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AMD and the DOE are launching Lux and Discovery supercomputers at ORNL, a $1 billion investment to establish secure U.S. Sovereign AI infrastructure.
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The line between traditional banking and digital assets is disappearing fast. Pave Bank, a fully licensed commercial bank built for this new era of programmable finance, has raised $39 million in fresh funding led by Accel, with participation from Tether […]
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Crusoe's $1.375B Series E funding will fuel its mission to build vertically integrated AI infrastructure "factories" at scale.
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Streetbeat secured $15 million to expand its AI wealth management platform, promising increased efficiency for advisors and AI-powered investment returns for retail users.
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It’s Saturday, October 25, 2025, and we’re back with the top startup and tech funding news stories spanning the U.S. and around the world. From billion-dollar AI infrastructure bets to fintech, enterprise SaaS, and Web3 innovations, investors showed no signs […]
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SambaNova Systems, once one of Silicon Valley’s most promising AI hardware startups, is reportedly exploring a sale after struggling to secure new funding. The Palo Alto–based company, known for its AI chips and full-stack computing systems, has held early talks […]
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Google's new initiatives in Southeast Asia are poised to drive significant AI economic growth SEA, with a projected US$270 billion boost through strategic investments in skills, research, and sustainability.
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The post South Korea’s Dual AI Strategy: A Global Blueprint appeared first on StartupHub.ai.
South Korea's new AI strategy combines sovereign capability development with strategic global partnerships to drive economic growth and establish the nation as a top-tier AI leader.
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Crusoe, the startup calling itself “the AI factory company,” has raised a staggering $1.37 billion in Series E funding co-led by Valor Equity Partners and Mubadala Capital, pushing its valuation above $10 billion. The new round cements Crusoe’s rise as […]
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The same technology that can write poetry, design proteins, or diagnose disease is now being used to prevent something far darker — AI-assisted biological attacks. To get ahead of that threat, OpenAI has teamed up with Founders Fund and Lux […]
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It’s Thursday, October 23, 2025, and we’re back with the top startup and tech funding news stories shaping the global innovation landscape. From multimillion-dollar AI infrastructure rounds to autonomous mobility, clean energy, and longevity biotech, investors continue to pour capital […]
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When Tim Chen tried to break into venture capital six years ago, multiple firms in Seattle turned him down. “Nobody wanted to hire me,” he recalled in an interview with GeekWire. “I was too technical, they said. Too nerdy.”
Chen, a University of Washington graduate and infrastructure engineer who had just sold a startup, decided to launch his own firm.
Six years later, Chen’s investors — known as limited partners, or LPs — line up to give him money before he even opens a pitch deck.
Chen recently raised $41 million for a fourth fund at Essence VC, his venture firm that backs infrastructure startups. His LPs include institutional investors such as Andreessen Horowitz’s Martin Casado and Cendana Capital’s Michael Kim.
TechCrunch described Chen as “one of the most sought-after solo investors,” highlighting how investors preempted the latest fund.
“I had no deck, no memo — I hadn’t even started raising,” Chen told GeekWire. “The LPs just all came in.”
Chen used AngelList to raise $1 million for his first fund in 2019, focusing on developer tools and infrastructure — categories he knew inside out. The experiment quickly snowballed: he raised $5 million for Fund II and $27 million for Fund III.
A dozen companies from the Essence portfolio have been acquired, including Tabular, a data management startup that sold to Databricks last year for a reported $2.2 billion.
What started as rejection has become a calling for Chen — and an unconventional venture capital success story.
After studying computer science at the UW, Chen worked at Microsoft and VMware, helped launch open-source cloud startup Mesosphere, and later founded Hyperpilot, an “AIOps” company acquired by Cloudera.
Chen’s experience as a software engineer and operator has become his edge in VC — especially amid the AI boom. He’s able to make faster decisions and gain respect from founders.
“Tim asked the hardest, most interesting questions about how we were going to build what we said we were going to build,” said Jordan Tigani, CEO of Seattle startup MotherDuck. “From a founder perspective, this let me trust that he actually believed in what we were doing and was coming to his decisions on his own.”
