The cybersecurity startup detects impersonation risk in real-time, across video, phone, and chat communication.
The post Imper.ai Emerges From Stealth Mode With $28 Million in Funding appeared first on SecurityWeek.
The startup will invest in expanding its engineering and research teams, deepening product integrations, and scaling go-to-market efforts.
The post Lumia Security Raises $18 Million for AI Security and Governance appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Helmet Security has built an end-to-end platform that secures the infrastructure for agentic AI communication.
The post Helmet Security Emerges From Stealth Mode With $9 Million in Funding appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Govstream.ai, a Seattle-area startup building AI-native permitting tools for local governments, raised $3.6 million in funding, the company announced Thursday.
The seed round was led by Menlo Park, Calif.-based 47th Street Partners, with participation from Nellore Capital of Palo Alto, Calif., Seattle-based Ascend, and angel investors including Socrata founder Kevin Merritt and First Due co-founder and CEO Andreas Huber.
Govstream.ai’s platform sits on top of the systems cities already use and acts as a conversational “copilot” for permit techs, planners, and reviewers. The company says the technology answers questions, checks documents, compares plan sets, and helps move applications through review faster.
The first public deployment is with the City of Bellevue, where Govstream.ai’s smart assistant has been helping Development Services staff with internal permitting and zoning questions since this summer.
“Cities are under intense pressure to add housing, support small businesses, and keep development sustainable, all while working inside permitting systems that were never really rethought for this moment,” said Safouen Rabah, founder and CEO of Govstream.ai.
In Washington, for example, state projections show that roughly 1.1 million additional homes will be needed by 2044 to keep up with population growth, and about 650,000 of those will need to be affordable for low-income households.
Rabah said permitting has been digitized in pieces but not truly modernized end to end. AI can reason over hundreds of pages of plans and regulations and surface what matters.
“That’s how cities move more homes and critical infrastructure from ‘submitted’ to ‘approved’ without burning people out on either side of the counter,” Rabah said. “Every month of delay we eliminate reduces costs of a new housing unit by about $5,000 on average and makes more projects economically pencil out.”
In July, Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell issued an executive order intended to speed the permitting process for housing and small businesses in the city, using AI software from Boston- and Chicago-based CivCheck to aid permit applicants and city reviewers. Other cities, including Los Angeles, Austin and Honolulu are using AI to improve their processes.
In Bellevue, Govstream.ai is targeting and seeing signs of results including:
Beyond Bellevue, the startup is gearing up to deploy in additional U.S. cities. Rabah declined to share financial metrics, but said revenue is growing as Govstream.ai converts design partners into production deployments.
A veteran of government-tech companies including Socrata and Tyler Technologies, Rabah started Govstream.ai in July 2024. The company currently employs five people and the new funding will fuel growth to 10 to 12 people over the next 12 months with the addition of engineering and AI roles in the Seattle area.
Govstream was previously featured in GeekWire’s Startup Radar series.
Established in 2024 by Cybereason co-founders Lior Div and Yonatan Striem-Amit, the company has raised a total of $166 million in funding.
The post Agentic Security Firm 7AI Raises $130 Million appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Seattle startup Gradial raised a $35 million Series B round to expand its AI platform that automates the behind-the-scenes work of enterprise marketing. VMG Partners led the round, with participation from existing backers Madrona and Pruven Capital.
It’s the second round of funding this year for Gradial, which raised $13 million in May. Total funding is $55 million. The company is valued at $350 million.
Gradial is targeting what it calls the “content supply chain” — the workflows that move marketing content to live campaigns. Its AI “agents” plug into existing systems to handle tasks such as CMS authoring, brand redesigns, QA, and large-scale campaign operations.
“Every enterprise marketing team faces the same challenge. Their current tools and processes are too fragmented for them to move at the speed they need,” co-founder and CEO Doug Tallmadge said in a statement. “Gradial agents live inside the workflow and learn to do the work just like a human employee would.
Customers include AWS, Prudential, and T-Mobile. Gradial was featured during AWS CEO Matt Garman’s keynote presentation this week at AWS re:Invent.
Gradial sits in a fast-growing category of “agentic” AI tools that go beyond content generation to orchestrate complex workflows in real time.
“Gradial’s agents don’t just assist; they perceive, decide, and coordinate in the flow of real work,” Madrona wrote in a blog post. “They represent a new class of reasoning machines that work alongside humans to manage complexity, turn feedback into foresight, and compound improvement over time.”
