SF AI Startups Raise $68M in New Funding
Two San Francisco-based AI startups have secured significant funding. NationGraph, an AI intelligence platform for businesses selling to the government, raised $18 million in a Series A round, bringing its total funding to $22.5 million. Separately, Rowspace AI, which uses AI for decision-making in financial services, secured $50 million in combined Seed and Series A funding.
NationGraph's funding round was led by Menlo Ventures, with participation from Perplexity's Fund, XYZ Venture Capital, and Reach Capital. The company aims to tackle the opaque and complex process of selling to over 110,000 government agencies in the U.S. The AI-native platform provides intelligence by indexing data from approximately four million websites and millions of public records. It generates "Signals" to predict government purchasing decisions and automates the process of requesting public records to give businesses a competitive edge. NationGraph was founded by CEO Kimia Hamidi, who previously sold a price intelligence platform to Ramp, and CTO Eden Ding, who has a background in turning large-scale data into a competitive advantage at Citadel. The company had previously raised a $4.5 million seed round in August 2024, led by XYZ Venture Capital. Rowspace AI’s substantial funding came from a Series A co-led by Sequoia and Emergence Capital, and a seed round led by Sequoia, with notable participation from Stripe. The company was founded by former Notion CTO Michael Manapat and two-time CFO Yibo Ling. Rowspace's platform is designed to unlock the "institutional judgment" trapped within a financial firm's scattered proprietary data, such as memos, models, and legacy systems. It connects and analyzes this structured and unstructured data to accelerate decision-making in areas like portfolio monitoring and credit optimization. The AI system can be integrated into existing tools like Excel and Microsoft Teams and is already being used by firms managing assets ranging from hundreds of billions to nearly a trillion dollars. Rowspace plans to use the new capital to expand its engineering and research teams in its San Francisco and New York offices.
