Morning VC Brief丨2025.03.10

Week11 Highlights丨Shield AI, Turing, SpecterOps, Renaissance Fusion, Crogl, Ataraxis AI, Ceramic, Intangible

Author

eric gu
March 10, 2025

Morning VC Brief is an expert daily curation of tech and venture news. Feel free to forward; the sign-up is here

TL;DR

01. Venture News

1/ Military AI Developer Shield AI raised $240M Series F at $5.3B

  • Product: Hivemind Enterprise platform powering autonomous systems like V-BAT drones, featuring AI-driven mission planning and real-time EW-resistant navigation

  • Highlight: Deployed in 30+ DoD programs; V-BAT drones achieve 98% mission success rate in contested environments

  • Investor: Hanwha Aerospace (Lead), L3 Harris Technologies,(Lead) Andreessen Horowitz

  • #AI #DefenseTech Source

2/ AI Data Solution Turing raised $111M Series E at $2.2B

  • Product: Remote engineering platform providing data solutions for LLM development (e.g., OpenAI) and enterprise generative AI apps via 4M+ global developers

  • Highlight: $300M ARR with 1-year profitability; launched AI code acceleration tools boosting output by 40% via automated code generation

  • Investor: Khazanah Nasional Berhad (Lead), WestBridge Capital, Sozo Ventures, UpHonest Capital

  • #AI #Data Source

3/ Identity Security Leader SpecterOps raised $75M Series B

  • Product: BloodHound platform detecting Active Directory attack paths, adopted by 50K+ security teams including Fortune 500 enterprises

  • Highlight: Open-source community edition powers 90% of AD security audits; launched AI-powered attack simulation reducing breach risks by 65%

  • Investor: Insight Partners (Lead), Ansa Capital, M12, Ballistic Ventures

  • #AI #Healthcare Source

4/ Fusion Energy Startup Renaissance Fusion raised €32M Series A

  • Product: Modular stellarator reactors using liquid metal walls for simplified nuclear fusion energy generation

  • Highlight: Reduces maintenance downtime by 70% via self-healing walls

  • Investor: Crédit Mutuel Impact (Lead), Lowercarbon Capital

  • #Energy Source

5/ AI Cybersecurity Analyst Crogl raised $30M Series A

  • Product: Autonomous AI assistant analyzing network alerts, reducing false positives by 60% via real-time log correlation across 300+ tools

  • Highlight: Deployed at Fortune 500 companies; processes 1M+ alerts daily with 90% accuracy; founded by Splunk/Databricks security veterans

  • Investor: Menlo Ventures (Lead)

  • #AI #Cybersecurity Source

6/ AI Cancer Prognostics Startup Ataraxis AI raised $20.4M Series A

  • Product: AI platform predicting 5-10 year cancer outcomes via high-resolution cell image analysis, starting with breast cancer diagnostics

  • Highlight: 30% higher accuracy than standard methods in clinical studies; trained on 100M+ patient images

  • Investor: AIX Ventures (Lead), Thiel Bio, Founders Fund, Obvious Ventures

  • #AI #Healthcare Source

7/ Model Training Infrastructure Ceramic raised $12M Seed

  • Product: Distributed training platform enabling 2.5X faster LLM development with 72% MFU efficiency at 64K context lengths

  • Highlight: Reduces compute costs by 40% versus SOTA; supports ultra-long-context training for models of any size

  • Investor: NEA (Lead), IBM, Samsung Next

  • #AI #Infra Source

8/ AI 3D Creation Platform Intangible raised $4M Seed

  • Product: No-code web-based 3D studio enabling filmmakers/game designers to build complex 3D worlds via text prompts

  • Highlight: 6,000+ pre-built 3D asset library; Founded by ex-Apple lead designer (Charles Migos) and Basis co-founder (Bharat Vasan)

  • Investor: a16z Speedrun, Crosslink Capital

  • #AI #3D-Gen Source