Nirva, an AI wearable startup, raises $8 million in seed funding On July 9, 2026, AI wearable device startup Nirva announced the completion of an $8 million seed funding round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from South Park Commons. The funding will be used to advance product development, expand the team, and accelerate the commercialization of its first AI wearable product. Nirva was co-founded by Wei Lyu, former product lead at Meta Reality Labs; Jason Chen, a former Meta engineer; and Hanying Hu, founder of a jewelry brand. The company focuses on AI wearable devices. Its first product is an AI device that can be worn as a necklace or bracelet. It continuously records the user’s spoken content to themselves and, powered by on-device AI models and long-term memory capabilities, helps users generate personal journals, organize their thoughts, and receive personalized suggestions. The goal is to create an AI companion that can accompany users over the long term. Lightspeed believes that future competition in AI wearables will depend not only on model capabilities but also on whether the product is comfortable and aesthetically pleasing enough for users to wear every day, thereby accumulating continuous personal contextual data. Lightspeed noted that consumers already spend billions of dollars annually on health management and mental wellness. Products like Oura and Whoop primarily focus on physical data, while Nirva aims to go further by understanding users’ thinking patterns, emotional changes, and behavioral patterns to build a more complete long-term personal memory. As wear time increases, the device can continuously accumulate the user’s long-term contextual information and deliver increasingly precise suggestions. Lightspeed also pointed out that sustained user engagement, hardware mass production, supply chain management, and building a consumer brand will remain important challenges for the company going forward. From the primary market perspective, AI wearables are emerging as a new focus of capital attention following AI Agents. As large model capabilities continue to improve, more startups are exploring next-generation AI interfaces beyond the smartphone, seeking more natural and continuous human-AI interaction through smart glasses, AI pins, AI pendants, and similar hardware. However, compared with model capabilities, product design, wearing experience, and user retention are increasingly becoming the key factors that will determine whether AI wearables can achieve true mass adoption. Nirva’s funding round also reflects the capital market’s ongoing interest in founding teams that combine AI technology, hardware development, and consumer product design capabilities. #AI# #WearableDevices# #Startup# #SeedRound# #Fundraising# #VentureCapital# #PrimaryMarket# #WAIC# #Fashion# #Design#

EMULATE NEARS $700M SEED ROUND AT NEARLY $4B VALUATION JUST ONE MONTH AFTER LAUNCH Emulate, a UK AI startup founded in August by former Google DeepMind researchers Jack Parker-Holder, Matthew McGill and Philip Ball, is in advanced talks to raise as much as $700M at a roughly $3.7B valuation. Index Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners are expected to lead the round. The founders previously worked on DeepMind’s Genie world-model efforts, which focus on AI systems capable of generating and simulating interactive environments. Emulate is still operating largely in stealth and has not publicly detailed its product. The raise would follow another massive DeepMind spinout: David Silver’s Ineffable Intelligence raised $1.1B in April at a $5.1B valuation, led by Sequoia and Lightspeed, with Nvidia, Google and Index also participating. Source: FT

👉Aethir Fundrasing 1 Pre-Seed /  $1.7M /  $60M FDV – done in Q1 2022 2 Seed  / $7M  /$150M FDV  – done in Q2 2023 3 Node Sale / 28,423 ETH /2.1b FDV - Started in March 2024 👉Aethir Core Investors 1 Pre-Seed @ivcryptofund  @hiFramework  @mirana @StratifiedCap 2 Seed Merit Circle @BuildOnBeam  @SanctorCapital  @citizenxcrypto @HashKey_Capital   @MaelstromFund  @BigBrainVC  Builder Capital @BuilderVC @Momentum_6 @YieldGuild   Sunshine @animocabrands  By the way , @Gate  @Liquid_Capital_ ， both participated in the seed round financing.

Grok bot is running our entire seed round autonomously now Expect to hear from it We are extremely busy growing our startup So I decided to place a team of Grok bots to run our seed round We grew 580% this year Now looking to expand faster since we have the playbook dialed in Grok bot does everything: 1. Researches all VC funds that fit our criteria 2. Scrapes them into lists on it's own 3. finds their contacts OR forms 4. fills them all out 5. waits for a week then follows up once 6. measures engagement and improves copy to get better responses The really impressive thing is I didn't buy any other tools. I didn't sign up to some GTM tools like Clay or hunter io It simply runs on it's own Doesn't matter also if I am there or not or if the computer is shut down It has it's own compute, browsers, everything! If it contacts you be nice to it ;)

💰 @vangrid_io raises $9M in a Seed round Backed by @HashKey_Capital, @borderless_cap, @Cryptocom_Cap, @animocabrands, @gate_labs, @Maple_block. #Vangrid# turns smartphones into a decentralized spatial data network, feeding real-world ground truth to robots & autonomous systems. 👉 #DePIN# #PhysicalAI# #Funding# #Web3‌‌#

Saturn is proud to announce our $2M seed round led by @TheSpartanGroup, with participation from @Anchorage, Susquehanna Crypto, and more. Saturn is building the application layer on Bitcoin - powered by $STRC. A thread on why it matters.

When we led @StillaAI’s seed round, we backed founders who’ve been building together for over a decade and know what it means to ship products at hyperscale. @siavashg and @kajdro scaled Shop and Shop Pay at Shopify to hundreds of millions of users. They learned that velocity is the definitive competitive advantage and that the biggest constraint isn’t individual productivity but team coordination. When your Cursor context, their Claude projects, and someone else’s Figma AI don’t talk to each other, speed doesn’t translate to progress. Stilla is the fix: a multiplayer AI agent that acts as a shared brain across the tools that product teams actually use, capturing context and maintaining a single source of truth so teams can ship at pace. This is foundational infrastructure for the AI era of work. Category-leading teams at @tryramp, @Lovable, and @wearelegora are already using Stilla to stay aligned as they scale. We’re proud to partner with Siavash and Kaj from day one as they build what modern product organizations will run on. More from @jcfurstenberg and @alexandremomeni:

When we led TaleMonster Games' seed round, we backed a team determined to bring real depth back to casual gaming. Co-founders @IrmSumer, Simay Kahraman, Berk Yaşar, Emre Yanık, and Eren Sariçiçek saw that casual players are far more experienced than they used to be, and they're ready for more than the same repetitive patterns. Now their $30M Series A proves the market agrees. In a billion-player market where most titles follow the same playbook, TaleMonsters is building games that surprise, challenge, and evolve with players. Proud to continue supporting this team as they set new standards for what casual games can be. More here: