Raise Watch: July 2026
Sequoia called it the highest valuation the firm had ever led at the Series C stage. That was Etched, the AI chip startup that closed a $300 million round in July at a $10.3 billion valuation, positioning itself as a direct challenger to Nvidia in inference hardware. It was the second-largest of eight major Applied AI raises this month, behind only a $1.7 billion round for Travis Kalanick’s new holding company, and just ahead of $180 million for an endpoint security startup that reached unicorn status before disclosing a single revenue number.
The other five rounds include an industrial operating system for aerospace and energy companies, a phishing defense startup built to fight AI attacks with AI agents of its own, a design tool built for coding agents rather than human hands, video search infrastructure for a dataset nobody had made searchable, and the financial plumbing behind hospital billing. All eight combined raised more than $2.5 billion in a single month.
If you have been reading this newsletter, you know the argument. AI is not one opportunity. It is thousands of opportunities, each sitting inside a specific industry, a specific workflow, a specific problem that has not been solved yet. The ones that get funded are going into those places deliberately, with domain expertise, and building deeply enough to become part of how the work will get done.
July gave us eight of them to write about, across eight sectors.
Etched — $300M Series C
Etched, an AI chip startup, raised $300 million in a Sequoia-led Series C, with participation from
Andreessen Horowitz, Jane Street, Diffusion, and SK Hynix, at a valuation of $10.3 billion. Sequoia called it the highest valuation ever recorded for a round they led at the Series C stage. The company builds frontier inference clusters covering custom chips, memory systems, racks, cooling equipment, interconnects, and software, engineered to run advanced AI models with higher throughput, lower latency, and lower power consumption, positioning Etched as a direct challenger to Nvidia in AI inference.
The round brings Etched’s total funding to more than $1 billion, a threshold the company crossed less than one month after emerging from stealth. Demand for its inference systems continues to exceed supply as customers move from testing to production, and Etched has already begun manufacturing to fulfill more than $1 billion in customer contracts, with first racks scheduled to ship this summer. Its roughly 400 employees, drawn from Nvidia, Google’s TPU division, Broadcom, and SK Hynix, work across facilities in San Jose and a factory in Taiwan.
Glow — $180M Series A
Glow, a cybersecurity startup, raised $180 million in an all-equity Series A at a $1.2 billion valuation, backed by Sequoia Capital, Cyberstarts, Greenoaks, and Redpoint Ventures, with Index Ventures, Lux Capital, and others participating. The Palo Alto-based company was founded by former Meta and Snowflake executives and builds an endpoint security platform for enterprises, emerging from stealth as a unicorn before publicly disclosing any revenue metrics. It already has paying customers in healthcare, retail, and financial services, with typical deployments covering tens of thousands of employee devices. The startup employs nearly 100 people, about 70 percent of whom are based in Israel.
Tiger said the incumbent tools, including CrowdStrike, Microsoft, SentinelOne, and Palo Alto Networks, are built to catch threats after they enter a network, while Glow is designed to stop risky software, AI agents, and developer tools from getting in at all. Concerns intensified earlier this year when Anthropic unveiled its Mythos AI model, which Anthropic said demonstrated advanced capabilities in identifying and exploiting software vulnerabilities, prompting broader debate over AI-assisted cyberattacks. “If you think of the past decade, everything was moving to the cloud and SaaS. Suddenly, AI lands on the endpoint in a way we’ve never seen,” Tiger said.
Arrakis — $38M Series A
Arrakis raised $38 million to build what it calls an AI “operating system” for industrial companies. Accel led an earlier $7.5 million seed and also participated in the $30 million Series A, which was led by Blossom Capital alongside GFC, MainObject, and Rerail. The company is valued at $140 million post-money, is seven months old, and is based in London and Paris. Its target customers are in aerospace, energy, logistics, and manufacturing.
CEO Rafael Quintanilla left a vice president role at Accel after spending the better part of a year studying defense and industrial resilience across the U.S., Europe, and the Middle East, and what he found convinced him to start a company. “Most AI investment to date has targeted the 30 percent of workers behind a desk. The real ROI lies in the 70 percent running industrial operations,” he told Fortune. Arrakis currently has five customers and plans to triple its headcount of roughly 15, with roughly half its fees tied to hitting specific performance targets. One Swiss C-suite executive told Quintanilla, “When we started this, everyone told us we had to be on Copilot. Then we went to OpenAI. Now it’s Anthropic. My head is going like this... I basically want someone who is able to route me to the best provider.”
AegisAI — $36M Series A
AegisAI, an email security startup, raised $36 million in a Series A led by Battery Ventures, with participation from existing backers Accel and Foundation Capital, bringing total capital to $49 million. The company was founded by Cy Khormaee and Ryan Luo, former Google security executives who helped build safe browsing technology and reCAPTCHA, and uses AI agents to catch AI-generated spear phishing attacks. Less than a year after launch, it has been adopted by dozens of customers including Mesh, LangChain, and Lokker.
