Humans& Raises Huge $480M Seed Round At $4.48B Valuation For ‘Human-Centric AI Lab’

On the heels of the rise of global venture funding to fintech and financial services startups last year, investors in the space say they expect funding growth to continue to concentrate into pre-IPO companies. Here's what else they said.

The pace of big funding rounds continued to hold up at brisk levels this past week, led by a $1.4 billion financing for “robot brain” developer Skild AI. More big rounds went to startups in sectors including AI chips, brain-computer…

Overall, investors put $18 billion into seed- through growth-stage rounds for companies in Crunchbase security and privacy categories last year. That’s up about 26% from 2024, with particularly pronounced growth at early stage.

Global venture funding to fintech startups climbed in 2025 to its highest level in several quarters, boosted by later-stage deals, Crunchbase data shows.

Skild AI, a robotics company building an “omni-bodied” brain to operate any robot for any task, announced Wednesday that it has raised $1.4 billion, tripling its valuation to over $14 billion.

Defense tech unicorn Onebrief has acquired Battle Road Digital, a startup that makes simulation and wargaming software for the military.

Since the new millennium, $4.2 trillion has been invested into the global startup economy, producing 97,982 scaleups, per research from Mind The Bridge and Crunchbase. And yet, dive deeper and one thing becomes clear: despite the “new…