Temporal, ZaiNar, Jump and Sphinx Power the Next Enterprise AI Stack

If the first wave of generative AI lived in the browser, the next wave is being wired into the enterprise backbone and this week’s funding news reflects that shift. Across orchestration engines, spatial intelligence, wealth management automation and compliance agents, artificial intelligence use cases are ramping to operational deployment.

Infrastructure and Orchestration at Scale

The most headline-grabbing deal of the week came from Temporal, which secured a $300 million Series D at a reported $5 billion valuation to expand its platform for reliable, long-running AI systems. Temporal’s core pitch revolves around what it calls “durable execution” — a way to coordinate tasks, manage state and recover from errors in multi-step AI workflows. As enterprises move beyond single prompts toward agentic applications that run over hours or days, investors see orchestration layers like Temporal’s as foundational infrastructure rather than nice-to-have tooling.

Another infrastructure bet with real-world implications is ZaiNar, which raised $100 million to commercialize an AI-powered alternative to traditional satellite GPS. By leveraging ubiquitous Wi-Fi and 5G signals for sub-meter spatial sensing, ZaiNar aims to enable precise positioning in indoor and dense urban environments, a capability robots, autonomous systems and industrial AI applications have long sought but struggled to achieve. These rounds underscore venture interest in the connective tissue of artificial intelligence: the layers that make systems dependable both in digital workflows and physical environments.

Vertical AI Platforms Integrate With Workflows

Investors are also backing startups that embed AI directly into specialized enterprise processes, particularly where compliance, finance and martech converge with regulation and human tasks.

Jump closed an $80 million Series B led by Insight Partners to expand what it terms an AI operating system for financial advisors. Jump’s platform automates labor-intensive tasks like meeting prep, CRM updating, compliance documentation and client follow-ups. In wealth management, an industry still dependent on relationship managers, automation helps advisors increase capacity while ensuring compliant recordkeeping. With tens of thousands of advisers on the platform, Jump illustrates how vertical AI can shift from productivity hacks to core workflow systems.

Marketing and campaigning workflows are also attracting capital. Kana emerged from stealth with a $15 million seed round to build flexible, modular AI agents that marketers can plug into existing stacks for campaign planning, analytics and optimization. Rather than a single monolithic assistant, Kana’s loosely coupled agents reflect a broader move toward specialized AI components that collaborate across tasks tailored to domain needs.

In adjacent tooling, Braintrust announced a Series B to scale developer tooling focused on evaluating and monitoring AI applications. As teams deploy increasingly complex workflows, observability and performance measurement tools become critical, turning quality assurance into its own category of infrastructure.

Compliance AI and Security Automation

As artificial intelligence adoption grows in regulated sectors, startups focused on security, risk and compliance are gaining traction, bolstered by both capital and urgency.

Sphinx raised $7.1 million in a seed round led by Cherry Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Rebel Fund, Deel Ventures and Singularity Capital, to build browser-native AI agents that automate compliance operations for financial institutions. The company’s agents run within banks’ existing systems from case management and third-party portals to email and internal dashboards. The agents also conduct anti-money-laundering (AML), know-your-customer (KYC) and know-your-business (KYB) reviews, draft requests for information and generate audit trails ready for regulators. By automating work traditionally done by human analysts, Sphinx aims to become what some founders describe as “every financial institution’s last compliance hire,” a reflection of the massive labor and cost burdens regulators place on banks and FinTechs.

Cybersecurity is another area where automation meets necessity. Cogent Security closed a $42 million Series A round to build autonomous, AI-driven vulnerability management, helping enterprises prioritize and remediate weaknesses faster than conventional tools. With digital threats evolving and attackers also leveraging automation, proactive, AI-augmented defense is emerging as a strategic imperative.

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