Tallmadge previously worked at SpaceX as a software engineering manager. Other co-founders include chief growth officer Anish Chadalavada, a former AI strategy manager at Microsoft and investor at Point72 Ventures; CTO Deip Kumar, who also worked at SpaceX and Microsoft; and COO Anup Chamrajnagar, who worked at Point72. All four co-founders graduated from Dartmouth College.
Gradial raised $5.4 million in a seed round in February 2024. The company employs around 50 people.
The startup will invest the funds in accelerating development of its second-generation fully homomorphic encryption (FHE) platforms.
The post Niobium Raises $23 Million for FHE Hardware Acceleration appeared first on SecurityWeek.
The cybersecurity startup will use the investment to accelerate product innovation and global expansion.
The post Zafran Security Raises $60 Million in Series C Funding appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Seattle biotech startup Curi Bio, which enables the screening of new drugs using cells and 3D tissue models derived from human cells, announced $10 million in new funding.
Curi Bio’s customers include large biopharmaceutical and biotech companies such Novo Nordisk, Eli Lilly, Astrazeneca, Pfizer, Boehringer Ingelheim, UCB, Novartis and others. Its Series B round was led by Seoul-based DreamCIS, which supports biopharma R&D through extensive research services.
“We are thrilled to partner with DreamCIS, who shares our conviction that drug discovery urgently needs more human-relevant data at the preclinical stage,” said Michael Cho, Curi Bio’s chief strategy officer, in a statement. “The vast majority of new drugs fail in human clinical trials because preclinical animal and 2D cell models have failed to be good predictors of human outcomes.”
Curi Bio’s platform integrates bioengineered tissues created from induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs) with data collection and analysis. The additional funding will expedite its development of new platforms for cardiac, skeletal muscle, metabolic, smooth muscle and neuromuscular diseases, the company said.
The Seattle area is a hub of life science and biotech companies, including numerous efforts focused on AI-assisted research. Researchers have emphasized the need to test computer-generated drug candidates in the lab to verify their capabilities and impacts.
“Curi Bio’s unique integration of cells, systems, and data is a paradigm shift for preclinical drug discovery,” said Jeounghee Yoo, CEO of DreamCIS. “We were incredibly impressed by the company’s innovative platforms and their ability to generate functional data from 3D human tissues at scale.”
Curi Bio has raised $20 million from investors and $12 million from federal grants.
The company spun out of the University of Washington a decade ago as NanoSurface Biomedical. In April, Curi Bio celebrated the opening of its new 13,942-square-foot headquarters and research facility on the Seattle waterfront.
Yoodli is on a roll.
The Seattle startup, which sells AI-powered software to help people practice real-world conversations such as sales calls and feedback sessions, announced a $40 million Series B round on Tuesday to fuel growth. WestBridge Capital, a $7 billion global investment firm, led the round.
The fresh funding comes less than a year after the company’s $13.7 million Series A round in May.
Yoodli’s software lets users create personas to simulate conversations with another person or multiple people. The company’s model is trained on effective communication techniques and can be customized depending on an organization’s goals. Customers include SAP, Google, Snowflake, the University of Washington, Korn Ferry, and others.
“At a moment when AI is replacing human jobs, we’re doubling down on a different belief: that AI should help people become the best version of themselves in the conversations that matter most,” co-founder and CEO Varun Puri wrote on LinkedIn.
Yoodli’s revenue has grown around 900% in the past year. Its headcount has tripled to more than 40 people.
Puri told GeekWire earlier this year that Yoodli is like a “batting cage before game time,” or a flight simulator for communication. The idea is to replace passive formats such as slide decks and training videos with interactive practice that builds conversational muscle memory.
The company said it will use the new funding to expand into what it calls “experiential learning.”
“Experiential learning is the next step of conversation coaching — helping people learn, practice, and apply skills with roleplays at the center of their experience,” Puri wrote. “We’re making learning more fun and actionable for individuals and much more closely tied to ROI for organizations.”
The raise comes amid competition in the AI-powered workforce training market, as employers look for tools to upskill workers in communication, leadership, and customer engagement — areas where traditional learning management systems may have limitations.
Puri and Esha Joshi launched Yoodli in 2021 at the AI2 incubator in Seattle. The startup got off the ground with a consumer-focused offering targeted at practicing public speaking.
Neotribe and Madrona also participated in the latest funding round. Total capital raised is nearly $60 million.
Crypto venture capital showed a split personality in November 2025: deal activity slowed, but the money flowing into the sector ballooned.
Key Takeaways:
Data from RootData shows 57 disclosed crypto VC deals, down 28% from October and 41% from a year earlier.
