Morning VC Brief丨2025.07.11

Week28 Highlights丨LangChain, Also, Datafy, Mentra, Solidroad, OnText, Monumental Labs

Author

eric gu
July 11, 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/ LLM Infrastructure LangChain Nears $1B Valuation

  • Product: Provides tools to build and monitor LLM-powered applications, including observability platform LangSmith

  • Highlight: Open-source framework gained 111k GitHub stars; LangSmith reached $12M-$16M ARR within a year

  • Investor: IVP(Lead)

  • Source

2/ Micro-EV Company Also raised $200M Venture Round

  • Product: Designing multi-format micro-EVs, starting with e-bikes developed by ex-Rivian team

  • Highlight: Originated as Rivian’s "Project Inder" (2022); partnered with Jony Ive’s LoveFrom for design

  • Investor: Greenoaks Capital(Lead)

  • Source

3/ Autonomous Storage Startup Datafy raised $20M Seed

  • Product: Fully autonomous cloud storage optimization platform eliminating manual sizing, featuring zero-downtime auto-scaling and real-time monitoring

  • Highlight: Achieves 40% EBS cost reduction (e.g., for H2O.ai) while auto-scaling storage dynamically

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

  • Source

4/ Smart Glasses OS Developer Mentra raised $8M Seed

  • Product: MentraOS 2.0, an open-source operating system for lightweight smart glasses, enabling real-time AI features (live captioning, translation) and cloud-native apps

  • Highlight: 4,000+ developers building apps; partnerships with Vuzix/Even Realities

  • Investor: Android co-founder Rich Miner, YouTube co-founder Jawed Karim, Y Combinator, Toyota Ventures, and Amazon.

  • Source

5/ AI Customer Experience Platform Solidroad raised $6.5M Seed

  • Product: AI-powered QA and training platform that improves both human and AI agent performance in customer service

  • Highlight: Processes 100K+ conversations/month for 50+ clients, including Crypto.com

  • Investor: First Round Capital(Lead), Y Combinator

  • Source

6/ Text Shopping Infra OneText raised $4.5M Seed

  • Product: A "text-to-buy network" enabling seamless purchases through SMS, bypassing traditional checkout flows

  • Highlight: Achieves 20-30% higher conversions through AI-powered two-way messaging and features like cart recovery

  • Investor: Khosla Ventures(Lead), Coatue

  • Source

7/ Robot Sculpting Factory Monumental Labs raised $9M Seed

  • Product: Combining advanced robotics with traditional hand carving, Monumental Labs produces custom stone sculpture at a fraction of the cost for artists, architects, and collectors.

  • Highlight: Developing software and hardware to progressively automate stone fabrication and reduce costs up to 90%

  • Investor: Seven Seven Six, Path Ventures

  • Source