HONG KONG, May 18, 2026 — AEON, the settlement layer built for the agentic economy, today announced it has successfully closed an $8 million pre-seed funding round. The round was led by YZi Labs, with participation from a robust group of leading investors, including IDG Capital, HashKey Capital, Stanford Blockchain Builders Fund, Oak Grove Ventures, SevenX Ventures, Alchemy Ventures, Draper Dragon, Contribution Capital, and Uphonest Capital.

The funding will accelerate AEON’s mission to build the financial backbone required for a new economic paradigm, where AI reshapes production relations across the internet and becomes an active participant in global commerce. AEON is building the settlement layer that this new paradigm demands, powering the agentic economy at scale, and bridging Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interactions with real-world merchant settlement.

As one of the earliest official partners of Coinbase‘s x402 protocol, AEON has been at the forefront of turning the concept of AI payments into reality. The company launched its first AI payment product in May, enabling AI agents to execute on-chain transactions and connect to over 50 million real-world merchants across the globe. With AEON, AI enters the marketplace, where ideas, intent, and intelligence can directly move value.

In partnership with BNB Chain, AEON recently launched the x402 Facilitator, built natively on the BNB Chain infrastructure. This enables verifiable transactions, on-chain settlement, and immutable receipts for millions of service providers within the BNB ecosystem, building payment infrastructure constructed for the agentic economy at internet scale.

By leveraging AI native protocols like x402, ERC-8004, Google AP2, and MCP, AEON enables autonomous and verifiable AI agent transactions that bridge the gap between digital agent interactions and real-world settlement. Its Protocol Kernel x402 Stack encapsulates payment instructions into HTTP 402 status codes, embeds settlement logic directly into every API request or service subscription, and ensures real-time clearing between A2A transactions. The distributed Trust Hub verifies transaction payloads with atomic finality, guaranteeing irreversible settlement. This architecture enables continuous value flows between agents, and through AEON’s Physical Gateway, extends into Agent-to-Merchant scenarios where agents can pay.

Building in phases, AEON’s roadmap begins with a completed foundation of cross-chain infrastructure and payment standards. It is now advancing into trust and scale, evolving from payment verification to execution verification while expanding its global settlement network across emerging markets and traditional financial rails. Looking ahead, AEON aims to unlock fully autonomous agent collaboration supported by a native KYA credit system and with full-stack AI financial services, where AI agents can coordinate, transact, and settle value across complex real-world scenarios. 

AEON’s founding team brings deep experience from Binance, Chainlink, Google, HSBC, and GrabPay, combining with deep expertise in AI, blockchain architecture, and real-world payments. This blend allows AEON to build a settlement layer the way the agentic economy actually operates, scaling payments that are verifiable, trustless, and at machine speed.

“AEON is not just bridging AI and real-world commerce, we are building the settlement layer the agentic economy inherently requires,” said Eddie Li, CEO and co-founder of AEON. “As production relations shift toward an economy powered by autonomous agents and value exchange between AIs, we believe a settlement layer built for the agentic economy will emerge and this economic paradigm needs its own financial foundation. This funding empowers us to accelerate that mission, advancing our settlement layer built for AI, and deepening collaboration with ecosystem partners like Coinbase and BNB Chain.”

About AEON

AEON is the settlement layer built for the agentic economy, leveraging leading protocols to enable autonomous, verifiable AI agent transactions at scale. It bridges Agent-to-Agent (A2A) interactions with real-world settlement and continuous value flows.

Serving more than 2 million users and processing 30M monthly transactions, AEON is backed by YZi Labs and IDG Capital, with participation from investors including HashKey Capital, Stanford Blockchain Builders Fund, etc.

Website | X | Telegram | Medium | AEON Pay

About YZi Labs

YZi Labs manages over $10 billion in assets globally. Our investment philosophy emphasizes impact first—we believe that meaningful returns will naturally follow. We invest in ventures at every stage, prioritizing those with solid fundamentals in Web3, AI, and biotech.

YZi Labs’ portfolio covers over 300 projects from over 25 countries across six continents. Some notable portfolios include Trustwallet, CoinMarketCap, Polygon, Injective, Ethena, Safepal Wallet, Better Payment Network, Aster, XAI (acquired by SpaceX), and more. More than 65 of YZi Labs’ portfolio companies have gone through our incubation program, EASY Residency. For more information, follow YZi Labs on X. 

