Issue #26 • August 15, 2025
Hi Seedradar Squad! This week, AI lab Cohere has secured a massive funding round to fuel the growth of its enterprise-grade platform, positioning it as a major competitor to established giants. This is happening alongside AI safety leader Anthropic's strategic acqui-hire of the Humanloop team to bolster its enterprise AI capabilities.
Besides, high-profile ventures from Sam Altman and Parag Agrawal are making headlines, while Oracle and Google have announced a major partnership to integrate AI models into cloud infrastructure. Capital is also flowing into a diverse array of startups, from biotech firms advancing women's health to AI platforms redefining workflow automation.
🤖 Cohere Secures $500M to Advance Enterprise-Focused AI Platform
AI lab Cohere raised $500M in a round led by Radical and Inovia, pushing its valuation to $6.8B.
The funding will fuel the growth of its enterprise-grade AI platform, which emphasizes data privacy, customizability, and flexible deployment options to compete with major players like OpenAI and Google.
🤝 Anthropic Acqui-hires Humanloop Team to Bolster Enterprise AI Safety
AI safety leader Anthropic announced the strategic acqui-hire of the core team from Humanloop, a platform for AI evaluation and prompt management.
The move, which includes Humanloop's CEO, CTO, and CPO, is designed to accelerate Anthropic's development of robust, enterprise-ready AI systems with a strong focus on safety, compliance, and monitoring.
💰 Snapshots: What Else Is Happening?
• Sam Altman's Merge Labs is preparing to raise $250M at an $850M valuation. The company aims to develop less invasive, high-bandwidth BCIs for broad human-AI integration, diverging from the initial medical focus of competitors like Neuralink. - Read More
• Parag Agrawal, the former CEO of Twitter, launched Parallel Web Systems, a new venture focused on building infrastructure for AI agents to search and interact with the web. The company has raised $30M from investors including Khosla Ventures to create a new web architecture built "with, by, and for AIs." - Read More
• Oracle and Google announced a major partnership to integrate Google's Gemini AI models, including the latest Gemini 2.5, into Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI). This allows Oracle's enterprise customers to use Gemini's advanced AI capabilities for finance, HR, and supply chain applications, paying with their existing Oracle Cloud credits. - Read More
• Google announced Gemma 3 270M, a new compact and highly efficient model in its Gemma 3 family, designed for task-specific fine-tuning. With 270 million parameters, the model is optimized for on-device applications, offering significant power efficiency and enabling developers to build lean, cost-effective systems for tasks like text classification and data extraction. - Read More
💰 Sharks of the Week!
️🔥 Andreessen Horowitz - Led a $17.5 million Series A for AI automation startup Sola, an AI-native platform redefining automation, enabling the enterprises of tomorrow to automate workflows with intelligent agents beyond the limits of traditional RPA. - Read More
️🔥 Bain Capital Ventures - Was a key investor in the $155 million funding round ($135 million equity, $20 million debt) for Loyal, a biotech firm developing drugs to extend the lifespan of dogs. - Read More
️🔥 Overwater Ventures - Led a $44 million venture round for Gameto, a biotech company focused on women's health, to fund US clinical trials for its fertility therapy. - Read More
️🔥Peak XV Partnerss - Led a $21 million Series A funding round for Arintra, a startup using AI to automate medical coding for health systems. - Read More
🚀 Startup Radar: Movers, Shakers & Future Makers
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🛠️ Trending AI Tools to Supercharge Your Workflow!
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💼 Join the Revolution: Hot Startup Jobs!
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💼 Resource of the Week: Compliance Checklist!
✅ The Consolidated AI Compliance & Ethics Checklist for 2025
A synthesized checklist for AI-driven companies, combining best practices for navigating the complex regulatory landscape of 2025. It covers critical areas like the EU AI Act, bias mitigation, explainability, data privacy, model monitoring, and vendor accountability, providing a framework for building trustworthy and compliant AI systems.
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Disclosure: Seedradar Ventures and/or its general partner may hold investments in some of the companies mentioned in this newsletter. This content is provided for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice.
