The artificial intelligence (AI) funding boom shows no signs of slowing down, with deep tech startups garnering huge amounts of funding even before their major products launch.
Case in point: Humans&, a three-month-old San Francisco-based AI lab founded by researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI, and Meta, closed a $480 million seed round, one of the largest seed financings in history, at a whopping $4.48 billion valuation.
According to Reuters, the round was led by SV Angel and co-founder Georges Harik, with participation from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, Google Ventures, Emerson Collective, Forerunner and others. Humans& told Reuters its mission is to build “human-centric AI tools” that enhance, rather than replace, human collaboration and communication.
Also in the AI infrastructure layer, Inferact, founded by the leading developers of the open source LLM inference system, secured $150 million in seed funding at a valuation of $800 million.
Inferact, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed and joined by Sequoia, Altimeter, and others, aims to commercialize and scale up inference, the compute-intensive stage where a trained model produces an output, by providing an optimized, serverless, and scalable inference solution.
On the enterprise AI front, London-based generative video platform Synthesia has raised $200 million in Series E funding at a $4 billion valuation, nearly doubling its valuation from a year ago. Led by Google Ventures and with support from existing backers including Nvidia’s NVentures, Accel, Kleiner Perkins, and NEA, the company plans to use the capital to expand its AI video avatars and agent-based learning tools for enterprise training, knowledge sharing, marketing, and sales enablement. Secondary sales also provide long-tenured employees with liquidity at new valuations.
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Inference and developer platforms: building the stack
Not all actions are in application AI. As the broader AI ecosystem matures, the underlying infrastructure and developer platforms are attracting significant investment.
Baseten, an AI inference platform that enables companies to efficiently run models at scale, has raised $300 million in its latest round at a valuation of nearly $5 billion, more than doubling its previous funding amount, PYMNTS reports. Nvidia and venture investors including CapitalG, IVP, Altimeter, and Battery Ventures supported this round, highlighting the growing demand for optimized inference pipelines that support complex AI applications across industries.
Meanwhile, voice, video, and real-time AI development infrastructure provider LiveKit closed a $100 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, becoming a unicorn in its own right. Index Ventures led the funding, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, hanabi Capital, Altimeter, and Redpoint. The funding will support the expansion of real-time capabilities, developer tools, and global infrastructure footprint.
On the software development side, Indian AI platform Emergent has raised $70 million in Series B funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Khosla Ventures, with additional support from Prosus, Lightspeed, Together, and Y Combinator.
The raise triples the company’s valuation to about $300 million, continuing its rapid trajectory from its Series A just a few months ago. Emergent uses AI to enable non-technical users to generate full-stack monetizable applications from simple natural language input. The company has more than 5 million users worldwide and reports annual recurring revenue (ARR) of approximately $50 million, highlighting strong market demand for AI-enabled no-code/low-code innovation tools.
Healthcare and legal tech funding surges
Beyond general AI and infrastructure, industry-specific AI applications are attracting significant investment as real-world usage and revenue begin to validate business models.
OpenEvidence, a Miami-based healthcare AI company focused on medical insights and decision support for physicians, raised $250 million in Series D funding at a $12 billion valuation, doubling its value in just a few months.
Backed by Thrive Capital, DST and others, OpenEvidence’s AI platform integrates and analyzes clinical research and is reportedly used by the majority of U.S. physicians, PYMNTS reported. This capital will be funneled into research, computing multi-AI agent architectures, and expanding content licensing partnerships.
In legal technology, Ivo.ai, an AI-powered contract intelligence platform customized for in-house legal teams, has secured $55 million in a Series B round led by Blackbird and several venture partners. The company’s AI helps automate complex contract reviews, extract insights, and reduce risk, and has reported ARR growth and adoption by Fortune 500 companies.