SOURCE AEON

Financing and expanded board leadership position the company to accelerate FDA clearance and commercialization of its novel imaging system

SUNNYVALE, Calif. and GIVATAYIM, Israel, May 18, 2026 — Vortex Imaging Inc. announced today the closing of a $12 million financing round, supported by existing and new investors, including 10D Ventures, Entrée Capital, Harel T.E.C Partnership, Connecticut Innovations, and PhiFund Ventures.

The financing will support the continued development, regulatory clearance, and market launch of Vortex Imaging’s computational ultrasound system, a novel imaging technology designed to enable high-quality 3D volumetric imaging at the point of care using pioneering computational image reconstruction technology, utilizing GPUs-on-Cloud.

Today, many advanced imaging workflows rely on centralized radiology suites, which can contribute to delays in access to imaging and patient care. Vortex Imaging is developing a compact ultrasound-based imaging system designed to bring advanced 3D volumetric imaging into everyday clinical settings. The system aims to reduce variability associated with conventional ultrasound workflows by enabling standardized, reproducible volumetric datasets with a reduced learning curve, while avoiding ionizing radiation and large imaging infrastructure.

The reconstructed images are intended to provide physicians with advanced 3D volumetric visualization capabilities in a format traditionally associated with CT and MRI, while maintaining the accessibility, safety, and portability advantages of ultrasound.

“This financing round marks a major milestone for Vortex Imaging,” said Tomer Ben David, CEO of Vortex Imaging. “Vortex is focused on transforming ultrasound from a highly operator-dependent modality into a standardized, volumetric imaging system capable of delivering advanced 3D clinical insights directly at the point of care. We are excited to have the support of experienced investors and board members as we continue advancing toward FDA clearance and initial clinical deployment.”

In addition, Ori Hadomi, former CEO of Mazor Robotics and current Vice President of Strategic Initiatives & Partnerships at Medtronic, has been appointed Chairman of the Board, bringing significant experience in guiding transformative medical technologies from development to global commercialization.

The board will also include experienced healthcare and medtech leaders, including Chris Cleary, former Vice President of Corporate Development at Medtronic and former GE Healthcare executive; Yahal Zilka, co-founder and Managing Partner at 10D Ventures; and Dr. Yael Grunbaum, Partner at Entree Capital and Head of Entrée Bio.

Together, the expanded board brings deep expertise across medical imaging, strategic growth, corporate development, and commercialization of global medtech platforms.

Vortex Imaging’s initial clinical focus is on urology and nephrology, with broader future applications planned across additional diagnostic and procedural domains.

“Vortex Imaging has the potential to significantly expand how and where advanced imaging is performed,” said Ori Hadomi, Chairman of the Board. “The combination of high-quality volumetric imaging, reduced operator dependency, and a compact ultrasound-based platform could enable a far more scalable and standardized approach to imaging across healthcare systems.”

For more information visit: https://www.vortex-imaging.com/ or LinkedIn.

Watch: Why wait for imaging? 

Contact:
Izik Ithakov
[email protected]

SOURCE Vortex Imaging Inc.

GERMANTOWN, Wis., May 18, 2026 — Innovative Motion Technologies (IMT), a global industrial technology platform and Cathay Capital portfolio company, today announced the successful closing of a new senior credit facility led by TPG Twin Brook. The financing supports IMT’s continued growth and buy-and-build strategy across diversified end markets including healthcare, industrial, HVAC, and utilities.

The new financing strengthens the company’s capital structure and provides additional flexibility to invest in its vertically integrated platform, expand engineering capabilities, pursue strategic and synergistic acquisitions, and broaden its product offering across key end markets, including healthcare, industrial, HVAC, and utilities. The financing was led by TPG Twin Brook, which served as sole lender.

“This financing enables us to continue investing in the business while expanding our product offering across both existing and new end markets,” said Rich Weeden, CEO of IMT. “We remain focused on building on our platform, supporting customers across our diversified end markets, and driving continued growth across the business.”

Andrew Hartinger, CFO of IMT, added “We are pleased to have completed this financing with a top-tier lending partner, which provides significant capacity to execute IMT’s buy-and-build strategy.”