Seattle entrepreneur Patrick Thompson raised capital from Chen twice — with his previous startup Iteratively, which was acquired, and his current company Clarify. “He’s one of the most technically-minded people, but also super humble and easy to work with,” Thompson said.
The combination of engineering depth and empathy has helped Chen win competitive early-stage deals. He’s built a niche around helping technical founders translate research and code into products and go-to-market strategies.
“I’m looking for people that have a deep enough background, with high intensity, and huge flexibility on learning,” he said.
Essence’s portfolio spans across the U.S. and beyond. LPs ask Chen why he hasn’t moved to the Bay Area yet.
Chen is staying in Seattle, where he’s lived since high school. He believes Seattle’s tech scene is under-networked but brimming with talent.
“There’s so much great engineering talent with great iconic companies here,” he said.
Essence plans to make around 40 investments out of its fourth fund. Seattle is certainly on Chen’s radar.
“Of course,” he said. “I’m meeting people here, like UW PhDs. I like technical people. The nerdier, the geekier, the better.”
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Paygentic has raised $2 million in pre-seed Paygentic funding to develop flexible billing and payment infrastructure specifically for the complex demands of AI-native and agentic products.
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Seattle-area cybersecurity startup Chainguard landed $280 million in new financing, just six months after a Series D round pulled in $356 million.
The new funding, announced Thursday, comes from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF).
Founded in 2021, Chainguard aims to help customers secure their “software supply chain,” a term used to describe a company’s software production line.
Chainguard focuses on helping companies keep their open source software secure and offers tools to manage container images, a core code component of cloud-based applications. It has more than 200 customers, including ANZ Bank, Canva, GitLab, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, VPBank, and Wiz.
Technically based in Kirkland, Wash., the remote startup employs more than 500 people and has raised $892 million to date as its valuation has risen to $3.5 billion. The company is ranked No. 3 on the GeekWire 200 index of the Pacific Northwest’s top startups, and Chainguard recently landed on LinkedIn’s list of the top 50 startups in the U.S. (at No. 18).
In fiscal year 2025, Chainguard says it grew its annual recurring revenue seven times to $40 million.
CEO and co-founder Dan Lorenc said the funding will help accelerate the adoption of Chainguard across more companies.
“Open source powers the world, but the way it’s delivered and deployed often introduces risk,” Lorenc said in a statement. “At Chainguard, we’re flipping that script: we guard open source from all the things that can go wrong with it, so engineering teams can build anything they want with it.”
Chainguard CFO Eyal Bar said the partnership with General Catalyst enables Chainguard “to scale go-to-market investment without diluting ownership or slowing innovation.”
Instead of using equity to fund sales and marketing spend, General Catalyst provides structured growth capital tied directly to customer acquisition and recurring revenue. The goal is to let startups like Chainguard preserve equity while using outcome-based financing to scale efficiently.
Previous Chainguard investors include Amplify, IVP, Kleiner Perkins, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mantis VC, Redpoint Ventures, Sequoia Capital, and Spark Capital.
Previously:
Hyphen AI, a new Seattle-based startup using generative AI to help developers deploy cloud applications, raised $5 million in a seed round led by Unlock Venture Partners.
The company’s product, Hyphen Deploy, aims to make cloud infrastructure setup as simple as describing what an app should do.
The product automates complex DevOps processes — replacing YAML files, Dockerfiles, and Terraform modules with natural language prompts and business rules. Developers can describe service goals such as latency, scale, or compliance, and the platform automatically generates production-ready cloud infrastructure across providers such as AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, and Cloudflare.
“Today infrastructure automation typically takes weeks to setup and configure and then monthly maintenance on those configurations — Deploy reduces it to minutes,” Jared Wray, CEO and founder at Hyphen AI, said in a statement.
Wray previously founded Tier 3, a Seattle-area enterprise cloud startup acquired by CenturyLink (now Lumen Technologies) in 2013. He spent two years as an exec at CenturyLink and was later CTO at streaming company iStreamPlanet and clean tech startup Palmetto.
Hyphen joins a growing number of startups using generative AI to automate infrastructure work, including fellow Seattle startup Pulumi.
