Federal prosecutors are reportedly examining whether lucrative trades on Polymarket and Kalshi may have crossed insider trading and fraud lines. CNN has more here.

Mistral AI has reportedly raised $830 million in debt financing to build an Nvidia-powered data center outside Paris as it expands its AI infrastructure footprint across Europe. TechCrunch has more here.

By Julie Bort

Yet another startup aiming to help enterprises build, secure, and orchestrate AI agents has raised a honking-big seed round. Sycamore on Monday announced a $65 million seed led by Coatue and Lightspeed, with a long list of angels including former OpenAI chief scientist Bob McGrew, Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan, Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, and others. 

A few things turned investors’ heads and drew them to participate in such a big round out of the gate. First, unlike many startups in this space, Sycamore isn’t led by a 19-year-old Y Combinator grad — its founder brings decades of experience: Sri Viswanath, a former Coatue investor. He left the full-time VC role in the fall to launch Sycamore, where he is CEO. 

“I’ve spent over 20 years building enterprise platforms at global scale at Sun Microsystems, VMware, Groupon, and as CTO of Atlassian, where I led the cloud transformation and scaled the engineering org to 7,000+,” Viswanath tells TechCrunch. “The round came together through long-standing relationships.” 

Second, he’s not building a single-purpose product that solves one narrow problem but attempting to build the whole agentic orchestration layer that handles everything from coding to back-end infrastructure, stepping in wherever needed.

“Most tools take existing workflows and layer agents on top,” he said, adding that his startup’s product “starts with the problem itself and then designs and builds the right solution from scratch, whether that involves agents, back-end systems, front ends, or data integrations,” he said. 

He said Sycamore has already gained traction with some big enterprise customers but declined to name them.

Physical Intelligence, a two-year-old San Francisco startup that builds AI models that let robots learn and carry out a wide range of physical tasks, is reportedly in the market to raise a $1 billion round at an $11+ billion valuation, according to Bloomberg. Rumored investors include Founders Fund and Lightspeed Venture Partners as well as prior backers Thrive Capital and Lux Capital. TechCrunch has more here.

Qodo, a four-year-old New York startup that uses AI agents to review, test, and govern code, raised a $70 million Series B round led by Qumra Capital, with Maor Ventures, Phoenix Venture Partners, S Ventures, Square Peg, Susa Ventures, TLV Partners, and Vine Ventures also piling on. The company has raised a total of $120 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Rebellions, a five-year-old South Korean startup that designs AI chips optimized for running machine learning models, raised a $400 million round at a $2.3 billion post-money valuation. The deal was co-led by Mirae Asset Financial Group and the Korea National Growth Fund. The company has raised a total of $850 million, $650 million of which was raised in the last six months. TechCrunch has more here.

ScaleOps, a four-year-old New York startup that automates real-time cloud and AI infrastructure resource management for Kubernetes workloads, raised a $130 million Series C round at an $800 million valuation. The deal was led by Insight Partners, with prior backers Lightspeed Venture Partners, NFX, Glilot Capital Partners, and Picture Capital also contributing. The company has raised a total of about $210 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Starcloud, a two-year-old startup based in Redmond, WA, that aims to build solar-powered data centers in space, raised a $170 million Series A round at a $1.1 billion post-money valuation. The deal was co-led by Benchmark and EQT Ventures. The company has raised a total of $200 million. TechCrunch has more here.

Sett, a four-year-old Tel Aviv startup that automates the production and optimization of marketing creatives for game publishers, raised a $30 million Series B round led by Greenfield Partners, with previous investors F2 and Bessemer also pitching in. The company has raised a total of $57 million. Pocket Gamer has more here.

Valinor, a two-year-old New York startup that uses blockchain-based smart contracts to originate and manage private credit loans more efficiently, raised a $25 million seed round led by Castle Island Ventures, with Susquehanna Crypto and Maven11 also opting in. Fortune has more here.

