Morning VC Brief丨2025.12.12

Week50 Highlights丨Boom Supersonic, Fal, Port, Solve Intelligence, Medra, Runware, Oboe, Surf

Author

eric gu
December 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/ Supersonic Aircraft startup Boom Supersonic raised $300M

  • Product: Developing supersonic jets and a stationary turbine for power generation, using the latter's sales to fund the aircraft's development

  • Highlight: Secured a $1.25B contract with data center startup Crusoe for its stationary turbines

  • Investors: Darsana Capital Partners (Lead), Altimeter Capital, Ark Invest, Bessemer Venture Partners, Robinhood Ventures, Y Combinator

  • Source

2/ Generative AI Inference Platform fal.ai raised $140M Series D

  • Product: A platform scaling globally to meet accelerating demand for Generative Media, providing high-performance inference infrastructure for new use cases from design to commerce

  • Highlight: Pika's API is now powered by fal, bringing its powerful video model to fal's infrastructure

  • Investor: Sequoia, Kleiner Perkins, NVIDIA

  • Source

3/ Internal Developer Portal Port raised $100M Series C at $800M

  • Product: A proprietary internal developer portal that competes with Spotify's open-source Backstage, now expanded to include management and orchestration for AI agents

  • Highlight: Gained major customers like GitHub, British Telecom, and LG; provides a layer of orchestration to measure agent performance and add human-in-the-loop approvals

  • Investor: General Atlantic (Lead), Accel, Bessemer Venture Partners

  • Source

4/ Patent Lifecycle Platform Solve Intelligence raised $40M Series B

  • Product: AI-driven platform for the entire patent lifecycle, including drafting, prosecution, and a new litigation tool called "Charts" for high-volume IP analysis

  • Highlights: Reached profitability with annual recurring revenue growing over 10x to eight figures since its Series A

  • Investor: Visionaries (Co-lead), 20VC (Co-lead), Thomson Reuters, Y Combinator, Operator Collective

  • Source

5/ Physical AI Startup Medra raised $52M Series A

  • Product: Building a Physical AI Scientist that integrates a reasoning AI for hypothesis generation with a physical AI using robots to autonomously conduct lab experiments

  • Highlight: Partnering with leading biopharma companies including Genentech, Cultivarium, and Addition Therapeutics

  • Investor: Human Capital (Lead), Lux Capital, Neo, NFDG, Menlo Ventures

  • Source

6/ Inference Platform Runware raised $50M Series A

  • Product: A developer tool platform specializing in the real-time generation of images, videos, and audio through a unified API

  • Highlight: Powered over 10 billion creations for more than 200,000 developers; utilizes a custom Sonic Inference Engine on custom AI hardware for speed and cost-efficiency

  • Investor: Dawn Capital (Lead), Comcast Ventures, Speedinvest, Insight Partners, a16z Speedrun

  • Source

7/ AI Learning Platform Oboe raised $16M Series A

  • Product: AI-powered learning platform where users can define a goal, and the AI generates a personalized course with various formats like text, audio, quizzes, and flashcards

  • Highlight: Founded by the co-founders of Anchor and former Spotify executives; offers unlimited course generation and is revamping its model to allow users to dive deeper into topics with chapter-based learning

  • Investor: a16z (Lead), Eniac, Haystack, Offline, and Factorial

  • Source

8/ Crypto Research Platform Surf raised $15M

  • Product: An AI research and intelligence platform using proprietary models and crypto-native datasets for digital asset analysis

  • Highlight: Reached millions in annual recurring revenue since its July launch, growing 50% month-over-month, and is used by 80% of top exchanges and research firms

  • Investor: Pantera Capital (Lead), Coinbase Ventures, Digital Currency Group

  • Source