AI startups raised over $3.2 billion this week, with record-breaking deals spanning AI infrastructure, enterprise automation, and scientific discovery. From Cerebras’ massive $1.1 billion Series G to pioneering ventures in autonomous science labs, here are the highlights: Cerebras Systems Secures $1.1 Billion Series G at $8.1 Billion Valuation Fund Raised: $1.1 billion Fund Raised: Investors: Fidelity Management & Research (lead), Atreides Management (lead), Tiger Global, Valor Equity Partners, 1789 Capital, Altimeter Capital, Alpha Wave, Benchmark Investors: Sunnyvale-based Cerebras Systems closed an oversubscribed $1.1 billion Series G round just days after withdrawing its long-planned IPO filing. Founded in 2016 by Andrew Feldman (CEO), the company’s flagship Wafer Scale Engine 3 (WSE-3) chip is 56 times larger than the biggest GPU, packing 900,000 AI cores and 4 trillion transistors on a single wafer-scale processor. Cerebras claims inference speeds more than 20 times faster than competing GPUs by eliminating the complex interconnects required in traditional GPU clusters. The wafer-scale architecture places entire AI models and memory on a single chip, avoiding memory bandwidth bottlenecks. The company serves trillions of tokens monthly through its cloud, on-premise deployments, and partner platforms. In 2025, major customers including AWS, Meta, IBM, Mistral AI, Cognition, AlphaSense, and Notion have adopted Cerebras, joining enterprise and government clients like GlaxoSmithKline, Mayo Clinic, the US Department of Energy, and the US Department of Defense. On Hugging Face, Cerebras is the number one inference provider with over 5 million monthly requests. The funding will expand Cerebras’ technology portfolio with continued innovations in AI processor design, packaging, and supercomputer systems, while scaling US manufacturing capacity and data center infrastructure. The company opened five new data centers in 2025 across Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Santa Clara, with additional facilities planned for Montreal and Europe. Vercel Raises $300 Million Series F at $9.3 Billion Valuation Fund Raised: $300 million Fund Raised: Investors: Accel (co-lead), GIC (co-lead), BlackRock, StepStone, Khosla Ventures, Schroders, Adams Street Partners, General Catalyst, GV, Notable Capital, Salesforce Ventures, Tiger Global Investors: San Francisco-based Vercel, founded in 2015 by Guillermo Rauch (CEO), secured $300 million in oversubscribed Series F funding to scale its AI Cloud platform. The company also launched a $300 million secondary tender offer for employees and early investors, closing in November. Vercel serves as the AI-native infrastructure powering companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, PayPal, Square, WPP, Nike, Walmart, Target, Hulu, and AT&T. The platform’s user base doubled in the past year while revenue surged 82% year-over-year. Over 3.5 million developers now use v0, Vercel’s AI development agent that transforms natural language prompts into full-stack applications. The company strengthened its executive team with key hires including Jeanne Grosser (former Stripe Chief Business Officer) as COO, Keith Messick (former Redis CMO) as CMO, Aparna Sinha (former Capital One Head of Enterprise AI/ML) as SVP Product, and Talha Tariq (former IBM CTO Security) as CTO Security. Vercel is launching v0 Mobile in October, enabling developers to build applications using voice prompts and camera input on the go. The mobile app syncs with existing v0 chats and delivers push notifications for completed builds, supporting the emerging trend of development ideation happening outside traditional office hours. Periodic Labs Emerges from Stealth with $300 Million Seed Round Fund Raised: $300 million Fund Raised: Investors: Andreessen Horowitz (lead), Felicis, DST Global, Nvidia (NVentures), Accel, plus Jeff Bezos, Eric Schmidt, Jeff Dean, Elad Gil Investors: Menlo Park-based Periodic Labs emerged from stealth with a $300 million seed round—one of the largest seed rounds in startup history—to build “AI scientists” and autonomous laboratories for materials discovery. Co-founded by Liam Fedus (former OpenAI VP of Research and ChatGPT co-creator) and Ekin Dogus Cubuk (former Google Brain/DeepMind materials and chemistry lead), the company brings together researchers who helped create ChatGPT, DeepMind’s GNoME, OpenAI’s Operator, the transformer attention mechanism, and Microsoft’s MatterGen. Periodic Labs’ thesis is straightforward: the internet’s text is finite and largely exhausted as a training source. The company is building a closed-loop system where AI proposes experiments, robots execute physical synthesis, instruments measure properties, and the AI planner uses results to design better next experiments—generating proprietary experimental data at scale. The first target is discovering higher-temperature superconductors to enable next-generation transportation and low-loss power grids. The company is also working with a semiconductor manufacturer on heat dissipation challenges, training custom agents for engineers to analyze experimental data and iterate faster. The