Morning VC Brief丨2025.08.21

Week34 Highlights丨FieldAI, EliseAI, Pylon, Zed, Bluefish, Firecrawl, Keychain, Zipline

Author

eric gu
August 22, 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/ Robotics Startup FieldAI raised $405M Venture Round

  • Product: Field Foundation Models (FFMs) - "physics-first" foundation models providing hardware-agnostic autonomy brain for robots to navigate dynamic environments without maps, GPS, or predefined paths

  • Highlight: Deployed across hundreds of complex real-world industrial environments globally, proven across quadrupeds, humanoids, wheeled robots, and passenger-scale vehicles

  • Investor: Bezos Expeditions, Canaan Partners, Khosla Ventures

  • Source

2/ AI Automation Platform EliseAI raised $250M Series E

  • Product: AI-powered automation platform for healthcare and housing systems, handling complex workflows from scheduling and prior authorizations to property management and resident services

  • Highlight: Surpassed $100M ARR, serves 600+ housing operators including 75% of NMHC's Top 50, powers 10% of U.S. apartment market, cuts healthcare overhead by up to 25%

  • Investor: a16z(Lead), Bessemer Venture Partners, Sapphire Ventures

  • Source

3/ B2B Customer Support Platform Pylon raised $31M Series B

  • Product: B2B customer support platform integrating ticketing, customer operations across multiple teams and channels, with comprehensive customer context and workflow automation

  • Highlight: 780+ customers including Together AI, Cognition, and Temporal; 150+ migrated from Zendesk and Intercom

  • Investor: a16z & Bain(Lead), General Catalyst, Y Combinator

  • Source

4/ High-Performance IDE Developer Zed raised $32M Series B

  • Product: World's fastest IDE with real-time collaborative features and DeltaDB - operation-based version control system that tracks every edit with character-level permalinks, designed for seamless human-AI collaboration

  • Highlight: Open-source IDE with optional paid offering, developing revolutionary operation-level version control using CRDTs for incremental change tracking

  • Investor: Sequoia Capital(Lead),

  • Source

5/ AI Marketing Platform Bluefish raised $20M Series A

  • Product: AI marketing platform that helps Fortune 500 companies track AI performance, manage brand safety, and optimize how their brands appear in AI queries and responses

  • Highlight: helps marketers monitor AI positioning and optimize content strategies for AI-driven search

  • Investor: NEA (Lead), Salesforce Ventures, Crane Venture Partners

  • Source

6/ Web Data Infrastructure Platform Firecrawl raised $14.5M Series A

  • Product: Web scraping and data extraction API platform for AI applications, providing clean, structured web data through Fire-Engine technology with 33% faster speeds and 40% higher success rates

  • Highlight: 350,000+ developers signed up, 48k GitHub stars, used by Zapier, Shopify, and Replit, grown 15x in past year, launched v2 with 10x faster scraping

  • Investor: Nexus Venture Partners(Lead), Y Combinator

  • Source

7/ AI-Powered CPG Manufacturing Platform Keychain raised $30M Series B

  • Product: KeychainOS - SaaS-based AI operating system that streamlines CPG manufacturing operations with natural-language interfaces, computer vision, and automated data ingestion to reduce waste, predict bottlenecks, and improve real-time planning

  • Highlight: serves major retailers including 7-Eleven, Whole Foods, and CPG brands like General Mills

  • Investor: Wellington Management(Lead), BoxGroup

  • Source

8/ AI Infrastructure Platform Zipline AI raised $7M Seed

  • Product: Next-generation data platform built on open-source Chronon engine that unifies data pipelines, serving infrastructure, and observability tools to accelerate AI/ML development and deployment with improved performance and governance

  • Highlight: Roku reports 6x cost reduction and 3x runtime efficiency improvement after adoption

  • Investor: Wing VC(Lead), BoxGroup, Stripe

  • Source