Tag Archives: Venture Capital

EQT Life Sciences portfolio company VarmX partners with CSL in a strategic collaboration and option agreement worth up to USD 2.2 billion

EQT Life Science
  • VarmX is developing a bypass agent to restore coagulation for patients facing life-threatening bleeding or requiring emergency surgery while on anticoagulants that target Factor Xa
  • Under the agreement, CSL will fully fund clinical development of VMX-C001 and pay VarmX shareholders USD 117 million upfront for an exclusive option to acquire VarmX, in a transaction worth up to USD 2.2 billion
  • EQT Life Sciences has backed VarmX since 2020, actively supporting the Company at board level as it successfully completed a first-in-human clinical study and obtained FDA clearance to start a global registrational Phase 3 trial

EQT Life Sciences, a leading European life sciences venture capital firm, is pleased to share that CSL has entered into a strategic collaboration with its portfolio company VarmX to support the development of its lead asset, VMX-C001. CSL has also entered into an exclusive option agreement with VarmX shareholders to acquire all issued and outstanding shares of the company in a transaction worth up to USD 2.2 billion.

VarmX, based in Leiden, the Netherlands, is a biotech company developing innovative approaches for the bypass of direct oral anticoagulants targeting activated Factor Xa (FXa DOACs) and inherited coagulation disorders. More than 20 million patients globally take FXa inhibitors as chronic anticoagulation therapy, with approximately 3 per cent of these patients experiencing severe bleeding or requiring urgent surgery. Despite the unmet clinical need, no fully approved therapeutic agent is currently available in the E.U. or the U.S. for treating acute major bleeding in patients on Factor Xa inhibitors.

VMX-C001 is an investigational product, designed to bypass the FXa anticoagulation activity and swiftly restore coagulation in patients in urgent surgery and severe bleeding situations. Under the terms of the strategic collaboration agreement, CSL will fully fund VarmX’s global Phase 3 trial evaluating VMX-C001. CSL will also fully fund and support VarmX in late-stage product development, manufacturing and pre-launch commercial and medical affairs activities.

EQT Life Sciences originally invested in VarmX in 2020, co-leading the company’s Series B financing, investing from its LSP 6 fund. At the time, VMX-C001 was still in preclinical stages but with EQT’s support, the company successfully completed a first-in-human clinical study and recently obtained FDA clearance for its Investigational New Drug (IND) application to start a global registrational Phase 3 trial with VMX-C001.

John de Koning, board member at VarmX and Partner at EQT, added: “We are very proud to see that VarmX is, together with CSL, advancing its truly game-changing approach for this large unmet need in the emergency care setting. FDA’s recent granting of Fast Track Designation for VMX-C001 aims to shorten the time to market, further recognizing the company’s unique opportunity as well as the promise for patients.”

John Glasspool, Chief Executive Officer of VarmX, said: “The collaboration with CSL represents a transformative step for VarmX. By securing full funding for the registrational trial, product development, CMC and pre-launch activities, we are well positioned to bring VMX-C001 to patients. We are proud to partner with CSL, whose expertise and global reach will be invaluable as we move forward.”

Dr. Paul McKenzie, Chief Executive Officer of CSL, commented: “We are excited to partner with VarmX to develop a novel treatment and address a significant unmet need aligning strongly with our strategic ambition to deliver enduring patient impact. It also aligns with our portfolio of medicines designed to minimize bleeding, preserve a patient’s own blood supply, improve surgical and medical outcomes and support global public health approaches to patient blood management.”

CSL will make an upfront payment to VarmX shareholders of USD 117 million upon closing of the transaction for an exclusive option to acquire the company. CSL will have the right to exercise the option upon Phase 3 data. Subject to the achievement of certain milestones, following the exercise of the option and customary regulatory clearances, VarmX shareholders will receive a further USD 388 million in acquisition and additional payments up to the commercial launch of VMX-C001 and up to USD 1.7 billion in sales-based success milestones thereafter.

Contact
EQT Press Office, press@eqtpartners.com

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Penguin Ai Accelerates Agentic AI for Healthcare with Snowflake Ventures Investment

Snowflake

Across every industry, organizations are adopting AI to drive new efficiencies and improve decision-making. The healthcare industry is complex and highly regulated. Compliance with regulatory statutes is mandatory, given the myriad rules around protected health information (PHI). The first step on the AI journey is building a robust data foundation, governance and security framework. Solving this challenge requires a new approach that can navigate these intricacies and unlock true efficiency.

The healthcare industry also expects an outcomes-driven approach to AI. That’s why we are thrilled to announce that Snowflake Ventures is investing in industry-AI disruptors like Penguin Ai to deliver innovations purpose-built for healthcare.

