OpenAI reshuffles leadership as Sam Altman pivots to technical focus & Meta faces $1B EU fine over ‘pay or consent’ model.

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STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS

💰 Startup funding updates

Silna Health, a NYC-based company that uses AI to manage prior authorization, benefit checks and eligibility verification, raised $27m in total funding. A $22m Series A round was co-led by existing investors Accel and Bain Capital Ventures, with participation from notable angel investors, including the co-founders of Ramp, Opendoor, Truework and Eight Sleep.

Arcade, a San Francisco, CA-based generative AI physical product marketplace, raised $25m in Series A funding. The Series A, which brought total funding raised to date $42M, was raised from Laura Chau of Canaan Partners and Kirsten Green of Forerunner Ventures, with April Underwood of Adverb Ventures and Sol Bier of Factorial Funds participating.

Plural, a Kubernetes management startup based in New York, raised $6M in Seed funding. The round was led by Primary Venture Partners, with participation from Capital One Ventures and Company Ventures.

Charm Security, a NYC-based provider of an AI-powered customer security platform, raised $8M in seed funding. The round was led by Team 8’s Venture Creation Fund.

Sunday, a Boulder, CO-based provider of environmentally responsible lawn care products, raised $25M in funding. S2G Investments made the investment.

Nexthop AI, a Santa Clara, CA-based artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure company serving cloud companies with its networking solutions, raised $110M in funding. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. Additional investors included Kleiner Perkins, WestBridge Capital, Battery Ventures and Emergent Ventures.

Dyna Robotics, a Redwood City, CA-based AI-powered robotics company, raised $23.5M in funding. The round was led by CRV and First Round Capital.

Character Biosciences, a Jersey City, N.J.-based precision medicine company improving drug development for polygenic diseases, raised $93M in Series B funding. The round was led by aMoon and Luma Group, with additional participation from Bausch + Lomb and Jefferson Life Sciences, alongside existing investors Innovation Endeavors, Catalio Capital Management, S32, and KdT Ventures.

Sympera AI, a NYC-based agentic AI company for the banking sectors, raised $10M in Seed funding. The round was led by Nyca Partners and Viola Ventures.

Navina, a NYC-based company which specializes in AI-powered clinical intelligence, raised $55M in Series C funding. The round was led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, with participation from existing investors, including Vertex Ventures Israel, Grove Ventures and ALIVE, bringing the total funding to $100M.

Styx Intelligence, a Vancouver, BC, Canada-based provider of a platform that protects from digital threats, raised $2.7M Seed round. The round was led by BDC’s Seed Venture Fund, with participation from FRAMEWORK Venture Partners, Top Down Ventures, and Sprout Fund.

AMBOSS, a Berlin, Germany-based company focused on medical education and clinical decision-making in Germany and the US, raised €240M in funding. Backers were KIRKBI, M&G Investments and Lightrock, as well as existing shareholders.

Lumber, a Palo Alto, CA-based provider of an AI-powered construction workforce management platform, raised $15.5M in Series A funding. The round was led by Foundation Capital, with participation from Tishman Speyer, Carbide Ventures, 8VC, Sure Ventures, and FirsthandVC.

Paid, a London, UK-based business platform for AI agents, raised €10m (approx. $11m) in pre-seed funding. Backers included EQT Ventures, Sequoia, and GTMFund.

Lumi AI, a Toronto, Canada-based provider of a self-service data analytics and insights platform, raised $3.7M in Seed funding. The round was led by AgFunder with participation Forum Ventures, Abu Dhabi sovereign wealth fund ADQ, Qora71 syndicate, and other angel investors.

Arlo, a NYC-based AI-powered health insurance underwriter for small businesses, raised $4M in Seed funding. The round was led by Upfront Ventures, with participation from 8VC and General Catalyst.

Catio, a Palo Alto, CA-based provider of an AI-powered Copilot for tech architecture, raised $3M in funding. Backers included RRE Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Pender Ventures, Celero Ventures, Vermilion Cliffs Ventures, Jefferies Family Office, RTP Global, and Silicon Badia.

NEW VCs IN THE MARKET

🏦 Venture Capital updates

Emergence Capital, a San Mateo-based VC firm known for backing enterprise tech startups like Zoom, Gusto, and Salesforce, has closed its $1B seventh fund. This is its first raise in nearly four years and signals a strong bet on AI, with continued support from longtime LPs like Stanford University.

