Raises, acquisitions, and the business of building AI companies.
8 stories
Infinity, an AI inference infrastructure startup, raised $15 million at a $100 million valuation, with backers including Touring Capital and individual researchers from both OpenAI and Anthropic. Notably, the round was backed by people from two labs that normally compete head-to-head. It's a small check by 2026 standards, but the investor list signals real technical credibility.
Fora, an AI-powered travel agency, raised a $60 million Series D led by Forerunner and Tactile Ventures, pushing its valuation to $1 billion. The company pairs AI-generated itineraries with a network of human travel advisors rather than replacing them outright. It's a reminder that some of the more durable AI businesses are pairing automation with people, not swapping one for the other.
A former hardware VP at wearable maker Ultrahuman raised $5.5 million for a new venture building devices meant to actively control AI agents, rather than just passively record the wearer's data. The pitch is a physical interface layer for agentic AI — a button or gesture that redirects what an agent is doing in real time. It's an early bet that agent control needs its own hardware category, not just better prompts.
Oak came out of stealth with $60 million in funding to tackle a problem more companies are running into: AI agents that need to authenticate as a person, a service, or something in between, without a clean identity system to handle it. The company is building infrastructure to manage which agents can act on whose behalf and with what permissions. As agents get more autonomy, this kind of plumbing is quietly becoming one of the more investable layers of the stack.
Emergent, an AI coding startup based in India, raised a $130 million Series C at a $1.5 billion post-money valuation — just over a year after launching. The speed of the raise reflects how competitive the coding-agent category has become globally, not just among US and Chinese labs. It's also a notable data point for AI startups building outside the usual Bay Area and Beijing axis.
OpenAI researcher Miles Wang is reportedly in talks to raise around $200 million for a new AI drug discovery startup at a $2 billion valuation. It's part of a broader pattern of senior researchers at frontier labs spinning out into applied, vertical-specific AI companies rather than staying at general-purpose model shops. Drug discovery in particular keeps drawing outsized valuations relative to how early-stage these companies actually are.
Gradium, a Paris-based startup building voice AI models, raised $100 million total across its seed round, reopened to new investors including Nvidia. The size of the round is unusual for a seed stage — a sign of how much capital is still chasing voice AI specifically, even as the broader funding market has gotten choosier. European AI startups landing checks this large from U.S. and Nvidia-adjacent investors is also worth watching as its own trend.
TechCrunch's running tally counts nearly 90 companies that have crossed the billion-dollar valuation mark so far in 2026, spanning coding agents, voice AI, biotech, and infrastructure. The pace shows little sign of slowing even as investors say they're being choosier about which AI bets they'll fund. It's a useful gut check against any narrative that AI funding is cooling off broadly — it's concentrating, not disappearing.