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- $400M for Cognition AI, $350M for Sierra & The Future of Hardware Design! 🚀
$400M for Cognition AI, $350M for Sierra & The Future of Hardware Design! 🚀
Seed Radar
September 09, 2025
Issue #33 • September 9, 2025
Hey SeedRadar Squad! The AI sector saw a rush of major news this week. Funding rounds valued multiple companies in the billions, with Sierra, Baseten, and Cognition AI securing massive new investments. This shows a strong investor belief in the power of platforms that let businesses deploy branded AI agents and enhance their own AI products.
In a different corner of the tech world, a startup is gaining attention for its work in hardware engineering. MorphoAI, a new company coming out of Y Combinator, is developing a "compiler for the physical world."
📈 Important News of the Week!
• Sierra raised $350 million, the funding values the company at $10 billion and will be used to scale its platform, which enables businesses to deploy branded AI agents to enhance customer experiences. - Read More
• Baseten raised $150 million in a Series D round led by BOND.The funding values the AI inference unicorn at $2.15 billion and will be used to enhance its platform, which powers AI products for companies like Clay and OpenEvidence. - Read More
• Cognition AI has raised $400 million in new funding, catapulting its valuation to an immense $10.2 billion. The round, led by Founders Fund, more than doubles the company's previous valuation from March. The funding follows Cognition's recent acquisition of assets from rival AI coding startup Windsurf and will be used to scale its AI software engineer, Devin, which has seen its annual recurring revenue skyrocket from $1M to $73M in just nine months. - Read More
• Lenovo announced a series of new AI-focused products at its Innovation World 2025 event in Berlin, including the ThinkPad P16 Gen 3 mobile workstation. The new hardware features Intel's latest Core Ultra processors with integrated NPUs for efficient AI processing. The company also showcased bold new concepts like the ThinkBook VertiFlex, a laptop with a rotatable display, and a new AI Developer suite to accelerate AI solutions. - Read More
💰 Hot Funding Rounds You Missed!
• Augment ($85M) -An AI-powered platform featuring a virtual teammate named "Augie" that automates tasks across the entire order-to-cash cycle for the logistics industry, from quoting and billing to delivery. - Read More • Lead Bank ($70M) -A Kansas City-based, state-chartered bank serving fintechs and digital asset companies with a technology-first, compliant banking-as-a-service (BaaS) platform. - Read More • Ketryx ($39M) -An AI-powered compliance platform for life sciences companies that automates validation, traceability, and regulatory workflows to help ship safer products faster. - Read More • Recall.ai ($38M) -A developer platform providing a single API to get recordings, transcripts, and metadata from meeting platforms like Zoom and Google Meet to power conversation intelligence products. - Read More
🌱 The Next Big Thing: Our Startup Pick!
🎯 This Week's Emerging Star: MorphoAI
MorphoAI is a new startup making some serious noise in the robotics and manufacturing space. Fresh out of Y Combinator's Spring 2025 batch and commercializing over a decade of research from MIT and Harvard, they are definitely one to watch.
So what's their big idea? MorphoAI is building an AI-powered platform for engineers who design new robots and machines. We aren't talking about just another CAD plugin. Their technology acts as a "compiler for the physical world," taking an engineer's requirements—like tasks, parts, and constraints—and automatically generating, simulating, and fine-tuning hundreds of optimal, manufacturable designs in minutes.
Everyone in hardware engineering knows the pain of designing a new robot. It's a process that can feel stuck in 1985, involving weeks of manual drawings, costly prototype-and-test loops, and the constant uncertainty of whether a design will even work. That's exactly what MorphoAI is trying to fix. They are betting that AI can cut R&D cycles by more than 50%, freeing engineers from tedious grunt work to focus on true innovation. It is a bold goal to make hardware development as agile and fast as software development, and that makes MorphoAI a company worth watching very closely.
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💼 Resource of the Week: AI Startups Reports!
📈 AI Startup Financial Benchmarks (2025)
This report from Bessemer Venture Partners outlines key financial metrics for "AI Supernovas" and "AI Shooting Stars," providing crucial benchmarks for ARR, gross margins, and revenue per employee that founders can use to model their own growth trajectories.
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