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Top Stories This week
• It’s so interesting, isn’t it, that we’ve all moved so quickly from hating the idea of AI-generated video, to it becoming an accepted norm of the media industry. Few examples represent this as much as this week's news that AI video startup Higgsfield was now valued at $5.4bn, with backing from Goldman and Intel.
Although Higgsfield was initially used by creators to produce more polished visual content, it’s now selling its platform to corporate marketing clients. “At Snapchat, the face filters I built were primarily used by teenagers for entertainment. At Higgsfield, we are transforming how larger businesses run marketing campaigns,” said Alex Mashrabov, Higgsfield founder and former Snap executive.
Dollar Shave Club has begun using Higgsfield to create multiple videos a day, instead of relying on one ad-agency-generated video. Other investors in the two-year-old start-up included DST Global, Goldman Sachs, Liberty Global and Intel. Eight months ago, the company raised $80mn at a $1.3bn valuation, and it was only launched in 2025. Higgsfield now has 30mn users across 238 countries and territories, with the US its largest market.
• London-based AI chip start-up Fractile is allegedly in talks to raise funding at a pre-money valuation of around $6.5 billion (£4.8bn), roughly six times its valuation at the time of an earlier round of funding only three months ago. Fractile has a deal to supply inference chips to Anthropic and expects to generate about $600m in revenue. Lightspeed Venture Partners and Redpoint Ventures are reportedly co-leading the round, along with Thrive Capital and Founders Fund are also co-leading. At its Series B round in May for $220m), investors included Accel, Factorial Funds and the Founders Fund, Conviction, Felicis and 8VC, giving it a valuation of about $1bn. Founded in 2022 by University of Oxford robotics specialist Dr Walter Goodwin, who we interviewed last year (long before he was famous) Fractile says it can increase the number of tokens processed per second. Pretty handy these days.
• Swiss startup Gravis Robotics does something fun and useful. It retrofits existing excavators and other types of heavy machinery with autonomous and semi-autonomous capabilities. Imagine an autonomous excavator! It’s now raised $200m in Series A funding from Japanese tech giant SoftBank, hitting a $1bn valuation with $200m investment soley from SoftBank.
Ryan Luke Johns, CEO and Co-Founder, was recently on Bloomberg explaining it all. The round is one of the largest Series A raises in construction robotics to date. In fact, before it invested, SoftBank was talking about buying the startup for more than $500 million. McKinsey reckons that, because global construction output was about $13 trillion in 2023 and productivity grew by only 10% from 2000 to 2022, and given the shortage of construction workers, autonomy will be needed more than ever. It previously raised €19 million in 2025.
• Founded in Milan by Uljan Sharka in 2016, iGenius was a supercomputer installation which sold its power to organisations like banks and insurers. But along came the AI era, and the desire for compute. With a fresh rebrand as Domyn, the company has now raised more than $1bn, on the basis that lenders will finance a building full of GPUs. Domyn’s ‘Colosseum’ supercomputer in southern Italy contains chips from Nvidia and Vertiv and can run AI models with over a trillion parameters. Exactly what pharmaceutical companies, defence contractors, and governments are after, because they want to pre-train with their own data and thus own their own AI models rather than rent them from the US. “We saw a white space not just enabling regulated industries to adopt AI, but to actually own and be an AI company in their market,” Sharka told Semafor in April. The models are then distributed through Microsoft’s Foundry platform. Domyn has already benchmarked against GPT-4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet, it says. Domyn says it wants to invest $10bn over three years and reach €1bn of revenue in the same window. “$1 trillion is the new unicorn right now,” he told Semafor. No pressure, everyone…
• UK startup Callosum has built a software layer that optimises AI models and chips so that it spreads the workload across the hardware best suited to run it (an idea they got from the human brain). That removes the reliance on any single frontier model or chip. That’s pretty huge, because all of a sudden you can mix and match all sorts of chips and still get very high performance on compute, and reduce redundancy. It’s now raised a $100m Seed round led by Atomico. Founded by Cambridge scientists Danyal Akarca and Jascha Achterberg, the round is one of the largest seed rounds ever raised in Europe. Also participating were Plural, DCVC, UK Sovereign AI, and Albion VC, among others. Just six months ago, it emerged from stealth with a $10.25m pre-seed round. Callosum’s heterogeneous approach makes each token of compute worth more, meaning the AI industry won’t have to rely on one model or one kind of chip, according to CEO Akarca: “We build AI that is not only more capable, but dramatically faster, more affordable and far more energy-efficient, opening the door to applications that were not viable before,” he told the BBC.
• Nebius needs to build out data centres, invest in AI cloud, and buy GPUs. And as you can tell from our exclusive interview at RAISE Summit in Paris a couple of months ago, there is no stopping the AI build-out right now. It’s now looking to raise $4.5BN through a bond issue. The Amsterdam-based AI infrastructure provider will raise most of it through convertible notes worth $2.75bn due in 2030 and notes valued at $1.75bn which mature in 2034, it said in a statement. Nebius is sometimes referred to as a neocloud and has contracts with Meta and Microsoft, among others. In May, it acquired Eigen, a US startup which improves the performance of open-source AI models for approximately $643m in cash and stock.
• Revolut CEO Nik Storonsky co-founded the VC firm QuantumLight in 2023, headed-up by CEO Ilya Kondrashov. It’s now closed its second fund at $500 million, doubling the size of its previous vehicle. It invests across AI, FinTech, SaaS, HealthTech and DeepTech, among other sectors. Instead of using humans, it uses Aleph, its proprietary AI system, to analyse potential opportunities and support investment decisions, apparently with limited human involvement, and has backed 27 companies so far. Five hit unicorn status. The portfolio includes AI infrastructure company Together AI, health platform Function Health, software company Factory, legal technology startup Robin AI, employee benefits platform Ben, and UK energy company Fuse Energy. This happened at the same time Revolut proposed increasing the amount Storonsky can borrow against his stake in Revolut fivefold to $250mn, allowing him to access more cash. Revolut’s soaring has made him one of the UK’s richest people, but most of his wealth is tied up in his shares.
Other notable stories from the week:
• Aachen-based amber raises €7 million Series A to build the infrastructure for autonomous business AI
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