“Since our investment in IMT, the Company has evolved into a differentiated global platform in interface and control technologies, supported by best-in-class engineering and a scaled, diversified footprint across attractive end markets,” said Mark Woods, Partner at Cathay Capital. “This financing enhances IMT’s ability to accelerate growth and deliver on its long-term value creation strategy.”

Piper Sandler served as sole debt placement agent on the transaction.

About Innovative Motion Technologies

Innovative Motion Technologies (IMT) is a global industrial technology platform and industry-leading designer and supplier of advanced motion control and interface solutions across a diversified set of OEM and aftermarket applications. The Company operates through a family of brands to deliver highly engineered products across multiple end markets worldwide. For more information, please visit https://imtbrands.com.

About Cathay Capital

Cathay Capital is a global private equity and venture capital investment firm supporting healthcare, technology and consumer companies throughout North America, Europe, and Asia. The firm helps middle-market companies and startups navigate opportunities for growth, international expansion, and sustainable transformation. Cathay is the partner of choice for companies aspiring to lead markets and make a positive impact. Its platform connects people with global reach and local expertise – from investors and entrepreneurs to management teams and leading corporations – to share knowledge, the tools to scale and to transform businesses.

Founded in 2007 with a strong entrepreneurial heritage, Cathay Capital now manages more than $5.5 billion in assets. It has made over 250 investments in verticals including healthcare, technology, and consumer from offices in New York, San Francisco, Paris, Munich, Berlin, Madrid, Shanghai, Beijing, Shenzhen, and Singapore.

For more information, visit: www.cathaycapital.com.

Media Contact:
Mary Magnani, CodePR
[email protected]

SOURCE Cathay Capital

NEW YORK, May 18, 2026 — Searchable, the AI performance marketing platform helping businesses compete in AI-driven search, has raised $14 million in funding led by global venture capital firm Headline. The latest round of funding values the company at $85 million, reflecting investor confidence that AI-led search will be one of the most important customer acquisition channels of the next decade. 

The funding follows a period of rapid growth, including reaching $2 million in revenue in 4.5 months and onboarding nearly 1000 customers.

Headline, whose portfolio includes Bumble, Farfetch, Goop and Sonos, has a track record of backing global category leaders, including Semrush, the SEO software group acquired by Adobe in a $1.9bn deal. Its investment comes as CMOs confront what many see as the biggest change in online visibility since the early days of Google.

With fresh capital from Headline, Searchable plans to accelerate product development across its execution engine and expand its presence in both the US and UK markets.

Dominic R. Wilhelm, Partner at Headline, said:

“AI–driven discovery is rewriting how customers find products. As more searches are answered directly by AI, brands that are invisible in this layer of search will see less demand. The companies that adapt first will grow market share; those that don’t will lose it quietly.”

Wilhelm adds: “We see Searchable becoming part of the core infrastructure for this shift, not just reporting on what AI engines say about a brand, but directly improving the visibility and revenue outcomes that matter to management teams and boards.”

AI-enabled search is projected to reach roughly 70 percent penetration by 2027, while 65 percent of searches already end without a click. AI-generated overviews now appear in nearly half of Google searches, reshaping how consumers discover products and services.

Chris Donnelly, founder of Searchable, said: “Search is going through a once–in–a–generation reset. When an AI assistant recommends your brand, customers arrive with more trust and a shorter path to purchase. Based on our own data customers are converting at 3x higher when they arrive from ChatGPT and other LLMs. If you aren’t visible in those answers, you’re giving ground to competitors every day.”

Over the next 12 to 24 months, the company expects three structural shifts: the automation of repetitive manual SEO labour through agentic systems; the rise of AI commerce as a standalone optimisation layer; and the convergence of paid and organic AI visibility into unified attribution models.

British serial entrepreneur Donnelly, who sold SEO agency Verb for $25 million and scaled Lottie Org to a nine-figure valuation, explains: “For more than a decade, SEO has been labour–intensive and expensive. Over the next two years, a large share of that work becomes automatable. Our goal is to give companies an execution layer for AI search that cuts SEO costs by up to 40 percent while growing high–intent traffic.”

Searchable works with brands including American Express, KPMG and Siemens. On average, enterprise-scale customers report a 22 percent increase in AI-driven traffic within their first 60 days of using the platform. The US-based company is incorporated in Delaware and operates between New York and London.

