Good day. Startups are advancing artificial intelligence for patient care, including tools that refill prescriptions and adjust medication doses. For this week's question, we want your view: Is this a promising application of AI, or do you have concerns about its use in clinical care? Please email responses to vcnews@wsj.com. (Note: Question of the Week will next appear on July 10.)

Last week, we asked whether this year’s crop of initial public offerings will result in a new cohort of entrepreneurs spinning out and hitting the startup fundraising circuit. Here are edited excerpts of responses:

• Noa Khamallah, general partner at Don't Quit Ventures: “Yes, a new founder cohort is coming. But standard 90–180 day lockups mean the fundraising wave lands in late 2026, not now. When it does, it will move fast: Serial founders raise seed rounds 2.5x larger than first-timers, and that gap widens to 3.4x at later stages. Smart investors aren’t waiting—the relationship that matters gets built during the S-1 roadshow, not after the lockup drops.”
   
• Pete Soderling, founding partner at Zero Prime Ventures: “IPOs create liquidity events that free people up. Some of those employees will take their chips off the table and go start something. The labs may end up being the best startup incubators we’ve ever seen.”

And now on to the news...

Reliable AI. Scaled Cognition, an AI lab focused on reliability, said Thursday it has raised $100 million in a Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures. Genesys, a provider of cloud-based AI customer experience technology, also invested in the round, which valued the company at $750 million.

• Scaled Cognition will use the funds to expand its research team and accelerate enterprise deployments, the company said.
   
• The startup was founded by Chief Executive Dan Roth and Chief Technology Officer Dan Klein, a natural language processing researcher and professor of AI at the University of California, Berkeley. They sold their prior startup, Semantic Machines, to Microsoft in 2018.

The U.S. Army is leasing land on bases across the country to companies that will build and operate critical mineral processing plants, military officials said Thursday, the latest push by the Trump administration to establish a domestic supply chain of the crucial materials. Army officials told The Wall Street Journal that it had awarded long-term leases to mining and extraction companies Titan Mining Corporation, EnergyX, Ioneer and REalloys for processing and refining critical minerals that are essential to American defense, but the production of which China dominates.

Summit Partners led a $200 million growth investment in artificial intelligence-driven technology company Quantifind, whose products help banks combat the increasing complexities of financial crimes such as money-laundering. Earlier backers, including banking giant Citigroup’s Citi Ventures, credit-risk assessment provider S&P Global, consulting firm Deloitte and family-backed investment firm Stephens Group, also participated in the latest transaction. 

• Quantifind’s Graphyte AI technology knits together public and private data to help organizations comply with rules while also quickly and accurately identifying illicit activity.

Om Malik, a partner emeritus at True Ventures and a prominent technology journalist, died on June 24.

Malik was the founder of GigaOm, a tech media company that he started as a personal blog in 2001. He also held editorial roles at Forbes.com, Red Herring and other publications.

Born and raised in New Delhi, Malik moved to New York in the 1990s and then to San Francisco.

He joined True Ventures in 2008. He served on the boards of companies including data and intelligence platform System, industrial internet-of-things company Petasense and academic media company Academia.edu. Malik was also an angel investor in Slack and other startups, and oversaw True’s investment in real-estate company OpenDoor.

“Om was the first founder we funded when we started True,” the firm, which was a backer of GigaOm, wrote in a social-media post Thursday.

“Om was one of the clearest and most powerful voices in technology of this era,” said Jon Callaghan, co-founder, an investor and a managing partner of True Ventures. He said Malik had an “ability to connect today’s products and trends with historical meaning and societal impact.”

“He was a secret adviser and sage to many of our industry’s biggest names,” Callaghan said.

Malik passed away at Stanford Hospital “after a long health journey with his heart,” said a post on his personal website. Malik had suffered a heart attack in 2007, shortly before joining True Ventures.

—Yuliya Chernova

People

Base10 Partners named Aaron Hinz as chief financial officer. He was previously CFO at Industry Ventures.

Cyber resilience provider Spektrum Labs appointed Mark Cravotta as chief operating officer. He previously served as chief revenue officer at CoreView.

