November
| 11/29 Find Your Grind Zinit Strataphy Parallax Worlds SportAI | 11/22 Pype AI Thimblerr Redrob Barker Ecostitch Labs | 11/16 Sonscription GreenFi Nolt | 11/9 Fit Collective Cactus MeshDefend Allie AI Digs | 11/2 Helix AccessGrids Polygraf AI LuLa Commerce Grasp |
11/29/25
Across the late-November tape, the loudest headlines went to mega-rounds in nuclear, drones, and AI infrastructure—but under the surface, a different signal was flashing. Smaller, highly targeted checks flowed into startups re-wiring how people work, how data centers stay cool, how robots are trained, and how sports and youth culture get quantified. In other words: the “up to $10M” zone is where tomorrow’s cultural infrastructure is quietly being built.
Below are five standouts that fit the Coolture lens—spanning Los Angeles edtech, Gulf climate infra, Dubai AI procurement, San Francisco robotics, and Oslo sports AI.
Find Your Grind, the Gen Z career-exploration platform founded by musician and entrepreneur Nick Gross, raised a $5M Series A led by Echo Investment Capital, with additional backing from Gross’s own family office, Gross Labs. The round brings total funding to $8M and lands squarely in Coolture territory: an LA-born platform that treats identity, lifestyle and creative ambition as the starting point for work—not an afterthought.
Instead of pushing students down the old “doctor / lawyer / engineer” funnel, Find Your Grind helps them map to non-traditional paths—from content creator and esports pro to media-tech and design roles—using assessments, video mentorship and an AI “Reflective Coach.” With 100,000+ students already on the platform and global research pointing to tens of millions of jobs disappearing by 2030, the company is positioning itself as cultural infrastructure for a workforce that values self-expression as much as salary.
From a Coolture lens, Find Your Grind is building an API between youth culture and the labor market. Celebrity mentors like Tony Hawk and will.i.am aren’t just marketing gloss; they signal to students that the creative and “alternative” lives they see online are economically real—and navigable through structured programs, not just luck. The platform’s focus on identity, values and lifestyle feels much closer to fashion and music fandom than to traditional guidance counseling, which is exactly why it resonates.
Zinit, a Dubai-based startup, quietly raised an $8M seed round at a $48M valuation, led by AltaIR Capital with participation from Dubai Venture Capital (DVC). The company builds an AI-driven procurement and sourcing platform that automates supplier discovery, RFP workflows and negotiations for large enterprises. Already serving 100+ enterprise customers, including divisions of Bacardi, BlackBerry and United Colors of Benetton, Zinit is proof that applied AI in “unsexy” back-office functions is now a global race.
Where older procurement systems were essentially glorified document repositories, Zinit inserts autonomous negotiation engines into the sourcing process and orchestrates multi-round supplier conversations with minimal IT integration. For corporates trying to enforce ESG targets and cost discipline across complex supply chains, taking friction and opacity out of sourcing is no longer a nice-to-have; it’s survival.
Coolturally, Zinit sits at the intersection of AI, luxury, and global retail logistics. When your customers include fashion and consumer brands that live and die on inventory turns and margin, the procurement stack quietly shapes what ends up on shelves and in feeds. Automating that layer with AI doesn’t just save time—it potentially re-allocates spend toward more sustainable materials, diverse suppliers, and faster trend response. It is a reminder that the next wave of fashion and consumer innovation isn’t only happening on the runway or in the storefront; it’s happening deep in B2B workflows.
Strataphy, based in Dammam, Saudi Arabia, raised a $6M seed round led by Outliers VC and Shorooq Partners, with Plus VC participating, to scale its geothermal cooling systems for data centers and mega-projects. Its proprietary “PrimeLoop” technology taps deep underground temperatures to cool massive infrastructure far more efficiently than traditional HVAC. The target customer set is blunt: hyperscale data centers, industrial megaprojects, and even entire smart cities across the Middle East and beyond.
