Good day. Artificial-intelligence darling CoreWeave has launched a venture arm to invest in AI startups, the latest illustration of how companies—even those at the forefront of AI—are turning to the venture ecosystem to get a leg up in the fast-evolving sector.

CoreWeave, which offers cloud computing that helps power AI for some of the biggest tech companies, is targeting startups of all stages that are building AI-related businesses with high computing power needs, said Brannin McBee, CoreWeave co-founder and chief development officer, who is overseeing the venture arm.

“It gets us closer to the earlier-stage space,” McBee said. “We will be working alongside leading investors on identifying and funding and providing compute to these companies. It’s an interesting bidirectional pipeline opportunity for us.”

CoreWeave’s initiative, called CoreWeave Ventures, comes after the Livingston, N.J.-based company held an initial public offering in March and has since seen booming demand for AI workloads that the company’s data centers are specially designed to provide. 

Corporations have broadly stepped up their venture efforts this year. Corporate investors participated in U.S. venture deals worth a combined $102.8 billion in the first half of the year, roughly double the same period of last year, according to analytics provider PitchBook Data.

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OpenAI’s restructuring plan. OpenAI executives are growing concerned that mounting political scrutiny in California could stymie their efforts to become a for-profit company and have discussed a last-ditch option of moving out of the state. Some of California’s biggest philanthropies, nonprofits and labor groups are joining forces to push back on the startup’s high-stakes restructuring plan. Because OpenAI is controlled by a nonprofit, they are asking the state’s attorney general to ensure the new company it creates doesn’t violate the state’s charitable trust law.

• An OpenAI spokesman said the company has no plans to leave California.

Europe’s most prominent artificial-intelligence developer is tapping the continent’s biggest tech giant for cash to keep up in the global AI race. Dutch chip-equipment giant ASML is pumping more than $1.5 billion into France’s Mistral AI for an 11% stake, leading a round valuing the Paris-based startup at nearly $14 billion—more than double its valuation last year. The ASML funds come as part of a roughly $2 billion round that Mistral says also includes Yuri Milner’s DST Global and French state-owned investment bank Bpifrance.

David Lauren is intent on propelling the fashion brand his father built into the artificial-intelligence age, despite the critics. Ralph Lauren, where Lauren serves as chief branding and innovation officer, Tuesday launched Ask Ralph, a conversational AI-powered fashion styling helper for users of its U.S. app. Trained on decades of Ralph Lauren archives and lookbooks, it can suggest outfit options for events and answer vital fashion questions in natural language. (Yes, it’s OK to wear white after Labor Day, Ask Ralph says. The brand confirmed the real Ralph, who still runs his company, would concur.) The AI stylist was built in collaboration with Microsoft using OpenAI’s foundation models on Azure.

Correction: Databricks said its annual revenue run rate will be more than $4 billion going forward as of July, and sales of AI products will generate $1 billion of revenue going forward. A news summary in Monday’s newsletter incorrectly said the company expected $4 billion for its fiscal 2025 revenue, including $1 billion from AI.

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Athena Capital appointed Serena Dayal and Avi Golan as investment partners, where they will focus on cybersecurity, AI, software and healthcare investments. Dayal was previously a partner at SoftBank Vision Fund. Golan was chief executive officer of Sygnia.

Growth equity firm Fulcrum Equity Partners added Scott Mitchell as venture partner. He was previously chief technology officer of Salesloft.

Vector database startup Pinecone appointed Ash Ashutosh as chief executive officer. He replaces company founder Edo Liberty, who will become chief scientist. Ashutosh was most recently global director of solution sales at Google.

Push Security, a browser-based detection and response provider, appointed Mark Orlando as field chief technology officer. He previously co-founded Bionic Cyber.

ProteanTecs, an Israel-headquartered electronics health and performance monitoring startup, closed a $51 million Series D round led by IAG Capital Partners.

Kin, a Chicago-headquartered digital home insurance provider, landed $50 million in Series E funding led by QED Investors and Activate Capital at a pre-money valuation of $2 billion. The company also closed on a $200 million debt facility.

Rainforest, an Atlanta-based embedded payment provider built for software platforms, secured $29 million in Series B financing led by Matrix and Infinity Ventures.

Isotopes.AI, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based startup focusing on collaborative AI for enterprise analytics, was seeded with a $20 million investment from NTTVC.

Dazl, an AI creation platform for building apps, emerged from stealth with $10 million in seed funding from investors including 40RTY Fund.

Kamino, a São Paulo-based financial operating system for mid-market companies in Brazil, collected $10 million in Series A funding co-led by Flourish Ventures and Quona Capital.

Geordie, a London-based developer of a security platform that helps enterprises to safely adopt AI agents, emerged from stealth with $6.5 million in seed funding co-led by Ten Eleven Ventures and General Catalyst.

Parento, a New York-based provider of paid parental leave insurance, added $5.9 million in Seed II funding led by ResilienceVC.

• Salesforce Has to Prove Software’s Staying Power in AI Age
   
• Mitsubishi Electric to Buy Nozomi Networks in $1 Billion Deal
   
• OpenAI Backs AI-Made Animated Feature Film
   
• StubHub Sets IPO Terms That Could Push Market Cap Above $9 Billion
   
• Impersonators Share Their Plight in the Age of AI

• Psychological tricks can get AI to break the rules (Wired) 
   
• AI could make the smartphone passé. What comes next? (New York Times)
   
• Apple iPhone event may lack sparkle, but rumored iPhone Air likely to spur upgrades (Reuters)
   
• Why basic science deserves our boldest investment (MIT Technology Review)

This newsletter was compiled by Marc Vartabedian, Zachary Cole and Brian Gormley. 

WSJ Pro Venture Capital is a premium service of The Wall Street Journal. We cover venture capital and the global startup ecosystem. Share your tips, comments and questions: vcnews@wsj.com

The Team: Matthew Strozier, Yuliya Chernova, Brian Gormley and Marc Vartabedian.

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