Morning VC Brief丨2026.03.13

Week11 Highlights丨Mind Robotics, Quince, Replit, Juicebox, Axiamatic, AgentMail, Scanner, Xscape

Author

eric gu
March 13, 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/ Industrial Robotics Startup Mind Robotics raised $500M Series A at $2B

  • Product: Builds AI-powered industrial robots capable of performing complex factory tasks such as assembling components and handling wiring, using real manufacturing data to improve dexterity and adaptability

  • Highlight: Spun out from EV maker Rivian and founded by CEO RJ Scaringe; Uses data from Rivian’s factories to train robots, creating a “robotics data flywheel” for real-world deployment

  • Investors: Accel (Lead), Andreessen Horowitz (Lead)

  • Source

2/ E-commerce Brand Quince raised $500M Series E at $10.1B

  • Product: A manufacturer-to-consumer (M2C) e-commerce platform that designs products and sells directly from partner factories to consumers, offering apparel, home goods, and lifestyle products at significantly lower prices by removing retail middlemen

  • Highlight: Surpassed $1B annual revenue and achieved rapid growth since launching in 2020

  • Investor: ICONIQ Growth (Lead), Basis Set Ventures, Wellington Management

  • Source

3/ AI-powered Coding Platform Replit raised $400M Series D

  • Product: AI-powered cloud development platform that lets users build, run, and deploy applications directly in the browser, with generative-AI coding assistants that enable even non-programmers to create software

  • Highlight: Previously reported $150M annualized revenue and aims to reach $1B ARR by 2026

  • Investor: Georgian Partners (Lead), G Squared, Prysm Capital, Coatue, Andreessen Horowitz

  • Source

4/ AI-powered Recruiting Platform Juicebox raised $80M Series B at $850M

  • Product: An AI-native recruiting platform that helps companies build outbound talent pipelines by using AI agents to source, engage, and move candidates through the hiring funnel at scale

  • Highlights: Since its last fundraise, the company has tripled ARR, helped teams engage 3M+ candidates, and powered 500,000+ talent searches

  • Investor: DST Global (Lead), Sequoia Capital, NFDG, Verified Capital, Y Combinator

  • Source

5/ AI Enterprise Transformation Platform Axiamatic raised $54M

  • Product: Agentic AI control plane that helps large enterprises manage and accelerate complex transformation programs (e.g., ERP, CRM, supply chain) by continuously ingesting signals from 250+ systems

  • Highlight: Used by Fortune 500 companies including The Heico Companies and Marmon, with deployments expanding from one program to 20+ initiatives within 12 months

  • Investor: Greylock Partners (Lead), Bessemer Venture Partners

  • Source

6/ AI Email‑for‑Agents Platform AgentMail raised $6M Seed

  • Product: API‑first email infrastructure that gives autonomous AI agents their own inboxes, supporting two‑way email (send, receive, reply), threading, parsing, labeling, and search — designed for machine interactions rather than standard human email clients like Gmail or Outlook

  • Highlight: Launched out of Y Combinator’s Summer 2025 batch and already adopted by tens of thousands of developers and hundreds of thousands of agent accounts powering B2B use cases across industries

  • Investor: General Catalyst (Lead), Y Combinator, Phosphor Capital

  • Source

7/ AI‑powered Cybersecurity Data Platform Scanner raised $22M Series A

  • Product: A fast full‑text search and threat‑hunting platform built for security data lakes that enables teams to quickly search, investigate, and detect threats over years of log data by combining the cost efficiency of object storage with high‑speed querying and AI agent support

  • Highlight: Used by security teams at Notion, Ramp, BeyondTrust, Lemonade, Benchling, Postman, EliseAI

  • Investor: Sequoia Capital (Lead), CRV, Mantis VC

  • Source

8/ Optical Interconnect Startup Xscape Photonics raised $37M Series A

  • Product: A silicon‑photonic, laser‑based optical interconnect platform for AI data center networks that dramatically increases bandwidth between GPUs and other accelerators by transmitting data via multiple wavelengths of light rather than electrical signals

  • Highlight: FalconX is described as the industry’s first fully redundant eight‑wavelength laser pluggable interconnect for AI clusters, addressing bandwidth bottlenecks in modern data centers and enabling multi‑terabits‑per‑second optical links

  • Investor: Addition(Lead), IAG Capital Partners, NVIDIA

  • Source