With AI workloads sending data-center power demand into the stratosphere, cooling is increasingly the choke point. Strataphy is pitching not just incremental efficiency, but a re-platforming of how we manage thermal loads at scale—critical in hot climates where traditional cooling is both expensive and carbon-intensive. The round positions Strataphy as one of the more interesting climate-infrastructure plays under $10M this month.
From a Coolture perspective, Strataphy is part of a deeper storyline: the aesthetics and culture of AI depend on invisible climate tech. If Strataphy proves its PrimeLoop systems can reliably cool at scale, it becomes an enabling layer for low-carbon AI culture: greener data centers powering everything from streaming and gaming to AI-driven design and retail. It’s also a signal that Gulf capital and founders aren’t just deploying cash into global climate deals—they’re building home-grown climate infra that could export to Europe, Asia and North America.
San Francisco-based Parallax Worlds raised a combined $4.9M across its pre-seed and seed rounds, with the most recent $4M seed led by Pear VC, joined by GS Futures, Kakao Ventures, Lightscape Partners and a roster of robotics-friendly angels. Earlier backers include Unusual Ventures, Conviction, Spacecadet Ventures and Boost VC. The startup builds hyper-realistic factory “digital twins” from simple video capture, letting robotics teams test thousands of scenarios in simulation before ever touching a physical line.
Instead of manually scripting environments, engineering teams can turn existing footage of warehouses or factories into simulation spaces, then stress-test robots against edge cases that would be dangerous, slow, or impossible to stage in real life. In a world where industrial automation is accelerating but reliability is non-negotiable, Parallax is selling faster iteration, fewer crashes, and better safety margins.
Robotics and simulation might sound far from coolture, but Parallax is building the render engine for physical commerce. The same techniques that make game engines and VFX look believable are now being pointed at pallets, conveyors and articulated robot arms. That matters because the way goods move—from fashion inventory and sneakers to electronics and food—will increasingly be choreographed in simulated worlds before any human steps onto the floor. It is a preview of a coming convergence: the tools used to create immersive digital experiences will also design our physical logistics.
SportAI, based in Oslo, secured $3M in funding from Altitude Capital and a group of notable angels, including tech investor Endre Holen, former U.S. men’s national team player Alejandro Bedoya, veteran VC Trond Riiber Knudsen, and tennis star Casper Ruud. The company uses computer vision and machine learning to analyze match footage and deliver pro-grade performance insights—technique breakdowns, shot charts, tactical recommendations and highlights—to athletes and coaches.
The platform is camera-agnostic, plugging into existing court camera systems across thousands of facilities and delivering analytics via SaaS. With the new round, SportAI’s total funding climbs to $5.7M, fueling global expansion and deeper integrations with partners like MATCHi (a racket sport network) and Save My Play (court-camera infrastructure).
This is a pure Coolture crossover: sports fandom, AI analytics and creator-style highlight culture in one stack. SportAI’s tools don’t just serve pros; they turn everyday players into instrumented athletes with pro-level film rooms in their pockets. That shifts how people train, how local clubs market themselves, and how highlights circulate on social—especially in sports like tennis and padel where visual storytelling is key.
The late-November “up to $10M” tape tells a clear story. Underneath the mega-rounds in nuclear and AI chips, capital is flowing into high-leverage, culture-adjacent infrastructure:
- LA edtech that treats lifestyle and identity as the starting point for careers (Find Your Grind).T
- AI that renegotiates how enterprises buy, cool, simulate and automate the world’s physical systems (Zinit, Strataphy, Parallax Worlds).
- Sports intelligence that upgrades everyday athletes into data-driven performers (SportAI).
For Coolture.club, these aren’t just funding blips; they’re early indicators of how work, climate, robotics and play are being rewired in ways that will show up in fashion, content, and city life over the next decade. This is the zone to watch: rounds small enough to still be experimental, but pointed directly at the systems that shape how we live, move and express ourselves.
