Morning VC Brief丨2025.10.14

Week42 Highlights丨Kalshi, Stoke Space, David AI, Datacurve, Relace, Vulcan, Resistant AI, Zania

Author

eric gu
October 14, 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/ Prediction Market Platform Kalshi raised $300M+ at $5B

  • Product: A prediction market platform that allows users to bet on future events across 140 countries

  • Highlight: Set to reach $50B in annualized trading volume, up from ~$300M last year; secured legal right for Americans to use the platform after successfully suing CFTC

  • Investors: Sequoia Capital and Andreessen Horowitz (co-leads), Paradigm Ventures, CapitalG, Coinbase Ventures

  • Source

2/ Reusable Rocket Startup Stoke Space raised $510M Series D

  • Product: Develops fully reusable rocket technology for satellite launch missions, focusing on defense and national security applications

  • Highlight: Selected for Space Force's NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 program with access to up to $5.6B in launch contracts over the next decade; reflects industry shift from commercial to defense-focused launch market driven by geopolitical tensions

  • Investor: USIT (Lead), Washington Harbour Partners LP, General Innovation Capital Partners

  • Source

3/ Audio AI Data Platform David AI raised $50M Series B

  • Product: The world's first audio data research lab, building the data layer for audio AI by creating high-quality, diverse audio datasets and evaluations for training AI models

  • Highlight: Focuses on solving complex audio data challenges including emotion, tone, pace, accent, environment, and multilingual variations; positions audio as the key frontend interface for real-world AI applications like humanoid robots, wearables, and personal assistants

  • Investor: Meritech (lead), NVIDIA, Alt Capital, First Round Capital, Amplify Partners, Y Combinator

  • Source

4/ AI Training Data Platform Datacurve raised $15M Series A

  • Product: High-quality AI training data collection platform for software development, using a "bounty hunter" system to attract skilled software engineers to complete complex datasets

  • Highlights: targets complex post-training data needs for sophisticated RL environments; plans to expand beyond software engineering into finance, marketing, and medicine

  • Investor: Chemistry (Lead), Y Combinator

  • Source

5/ Code Generation Platform Relace raised $23M Series A

  • Product: Building specialized language models and infrastructure to power software on demand, providing optimized tools for AI coding agents including embedding, reranking, and code application models

  • Highlight: serves clients including Lovable, Magic Patterns, and Orchids; achieves ~1-2 second codebase context retrieval and merges file edits at over 10,000 tokens per second

  • Investor: Andreessen Horowitz (Lead), Matrix Partners, Y Combinator

  • Source

6/ Regulatory AI Platform Vulcan Technologies raised $10.9M Seed Round

  • Product: Advanced AI platform that helps government agencies and legal professionals streamline compliance, reduce costs, and navigate complex regulations through a unified, AI-navigable legal database of U.S. laws, regulations

  • Highlight: early clients include Virginia Office of Regulatory Management, U.S. Department of Education, and South Carolina DOGE

  • Investor: General Catalyst and Cubit Capital (co-leads), SV Angel, A*, Liquid 2 Ventures

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7/ AI-Powered Fraud Detection Platform Resistant AI raised $25M Series B

  • Product: Offering document fraud detection and transaction monitoring that protect AI agents and compliance teams from sophisticated fraud including APP fraud, synthetic identity fraud, money laundering, and GenAI document fraud

  • Highlight: ARR increased 10x since Series A; customer base grew 4x; verified over 150M documents; transactions analyzed grew 100x; customers achieve 3x increase in document fraud prevention, 5x faster review times, 90% automation rates

  • Investor: DTCP Growth (lead), Experian, GV (Google Ventures), Notion Capital

  • Source

8/ AI Compliance Automation Platform Zania raised $18M Series A

  • Product: Autonomous AI agents that execute complex risk and compliance work end-to-end, including continuous compliance monitoring, third-party risk assessment, first-party risk evaluation, and security questionnaire responses—replacing manual GRC workflows with AI teammates

  • Highlight: 10x ARR growth this year; customers include KPMG, Plaid, Grant Thornton, Stanford University; delivers results up to 30x faster at 90% lower cost; continuously tests 100% of controls for compliance frameworks like SOC 2 and ISO 27001

  • Investor: NEA (lead), Anthropic, Menlo Ventures (Anthology Fund), Palm Drive Capital

  • Source