However, total funding leapt to $14.54 billion, a 219% jump month over month, dominated by a single blockbuster transaction.
That outlier was Naver’s $10.3 billion all-stock acquisition of Dunamu, the operator of Upbit.
The deal, the largest financing event the crypto industry has seen, values Dunamu at about KRW 15.1 trillion and signals renewed appetite for scale through consolidation.
Dunamu reported revenue of KRW 1.19 trillion for the first nine months of the year, with Upbit accounting for nearly all of it, underscoring how trading platforms continue to anchor cash flows even as the market matures.
Strip away the Naver-Dunamu mega-deal and November looks more cautious. Capital clustered around fewer, larger checks while early-stage activity cooled.
By sector, DeFi (30.4%) and CeFi (12.5%) led deal counts, followed by AI (7.1%), RWA/DePIN (7.1%), and Tooling/Wallets (5.4%), suggesting investors are prioritizing infrastructure and finance-native use cases over consumer experiments.
Prediction-market operator Kalshi closed a $1 billion round led by Sequoia and CapitalG, vaulting to an $11 billion valuation, while talks swirled that rival Polymarket could seek a double-digit-billion price tag.
Payments heavyweight Ripple secured $500 million, lifting its valuation to $40 billion, with backing tied to Fortress and Citadel Securities alongside marquee crypto funds.
November VC Monthly Report: November 2025 recorded 57 crypto VC deals, down 28% month-over-month, while total funding surged 219% to USD 14.54 billion, mainly due to Naver’s USD 10.3 billion acquisition of Upbit operator Dunamu. Other major deals included Kalshi (USD 1B), Ripple… pic.twitter.com/rjbjEUCKyM
— Wu Blockchain (@WuBlockchain) December 2, 2025
Kraken added $200 million at a $20 billion valuation after a $600 million raise earlier in the fall.
Market-infrastructure specialist Tharimmune lined up a $540 million private placement to hold Canton tokens for institutional workflows, while Bitcoin lender Lava raised $200 million to expand BTC-based instruments.
On the ecosystem side, L1 aspirant Monad pulled in $188 million via a public sale, wallet firm Exodus Movement struck a $175 million cash-and-BTC-financed acquisition for payments group W3C, and Lloyds agreed to buy Curve for roughly $158 million.
Custodian Paxos Trust Company capped the month by acquiring Fordefi in a deal topping $100 million.
As reported, crypto venture funding rebounded sharply in the third quarter, reaching $4.65 billion, the second-strongest quarter since the FTX collapse in late 2022.
The total marked a 290% jump from Q2 and came close to Q1’s $4.8 billion, according to data from Galaxy Digital.
Funding was heavily concentrated, with just seven deals accounting for half of all capital invested across 414 transactions.
The biggest raises went to established players, led by $1 billion for Revolut, $500 million for Kraken, and $250 million for Erebor, a US-based crypto bank.
Capital clustered around stablecoins, AI-linked crypto tools, infrastructure, and trading technology, while early-stage fundraising remained muted after nearly two years of cautious dealmaking.
The post Crypto VC Funding Surges in November on Naver’s $10.3B Deal appeared first on Cryptonews.
The Swiss cybersecurity firm will scale its R&D, sales and marketing teams as it pursues expansion across Europe.
The post Saporo Raises $8 Million for Identity Security Platform appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Harmonic, the math-focused AI startup founded by Robinhood’s CEO, has reached a $1.45B valuation after a major funding round to scale its provably correct AI models.
The post Robinhood CEO’s Math-Centric AI Firm Harmonic Climbs to $1.45B Valuation appeared first on TechRepublic.
Harmonic, the math-focused AI startup founded by Robinhood’s CEO, has reached a $1.45B valuation after a major funding round to scale its provably correct AI models.
The post Robinhood CEO’s Math-Centric AI Firm Harmonic Climbs to $1.45B Valuation appeared first on TechRepublic.
The cybersecurity startup embeds AI agents into widely used tools to identify design flaws and eliminate them early.
The post Clover Security Raises $36 Million to Secure Software by Design appeared first on SecurityWeek.
The cybersecurity startup plans to use the seed funding to accelerate product expansion and global growth.
The post Opti Raises $20 Million for Identity Security Platform appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Focusing on improving the resilience of AI agents, the startup will use the funding to accelerate deployments of its platform.
The post AI Agent Security Firm Vijil Raises $17 Million appeared first on SecurityWeek.
The company has operated in stealth mode for four months and has signed dozens of customers, including eight unicorns.
The post Runlayer Emerges From Stealth Mode With $11 Million in Funding appeared first on SecurityWeek.
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