🧠 Daily Dopamine Dealflow

• Nortian (Kansas City, KS) – Raised $41M at a $100M valuation to accelerate its biotech platform for therapeutic discovery.

• The Nuclear Company (Lexington, KY) - Raised $51.3M Series A, bringing the company’s total funding to $70M to to build new American nuclear reactors.

• Hedra (San Francisco, CA) - AI video generator Hedra raised a $32M Series A round led by Andreessen Horowitz's Infrastructure fund, bringing its total funding to $43M and valuing the startup at $200M.

• Chobani buys plant-based food maker Daily Harvest 😋

• Arkestro (San Francisco, CA) – Landed $36M to grow its predictive procurement platform helping enterprises optimize supplier decisions.

• Persona AI (Houston, TX) – Closed $27M Pre-Seed to bring embodied AGI to humanoid robots.

• Reflect Orbital (Hawthorne, CA) – Raised $20M Series A to take its in-space manufacturing and orbital delivery tech to the next level.

• Openlayer (San Francisco, CA) – Grabbed $14.5M Series A for its AI model evaluation and governance platform.

• Harvey AI (San Francisco, CA) – A legal AI tech company is in advanced talks to raise an over $250M round at a $5B valuation.

• Solestial (Tempe, AZ) – Secured $17M Series A to scale production of its silicon-based, self-annealing solar cells for spacecraft.

• Zeno Power (Washington, D.C.) – Closed $50M Series B to advance its nuclear-powered systems for extreme environments.

💸 VC Funds Raised & Raising

• Redpoint Ventures, a San Francisco-based firm that is about a quarter century old, raised a $650M 10th early-stage fund, according to a regulatory filing, marking its first major fundraise in three years.

• Soma Capital is reportedly raising $150M for Fund IV, doubling down on early-stage AI and fintech bets.

• SkyBridge Ventures announced a $60M seed fund targeting frontier tech startups in defense, biotech, and climate.

• Wyld VC has launched its inaugural $50M fund, marking the first AI-native venture capital fund to emerge from the MENA region. The fund aims to support early-stage startups advancing the frontiers of AI.

• Uncork Capital – Closed $225M for Uncork VIII and $75M for breakout fund Plus IV. Focused on seed-stage SaaS, marketplaces, and frontier tech.

• RAED Ventures is raising $150M for its third fund, targeting early-stage startups in fintech and SaaS sectors across the MENA region.

• Bat VC – Launched $100M Fund II to back early-stage AI, fintech, and enterprise startups across the US and India. Founded by ex-Yahoo, Twitter India, and Intuit execs.

• Rasmal Ventures has launched its first home-grown fund, the Rasmal Innovation Fund I LLC, targeting high-performance startups in climate tech, fintech, B2B SaaS, and AI sectors.

Founders: Want to be featured on @tradedvc? → traded.co/submit/vc

🚀 Startup Spotlight

ThriveAI – AI agents acting as junior product managers.

• Founded by: Ishwar Dhanuka and Brian Ngo (ex-Google, Palantir, Slack)

• Based in: San Francisco

• Funding: $1.2M pre-seed from 500 Global, Iterative, Hustle Fund

• Website: ThriveAI

• Team: 5 employees

• Business Model: B2B SaaS

• Early Traction: Pilot programs with several mid-sized tech companies

Background / Problem: Product managers are overwhelmed with administrative tasks, limiting their focus on strategic initiatives.

What They Do / Solution: ThriveAI develops AI agents that integrate with tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams to automate tasks such as issue flagging, data cataloging, feedback synthesis, and competitor monitoring.

Why ThriveAI: By automating routine tasks, ThriveAI enables product managers to focus on high-impact work, potentially transforming product development workflows.

Pricing: $10/hour. $8/hour once you hit 50hrs in a month.

We bumped into ScaleAI and Passes founder, Lucy Guo

tradedvc

149K followers

View more on Instagram