Good day. As startups flood the market with medical-AI software, healthcare providers are trying to figure out which products they can trust. RapidAI has just expanded its partnership with OSF HealthCare after gaining the Midwest health system's trust through a limited deployment.

RapidAI’s software helps physicians with tasks such as flagging patients likely to have had a stroke, determining how much of the brain is affected and coordinating care.

The company says its technology is used in over 2,500 hospitals across more than 100 countries.

RapidAI’s collaboration with OSF began with its software initially used in select OSF locations, but it has now expanded systemwide.

Additionally, OSF clinicians will expand their use of RapidAI to include other neurological illnesses and trauma-related conditions beyond stroke, said RapidAI Chief Executive Karim Karti.

This stepwise expansion—limited initial use, followed by enterprisewide deployment—hasn’t necessarily been the template for RapidAI, but it is a good model and one that the company will try to repeat with future partnerships, said Karti.

Stroke patients require rapid intervention to limit harm from the disease. If the company proves itself with this population, it signals that its technology warrants wider use, Karti said.

“It really shows that when you build trust through a solution and a patient population that is one of the most difficult to care for, hospitals are willing to take more steps with you,” he added.

And now on to the news...

AI financing pact. Nvidia reached deals with some of Wall Street’s largest firms aimed at raising massive amounts of capital to help its customers finance the cost of computing power.

• The chip maker has signed agreements to partner with Apollo Global Management, Blackstone, BlackRock, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR to establish “compute financing platforms,” the companies said Monday.
   
• The firms aim to deploy over $500 billion of outside capital in the coming years. The firms said the platforms will create pools of capital at “attractive rates” for Nvidia customers.
   
• “These financing platforms will help customers access scarce compute at scale and build the AI factories that will power every industry and country in the age of AI,” Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said.

Meta Platforms Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg issued a 6,500-word encyclical laying out the company’s thinking on the artificial-intelligence race, its significance for society and how the U.S. government should regulate and promote the technology. The company will resume releasing models with open weights, meaning their parameters can be downloaded by anyone, something it paused after reorganizing its AI operations last year. Zuckerberg also argues for allowing distillation, a controversial practice whereby developers query competing models to copy what they know. “Some have tried to frame distillation as harmful, but I think it is important to protect the principle that you can learn from anything you can observe,” he writes.

Corma, a frontier AI lab for defensive cybersecurity, landed $60 million in seed funding from investors including Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures and Coatue. The company is headquartered in Tel Aviv and San Francisco.

Gravity, a San Francisco-based agent-to-agent ad platform, raised $38 million in seed and Series A funding from investors including Basis Set Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners and others.

VibeIQ, a Boston-based product decision platform for apparel and consumer goods, secured $22.5 million in growth financing. Volition Capital led the investment, which included participation from Venture Guides.

Alloy Robotics, a San Francisco-based AI data platform for robotics teams, picked up $8 million in seed funding. Square Peg led the investment, which included participation from Blackbird, Airtree and Skip Capital.

Fisent Technologies, a Toronto-based maker of applied GenAI process automation software, collected a $4.3 million investment. Fintop led the funding, with Partner John Philpott joining the company’s board.

FriskAI, a Los Angeles-headquartered runtime intelligence platform for AI agents, snagged $3.6 million in pre-seed funding led by MaC Venture Capital.

Diald, a Los Angeles-headquartered real estate due diligence and underwriting platform, fetched a $1 million investment led by Feedback Ventures.

• Data-Center Backlash Leads to New Land Rush in Texas Oil Patch
   
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• ‘What About Garmin?’ I Tested the Company’s Answer to Whoop
   
• The Bruising Race to Rent in San Francisco Goes Into Overdrive

• Why AI agents lie and cheat to reach their goals (MIT Technology Review)
   
• Sanders calls on AI companies to pause development  to ‘avoid disaster’ (New York Times)
   
• The AI slop backlash is actually having an impact (Wired)

This newsletter was compiled by Zachary Cole and Brian Gormley.

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

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

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