Penguin Ai has built a full-service, enterprise-grade AI platform to empower healthcare organizations to embrace AI with confidence and drive measurable outcomes across both the payer and provider ecosystem.

Founded in 2024 by the former chief data officer at Kaiser Permanente, United Healthcare and Optum, Penguin Ai delivers powerful, compliant AI solutions that reimagine complex healthcare workflows. The platform offers pre-trained AI models and sophisticated AI-based Digital Workers and Agents that automate high-cost, high-volume and data-intensive tasks. These include critical back-office processes like: prior authorization, medical coding, and HCC risk coding.

With this investment, Penguin Ai will bring its agentic AI solutions to the Snowflake Marketplace through a series of Snowflake Native Apps, empowering our customers to deploy fine-tuned healthcare LLMs and AI agents. This integration keeps sensitive data within the customer’s own Snowflake account and is designed to accelerate key industry workflows:

  • For payers: Streamline prior authorization, optimize claims processing, enhance HCC coding and risk analysis, appeals and grievances management, and payment integrity.
  • For providers: Automate medical coding, modernize document management and fax processing, streamline denials and appeals management, and accounts receivable (A/R) recovery.
  • For revenue cycle management: Enhance claims processing, enable AI-assisted billing and revenue capture, and automate denials and appeals.

At Snowflake, our mission is to help every enterprise achieve its full potential through data and AI. This investment brings Penguin Ai’s specialized applications into the Snowflake AI Data Cloud, giving our healthcare customers a powerful new way to accelerate their AI journey.

Get ready for Penguin Ai’s Snowflake Native App, launching soon on Snowflake Marketplace. To see how Snowflake is already empowering the industry, explore our solutions for healthcare and life sciences here.

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The Snowflake Life Sciences Playbook for AI, Apps and Data Collaboration

Explore 4 key industry use cases and over 10 leading AI, apps and data solutions.

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Nea – From Algorithms to Atoms: Our Investment in CuspAI

NEa

It’s often said that the next decade is the age of atoms rather than bits. We believe advances in the latter will unlock breakthroughs in the former.

Looking at the evolution of intelligent systems, we can identify three distinct eras:

  1. First came the era of systems built on formal (mathematical) models and simulations, generating synthetic data and reasoning within well-defined, logic-driven, and largely deterministic representations of the world. Manual experiments by scientists persisted in this first era and were essential for validating and calibrating the models and simulations.
  2. Next was the era of systems that learned directly from large-scale experimental data, using statistical and probabilistic methods to capture patterns and make predictions from observed reality.
  3. The emerging era will blend these paradigms into agentic, closed-loop systems that can define goals, design and run simulations, select viable paths, commission physical experiments, interpret results, and adapt their strategies iteratively without human micromanagement. By tightly coupling in-silico design with real-world validation in rapid feedback cycles, these systems will accelerate computational discovery and extend intelligent problem-solving into complex domains of the physical world.

CuspAI is spearheading this emerging era in computational materials science, where novel materials can be generated, synthesized, tested and validated in months instead of the 10-20 year horizon the industry has learned to expect. Based in Cambridge, UK with teams across Amsterdam and Berlin, CuspAI has demonstrated exceptional vision and execution: building state-of-the-art models, partnering with industry leaders across different domains, and gathering a stellar team with more than 2 million citations collectively. The company’s innovative approach to computational materials science aligns perfectly with our investment philosophy in backing exceptional talent with a pragmatic approach to solving world-changing problems in high-impact industries. And that is why we are thrilled to have led their Series A financing round.

Why Materials Science?

Materials underpin nearly everything: the homes and infrastructure we build; energy generation, storage, and transmission; mobility and aerospace; computing, communications, and sensing; clean water and food systems; health care and medical devices; textiles and packaging; and national security. Advancements here ripple across the economy.

Historically, discovering a new material is slow and expensive – often a decade or more and tens to hundreds of millions of dollars from idea to deployment[1].

CuspAI’s platform uses inverse design – starting with target properties and working backward to propose candidates – then evaluates stability, performance, and manufacturability through fast feedback loops. In practice, that means high-fidelity simulations, learned surrogate models, degradation pathway modeling, and constraint-aware generation informed by experimental data.

The acceleration of materials discovery enables:

  • Addressing emerging challenges. e.g., filtration of PFAS (“forever chemicals”) from drinking water and industrial discharge.
  • Tackling persistent bottlenecks. e.g., safer solid-state electrolytes, longer-cycle batteries, low-loss power electronics, corrosion-resistant coatings, high-performance membranes for desalination and gas separation. 
  • Anticipate future demand. e.g., lightweight, high-temperature alloys for aerospace; rare-earth-lean magnets; thermal interface materials for data centers; recyclable or bio-derived polymers for packaging and apparel.

