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.
Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati finally closed her startup’s seed round, raising an eye-watering $2 billion. Following its $10 billion valuation, Thinking Machines Lab aims to disrupt the AI industry. Find out more about the other top deals from this week below.
Startup Name: Thinking Machines Lab
Industry: Artificial Intelligence
Region: United States
Amount (USD): $2 billion
The problem it is solving: Thinking Machines Lab aims to build a next-generation AI platform that facilitates more collaborative human-AI interaction. By leveraging top AI talent and focusing on general-purpose models, it seeks to create AI systems that better understand, align with, and assist humans in diverse contexts, addressing limitations in current AI-human collaboration and alignment.
What the Funds Will Be Spent On: The funding will be used to scale the company’s engineering and research teams, build out its collaborative AI platform, and develop cutting-edge AI models. A significant portion will likely go toward computing infrastructure and talent acquisition, especially as they compete at the frontier of general-purpose AI development.
Startup Name: Snowcap Compute
Industry: Computing
Region: United States
Amount (USD): $23 million
The problem it is solving: Snowcap Compute is addressing the growing energy and performance bottlenecks in AI and high-performance computing by developing superconducting chips. Traditional chips based on CMOS technology are reaching their physical limits in power efficiency and speed. Snowcap aims to overcome these limitations with a new architecture that dramatically boosts performance per watt, even accounting for cooling.
What the Funds Will Be Spent On: The funds will support the development of Snowcap’s superconducting AI chips, including R&D, prototyping, and initial fabrication using niobium titanium nitride. The company plans to deliver its first basic chip by the end of 2026 and likely use funding to expand its team, refine its architecture, and prepare for eventual commercialisation.
Startup Name: Portal Space Systems
Industry: Space Technology
Region: United States
Amount (USD): $17.5 million
The problem it is solving: The current space industry lacks spacecraft capable of high-speed, flexible, and cost-effective manoeuvrability across multiple orbits, especially in contested, congested, or defence-critical environments. Traditional propulsion systems are limited by performance, cost, and safety constraints. Portal Space Systems addresses these challenges with its Supernova spacecraft, which uses solar thermal propulsion to achieve nuclear-level performance without the regulatory burden or risks of operating a fission reactor in space.
What the Funds Will Be Spent On: The seed funding will support the critical design review of Supernova, propulsion system testing, system integration, and the launch of a full-scale demonstration mission scheduled for mid-2026. It will also help Portal scale production to build a fleet of spacecraft for commercial, defense, and scientific applications.