Temple Leads a $316M Week

Feb 22-28: 57 deals, $316M, 15 countries

Hey,

I’ll have an exciting announcement for you later this week. Let’s kick it off today with last week’s early stage numbers.

February 22-28: Top Line Numbers

57 early stage AI deals | $316M raised | 15 countries | Median: $3M

The split: 38 Seed and 19 Pre-Seed early stage AI deals.

The number that matters: 60% of this week’s deals came from outside the US. AI funding is not a Silicon Valley story anymore.

Biggest round: Temple ($54M Seed) by Zomato’s founder and ex-CEO.

Early stage funding was down 18% week-over-week.

Where the money went: Developer Tools & AI Infrastructure led with 10 deals (18% of deal flow). FinTech and Health & Biotech followed at 16% and 12%. San Francisco led with 10 deals, and London followed with 6. The top 5 cities held 55% of the deal flow.

The Signal

Three early-stage AI trends stand out this week:

1/ Volume Surge, Smaller Checks: Deal count jumped 16%, but average round size dropped 30%.

2/ Y Combinator Is Everywhere: Y Combinator participated in 3 deals this week. Covering Enterprise Software, Developer Tools & AI Infrastructure, Health & Biotech.

3/ AI Agents Run the Week: 53% of deals. 30 out of 57. We know agentic startups are just an established category, and they keep getting funded. Companies include Cernel, Potpie AI, and Sherpas.

Breakout Early-Stage AI Startups

1/ MeltPlan raised $14M Seed. Most budget overruns in construction happen before a single brick is laid. MeltPlan plans to fix that, automating takeoffs, code compliance, and cost estimation in one AI-native preconstruction platform. Bessemer led, SF-based.

2/ Gushwork raised $9M Seed in Lewes. They make sure AI search engines recommend your business, not your competitor’s. A swarm of specialized AI agents handles content, backlinks, and lead tracking automatically. Lightspeed and Susquehanna led, with B Capital and a crowd of others joining in.

3/ S2.dev raised $4M Seed in San Francisco. Accel and YC backed S2.dev to make streaming data a true cloud primitive. Think object storage, but for live data streams. They give developers simple APIs to run millions of real-time streams at once.

4/ Patientdesk AI raised $1M Pre-Seed in San Francisco. Dental front desks miss calls constantly. Patientdesk fixes that with an AI that answers 24/7, books appointments, verifies insurance in real-time, and plugs directly into existing practice management software. YC-backed, SF-based.

5/ RLWRLD is a Seoul based startup that closed $26M Seed to train robotics foundation models inside real, messy factories and warehouses. The bet is that robots trained on live industrial data handle the unpredictable stuff better. Headline Asia, Kakao Investment, and a deep roster of Korean strategics backed it.

6/ ValkaAI raised $14M Pre-Seed in Prague. They build AI sports commentators that react to live events in real-time. Their pitch is turning passive broadcasts into personalized, interactive experiences. Rockaway Ventures led.

7/ Oska Health raised $13M Seed in Frankfurt Am Main. They have a hybrid care model tackling kidney disease, diabetes, and hypertension between doctor visits.

Human health coaches work alongside AI to handle everything from nutrition to medication adherence. Capricorn Partners and SwissHealth Ventures led.

8/ Callosum raised $10M Pre-Seed in London. They let AI models run across whatever mix of chips a company has, instead of locking them into massive GPU clusters.

The approach, inspired by how biological brains are wired, schedules workloads across heterogeneous hardware automatically. Plural led, with ARIA and Charlie Songhurst joining.

9/ General Magic raised $7M Seed in Toronto. They run insurance workflows entirely over SMS and iMessage. Their AI agents handle everything from pre-quote eligibility to claims coordination, plugging into existing broker systems. Radical Ventures led, with a16z Speedrun and Aidan Gomez backing it out of Toronto.

10/ Kinfolk raised $7M Seed in London. They give HR teams AI agents that actually do the work inside Slack and Teams. Updating HRIS records, drafting documents, and managing lifecycle changes. AlbionVC led, London-based.

11/ Thema raised $6M Pre-Seed in London. They are building what they call ‘Portfolio Expansion Infrastructure’ for private equity. The platform gives investors a continuously updated map of market structures, adjacencies, and competitive dynamics. Stride.vc led.

12/ JetScale AI raised $5M Seed in Montréal. They clean up cloud waste automatically. How? By connecting to your cloud accounts, finding idle resources and inefficiencies and delivering fixes as reviewable code. BDC and Diagram ClimateTech led.

13/ Eezee raised $5M Pre-Seed in Singapore. They are on a mission to modernize how businesses buy industrial supplies. The platform connects buyers to suppliers and plugs directly into Oracle and SAP to automate the whole procurement process. Korea Investment Partners Southeast Asia led.

14/ YOU(th) raised $4M Seed in Berlin. They turn a smartphone camera and mic into a health screening tool. Face video, voice, skin images, and typing patterns combine to assess 50-plus biomarkers across ten organ systems in under two minutes. Callisto Health led.

Which of the above startups seems the most promising? Let me know in the comments.

Thanks,

Chintan