Top Startup and Tech Funding News – April 16 2025

It’s Thursday, April 16, 2026, and we’re back with today’s top startup and tech funding news. Today’s rounds reflect a clear shift toward AI-native infrastructure, financial operating systems, and domain-specific platforms that move beyond surface-level automation into core workflows. From digital banking in Latin America to tax compliance for private markets and AI-driven estate planning, investors are backing systems that sit at the center of how money, data, and decisions flow.

Large late-stage financings highlight continued conviction in fintech platforms with real revenue and scale, while a wave of Series A and B rounds points to growing demand for specialized AI across software operations, customer support, and solopreneur commerce. At the same time, capital is flowing into harder tech bets—from RNA-targeted therapies to autonomous maritime systems—signaling that investors are balancing near-term software velocity with longer-term scientific and industrial upside.

Today’s deals span fintech, enterprise AI, developer infrastructure, biotech, and defense-adjacent autonomy—and together they show a market that is increasingly focused on ownership of critical systems rather than on standalone tools.

Tech Funding News

Funding Highlights

• Plata raises $405M Series C to scale digital banking across Latin America
• K1x raises $175M growth round to modernize private market tax compliance
• Slash raises $100M Series C to build AI-native business banking platform
• Wealth.com raises $65M Series B for AI-powered estate and tax planning
• STORM Therapeutics raises $56M Series C to advance RNA-targeted cancer therapy
• Expo raises $45M Series B to power mobile app development infrastructure
• Resolve AI raises $40M Series A extension for production AI operations
• Ulysses raises $38M Series A to develop autonomous maritime systems
• Nas.com raises $27M Series A for AI-powered solopreneur commerce platform
• Solidroad raises $25M Series A to automate customer support quality assurance

Investor Activity

Today’s funding rounds drew strong participation from both institutional investors and strategic backers targeting control points across finance, AI, and infrastructure. Firms like Andreessen Horowitz, Ribbit Capital, Khosla Ventures, and DST Global backed platforms shaping how businesses operate and scale, while Charles Schwab, Salesforce Ventures, and Booz Allen Ventures signaled deeper corporate interest in embedding AI and automation into core systems.

Across sectors, the pattern is consistent: capital is concentrating around companies that own critical workflows—whether in banking, tax, software operations, or healthcare—while also placing measured bets on frontier technologies with long-term strategic importance.

Large Late-Stage Funding

Plata Raises $405M Series C for Latin American Digital Banking Scale

Plata landed the day’s largest startup financing with a $405 million Series C funding round that values the company at $5 billion. The Mexico City company operates Banco Plata in Mexico and has built its own banking core, CRM, and AI-driven risk engine, giving it real control over underwriting, servicing, and product rollout rather than relying on a patchwork of third-party infrastructure.

Why this round matters is timing. Plata is moving from a fast-growing credit business into full-service digital banking, which broadens its product surface while giving it access to deposit funding as it scales. The combination of 3.5 million active credit card customers, a growing loan book, and fresh crossover capital makes this one of the strongest signals yet that Latin American fintech can still command mega-rounds when growth and operating leverage line up.

• Startup: Plata.
• Investors: Bicycle Capital led; Qatar Investment Authority, BTG Pactual, Valor Capital Group, Kora, Hedosophia, Spice Expeditions, and Audeo Ventures participated.
• Amount Raised: $405M.
• Total Raised: More than $2B company-wide, including debt and equity.
• Funding Stage: Series C.
• Funding Date: April 16, 2026.

K1x Raises $175M Growth Round for Private Market Tax Compliance Infrastructure

K1x is attacking one of the least glamorous but most painful bottlenecks in private markets: tax reporting. Its platform automates the extraction, aggregation, validation, and movement of K-1, K-3, 1099, and related tax data so accountants, fund managers, and institutional investors can stop pushing spreadsheets around and start working from a structured system of record.

The strategic case for the round is unusually clear. As alternatives move beyond pension funds and endowments into wealth channels and retail-adjacent vehicles, tax complexity rises with them. K1x says it already serves more than 40,000 organizations, including 44 of the 100 largest U.S. institutional investors and 20 of the top 25 accounting firms. That makes this less a niche software bet than a broader infrastructure play on the digitization of private market operations.

Funding Details:

• Startup: K1x.
• Investors: Sumeru Equity Partners led; Edison Partners also invested.
• Amount Raised: $175M.
• Total Raised: At least $190M in disclosed funding.
• Funding Stage: Growth.
• Funding Date: April 16, 2026.

