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Stord Deal Is Latest Positive Sign for Logistics Tech
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By Marc Vartabedian, WSJ Pro
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Good day. Logistics software startup Stord’s fundraise last week is the latest sign that investors are still eager to bet on a sector that has fallen off its pandemic-era high.
Stord, which offers supply chain management software and provides fulfillment and warehousing services, raised $200 million in funding, which included a Series E equity round led by Strike Capital and a growth debt facility from Silicon Valley Bank, a division of First Citizens Bank, and ORIX USA. Investors including Founders Fund, Kleiner Perkins and NewView Capital also participated in the deal, which valued Stord at $1.5 billion.
In March, supply-chain visibility startups said they were getting a lift as companies navigate a shifting tariff landscape. The uptick in demand was welcome news for a sector that raised venture capital at lofty prices during the pandemic, but then saw funding broadly decline. Global supply-chain startups raised $16 billion last year, a 75% crash from what it garnered in 2021, according to analytics firm Pitchbook Data.
Now, venture investors appear to show some optimism. Global supply-chain startups raised $2.4 billion in this year’s first quarter, a 26% increase from the same quarter a year ago, according to Pitchbook.
Earlier this month, the venture arm of industrial conglomerate Koch led a $40 million round into trucking fleet-management software startup Optimal Dynamics. In March, venture firm Construct Capital said it would direct capital in its new $300 million fund toward logistics tech, among other industrial sectors.
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And now on to the news...
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The Mammoth carbon removal plant in Reykjavik, Iceland. The Swiss start-up Climeworks and Icelandic partner Carbfix collaborated on the Mammoth project. PHOTO: JOHN MOORE/GETTY IMAGES
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Climate tech worries. Carbon startups are facing staff cuts amid worries over the Trump administration axing funding in the U.S, WSJ Pro reports.
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Swiss direct air capture startup Climeworks said that it was trimming staff due to macroeconomic uncertainty, shifting policy priorities in some jurisdictions and over uncertainty related to whether it will receive funding for its plant in the U.S.
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Likewise, Heirloom, another direct air capture start up based in the U.S., said it was also being forced to cut staff due to uncertainty over its U.S. operations.
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$3 Billion
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Size of deal that TPG Twin Brook is aiming for to cash out credit fund backers.
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OpenAI Launches New AI Coding Agent
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OpenAI unveiled a research preview of a new software engineering agent on Friday, pushing forward in one of the most in-demand areas for artificial intelligence tools, The Wall Street Journal reports. The agent, known as Codex, will be able to perform several tasks at the same time, including writing code, fixing bugs, running tests and answering questions about a customer’s codebase, OpenAI said. It is built on a model called codex-1, a version of OpenAI’s o3 reasoning model optimized for software engineering, and will be available to ChatGPT Pro, Team and Enterprise users. OpenAI said it is now looking to double down on coding, a red-hot area that has seen rising investment from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Anthropic and startups like Anysphere, which developed the popular tool Cursor.
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AI Agents Face One Last, Big Obstacle
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The race to build useful artificial-intelligence agents that can perform complex actions for people is moving on to a new set of challenges. The large language models at the core of these agents are good enough for many tasks. But there is a growing emphasis on connecting the LLMs inside agents to a plethora of tools that they will need to get their jobs done. An advanced LLM might fail at complex multiplication, for example, while the cheapest, oldest model can ace the test if it has a calculator tool. But there is another hurdle: Agents will need permission to access apps, APIs and websites if they are ever going to call an Uber or book a flight, the kind of expectation that has been established over the past year.
Read the full article here.
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Funds
A100x raised $50 million for its second fund to invest in early-stage founders focusing on artificial intelligence, digital assets and blockchain.
People
BlueSphere Bio, a drug development company focused on novel T cell-based therapies, appointed Alan Korman as chief scientific officer. He was previously senior vice president of human immunology at Vir Biotechnology.
Deals
Together AI, a startup that enables developers and enterprises to train, fine-tune and run inference for generative AI models, acquired Refuel.ai, which transforms unstructured data into structured datasets for AI applications.
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Cohere Health, a Boston-based AI-powered prior authorization provider, secured $90 million in Series C financing from investors including Deerfield Management, Define Ventures and Flare Capital Partners.
Akido Labs, a Los Angeles-based developer of a tool that uses clinical reasoning to assist trained medical assistants during patient visits, scored $60 million in Series B funding led by Oak HC/FT.
Hedra, a San Francisco-based AI video generation platform, picked up a $32 million investment Andreessen Horowitz's infrastructure fund.
BreachRx, a San Francisco-based intelligent incident response platform, closed a $15 million Series A round. Ballistic Ventures led the investment, with General Partner Kevin Mandia joining the company’s board.
Theo Ai, a prediction platform for litigation, was seeded with a $4.2 million investment from NextView Ventures, Collide Capital and others. The company also named Jay Mandal as chief product officer and added Collide’s Aaron Samuels to the board.
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Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at a conference in March. PHOTO: BRITTANY HOSEA-SMALL/REUTERS
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In a chilly funding market, a VC explains why legal tech is hot (Business Insider)
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Crypto startups to lure $18bn in VC funding as experts see ‘a lot more activity’ (DL News)
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