11/22/25
The week of November 16-22 delivered a wave of small but strategically meaningful venture rounds—exactly the type of early-signal activity Coolture.club is known for tracking. Instead of vanity consumer apps or hype-cycle distractions, this week’s financings point directly to where real structural change is brewing: healthcare automation, sustainable supply chains, AI model infrastructure, and operational risk intelligence.
Below are five of the most compelling under-$10M deals of the week. Each one shows how early-stage capital is shifting toward vertical agents, fashion-tech workflows, AI infrastructure, and compliance automation—the hidden layers shaping the next decade of enterprise and cultural technology.
Pype AI, based in Bengaluru, raised a $1.2M pre-seed round led by Kalaari Capital to bring domain-specific agentic voice-AI into healthcare systems. Their thesis is straightforward and powerful: hospitals are overwhelmed by administrative burden, labor shortages, and bottlenecked communication workflows. Generic AI assistants don’t cut it in regulated medical settings, so Pype is building specialized agents that triage calls, follow up with patients, summarize clinical interactions, and integrate directly into hospital systems.
Digging deeper: Pype AI sits at the intersection of three converging forces—maturing voice-AI models, a global shortage of medical staff, and growing regulatory pressure to optimize patient throughput. Their approach is workflow-first, not model-first. That means deep integration with EMRs, compliance frameworks, and hospital admin stacks. This early round is about proving their verticalized agent model works in real-world clinical settings. If they succeed, Pype won’t just be a tool—they could become the AI backbone for hospital communication across India, Southeast Asia, and eventually the U.S.
Thimblerr raised a $1.4M bridge round to push its fashion supply-chain orchestration platform further into mid-market apparel brands. At its core, Thimblerr offers a full-stack digital layer that shortens production lead-times, improves vendor communication, and brings much-needed transparency to fragmented garment factories. In a world where trend cycles shrink by the month and excess inventory destroys margins, brands desperately need systems that allow real-time operational clarity.
On a deeper level, Thimblerr represents where fashion tech is actually evolving: not toward flashy consumer apps, but toward the industrial plumbing that enables the entire sector to move faster and more sustainably. Digitizing procurement and production directly impacts carbon emissions, waste, and inventory risk—areas brands are increasingly expected to report on. For banks, lenders, and enterprise partners, platforms like Thimblerr reduce operational opacity and create verifiable data trails. This bridge round suggests the company is entering the “prove-it-at-scale” phase, with larger brands likely watching closely.
The New York-based AI infrastructure startup backed by Korea Investment Partners, Redrob, secured a $10M Series A to build an alternative LLM platform stack outside the hyperscaler ecosystem. Their goal is to give enterprises and governments a controllable, auditable, and private way to deploy large-language-model systems without relying on big-tech black boxes. In a global environment demanding sovereignty over data and AI decisions, Redrob is aiming to become the “independent backbone” for industrial-grade AI.
Under the surface, this round speaks to a deeper shift: trust in AI infrastructure is becoming a geopolitical asset. Enterprises want to host their own models, enforce their own guardrails, and maintain compliance in regulated industries—finance, defense, healthcare, and government. Redrob is positioning itself as a full-stack solution offering training, deployment, governance, and monitoring. The $10M round is small relative to AI-infra norms, but strategically laser-focused. If they continue executing, Redrob becomes a critical alternative in a market hungry for independence from the hyperscaler oligopoly.
Barker is a fintech startup that aims to tackle the longstanding problem of valuing illiquid or hard-to-price assets (such as aircraft, used equipment, art, high-end GPUs) in asset-backed lending. Their platform uses AI-driven valuations (“agentic valuation system”) and couples that with insurance from a major underwriter — effectively “warranty” on the value of the collateral. The company raised approximately $3.5 million in seed funding led by Walkabout Ventures to scale its product into new asset classes, deepen integrations with banks and private lenders, and move toward real-time collateral-valuation monitoring.
