Morning VC Brief丨2025.12.05

Week49 Highlights丨Black Forest Labs, Gradium, Nevis, PermitFlow, Zafran, Raindrop, Eon, Tutor Intelligence

Author

eric gu
December 05, 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/ Image Generation Startup Black Forest Labs Raised $300M Series B at $3.25B

  • Product: Foundation AI models for generating and editing images with advanced capabilities including 4K resolution output and multi-image reference styling

  • Highlight: Launched in August 2024, powers Elon Musk's Grok chatbot image generation; used by Adobe, Picsart, ElevenLabs, VSCO, and Vercel

  • Investors: Salesforce Ventures(Lead), a16z, NVIDIA, Northzone, Creandum

  • Source

2/ Real-Time Voice AI Startup Gradium Raised $70M Seed

  • Product: Ultrafast "audio language" models enabling real-time voice exchanges with sub-150ms latency, supporting English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese at launch

  • Highlight: Spinout from French AI lab Kyutai (€300M backing); delivers end-to-end speech processing with streaming interaction, prosody control, and "barge-in" capabilities

  • Investor: FirstMark Capital and Eurazeo(Lead), Xavier Niel, DST Global Partners

  • Source

3/ Wealth Management AI Platform Nevis Raised $40M

  • Product: First unified AI platform for wealth management that automates operational work including meeting prep, client follow-ups, account openings, and ongoing service to free advisors from administrative tasks

  • Highlight: Supports RIAs managing over $50B in assets; addresses the challenge that advisors spend up to 80% of their time on admin work across fragmented tools; customers include national RIAs, multi-family offices serving ultra-high-net-worth families

  • Investor: Sequoia Capital, ICONIQ, Ribbit Capital

  • Source

4/ Construction AI Platform PermitFlow Raised $54M Series B

  • Product: AI-powered permit application and management platform that orchestrates every phase of pre-construction, from early design and planning to final approvals and groundbreaking

  • Highlights: powered over $20B in construction value nationwide; customers include Lennar, Amazon, and Dick's Sporting Goods

  • Investor: Accel(Lead), Kleiner Perkins, Felicis, Initialized Capital

  • Source

5/ AI-Native Cybersecurity Platform Zafran Security Raised $60M Series C

  • Product: First AI-native end-to-end Threat Exposure Management platform featuring Agentic Exposure Management that autonomously discovers, assesses, and remediates vulnerabilities with AI-powered agents

  • Highlight: Tripled ARR since last funding; serves multiple Fortune 500 enterprises across healthcare, tech, financial services, and manufacturing

  • Investor: Menlo Ventures(Lead), Sequoia Capital, Cyberstarts, PSP Growth

  • Source

6/ AI Agent Monitoring Platform Raindrop Raised $15M Seed

  • Product: First monitoring platform specifically built for AI agents, featuring automatic issue detection for silent agent failures, powerful AI production data search, and first agent-native A/B testing platform

  • Highlight: Trusted by fast-growing AI companies including Replit, Speak, Clay, Framer, Tolan, Avoca, and AngelList; addresses the gap that traditional AI evaluations can't measure real-world agent performance as agents evolve from simple chatbots to complex systems using thousands of tools

  • Investor: Lightspeed(Lead), Figma Ventures, Vercel Ventures

  • Source

7/ Cloud Data-Management Startup Eon Raised $300M Series D at $4B

  • Product: First cloud backup posture management (CBPM) platform that converts dormant cloud backups into a unified, queryable data lake for AI training, analytics, and recovery across AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud

  • Highlight: Delivers 30-50% backup cost reduction and accelerates data preparation time by over 90%

  • Investor: Gil Capital(Lead), Sequoia Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Greenoaks

  • Source

8/ Industrial Robotics Startup Tutor Intelligence Raised $34M Series A

  • Product: Low-cost, drop-in robots powered by fleet-scale learning that deliver production automation for manufacturing and logistics operations

  • Highlight: Robots deployed coast to coast serving some of the world's largest manufacturing and logistics businesses

  • Investor: Union Square Ventures(Lead), Fundomo, NEO

  • Source