Top Startup and Tech Funding News – May 13, 2025

It’s Wednesday, May 13, 2026, and we’re back with today’s top startup and tech funding news. Today’s rounds are led by Anduril’s massive $5 billion Series H, a deal that reinforces defense tech as one of the hottest categories in venture capital. Beyond defense, investors are also placing big bets on AI inference hardware, AI-powered access to medicine, indoor smart farming, natural hydrogen, pharma commercialization, chronic care, insurance workflows, AI home management, and mission-critical software modernization.

The spread of today’s deals shows how capital is moving toward startups solving real infrastructure problems across physical and digital markets. Fractile is tackling the AI inference bottleneck, Forus is going after prescription access, Oishii is scaling smart farms, and Mantle8 is betting on natural hydrogen as a new energy source. Smaller but strategically important rounds from BranchLab, 9amHealth, Outmarket AI, Hint, and DesignVerse point to the same theme: AI is moving deeper into regulated, operationally complex sectors where software can cut costs, improve speed, and unlock new market capacity.

Tech Funding News

Funding Highlights

Anduril raises $5B Series H for autonomous defense systems
Fractile raises $220M Series B for AI inference hardware
Forus raises $160M Series B for AI-powered medicine access
Oishii raises $150M Series C for indoor smart farm expansion
Mantle8 raises €31M Series A for natural hydrogen exploration
BranchLab raises $26M Series A for AI-powered pharma commercialization
9amHealth raises $26M Series B for chronic care expansion
Outmarket AI raises $17M Series A for insurance intelligence workflows
Hint raises $10M Seed for AI home management
DesignVerse raises $5.5M Seed for mission-critical software modernization

Investor Activity

Today’s funding activity drew a mix of top-tier venture firms, strategic investors, and sector-focused backers. Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz led Anduril’s $5 billion defense tech round, while Accel, Founders Fund, Factorial Funds, and Conviction backed Fractile’s AI inference hardware push. Healthcare and life sciences investors showed up across Forus, BranchLab, and 9amHealth, with General Catalyst, Accel, McKesson Ventures, Sanofi Ventures, Define Ventures, and Catalio Capital Management participating. Climate and infrastructure investors, including Breakthrough Energy Ventures and Bpifrance, backed Mantle8’s natural hydrogen platform, while insurance, home management, and enterprise software rounds showed continued investor appetite for AI tools built around specific industry workflows.

Anduril Raises $5B Series H for Autonomous Defense Systems

Anduril has raised $5 billion in fresh funding, pushing its valuation to $61 billion and cementing its place as one of the most valuable private defense technology companies in the world. The round, led by Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, comes as the startup expands its work across drones, surveillance systems, AI-enabled command software, and battlefield autonomy.

The raise reflects a broader shift in venture capital. Defense tech is no longer a fringe category for Silicon Valley. With global military tensions rising, investors are backing companies that can move faster than traditional contractors. Anduril’s $20 billion U.S. Army deal around its Lattice AI command-and-control platform gives the company a stronger case that software-first defense startups can compete for major government programs.

Anduril builds autonomous systems, AI software, sensors, and networked defense platforms for U.S. and allied military missions. The new capital infusion gives it fresh room to scale manufacturing and R&D as defense buyers shift toward software-defined systems and autonomous hardware.

This round stands out because it is not just another oversized defense check. It cements Anduril as the category’s capital leader at a moment when the company says 2025 revenue doubled to $2.2 billion and its software and platform bets are translating into major military programs. That combination of scale, traction, and timing makes this one of the day’s most consequential deals.

Funding Details:

• Startup: Anduril.
• Investors: Thrive Capital and Andreessen Horowitz.
• Amount Raised: $5B.
• Total Raised: $11.4B.
• Funding Stage: Series H.
• Funding Date: May 13, 2026.

Fractile Raises $220M Series B for AI Inference Hardware

Fractile is building chips and systems designed for AI inference, the part of the AI stack that turns trained models into live responses. Its thesis is straightforward: frontier models are becoming constrained less by training and more by the time and cost required to generate long, useful outputs at scale. The company says the new capital will push its hardware into customers’ hands faster.

Why this round matters is simple. Inference has become the revenue engine of the AI market, and latency is turning into a strategic bottleneck for reasoning-heavy workloads. Fractile’s raise signals that investors are now treating inference infrastructure as a frontier category of its own, not just a downstream extension of model training.

