Alex Konrad / Upstarts Media: Tolan, an AI assistant focused on users that are not tech-savvy, raised $30M from USV, Khosla Ventures, and Homebrew, and says 70% of its users are women — Far from Silicon Valley's echo chamber, about 250,000 everyday people turn to AI app Tolan as a friendly voice, or to help organize their lives and families.
Alex Konrad / Upstarts Media: UK startup Inforcer, which helps SMBs automate and manage Microsoft 365, security, and more, raised a $35M Series B, a source says at a $200M+ valuation — Inforcer's software helps IT shops manage security for SMB clients. Now the startup's raised $35 million in a Series B round to get them AI-ready, too.
Alex Konrad / Upstarts Media: Sources: Applied Compute, a pre-launch reinforcement learning startup founded by three former OpenAI staffers, raised $20M at a $100M valuation led by Benchmark — The pre-launch reinforcement learning startup founded by Rhythm Garg, Linden Li and Yash Patil, is now valued at $100 million …
Alex Konrad / Upstarts Media: Browserbase, which develops headless browsers for AI agents and apps, raised a $40M Series B led by Notable Capital at a $300M valuation, up ~4x since September — The 16-month-old infrastructure startup behind ‘headless browsers’ is now valued at $300 million and claims more than 1,000 customers.
Alex Konrad / Upstarts Media: Qualtrics founder and Utah Jazz owner Ryan Smith launches a $1B fund aimed at connecting tech startups with sports and entertainment across 20 to 25 investments — Utah Jazz owner and Qualtrics cofounder Ryan Smith is teaming up with Accel pal Ryan Sweeney to launch HXCO …