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Hybrid Capital Rises, NYC Funding Splits & AI OS at $5B | Ep. 1
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Wonderful's $550M AI operating system round, Félix's hybrid equity-debt structure, and a sharp divergence in New York startup funding dominate today's briefing. Six stories covering where institutional capital is moving in enterprise AI, fintech, deeptech, and European VC.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Wonderful just raised five hundred and fifty million dollars at a five billion dollar valuation, and the company is barely a year and a half old. That's the number that opens today's briefing, because it tells you something real about where institutional capital is moving in enterprise AI right now.
The other major round today is structurally more interesting than its headline number suggests. Félix, the Miami-based fintech running remittances over WhatsApp, closed two hundred million dollars, but only eighty-seven million of that is equity.
Félix isn't the only one doing this today. PeopleX, the Tokyo-based HR and sales AI platform, closed a round combining equity and venture debt totaling the equivalent of roughly thirty-seven million dollars.
Two infrastructure plays closed rounds today that don't get the same headline attention but probably should. Lasso Security, out of Tel Aviv and New York, raised thirty million dollars led by ClearSky to run AI safety and guardrail checks on standard processors rather than GPUs.
August data for New York funding deserves a closer look. New York startups raised eight hundred and thirty-seven point nine million dollars across thirty-four deals last month.
Finally, a new fund worth tracking. Uplift Ventures launched a one hundred million euro vehicle dedicated to late seed and Series A European deeptech, specifically physical AI, energy, enterprise AI, and logistics.
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