Funding Details:

• Startup: Fractile.
• Investors: Accel, Factorial Funds, Founders Fund, Conviction, Gigascale, O1A, Felicis, Buckley Ventures, and 8VC.
• Amount Raised: $220M.
• Total Raised: Approx. $237.5M.
• Funding Stage: Series B.
• Funding Date: May 13, 2026.

Forus Raises $160M Series B for AI-Powered Medicine Access

Forus is building an AI-powered network that connects doctors, pharmacies, payers, and biopharma companies so patients can get from prescription to treatment faster. Its platform is already used by providers across all 50 states and supports millions of patients each year.

The strategic importance here goes beyond a big healthtech raise. Forus is attacking one of the least glamorous but most expensive chokepoints in healthcare: the operational mess between the clinical decision and the patient actually starting therapy. The company has already reached a $1 billion valuation, serves thousands of practices, and expects more than $50 million in annualized revenue this year, which makes this one of the strongest signals in healthcare infrastructure today.

Funding Details:

• Startup: Forus.
• Investors: Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Bain Capital Ventures, Redpoint, BoxGroup, and Pear VC.
• Amount Raised: $160M.
• Total Raised: Over $160M.
• Funding Stage: Series B.
• Funding Date: May 12, 2026.

Oishii Raises $150M Series C for Indoor Smart Farm Expansion

Oishii operates indoor smart farms that combine robotics, automation, and controlled-environment agriculture with Japanese growing techniques. The company says the first closing of its Series C will help it expand production, deepen robotics integration, grow farm infrastructure, and keep building across the U.S. and Japan.

This is one of the day’s most interesting non-software rounds because it shows where deep tech and food systems are converging. Oishii is not selling a lifestyle story alone; it is funding a tightly engineered production model that treats agriculture as a systems problem. At $370 million raised since launch, it is becoming one of the clearer institutional bets on tech-enabled indoor farming.

Funding Details:

• Startup: Oishii.
• Investors: SPARX Asset Management, Nomura Real Estate Development, MISUMI Group, Mizuho Bank, and others.
• Amount Raised: $150M.
• Total Raised: $370M.
• Funding Stage: Series C.
• Funding Date: May 13, 2026.

Mantle8 Raises €31M Series A for Natural Hydrogen Exploration

Mantle8 is developing exploration and subsurface modeling technology to find commercially viable natural hydrogen deposits. The company combines geology, geophysics, and geochemistry into predictive models and imaging tools to identify underground hydrogen-generating systems.

The funding matters because natural hydrogen has moved from scientific curiosity toward a real climate-tech infrastructure bet. Mantle8 plans to use the money for a global exploration and drilling campaign targeting high-purity reserves, and the company’s backers are effectively wagering that a scalable, geologic hydrogen supply could redraw the economics of low-carbon fuel.

Funding Details:

• Startup: Mantle8.
• Investors: Sandwater, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Bpifrance’s Ecotechnologies 2 fund, IP Group, Wind Capital, and Calderion.
• Amount Raised: €31M.
• Total Raised: €37M.
• Funding Stage: Series A.
• Funding Date: May 13, 2026.

BranchLab Raises $26M Series A for AI-Powered Pharma Commercialization

BranchLab has raised a $26 million Series A round led by McKesson Ventures to transform pharma commercialization with privacy-first AI. The financing included participation from FCA Venture Partners, Sanofi Ventures, and AIX Ventures, bringing the company’s total funding to $35 million.

BranchLab is building an AI platform for pharmaceutical commercialization that covers workflows such as patient identification, audience segmentation, activation, and real-world measurement. Its pitch is that pharma launch execution is still too fragmented, too manual, and too slow for modern therapy markets.

This raise stands out because it targets a layer of healthcare infrastructure that usually gets less attention than drug discovery but directly shapes whether therapies actually reach the right patients. With McKesson Ventures leading and Sanofi Ventures participating, BranchLab is securing support from investors who sit close to the industry’s commercial plumbing.

Funding Details:

• Startup: BranchLab.
• Investors: McKesson Ventures, FCA Venture Partners, Sanofi Ventures, and AIX Ventures.
• Amount Raised: $26M.
• Total Raised: $35M.
• Funding Stage: Series A.
• Funding Date: May 13, 2026.

9amHealth Raises $26M Series B for Chronic Care Expansion

9amHealth runs an AI-enabled virtual specialty care platform for high-cost chronic conditions. It already supports obesity, diabetes, hypertension, and dyslipidemia with clinicians, at-home lab testing, medication management, and digital care workflows.

