Morning VC Brief丨2026.01.20

Week03 Highlights丨Skild AI, Listen Labs, Higgsfield, WebAI, DepthFirst, Fleetzero, Converge Bio, WithCoverage

Author

eric gu
January 20, 2026

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/ General-Purpose Robotics Model Developer Skild AI raised $1.4B Series C

  • Product: Building the "Skild Brain," a unified robotics foundation model capable of controlling any robot form factor (humanoids, quadrupeds, arms) across diverse tasks

  • Highlight: Scaled revenue from zero to ~$30M in just a few months in 2025; utilizes a unique data flywheel combining simulation, internet videos, and real-world deployment

  • Investors: SoftBank (Lead), NVentures (NVIDIA), Jeff Bezos, Lightspeed, Sequoia Capital

  • Source

2/ AI-led User Research Platform Listen Labs raised $69M Series B

  • Product: The world's fastest research platform that conducts AI-led user interviews, enabling companies to gather qualitative insights from real people in hours instead of weeks

  • Highlight: Annualized revenue grew 15x since launch 9 months ago; interviewed over 1 million people; serving clients like Microsoft, Sweetgreen, and Perplexity

  • Investor: Ribbit Capital (Lead), Evantic, Sequoia Capital, Conviction, Pear VC

  • Source

3/ AI Video Startup Higgsfield Raises $80M Series A+ at $1.3B

  • Product: An AI-native video creation platform featuring "Diffuse," a mobile-first app that generates realistic characters and videos from text/image prompts

  • Highlight: Hit $200M ARR with 15 million users and 4.5M daily video generations

  • Investor: Accel (Lead), AI Capital Partners, Menlo Ventures

  • Source

4/ Private Enterprise AI Platform webAI Reaches $2.5B Valuation

  • Product: An enterprise AI platform enabling organizations to run private, custom models locally with complete data sovereignty, avoiding cloud dependency

  • Highlights: Launched "Intelligence Labs" led by former NSC Director Dr. PJ Maykish; focuses on "sovereign AI" to solve security and cost issues

  • Investor: TIME Ventures, Atreides Management, Forerunner, OXCART Ventures

  • Source

5/ AI Software Security Lab DepthFirst Raises $40M Series A

  • Product: An applied AI lab building "General Security Intelligence," a platform that uses agents to detect, triage, and remediate vulnerabilities across software and infrastructure

  • Highlight: Agents uncover 8x more true-positive vulnerabilities than traditional tools with 85% fewer false positives; achieved state-of-the-art performance on CyberGym

  • Investor: Accel (Lead), Alt Capital, BoxGroup, Liquid 2 Ventures, Mantis VC, SV Angel

  • Source

6/ Marine Technology Company Fleetzero Raises $43M Series A

  • Product: Develops the "Leviathan™" hybrid and electric marine propulsion system, designed to lower the total cost of ownership for large commercial ships through electrification

  • Highlight: Opened a new manufacturing and R&D facility in Houston with an initial capacity of 300 MWh/year; aims to expand to 3 GWh/year

  • Investor: Obvious Ventures (Lead), Maersk Growth, 8090 Industries, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Y Combinator

  • Source

7/ AI Drug Discovery Startup Converge Bio Raises $25M Series A

  • Product: A generative AI platform trained on vast biological data (DNA, RNA, proteins) that allows researchers to "converse" with data to design drugs and predict molecule behavior

  • Highlight: Founded by former Meta AI researcher Dov Gertz; enables zero-shot predictions for toxicity and immunogenicity

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

  • Source

8/ AI Risk Management Platform WithCoverage Raises Series B

  • Product: An AI-powered risk management platform that pairs industry experts with an AI audit engine to analyze business policies and operations, replacing traditional manual insurance brokerage

  • Highlight: Saves customers up to 30% on insurance budgets (up to seven figures)

  • Investor: Sequoia Capital, Keith Rabois (Co-lead)

  • Source