AI Startups Hit Unicorn Status at Seed Stage

The artificial intelligence (AI) funding boom shows no signs of slowing as deep tech startups capture massive capital even before major product launches.

Case in point: Humans&, a three-month-old San Francisco-based AI lab founded by researchers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, xAI and Meta, closed a $480 million seed round, one of the largest seed financings ever, at an extraordinary $4.48 billion valuation.

According to Reuters, the round was led by SV Angel and co-founder Georges Harik, with participation from Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, Google Ventures, Emerson Collective, Forerunner and others. Humans& told Reuters that its mission is to build “human-centric AI tools” that enhance rather than replace human collaboration and communication.

Also in the AI infrastructure layer, Inferact, founded by the leading developers behind the open-source LLM inference system, secured $150 million in seed funding at an $800 million valuation.

Co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed with participation from Sequoia, Altimeter and others, Inferact aims to commercialize and scale inference, the compute-intensive stage where trained models generate outputs by offering optimized, serverless and scalable inference solutions.

On the enterprise AI front, Synthesia, a London-based generative video platform, raised $200 million in Series E funding at a $4 billion valuation, nearly doubling its valuation from a year ago. Led by Google Ventures with support from existing backers, including Nvidia’s NVentures, Accel, Kleiner Perkins and NEA, the company plans to use the capital to expand its AI video avatars and agent-based learning tools for enterprise training, knowledge sharing, marketing and sales enablement. A secondary sale also provides liquidity for long-tenured employees at the new valuation.

Inference and Developer Platforms: Building the Stack

Not all the action is in application AI. Foundational infrastructure and developer platforms are attracting large investments as the broader AI ecosystem matures.

Baseten, an AI inference platform that helps companies run models efficiently at scale, raised $300 million at a roughly $5 billion valuation in its latest round, more than doubling its value from previous funding, as reported by PYMNTS. Nvidia and venture investors including CapitalG, IVP, Altimeter and Battery Ventures backed the round, underscoring growing demand for optimized inference pipelines that support complex AI applications across industries.

Meanwhile, LiveKit, a voice, video and real-time AI developer infrastructure provider, closed a $100 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, becoming a unicorn in its own right. Index Ventures led the financing, with Salesforce Ventures, Hanabi Capital, Altimeter and Redpoint joining. The funding will support expanding its real-time capabilities, developer tools and global infrastructure footprint.

On the software-creation end, Indian AI platform Emergent raised $70 million in Series B funding led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Khosla Ventures, with additional support from Prosus, Lightspeed, Together and Y Combinator.

The raise triples the company’s valuation to about $300 million and follows a rapid trajectory from Series A just months ago. Emergent uses AI to enable non-technical users to generate full-stack, monetizable applications from simple natural-language input. The company reports more than 5 million users worldwide and roughly $50 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR), highlighting strong market demand for AI-enabled, no-code/low-code innovation tools.

Healthcare and Legal Tech Funding Surges

Beyond generic AI and infrastructure, vertical-specific AI applications are attracting significant investment as real usage and revenue start to validate business models.

OpenEvidence, a Miami-based healthcare AI company focused on medical insights and decision support for physicians, raised $250 million in Series D funding at a $12 billion valuation, doubling its value in just months.

As PYMNTS reported, backed by Thrive Capital and DST, among others, OpenEvidence’s AI platform synthesizes and analyzes clinical research and is reportedly used by a large portion of U.S. physicians. The capital will be poured into research, compute for multi-AI agent architectures and expanding content-licensing partnerships.

In legal tech, Ivo.ai, an AI-powered contract intelligence platform tailored to in-house legal teams, secured a $55 million Series B round led by Blackbird and several venture partners. The company’s AI helps automate complex contract reviews, extract insights and reduce risk, with reported ARR growth and adoption among Fortune 500 companies.