Large AI rounds keep hitting
Several AI‑native teams raised big checks in the last 48 hours — AMI Labs ($1.03B seed), Rhoda AI ($450M Series A), Thinking Machines (1GW NVIDIA compute deal), and Eridu ($200M+) — signaling fresh-scale compute demand reported. These rounds are the kind of triggers that accelerate DGX/CUDA procurement conversations.
AMI Labs launched with a reported $3.5 billion pre‑money valuation, positioning the Paris‑based world‑model lab as a rare, high‑valuation early-stage research play (techcrunch.com). The company named Alexandre LeBrun CEO and lists Yann LeCun as executive chair with senior hires including Saining Xie and Pascale Fung, and has announced Nabla as an initial partner. (techcrunch.com) Rhoda AI surfaced from 18 months of stealth with a $1.7 billion post‑money valuation, backed by investors including Premji Invest, Khosla Ventures and Temasek according to coverage of the round. (bloomberg.com) Rhoda’s FutureVision stack uses a “Direct Video Action” architecture that pretrains on internet‑scale video (hundreds of millions of clips) and then post‑trains on robot telemetry, reportedly enabling new tasks with as little as ten hours of teleoperation data. (morningstar.com) Thinking Machines Lab — led by Mira Murati — struck a multiyear strategic partnership to run on NVIDIA’s Vera Rubin platform and received a strategic investment from NVIDIA, with deployments on Vera Rubin targeted for early next year. (blogs.nvidia.com) NVIDIA’s announcement frames the deal as co‑designing training and serving systems for its architectures, creating a public reference for large‑scale Vera Rubin engagements. (blogs.nvidia.com) Eridu came out of stealth claiming a “clean‑sheet” networking architecture and an oversubscribed Series A led by Socratic Partners with participation from John Doerr, Hudson River Trading and others. (eridu.ai) Founder Drew Perkins — whose prior exits include Lightera and Infinera — says Eridu designs on‑chip communications and switches intended to replace incremental networking stacks in AI data centers, and TechCrunch reports the company has now raised roughly $230 million in total. (techcrunch.com) Investor lineup across these deals includes strategic names — Jeff Bezos, Mark Cuban and multiple VCs on AMI, Premji/Temasek/Khosla on Rhoda, and marquee institutional backers on Eridu — signaling both deep capital and strategic corporate interest in infrastructure‑heavy AI bets. (pitchbook.com) The combination of a public Vera Rubin partnership for a frontier lab, a networking vendor promising on‑chip interconnects, and a robotics stack built on internet‑scale video establishes three concrete procurement vectors for infrastructure teams: platform co‑design with NVIDIA architectures, specialized AI networking gear replacing legacy switching, and custom validation pipelines for robot‑scale data movement. (blogs.nvidia.com)
