Seed Watch: AI, Healthtech, and Fintech Startups Lead the Way

Author

Ofodile Iloanya
March 07, 2025

Welcome to our weekly edition of Seed Watch, a segment of Market Insyte Digest focused on sharing some of the latest and most intriguing Pre-seed & Seed funding news grabbing the headlines in the startup world.

This week’s leading startups are solving significant issues in the fintech, healthtech, and AI arenas. Below is an overview of the top 3 deals that grabbed the headlines this week.

  • Startup Name: TRIMTECH Therapeutics

  • Industry: Healthtech

  • Region: United Kingdom

  • Amount (USD): $31 million

  • The problem it is solving: Lack of Effective Treatments for Neurodegenerative Diseases: Conditions like Alzheimer’s and Huntington’s disease have limited treatment options and no cures. Challenge in Removing Protein Aggregates: Current targeted protein degradation (TPD) approaches struggle to clear harmful protein aggregates, which are key drivers of neurodegeneration. Inefficiency of Traditional Drug Discovery: Many treatments focus on symptom management rather than targeting the root cause of disease progression.

  • What the Funds Will Be Spent On: Advancing TRIMTAC Drug Pipeline for treating severe neurodegenerative and inflammatory disorders. Preclinical and Clinical Development to bring promising drug candidates closer to human trials. Expanding Scientific Research into TRIM21’s potential across multiple CNS diseases.

  • Startup Name: Helios Global Payments Solutions

  • Industry: FinTech

  • Region: USA

  • Amount (USD): $15.5 million

  • The problem it is solving: Complexity of Managing a Global Workforce: Companies face challenges in hiring, paying, and managing employees across multiple countries due to varying labor laws, tax regulations, and compliance requirements. Inefficiencies in Traditional Payroll and HR Systems: Many businesses rely on fragmented, manual processes that lead to compliance risks, administrative burdens, and operational inefficiencies. Lack of Seamless, AI-Driven Workforce Management Solutions: Organizations need an all-in-one, automated platform that simplifies HR, payroll, and compliance management.

  • What the Funds Will Be Spent On: Global Expansion as Helios rolls out its platform in 125+ countries. Further Development of AI and Automation Tools for workforce management, payroll, and compliance. Strategic Partnerships and Integrations to enhance the platform’s capabilities. Scaling Customer Acquisition and Market Reach in new regions.

  • Startup Name: Ceramic

  • Industry: AI

  • Region: USA

  • Amount (USD): $12 million

  • The problem it is solving: Enterprise AI Model Training is Expensive & Complex: Companies need powerful foundation models, but training and fine-tuning them is costly, resource-intensive, and time-consuming. Scalability Challenges: Many enterprises struggle to efficiently scale AI model training across various infrastructure setups. Limited Flexibility in Model Training: Most existing AI training tools have fixed constraints on context length and cluster size, limiting adaptability for enterprise use cases.

  • What the Funds Will Be Spent On: Product Development – Enhancing the AI model training platform. Enterprise Customer Expansion – Growing the client base by targeting businesses looking to train and fine-tune generative AI models.