Anduril, Anysphere, clare&me, and Userled

Welcome to another edition of the Who Got Funded newsletter. 🚀 

My name is Onofre, and I'm an entrepreneur living in Aarhus, Denmark. Every week, I dedicate 3 to 4 hours of my free time to reading startup news, which I then summarize in this newsletter.

I hope you enjoy this content. Thank you so much for reading. ✌️ 

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Estimated reading time: ⌛️ 5 min 20 sec.

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SERIES B AND LATER
Defense tech startup Anduril secures €1.37 billion to become the next major American defense contractor

🇺🇸 California-based defense tech startup Anduril has secured what is likely to be one of the largest funding rounds of the year: a €1.4 billion at €12.8 billion valuation.

This company is targeting a large market that has historically been dominated by a few players. To give you an idea of the market's magnitude, in 2023, the US government alone invested $34 billion in startups focused on early-stage R&D.

Earlier this year, the company beat out three other major defense firms (including Boeing) in a program to develop and test small unmanned fighter jet prototypes.

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More Series B (and later) interesting stories:

🇺🇸 California-based AI chip startup Groq lands €585 million to challenge Nvidia.

🇵🇹 Lisbon-based electric vehicle (EV) charge point operator Powerdot raises €165 million for European expansion.

🇬🇧 London-based CloudPay, an independent provider of global payroll and payment solutions, has secured €109 million in a fresh funding round.

🇬🇧 Liverpool-based Yodel, a parcel carrier startup offering a wide range of delivery options to suit business needs, has raised €99 million.

🇬🇧 Cambridge-based Riverlane nabs €68.6 million Series C to deliver quantum error correction roadmap.

🇨🇭 Zurich-based KNIME secures €27.5 million to help individuals and organizations understand and take advantage of their data.

SERIES A
Anysphere, a GitHub Copilot rival founded by MIT students, has raised a €55 million Series A

🇺🇸 Anysphere, a two-year-old startup that’s developed an AI-powered coding assistant called Cursor, has raised over €55 million.

The company was co-founded by Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark and Aman Sanger while they were students at MIT. Awesome!

Although I haven’t found specific revenue figures for this startup, Anysphere is part of an increasingly crowded field of AI coding copilot startups.

For instance, Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft, mentioned during the company’s last earnings call that over 3 million developers are already paying $100 per year for GitHub Copilot.

I believe that in the future, we’ll have coding suites so powerful that coding will be done entirely through natural language.

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More Series A interesting stories:

🇳🇱 Delft-based VSParticle raises €6.5 million for next-generation material discovery printers.

🇩🇪 German spacetech Dcubed raises €4.4 million for in-space manufacturing.

🇸🇪 Stockholm-based Impactpool raises €3.6 million to accelerate AI job-matching in the impact sector.

SEED
Berlin-based Clare&me raises €3.7 million to train an empathic Clinical LLM

🇩🇪 Clare&me, a German AI healthtech startup focusing targeting the therapeutic self-help market, has raised €3.7 million in funding.

This startup provides digital psychotherapeutic support via voice-based conversations on smartphones with therapeutic content on topics such as fear, stress and panic.

In this way, clare&me wants to solve the problem of high entry barriers, waiting times and stigma.

I think this startup has a good product proposal and is targeting an interesting market. However, I’m not sure how they are going to compete with other LLMs in a world where these models are becoming abundant. Why would I choose Clare&me over ChatGPT, for instance?

This startup was founded in 2021 by Celina Messner and Emilia Theye, and the funds will help them continue training their “empathic Clinical LLM”.

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More Seed interesting stories:

🇱🇹 Vilnius-based Biomatter raises €6.5 million to unlock new horizons for protein design.

🇩🇪 Berlin-based travel tech YGO Trips bags €2.5 million to take the tourism industry deep into AI.

🇬🇧 London-based PHINXT Robotics raises €2.3 million to redefine warehouse automation.

🇩🇪 Berlin-based ACE Alternatives gets a seven-figure seed to redefine alternative fund management.

PRE-SEED
London-based Userled gets €4.6 million to automate the creation of branded marketing campaigns in seconds

🇬🇧 Userled, an AI-powered startup helping brands design and manage personalized marketing campaigns at scale, has raised €4.6 million in pre-seed funding.

Given the fact that AI is opening the door for hyperpersonalization of, potentially, everything, I believe this startup has a compelling angle with its product.

Founded in 2023 by serial entrepreneurs Yann Sarfati and Tristan Saunders, Userled is a no-code platform that automates the creation and distribution of tailored, branded marketing campaigns. It can also be integrated with different CRM systems.

According to the funding press release, this startup has already helped some companies with its software, and the results must have been very positive, given the size of this pre-seed round. Nice!

👉️ You can read more about this deal here.

More pre-Seed interesting stories:

🇮🇪 Dublin-based MixRift raises €1.4 million to bring mixed reality gaming to the masses.

🇨🇭 Lausanne-based DemoSquare gets €1.2 million to deploy AI monitoring tool for public affairs teams.

🇩🇰 Danish startup ABH Optics secures €1 million to develop ultra-thin eyeglass lenses.