Slash Raises $100M in Series C Funding for AI-Native Business Banking

Slash has grown from a focused fintech startup into a broader financial operating system for modern businesses. Its stack now spans business checking, cards, expense management, treasury, global payments, and stablecoin-linked capabilities, with a new AI layer designed to automate routine finance workflows directly inside the platform.

This funding matters because it reflects how investors are starting to price AI-native SMB infrastructure: not just by software features, but by throughput. Slash says it grew from $10 million to $250 million in annualized revenue within 24 months and now handles more than $30 billion in annualized payment volume. That kind of velocity helps explain why the company crossed the unicorn threshold in this round.

Funding Details:

• Startup: Slash.
• Investors: Ribbit Capital led; Khosla Ventures and Goodwater Capital co-led, with NEA and Y Combinator participating.
• Amount Raised: $100M.
• Total Raised: More than $160M.
• Funding Stage: Series C.
• Funding Date: April 16, 2026.

Wealth.com Raises $65M Series B for AI-Powered Estate and Tax Planning

 Wealth.com, a platform focused on estate and tax planning, has raised $65 million in an oversubscribed Series B round to power the AI-driven future of wealth management, as financial institutions move away from fragmented tools and manual workflows. Wealth.com is building software that turns estate planning and tax analysis from a fragmented advisory-side service into a structured, repeatable workflow within wealth management firms. Its pitch is straightforward: unify estate and tax planning in one platform, then use a domain-specific AI engine to help advisors deliver more rigorous recommendations at larger scale.

The funding matters because it signals a broader shift in advisor tech. Wealth.com says firms using its platform collectively oversee more than $15 trillion in client assets, that AI-powered workflows rose 664% year over year, and that approvals in 2025 from the three largest U.S. broker-dealers opened the door to more than 50,000 advisors. Estate planning has long been under-digitized; this round says investors increasingly view it as core wealth infrastructure rather than a peripheral toolset.

Funding Details:

• Startup: Wealth.com.
• Investors: Charles Schwab led; Titanium Ventures, Pruven Capital, The K Fund, Dynasty Financial Partners, GV, Citi Ventures, 53 Stations, Anthos Capital, and Alumni Ventures participated.
• Amount Raised: $65M.
• Total Raised: At least $95M in disclosed equity funding.
• Funding Stage: Series B.
• Funding Date: April 16, 2026.

STORM Therapeutics Raises $56M in Series C Funding for RNA-Targeted Cancer Therapy

STORM Therapeutics is one of a small group of biotech companies working on RNA-modifying enzymes as drug targets. Its lead asset, STC-15, is an oral METTL3 inhibitor designed to reprogram malignant progenitor cells, and the new financing will support the company’s Phase 2 monotherapy study in selected sarcoma indications, following the first patient dosing.

This round carries more weight than a routine clinical financing round because it ties fresh capital directly to a trial-stage transition and a potential accelerated pathway. In a market where many biotech financings remain hard to close without strong technical differentiation, STORM has assembled a syndicate of existing specialist backers willing to fund the next step in a novel epitranscriptomic approach.

Funding Details:

• Startup: STORM Therapeutics.
• Investors: M Ventures, Pfizer Ventures, Taiho Ventures, IP Group, UTokyo IPC, and Fast Track Initiative.
• Amount Raised: $56M.
• Total Raised: Not publicly disclosed in today’s announcement.
• Funding Stage: Series C.
• Funding Date: April 16, 2026.

Growth software and infrastructure

Expo Raises $45M in Series B Funding for Mobile App Development Infrastructure

Expo has become a foundational layer in the React Native ecosystem, providing developers with tooling to build, ship, update, and monitor mobile apps without stitching together a fragmented workflow across multiple vendors. The new round arrives alongside Expo Agent, which pushes the company further into AI-assisted software creation while keeping the emphasis on production-ready mobile deployment.

Why this funding matters is that Expo sits at a real control point in the software stack: millions of developers already touch its tooling, and the company says its platform powers apps used by hundreds of millions of people. As AI coding tools generate more app prototypes, the bottleneck shifts toward turning generated code into maintainable, shippable mobile products. Expo is raising against that exact transition.

Funding Details:

• Startup: Expo.
• Investors: Georgian-led; Leadout Capital, A. Capital Ventures and Red Swan Ventures participated.
• Amount Raised: $45M.
• Total Raised: More than $50M.
• Funding Stage: Series B.
• Funding Date: April 16, 2026.

Resolve AI Raises $40M in Series A Extension for Production AI Operations

Resolve AI is building AI for software operations rather than software development. Its platform is designed to investigate incidents, reason across logs, metrics, traces, and change history, and help engineering teams run production environments with less manual triage and coordination.