Daphni, a Paris-based VC firm, has announced the first close of its new fund, Daphni Blue, at €200M (~$215M), with plans to reach €250M by year-end. Backers include Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, Bpifrance, and the European Investment Fund. The firm will back 40 European startups, focusing on science-led innovation across life sciences, physics, and AI-related fields.

KEY STORIES IN TECH

📜 Latest in tech

Google unveils a next-gen family of AI reasoning models:

• Google introduced Gemini 2.5 Pro Experimental, a multimodal reasoning AI model now available in Google AI Studio and for Gemini Advanced ($20/month subscribers), with a 1 million token context window, soon expanding to 2 million.

• Designed for agentic coding and web app development, Gemini 2.5 Pro outperforms models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepSeek on the Aider Polyglot benchmark but trails Claude 3.7 Sonnet in SWE-bench Verified for software development.

• Gemini 2.5 Pro represents Google’s strongest challenge yet to OpenAI’s “o” series, as it pauses to “think” before answering and reflects Google’s shift toward embedding reasoning in all upcoming AI models.

OpenAI reshuffles leadership as Sam Altman pivots to technical focus:

• OpenAI is reorganizing its leadership team, with COO Brad Lightcap taking on expanded business responsibilities while CEO Sam Altman shifts his focus toward AI development and product strategy.

• The restructuring accompanies OpenAI's evolution from a research organization to a commercial AI company, with recent appointments including Mark Chen as Chief Research Officer and Julia Villagra as Chief People Officer.

• This leadership transition occurs as OpenAI diversifies its infrastructure partnerships beyond Microsoft, secures major investments from SoftBank, and develops new enterprise AI offerings to compete in the market.

Microsoft adds AI-powered deep research tools to Copilot:

• Microsoft is introducing two new deep research tools, Researcher and Analyst, in Microsoft 365 Copilot, powered by OpenAI’s advanced reasoning models including the o3-mini model.

• Researcher supports complex tasks like building go-to-market strategies and client reports by combining deep search with data from tools like Salesforce and Confluence; Analyst focuses on advanced data analysis using Python and iterative reasoning.

• Both tools will be available in April to Microsoft 365 Copilot users enrolled in the Frontier program, which grants early access to experimental features.

Chinese robot maker aims to match Tesla's 5,000 humanoids this year:

• Chinese robotics start-up Agibot plans to produce between 3,000 and 5,000 humanoid robots this year, matching Elon Musk's Optimus project target while expanding with a new plant in Shanghai's Pudong district to boost monthly capacity to over 400 units.

• Agibot launched the Genie Operator-1 (GO-1) AI model in March 2025, which processes extensive image and video data to enhance humanoid robots' ability to interpret human actions, improving task completion rates from 46% to 78% in recent tests.

• The company's flagship Yuanzheng A2 robot stands 175 cm tall, weighs 55 kg, and features AI-powered sensors that process multiple data types, while Agibot predicts household adoption of humanoid robots will take approximately five more years.

Alibaba unveils its latest AI model "Qwen2.5-VL-32B":

• Qwen2.5-VL-32B, the new language model from China, offers improved capabilities including better human preference alignment, enhanced mathematical reasoning, and superior visual analysis compared to its predecessors.

• Benchmark results show Qwen2.5-VL-32B outperforming competitors like Gemma 3-27B, Mistral Small 3.1 24B, and a specific version of GPT-4o, positioning it as a strong contender in the AI landscape.

• At 32B parameters, the model strikes an optimal balance between powerful GPT-4-class capabilities and reasonable resource requirements, allowing users to run it alongside other applications on 64GB systems.

LAST COFFEE SIP

☕Other news

Meta faces $1B EU fine over ‘pay or consent’ model:

• The European Commission is preparing to fine Meta up to $1 billion for allegedly violating the Digital Markets Act with its "pay or consent" model, which regulators claim restricts consumer choice by forcing users to either pay for ad-free service or accept data tracking.

• Meta faces potential penalties of up to 10% of its global annual revenue if found guilty, with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and U.S. officials strongly objecting to what they view as excessive European regulatory actions against American tech companies.

• This potential sanction follows previous EU penalties against the company, including a €797.72 million fine for tying Facebook Marketplace to its social media platform and a record €1.2 billion GDPR fine for inadequate data transfer protections.

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