About Searchable
Founded in 2025 by British serial entrepreneur Chris Donnelly, Searchable is a new AI performance platform that helps brands understand, track and improve how they appear across AI-led search. Acting as a growth command centre, it tracks visibility on 10 AI engines, surfaces insights through interactive agents, connects analytics from Google Analytics & Search Console, and turns data into actions that drive traffic growth. The US-based company is incorporated in Delaware and operates between New York and London, and is redefining performance marketing for the age of AI.

For further information see: https://www.searchable.com/

Photo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2982026/Chris_Donnelly_Founder_of_Searchable.jpg
Logo – https://mma.prnewswire.com/media/2982025/Searchable_Logo.jpg

SOURCE Searchable

Medical devices are increasingly defined by software, with value moving from hardware to real-world data and AI-driven intelligence delivering guidance and interpretation

NEW YORK, May 18, 2026 — Aegis Ventures, a next-generation startup studio that partners with entrepreneurs and industry leaders to originate, launch, and scale transformative companies, today released a new whitepaper, Medical Devices in the AI Era, examining why medical devices have historically underperformed in venture portfolios, and why the next decade is likely to look different.

Medical devices have produced some of the most important companies in healthcare, yet sparse venture-scale outcomes. Over the past two decades, very few venture-backed medical device companies have exited above $1 billion, with most requiring long, capital-intensive development cycles of more than ten years from founding to exit.

Even as healthcare’s share of U.S. venture capital has grown from ~21% to over 32% since 2018, medical devices have remained flat at 2–3% of overall investment. The new Aegis whitepaper posits that the conditions which produced this gap are beginning to shift.

“The next era of medtech will be defined by platforms that combine sensing technologies, AI, and real-world data to generate clinically meaningful insights over time,” said John Beadle, Co-Founder and Managing Partner of Aegis Ventures. “As these structural shifts converge, we believe medical devices can evolve into platforms that expand across clinical applications, make specialist-level insight accessible in more care settings, and generate proprietary data that improves performance and creates advantages that become increasingly difficult to replicate. While AI does not reduce all of the barriers that make medtech challenging to build, for companies that get it right, it can meaningfully raise the ceiling for both impact and scale, enabling a new generation of medtech companies to support a more intelligent, proactive model of medicine.”

The Aegis whitepaper identifies three AI-driven structural shifts already reshaping the medical device category:

1. expanding total addressable markets, such as a single sensing platform supporting multiple clinical applications
2. tapping into higher-value clinical workflows, such as AI-guided systems that allow generalists to perform tasks previously reserved for specialists
3. building compounding data advantages, with devices that create proprietary datasets tied to real-world usage and outcomes

Taken together, these shifts suggest that while the category remains difficult to build in, the ceiling for outcomes is rising meaningfully, with the potential to generate larger venture-scale companies than the category has historically produced.

Aegis points to its own portfolio companies as examples of these shifts.

Optain Health has built an AI-powered retinal imaging platform to enable primary care providers to identify eye and cardiovascular diseases earlier than the traditional specialist referral pathway typically allows. While currently deployed for diabetic retinopathy screening, there is promising potential to expand Optain’s clinical utility to assess additional types of disease by developing new algorithms, while using the same hardware.

Wavelet Medical, another Aegis portfolio company, uses AI to non-invasively capture and reconstruct EEG signals through the mother’s abdomen to identify signs of fetal distress in real-time. The platform leverages sensors, data, and AI in service of reducing brain injury at birth and unnecessary C-sections.

The Aegis whitepaper Medical Devices in the AI Era is available now at https://aegisventures.com/insights/medical-devices-in-the-ai-era

About Aegis Ventures

Aegis Ventures is a next-generation startup studio that partners with entrepreneurs and industry leaders to originate, launch, and scale transformative companies. The Aegis platform brings together market-shaping ideas, permanent growth capital, and ambitious individuals who are driven to solve major societal problems. We aim to build companies with the capacity for vast impact, with an initial focus on artificial intelligence and health technology. Within these verticals, Aegis seeks to create companies that use technology to transform healthcare quality, access, and cost, focusing on innovations that promote seamless continuity of care, patient empowerment, and better-informed clinical decision-making. In parallel with launching our first six successful portfolio companies over the last several years, Aegis has created the Digital Consortium, a group of fourteen leading health systems that will partner with Aegis to co-develop, invest in, and launch new companies. To learn more about Aegis, visit our website and follow us on LinkedIn.