What makes Barker compelling is its risk-layered business model: the lender gets not just a valuation, but a warranty that if the collateral sells for less than the model predicted, the insurance kicks in. This shifts the traditional credit-risk paradigm and could unlock more efficient asset-backed lending. For banks and specialty lenders (your network included), this means fewer surprises, clearer downside protection, and potentially more flow of capital into previously tricky collateral types. In essence, Barker is bridging AI valuation + risk underwriting — a combo increasingly relevant as more “non-standard” assets enter credit portfolios.
EcoStitch Labs, a European-based sustainable-fashion-tech startup, secured a $3.8M seed round to scale its biodegradable polymer blends and AI-driven textile optimization platform. Their innovation lies in creating fully recyclable and partially compostable fibers that mimic the performance of synthetics without the toxic byproducts. With global regulations tightening on microplastics and textile waste, EcoStitch is solving a compliance-plus-consumer-demand issue in one stroke.
What makes EcoStitch especially interesting is the dual pillar of chemistry + data. Their fibers reduce environmental impact, but the bigger story is the AI-powered platform that models fiber durability, dye compatibility, lifecycle emissions, and recyclability forecasts for global apparel manufacturers. Brands can use EcoStitch to design supply-chain sustainability into garments before they hit production. As EU regulations continue to push extended-producer responsibility, EcoStitch positions itself as a must-have tech layer for brands navigating material compliance and ESG scrutiny.
This week’s venture activity reinforces a clear trend: the smartest early-stage capital is flowing into foundational systems that make industries faster, cleaner, more compliant, and more intelligent. Whether it’s agentic voice AI in hospitals, digitized global fashion supply chains, independent LLM infrastructure, modernized compliance automation, or sustainable textile innovation, the real action is at the infrastructure layer—not the hype cycle.
These are the startups worth tracking long before they hit mainstream attention. Each one solves a problem that is operational, measurable, and economically unavoidable. And that’s where the next decade of value creation will live.
11/16/25
As we moved into the second week of November 2025, the venture landscape under the $10 million mark is quietly rich with startups tackling new layers of infrastructure — whether that’s music tech, enterprise risk, or enterprise data plumbing. Below are three standout funding rounds from the week of November 9–15 that reflect how capital is flowing into foundational tools rather than headline-apps.
Songscription, an AI-powered music transcription startup, raised $5 million in a seed round led by Reach Capital with participation from Emerge Capital, 10x Founders, and Dent Capital. The company describes itself as “the Shazam for sheet music,” converting audio recordings into editable sheet-music, guitar tabs, and MIDI formats. Since launching in June, Songscription reports more than 150,000 users across 150 countries.
What stands out is the intersection of AI, music creation, and user-self-service. By enabling musicians (amateurs and pros alike) to instantly generate notation from recordings, Songscription is lowering a friction point that has persisted for decades. The product also taps into the long-tail of non-published music—songs that don’t have official sheet music—and gives creators and fans tools to engage. The raise will support expansion of instrumentation support (currently supports piano, violin, flute, guitar, bass, trumpet) and notation output formats, which opens doors to broader workflows (education, licensing, collaboration).
This is not just another AI startup — it’s a tool for culture-makers, enabling deeper connections between artists and learners. It also signals investor interest in “creator-tools” rather than purely consumer-viral apps, especially when those tools bridge art + tech + global scale.
A Singapore-headquartered startup founded in 2023, GreenFI, raised $2 million in a seed round led by Transition VC to expand its AI-driven ESG (Environmental, Social & Governance) risk management platform for banks and enterprises. The platform aggregates disclosures, media sentiment, alternative datasets and supply-chain signals to support real-time sustainability risk assessment.
GreenFi addresses a growing pain: companies are under increasing regulatory, investor and reputational pressure to track sustainability metrics — yet many still rely on manual, spreadsheet-heavy processes. GreenFi’s no-code platform aims to automate ESG due diligence, supplier screening and emissions reporting, and claims enterprise clients already across Singapore, India, Europe and the US. With this funding, GreenFi plans global rollout (California, Europe, Southeast Asia, Middle East) and further AI module development — a smart bet given the rising ESG compliance tailwinds in 2026. For relationship-manager readers, it’s a lens on the “compliance infrastructure layer” of sustainability rather than the headline “clean-tech” hardware.