Why CuspAI?

We believe CuspAI has amassed a set of unique resources and strategies that are unparalleled in this space:

Professor Max Welling and Dr. Chad Edwards, co-founders of CuspAI

Stellar, interdisciplinary team: CuspAI is led by a highly reputable, interdisciplinary team that brings together deep expertise in ML, computational chemistry, and industrial process engineering — as exemplified by the co-founders.

  • Dr. Chad Edwards (Co-founder & CEO) was previously the Commercial Co-Founder of Cambridge Quantum Computing (CQC). He later served as VP of Strategic Partnerships and Global Head of Strategy at Quantinuum following CQC’s merger with Honeywell.
  • Professor Max Welling (Co-founder & CTO) is a Professor at University of Amsterdam, and previously VP Technology at Qualcomm AI Research and Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft Research. He is considered a pioneer in AI’s application to science, variational inference, probabilistic deep learning, and geometric deep learning.

Focus on large scale, curated data collection: CuspAI recognizes that high-quality, large-scale data is foundational to building state-of-the-art models. The team has made early and deliberate investments in building proprietary datasets at scale, including MOFs, to enable models that are both high-performing and generalizable across material classes. In addition, CuspAI runs tight integrations with downstream experimental data pipelines for simulation, synthesis, and testing workflows. This is also complemented by academic and scientific literature through licensing agreements.

Partnering with industry leaders across various domains: CuspAI partners directly with commercially successful businesses and industry leaders to drive impact at scale – aligning closely with partners’ priorities, and building deep collaborations across sectors like energy, climate, automotive, and semiconductors. In addition, CuspAI has assembled a distinguished advisory board that includes Nobel laureate Geoff Hinton (Turing Award laureate, deep learning pioneer), Yann LeCun (Turing Award laureate, Chief AI Scientist at Meta), Lord John Browne (former CEO of BP), Martin van den Brink (former President & CTO of ASML), Verity Harding (former Global Head of Policy at DeepMind), and Prof. Kristin Person (a leading figure in materials science).

Achieving SOTA model performance: CuspAI’s core model stack is fully proprietary, designed to cover end-to-end materials discovery lifecycle from micro-scale design (molecular and atomic levels) to macro-level deployment (process and manufacturability). The CuspAI platform includes a suite of generative models like MOFGEN, a state-of-the-art autoregressive transformer for metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) that achieves a VUN (valid, unique, novel) rate of 49%, which outperforms by a large margin models from Microsoft (10%) and Meta (16%)[2]. Unlike simpler inorganic generators, MOFGEN produces highly complex, synthesizable structures validated against strict physical and chemical constraints and tested against experimental data generated from industry partners.

The Future of Materials

We believe that CuspAI will play a crucial role in shaping the future of materials discovery for generations to come, and will touch many aspects of our physical world from the chips powering our machines to ensuring the sustainability of our environment.

With our investment, CuspAI will be able to accelerate its research and development efforts, expand its market reach, and further solidify its position as a leader in the domain. We are thrilled to partner with Chad, Max, and the entire CuspAI team. Their vision and ambition have the potential to reshape the world, and we can’t wait to be part of that journey.

by Lila Tretikov, Philip Chopin, Andrew Schoen and Aya Somai

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CoreWeave Launches Ventures Group to Invest in Future of AI

CoreWeave Ventures

LIVINGSTON, N.J. – September 9, 2025 – CoreWeave (Nasdaq: CRWV), the AI Hyperscaler™, today announced the launch of CoreWeave Ventures, a new initiative committed to backing founders and companies developing the platforms and technologies shaping the AI ecosystem and the next frontier of computing.

As AI adoption expands across industries, demand for purpose-built infrastructure, tools, and applications continues to grow. By providing investment resources, technical expertise, and compute, CoreWeave Ventures enables founders to bring new ideas to market faster.

“We started CoreWeave with the conviction that AI’s true promise required a cloud platform built from the ground up to optimize for AI specific workloads. It took audacity, humility, and the support of other believers who helped us create the cloud platform of choice for many of the largest AI labs and enterprises” said Brannin McBee, Co-founder and Chief Development Officer, CoreWeave. “Our aim with CoreWeave Ventures is to give other audacious, like-minded founders the support they need to drive technical advancements and bring to market the next class of innovation.”

CoreWeave Ventures supports founders in driving the development of their platforms by providing:

  • Variety of capital investment models to help companies scale.
  • Accelerated access to the CoreWeave  cloud platform purpose-built for AI.
  • Testing environments across production-grade performance clusters to fast track new real-world use cases in AI.
  • Insights on product and go-to-market strategies shaped by CoreWeave’s relationships with hundreds of enterprises and AI-first organizations.
  • Opportunities for deep technical alignment through technology partnerships and integrations.

