📌 12 AI Startups raises $500M+

BONUS: Optimize First, Automate Second From Insight Partners

October 01, 2025

TODAY’S FUNDING RECAP 🗓️

  • Periodic Labs raises a $300M Seed — AI scientist & autonomous labs

  • Axiom raises a $64M Seed — AI mathematician

  • MAI raises a $25M Seed — Ads optimization

  • Zania raises a $18M Series A — Compliance agents

  • 9 more rounds caught by my funding tracker

Read time: 3 minutes

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TOP PICKS 📢

1/4

Amount: $300M 🎉

Round: Seed

Lead Investor: Andreessen Horowitz

Periodic Labs is building “AI scientists” and autonomous laboratories to automate discovery in the physical sciences.

Their core product combines models that reason across quantum mechanics, chemistry, and materials science with robotic laboratories that synthesize materials and gather high-resolution experimental data. The system operates as a closed loop system where models generate hypotheses, run simulations, design experiments, and command lab robots to execute them.

2/4

Amount: $64M 🎉

Valuation: $300M

Round: Seed

Lead Investor: B Capital

Axiom is building advanced reasoning models trained on verified mathematical proofs.

Their product is a self-improving AI mathematician that serves as a foundational reasoner capable of conjecture, deduction, and formal verification. Their systems enable applications in scientific discovery, software verification, legal analysis, and quantitative finance.

3/4

Amount: $25M 🎉

Round: Seed

Lead Investor: Kleiner Perkins

MAI offers autonomous agents that run performance marketing.

Their agents integrate with a brand’s data and ad stack to ingest historical performance, structure campaigns, and optimize budgets, bids, audiences, and creatives. The system operates 24/7 and continuously reallocates spend toward products and segments to enforce user-defined goals. Beyond optimization, agents detect and remediate issues that burn budget before they cascade.

4/4

Amount: $18M 🎉

Round: Series A

Lead Investor: NEA

Zania is an AI system for automating governance, risk, compliance, and audit workflows through domain-specific agents.

These agents ingest policies and evidence across 80+ languages, map them to control frameworks such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001, and test design and operating effectiveness. They execute third-party risk assessments by analyzing vendor controls, breach history, and supply chains, while first-party risk models quantify internal exposure using an organization’s systems and data.

OTHER ROUNDS 🤏

ESSENTIAL INTRODUCTIONS

→ Eve raises $103M Series B — AI platform for plaintiff-side litigation

→ Mondoo raises $17.5M Series A-2 — Vulnerability managment

→ Datawizz raises $12.5M Seed — LLM router and observability platform

→ Composite raises $5.6M Seed — Agentic browser automation for internal workflows

→ Lunos raises $5M Pre-Seed — AI receivables and cash collection automation

BONUS 🔥

FOR CURIOUS MINDS

Optimize first, automate second: Three AI flaws to avoid

Automating before process improvement cements flaws and limits P&L impact. We unpack the 5% P&L paradox, the three fatal flaws, and a Lean, human-in-the-loop playbook to turn GTM into compounding ROI.

www.insightpartners.com/ideas/optimize-first-automate-second/#:~:text=Three%20fatal%20automation%20flaws

THAT’S IT FOR TODAY

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