founding team includes over 25 researchers from Meta, OpenAI, DeepMind, Databricks, and Samsung. Cubuk’s previous work includes GNoME, which discovered over 2 million new crystals in 2023. Fedus led the team that created the first trillion-parameter neural network at OpenAI. The funding will scale Periodic’s autonomous lab facilities, hire AI researchers and experimentalists, and deploy initial industry products targeting physics-based problems with high signal-to-noise ratios and fast experimental cycles. Rebellions Raises $250 Million Series C at $1.4 Billion Valuation Fund Raised: $250 million Fund Raised: Investors: Arm Holdings, Samsung Ventures, Korea Development Bank, Korelya Capital Investors: Seoul-based Rebellions secured $250 million in Series C funding to ramp up production of its cutting-edge AI accelerator chips. The company is developing modular AI chipsets, including its new Rebel-Quad chiplet, designed for high-end AI inference workloads in data centers. This investment—valuing the company at approximately $1.4 billion—will fast-track manufacturing of Rebel-Quad and propel Rebellions from a national AI chip champion into a leading Asia-Pacific semiconductor player. The strategic backing from Arm Holdings and Samsung Ventures signals strong conviction in Rebellions’ ability to compete in the global AI chip market. Crystalys Therapeutics Emerges with $205 Million Series A Fund Raised: $205 million Fund Raised: Investors: Novo Holdings (co-lead), SR One (co-lead), Catalys Pacific (co-lead) Investors: San Diego-based Crystalys Therapeutics emerged from stealth with $205 million in Series A financing to advance new treatments for gout. The massive Series A round—one of the largest biotechnology seed rounds—was co-led by Novo Holdings (the investment arm of Novo Nordisk), SR One, and Catalys Pacific. The funding will support clinical development of Crystalys’ novel therapies addressing the unmet medical needs of people living with gout, a form of inflammatory arthritis affecting millions worldwide. Temporal Hits $2.5 Billion Valuation with $105 Million Secondary Fund Raised: $105 million (secondary) Fund Raised: Investors: GIC (lead), Tiger Global, Index Ventures Investors: Seattle-based Temporal, founded in 2019 by Samar Abbas (CEO) and Maxim Fateev (CTO), closed a $105 million secondary transaction that pushed its valuation to $2.5 billion—up from $1.72 billion during its $146 million Series C earlier in 2025. Temporal’s open-source microservices orchestration platform helps developers manage complex workflows across disparate applications—payment processing, customer onboarding, order management, and increasingly, AI agent workloads. The platform reduces development time and eliminates manual handling of failures, retries, and timeouts. The company serves 183,000 weekly active open-source developers and has been deployed in over 7 million unique clusters. Temporal Cloud, its commercial managed service, has been adopted by over 2,500 customers globally, with revenue growing 4.4x in the past 18 months and net dollar retention of 184%. The company employs over 300 people and plans to expand aggressively in Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Asia-Pacific regions. Einride Raises $100 Million to Scale Autonomous Electric Freight Fund Raised: $100 million Fund Raised: Investors: Undisclosed Investors: Swedish mobility startup Einride secured $100 million to accelerate deployment of its autonomous electric freight trucks. The company combines self-driving technology with electric powertrains to create sustainable transportation solutions for logistics and supply chain operations. Einride’s autonomous trucks are already operational in commercial deployments, with the funding enabling expanded fleet operations and further technology development for the autonomous freight sector. Modal Labs Achieves Unicorn Status with $87 Million Series B Fund Raised: $87 million Fund Raised: Investors: Lux Capital (lead), Redpoint Ventures, Amplify Partners, Definition Capital Investors: New York-based Modal Labs, founded in 2021 by Erik Bernhardsson (CEO), hit unicorn status with an $87 million Series B round valuing the company at $1.1 billion. Bernhardsson previously built Spotify’s music recommendation system and served as CTO of fintech firm Better.com. Modal provides serverless AI infrastructure built from scratch—including a custom file system, container runtime, scheduler, and image builder coded in Rust. The platform offers instant access to pooled GPUs and CPUs with sub-second container startups and usage-based pricing, supporting the full machine learning lifecycle from training to inference. Unlike traditional cloud providers that retrofit existing systems, Modal designed its entire stack specifically for AI workloads. The platform scales to hundreds of GPUs in seconds and serves customers ranging from cutting-edge biotech applications to generative AI media companies. Total funding to date reaches $111 million. The new capital will expand Modal’s product suite, extend its global compute network, and optimize infrastructure performance to support increasingly complex AI and