Morning VC Brief丨2026.01.30

Week04 Highlights丨Waabi, Redwood Material, Ricursive Intelligence, Fiddle, Mendra, InferAct, Concourse, Risotto

Author

eric gu
January 30, 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/ Physical AI Platform(Autonomous Trucking) Waabi raised $1B Series C

  • Product: Develops a unified Physical AI platform that automates both autonomous trucking and robotaxis using a single reasoning-capable AI model and advanced neural simulation

  • Highlight: Largest fundraise in Canadian history; exclusive partnership with Uber to deploy 25,000+ robotaxis

  • Investors: Khosla Ventures and G2 Venture Partners (Lead), Uber, NVentures (NVIDIA), Volvo Group, Porsche, BlackRock

  • Source

2/ Sustainable Battery Materials Leader Redwood Materials raised $425M Series E

  • Product: Creates a circular supply chain for lithium-ion batteries by recycling end-of-life cells to produce critical anode and cathode materials

  • Highlight: Expanding production to supply energy storage systems (ESS) designed to meet the surging power demands of AI data centers

  • Investor: Google (Lead)

  • Source

3/ AI-driven Chip Design Platform Ricursive Intelligence raised $300M Series A

  • Product: Builds a next-generation platform that automates and accelerates semiconductor design by closing the recursive feedback loop between AI models and the chips that power them

  • Highlight: Achieved a $4 billion valuation less than two months after public launch; founded by the co-creators of Google DeepMind's AlphaChip

  • Investor: Lightspeed Venture Partners (Lead), DST Global, NVentures (NVIDIA), Sequoia Capital, Felicis Ventures

  • Source

4/ AI Control Plane & Observability Platform Fiddler AI raised $30M Series C

  • Product: Builds an AI Control Plane and Observability platform that provides end-to-end visibility, governance, and trust for enterprise AI agents and models

  • Highlights: Used by major institutions like the U.S. Navy (reducing model update time by 97%

  • Investor: RPS Ventures (Lead), Insight Partners, Lightspeed Ventures, Lux Capital

  • Source

5/ Biopharmaceutical Company Mendra raised $82M Series A

  • Product: An AI-driven biopharmaceutical platform focused on acquiring, developing, and commercializing therapeutics for high unmet need rare diseases

  • Highlight: Aims to solve critical bottlenecks in rare disease drug development (patient identification, trial enrollment) using AI

  • Investor: OrbiMed, 8VC, and 5AM Ventures (Co-leads), Lux Capital, Wing VC

  • Source

6/ AI Inference Optimization Startup InferAct raised $150M Series B at $800M

  • Product: Commercializing vLLM (a high-throughput and memory-efficient LLM inference engine) to optimize AI model deployment and reduce inference costs

  • Highlight: vLLM has 68k+ GitHub stars; Founders are the original creators from UC Berkeley; Achieves up to 24x higher performance with PagedAttention technologyInvestor: a16z, Lightspeed (Co-leads), Sequoia, Altimeter

  • Source

7/ Finance AI Agent Platform Concourse Raises $12M Series A

  • Product: AI agents designed for finance teams that connect to data stacks (ERPs, billing systems) to automate analysis, reporting, and complex workflows

  • Highlight: Grown revenue 19x and customer base 13x in the past 12 months

  • Investor: Standard Capital (Lead), a16z, CRV, Y Combinator, SV Angel

  • Source

8/ AI IT Help Desk Automation Platform Risotto Raises $10M Seed

  • Product: An AI-powered automation platform that integrates with tools like Slack and Jira to autonomously resolve IT help desk tickets and streamline internal support

  • Highlight: Automated 60% of support tickets for Gusto; acts as an orchestration layer for reliable ticket handling with policy checks

  • Investor: Bonfire Ventures (Lead), 645 Ventures, Y Combinator, Ritual Capital, Surgepoint Capital

  • Source