Morning VC Brief丨2025.09.12

Week37 Highlights丨Cognition, CuspAI, Motion, Rainforest, Accordance, Poke, Metal, Born, AegisAI

Author

eric gu
September 12, 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/ Coding Agent Startup Cognition AI raised $400M Series C at $10.2B valuation

  • Product: Devin, an AI coding agent that automates software development tasks

  • Highlight: ARR grew from $1M to $73M in 9 months; Recent acquisition of AI coding startup Windsurf

  • Investor: Founders Fund(Lead), Lux Capital, 8VC, Elad Gil

  • Source

2/ AI Materials Discovery Platform CuspAI raised $100M Series A

  • Product: AI-powered "search engine" for materials discovery that uses generative AI, deep learning and molecular simulation to accelerate new materials development

  • Highlight: Materials discovery up to 10x faster than traditional methods; Multiple industry partnerships with Hyundai, Kemira, Meta

  • Investor: NEA&Temasek (Lead), NVentures, Samsung Ventures

  • Source

3/ AI Agent Platform Motion raised $38M Series C at $550M

  • Product: Integrated AI agent suite for SMBs including executive assistant, sales rep, customer support, and marketing assistant - positioned as "Microsoft Office of AI agents"

  • Highlight: 10,000+ B2B customers and $10M ARR in 4 months after May launch

  • Investor: Scale Venture Partners(Lead), HOF Capital, 468 Capital, SignalFire

  • Source

4/ Embedded Payments Platform Rainforest raised $29M Series B

  • Product: Purpose-built embedded payments solution for vertical software platforms with focus on service and migration support

  • Highlights: 10x revenue growth since Series A; Processing billions of dollars in volume; Many clients rely on Rainforest for 50%+ of their revenue

  • Investor: Matrix Partners & Infinity Ventures(Lead), Accel

  • Source

5/ AI-Native Accounting Platform Accordance raised $13M Seed

  • Product: AI-powered co-pilot platform for tax and accounting firms, trained on comprehensive global regulations and professional experience to handle complex scenarios

  • Highlight: 10x usage growth in past 6 months; Outperforms major foundation models on tax/accounting tasks

  • Investor: Khosla Ventures(Lead), General Catalyst, Anthropic, NEA, Bain Capital Ventures, Sequoia Capital

  • Source

6/ iMessage AI Assistant Poke raised $15M Seed at $100M

  • Product: AI assistant that integrates directly into iMessage for tasks like paying invoices, booking flights, and scheduling meetings through conversational text interface

  • Highlight: 6,000 Silicon Valley insiders sending 200,000+ messages monthly; SOC2 and CASA Tier 2 security standards

  • Investor: General Catalyst(Lead), Village Global

  • Source

7/ AI Private Market Platform Metal raised $5M Seed

  • Product: AI operating system for private markets that transforms fragmented data into institutional intelligence, helping investment teams make faster decisions and capture fund knowledge

  • Highlight: 2-3x increase in deal flow without adding headcount; 80%+ reduction in sourcing prep time

  • Investor: Base10 Partners (Lead), General Catalyst

  • Source

8/ AI Companion Platform Born raised $15M Series A

  • Product: AI friends and social companions that grow and evolve with users, featuring flagship character Pengu - emotionally intelligent AI characters for social interaction

  • Highlight: 15+ million global users for Pengu app

  • Investor: Accel (Lead), Tencent, Laton Ventures

  • Source

9/ AI-Powered Email Security Platform AegisAI raised $13M Seed

  • Product: Autonomous AI agent network that detects and neutralizes phishing, malware, and business email compromise threats in real-time without rule-based approaches

  • Highlight: Reduces false positives by 90% vs traditional solutions; 10+ specialized AI agents with plans for 50-100; Founded by former Google Safe Browsing & reCAPTCHA executives

  • Investor: Accel & Foundation Capital(Lead)

  • Source