Unlock Ventures partner Andy Liu, who is based in Seattle, said the market “desperately needs” a “truly developer-first operations platform.”
“Deploy returns software development to the promise of developers leading the way with no infrastructure overhead, just focus on code,” Liu said in a statement.
Wray declined to disclose the company’s revenue metrics. He said customers have been using the platform for the past five months. Hyphen employs 10 people, including Jim Newkirk, who is serving as a fractional COO and was also an exec at CenturyLink and Tier3.
Seattle-based venture capital firm Ascend also participated in the seed round.
Hest, the Seattle-based maker of sleeping gear for outdoor enthusiasts, raised $2.7 million in Series A funding this month as the company sees continued growth.
The initial close was backed by existing investors — Ascend, Cascade Seed Fund, Alliance of Angels, and a number of Seattle-area angel investors — and Hest is opening the round to new investors with a final close later this year.
Founder and CEO Aaron Ambuske told GeekWire that Hest continues to experience significant growth with a 50% increase in sales this year. The startup expects to turn an operating profit for the first time.
Ambuske said the growth is driven by an expanded product line and an increase in sales at REI, where Hest is now in all stores. The company also has a partnership with electric vehicle maker Rivian.
The fresh cash will be used to support future growth opportunities.
“We are launching a new product category in 2026, expanding our partnership with Rivian and investing in new sales channels,” Ambuske said. “We recently launched in Japan and will continue to explore international options when they are a fit.”
He added that while tariffs imposed by the Trump administration “have been a lot to navigate,” over half of Hest’s cost of goods and final assembly are in the U.S., so the company has been “slightly insulated from the turbulence.”
Ambuske, who spent 18 years at K2 Sports, launched Hest in 2019 to satisfy his desire to bring a more comfortable sleeping experience to car and tent campers.
Based in Seattle’s Georgetown neighborhood, Hest opened its first showroom this summer. The company employs 10 people.
Silkline, a Seattle startup using AI to help advanced manufacturing companies manage their supply chains, raised $4 million in seed funding, the company announced Wednesday.
Founded in 2023, Silkline aims to reduce production delays by simplifying and lowering the cost of sourcing materials from multiple suppliers. AI-enabled requests for quotes and purchase orders are among its recently released features.
The fresh cash will help Silkline accelerate its development of AI-powered capabilities.
Silkline customers include manufacturers in aerospace, energy, defense and robotics, including Starfish Space (Tukwila) and Portal Space (Bothell), as well as Vast, Castelion, H3X, K2 Space, Antares Industries, and Machina Labs.
In July, Silkline projected it would triple revenue in 2025. Since then, the company says revenue has grown fivefold year-over-year.
The company says its growth is being driven in part by a “network effect,” in which 20% of new customers are suppliers who received an RFQ generated by the Silkline platform.
“Supply chain teams in advanced manufacturing are struggling with missed production deadlines, RFQ to order management, and increasing demands from their customers,” Isaac Chambers, co-founder and CEO of Silkline, said in a statement. “This round of funding helps Silkline deliver more AI capabilities and reach further into the advanced manufacturing market so all modern hardware companies can experience a fully connected supply chain.”
Silkline currently employs five people.
The funding round was led by Origin Ventures with participation from Forward Deployed VC, 25madison, Matchstick Ventures, Barrel Ventures, and Plow Ventures.
A new Seattle startup is betting that artificial intelligence can take marketing off the plate of small business owners.
Omada.ai, founded earlier this year by longtime tech entrepreneur Pete Christothoulou, officially launched Tuesday with what it describes as an “AI marketing team” designed to handle the day-to-day digital marketing tasks for small and midsize business owners.
Backed by Crosslink Capital, HubSpot Ventures, and Seattle-based firm Ascend, the startup says its platform can plan, create, and optimize marketing campaigns automatically for less than $9 per day.
Instead of developing a single marketing “copilot” or dashboard, Omada’s approach is a set of coordinated AI agents — a marketing assistant, social media manager, designer, video producer, and more — that collaborate like a virtual team. Users interact through a simple chat interface, and the system handles tasks such as posting content, running ads, responding to customers, and tracking performance.