“Working with CoreWeave has given us the freedom to think bigger and move faster,” said Naeem Talukdar, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer, Moonvalley. “They understand the challenges of scaling breakthrough technologies and have backed us with the kind of support that lets us focus on innovation. We’re grateful to have a partner that invests in both our company and the future we’re trying to create.”

CoreWeave Ventures supports founders with the resources to create impact from day one, ranging from direct capital investment and compute-for-equity transactions to technical collaboration and go-to-market opportunities. CoreWeave Ventures is already working with a diverse group of innovators, from foundational model developers building novel large language models to pioneers in vertical AI applications and infrastructure.

To learn more about CoreWeave Ventures, visit:  www.coreweave.com/ventures or email ventures@coreweave.com.

‍About CoreWeave

CoreWeave, the AI Hyperscaler™, delivers a cloud platform of cutting-edge software powering the next wave of AI. The company’s technology provides enterprises and leading AI labs with cloud solutions for accelerated computing. Since 2017, CoreWeave has operated a growing footprint of data centers across the US and Europe. CoreWeave was ranked as one of the TIME100 most influential companies and featured on Forbes Cloud 100 ranking in 2024. Learn more at www.coreweave.com.

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Mistral: AI for tomorrow’s enterprise

Index Ventures

Mistral cofounders: Timothée Lacroix, Arthur Mensch, Guillaume Lample

INDEX PERSPECTIVE

By Julia Andre

Strong relationships create their own serendipity. A few years ago, my colleague Jan Hammer and I were visiting the Paris HQ of Alan, the digital health insurance platform in which Index was an early investor. Alan’s CEO and co-founder, Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve, mentioned that he was incubating an open-source AI startup called Mistral a couple of floors below. After meeting his co-founder Arthur Mensch, we knew we had to be part of the journey.

Index invests in people as much as we invest in companies – which is why, after cutting that first seed check for Mistral, we’re thrilled to be continuing to support Arthur and the team in their latest funding round. At heart, Arthur is the kind of deeply technical engineer who could easily be building Mistral’s core models himself. Yet he’s shown himself to be talented at communicating Mistral’s bigger vision to customers, investors and policymakers. As a founder, it’s rare and incredibly powerful to be able to flip so fluidly between the close-up and the birds-eye view of your company.

That macro perspective is crucial as Mistral rides – and drives – a transformational wave in how businesses use AI. It’s no longer an experimental, ‘nice-to-have’ technology that employees are using ad-hoc; instead, we’re moving towards a world in which every major company will need to have a customized intelligence at its core. ASML’s decision to strategically partner with Mistral is a reflection of this. Mistral has shown impressive execution in building custom decentralized frontier AI solutions to solve the most complex engineering and industrial problems. More than simply selling cutting-edge models and LLMs, Mistral is en route to becoming the implementation partner of choice for enterprise – a one-stop shop for organizations putting AI to work at scale.

Mistral is the unquestioned AI leader being built out of Europe. Yet what excites us most is that it’s still early days. The enterprise AI market is just beginning to take shape, and Mistral’s success sets it up to be one of the big winners over the long term. We’re delighted to support them as they build the crucial AI infrastructure of tomorrow.

THE DETAILS

Mistral AI raises €1.7bn to accelerate technological progress with AI

Mistral announced a Series C funding round of €1.7bn at a €11.7bn post-money valuation. This investment fuels the company’s scientific research to keep pushing the frontier of AI to tackle the most critical and sophisticated technological challenges faced by strategic industries.

The Series C funding round is led by leading semiconductor equipment manufacturer, ASML Holding NV (ASML).

“ASML is proud to enter a strategic partnership with Mistral AI, and to be lead investor in this funding round. The collaboration between Mistral AI and ASML aims to generate clear benefits for ASML customers through innovative products and solutions enabled by AI, and will offer potential for joint research to address future opportunities.” said ASML CEO Christophe Fouquet.

For the last two years, Mistral has advanced AI through cutting-edge research and strategic partnerships with corporate and industrial champions. They will continue to develop custom decentralized frontier AI solutions that solve the most complex engineering and industrial problems. It powers enterprises, public sectors, and industries through state-of-the-art models, tailored solutions, and high-performance compute infrastructure.

“This investment brings together two technology leaders operating in the same value chain. We have the ambition to help ASML and its numerous partners solve current and future engineering challenges through AI, and ultimately to advance the full semiconductor and AI value chain”, said Mistral AI CEO Arthur Mensch.

