Morning VC Brief丨2025.08.08

Week32 Highlights丨Clay, Rillet, Chai Discovery, E2B, Knit, Caspian, Julius, August

Author

eric gu
August 08, 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 GTM Platform Clay raised $100M Series C

  • Product: Revenue automation platform that enables "GTM Engineers" to build scaled revenue systems by automating research, signal tracking, data entry, and messaging without requiring coding skills

  • Highlight: On track to triple revenue this year; AI agent completed >1.5 billion lifetime tasks; serves 10K+ customers including Anthropic, Cursor, Vanta

  • Investor: CapitalG (Lead)

  • Source

2/ AI ERP Platform Rillet raised $70M Series B

  • Product: AI-native ERP platform that modernizes accounting and finance operations with intelligent automation, built specifically by accountants for modern finance teams

  • Highlight: Signed 200+ customers and doubled ARR in 12 weeks; customers like Postscript ($100M+ ARR) close books in 3 days vs weeks

  • Investor: a16z & ICONIQ(Lead), Sequoia Capital

  • Source

3/ AI Molecular Design Platform Chai Discovery raised $70M Series A

  • Product: AI-driven platform that predicts and reprograms biochemical molecular interactions to accelerate therapeutic drug development, transforming biology from science to engineering

  • Highlight: Chai-2 breakthrough achieved fully de novo antibody design with near-20% hit rate vs. traditional 0.1% computational methods; solved $5M+ three-year problem in two weeks

  • Investor:Menlo Ventures(Lead), DST Global, SV Angel

  • Source

4/ AI Agent Sandbox Infra E2B raised $21M Series A

  • Product: Secure, scalable cloud sandbox infrastructure that provides AI agents with instant-on cloud machines and specialized tools to perform complex, multi-step tasks safely in enterprise environments

  • Highlight: 88% of Fortune 100 companies signed up on platform; hundreds of millions of cloud sandboxes initiated at 50%+ of Fortune 500; customers include Hugging Face, Perplexity, Groq, LMArena, and Lindy

  • Investor: Insight Partners(Lead), Decibel, Sunflower Capital

  • Source

5/ AI Research Platform Knit raised $16.1M Series A

  • Product: Researcher-driven AI platform that combines in-house research expertise with AI speed to deliver report-ready enterprise insights for concept testing, strategic segmentation, and decision-making

  • Highlight: 5X year-over-year growth; adopted by 60+ enterprise brands including Amazon, NASCAR, Overtime, and Mars Wrigley

  • Investor: GFT Ventures & Sound Ventures (Lead), Osage Ventures

  • Source

6/ AI Trade Advisory Platform Caspian raised $.54M Seed

  • Product: AI-driven customs compliance platform that automates duty drawback and trade advisory services, helping businesses reclaim billions in unclaimed tariff refunds by analyzing shipping and inventory data to identify eligible duty refunds

  • Highlight: CBP-approved tech company and licensed U.S. customs broker; reduces duty drawback process from months to days

  • Investor: Primary Venture Partners(Lead)

  • Source

7/ AI Data Analysis Platform Julius raised $10M Seed

  • Product: Personal AI data analyst that enables non-technical users to generate analysis and visualizations in plain English, eliminating the need for specialized data skills by automatically writing code and connecting to data warehouses

  • Highlight: 2+ million users created 10+ million visualizations; writes 4 million lines of code daily

  • Investor: Bessemer Venture Partners(Lead), Y Combinator, AI Grant, 8VC

  • Source

  • Product: AI platform specifically designed for midsize law firms with modular AI agents that configure to local statutes, disclosure rules, and document standards, enabling contract review, due diligence, discovery preparation, and drafting

  • Highlight: Serves 50,000+ midsize practices employing 500K lawyers globally; deployed across four continents

  • Investor: NEA & Pear VC(Lead)

  • Source