Media Contact:
Kara Spak
[email protected]

SOURCE Aegis Venture Partners LLC

BOSTON, May 18, 2026 — Tomorrow.io, the world’s leading Resilience Platform™, today announced an additional $35 million investment from existing partner Pitango, and their partner Harel Insurance, joining Stonecourt Capital and HarbourVest Partners, bringing the company’s previously announced Series F to $210 million. The expanded investment reflects a multi-year partnership and deepening conviction in Tomorrow.io’s role as critical AI weather intelligence infrastructure for organizations operating in an increasingly volatile world.

The extension follows Tomorrow.io’s $175 million Series F earlier this year, which supported the planned deployment of DeepSky—the world’s first AI-native weather satellite constellation—alongside broader investments in its space infrastructure and the advancement of its AI-driven platform. The additional capital will further accelerate AI capabilities, expand the company’s space-based observation network, and advance development of its agentic platform to deliver real-time, actionable resilience intelligence at a global scale.

Weather-driven disruption is increasingly impacting day-to-day operations across industries, raising the stakes of how organizations plan, respond, and allocate resources. At the same time, as AI adoption moves from experimentation to scaled deployment, the need for proprietary, high-quality data has become foundational. Against this backdrop, Tomorrow.io’s combination of space-based observation, advanced weather modeling, and generative AI is transforming weather intelligence into mission-critical infrastructure for the modern enterprise.

“Our continued investment in Tomorrow.io reflects what we believe defines truly category-shaping companies: visionary founders, a long-term mission, and a partnership that compounds over time. This team isn’t simply building a product: they’re laying down critical infrastructure for how the world adapts to volatility. We’re proud to keep building alongside them,” said Aaron Mankovski, Managing Partner at Pitango.

“Weather is one of the most powerful forces shaping the global economy, yet it remains one of the least fully integrated into how decisions are made,” said Shimon Elkabetz, CEO and Co-Founder of Tomorrow.io. “Tomorrow.io was built to change that by transforming how the planet is observed and turning data into real-time, actionable intelligence. As AI becomes embedded in operations, that capability becomes foundational. With Pitango’s continued partnership, we are accelerating Tomorrow.io into the infrastructure layer organizations depend on every day.”

Together, Tomorrow.io and Pitango remain focused on building the AI-based foundational layer for resilience in the global economy, helping the world’s largest organizations adapt, decide, and act in real time as weather, supply chains, and operating environments grow more volatile.

About Tomorrow.io

Selected as a TIME 100 Most Influential Company and a Fast Company Most Innovative Company, Tomorrow.io is the world’s leading Resilience Platform™. With a fully operational proprietary satellite constellation and a generative AI–integrated forecasting engine, Tomorrow.io delivers the world’s most accurate and actionable weather intelligence. Combining next-generation space technology, advanced AI, and proprietary weather modeling, the platform empowers organizations to proactively manage risk, seize opportunity, and improve operational efficiency. Trusted by six of the top ten Fortune 500 companies, Tomorrow.io serves as essential infrastructure for the global economy, enabling industries from aviation and energy to logistics and government to adapt in real time to an increasingly volatile world.

About Pitango

Pitango is Israel’s largest and longest standing venture capital fund. We have raised 13 funds to date that amount to $3+ billion in assets, and invested in over 300 companies including Via, AppsFlyer, Finout, DriveNets, AI21 Labs, QuantHealth and Protai. We have overseen 91 exits and IPOs, including Taboola, Riskified, Vertos, and Forescout. Our firm operates through three dedicated funds: Pitango First, Pitango Growth, and Pitango HealthTech.

MEDIA CONTACT 
Tomorrow.io
[email protected]

SOURCE Tomorrow.io

Funding will accelerate the expansion of Wirestock’s data platform and the company’s ability to deliver premium, ethically sourced multimodal datasets to the world’s leading AI labs while deepening its commitment to empowering creators globally

SAN FRANCISCO, May 15, 2026 — Wirestock, the platform connecting the world’s creative community with the frontier of artificial intelligence, today announced the close of a $23 million Series A funding round led by Nava Ventures with participation from SBVP (co-founded by Sheryl Sandberg), Formula VC, I2BF Global Ventures and other strategic and existing investors. The investment will fuel the next chapter of Wirestock’s mission: building the definitive platform for creators to monetize their skills while powering the most advanced AI models in the world with premium, human-made multimodal data. Data that isn’t scraped or repurposed, but made intentionally.