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The Missing Emotional Layer in AI: Our Investment in Nuance Labs

Lightspeed

Nuance Labs Co-Founders Fangchang Ma and Edward Zhang

We’ve all experienced the uncanny valley: the slight discomfort when watching an AI avatar speak, the sense that something fundamental is missing despite impressive technical capabilities. Today’s AI can reason brilliantly and generate human-like text, but when it comes to emotional intelligence, AI remains surprisingly tone-deaf.

That’s where Nuance Labs comes in. We at Lightspeed are excited to invest in their seed round alongside Accel as they build what we believe will become a foundational layer for emotional intelligence in AI.

As IQ becomes commoditized through increasingly capable language models, emotional quotient (EQ) emerges as the critical differentiator. Yet we believe current AI systems fundamentally miss this dimension. AI avatars feel robotic, not because of pixel quality, but because they lack the subtle emotional expressiveness that makes human faces compelling, and they are far from real-time responsiveness.

Nuance’s breakthrough insight mirrors that of large language models: just as LLMs learned to understand meaning by predicting the next word, AI can understand emotions by learning to predict human emotions and behavior.

Nuance Labs is building a unified foundation model for real-time generation and understanding of realistic human expression across multiple simultaneous modalities, including text, speech, and video. This unlocks new categories of AI interaction:

  • Real-time emotional generation: Lifelike avatars that don’t just speak words but convey appropriate emotional responses through coordinated facial expressions, vocal inflection, and body language. Imagine AI therapists that pause thoughtfully, offer encouraging expressions, and adapt their demeanor to your emotional state, all in real-time.
  • Real-time emotion understanding: AI systems that can read subtle emotional cues as they happen, enabling applications like live coaching systems that detect when you’re losing confidence during a presentation, or interview AI that understands not just what candidates say but how they say it.

The team brings exceptional depth: Fangchang Ma and Edward Zhang previously built research teams at Apple, contributing to products like Vision Pro’s Digital Persona system. Their combined expertise in computer graphics, robotics, and machine learning, along with thousands of academic citations, strongly positions them to solve this technically complex challenge.

We’re entering an era where AI interactions will be measured not just by accuracy or speed, but by emotional authenticity. Any interface where humans interact with AI, from customer service and education to entertainment and healthcare, will benefit from emotional intelligence. We believe Nuance Labs is building the infrastructure that will power this next generation of AI experiences.

The uncanny valley stands as a barrier to natural human-AI interaction. Nuance Labs is building a bridge that will enable an entire ecosystem of emotionally intelligent AI applications. We’re thrilled to support their mission to make AI interactions as natural and emotionally rich as human conversation itself.

Excited to bring emotional intelligence to artificial intelligence? Nuance is hiring.

 

The content here should not be viewed as investment advice, nor does it constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. Certain statements herein are the opinions and beliefs of Lightspeed; other market participants could take different views.

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Nnamdi Iregbulem

Nnamdi Iregbulem

Guru Chahal

Guru Chahal

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Koah raises $5M to bring ads into AI apps

Forerunner

How can startups and developers actually monetize their AI products? A startup called Koah, which recently raised $5 million in seed funding, is betting that ads will be a big part of the answer.

If you spend any time online, there’s a good chance you’ve seen plenty of ugly, AI-generated ads — but few to none when interacting with AI chatbots. Koah co-founder and CEO Nic Baird argued that will inevitably change.

“Once these things get outside San Francisco, there’s only one way to make [them profitable] on a global scale,” Baird told TechCrunch over Zoom. “It’s happened time and time again.”

To be clear, Koah isn’t trying to introduce advertising to ChatGPT. (That’s probably something OpenAI will do for itself one day.) Instead, it’s focused on the “long tail” of apps that are built on top of the big models, including apps with a user base outside the United States.

Baird suggested that when consumer AI products were first becoming popular, it made sense for them to focus on “wealthier, prosumer” users and to monetize those users by converting some of them into paid subscriptions.

But now someone could build an AI app that reaches millions of users in Latin America, and those users are “not paying 20 dollars a month,” Baird said. So the developer could struggle to bring in subscription revenue, but “they have the same inference costs as everyone else.”

A sample Koah ad for acne wash
Image Credits:Koah

Baird suggested that by successfully figuring out how to make advertising work in AI chats, Koah could actually unlock more potential for “vibe coded” apps that might otherwise be “too expensive to operate at scale” unless their creators raise VC funding.

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In fact, Koah is already serving ads in apps like AI assistant Luzia, parenting app Heal, student research tool Liner, and creative platform DeepAI. Its advertisers include UpWork, General Medicine, and Skillshare.

These ads are marked as sponsored content, and they’re supposed to appear at relevant moments in your chats. For example, if you’re asking for advice about startup business strategies, the app could show you an ad from UpWork offering to connect you with freelancers who could work with your company.