The extension matters because it shows investor appetite for specialized operational AI rather than generic copilots. Resolve AI says it has raised more than $190 million only 18 months after emerging from stealth and is already serving enterprise customers including Coinbase, DoorDash, MSCI, Salesforce, and Zscaler. Launching Resolve AI Labs alongside the financing also signals that the company sees model development and evaluation as strategic assets, not just features layered on top of third-party models.

Funding Details:

• Startup: Resolve AI.
• Investors: DST Global and Salesforce Ventures led the extension.
• Amount Raised: $40M.
• Total Raised: More than $190M.
• Funding Stage: Series A Extension.
• Funding Date: April 16, 2026.

Ulysses Raises $38M in Series A Funding for Autonomous Maritime Systems

Ulysses is developing autonomous surface and underwater vehicles for work in challenging ocean environments, spanning habitat restoration, subsea inspection, environmental monitoring, and defense applications. Today’s announcement brought a new $38 million Series A into view and disclosed an earlier $8 million seed round, bringing total announced funding to $46 million.

This is strategically important because maritime autonomy is shifting from experimental robotics to a national-security and industrial-capability race. Ulysses now counts Andreessen Horowitz’s American Dynamism fund among its lead backers, with Booz Allen Ventures joining the Series A as part of a deeper push into defense-adjacent autonomy. That combination of climate, industrial, and defense applications gives the company a broader market entry than many single-use maritime robotics startups.

Funding Details:

• Startup: Ulysses.
• Investors: Andreessen Horowitz led the Series A; Booz Allen Ventures and Harpoon Ventures participated. Earlier seed backing came from Pebblebed, Genius Ventures, Lowercarbon Capital, Superorganism, and ReGen Ventures.
• Amount Raised: $38M Series A.
• Total Raised: $46M announced to date.
• Funding Stage: Series A.
• Funding Date: April 16, 2026.

Specialized platforms and enterprise AI

Nas.com Raises $27M in Series A Funding for AI-Powered Solopreneur Commerce

Nas.com is positioning itself as a full-stack operating system for solo business creation. The platform combines storefront generation, digital and physical product setup, marketing creation, advertising support, customer-acquisition tooling, and payments into a single AI-assisted workflow for people who want to launch a business without learning a conventional software stack.

The reason this round stands out is less the headline amount than the thesis underneath it. Nas.com says it has 3.5 million members across more than 150 countries, 20,000 paying business owners, and fivefold revenue growth in 2025. That puts it squarely in the middle of one of the more investable narratives of 2026: AI tools that collapse the functional distance between an individual operator and a small company.

Funding Details:

• Startup: Nas.com.
• Investors: Khosla Ventures led; 500 Global, Shuo Wang, Stanley Tang, Scott Adelson, and Tim Ferriss participated.
• Amount Raised: $27M.
• Total Raised: Not publicly disclosed in today’s announcement.
• Funding Stage: Series A.
• Funding Date: April 16, 2026.

Solidroad Raises $25M in Series A Funding for Customer Support Quality Automation

Solidroad sells into an increasingly urgent problem inside customer operations: companies have deployed AI to support far faster than they have developed systems to audit quality across human and AI conversations at scale. Its software reviews every interaction, identifies risk and coaching gaps, and feeds those insights back into support teams in real time.

The funding matters because quality assurance is becoming a board-level issue as support automation expands. Reviewing two or three percent of conversations no longer works when AI agents can produce thousands of low-quality interactions before a team catches them. Solidroad is betting that QA will become a systems layer rather than a sampling workflow, and investors appear to agree.

Funding Details:

• Startup: Solidroad.
• Investors: Hedosophia led; First Round Capital, Y Combinator, and Sony Innovation Fund participated.
• Amount Raised: $25M.
• Total Raised: $33M.
• Funding Stage: Series A.
• Funding Date: April 16, 2026.

Tech Funding Summary Table

Market read

Today’s list shows a clear funding pattern: investors are paying up for software that sits directly in the operating path of money movement, production systems, or developer workflows. Plata, K1x, Slash, and Wealth.com all target financial infrastructure or planning; Resolve AI, Expo, and Solidroad go after operational bottlenecks created by AI adoption; and Ulysses and STORM show that deep-tech and biotech still attract capital when the technical wedge is strong and the next milestone is concrete.

Just as notable, most of the biggest rounds were not generic AI bets. They were vertical-systems bets: bank infrastructure, private-market tax reporting, estate planning, mobile app deployment, production reliability, and customer-support QA. That is an important signal for the rest of 2026. Capital is still flowing aggressively, but it is flowing toward companies that can demonstrate that AI translates into a workflow advantage with measurable consequences for revenue, compliance, reliability, or deployment speed.