Tootfinder

Sources: Menlo Ventures targets ~$1.5B for new funds to invest in AI ventures, including $650M for early-stage startups, and $850M for later-stage companies (Yuliya Chernova/Wall Street Journal)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/menlo-venture

Sparrow, which uses AI to consolidate fragmented leave management processes, raised a $35M Series B led by Silver Lake Waterman, for $64M in total funding (Michael Nuñez/VentureBeat)
https://venturebeat.com/ai/sparrow-raises-35m-ser…

Sparrow raises $35M Series B to automate the employee leave management nightmare
Sparrow raises $35M Series B to scale AI-powered employee leave management platform that has grown 14x since 2021, serving 1,000+ companies and saving $200M in payroll costs.

#Karlspreis? #VonDerLeyen? In was für einer Dystopie sind wir gelandet? ^^

Bengaluru-based ShopOS, whose AI agents help automate content creation, marketing, and site management for e-commerce brands, raised $20M from 3State Ventures (Moneycontrol)
https://www.moneycontrol.com/n…

Report: Swiss deep tech startups have created over $100B in total enterprise value, with 60% of VC funding in Switzerland from 2019 to 2025 going to deep tech (Cate Lawrence/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2025/06/26/switzerlands-100b-deeptech-engine-comes-…

Switzerland’s $100B deeptech engine comes Into focus
Today, the launch of The Swiss Deep Tech Report 2025 spotlights how Switzerland has quietly become one of the world’s most advanced and efficient deeptech ecosystems. Curated in close collaboration with Dealroom.co, Startupticker and venture capital firms Founderful and Kickfund, the report is the first of its kind to map the full scope of Switzerland’s deeptech performance - from research institutions and patents to venture activity and late-stage outcomes. With over 1500 Swiss deeptech …

Alibaba releases its Qwen3-235B-A22B-Thinking-2507 reasoning LLM on Hugging Face, topping several benchmarks, as Alibaba moves away from hybrid reasoning models (Carl Franzen/VentureBeat)
https://venturebeat.com/ai/its-qwens-s…

Online platforms offering astrological advice are thriving in India, with the leading app Astrotalk claiming about 84% of its 70M users are under the age of 35 (Bloomberg)
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-0…

Star Charts and Stock Tips: Venture Capital Bets on Financial Astrology
An age-old belief in astrology has snowballed into a $7 billion industry as a younger generation seeks celestial guidance.

Niural, whose AI agents help companies automate payroll, benefits, vendor payments, and compliance, raised a $31M Series A led by Marathon Management Partners (Ryan Lawler/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/fintech-deals/2025/06/25/niural-31-milli…

Exclusive: Niural lands $31M to streamline global payroll
Its AI simplifies cross-border pay, benefits and compliance.

BlinkOps, which provides AI agents for cybersecurity tasks like managing identity access and patching bugs, raised a $50M Series B led by OG Venture Partners (Meir Orbach/CTech)
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hjwr1jhvge

BlinkOps secures $50M for its micro agent cyber platform
Led by veterans behind Secdo’s $100M Palo Alto exit, the company is taking a decentralized approach to cyber defense.

Seattle-based Dropzone AI, which offers AI agents that act as Security Operations Center analysts, raised a $37M Series B led by Theory Ventures (Taylor Soper/GeekWire)
https://www.geekwire.com/2025/seattle-startup-dropzo…