Startup Bios

Hone, a five-month-old startup, just raised a $60 million seed led by Benchmark and Index Ventures to build AI "Engines": agents you hand a business goal, not a task, and that work on it for weeks or months. Here's how Engines are supposed to onboard themselves, why Hone replays every change against the past before it goes live, who's behind it, and why owning an outcome is such a hard problem.

Ghost, a startup run by a 19-year-old CEO, just came out of stealth with an $11 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. Its product, Core, is a $3,499 screenless computer that runs your personal AI agents at home, with the models, memory and your data kept on the device. Here's what's inside the box, what the privacy fine print actually says, and how it stacks up against the Mac Mini, Apple and the big AI labs.

Mithrl, the San Francisco startup behind a Scientific Decision Engine for drug discovery, just raised a $20 million Series A led by Obvious Ventures. Co-founder Vivek Adarsh came out of NVIDIA's CUDA compiler team, and his pitch is triage: AI has made drug hypotheses cheap, lab experiments are still expensive, so Mithrl's biomedical world model helps decide which ideas are worth testing. Here's how it works, who it's up against, and why patents are the number Adarsh cares about most.

HIFI, the New York startup wiring bank rails, stablecoins and Wall Street's tokenized securities into one API, just raised a $37 million Series A led by Left Lane Capital. The company says it moves more than $7 billion a year, counts Sumitomo as a customer, and was in DTCC's tokenized production trades alongside BlackRock and Goldman. Here's how it works, who it's up against, from Stripe's Bridge to Circle, and the risks worth watching.

Chamelio, an Israeli legal AI startup, just raised a $26 million Series A led by Entrée Capital, eight months after its $10 million seed. Instead of just storing contracts like traditional CLM software, Chamelio's platform drafts, reviews and negotiates them for in-house legal teams, with lawyers kept in the loop where the company wants oversight. Here's who's behind it, how it works, and whether it can take on Ironclad, Icertis and the AI-native crowd.

Ando came out of stealth with $20 million from Accel, Index Ventures and Emergence to build a team messaging app where AI agents are actual members of the team, not bots you have to copy and paste into. Sara Du, the second-time founder behind Alloy Automation, wants to kill the “meat proxy” problem. But can a new chat app really pull teams off Slack?

Maven Robotics came out of stealth with a $100 million Series A led by RoboStrategy to put wheeled, two-armed robots to work building pallets in warehouses. Two brothers, an Apple car team, one unnamed customer won with a cartoon robot, and a bet that “deep, then wide” beats the humanoid demo reel.