Morning VC Brief丨2026.01.23

Week03 Highlights丨Human&, LiveKit, OpenEvidence, Ivo, Emergent, Cosmos, Formulary Financial, Open

Author

eric gu
January 23, 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/ Human-Centric AI Lab Humans& Raises $480M Seed Round at $4.48B

  • Product: Building an AI platform designed to act as "connective tissue" to facilitate collaboration between people and intelligent systems

  • Highlight: Founded by top researchers from Google, OpenAI, and Meta; represents one of the largest seed rounds in venture capital history

  • Investors: Georges Harik (Lead), Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, GV, Emerson Collective

  • Source

2/ Voice AI Infra LiveKit Raises $100M Series C at $1B

  • Product: Infrastructure stack and runtime for building and scaling real-time, stateful voice and video AI applications

  • Highlight: LiveKit Agents downloaded 1M+ times/month; powers billions of calls annually; modeled after ChatGPT Voice Mode

  • Investor: Index Ventures (Lead), Salesforce Ventures, Hanabi Capital, Altimeter, Redpoint Ventures

  • Source

3/ Medical ChatGPT OpenEvidence Raises $250M Series D at $12B

  • Product: ed medical search engine acting as a "brain extender" for clinicians by providing citation-linked answers from medical literature

  • Highlight: supports 18M+ clinical consultations/month; used daily by >40% of US physicians across 10,000+ medical centers; reached $100M ARR

  • Investor: Thrive Capital (Co-lead), DST (Co-lead), GV, Sequoia Capital, Kleiner Perkins, Coatue

  • Source

4/ Contract Intelligence Platform Ivo Raises $55M Series B at $355M

  • Product: AI-powered contract intelligence platform that transforms legal agreements into streamlined, insight-driven workflows directly within Microsoft Word

  • Highlights: Achieved 6x ARR growth in the last year; trusted by major enterprises like Uber, Shopify, and Reddit

  • Investor: Blackbird (Lead), Costanoa Ventures, Uncork Capital, Fika Ventures, GD1, Icehouse Ventures

  • Source

5/ Vibe Coding Startup Emergent Raises $70M Series B at $300M

  • Product: AI-native "vibe coding" platform that enables anyone to build full-stack, production-ready web and mobile applications using natural language, without writing code

  • Highlight: ARR skyrocketed from $100k to $50M in just 7 months; amassed 5M+ users across 190 countries

  • Investor: Khosla Ventures (Co-lead), SoftBank Vision Fund 2 (Co-lead), Prosus, Lightspeed, Together, Y Combinator

  • Source

6/ Visual Curation Platform Cosmos Raises $15M Series A

  • Product: A visual curation and discovery platform designed as a "living archive" for creatives to save, organize, and find inspiration with proper context and attribution

  • Highlight: Users save over 10M images/month; featured in Apple's "25 Apps for 2025"; reached #1 in App Store Design category in 28 countries

  • Investor: Shine Capital (Co-lead), Matrix (Co-lead), GV, Accel

  • Source

7/ Fund Administration Platform Formulary Financial Raises $4.6M Seed Round

  • Product: AI-native fund administration platform that automates accounting, reporting, compliance, and investor communications for private equity and VC firms

  • Highlight: Emerged from stealth to solve the "shadow fund administration" problem; streamlines end-to-end workflows to reduce manual errors

  • Investor: Khosla Ventures (Lead), Acrew Capital, Company Ventures, Human Ventures

  • Source

8/ AI Customer Support Engine Open Raises $7M Seed

  • Product: AI-powered customer support agent and engine that automates interactions across phone, email, SMS, and more, serving as a unified communication system

  • Highlight: Achieved 77% automation rate on average; trusted by major brands like MoneyGram and Mollie

  • Investor: Y Combinator (Lead), X By Unifonic (Lead), Shorooq Partners, Sadu Capital

  • Source