Weekly Digest: World Labs Hits $5B, Temporal’s $300M Bet on Agents, and Palmer Luckey’s New Bank
Massive moves this week — from World Labs’ $1 billion leap into spatial intelligence to Temporal’s $300 million engine for the agentic era, and Palmer Luckey’s $4 billion disruptor bank
This week’s ecosystem activity proved that the “Agentic” shift is no longer a roadmap — it’s a reality. From Temporal’s $300M Series D anchoring the infrastructure for AI agents to Hims & Hers’ massive acquisition of Eucalyptus, the market is aggressively consolidating around personalized health and automated intelligence.
The capital floodgates also remain wide open as Battery Ventures and Peak XV raised nearly $5B combined in new dry powder, while Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs reached a $5B valuation to pioneer spatial intelligence and finally, Palmer Luckey’s jump into fintech with the launch of Erebor.
To help you make sense of it all, we’ve rounded up the most talked-about startup stories from the past week — broken down into these categories:
🔔 The latest trend
🗝️ Read of the week
🔍 Top tech news
💰 Startup funding news
👀 New VC funds
🤝 Acquisitions
🎤 Must-watch interviews
Let’s dive in 🚀
Brought to you by Framer
Launch fast. Design beautifully. Build your startup on Framer — free for your first year.
First impressions matter. With Framer, early-stage founders can launch a beautiful, production-ready site in hours. No dev team, no hassle. Join hundreds of YC-backed startups that launched here and never looked back.
Pre-seed and seed-stage startups new to Framer can enjoy:
One year free: Save $360 with a full year of Framer Pro, free for early-stage startups.
No-code, no delays: Launch a polished site in hours, not weeks, without hiring developers.
Built to grow: Scale your site from MVP to full product with CMS, analytics, and AI localization.
🔔 The latest trend: Healthcare
We’re watching the consumerization of preventative medicine in real time. People no longer want to wait for symptoms; they want dashboards. They want continuous insight into their gut, sleep, glucose, hormones, recovery, and longevity. What fintech did for money visibility, healthtech is now doing for the body.
Here are a few startups worth watching:
Throne Science: See how foods hurt or heal your gut health.
Miora: Health agent that does healthy things for you so you can focus on being your fab self.
Fort Wearable: A wearable that automatically tracks strength training, for people who care about longevity.
TRIP Drinks: UK’s #1 CBD Drinks.
Neko Health: Stay ahead of your health with the Neko body scan.
Watch this space!
🗝️ Read of the week
We recently had Colin Angle, co-founder of iRobot on the podcast, which you can watch in full here. We covered everything from finding your magical early collaborators to why storytelling matters and why a deal isn’t done until it’s done.
A few notes from Colin on building a billion dollar company:
🔍 Top tech news
AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs raised $1 billion in funding.
Twilio co-founder’s fusion power startup Inertia raised $450M led by Bessemer Venture Partners.
Finland’s IQM to become one of Europe’s first listed quantum companies at a $1.8 billion valuation.
Palmer Luckey launches a new bank, Erebor.
💰 Startup funding news
InScope raised $14.5M Series A to solve the pain of financial reporting. The round was led by Norwest.
Freeform raised $67M Series B to scale up laser AI manufacturing.
Heron Power raised $140M Series B to ramp production of grid-altering tech. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz.
AI-driven vulnerability remediation company Cogent Security raised $42M Series A. The round was led by Bain Capital.
Temporal raised $300M Series D to make agentic AI real for companies. The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz.
Meridian, the AI-powered modeling layer for Excel, raised $17M Seed led by Andreessen Horowitz and The General Partnership.
Code Metal raised $125M Series B to rewrite the defense industry’s code with AI. The round was led by Salesforce Ventures.
Access the full list of 450+ Pre-Seed to Series A deals announced over the past week below.
👀 New VC funds
Peak XV raised $1.3B, doubles down on AI as global VC rivalry in India heats up.
French VC Quantonation raised €220M for flagship quantum and deep-physics fund.
Battery Ventures raised $3.25 Billion for Fund XV to back AI and software innovation.
Crypto venture capital firm Dragonfly raised $650M.
🤝 Acquisitions
Hims & Hers announces agreement to acquire Eucalyptus, accelerating its vision to become the leading global consumer health platform.
Polymarket acquires prediction market API startup Dome.
Palo Alto Networks acquires one-year-old Israeli startup Koi for $400M.
Mistral acquires French startup Koyeb for cloud offensive.
Superhuman to acquire Rows to strengthen its all-in-one AI workspace.
Nvidia acquires Israeli AI startup Illumex for $60M.
Uber to acquire parking app SpotHero.
HubSpot acquires YouTube-based media brand Starter Story.
🎤 Must-watch interviews
In our latest episode, we sit down with Kirill Bigai, founder of Preply, for a deep dive into his journey from a scrappy entrepreneur to leading a global education powerhouse. In a candid conversation, Kirill reflects on the meteoric rise of the world’s leading language-learning marketplace and the hard-won lessons from a decade of pivots and a recent move to unicorn status.
For some context: You might remember Preply — it quickly became one of the most talked-about EdTech startups in the ecosystem, raising hundreds of millions of dollars and promising to connect every learner in the world with the perfect human tutor. But beyond the headline-grabbing $150 million Series D, the company has navigated intense challenges, from the manual “concierge” grind of the early 2010s to the profound responsibility of protecting its team during the invasion of Ukraine. In this episode, we unpack what it really takes to build a legendary brand in the age of AI.
Previous episodes include:
The $1.7B Mistake That Ended a Founder’s Dream | Colin Angle
Andreessen Horowitz General Partner: Venture Capital’s Future | David Haber.
He Built A $1.8B AI Company With No Experience | Max Junestrand.
Forget AI: Inside the Meltdown That Made Airalo #1 eSIM Unicorn | Ahmet Bahadir Ozdemir.
The Hidden Skill Behind Every Successful Founder | Lindsay Kaplan.
The Harsh Truth About Building a Startup in the AI Era | Anish Acharya.
The AI Version of You Will Outperform You — Emad Mostaque.
How Solana Survived When Most Other Coins Fell | Anatoly Yakovenko.
Watch and subscribe now!