Since its founding, Wirestock has grown to a community of more than 700,000 creators spanning photographers, videographers, graphic designers, 3D artists, filmmakers, and musicians who have collectively contributed millions of assets to the platform, with millions of dollars paid directly to creators monthly. These figures are evidence that human creativity and technological progress reinforce rather than undermine each other. Moving to an AI licensing model has driven 20x YoY growth in creator payouts, and aided in the business surpassing a 40M annual run rate.

“Wirestock has built an incredibly versatile platform that orchestrates the creation, curation, and delivery of complex multimodal datasets,” said Mikayel Khachatryan, CEO and co-founder of Wirestock. “By learning from this data, AI models gain a deeper understanding of the world around us and become more capable of performing creative tasks. With all this innovation, we never lose sight of what powers Wirestock, our global community of creators. We remain deeply committed to fair compensation, transparency, and providing ethical data that drives responsible AI development.”

“This investment will allow us to deepen our research and continue expanding the platform to meet the evolving data needs of future AI models. We’re excited to partner with Nava Ventures and other like-minded investors who share this vision.”

Next Generation Multimodal Data

Wirestock’s datasets are built for the demands of modern multimodal architectures, serving major hyperscalers and frontier AI labs. Most visual data used to train AI models today was never intended for that purpose. It was produced for entertainment, marketing, or social media, and repurposed after the fact. Wirestock takes the opposite approach. Every asset on the platform is sourced, curated, and structured specifically for AI learning, spanning images, video, 3D models, design, and real-world spatial data.

Curation is handled through layered pipelines combining human expert review and AI-assisted moderation, producing datasets with high signal-to-noise ratios, dense semantic annotations, and tight image-text alignment essential for vision-language model training. The result is something closer to a textbook than a data dump: content organized intentionally around how AI models practically learn to understand the visual world and human creativity. For the AI labs building the next generation of foundation models, that distinction directly impacts convergence speed, downstream task performance, and deployment robustness. With over 700,000 credentialed creators contributing across a wide range of creative disciplines, Wirestock has assembled a data sourcing and curation infrastructure that no competitor has replicated.

This is the position that Wirestock’s Series A will strengthen. The investment will expand the company’s capacity to execute on increasingly complex custom datasets, extend coverage across emerging creative modalities, and deepen the integrations that make Wirestock’s data pipelines a seamless extension of its AI lab partners’ research workflows. As the models being built today push into new domains of perception, generation, and reasoning, the infrastructure required to train them must keep pace. Wirestock is building that infrastructure.

“Wirestock is at the cutting edge of the rapidly growing multimodal data ecosystem,” said Freddie Martignetti of Nava Ventures. “As artificial intelligence progresses past language-based systems, multimodal data will become an increasingly important part of any model’s training.  Mikayel and the team at Wirestock have a deeply prepared mind in the space, and have positioned themselves as clear leaders in the category.”

Building the World’s Leading Monetization Platform for Creators

A significant portion of the Series A will be directed toward expanding Wirestock’s creator platform developing new tools, capabilities, and earning pathways that make it easier for creative professionals at every stage of their career to contribute meaningfully and earn consistently.

The platform already supports a wide range of disciplines in photography, video, graphic design, motion design, 3D modeling, music, and more and will continue expanding its creative disciplines, project formats, and compensation structures. Every creator on Wirestock knows precisely where their work goes and how they will be paid for it. That transparency is foundational, and it is not negotiable.

About Wirestock

Wirestock is the world’s leading platform for creators to monetize their skills while powering the frontier of artificial intelligence with premium, ethically sourced multimodal training data. With a global community of over 700,000 creators who have earned millions of dollars on the platform, and partnerships with the world’s leading AI labs, Wirestock operates at the intersection of the creative economy and cutting-edge AI development. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, CA. Learn more at: wirestock.io 

About Nava Ventures

Nava Ventures is a modern, early-stage investment firm built on more than a decade of venture capital experience. The firm partners with founders who are creating new markets, changing industries, and building companies with a positive impact on the world. For more information, visit nava.vc.