Deeplify, a three-year-old German startup that uses AI to turn sensor data and imagery into defect detection and reporting for industrial inspections, raised a $2 million pre-seed round led by D11Z Ventures, with Vanagon Ventures and EWOR also participating. Tech Funding News has more here.

Huskeys, a one-year-old Tel Aviv startup whose AI-powered platform monitors edge security activity and manages rules across cloud and web application firewall systems, raised an $8 million seed round. Investors included 10D, SV Angel, toDay Ventures, CCL, and Alumni Ventures. SecurityWeek has more here.

TerraSpark, a one-year-old Luxembourg startup that aims to capture solar energy in space and transmit it wirelessly to Earth, raised a $5 million pre-seed round. Investors included Daphni, Sake Bosch, better ventures, the Hans(wo)men Group, the Luxembourg Business Angel Network, and Karaoke Club. EU-Startups has more here.

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Uber is buying 15-year-old Berlin-based chauffeur startup Blacklane, which has raised more than $100 million from backers including Sixt, Mercedes-Benz, and ALFAHIM, as it expands further into luxury and executive travel. TechCrunch has more here.

Allbirds, the wool sneaker brand that became a kind of unofficial uniform for the Silicon Valley set, has agreed to sell all of its assets and intellectual property to American Exchange Group for $39 million — which is roughly one-tenth of the $348 million it raised in its 2021 IPO and a fraction of the more than $4 billion valuation it briefly commanded on its first day of trading. TechCrunch has more here.

Reuters reports that Morgan Stanley’s E*Trade is in talks to take the lead role in selling SpaceX IPO shares to everyday U.S. investors, potentially edging out Robinhood and SoFi from one of the year’s biggest retail allocations. More here.

Delaware judge Kathaleen McCormick is reassigning cases involving Elon Musk after Musk accused her of bias for liking a LinkedIn post about a court verdict that could cost him more than $2 billion. CNBC has more here.

Jeff Dean, Google’s chief scientist and one of the company’s most influential AI leaders, has become a rare public critic of Trump-era crackdowns in an industry that has largely stopped talking politics. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

In a New York Times guest essay, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark defends the Giving Pledge against criticism from some tech billionaires that donations go to left-wing causes, pointing out that participants can support whatever causes they choose. More here.

Cash is increasingly trumping equity in the AI talent wars, with startups dangling base salaries of $250,000 to $300,000 for young engineers, profit-sharing deals, and quicker liquidity on stock. The Wall Street Journal has more here.

Coatue projected in a January investor deck that Anthropic could be worth nearly $2 trillion by 2030 even as it forecast the company would lose $14 billion on $18 billion in revenue in 2026. Newcomer has the scoop here.

The Wall Street Journal digs into OpenAI’s decision to shutter Sora, finding that the video app never found much of an audience, consumed too much compute, and became an easy target as the company refocused on coding, enterprise tools, and other higher-priority bets. More here.

A new Quinnipiac poll found 55% of Americans think AI will do more harm than good in their daily lives, with broad concern over jobs, schools, and data center construction in their communities. TechCrunch has more here.

Waymo’s robotaxis kept illegally passing Austin school buses even after a recall, a special data-collection effort with the local school district, and software updates, underscoring how hard it is to train self-driving systems on edge-case road behavior. Wired has more here.

A new documentary has thrown the Bigfoot world into chaos by surfacing apparent rehearsal footage that suggests the famous 1967 Patterson-Gimlin film showing Bigfoot walking through a forest was staged.

Plastic surgeons have started using sterilized fat from cadavers (aka “zombie filler”), singing its praises as a minimally invasive alternative to traditional fat transfers.

What’s trending at Tokyo Fashion Week.

Ponant’s Le Commandant Charcot, the first luxury passenger ship to reach the Geographic North Pole, is offering polar expeditions with private-balcony suites, Alain Ducasse dining, and a starting price of $61,062.

Recently revived Swiss watchmaker Amida is back with a NASA-branded driver’s watch styled to look like it’s straight out of the 1970s.

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