Covers roughly 5am ET Oct 22 to 5am ET Oct 23, plus four Oct 19–21 rounds that earlier issues missed (marked "catch-up"). Every round below is confirmed by the company or its lead investor. Figures the companies report about themselves (revenue growth, customer counts, data volumes) are labeled company-reported.

Warp Sciences came out of stealth on Thursday with $215M. Lightspeed led the Series A, and Premji Invest, Mayfield, IVP, Lux, Conviction, Menlo Ventures and a dozen other funds joined (Warp / Business Wire · Lightspeed). Bloomberg reports an $865M post-money valuation, citing the company (Bloomberg). Warp isn't developing drugs. It is building a U.S.-based contract research organization (CRO) in which chemists, AI models and lab robots make and test molecules for pharma and biotech customers. The first service is lead-optimization analog synthesis, i.e. producing close variants of a candidate compound for side-by-side testing. The four co-founders are Weil (formerly OpenAI's CPO and VP of Science), DJ Patil (the first U.S. Chief Data Scientist), medicinal chemist Sol Reisberg (Terremoto Biosciences) and Mano Paluri (a founding member of Meta's FAIR lab). According to Lightspeed's investment memo, Warp logs each step of its lab runs in model-ready form, failures included, and eventually intends to sell model predictions alongside the compounds it makes. Why it matters for investors: On the headline numbers, the round puts roughly a quarter of the post-money valuation into cash on day one, so the cap table is betting on execution rather than paying for traction. The underwriting case has two parts. The near-term revenue is a services business with services margins. The upside is a proprietary experimental dataset, especially of failures, that public chemistry data lacks. Policy helps on the demand side: the BIOSECURE Act, signed in December 2025, sets up restrictions on federal procurement and funding that involve designated biotech companies of concern (per Warp's release). When an AI-for-science company pitches you, ask what share of revenue will come from models rather than lab work, and by when.

Tractian, an Atlanta company that pairs vibration and ultrasound sensors with AI that diagnoses failing industrial machines, raised a $130M Series D at a $1.4B valuation. Sapphire Ventures led, M&G's Catalyst co-led, and N47, General Catalyst, Bosch Ventures, 53 Stations, Monashees, Endeavor Catalyst, Norte Ventures and Y Combinator also took part (Tractian · Reuters via TradingView). Sapphire also led the Series C, per the release. Tractian says more than 2,000 facilities use its technology and that it has more than 700 employees (company-reported). It names data-center operators among its customers, alongside Eli Lilly, Whirlpool, Coca-Cola bottling plants and Cummins. Why it matters for investors: A lead that writes the next check after leading the last round has inside data on retention and expansion, and Sapphire chose to lead again. The bigger point is where the demand comes from. AI infrastructure spending is creating customers for "physical AI" one layer down: the cooling plants, power systems and production lines that can't go offline. Hardware plus a proprietary failure dataset is harder to copy than a software layer on top of a foundation model. Expect more sensor-plus-AI companies to raise on this framing. In diligence, separate hardware gross margin from software margin.

Andreessen Horowitz is renaming a16z Crypto as a16z Frontier. In his announcement, Chris Dixon says the team's new fund will back "frontier startups" in AI, autonomous machines, biology and new networks linking people and AI agents, while still investing in crypto (a16z Frontier). Dixon will lead the fund with Marc Andreessen, Ben Horowitz and general partners Eddy Lazzarin and Guy Wuollet. TechCrunch notes that the crypto practice has raised nearly $10B across five funds since 2018 (TechCrunch). The announcement doesn't give the new fund's size. Why it matters for investors: A team that has raised close to $10B for crypto is now hunting AI deals, which means more competition for early AI deals, particularly in robotics and agent networks. Dixon's post names machine-to-machine payments as a place where blockchains fit. Startups that combine agents and payments now have a natural lead investor with a regulatory team behind it. For angels and seed funds, expect a16z Frontier to show up in rounds that used to be left to AI specialists, and expect prices in those rounds to reflect it.

Round notes - Tenstorrent: Agostinelli Group, ARK Invest, Cadence Ventures, Eclipse, Fidelity, Maverick Silicon, Morgan Stanley, Protagonist, Sandisk, T. Rowe Price, Tether Investments, Troluce Capital, Virtu Financial, XTX Markets and others also invested. The money goes to deploying its Galaxy servers at scale and developing the chip IP it licenses. Reuters says the previous round, in December 2024, raised more than $693M at a $2B pre-money valuation. - Maxinsights: Tola Capital, South Park Commons, INCE Capital and Alumni Ventures also invested. The company says it has captured more than 2M hours of footage from 5,000-plus paid contractors and serves over 30 customers, eight of them on recurring contracts (all company-reported). It also launched MaxLoop, which scores footage quality, and MaxGlove, a force-sensing glove it is developing with Genesis AI. - Enact: firstminute capital also invested, along with angels including Yann LeCun and Mistral's Arthur Mensch. The company ranks the round among Europe's biggest pre-seeds so far and says it plans to grow its 12-person team fivefold by the end of 2027.

Not investment advice. The AI Cap Table is published for information only and is not investment, legal, or tax advice. Nothing in this newsletter is an offer or solicitation to buy or sell any security. Funding data comes from public sources we cite and verify, but errors are possible; do your own due diligence and consult a qualified adviser before making any investment decision.