Morning VC Brief丨2025.08.19

Week34 Highlights丨Cognition, Parallel, Create, Medallion, IVIX, Paradigm, Palabra

Author

eric gu
August 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 Coding Agent Platform Cognition raised $500M Series C at $9.8B

  • Product: AI software engineer "Devin" that automates code generation and software development processes

  • Highlight: Recent acquisition of AI startup Windsurf; backed by Peter Thiel's Founders Fund; positioned in rapidly growing AI coding market where tools can write 70% of finished products

  • Investor: Founders Fund (Lead), Kholsa Ventures, 8VC, Conviction

  • Source

2/ Web Search Infrastructure for AI Agents Parallel raised $30M Seed

  • Product: Parallel Deep Research API - web search infrastructure specifically designed for AI agents to autonomously collect and analyze information, outperforming humans and leading AI models including GPT-5 on rigorous benchmarks

  • Highlight: Only AI system to beat both humans and GPT-5 on BrowseComp and DeepResearch Bench; powers millions of daily research tasks; achieves human-level accuracy for $0.10 per task vs humans working 2 hours

  • Investor: Khosla Ventures(Lead), Index Ventures, First Round Capital

  • Source

3/ AI App Builder Create raised $8.5M Series A

  • Product: Create's "Anything" platform - AI-powered tool that generates complete mobile and web applications from text descriptions, including backend systems, hosting, payments, and App Store submission

  • Highlight: Anything reached 3.2M views and 30K sign-ups within 72 hours of launch; handles 20,000 new projects daily; 500,000+ registered users

  • Investor: Bessemer Venture Partners(Lead)

  • Source

4/ Healthcare Back-Office Automation Platform Medallion raised $43M Series B

  • Product: Medallion's intelligent infrastructure platform automates healthcare provider credentialing, enrollment, and license management processes, reducing administrative bottlenecks between providers and patients

  • Highlight: More than doubled enterprise ARR (+106%) last year; helps healthcare organizations speed up operations by 60% on average

  • Investor: Acrew Capital(Lead), Sequoia Capital, GV, Spark Capital

  • Source

5/ AI Financial Crime Platform IVIX raised $60M Series B

  • Product: IVIX's AI-powered platform uses LLMs, advanced graph analytics, and publicly available data to help governments combat financial crime, money laundering, sanctions evasion, and tax non-compliance at scale

  • Highlight: deployed by government authorities in U.S., Europe, and Asia; addresses $20 trillion global shadow economy

  • Investor: O.G. Venture Partners (Lead), Insight Partners

  • Source

6/ AI-Powered Spreadsheet Platform Paradigm raised $8M Seed

  • Product: Paradigm's AI-powered spreadsheet with 5,000+ AI agents that can be assigned to individual columns and cells to crawl the internet and automatically fill out information

  • Highlight: Early customers include consulting firm EY, AI chip startup Etched, and AI coding company Cognition

  • Investor: General Catalyst(Lead), Y Combinator

  • Source

7/AI Speech Translation Startup Palabra raised $8.4M Pre-Seed

  • Product: Palabra AI's real-time speech translation engine with 800ms latency, supporting 30+ languages through desktop apps for video calling platforms

  • Highlight: Custom data pipeline enables new language support within weeks; powers video platforms like Agora for multilingual streams; consumer plans start at $25/month for 60 minutes

  • Investor: Seven Seven Six(Lead), Creator Ventures

  • Source