“Their agent-based architecture delivers a truly autonomous and proactive system that gives small business owners the access to capabilities and marketing expertise they’ve never had access to before,” Adam Coccari, managing director at HubSpot Ventures, said in a statement.
Omada’s pitch is that it acts less like another app and more like a full-service team — a “do-it-for-me” model rather than “do-it-yourself.” Its agents are built on proprietary infrastructure that coordinates specialized AI models for language, vision, and audio tasks. The company says the system learns each business’s tone and goals over time, continuously optimizing campaigns.
Omada enters an increasingly competitive space. A growing number of startups use generative AI to help businesses create content and automate tasks — including Seattle-area companies Gradial, Adora, and Forum3. Larger companies such as HubSpot, Canva, and Adobe have also embedded AI marketing tools into their small business offerings.
Christothoulou co-founded Omada with Siva Muthukumarasamy, a longtime engineering leader who was CTO at Peel Technologies, as well as Andrew Miller, a veteran marketing exec who worked at Xembly as head of user acquisition.
Omada marks Christothoulou’s latest foray into applying automation and data intelligence to the marketing world. He previously co-founded and ran Marchex, a Seattle-based advertising analytics company that went public in 2004 and helped pioneer digital call tracking for marketers.
Christothoulou served as CEO at Marchex until 2016 and later launched Xembly, a Seattle startup that developed an “AI chief of staff” to automate productivity tasks. The company shut down its consumer service last year.
Dubai-based fintech startup UPFRONT has secured a $10 million pre-seed round, a mix of equity and debt allocation, to tackle one of the most persistent pain points for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) in the MENA region, which is cash flow inefficiencies.
The round was led by venture capital funds Palm Ventures and SABAH.fund, with participation from a network of strategic angel investors. The funding will fuel product development and hiring across the UAE and soon Saudi Arabia.
Launched in May 2025 by serial entrepreneurs Anas Qudah, Abdullah Alghadouni, and Mahmoud Abdel-Fattah Moursy, whose prior experience spans Careem, Dubizzle, Property Finder, Nana, and Cartona. UPFRONT is building what it calls a “next-generation financial operating system” for MENA’s underserved SMB sector.
Its platform integrates seamlessly with existing accounting software to deliver real-time financial analytics, automate receivables, orchestrate payments, and unlock working capital, all while reducing Days Sales Outstanding (DSO) and friction around cash flow.
“Cash flow inefficiencies are one of the biggest growth bottlenecks for SMBs in MENA,” said Anas Qudah, UPFRONT’s co-founder and CEO. “We’re building financial infrastructure that gives these businesses real-time visibility, faster access to credit, and tools that enable them to operate with more confidence and less manual overhead.”
In under six months, UPFRONT has attracted top regional and international investors and secured a strategic partnership with CredibleX, one of the region’s leading embedded finance platforms, giving it access to more flexible capital structures to serve SMBs with varying liquidity needs.
According to UPFRONT, the funding gap for SMBs in MENA sits at roughly $250 billion, largely driven by inefficient financial operations and delayed receivables across industries like F&B, FMCG, retail, and manufacturing.
Radwan Abudawood, General Partner at Palm Ventures, echoed the sentiment, pointing to Saudi Arabia’s rapidly maturing fintech landscape, “The Kingdom’s fintech ecosystem is hitting an inflection point,” Abudawood said. “UPFRONT is tackling foundational gaps in SMB financial infrastructure, and their execution so far makes them one of the most promising players we’ve seen in the space.”
Abbas Kazmi, Co-Founder and Managing Partner at SABAH.fund, said the firm was drawn to UPFRONT’s approach to solving this “invisible tax” on regional SMBs, “Their innovative blend of revenue-based financing, payment orchestration, and accounts receivable automation directly targets the critical liquidity issues choking business growth,” Kazmi said. “We are truly excited by UPFRONT’s vision and believe that they have the right team in place to deliver on this huge promise and create lasting impact.”
With operations in both the UAE and soon Saudi Arabia, UPFRONT plans to use the new capital to grow its engineering and go-to-market teams, and double down on building infrastructure that empowers SMBs to grow sustainably, without the constraints of outdated financial workflows.
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