SOURCE Wirestock

Funding brings total raised to $14M. Sprouts.ai’s differentiated GTM data layer powers autonomous Revenue Agents already trusted by Global Brands like Hewlett Packard, Razorpay, HighRadius, and Udemy.

SAN FRANCISCO, May 15, 2026 — True Global Ventures (TGV) and Accel today announced a $9 million Pre-Series A round in Sprouts.ai, bringing the company’s total funding to $14 million. Sprouts.ai is a fast-growing AI native startup delivering Revenue Agents for B2B enterprises, anchored in a proprietary go-to-market (GTM) data layer.

The platform enables revenue teams to identify, enrich, engage, and convert ideal customers with precision using deep account intelligence. Its Deep AI GTM Engine powers several first to market AI functionality like complex query search, product heatmaps, buyer committee mapping, relationship networks, and autonomous AI workflows. Sprouts.ai delivers this functionality natively, inside customer CRMs like Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics, and through leading LLMs like Claude.

The investment underscores TGV and Accel’s conviction in AI-first companies transforming how businesses grow revenue, and marks another milestone in TGV’s global strategy of backing visionary founders at the intersection of AI and enterprise GTM.

Solving the B2B GTM Intelligence Gap

Sprouts.ai is headquartered in Palo Alto and addresses one of the most persistent challenges in modern B2B: efficiently identifying and engaging the right buyers at the right time. One key reason for the same is dirty and siloed data. According to Gartner, 85% of enterprise AI initiatives fail due to dirty data. Enterprises run an average of more than 20 GTM tools, compounding data-quality problems across silos, with CRM the largest offender with 30 to 40 percent of records being inaccurate, stale, or missing.

Sprouts.ai replaces the fragmented stack with a unified AI-native layer that maintains high-fidelity data and auto-cleans the surrounding ecosystem. The platform discovers ICP-qualified accounts, enriches contacts with high accuracy, surfaces real-time buying signals, and automates multi-channel outreach.

Trusted by leading global brands including Razorpay, Hewlett Packard, HighRadius, and Udemy, Sprouts.ai has delivered measurable outcomes. Customers report a 3x increase in ICP-qualified leads, a 25% lift in Sales Qualified Leads, a 3x improvement in response rates, and a 35% reduction in GTM tooling costs.

“The B2B revenue stack is broken. Sales and marketing teams operate across more than 20 tools, work off dirty data, and bolt AI on top of infrastructure that was never built for it. We built Sprouts.ai to replace that fragmentation with a unified data and agent layer that actually moves the pipeline. With TGV and Accel, we have the partners and the global reach to put Revenue Agents inside every enterprise running on Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, and the leading LLMs.”

Karan Chaudhry, Co-Founder and CEO, Sprouts AI

“Sprouts AI is exactly the kind of company TGV looks for — a Californian AI-first business with real traction, clear product-market fit, and a data moat accelerated by distribution channels. B2B go-to-market has historically been expensive, fragmented, noisy and opaque. Karan and his team have built something genuinely transformative: a platform that brings together data, intent, and automation into a single intelligent layer that helps companies grow faster and smarter. We are thrilled to support Sprouts AI’s next chapter of growth in agentic AI to help the sales team perform better without additional headcount.”

Beatrice Lion, General Partner and CEO, True Global Ventures

“At Accel, we’ve long believed that the future of B2B growth lies at the intersection of AI, data, and automation. Sprouts AI embodies that thesis. Their platform gives revenue teams unprecedented intelligence and execution capability, dramatically compressing the time from prospect identification to closed deals. Native integration with Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics accelerates distribution across enterprise clients. We’re excited to have TGV join us in backing Sprouts as they scale.”

