Morning VC Brief丨2025.04.15

Week15 Highlights丨SSI, incident, Fern, Blue Water Autonomy, Vinyl Equity, Redcar, Plastic Labs

Author

eric gu
April 15, 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/ Safe Superintelligence (SSI) raised $2B at $32B

  • Product: Develop superintelligent AI systems with human-aligned safety as core priority, led by ex-OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever

  • Highlight: Singular focus on safety-capability balance; partnerships with Google Cloud for infrastructure

  • Investor: Greenoaks(Lead), a16z, Lightspeed, DST Global

  • Source

2/ AI Incident Management Platform incident.io raised $62M Series B

  • Product: AI agents to automate incident resolution, integrated with Slack and offering tools like On-call scheduling

  • Highlight: Trusted by clients like Netflix, Airbnb, and OpenAI; weekly product updates; 2/3 customers migrated from legacy tools (e.g., PagerDuty)

  • Investor: Insight Partners(Lead), Index Ventures, Point Nine Capital

  • Source

3/ API Development Platform Fern raised $9M Series A

  • Product: Automates SDK generation and API documentation to streamline developer experience

  • Highlight: Trusted by 150+ clients (e.g., Square, ElevenLabs)

  • Investor: Bessemer Venture Partners(Lead), Y Combinator

  • Source

4/ Autonomous Naval Ship Startup Blue Water Autonomy raised $14M Seed

  • Product: Develops full-stack autonomous unmanned ships for U.S. Navy missions, with integrated hardware, software, and AI for open ocean operations

  • Highlight: Team combines Amazon Robotics/iRobot/Navy veterans; salt-water testing underway

  • Investor: Eclipse(Lead), Riot Ventures

  • Source

5/ Transfer Agent Vinyl Equity raised $11.5M Seed

  • Product: API-first, AI-powered platform automating shareholder registry management, replacing legacy fax/PDF workflows for public companies

  • Highlight: Serves 70K+ shareholders (e.g., Talkspace)

  • Investor: Index Ventures(Lead), Spark Capital (Lead)

  • Source

6/ Sales Automation Startup Redcar raised $5.3M Seed

  • Product: F1 Agent—AI-powered sales assistant automating lead research, personalized outreach, and workflow mirroring for B2B teams

  • Highlight: Aims to free 50%+ sales time from manual tasks

  • Investor: Khosla Ventures (Lead)

  • Source

7/ AI Personal Identity Platform Plastic Labs raised $5.35M Pre-Seed

  • Product: Honcho platform—cloud-based API for AI agent personalization via adaptive memory, theory-of-mind inference, and real-time user identity mapping

  • Highlight: Zero manual data input for users; decentralized identity network plans

  • Investor: Betaworks(Lead), Variant(Lead), Greycroft

  • Source