When Koah talks to publishers, Baird said many of them believe that ads simply don’t work in AI chats, while others have found limited success with AI offerings from older adtech companies like AdMob and AppLovin.

But Baird said Koah is 4x to 5x more effective, delivering clickthrough rates of 7.5%, and with early partners earning $10,000 in their first 30 days on the platform. He added that Koah achieves all that while having less of a detrimental effect on user engagement — though his ultimate goal is for Koah ads to feel relevant enough that they actually improve engagement.

Image Credits:Koah

Koah’s seed round was led by Forerunner, with participation from South Park Commons and AppLovin co-founder Andrew Karam.

Forerunner partner Nicole Johnson echoed many of Baird’s points when discussing the investment over email. She said that when it comes to AI, monetization is “the elephant in the room amongst builders and investors.” And while the “going standard for monetizing consumer AI services is subscription,” focusing exclusively on subscriptions can “quickly lead to fatigue and churn.”

“Multiple revenue models in Consumer AI are inevitable, and if the past decades of internet services are any indicator, ads will play a major role,” Johnson said. In her view, Koah is “building the essential monetization layer for consumer AI services.”

As for where AI chats fall in the larger advertising ecosystem, Baird and his team have found they represent the middle of the purchase funnel — somewhere between the awareness raising of an Instagram ad and the actual purchase that might be driven by ads in Google search.

“People are not transacting on AI — they’re just not,” Baird said. They might ask a chatbot for recommendations or product details, but then “they’re going to Google to buy.” So part of the challenge for Koah is figuring out the best ways to capture a user’s “commercial intent.”

“It’s not interesting to me to try to figure out, ‘How do we show a display ad in AI?” Baird said. Instead, he wants to understand, “What is the user looking for and how do we give that to them?”

Anthony Ha is TechCrunch’s weekend editor. Previously, he worked as a tech reporter at Adweek, a senior editor at VentureBeat, a local government reporter at the Hollister Free Lance, and vice president of content at a VC firm. He lives in New York City.

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Recall.ai: unlocking conversation and meeting data to power AI applications and agents

Bessemer

Bessemer Venture Partners leads Recall.ai’s $38M Series B to help teams capture and leverage conversational data at scale.

Conversations are arguably the world’s largest data set. Yet, the data and context that fuel today’s AI revolution are often relegated to what’s already documented or structured. Conversation data, on the other hand, just floats in the ether. But every strategy meeting, sales call, customer complaint, brainstorming session, doctor consult, and coffee chat holds something invaluable: context.

Agents and applications need context 

Conversation and meeting data offer vital context to supercharge AI agents and apps. Enter Recall.ai — the infrastructure that makes it effortless to capture and leverage this data at scale and in real time. The ability to gain insights from conversation data is enabling the emergence of new markets and products. This burgeoning ecosystem includes many of our portfolio companies, like Abridge, Rilla, and Avantos. Recall.ai underlies this trend, which is why we’re proud to lead the company’s $38M Series B round.

In every modern organization, meetings are where crucial context is shared, customer knowledge is exchanged, and decisions are made. Until now, accessing and scaling that flood of meeting data intelligently — across platforms, formats, and workflows — has been a challenge. Recall.ai solves this by providing a single, robust solution that abstracts the complexity.

One API, every platform

Recall.ai provides a unified API and developer platform for conversation intelligence. It powers meeting bots, captures and distills video, audio, and metadata across platforms, including Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Google Meet, Webex, Slack, Desktop, and more. Recall.ai handles it all — from unlimited concurrent Virtual Machine infrastructure to real-time transcripts, audio and video streams, and granular metadata, like speaker identification and screen sharing — all delivered securely.

As the infrastructure behind thousands of conversation intelligence products, processing many billions of minutes annually, Recall.ai is growing quickly across developers and enterprises. Leaders and innovators like HubSpot, DataDog, Calendly, Instacart, Charlie Health, Rippling, and ClickUp all rely on Recall.ai. The company has grown 12X in 2023 and 3X in 2024, and is on track for a record 2025, with recent launches including Desktop Recording SDK, Calendar Integration, and Storage and Playback, with a Mobile SDK in beta and other major releases coming soon.

Customers get up and running within hours instead of spending months building custom infrastructure and dedicating ongoing headcount to maintenance. Teams save 500+ developer hours of engineering time by offloading meeting data management to Recall.ai. This allows companies to ship fast and free up precious development resources.

Why we’re backing the team behind Recall.ai

The idea for Recall.ai stemmed from a problem that cofounders David Gu (CEO) and Amanda Zhu (COO) experienced firsthand while building their previous company, a real-time transcription tool for video conferences. They realized the bulk of their engineering team’s resources were consumed by building, scaling, and maintaining integrations with platforms.