Shekhar Kirani, Partner, Accel

ABOUT SPROUTS AI

Sprouts.ai builds Revenue Agents that turn traditional revenue teams AI-native. The company has invested in a deep data intelligence moat to power autonomous agents across the full funnel, from ICP to Closed Won. Customers can run Sprouts.ai inside the platforms they already use, including Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Copilot and Claude. Built for enterprises that demand secure, compliant, and trusted data, Sprouts.ai is disrupting a $250B category by replacing fragmented legacy tooling and dirty data with a unified GTM intelligence layer. Founded in 2023 by Karan Chaudhry, Kapil Chaudhry, and Avinash Nagla, the company is headquartered in Palo Alto and trusted by leading global brands. Learn more at www.sprouts.ai

ABOUT TRUE GLOBAL VENTURES

True Global Ventures (TGV) is a global venture capital firm investing in post-revenues AI-first companies at the early stage. TGV’s current portfolio includes Prezent, Cynch, COVU, Obligo, Ledger, Animoca Brands, Jus Mundi, Coding Giants and many others. Almost all portfolio companies are in the U.S. or entering the U.S. With presence in San Francisco, New York, Paris, London, Stockholm, Dubai, Singapore and Hong Kong, TGV backs visionary founders building the next generation of transformative technology ventures. www.trueglobalventures.com

ABOUT ACCEL

Accel is a global venture capital firm that is the first partner to exceptional teams everywhere, from inception through all phases of private company growth. Atlassian, Browserstack, Bumble, CrowdStrike, Freshworks, Flipkart, Ola Cabs, Qualtrics, Scale, Segment, Slack, Spotify, Swiggy, and UiPath are among the companies Accel has backed over the past 40+ years. We help ambitious entrepreneurs build iconic global businesses. For more, visit www.accel.com.

SOURCE True Global Ventures

WASHINGTON, May 15, 2026 — Arkeus, a defense technology company building AI powered sensing systems that serve as the eyes and brains of autonomous platforms, has raised $18 million in Series A funding to accelerate its global expansion and scale manufacturing capability in the United States, Australia, and Europe.

The round, led by QIC Ventures with participation from U.S. and international investors, positions Arkeus to significantly scale its core technology, which is already deployed with the U.S. Department of War and Australian Department of Defence to meet growing global demand. The technology is also integrated with major drone manufacturers including AeroVironment, Textron, Tekever and Boeing subsidiary Insitu.

Arkeus has secured multiple defense contracts for its flagship Hyperspectral Optical Radar, a world-first ISR capability designed for autonomous-enabled operations, as well as for the expedited delivery of its AI-powered hyperspectral sensors in response to growing Pentagon demand for real-time ISR. The contracts followed competitive evaluations against incumbents, in which Arkeus’ sensing systems demonstrated it could detect targets up to eight times further than existing optical systems in degraded visual conditions.

“Machines can’t act autonomously if they can’t truly perceive their environment. In the moments that matter most, systems are still flying blind. Data is collected but not understood in time to act. That’s the problem we set out to solve,” said Arkeus CEO and co-founder Simon Olsen. “The next generation of autonomy isn’t limited by platforms; it’s limited by perception. Decision-making is moving closer to the edge, and that requires a completely different approach to sensing and autonomy.”

While billions have been invested globally in drones, aircraft and autonomous systems, most still rely heavily on human interpretation and external processing to make decisions. Arkeus’ core technology, including hyperspectral optical radar systems, captures multiple layers of visual data simultaneously, allowing AI to detect, classify and track objects across any domain, day and night, and even in degraded or contested environments where traditional sensors struggle.

With a growing pipeline of defense programs and expanding global demand, the company is positioning its systems as foundational infrastructure for the next generation of autonomous operations.

Led by QIC Ventures, the $18M Series A raise saw participation from new investors R+VC, Folklore Ventures and DYNE Ventures, alongside continued support from existing investors Main Sequence Ventures, Salus Ventures and Beaten Zone.

Images to accompany this release will be regularly updated.

About Arkeus

Arkeus is a defense technology company developing AI powered sensing systems that enable real-time perception and decision-making for autonomous platforms. Its hardware-enabled software approach combines advanced sensing with onboard AI to deliver situational awareness at the edge, supporting defense, security and civil applications globally.

Founded in 2020 by CEO Simon Olsen and CTO Dr Jonathan Nebauer, Arkeus was built to solve the perception limitations of autonomous systems operating in complex environments. Olsen brings more than 15 years’ experience in defense, autonomy and ISR systems, including senior leadership roles at Sentient Vision Systems and across the Australian uncrewed systems sector.

Dr Nebauer is an aerospace engineer and optical sensing specialist with deep expertise in autonomous software and hardware systems. He holds a PhD in Aerospace Engineering focused on spectral-method solutions, alongside degrees in Aerospace Engineering and Physics with a concentration in High Performance Computing.

SOURCE Arkeus