🚨 BREAKING: @Machenta_ just raised $40M in seed funding, the largest robotics seed round ever raised in the UK. 🇬🇧 Founded by @Ed__Johns, @vitalisvos19 and the team that spent years developing this concept at Imperial College London. The round was co-led by @creandum and @usv, and many other amazing parties The technology they’re launching is called Instant Robot Learning. A robot foundation model trained entirely in simulation. Zero real-world training data required. Teach a robot a new manipulation task in a minute. Not hours. Not days. One minute! 🤯 The robot in the demo needs to pass a shoe between its hands twice to flip it the right way around, a creative, multi-step manipulation sequence. The team didn’t pre-program it. They just tried things out until it worked. Ed describes it as “physical vibe coding.” It signals something genuinely new about the development experience. When teaching a robot takes minutes instead of weeks, you can iterate, experiment and get creative with behaviours the way a software engineer iterates on code.  The barrier between idea and physical execution collapses drastically. The underlying insight is powerful. If you can generate enough high-quality simulation data and close the sim-to-real gap tightly enough, you never need to touch real hardware during training at all. Every robot deployment starts from the same foundation. Every new task is a prompt, not a project. Imperial College London research. $40M seed. UK record. The British are very much in the robot learning race. 🇬🇧 Proud to back another outstanding physical AI company as an angel investor among so many awesome investors! 😇 🔗 Learn more about it in their blog: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

🚨 BREAKING: Minerva Humanoids (@mnv_humanoids) has just emerged from stealth with $10M in pre-seed funding led by @generalcatalyst. It's building humanoid robots for the world's most dangerous jobs. Oil and gas. Explosive ordnance disposal. Hazardous material response. ☢️ Every 75 minutes, an energy worker somewhere in the world is killed on the job. That's roughly 7,000 deaths a year. NATO consistently identifies EOD and hazmat response teams as the highest-risk segment in every unit, relying on decades-old wheeled, single-arm robots that simply lack the dexterity for complex tasks. Minerva's answer is Roger, a purpose-built semi-autonomous humanoid that puts the specialist's judgment and hands on the task while keeping their body in a command post far from the danger. Founded by CEO Sandor Felber and CTO Maurice Rahme, with first paid pilots launching this fall. The investor lineup is strong with General Catalyst, @LongJourneyVC, @CredoVentures, MVP Ventures, and many other cool funds! I am proud to be among the angel investors in this round! 😇 Having spent more than 2 years deploying robots in the energy and oil & gas sector, I know firsthand how real this problem is, and how hard it is to solve. Minerva is going after exactly the right market, with exactly the right approach. This is the kind of company robotics was always supposed to build! 🛢️ 🔗 Read more here: ~~   ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →

A former xAI and Google staffer is in talks to raise roughly $50 million in seed funding for a new company focused on combating deepfakes online, according to a person familiar with the matter

Noah, the stablecoin payments infrastructure provider, has closed its seed funding round at $38 million following the raise of an additional $16 million from existing and new investors. The raise follows strong growth that has seen revenues surge by 538% during year-to-date 2026 compared to the same period 2025, with recurring monthly growth of 31%. Noah has also signed over 150 new customers during 2026 including major enterprises such as they transition to stablecoin transfers. Read the full breakdown:

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#

Sowilo, an AI Fashion Startup, Completes Pre-Seed Funding On July 21, 2026, Icelandic fashion-tech startup Sowilo announced the completion of its Pre-Seed funding round. The amount raised has not been disclosed. The round was co-participated by Icelandic venture fund Kría, Dutch investment firm TGC Capital, and multiple angel investors from Iceland and Australia. The company stated that the funds will be used to drive the global expansion of its AI fashion product intelligence platform Catecut and further expand its application within the Shopify ecosystem. According to Dealroom, Catecut has been selected for the Kría Frumsjóður 25 startup program, standing out from 88 applicant companies to become one of the final 11 selected. Sowilo was founded by Heiðrún Ósk Sigfúsdóttir. Its product Catecut is an AI product intelligence platform designed for fashion retailers. Using proprietary AI, the platform analyzes images of clothing, jewelry, and other products to automatically identify product categories and design features, then generates product titles, descriptions, tags, metadata, and SEO-optimized product content. This helps e-commerce merchants automatically create and update product pages, significantly reducing manual data entry work. Catecut is now officially available in the Shopify App Store. Merchants can use the tool directly in the Shopify backend to generate multilingual product content, update both new and existing product pages, and automatically create image alt text and search tags. The company reports that Catecut is already serving U.S. jewelry and apparel retail clients and has completed pilot collaborations with several large international retailers. The new funding will support further expansion into the North American and European markets, as well as accelerated entry into the Asia-Pacific region. From the primary market perspective, AI applications in e-commerce are gradually extending from customer service and marketing into product operations and content management. As the number of SKUs on e-commerce platforms continues to grow, using AI to automatically generate product information, optimize search performance, and improve operational efficiency is becoming an important need for brands and retailers. Sowilo’s Pre-Seed raise also reflects growing capital market attention to vertical AI SaaS commercialization opportunities in niche scenarios—particularly in fashion retail and cross-border e-commerce. #AI# #ArtificialIntelligence# #Fashion# #Tech# #Startup# #CrossBorderEcommerce# #Shopify#

This startup uses agents AI to ease the transition to new financial providers and just raised $4.7 million in seed funding. Meet InstaSwitch: (Photo: InstaSwitch)

Metriport, whose tools help doctors retrieve patient data, raised $26M in Series A and seed funding led by Matrix GP TJ Parker, taking its total raise to $28.4M (@nyeungs / Endpoints News) (Visit Techmeme dot com for the link and full context!)

Sixpence @SixpenceAI, an onchain money market for tokenized U.S. stocks, will run a points campaign on Robinhood Chain from October 26 at 00:00 to November 23 at 00:00 (UTC), with a total reward pool of 10,000 USDG, split into two periods of 5,000 USDG each. Sixpence allows users to borrow stablecoins against tokenized U.S. stocks such as AAPL, TSLA, and NVDA, or deposit stock tokens into a Vault to earn interest. The project raised $5 million in seed funding from investors including a16z CSX.