Bay Area AI Startups Announce New Funding

Wellington Management led the $60M Series C for Encord, bringing the company's total funding to $110 million. The firm is building data infrastructure for "physical AI," where autonomous systems like robots and drones rely on complex sensor data such as video, LiDAR, and audio—a significant shift from models trained on static text and images. Encord's platform manages the entire data lifecycle for clients like Toyota, Zipline, and Skydio, addressing the bottleneck of data quality for AI operating in the real world. Rowspace AI's $50M launch, co-led by Sequoia Capital and Emergence Capital, tackles the problem of "trapped" institutional knowledge within financial firms. Founders Michael Manapat, former CTO of Notion and a leader on machine learning systems at Stripe, and Yibo Ling, a two-time CFO, aim to unify proprietary data from scattered memos, models, and legacy systems to sharpen investment decisions. The platform is already used by firms managing assets from hundreds of billions to nearly a trillion dollars for tasks like real-time portfolio monitoring and analyzing decades of deal data. NODA AI, founded by Global War on Terrorism veterans, is building a vendor-agnostic "open orchestrator" for military autonomous systems with its $25M Series A led by Bessemer Venture Partners. The company’s core platform, Urza, acts as an AI-powered reasoning engine to coordinate mixed fleets of drones, robots, and manned systems from over 30 different OEMs across domains like air, land, and sea. This approach allows operators to manage mission effects rather than controlling individual platforms, addressing the issue of fragmented and siloed control systems. London-based Callosum is challenging the AI industry's reliance on a hardware "monoculture" dominated by NVIDIA. Founded by two Cambridge neuroscientists, the company's software orchestrates AI workloads across diverse types of chips from different manufacturers, including AMD and AWS. Backed by Plural and the UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA), Callosum claims its system can deliver significantly higher accuracy and speed at a lower cost for complex tasks by optimizing models across various specialized processors. Potpie AI's pre-seed round was led by Emergent Ventures to build a "context layer" for large-scale software engineering. Founded by Aditi Kothari and Dhiren Mathur, the platform creates a knowledge graph by analyzing a company's entire codebase, tickets, and documentation. This allows AI agents to reason about code like an experienced engineer, enabling automation of complex tasks such as debugging cross-service failures and detecting the blast radius of changes in codebases with over a million lines.