The startup shines a light on how enterprise fintech + climate tech are merging. For your audience (relationship managers, enterprise operators), this is the kind of tech that quietly becomes baseline infrastructure — similar to audit software or ERP modules, but for sustainability.
NOLT, a fashion-tech startup based in Nice, France, raised €1.7 million in seed funding to industrialize its fully recyclable “Infinite Jersey” fabric and expand its AI-powered 3D configurator for circular sports apparel.
The company sits squarely at the intersection of sustainable materials + digital fashion tech. On one side, the recyclable jersey material addresses textile waste and circular economy issues; on the other, the 3D configurator enables quicker design iterations, less physical waste and digital-first experiences for brands. With the seed raise they will invest in scaling manufacturing, digitization of brand workflows and logistics for circular goods. For an audience rooted in private banking or specialty banking, this could signal how “fashion supply chain innovation” is being funded, with potential impact on brand risk, ESG scoring, and new business models.
This is less about consumer flash and more about supply-chain transformation. The raise size is modest, but the area — circular fashion + AI design infrastructure — is emergent and strategic.
The week shows a consistent pattern: modest seed rounds (≈ $2M–$5M) going to companies building infrastructure for art, risk, and supply chains rather than consumer apps chasing virality. From Songscription (music-tech), to GreenFi (enterprise ESG infrastructure), to NOLT (sustainable fashion materials + tech), the capital is flowing toward foundational layers that support culture, enterprise and sustainability. For your audience at Coolture.club — especially those familiar with enterprise banking, specialty sectors, and trend-spotting — these are the kinds of companies worth watching: they operate ahead of the spotlight, but may form the basis for major category shifts.
11/9/25
The roundup and spotlight is wider. The theme this week: small checks, big operational impact. From sizing intelligence in fashion to autonomous service ops and factory AI, these under-$10M rounds are building the rails that make AI usable outside the lab.
London’s Fit Collective secured a pre-seed to attack fashion’s most expensive UX bug: inconsistent sizing that fuels costly returns. The platform ingests sales, returns, and fabric-behavior data to generate fit intelligence for design and merchandising teams—before a garment hits production. Credible outlets report it as the UK’s largest pre-seed by a solo female founder, with backing from AlbionVC, SuperSeed, True Global, and January Ventures; coverage spans EU-Startups, Tech.eu, and Vogue Business. The raise will go to engineering hires and rolling out brand integrations across Europe.
Why it matters: fit-related returns are a multi-hundred-billion-dollar drag on margins and sustainability. By moving “fit” from post-purchase guesswork to pre-production data science, Fit Collective can cut return rates while boosting conversion and repeat purchase. If they nail SKU-level predictions that merch teams trust, this becomes embedded infrastructure rather than a bolt-on widget. It’s exactly the kind of defensible, insight-rich layer retailers will pay for at scale.
San Francisco–based Cactus is building an AI copilot for home-service businesses (think HVAC, plumbing, electrical)—automating calls, bookings, and follow-ups so owners never miss revenue. The company announced a $7M seed with Wellington Management, YC, Pelion, and Rebel Fund in the round. The wedge is simple: most service shops still run on phones and spreadsheets; Cactus turns every missed call into a captured job. Funds head to product and go-to-market to standardize workflows across thousands of Main Street operators.
Deeper take: AI in “thin-margin services” only works if it drives measurable ROI fast. Cactus’ bet is that 24/7 automated intake + scheduling beats after-hours voicemail and peak-season chaos. If they can integrate with the messy stack (dispatching, invoicing, financing) and prove uplift in booked jobs per inbound lead, expansion via franchises and networks becomes obvious. It’s a playbook we’ve seen in dental and auto repair—home services are next.
