[2/14 - 2/20] Major Funding Rounds for Notable Overseas Startups
For the week of February 14-20, 2025, AI-related deals once again dominated the US startup market. The largest deal was the $1 billion raised by World Labs, founded by Fei-Fei Li, followed by fintech firm Vestwell and workflow management company Temporal. Energy tech and developer infrastructure also showed a strong presence, making it a week where capital flowed into a diverse range of sectors.
1. Top Funding Rounds This Week—AI Continues to Take Center Stage
1-1. World Labs—$1 Billion for Spatial AI
Business Overview: A startup developing foundational AI models to understand, generate, and manipulate 3D worlds. It aims to enable models to understand and manipulate the structure of physical space, rather than just text or 2D images. Applications are expected in a wide range of fields, including robotics, architecture and design, augmented reality, and simulation.
Based in San Francisco and founded by AI researcher Fei-Fei Li. AMD, Autodesk, Fidelity, Nvidia, and Sea invested in the company. This deal signals a major expansion of investment into the realm of spatial and 3D understanding, the next frontier after the mainstream adoption of 2D image generation.
1-2. Vestwell—$385 Million for Fintech Savings Platform
Business Overview: A platform that provides a centralized online offering for multiple types of savings and retirement accounts, including 401(k)s, IRAs (Individual Retirement Accounts), and HSAs (Health Savings Accounts). It supports employers, small and medium-sized businesses, and financial institutions in designing and managing retirement benefit plans, encouraging asset formation through a user-friendly digital interface for employees.
The 10-year-old, New York-based company completed a Series E round led by Blue Owl Capital and Sixth Street Growth. Its valuation has reached $2 billion.
1-3. Temporal Technologies—$300 Million for Developer Workflow Infrastructure
Business Overview: Provides an open-source-based development platform for reliably executing application workflows running on distributed systems, even in the face of failures. Its key feature is a mechanism that maintains state and allows processes to resume even if a server crashes mid-execution, making it widely adopted by companies with "must-complete" processes such as payment processing, order management, and data pipelines.
Based in Bellevue, Washington, and founded 7 years ago. Andreessen Horowitz led the round, bringing the company's valuation to $5 billion.
2. Energy Tech—Capital Inflow into Power Infrastructure and Clean Energy
2-1. Heron Power—$140 Million for Renewable Energy Grid Connection
Business Overview: Develops power electronics hardware to efficiently connect renewable energy sources like solar and wind to power grids and data centers. The focus is on technology that integrates renewable energy into the grid while stabilizing output fluctuations, a field gaining attention due to the surge in power demand from AI data centers.
Based in Scotts Valley, California. Founded by former Tesla SVP Drew Baglino, with investments from Andreessen Horowitz and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.
2-2. Utility Global—$100 Million for Hydrogen Production from Industrial Gas
Business Overview: Develops technology to produce hydrogen and recoverable carbon using industrial gases emitted during industrial processes such as steelmaking, oil refining, and chemical production. Unlike conventional hydrogen production, its strength lies in its ability to advance decarbonization while working with existing industrial infrastructure, positioning it as a practical means of cleaning up the industrial sector.
Based in Houston and founded 8 years ago. Ara Partners and APG Asset Management led the round.
3. AI and Developer Tools—Diversification of Subcategories
3-1. Code Metal—$125 Million for Code Conversion Tool
Business Overview: Provides a "verifiable code transformation" tool that automatically converts existing source code into different programming languages or execution environments. Its key feature is the ability to mathematically verify that the converted code matches the original behavior, making it useful for modernizing legacy systems and porting to different hardware.
Based in Boston. Salesforce Ventures led the series, which took place just three months after the completion of the Series A round.
3-2. Braintrust—$80 Million for AI Observability
Business Overview: Provides an observability platform for AI development teams to monitor, evaluate, and debug model behavior. It centralizes log collection for model output in production environments, management of quality evaluation experiments, and prompt version control, helping to improve the reliability of AI applications.
Based in San Francisco. Iconiq Capital led the Series B round.
3-3. Jump—$80 Million for AI Agents for Financial Advisors
Business Overview: Provides AI agents for financial advisors and financial service providers that automate tasks such as customer correspondence, proposal creation, and compliance checks. It is structured to handle back-office operations so that advisors can focus on their core customer interactions.
Based in Salt Lake City. Insight Partners led the Series B round.
4. Other Notable Deals
4-1. Render—$100 Million for Developer Cloud
Business Overview: Provides a cloud platform for easily deploying and operating web applications, API servers, databases, and static sites. It abstracts the complexity of infrastructure configuration, creating an environment where developers can focus on their code. It is widely adopted by small and medium-sized development teams and individual developers as an alternative to AWS and GCP, and as a successor to Heroku.
Based in San Francisco, with over 4.5 million registered developers. Georgian led an extension of the Series C round.
4-2. ZaiNar—Over $100 Million for Satellite-Free Positioning Technology
Business Overview: Develops technology that utilizes existing wireless network infrastructure to track the real-time position of objects and people without the need for GPS satellites, cameras, or large-scale computing resources. Its key feature is the ability to obtain highly accurate location information even indoors, underground, or in environments with significant radio interference, with expected applications in asset tracking and safety management for logistics, manufacturing, and medical facilities.
Based in Belmont, California. Emerging from stealth, it disclosed over $100 million in total funding and a valuation exceeding $1 billion. Steve Jurvetson, Jerry Yang, Tom Gruber, and Jaan Tallinn are among its investors.