Morning VC Brief丨2025.10.21

Week43 Highlights丨Suno, Daylight, Strella, Counsel Health, 1001, Trove AI, Dialogue, Tempo

Author

eric gu
October 21, 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 Music Generator Suno in Talks to Raise $100M+ at $2B

  • Product: AI-powered music generation platform that creates complete songs (lyrics, melody, vocals) from text prompts

  • Highlight: $100M+ annual recurring revenue; 3M+ monthly active users; integrated with Microsoft Copilot

  • Investors: Previous backers include Lightspeed Venture Partners, Nat Friedman, Daniel Gross, Matrix Partners

  • Source

2/ Decentralized Energy Network Platform Daylight Raised $75M

  • Product: Energy subscription platform that provides homeowners with solar, battery storage, and grid participation at no upfront cost

  • Highlight: Subscribers earn Sun Points for grid support; building the world's largest decentralized energy network; actively deploying in Illinois and Massachusetts

  • Investor: Framework Ventures (Equity lead), a16z crypto, Lerer Hippeau, M13

  • Source

3/ AI-Native Customer Insights Platform Strella Raised $14M Series A

  • Product: AI-native insights engine that unifies qualitative research workflow—recruit verified participants in minutes, run AI-moderated interviews, and synthesize insights instantly with auto-generated transcripts and clips

  • Highlight: 10x revenue growth and 4x customer base expansion in one year since launch; partnerships with major enterprises including Amazon and Chobani

  • Investor: Bessemer Venture Partners (Lead), Decibel Partners, MVP Ventures

  • Source

4/ Physician-Supervised AI Care Platform Counsel Health Raised $25M Series A

  • Product: AI-enabled virtual care platform combining AI chatbot with licensed physician oversight—delivers instant, context-aware health answers via chat/voice, with physicians stepping in for diagnosis, prescriptions, and follow-up care

  • Highlights: 96% issue resolution rate; 2-minute average physician response time; $381 annual savings per member; 100,000+ members served

  • Investor: Andreessen Horowitz (Co-lead), GV (Co-lead)

  • Source

5/ AI-Native Decision Operating System 1001 Raised $9M Seed Round

  • Product: AI-native operating system for critical industries combining live data ingestion, operational mapping, AI-driven decisioning, and oversight modules to turn real-time complexity into clear, auditable actions

  • Highlight: Pilots with tier-one logistics operators and regional developers

  • Investor: CIV (Co-lead), General Catalyst (Co-lead), Lux Capital (Co-lead)

  • Source

6/ AI Associate for Private Equity Trove AI Raised $7.1M Seed

  • Product: AI Associate platform for private equity firms—agents search across deal files, emails, past analyses, and CRM data to run complex deal screens, extract metrics, and build quarterly portfolio reports; powered by finance-specific knowledge graph

  • Highlight: Customers use Trove 12+ times per week on average (86% growth in 3 months); SOC 2 Type II compliant with "cloud-prem" deployment in private cloud

  • Investor: Menlo Ventures (Lead), Khosla Ventures

  • Source

7/ AI-Powered Customer Research Platform Dialogue Raised $6M Seed

  • Product: AI-native research platform that sources participants through proprietary network, conducts hundreds of video interviews with AI moderator, and synthesizes insights in real-time—turning weeks-long research into hours

  • Highlight: customers include Wayfair (saves 7 hours per study), Suno, and Quill (reduces research timeline from weeks to 24 hours, saving thousands in agency costs)

  • Investor: Lightspeed Venture Partners (Lead), Seven Stars, Uncommon Projects

  • Source

8/ Payments-Focused Blockchain Tempo Raised $500M Series A at $5B

  • Product: Stablecoin-agnostic blockchain infrastructure designed for dollar-backed cryptocurrency payments, allowing different tokens to cover transaction processing fees without requiring a single native currency

  • Highlight: Developed by Stripe and Paradigm; design partners include OpenAI, Shopify, and Visa; positioned to compete with Circle, Tether, Mastercard

  • Investor: Greenoaks (Lead), Thrive Capital (Lead), Sequoia, Ribbit Capital

  • Source