Recognizing that this infrastructure challenge was plaguing others, David and Amanda launched Recall.ai in 2022. The small but mighty team is relentless in solving complex technical challenges and offering customers and developers robust, delightful, and dependable infrastructure. The team is also growing. Check out opportunities at Recall.ai here.

We’re excited to back this all-star team as it enables a growing ecosystem of innovative applications. If you’re building applications or agents that could be supercharged with context and need to access, analyze, or act on conversation data, try Recall.ai.

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Emerald leads $14M investment in Xampla, accelerating the replacement of single-use plastics

Emerald

CAMBRIDGE, UK – Emerald Technology Ventures, a global leader in climate-tech venture capital, has led a $14m of investment round in Xampla, a University of Cambridge spin-out that has created world-first natural materials from plant protein, to replace the world’s most polluting plastics. Other investors include BGF and Matterwave Ventures, and the funding will support more than ten billion units of single-use plastic replaced with Xampla’s Morro™ materials in the next five years, including plastic linings found in takeaway boxes, coffee cups and sachets.

Investors, including Neil Cameron of Emerald, and CEO Alexandra French of Xampla

Global plastic production is estimated to rise to a billion tonnes annually, and with less than 10% of plastic ever produced being recycled, there are now 8 billion tonnes of plastics and microplastics in our global environment. Xampla’s Morro materials offer a world-first natural polymer alternative. Made from abundant and natural plant protein feedstocks, including peas, rapeseed and sunflower, the materials are completely PFAS and plastic-free, and exempt from the European Union’s Single-Use Plastic Directive (SUPD).

Through partnerships with big names such as 2M Group of Companies, Huhtamaki and Transcend Packaging, Xampla has already replaced polluting coatings on boxes used by food delivery giant Just Eat Takeaway and Bunzl Catering Supplies. Unlike plastic, Morro™ Coating maintains the recyclability of cardboard without compromising on grease, oxygen and moisture barrier properties. The company’s Morro™ films, being commercialized through global partnerships, are soluble, giving them the potential to replace polluting plastic PVA films in dishwasher tablets and laundry pods.  They are also food-safe and can be used as edible replacements for packaging a wide range of single-serve products, from sweets to soups.

In addition, Xampla is working in partnership with leading FMCG brands and fragrance houses to deploy Morro™ materials in place of harmful plastic microencapsulates used to convey scents and active ingredients in homecare and beauty products.

Xampla’s Chief Executive, Alexandra French, said:

“This is a major vote of confidence for our revolutionary replacements for polluting plastics, and will see us expanding into Asia Pacific as well as growing in the UK and Europe. We have proven to investors and to brands that Morro™ materials are the real deal in making plastic a material of the past.  In just the next five years, Xampla will replace ten billion pieces of single-use plastic.  This is the technology industry has been crying out for. Our ambition now is nothing less than to see our products – proudly bearing their Morro marque – become the world’s go-to plastic replacement.”

Neil Cameron, Partner in Emerald’s sustainable packaging investment fund, added:

“Working with Xampla is part of our mission to turbocharge a revolution in innovative packaging. This technology hits the sweet spot I search for: a big solution to a big problem that can reap big rewards. And with its current global traction, there is huge potential to scale even further. The global barrier coatings market alone is set to be worth over $30bn by 2032, and that is just the beginning.”

Rowan Bird, Investor at the BGF, said:

“Xampla’s technology stands out as a truly scalable and practical alternative to plastic. Its patented, entirely natural and PFAS-free material is not only strong in performance but also drop-in ready for existing manufacturing lines, making it an attractive option for brands looking to adopt more sustainable solutions. We believe in the strength of the team, the quality of the product, and the positive role Xampla can play in helping reduce reliance on polluting plastics. We’re excited to support their continued growth as they bring this innovation to more partners and applications.”

Ines Kolmsee at Matterwave Ventures, added:

“Xampla’s mission fully aligns with ours: they are tackling a major sustainability issue with smart technology that can be used in existing manufacturing equipment, making it both easy to adopt and capital efficient. What really wowed us is their global team.  These are real experts, drawing on the best science from the University of Cambridge and elsewhere.  But this isn’t an academic exercise. They have got their product out of the lab and into the market.  It is a remarkable achievement and I know they will now go from strength to strength.”

For more information: www.xampla.com/morro-materials

More on Packaging and Materials at Emerald:

Shaping the Future of Packaging: Emerald’s Formed Fiber Sprint

Packaging and Materials

Emerald Invests in Cajo Technologies, Sustainable Laser Marking Leader

About Emerald Technology Ventures

Emerald is a globally recognized venture capital firm, founded in 2000, that manages and advises assets of over €1 billion from its offices in Zurich, Toronto and Singapore. The firm invests in start-ups that tackle big challenges in climate change and sustainability, with four current funds, hundreds of venture transactions and five third-party investment mandates, including loan guarantees to over 100 start-ups.

