Maria Deutscher
Latest from Maria Deutscher
Crypto payments startup Mesh raises $75M at $1B valuation
Crypto payment processing provider Mesh Connect Inc. today announced that it has closed a $75 million funding round at a $1 billion valuation. Dragonfly Capital led the Series C deal. It was joined by Coinbase Ventures, Japanese financial services giant SBI, Paradigm, Moderne Ventures and Liberty City Ventures. Mesh has raised more than $200 million to ...
Moonshot AI releases open-source Kimi K2.5 model with 1T parameters
Chinese artificial intelligence developer Moonshot AI today debuted Kimi K2.5, an open-source model that it says can outperform GPT-5.2 across several benchmarks. The launch comes a few days after word emerged that the company is raising capital at a $4.8 billion valuation. Moonshot reportedly closed a separate $500 million round in December. Kimi K2.5 is derived from ...
Industrial robotics startup Vention reels in $110M funding round
Vention Inc., a Canadian startup that supplies manufacturers with customized automation equipment, has raised $110 million in late-stage funding. The investment arm of Quebec’s government led the Series D round. It was joined by Nvidia Corp.’s NVentures and several other institutional backers. Vention offers more than 3,000 hardware products that range from simple metal components ...
Cloud security startup Upwind raises $250M funding round
Upwind Security Inc., a startup with a platform for securing public cloud environments, today announced that it has closed a $250 million funding round. Bessemer led the Series B investment with participation from Salesforce Ventures and Picture Capital. The cash infusion comes about a year after Upwind’s previous raise. The company says its revenue increased by ...
Ricursive Intelligence nabs $300M to speed up chip design with AI
Ricursive Intelligence Inc., a startup that plans to use artificial intelligence to speed up chip development, has raised $300 million in funding at a $4 billion valuation. Lightspeed led the Series A investment. Recursive disclosed in its funding announcement today that the venture capital firm was joined by Nvidia Corp.’s NVentures, DST Global, Felicis Ventures ...
Quantum chipmaker IonQ to acquire fab operator SkyWater for $1.8B
Quantum chip developer IonQ Inc. today announced plans to acquire SkyWater Technology Foundry Inc. for $1.8 billion. SkyWater was formed in 2017 from a former unit of Cypress Semiconductor Corp., an early memory manufacturer. One of its specialties is making cryogenic control electronics for quantum computers. That capability may have been one of the factors ...
Hotel software maker Mews nabs $300M at $2.5B valuation
Mews Systems BV, a Dutch startup that develops software and payment terminals for hotel operators, has raised $300 million in funding. The company stated on Thursday that EQT Growth led the Series D round. It was joined by Atomico, HarbourVest Partners, Kinnevik, Battery Ventures and Tiger Global. Mews is now valued at $2.5 billion. The ...
Report: Databricks raises $1.8B in debt financing
Databricks Inc. has raised $1.8 billion in debt financing from a group of institutional investors, Bloomberg and CNBC reported today. The funds were provided in two tranches. Databricks received the bulk of the sum, $1.15 billion, through an extension to an existing revolving credit facility. Most of the remaining debt arrived in the form of ...
Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs reportedly raising funding at $5B valuation
Artificial intelligence developer World Labs Inc. is reportedly in talks to raise up to $500 million from investors. Sources told Bloomberg late Thursday that the startup, which is led by AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, could receive a valuation of $5 billion in the round. That’s $4 billion more than in 2024. The sources added that ...
Inferact launches with $150M in funding to commercialize vLLM
A group of artificial intelligence researchers today launched Inferact Inc., a new startup that will commercialize the open-source vLLM project. The company is backed by $150 million in seed funding. Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed led the round with participation from Databricks Inc.’s venture capital arm, UC Berkeley Chancellor’s Fund and several other backers. Their investment ...