Bengaluru’s MeshDefend raised $2.3M to build an AI “operating system” for enterprise data infrastructure—think policy-aware pipelines and governance that adapts as data changes. Kalaari led, with participation from Kettleborough VC and notable angels. Early dollars will harden the core platform and validate deployments with Indian enterprise customers facing data sprawl. For a first institutional check, the cap table signals real interest in infra-grade AI beyond flashy apps.
Zooming out: as companies stitch together lakes, warehouses, and vector stores, static rules collapse under drift and scale. An AI-native control plane that watches lineage, quality, and access in real time could meaningfully cut risk and ops toil. If MeshDefend can ship primitives that play nicely with Databricks, Snowflake, and open-source stacks, it can ride the broader governance-and-security wave sweeping enterprise AI.
Allie AI raised $5.2M to bring autonomous intelligence to global manufacturing—automating inspection, monitoring, and optimization on production lines. Coverage emphasizes its focus on making factories more resilient and less labor-intensive by pushing AI agents into day-to-day plant operations. The capital is earmarked for product acceleration and international rollout. In a year where supply chains are still whipsawing, “AI for uptime and yield” remains an easy budget line.
Strategic angle: the winners in industrial AI minimize custom on-site work while slotting into existing MES/SCADA environments. If Allie shows quick-time-to-value pilots (weeks, not quarters) and model robustness in noisy factory settings, expansion via systems integrators is plausible. The moat becomes proprietary datasets from diverse production lines—fuel for performance that generic models can’t match.
Vancouver, WA–based Digs revealed it recently added $5M to its seed, bringing total seed funding to $19.1M to digitize homebuilding and post-construction care. Its twin products—DigsCanvas for collaborative pre-construction and DigsCare for warranty—plus “digital twin” homeowner records aim to reduce costly rework and speed closeouts. The model targets builders on seats while letting contractors/homeowners participate free, which helps network effects at job-site level. Fresh funding fuels sales expansion and feature velocity.
Residential construction is a graveyard of half-adopted tools; the platforms that win connect builders, trades, and homeowners in one canonical record. If Digs proves that digital twins reduce warranty headaches and elevate homeowner experience, insurers and lenders could become indirect advocates. With construction labor still tight, software that shortens schedules or cuts callbacks pays for itself.
This week’s sub-$10M financings all share a bias for operational leverage: fewer returns in fashion, fuller calendars in services, cleaner governance in data, steadier factories, and smoother builds. They’re not chasing headlines—they’re fixing leakages that cost industries billions. For Coolture.club readers, the signal is clear: the most interesting early-stage AI plays right now are boring-sounding but brutally valuable. That’s where adoption—and durable revenue—lives.
11/2/25
As the tail of October 2025 draws to a close, the smaller venture rounds tell a subtler story of innovation quietly advancing in biotech, enterprise infrastructure and regulation-driven markets. While mega-rounds dominate headlines, it’s these sub-$10 million seed and early-stage financings that often signal where the next wave of growth will emerge. Below are the most notable deals in that band during the week of October 26–31 — each pointing to a different frontier.
A US and India-based biotech startup, Helex, has raised a $3.5 million seed round led by pi Ventures with participation from Bluehill Capital, SOSV and others. The company is developing a new class of non-viral gene therapies for genetic kidney diseases, leveraging proprietary lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery and AI-based drug design platforms.
Helex’s dual-hub approach (New York + Hyderabad) allows it to tap global talent and cost arbitrage, while partnering with Bayer Co.Lab Cambridge enhances credibility and translational speed. With this round their total funding crosses $6 million. Their focus on kidney disorders is strategic: many gene-therapy efforts target rare but high-margin indications, and kidney disease remains underserved. If Helex can deliver a non-viral vector with scalable manufacturing, they may carve a specialty niche rather than compete head-on with viral-vector heavyweights.
Polygraf AI, based in Austin, Texas (with a presence in San Francisco), closed a $9.5 million seed round led by Allegis Capital, with backing from Alumni Ventures, DataPower VC, Domino Ventures and others. The startup builds enterprise-grade “small language models” (SLMs) focused on AI security: detecting risks, fraud and integrity issues within mission-critical data and workflows.