Socure, a platform for digital identity verification, compliance and fraud prevention, appointed Mark Carter as chief information security officer. He has previously worked at Navan, Tesla and Vimeo.

Exits

Qualcomm agreed to acquire AI software company Modular in a stock deal valued at around $3.9 billion, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Identity verification and fraud prevention provider Incode Technologies acquired Identiq, a developer of privacy-enhancing technology for peer-to-peer anti-fraud collaboration.

Alan, a Paris-based integrated healthcare platform, is raising a €480 million (almost $550 million) Series G round, valuing the company at €5.5 billion. Prosus is the lead investor, with Teachers' Venture Growth, Index Ventures and Dara Holdings also participating.

Airwallex, a global payments and financial platform for businesses, secured $320 million in Series H funding, bringing the company’s valuation to $11 billion. Addition led the round, which included participation from QED Investors and others. The company is co-headquartered in San Francisco and Singapore.

General Intuition, a New York-headquartered startup building foundation models and general agents for environments that require deep spatial and temporal reasoning, scored $320 million in Series A funding at a $2.3 billion valuation. Khosla Ventures led the investment, which included additional support from General Catalyst, Hedosophia, Bezos Expeditions and others.

Taktile, a New York-based agentic decision platform for financial institutions, secured $110 million in Series C financing. The growth equity business within Goldman Sachs Alternatives led the investment, which included participation from Balderton Capital, Index Ventures and others.

Trase, a McLean, Va.-based startup building an agentic operating system for deploying agents in high-stakes environments, collected a $107 million seed round from investors including ARCH Venture Partners.

Runpod, a San Francisco-based AI developer cloud platform, nabbed a $100 million growth investment, bringing the company’s valuation up to $1 billion. Summit Partners led the funding, with Managing Director Michael Medici joining the company’s board.

Redo, a Draper, Utah-based startup helping brands manage customer interactions across the post-purchase journey, raised $81 million in Series B funding at a reported valuation of $1.25 billion. Smash Capital led the round, which included participation from Pelion Venture Partners and Cervin Ventures.

Sail Research, a San Francisco-based startup building infrastructure for long-horizon AI agents, emerged from stealth with $80 million in seed and Series A funding at a $450 million valuation. Investors included Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital, Redpoint Ventures, Theory Ventures and Vine Ventures.

Float Financial, a Toronto-based startup building an intelligent financial operating system for businesses, snagged 85 million Canadian dollars (about $60 million) in Series C funding led by Inovia Capital.

Warp, a New York-based startup using AI to automate payroll compliance and employee management, landed $60 million in Series B funding. Battery Ventures led the round, which saw participation from Peak XV Partners, Sound Ventures and Y Combinator.

Patronus AI, a San Francisco-based startup focused on AI evaluation, simulation infrastructure and reliability testing for frontier AI systems, grabbed $50 million in Series B funding. Greenfield Partners led the round, which included contributions from Notable Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and others.

Ornn, a New York-based startup building financial market infrastructure for the compute economy, snagged $33 million in seed funding led by a16z crypto.

Hang Ten Systems, a Palo Alto, Calif.-based enterprise AI services provider, raised $32 million in seed funding led by Mayfield.

• Meta Tried to Silence Her. Now She’s Suing.

• Apple Raises Prices on Macs, iPads by $200 or More on Some Models

• Anthropic Claims Alibaba Ran ‘Brazen’ Campaign to Access Its Claude AI Model

• Is AI Good at Stock-Market Timing? A New Study Casts Doubt

• BlackBerry Sees New AI Opportunities as Embedded-Software Business Accelerates

• Agility, Maker of Humanlike Robots, to Go Public in $2.5 Billion SPAC Deal

• When AI Puts Gen Z in the C-Suite

• British police built a sprawling crime-prediction machine. Some results couldn’t be trusted. (Wired)
   
• IBM unveiled chip technology that could help extend Moore’s Law another decade (MIT Technology Review)
   
• Mark Zuckerberg directed Meta to create a prediction markets app (New York Times)

This newsletter was compiled by Brian Gormley, Matthew Strozier and Zachary Cole.

Share your tips, comments and questions: vcnews@wsj.com

The team: Matthew Strozier, Yuliya Chernova, Brian Gormley and Sarah Klearman.

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