The bigger story is where the company is pushing next. 9amHealth says it is expanding beyond cardiometabolic care into the chronic conditions that account for the majority of employer pharmacy spend. That gives this round more weight than a standard telehealth story: it is really a bet on AI-assisted operating leverage in one of the most expensive corners of employer healthcare.

• Startup: 9amHealth.
• Investors: Define Ventures, SemperVirens VC, Catalio Capital Management, and NewHealth Ventures.
• Amount Raised: $26M.
• Total Raised: Approx. $56M.
• Funding Stage: Series B.
• Funding Date: May 13, 2026.

Outmarket AI Raises $17M Series A for Insurance Intelligence Workflows

Outmarket AI develops an AI platform built specifically for insurance brokerages, with products spanning commercial, benefits, personal lines, and specialty insurance workflows. The company says the new funding will accelerate product development and expand its footprint across the industry.

This is a strong signal from a stubbornly under-digitized market. Insurance distribution still runs on fragmented systems, manual processing, and relationship-heavy workflows. Outmarket is positioning itself as a workflow layer for brokerages that want intelligence, automation, and better operating speed without rebuilding the entire stack.

Funding Details:

• Startup: Outmarket AI.
• Investors: Permanent Capital Ventures, SignalFire, Fika Ventures, TTV Capital, and Dash Fund.
• Amount Raised: $17M.
• Total Raised: $21.7M.
• Funding Stage: Series A.
• Funding Date: May 13, 2026.

Hint Raises $10M Seed for AI Home Management

Hint is building an AI home management platform that starts with a home address and then layers in property data, weather, soil, air quality, listings, inspection reports, warranties, insurance policies, and utility bills to proactively flag maintenance and cost issues. In plain English, it wants to turn homeownership into a continuously managed system rather than a reactive headache.

Why it matters: This is a cleaner and more ambitious version of the “home services marketplace” thesis. Instead of selling labor first, Hint is trying to own the intelligence layer that decides what a homeowner should actually do, when, and why. That keeps the company squarely in the current wave of AI agents that are moving from chat to real-world operational tasks.

Funding Details:

• Startup: Hint.
• Investors: Slow Ventures, Montauk Capital, Tusk Venture Partners, Amplo, Energy Impact Partners, Hannah Grey, and Brian Kelly.
• Amount Raised: $10M.
• Total Raised: $10M disclosed.
• Funding Stage: Seed.
• Funding Date: May 13, 2026.

DesignVerse Raises $5.5M Seed for Mission-Critical Software Modernization

DesignVerse builds AI software that uses an organization’s own documentation and internal rules to generate and deliver complex enterprise software. The platform is designed for environments where reliability, auditability, and architectural consistency matter more than quick prototypes.

That positioning gives the startup more substance than a generic devtools pitch. DesignVerse says it has already helped modernize mission-critical aviation systems used by EUROCONTROL, including overhauling a 15-year-old application in just over a month rather than the roughly six months conventional methods would have required. In regulated industries, that kind of time compression is a serious wedge.

Funding Details:

• Startup: DesignVerse.
• Investors: Begin Capital, Gapminder VC, Underline Ventures, and strategic angel investors from Adobe, LSEG, UiPath, and others.
• Amount Raised: $5.5M.
• Total Raised: $6.35M.
• Funding Stage: Seed.
• Funding Date: May 12, 2026.

Tech Funding Summary Table

What Today’s Funding Says About the Market

Today’s biggest checks clustered around defense, AI infrastructure, and healthcare operations. Anduril dominated the day on size and strategic importance, while Fractile and Oishii showed investors are still willing to back capital-intensive hardware and automation platforms when they see long-term infrastructure potential. Forus reinforced another emerging theme: some of AI’s biggest commercial opportunities now lie within expensive operational bottlenecks rather than in consumer-facing apps.

Another trend stood out across today’s rounds: AI is moving deeper into regulated industries and real-world operational systems. BranchLab is targeting pharma commercialization, 9amHealth is expanding into employer-driven chronic care, Outmarket AI is modernizing insurance workflows, and DesignVerse is compressing modernization timelines for mission-critical enterprise software. Together, the deals point to a broader shift from AI experimentation toward deployment inside industries where speed, compliance, and execution directly affect revenue and operating costs.