Profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/neil-zeghidour-a838aaa7/
10 large seed rounds from the past week
Gradium ($100M seed): Paris voice-AI lab spun out of the Kyutai research lab, building ultra-low-latency text-to-speech, speech-to-text and speech-to-speech translation for edge devices; the seed passed $100M and the team ships a new voice model roughly monthly. Founders: Neil Zeghidour, Alexandre Défossez, Olivier Teboul, Laurent Mazare.
Skapion ($36M seed): DC-based, Israel-R&D defense startup building the first "native counter-swarm" system to down mass drone attacks at low cost; the founding team comes from Israel's Iron Dome and David's Sling programs. Founders: Ido Bar-On, Brig.Gen.(Res.) Pini Yungman.
Arkenstone Defense ($35M seed): Menlo Park startup out of stealth with a "GovCon back office" bundling compliance, HR, payroll, security and contracting so tech companies can sell to the Pentagon without years of setup. Founders: Peter R Dixon, William Treseder, Rachel Olney.
Velocity ($27M seed): Israeli startup building an AI-native monetization layer that places intent-based ads inside AI conversations, already powering millions of AI interactions daily. Founders: Tal Shoham, Amir Shaked, Nimrod Zuta.
QIZ Security ($17M seed): New York post-quantum cryptography platform that helps enterprises discover and remediate the crypto assets protecting their systems before "Q-Day." Founder: Ben Volkow.
Marker ($13M seed): London AI writing startup building a "reimagined word processor" as a deliberate antidote to AI slop, designed to support writers across ideation, drafting, revision and collaboration. Founders: Jon Steinback, Ryan Bowman.
geoSurge ($12M seed): London "corpus engineering" platform that shapes how generative AI models learn and represent brands, effectively SEO for the LLM era. Founders: Francisco V. and Jons Mostovojs.
Polysense ($11M seed): Belgian startup using computer vision to automate in-line quality control for food manufacturers, live with Agristo and Poppies Bakeries. Founder: Yarne De Munck.
Katalyze AI ($10.5M seed): Agentic operating system that unifies production data for pharmaceutical companies and runs domain-trained agents on top of it. Founders: Reza Farahani, Shreyas Becker
Worldmodeldata ($9M seed): UK startup that builds and licenses structured, video-game-generated training data for AI "world models." Founder: Rhea Loucas.
Gradium ($100M seed): Paris voice-AI lab spun out of the Kyutai research lab, building ultra-low-latency text-to-speech, speech-to-text and speech-to-speech translation for edge devices; the seed passed $100M and the team ships a new voice model roughly monthly. Founders: Neil Zeghidour, Alexandre Défossez, Olivier Teboul, Laurent Mazare.
Skapion ($36M seed): DC-based, Israel-R&D defense startup building the first "native counter-swarm" system to down mass drone attacks at low cost; the founding team comes from Israel's Iron Dome and David's Sling programs. Founders: Ido Bar-On, Brig.Gen.(Res.) Pini Yungman.
Arkenstone Defense ($35M seed): Menlo Park startup out of stealth with a "GovCon back office" bundling compliance, HR, payroll, security and contracting so tech companies can sell to the Pentagon without years of setup. Founders: Peter R Dixon, William Treseder, Rachel Olney.
Velocity ($27M seed): Israeli startup building an AI-native monetization layer that places intent-based ads inside AI conversations, already powering millions of AI interactions daily. Founders: Tal Shoham, Amir Shaked, Nimrod Zuta.
QIZ Security ($17M seed): New York post-quantum cryptography platform that helps enterprises discover and remediate the crypto assets protecting their systems before "Q-Day." Founder: Ben Volkow.
Marker ($13M seed): London AI writing startup building a "reimagined word processor" as a deliberate antidote to AI slop, designed to support writers across ideation, drafting, revision and collaboration. Founders: Jon Steinback, Ryan Bowman.
geoSurge ($12M seed): London "corpus engineering" platform that shapes how generative AI models learn and represent brands, effectively SEO for the LLM era. Founders: Francisco V. and Jons Mostovojs.
Polysense ($11M seed): Belgian startup using computer vision to automate in-line quality control for food manufacturers, live with Agristo and Poppies Bakeries. Founder: Yarne De Munck.
Katalyze AI ($10.5M seed): Agentic operating system that unifies production data for pharmaceutical companies and runs domain-trained agents on top of it. Founders: Reza Farahani, Shreyas Becker
Worldmodeldata ($9M seed): UK startup that builds and licenses structured, video-game-generated training data for AI "world models." Founder: Rhea Loucas.