Morning VC Brief丨2026.05.08

Week19 Highlights丨Rogo, Sierra, Hightouch, DeepInfra, Parallel, Netomi, Shapes, General Analysis

Author

eric gu
May 08, 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/ Rogo — Finance AI Agent Platform — $160M Series D

  • Product: Build an agentic AI platform purpose-built for financial services, including Felix, an AI agent that can execute multi-step finance workflows such as deal screening, CIM generation, buyer outreach, and data room diligence

  • Highlight: Used by 35,000+ finance professionals across 250+ institutions; total funding now exceeds $300M, with new capital aimed at deeper enterprise integrations and expansion across EMEA and Asia

  • Investors: Kleiner Perkins (Lead), Sequoia, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures

  • Source

2/ Sierra — Agentic Customer Experience Platform — $950M at $15B+

  • Product: Build AI agents for enterprise customer experiences, enabling companies to automate and personalize interactions across support, sales, claims, returns, mortgage refinancing, and fundraising workflows

  • Highlight: Sierra now serves over 40% of the Fortune 50; agents built on the platform power billions of customer interactions; the company now has more than $1B to invest in becoming the global standard for AI-powered customer experience

  • Investor: Tiger Global and GV (Lead)

  • Source

3/ Hightouch — Agentic Marketing Platform — $150M Series D at $2.75B

  • Product: Build an AI platform for marketers that combines customer data, brand context, and campaign orchestration so agents can identify opportunities, create on-brand content, and execute personalized marketing across channels

  • Highlight: Revenue grew more than 100% in each of the past two years; customers include Domino's, PetSmart, DraftKings, Ramp, and WHOOP

  • Investor: Goldman Sachs Alternatives and Bain Capital Ventures (Lead), Amplify Partners, ICONIQ Capital, Sapphire Ventures

  • Source

4/ DeepInfra — AI Inference Cloud — $107M Series B

  • Product: Build a purpose-built cloud platform for high-throughput AI inference, enabling enterprises and scaleups to run open-source and agent-driven AI workloads with lower cost, better latency, and enterprise-grade security

  • Highlights: Processes nearly five trillion tokens per week; supports 190+ open-source models through OpenAI-compatible APIs; revenue has tripled since the beginning of 2026

  • Investors: 500 Global and Georges Harik (Co-lead), A.Capital Ventures, Crescent Cove, Felicis, NVIDIA

  • Source

5/ Parallel — Web Infrastructure for AI Agents — $100M Series B at $2B

  • Product: Build web search and agentic research APIs for AI agents, giving autonomous systems infrastructure to search, browse, and reason over the web at production scale

  • Highlights: Valuation more than doubled in five months; total capital raised reached $230M; the platform is becoming a core component for businesses building long-running AI agents

  • Investors: Sequoia Capital (Lead), Kleiner Perkins, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, First Round Capital, Spark Capital

  • Source

6/ Netomi — Agentic CX Platform — $110M Series C

  • Product: Build an enterprise-grade agentic customer experience platform that embeds AI into digital experiences, not just chat widgets, helping companies anticipate customer issues before support tickets are created

  • Highlights: Accenture entered a global alliance to bring Netomi to Fortune 100 clients; Adobe plans to integrate Netomi into its Brand Concierge ecosystem; customers include United Airlines, Paramount, and DraftKings

  • Investors: Accenture Ventures (Lead), Adobe Ventures, WndrCo

  • Source

7/ Shapes — AI Group Chat App — $8M Seed

  • Product: Build a social app where humans and AI characters can participate in the same group chats, letting Gen Z and Gen Alpha users interact with AI alongside friends instead of in isolated one-on-one chatbot sessions

  • Highlights: Reached 400,000+ monthly active users by the end of March 2026, a 6x increase from the start of the year; thousands of users spend 2-4 hours per day in the app

  • Investors: Lightspeed (Lead), AI Capital Partners, AI Grant

  • Source

8/ General Analysis — Agentic AI Security Platform — $10M Seed

  • Product: Build an enterprise security layer for agentic AI systems, combining red teaming, runtime guardrails, prompt hardening, observability, agent identity management, and adversarial simulations

  • Highlights: Focused on bridging the gap between simulation and production by benchmarking agentic systems against real failure modes and configuring defenses for high-stakes enterprise deployment

  • Investors: Altos Ventures (Lead), 645 Ventures, Menlo Ventures

  • Source