If you want to know where AI is heading, don’t read the research papers. Read the term sheets.
This past week, over $2 billion in AI funding and valuations landed in one news cycle (and it wasn’t from OpenAI or Anthropic; shocking!). Three patterns jump out.
Pattern 1: The ‘boring’ verticals are getting the biggest checks
- Rox AI hit a $1.2 billion valuation for autonomous sales agents that plug into your CRM and deploy AI workers to monitor accounts, research prospects, and update Salesforce (Sequoia, General Catalyst)
- Oro Labs raised $100 million for AI-powered corporate procurement (automating vendor selection and contract negotiation)
- Wonderful raised $150 million at a $2 billion valuation for AI customer service agents operating in 30+ non-English markets
- Waiv raised $33 million for AI-powered blood testing that detects cancer early
Nobody’s writing viral tweets about procurement automation. But that’s where the biggest checks are going.
Pattern 2: Agent infrastructure is the new cloud
- Gumloop raised $50 million to let non-technical employees build AI agents (Benchmark led)
- Qdrant raised $50 million for vector search (the retrieval layer that lets agents find relevant information)
- Onyx Security raised $35 million to monitor, govern, and correct AI agents inside enterprises
- HydraDB raised $6.5 million for agent memory infrastructure (so agents can remember context across sessions)
If agents are the new apps, this infrastructure is the new cloud. Search (Qdrant), memory (HydraDB), governance (Onyx), building (Gumloop). The VCs are funding the picks-and-shovels layer.
Pattern 3: The creative AI arms race is global
- PixVerse raised $300 million, backed by Alibaba, for AI video generation, becoming a unicorn
- Axiom raised $200 million at a $1.6 billion valuation for “Verified AI” using formal mathematics (their prover got a perfect Putnam score, only the fifth in a century)
- Bold raised $40 million in Israel for on-device AI cybersecurity agents
A Chinese-backed video AI unicorn and a math-verification startup at $1.6 billion in the same 24 hours. Neither is US-only.
Why this matters
When over $2 billion moves in a single news cycle, and it’s not just OpenAI or Anthropic doing another mega-funding round, it’s a signal.
Agents are the next platform; we hate to say it, but boring verticals are the biggest opportunity, and the global AI race has more players than Silicon Valley wants to admit.
After all, if the world is moving towards a world where agents do all the work, they’re going to need a lot of infrastructure and services… And no, we’re not talking about Rent A Human. Although… if one needed a career pivot… there are worse ideas.
Editor’s note: This content originally ran in the newsletter of our sister publication, The Neuron. To read more from The Neuron, sign up for its newsletter here.