Morning VC Brief丨2025.05.07

Week19 Highlights丨Wonder, Parloa, Orca AI, Recraft, Relevance, Blinq, Unblocked, Posha

Author

eric gu
May 07, 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/ Food Hall and Delivery startup Wonder raised $600M at $7B

  • Product: "Super app for mealtime" integrating physical food halls (30+ proprietary brands), delivery (Grubhub), meal kits (Blue Apron), and food media (Tastemade)

  • Highlight: $2B+ annual revenue; rapid expansion to 90+ Northeast U.S. stores by 2024 (opening 1/week)

  • Investor: NEA (Lead)

  • Source

2/ AI Customer Experience Platform Parloa raised $120M Series C

  • Product: Agentic AI platform for enterprise contact centers

  • Highlight: 4x revenue growth in 12 months; First Agentic AI platform for enterprise contact centers

  • Investor: Durable Capital Partners(Lead), Altimeter Capital(Lead), General Catalyst(Lead)

  • Source

3/ Autonomous Shipping Platform Orca AI raised $72.5M Series B

  • Product: AI-driven navigation system reducing maritime collisions through 80M+ nautical mile visual dataset analysis

  • Highlight: Achieved 54% reduction in close encounters (saving $100k/vessel/year in fuel) and expanded into defense sector with navy contracts

  • Investor: Brighton Park Capital(Lead), Ankona Capital, Hyperlink Ventures

  • Source

4/ AI Brand Image Generation Recraft raised $30M Series B

  • Product: AI model "red_panda" specializing in brand-centric image generation (logos, marketing materials) with precise compliance to branding guidelines

  • Highlight: $5M+ ARR, 4M users

  • Investor: Accel(Lead), Khosla Ventures, Madrona

  • Source

5/ AI Agent Operating System Relevance raised $24M Series B

  • Product: Enables businesses to build and manage teams of AI agents that integrate into workflows, learn roles, and adapt over time

  • Highlight: 40,000 AI agents onboarded in January 2025 alone; clients include Qualified, Activision, and Safety Culture

  • Investor: Bessemer Venture Partners(Lead), Insight Partners

  • Source

6/ Digital Business Card Platform Blinq raised $25M Series A

  • Product: Offers customizable digital business cards via QR codes, NFC, and short links, integrating with CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce

  • Highlight: 2.5M+ individual users and 500K+ enterprise clients across the U.S., Canada, U.K., and Australia

  • Investor: Touring Capital(Lead), Blackbird Ventures, Square Peg Capital

  • Source

7/ AI Code Understanding Tool Unblocked raised $20M Series A

  • Product: AI assistant integrating with Slack, Jira, etc., to help developers analyze legacy codebases and answer contextual questions like code ownership and metric definitions

  • Highlight: Founder Dennis Pilarinos (ex-Microsoft/Amazon, sold Buddybuild to Apple)

  • Investor: Theory Ventures(Lead)

  • Source

8/ AI-powered Cooking Robot Posha raised $8M Series A

  • Product: Countertop robot using computer vision to automate cooking. Users select recipes, add ingredients, and the machine handles cooking, akin to a coffee machine for food

  • Highlight: Allows ingredient substitutions and flexible measurements; targets users who cook 2-6 times weekly

  • Investor: Accel(Lead), Xeed Ventures, Waterbridge Ventures

  • Source