Morning VC Brief丨2025.12.16

Week51 Highlights丨K2 Space, Serval, Chai Discovery, PolyAI, Axion, Vybe, Channel3, Mirelo

Author

eric gu
December 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/ Satellite Platform K2 Space Raises $250M Series C at $3B

  • Product: Developing large, high-power satellite platforms for the new era of heavy-lift launch vehicles, enabling more capable and reliable spacecraft for deployment in any orbit

  • Highlight: Has secured $500M in contracts; developed a hall-effect thruster 4x more powerful than any flown to date

  • Investors: Redpoint (Lead), T. Rowe Price, Altimeter, Lightspeed

  • Source

2/ Enterprise Automation Platform Serval Raises $75M Series B at $1B

  • Product: An AI-native system of record and automation platform that enables IT, HR, Finance, and Legal teams to automate work end-to-end with natural language

  • Highlight: Revenue grew 500% in the three months since its Series A; customers are automating over 50% of their IT tickets

  • Investor: Sequoia (Lead), Redpoint, Meritech, First Round, General Catalyst, Evantic

  • Source

3/ AI for Science Chai Discovery Raises $130M Series B

  • Product: An applied research lab building a "computer-aided design suite" for molecules to predict and reprogram their interactions, aiming to engineer the next generation of medicine

  • Highlight: Released a series of significant research breakthroughs in computational protein design

  • Investor: General Catalyst and Oak HC/FT (Lead), Thrive Capital, OpenAI, Dimension, Menlo Ventures

  • Source

4/ Voice Customer Support PolyAI Raises $50M Series C

  • Product: An AI platform for creating voice assistants that answer calls for large enterprises, providing conversational and automated customer service over the phone

  • Highlights: Deployed in over 20 languages; clients include major brands like FedEx, Marriott, and Unicredit

  • Investor: Hedosophia (Lead), NVentures, Point72 Ventures, Sands Capital

  • Source

5/ Manufacture Quality Intelligence Platform Axion Raises $37M Series B

  • Product: An AI-powered quality intelligence platform that helps manufacturers detect issues earlier, fix them faster, and bring higher-quality products to market

  • Highlight: Accelerates root cause analysis by 85% on average; used by Fortune 500 companies like Cummins and Medtronic

  • Investor: Salesforce Ventures (Lead), Bessemer Venture Partners

  • Source

6/ Enterprise Internal Vibe Coding Vybe Raises $10M Seed

  • Product: AI platform that enables non-developers to build secure, data-connected internal apps using natural language, without requiring engineering time

  • Highlight: Gained over 1,000 sign-ups during its closed waitlist

  • Investor: First Round Capital (Lead), Y Combinator, Orange Collective, Pelion Ventures

  • Source

7/ Product Graph Platform Channel3 raised $6M Seed

  • Product: Building a universal, AI-ready product graph—a connected database of every product on the internet, accessible via a simple API for developers to find products and earn commissions

  • Highlight: The catalog already spans more than 50 million products across tens of thousands of brands, with hundreds of developers building on the API

  • Investor: Matrix (Lead), Y Combinator, Ludlow Ventures

  • Source

8/ AI-powered audio generation platform Mirelo raised $41M Seed

  • Product: Building AI that adds soundtracks and synced sound effects to videos, addressing the "silent problem" of many AI video creation tools

  • Highlight: Models are based on public and purchased sound libraries with revenue-sharing partnerships to respect artists' rights; backed by prominent angels like the CEO of Mistral and the CSO of Hugging Face

  • Investor: Index Ventures (Lead), Andreessen Horowitz

  • Source