Startups
Coverage of Asia's most promising AI and tech startups.
Travis Kalanick's Atoms Eyes Robotaxis — With Uber's $100 Million and His Old AV Team
Fresh off a $1.7 billion a16z-led round, the Uber co-founder's 'physical AI' startup is reuniting veterans of Uber's autonomous vehicle program and holding early talks to put its technology on Uber's network.
Fluidstack Closes $1.5 Billion Led by Jane Street — Revenue Up From $1.8M to a Projected $660M, While Owning Zero Chips
The AI cloud that aggregates other people's GPUs raised one of the week's largest rounds, riding its $50 billion Anthropic infrastructure pact into hyperscale — an asset-light bet in an increasingly asset-heavy race.
Gimlet Labs Raises $300M at $3B Valuation to Build the First Multi-Silicon Inference Cloud
Andreessen Horowitz leads the Series B for a company that decomposes AI models across GPUs, CPUs, near-memory compute and dataflow chips — with Arm and Microsoft's M12 betting inference is about to escape the GPU.
Asia's Startup Funding Hits a Multiyear Peak — and AI Is Taking More Than 60 Cents of Every Dollar
Investors poured $42.8 billion into Asian startups in Q2, with AI companies capturing over $26 billion. Southeast Asia's native AI funding has doubled to $4.1 billion — but one deal accounts for most of it.
Crusoe Closes $3 Billion Round at a $30 Billion Valuation, Tripling in Ten Months
The AI infrastructure builder confirms the mega-round first reported in July — co-led by Atreides and Valor with Abu Dhabi's Mubadala participating — on the heels of a $13 billion GPU cloud contract with Jane Street.
Qualcomm Backs India's Ultrahuman in $70M Round to Turn Smart Rings Into Computers
The Bengaluru wearables maker hits a $365 million valuation — triple its 2023 mark — as it builds a Qualcomm-powered ring that runs apps on-device and targets a $200 million revenue run rate by January 2027.
CORE Biomedicine Raises $21M Across Boston, Tokyo and Suzhou for AI-Guided Precision Oncology
The cross-border biotech — co-led by UTokyo's innovation fund and backed by an AMED grant and an Eisai licensing deal — is targeting the biological pathways that define cancer cell identity, not just its genome.
Fish Audio Reels In $52M Seed a Year After Starting in a Bedroom — With $21M ARR and 8M Users
The voice-AI startup, founded by a former Nvidia researcher and lifelong VTuber, already powers OpenAI, HeyGen and LiveKit — and can clone a voice from five seconds of audio in roughly fifteen.
LimX Dynamics Raises $200M at $2.2B Valuation to Push Humanoid Autonomy Past the Demo
The Shenzhen robotics maker's raise — one of the largest in China's humanoid wave — targets the hard part everyone's demo videos skip: autonomous execution of complex, unscripted tasks.
Paper Raises $34M Series A From Accel and ICONIQ to Build Design Tools for the Agent Era
The design platform startup, which grew ARR 25x after launching its desktop app, is betting that AI coding agents need a design canvas as much as human engineers do.
China's PsiBot Nears $100M Round at $1.48B Valuation as Chery Bets on Embodied AI
The Beijing world-model startup is finalizing funding led by carmaker Chery Automobile, becoming one of more than twenty Chinese embodied AI companies to cross the unicorn line in 2026.
Singapore's Ropedia Raises $30M to Build the Data Layer for Physical AI
The NTU-linked startup has closed a $30 million pre-Series A to scale its wearable-powered data platform, betting that robots need real-world experience — not internet video — to learn manipulation.