Attackers are increasingly using AI to aggregate personal data and craft convincing targeted emails on a massive scale, making existing rule-based filters too slow to keep up. AegisAI’s agents evaluate each message the way a security analyst would, catching threats that standard filters miss, including malicious PDF attachments with built-in passwords and CAPTCHAs. “AI-powered attacks bypass existing controls more than half the time now, which means they’re almost twice as effective as they used to be,” Khormaee told TechCrunch. “They’ve researched you, they understand everything about you, and they’re targeting attacks that are perfectly bespoke to you.” Dharmesh Thakker at Battery Ventures said he set out to back a company defending against AI with AI. “The bad guys are using email to attack us using AI at a much faster pace than we can keep up with. Defending against that is going to be a number one priority for a lot of companies,” he said.
Paper — $34M Series A
Paper, a design platform for software teams, raised $34 million in a Series A from Accel and ICONIQ, with participation from Designer Fund, WorkOS CEO Michael Grinich, Lovable CEO Anton Osika, and engineers and designers from Anthropic and OpenAI. Unlike traditional design tools, Paper renders in HTML and CSS, connecting designs directly to production code and the AI coding agents increasingly responsible for writing it. Since the early 2026 launch of Paper Desktop, Paper has grown ARR 25 times and ranked on Ramp’s Fastest Growing Companies list for four consecutive months. Customers include Ramp, Lovable, Vercel, PostHog, Quartr, and Y Combinator.
“Designers are being asked to move faster than ever, yet they’re still working with tools built for a different time. We believe there is a massive opportunity for a new generation of tools that help designers do their best work while working seamlessly with modern AI engineering workflows with coding agents like Claude Code and Codex,” founder and CEO Stephen Haney said. Dan Levine at Accel said “most design tools were built for a world where humans did all the work. Paper is built for a world where humans and AI create together, and is already seeing strong adoption among some of the world’s most influential technology companies.” Guillermo Rauch, CEO of Vercel, said Paper “was born at the perfect time to leverage intelligence on demand, which creative people can influence and channel to design the next big thing.”
Atoms — $1.7B
Atoms, a robotics company, raised $1.7 billion in an equity round led by a16z, with Ben Horowitz joining the board. Bain Capital, Fifth Wall, and Uber also participated. Founded by Travis Kalanick, the company is built atop CloudKitchens, his ghost kitchen business, and Pronto, the heavy-industry automation firm he acquired from Anthony Levandowski in March.
“Fuel to complete the bits-to-atoms story arc we started at Uber, continued at CloudKitchens and will now finish at Atoms,” Kalanick wrote on X. Uber’s participation in the round reconnects Kalanick with the company that pushed him out as CEO in 2017. Horowitz wrote that “the most valuable thing someone could do with AI and robotics is to repeat the same thing Uber did for transportation, or that computers did for the digital world: to make everything and everyone more productive.” All three Atoms divisions, he wrote, target “all trillion dollar industries.”
TwelveLabs — $100M Series B
TwelveLabs, a video intelligence company, raised $100 million in a Series B co-led by NEA and NAVER Ventures, with Amazon, Radical Ventures, Korea Investment Partners, Index Ventures, Quadrille Capital, and Red Bull Ventures participating. Video represents upward of 90 percent of the world’s data yet most of it is opaque and inaccessible, and this round marks TwelveLabs’ move from foundation models into a full-stack agentic video intelligence system.
“Five years ago, we made a contrarian bet: the substrate of machine intelligence is recorded reality in motion, not language. Language is downstream of understanding. Video is the data understanding has to answer to,” said Jae Lee, CEO and co-founder. “Models commoditize. The intelligence layer that composes them does not.” YJ Park, General Partner at NAVER Ventures, which made TwelveLabs its first-ever investment, noted that “when we first met Jae, he described TwelveLabs as the visual cortex for future AI agents. As agents and machines move into roles where they need to perceive and reason about the physical world, video is the modality that matters most.”
Candid Health — $120M Series D
Candid Health, a healthcare billing platform, raised $120 million in a Series D led by Sixth Street Growth, with participation from Oak HC/FT, 8VC, and Y Combinator. The round triples Candid’s valuation from its February 2025 Series C. The company grew annual contracted run-rate revenue 190 percent year-over-year, posted 180 percent net dollar retention in 2025, and is trusted by more than 200 healthcare organizations.
Candid exists to automate the financial infrastructure of American healthcare, specifically the $280 billion spent annually on revenue cycle management, the process by which providers get reimbursed for services. “The legacy players haven’t kept pace, and the companies lightly sprinkling AI on top of them have yet to deliver. We’ve spent the past seven years rebuilding the core infrastructure of this problem space from the ground up. We’re driving cost reduction and collection increases no one in our industry has ever seen before using AI and other automation,” co-founder and CEO Nick Perry said. Alex Katz at Sixth Street Growth said his team spoke with nearly 40 Candid customers. “The feedback was consistently ‘off the charts’ and really emphasized how Candid’s platform had transformed underlying practice operations.”
Venture Forward Capital is a venture fund specializing in Applied AI investments. We back entrepreneurs building the platforms and vertical applications that make AI work in the real world.