This is Emerald.

Bold Ideas. Bright Future.  www.emerald.vc

CONTACT FOR EMERALD:

info@emerald.vc

About Xampla and Morro™ materials

Xampla is a materials innovation company unlocking the power of plants to create natural materials that change the world. Its range of world-first Morro materials are natural alternatives developed to address the plastic pollution crisis, and have been designed to eliminate the worldʼs most polluting plastics.

400 million tonnes of plastic waste produced every year globally according to figures from the  United Nations.. Morro™ materials re designed to leave nothing harmful behind.

Made from plants with no chemical modification, they are completely plastic-free, home compostable, fully biodegradable, and SUPD exempt. In scaling their Morro™ materials, Xampla has partnered with leading organisations including 2M Group of Companies, ELEMIS Skincare, Transcend Packaging, Just Eat and Gousto.

Find out more at www.xampla.com/morro-materials

Media contact:

Catherine Kitchen
Catherine@higginsonstrategy.com
+44 7763 671 844

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Search, Perfected for AI: Why We’re Doubling Down on Exa

Lightspeed

Exa Co-Founders Will Bryk and Jeff Wang.

AI agents and AI-native products are here. These AIs need access to information, critical context that helps them perform at their best. “Garbage in, garbage out” still applies — no matter how intelligent the model, its reasoning is contingent on the availability of fresh, accurate data. In other words, they need search. Application builders are rapidly integrating and embedding search capabilities into a range of AI products – from consumer apps to B2B tools. This is where Exa comes in.

Exa is an applied AI lab training a search engine optimized for AI agents to perfect web search and improve upon the “ten blue links” paradigm that Google defined in the early days of the web. Exa’s goal is to create the world’s most powerful search technology, and unlike Google, they aren’t bound by optimizing for consumer clicks and SEO.

When Lightspeed led Exa’s Series A round last year, agents were only just beginning to take off. Now, they’ve taken over.

Exa has become the leading search engine for AI. For example, AI coding products like Cursor use Exa to retrieve technical documentation to output well-informed, up-to-date code. Today, thousands of developers, AI startups, and enterprises are building on top of the Exa API.

It’s why we’re excited to double down on our investment as part of Exa’s $85M Series B round, led by Peter Fenton at Benchmark Capital, alongside participation from YCombinator and NVIDIA Ventures. Peter served on the board of Elastic, the last major search company built, so we are delighted to see he shares our conviction about this massive opportunity.

Agents are merely large language models paired with appropriate tools. We believe search is one of the two big “killer tools” for agents, along with code execution. With code execution, agents become “Turing complete”, enabling them to write programs on the fly. With search, agents become “information complete” — they can acquire any public information needed to accomplish a task.

While AI models are trained on increasingly vast sums of data, AI models cannot perfectly memorize all the information on the public web, as their recall is unreliable. Further, there’s always a “last mile” of data — private data, alternative data sources, etc. — which will never end up in the training data of these models. For AIs to work with and reason about this data, they require search capabilities.

Exa is strategically positioned to power search for AI. Exa indexes billions of web documents, processes through them all with their custom models, and serves them through a state-of-the-art search and retrieval stack. The quality and craftsmanship of the Exa team is evident through benchmarks, where Exa is best-in-class in terms of relevance and latency.

This incredible performance is no longer limited to AI consumption — Exa now serves human users too via its new product, Websets, an agentic search tool for extracting structured information from the unstructured web. Non-technical users can write a query asking for lists of people, companies, and more (e.g., “US-based startups that have raised over $10M USD focused on longevity healthcare”) and get hundreds of results matching the exact criteria, verified by Exa’s AI agents. Websets has become incredibly popular for recruiting, lead generation, and market research use cases.

But they aren’t stopping there: the Exa team has set out an aggressive product roadmap for the coming years, with the goal of powering every AI app, indexing beyond the public web, and becoming the AI world’s data layer.

We are heading toward a future where AIs search far more than humans, where most search queries actually originate from an AI of some kind rather than a human. We believe this new world will require AI-native search infrastructure to support this new, rapidly growing consumer of the web.

That’s Exa — a single API to get any information from the web, built specifically for AI products. Lightspeed is proud to continue supporting Exa’s vision of perfect search. If you want to work on industry-changing, high-impact, massive-scale challenges, apply here.

 

The content here should not be viewed as investment advice, nor does it constitute an offer to sell, or a solicitation of an offer to buy, any securities. Certain statements herein are the opinions and beliefs of Lightspeed; other market participants could take different views.

Authors

Guru Chahal

Guru Chahal

Nnamdi Iregbulem

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