Morning VC Brief丨2025.05.19

Week21 Highlights丨Pathos, TensorWave, Reflect Orbital, Hedra, Granola, Openlayer, Cognichip

Author

eric gu
May 19, 2025

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

Table of Contents

01. Venture News

1/ AI Oncology Drug Development Startup Pathos raised $365M Series D

  • Product: Multimodal AI foundation model integrating clinical, molecular, and imaging data for oncology R&D

  • Highlight: Building the largest oncology-specific multimodal AI model to enhance clinical trial design and biomarker discovery

  • Source

2/ AI Cloud Provider TensorWave raised $100M Series A

  • Product: Specialized AMD-exclusive cloud platform with 8,192 MI325X GPUs, optimized for AI training/inference via direct hardware access and liquid-cooled infrastructure

  • Highlight: World’s largest liquid-cooled AMD GPU deployment

  • Investor: AMD Ventures(Lead), Magnetar(Lead), Prosperity7

  • Source

3/ On-Demand Sunlight Satellite Network Reflect Orbital raised $20M Series A

  • Product: Constellation for reflecting sunlight to Earth for lighting/energy applications

  • Highlight: First satellite launch by Spring 2026 with "World Tour" lighting pilot in 10 locations; Over 260,000 service requests from 157 countries since fall 2023

  • Investor: Lux Capital (Lead), Sequoia Capital

  • Source

4/ Video-Generated Character Platform Hedra raised $32M Series A

  • Product: Web-based video generation/editing suite powered by its Character-3 model, enabling AI-generated characters in videos with long dialogues and style transfer

  • Highlight: Viral use cases like AI-generated baby/dog podcasts; Integrates third-party models (Veo 2, ElevenLabs) for multimodal content creation

  • Investor: Andreessen Horowitz (Lead)

  • Source

5/ AI Meeting Knowledge Platform Granola raised $43M Series B

  • Product: AI-powered workspace for organizing, analyzing, and querying meeting transcripts across teams, with shared folders, multi-model reasoning, and Slack integration

  • Highlight: Processes millions of conversation minutes daily; offers cross-meeting trend analysis, source-linked citations, and enterprise features like company-wide knowledge browsing

  • Investor: NFDG(Lead), Lightspeed, Spark Capital

  • Source

6/ AI Testing Platform Openlayer raised $14.5M Series A

  • Product: Unified platform for end-to-end AI testing and governance, enabling teams to validate model behavior and ensure reliability across traditional ML and LLM deployments

  • Highlight: Helps enterprises accelerate iteration, reduce debugging costs, and align AI systems with business outcomes through collaborative testing workflows

  • Investor: Race Capital, Quiet Capital, Y Combinator

  • Source

7/ AI Chip Design Startup Cognichip raised $33M Seed

  • Product: Building a physics-informed foundational AI model ("artificial chip intelligence") to accelerate chip development by 50% with cost reduction

  • Highlight: Targets talent shortages and R&D bottlenecks in $1T semiconductor industry

  • Investor: Lux Capital(Lead), Mayfield

  • Source