. So they went from YC batch to unicorn in under two years. That's a fast clock. What I want to know is the loss ratio when your AI is underwriting fast-moving startups — which are, by definition, high-risk, short-history businesses. The valuation works out to about eight times the round size, which isn't wild for an insurtech with a carrier license — those are genuinely hard to get — but $1.3 billion for a company that's been writing policies for less than a year deserves a hard look on the claims side. Owning the full stack sounds great until you own the full stack of a D&O claim from a startup that just blew up. I want to see two years of combined ratios before I call this a business and not a very well-funded experiment. Ventureburn writes:
Tessera Labs has raised $60 million in Series A funding. Andreessen Horowitz led the round. Foundation Capital also participated. Myriad Venture Partners and Osage University Partners joined the raise. The company builds a multi-agent AI platform for enterprise transformation. It focuses on ERP systems and complex business infrastructure.
Tessera Labs just raised $60 million in Series A, with Andreessen Horowitz leading and Foundation Capital, Myriad Venture Partners, and Osage University Partners in the round. Seema Amble is taking a board seat, so a16z is treating this like a real conviction bet, not a spray-and-pray. ERP transformation. That's the pitch. You know how many companies have died trying to modernize legacy ERP? This has to be true: enterprises actually let an autonomous AI agent touch their SAP instance without a two-year change-management process. I'm not there yet. Vendor-agnostic is doing a lot of work in that pitch deck. Either they haven't gotten sticky with any one system yet, or they really can thread the needle across stacks. Sixty million should tell us which one it is. Global expansion and research headcount at Series A, before you've proven the enterprise sales motion — that's a lot of burn surface. What's the ACV on a deal here? ERP cycles are long, and procurement is brutal. Pulse 2.0, with Amit Chowdhry:
Veteran investors Yaron Elad and Elik Etzion have launched AlphaDrive, a $100 million venture fund targeting the intersection of cybersecurity and artificial intelligence, bringing aboard Leumi Partners as an anchor investor alongside family offices, cybersecurity entrepreneurs, and institutional backers from the United States and Europe.
AlphaDrive is the new fund out of Pulse 2.0 — a $100 million vehicle targeting cyber-AI convergence, with Bank Leumi's investment arm as the anchor. Elad and Etzion are the GPs: one ran Elron Ventures, the other is ex-Unit 8200 and former CISO at Bank Hapoalim. So this is a classic Israeli deep-tech pedigree play — intelligence community credentials, an institutional anchor, family offices in the mix. The question is whether $100 million is a real fund or just a scout vehicle with a press release. They've already put money into five deals alongside Greylock, Accel, and CRV, so they're not raising blind. They're raising into a portfolio that's already been co-signed by top-tier leads. That matters. Twenty-two exits, $2.5 billion combined — I'll take that track record seriously. But cyber-AI convergence is the hottest label in the room right now. I want to know which side of that bet they're actually making: AI that defends, or defending AI infrastructure? Those are very different theses. Here's James Dargan at AI Insider:
Seattle-based CopilotKit has closed a $27 million Series A led by Glilot Capital, NFX, and SignalFire, backing its mission to move AI beyond chatbots and into the fabric of applications themselves. Co-founders Atai Barkai and Uli Barkai argue that text-based AI interfaces fall short, and that agents should instead generate dynamic, interactive UIs tailored to each user action.
CopilotKit has a $27 million Series A, led by Glilot Capital, NFX, and SignalFire, to push AI agents out of the chat window and into the UI layer of enterprise apps. Deutsche Telekom, Docusign, and Cisco are already in production, and their AG-UI protocol has Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle backing it. Three co-leads on a $27 million A is a lot of cooks. I want the revenue behind those logos, because "in production" at Cisco can mean very different things depending on which procurement closet this lives in. The open-source angle is the real play here. AG-UI is the distribution wedge, and if the protocol becomes the standard, the enterprise platform monetizes on top of it. That's a legitimate strategy, not just founder spin. Sure, but "open-source best-in-class as a growth strategy" is also the thing every infra company says before they find out enterprises want support contracts, not GitHub stars. Over on r/startups (17 upvotes):
Fair point, but also… this is basically the thing everyone says & then somehow ignores when they start fundraising. Yes, big painful expensive problems matter. But the more time I spend around VC / fundraising, the more I think the best position is: build the company like you *don’t need* VC money. If it can survive, grow, and prove demand without investors, the whole dynamic changes. You’re not pitching from hunger anymore. You’re choosing whether extra capital actually helps. Ironically…
Reddit's take is basically: build like you don't need the money, and fundraising gets easier. True. Also completely useless advice once you're already in the room. CopilotKit actually has a shot at fitting that framing — open-source adoption, real enterprise customers, protocol backing from the cloud giants. If they're not burning on vibes alone, this round is them choosing capital, not begging for it. That's the version I'd want to believe. Here's SiliconANGLE:
Application security startup Boost Security Inc. today announced two acquisitions and an additional $4 million in funding as it builds out what it pitches as an artificial intelligence-native defense platform for software development. The company has acquired SecureIQx, an MIT-founded startup that built a software composition analysis reachability engine and Korbit Technologies Inc., an AI-driven pull request review platform.
Boost Security, out of SiliconANGLE this morning: two acquisitions — SecureIQx and Korbit — plus a $4 million funding add-on. That's a lot of corporate activity for a company that hasn't disclosed acquisition prices. Four million dollars, two acquisitions. I don't know what SecureIQx and Korbit cost, but four million in new cash is not a war chest — that's a bridge with a nice press release stapled to it. The strategic logic does track, though: reachability analysis from SecureIQx, PR review automation from Korbit, all bolted onto Boost's SDLC platform. They're assembling a stack instead of building every layer from scratch. Sure, but what does Boost need to be true in two years? AppSec is crowded, Snyk and GitHub Advanced Security are right there. Tell me who's paying, how much, and why they're not just using what's already in their CI pipeline. Got feedback on today's briefing, a fundraising question, or a story idea we should track? Send it our way at startupfundraising at lantern podcasts dot com. Corrections are welcome, too.
If you want to dig further into any of today's stories, we've put the relevant links in the show notes. They're there for a closer read whenever something is useful to your own fundraising work.
That's Startup Fundraising for today. This is a Lantern Podcast.