Morning VC Brief丨2025.03.11

Week11 Highlights丨Safe Superintelligence, Lila Sciences, Reflection AI, Cursor, Uthana, Seismic

eric gu
March 11, 2025

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1/ Safe Superintelligence (SSI) Valued at $30B in $2B Funding Round

Product: Secretive AI lab co-founded by OpenAI ex-chief scientist Ilya Sutskever, focused on developing superhuman-level AI
Highlight: Zero announced product roadmap; solely dedicated to "safe superintelligence" R&D
Investor: Greenoaks Capital (Lead), a16z, Sequoia Capital
#AI #Foundation Model Source

2/ AI Scientific Superintelligence Platform Lila Sciences raised $200M Seed

Product: Pioneers AI-driven scientific superintelligence platform and autonomous labs for life sciences, chemistry, and materials science
Highlight: Achieved breakthroughs in genetic medicine design, novel antibody discovery, low-cost green hydrogen catalysts, and carbon capture materials
Investor: Flagship Pioneering (Lead), General Catalyst, March Capital
#AI #Science Source

3/ Superintelligence Startup Reflection AI raised $130M Seed & Series A

Product: Founded by ex-Google DeepMind researchers, developing AI systems for autonomous coding and superintelligence
Highlight: Building AI agents for code vulnerability scanning, memory optimization, and app testing; CEO Misha Laskin (co-developed Google Gemini’s training), CTO Ioannis Antonoglou (Gemini post-training expert)
Investor: Sequoia Capital (Lead), CRV(Lead), Lightspeed Venture Partners(Lead), NVentures, SV Angel, Alexandr Wang
#AI #Foundation Model Source

4/ AI Coding Startup Cursor in Talks for $10B Valuation Funding

Product: Anysphere’s AI coding assistant Cursor competes with GitHub Copilot, leverages custom LLMs
Highlight: ARR grew from $100M to $150M in 3 months; new round would value at 66x ARR (vs. 25x previously)
Investor: Thrive Capital (Lead)
#AI #Coding Source

5/ Generative AI Animation Platform Uthana raised $4.3M Seed

Product: Builds generative AI tools for 3D character animation, targeting game developers and animators
Highlight: Platform features Text-to-Motion, Video-to-Motion, and a library of 10,000+ animations with finger-level detail; Integrates with Unreal Engine, Unity, Maya, and Blender; used by 10+ partner studios
Investor: IA Ventures (Lead), A16Z Speedrun, Acequia Capital
#AI #3D Animation Source

6/ Encrypted Blockchain Startup Seismic raised $7M Seed

Product: Building a privacy-first blockchain with app-level encryption
Highlight: Solves blockchain’s "forced transparency" bottleneck via base-layer encryption; Early use cases: Nibble (restaurant revenue sharing), Level (belief-based asset trading), Folio (pay-it-forward chains)
Investor: a16z crypto (Lead), Polychain, 1kx
#Blockchain Source