Morning VC Brief丨2025.09.16

Week38 Highlights丨Replit, Apex, Dyna Robotics, Koi, Runware, MarqVision, Eloquent AI, Spiral

Author

eric gu
September 16, 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 Cloud Development Platform Replit Raises $250M Series C at $3B

  • Product: AI-powered development platform that turns natural language into apps and websites, featuring Agent AI assistant for building entire applications without coding knowledge

  • Highlight: Explosive revenue growth from $2.8M to $150M annualized revenue in less than a year

  • Investor: Prysm Capital(Lead), Amex Ventures, Google AI Futures Fund

  • Source

2/ Spacecraft Manufacturing Startup Apex Raises $200M Series D

  • Product: Productized satellite bus platforms ranging from 100kg to tons, offering standardized base models and configurable packages with rapid delivery capabilities

  • Highlight: Set record for fastest satellite development - clean-sheet design to flight-ready in under one year

  • Investor: Interlagos (Lead), Point72 Ventures, 8VC

  • Source

3/ Embodied AI Startup Dyna Robotics Raises $120M Series A at $600M

  • Product: AI-powered robotic arms designed to automate repetitive tasks with affordability and precision, starting with folding and food preparation tasks for businesses

  • Highlight: DYNA-1 foundation model achieved 99%+ success rate in 24-hour operations, robots run 16 hours daily in hotels, restaurants, laundromats and gyms

  • Investor: RoboStrategy, CRV & First Round Capital(Lead), Salesforce Ventures, NVentures, Amazon Industrial Innovation Fund

  • Source

4/ Next-Gen Endpoint Security Platform Koi Raises $48M Series A

  • Product: World's first solution providing full visibility into all endpoint software (binary and non-binary), featuring agentic AI risk engine for continuous risk evaluation and proactive threat blocking

  • Highlights: Early customers include Fortune 50 organizations, major BFIS companies, and world's biggest tech/cybersecurity vendors

  • Investor: Battery Ventures, Team8, Picture Capital, NFX

  • Source

5/ AI Media Generation Platform Runware Raises $13M Seed

  • Product: Unified AI media generation API with Sonic Inference Engine® enabling lightning-fast inference, supporting 400,000+ models for image, video, audio generation and LLM capabilities

  • Highlight: 40x monthly revenue growth, serves 100,000+ developers daily reaching 250M end users, customers include Quora, NightCafe, OpenArt, and Higgsfield AI

  • Investor: Insight Partners(Lead), a16z Speedrun, Begin Capital

  • Source

6/ AI Brand Protection Platform MarqVision Raises $48M Series B

  • Product: AI-driven computer vision platform for fighting counterfeiting and trademark infringement, evolved into end-to-end managed services for brand protection and revenue recovery

  • Highlight: $20M ARR after 4 years with 100% annual growth, serves 350+ customers globally, clients report ~5% sales boost, targeting $100M ARR by mid-2027

  • Investor: Peak XV Partners(Lead), Salesforce Ventures, HSG

  • Source

7/ AI Customer Operations Platform Eloquent AI Raises $7.4M Seed

  • Product: First AI Operator built specifically for financial services to automate complex, regulated customer operations, featuring proprietary Oratio LLM that can automate up to 96% of operations without APIs or engineering required

  • Investor: Foundation Capital (Lead), Y Combinator

  • Source

8/ Object Storage Native Database Spiral Raises $22M Series A

  • Product: Object storage native database built on open-source Vortex file format for machine-scale AI workloads

  • Highlight: Vortex format achieves Parquet compression with 10-20x faster scans, 5-10x faster writes, and 100-200x faster random access

  • Investor: Amplify Partners & General Catalyst (Lead)

  • Source