computational biotech workloads. Assort Health Secures $76 Million Series B for AI Patient Access Fund Raised: $76 million Fund Raised: Investors: Lightspeed Venture Partners, Accel, Khosla Ventures Investors: New York-based Assort Health landed $76 million in Series B funding to scale its AI-powered patient access platform. The company deploys AI voice agents to automate clinical call center operations, handling appointment scheduling, insurance verification, and patient inquiries. Assort Health landed $76 million in Series B funding Assort Health’s platform reduces administrative burden on healthcare providers while improving patient experience through conversational AI that understands medical terminology and insurance complexities. The funding will accelerate product development and expand the company’s healthcare provider customer base. Phaidra Raises $50 Million Series B for Data Center Optimization Fund Raised: $50 million Fund Raised: Investors: Insight Partners (lead) Investors: Phaidra secured $50 million in Series B funding to optimize data center energy efficiency using AI. As AI workloads drive exponential growth in data center power consumption, Phaidra’s platform uses reinforcement learning to dynamically adjust cooling systems, reducing energy costs while maintaining optimal operating conditions. The company’s AI continuously learns from data center operations to improve efficiency over time, addressing one of the most pressing challenges in AI infrastructure: energy consumption and thermal management at scale. Other Notable Rounds Filevine closed $400 million across two rounds (Series E and prior unreported Series D extension) for its AI-powered legal operating system, serving 6,000 law firms and processing 4 million cases annually. Filevine Nscale secured $433 million in pre-Series C SAFE funding to expand its sovereign GPU cloud network across Europe, North America, and the Middle East. Nscale Eve landed $103 million Series B at over $1 billion valuation for its AI platform serving plaintiff law firms, with Spark Capital leading the round. Eve DualEntry raised $90 million Series A to transform ERP migrations with AI, automating the complex process of enterprise software transitions. DualEntry Baselane announced $34.4 million in combined Series B and previously undisclosed Series A extension for its AI-powered banking platform serving landlords. Baselane Aerska emerged with $21 million in seed funding to develop RNA therapeutics targeting brain diseases, addressing the challenge of blood-brain barrier penetration. Aerska AudioShake secured $14 million Series A to expand its AI-powered audio separation platform, which deconstructs audio files into individual components for editing. AudioShake DermaSensor added $16 million to commercialize its FDA-cleared AI skin cancer screening device for point-of-care detection. DermaSensor International Spotlight Mistral AI (France) is raising €1.7 billion ($1.8 billion) in a round led by Dutch chip equipment giant ASML with a €1.3 billion investment, valuing Europe’s leading AI company at €10 billion. ASML will likely gain a board seat and could integrate Mistral’s AI into its lithography tools. Mistral AI LayerX (Japan) secured $100 million Series B led by Technology Cross Ventures, marking TCV’s first investment in a Japanese startup. The Tokyo-based AI SaaS company serves over 15,000 enterprise clients with its Bakuraku workflow automation platform. LayerX Tide (UK) raised $120 million Series F at $1.5 billion valuation for SME banking, serving 1.6 million businesses with AI-powered financial services. Tide Important Takeaway This week’s $3.2+ billion in AI funding demonstrates continued investor appetite across the entire AI value chain—from chips and infrastructure to applications and scientific discovery. The emergence of Periodic Labs with a $300 million seed round signals a new frontier: using AI not just to process existing data, but to generate entirely new scientific knowledge through autonomous experimentation. Meanwhile, established infrastructure players like Cerebras and Vercel continue attracting massive capital despite market uncertainties, reflecting confidence that AI infrastructure remains a strategic investment. The week’s 20+ deals span everything from wafer-scale processors to patient access automation, underscoring AI’s expanding reach across industries and the ongoing need for specialized tools at every layer of the stack. Want to stay updated on the latest AI startup funding trends? Check out our weekly roundups for comprehensive coverage of venture capital activity in the artificial intelligence space. Want to stay updated on the latest AI startup funding trends? Check out our weekly roundups for comprehensive coverage of venture capital activity in the artificial intelligence space. weekly roundups The article was originally publish on AI Funding Tracker. originally publish on AI Funding Tracker

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Weekly AI Startup Funding: September 28 to October 4, 2025

Weekly AI Startup Funding: September 28 to October 4, 2025

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