Polygraf is deliberately addressing the gap between opaque “big LLM” solutions and regulated environments (defense, intelligence, enterprises) that require explainability, auditability and on-premises deployment. The funds will go into R&D (making their SLMs more robust), productization (enterprise feature sets) and global go-to-market expansion (Europe & Asia are mentioned). They are riding two trends: heightened regulatory scrutiny of AI in enterprise, and the realization that “just plug in GPT-4 for enterprise” doesn’t cut it where data sovereignty or latent risk matter. Polygraf is positioning itself as mature infrastructure rather than a flashy app.
AccessGrid secured $4.4 million in a seed round led by Harlem Capital (with Spice Capital, Exceptional Capital, HF0, etc.). The company provides APIs that let companies convert smartphones into encrypted digital keys (via Apple Wallet / Google Wallet) for building access – replacing physical key-cards and legacy access platforms.
The shift from physical access control to mobile-first credentials is gaining urgency as buildings become more IoT-enabled and security stacks merge with identity infrastructure. AccessGrid’s approach embeds itself into wallets and mobile devices, meaning lower friction for end-users and fewer legacy hardware constraints for facilities. Harlem Capital’s “why we’re investing” narrative highlights the convergence of digital identity + physical access as one of the next operational security frontiers. The seed funding will help the startup scale pilots and build integrations with corporate and potentially automotive access platforms. If AccessGrid can demonstrate large-scale deployments and business-class metrics (reduction in lost cards, access-audit cost savings), they may become a layer in the physical-digital identity stack.
Based in Philadelphia, Lula Commerce, raised an $8 million Series A led by SEMCAP AI with participation from Rich Products Ventures, GO PA Fund, NZVC, UP.Partners, Green Circle Foodtech Ventures and Outlander VC. The company offers an AI-powered commerce platform aimed at convenience retailers (c-stores), many of which are still largely offline and underserved by modern e-commerce infrastructure.
Lula claims to serve over 2,000 retailers already and is bridging the gap between legacy convenience-store operations and digital commerce/delivery. The timing is compelling: with over 155,000 convenience stores in the U.S. and fewer than 10% offering online ordering, Lula’s addressable market is massive. The Series A will fuel expansion of engineering/dev teams, client success and go-to-market — effectively helping mom-and-pop & regional c-store chains catch up to the digital retail era. If Lula can deliver measurable lift in online revenue and analytics for these stores, it could become the go-to stack for convenience retail digitization.
Grasp, a Stockholm-based AI startup founded in 2020 by former McKinsey consultants and an Ericsson AI engineer, raised $7 million in Series A funding led by Octopus Ventures (with Yanno Capital) to scale its multi-agent platform automating work for investment banking and consulting. The company claims to be building an “AI Analyst” that works alongside humans in finance workflows (spreadsheets, tool use, drafting reports).
Deeper dive: Grasp is tapping into the high-value domain of financial services operations: deal modelling, client decks, due-diligence memory, slide build-outs — tasks that are expensive, repetitive, and ripe for automation. Their multi-agent architecture suggests a system of cooperating AI “workers”, not a monolithic LLM, which may offer better modularity and specialization. With the Series A, they’re launching international expansion (London office mentioned) and productization toward consultancies and banks. BeBeez If successful, Grasp could reduce the human load in high-margin advisory functions — a tall order, but one with large upside.
What emerges from this group is a consistent pattern: smaller rounds, yes, but purposeful ones. These companies are either automating enterprise/trusted domains (AccessGrid, Grasp, Polygraf AI) or targeting foundational tech + global expansion (Helex, Lula Commerce). The size of each round (~$3.5 M to ~$9.5 M) reflects caution but also clarity of mission. For readers of Coolture.club, the signal is that real opportunity is increasingly in these “build for compliance/trust/infrastructure” plays, rather than the flashy consumer markets. The frontier is getting institutional faster — and founders are raising to scale and legitimize, not just to prototype.
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