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Six US companies raised a combined $437 million this week at Series B and later. AI infrastructure led, with model marketplace OpenRouter pulling in $113 million and fusion startup Thea Energy adding $100 million. Insurance showed up twice, a sign that money is flowing toward applied AI as much as toward the foundational layer.
The week's pattern was speed. Corgi doubled its valuation to $2.6 billion just three weeks after its previous round, and several companies here had closed earlier raises within the past year. Late-stage capital dwarfed these numbers, with US growth-stage deals totaling roughly $66.45 billion over the same period, but the Series B cohort shows where the next set of category leaders is forming. Half of this week's deals went to companies pointing AI at regulated industries like insurance and healthcare.
1. OpenRouter Raises $113M For AI Model Routing
Deal Overview
- Stage: Series B
- Sector: AI infrastructure
- Geography: United States
- Round size: $113 million
- Valuation: $1.3 billion post-money
Investor Profile
CapitalG, Alphabet's growth fund, led the round. NVentures, ServiceNow Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, and Menlo Ventures joined. The backers span the cloud, chip, and enterprise software worlds, which fits OpenRouter's pitch as neutral plumbing rather than a bet on any one model lab. The round more than doubled the company's valuation in about a year.
Company and Leadership
OpenRouter was founded in 2023 and is publicly associated with co-founder Alex Atallah, who earlier co-founded OpenSea. It raised a $40 million Series A in June 2025 at an estimated $547 million valuation. Reaching $1.3 billion this quickly says a lot about how fast its volume has grown.
Problem and Opportunity
Enterprises don't want to be locked into a single AI vendor. As they build agents, they find that no one model wins every task. That creates demand for a layer that lets teams swap models without rewriting their code.
Product and Technology
OpenRouter is a single API that reaches 400-plus models from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, xAI, DeepSeek, and others. It routes each task to the cheapest or most accurate option and handles fallback across providers. It serves about 8 million users and moves roughly 25 trillion tokens a week, a fivefold jump over six months. That volume gives it live data on price, latency, and quality that newcomers can't easily match.
Use of Proceeds and Vision
The company didn't break out a detailed plan. The capital is expected to scale its gateway, widen model coverage, and grow the team. OpenRouter is betting on a multi-model future where AI models become interchangeable parts chosen per job.
Market Context
OpenRouter sits in the AI inference and orchestration market against Together AI, Fireworks AI, and the first-party APIs of the model labs themselves. Its edge is neutrality, model breadth, and routing smarts.
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2. Corgi Raises $106M For AI-Native Commercial Insurance
Deal Overview
- Stage: Series B1
- Sector: Fintech, insurtech
- Geography: United States, San Francisco
- Round size: $106 million
- Valuation: $2.6 billion
Investor Profile
TCV led the B1, with Prime Capital, Zone 2 Ventures, Kindred Ventures, and a group of strategic investors. The round landed three weeks after a $160 million Series B and roughly doubled the valuation again. That pace is rare in fintech.
Company and Leadership
Corgi was founded in 2024 by Emily Yuan and CEO Nico Laqua, with early backing from Y Combinator. It has raised about $378 million across a fast sequence of rounds, starting with a $108 million Series A in January 2026.
Problem and Opportunity
Commercial insurance runs on slow, manual processes. Modern companies, including startups and businesses facing AI-related risks, are poorly served by legacy carriers that lack pricing data for newer categories.
Product and Technology
Corgi runs the full insurance stack: underwriting, pricing, binding, claims, and embedded coverage. Owning the whole chain lets it underwrite risks incumbents avoid and capture proprietary loss data that improves its models as volume climbs.
Use of Proceeds and Vision
Corgi reached profitability around the raise, so the money funds expansion rather than losses. It plans to launch into trucking, small business, and sports insurance. Laqua frames the company as the modern infrastructure layer for commercial coverage.
Market Context
Corgi competes with incumbent carriers, brokers, and a wave of insurtech players. Its differentiation is full-stack, AI-native underwriting aimed at startups and novel risks that traditional insurers struggle to price.
3. Thea Energy Raises $100M For Scalable Fusion Power
Deal Overview
- Stage: Series B
- Sector: Deeptech, fusion energy
- Geography: United States, Jersey City, New Jersey
- Round size: $100 million
- Total private investment: roughly $130 million
Investor Profile
The oversubscribed round was led by the US Innovative Technology Fund, Thomas Tull's vehicle, with General Innovation Capital Partners, Linse Capital, and Emerald Technology Ventures. The raise makes Thea one of the top-funded fusion startups.
Company and Leadership
Thea Energy spun out of Princeton University and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory in 2022 and is led by CEO Brian Berzin. It raised a $20 million Series A in early 2024.
Problem and Opportunity
Electricity demand is climbing, much of it from AI data centers, and the grid needs clean, firm baseload power. Fusion promises exactly that, if anyone can build it economically.
Product and Technology
Thea builds stellarator power plants using a planar coil design. Instead of huge, bespoke curved magnets, it surrounds the reactor with arrays of small identical rectangular magnets, each tuned in software to shape the field that confines the plasma. The approach uses about 12 large magnets plus 300-plus smaller ones, and the software can correct for misaligned parts during assembly. It has earned a US Department of Energy design milestone.
Use of Proceeds and Vision
The $100 million expands magnet manufacturing, including a second New Jersey facility, and funds siting and construction of Eos, an integrated stellarator targeted for around 2030. A commercial reactor, Helios, is planned for the mid-2030s.
Market Context
Fusion is drawing billions in private capital. Thea's most cited rival is Commonwealth Fusion Systems, alongside TAE Technologies, Helion, and Type One Energy. Thea's thesis rests on manufacturing simplicity and the stellarator's stability.
4. ClearNote Health Raises $52M For Early Cancer Detection
Deal Overview
- Stage: Series D
- Sector: Healthtech, diagnostics
- Geography: United States, San Diego
- Round size: $52 million
- Total funding: more than $185 million
Investor Profile
Mattias Westman led the round. Former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill, co-founder Stephen Quake, a large Seattle family office, and other institutional investors joined. The company also added Kevin Keegan as President and COO, bringing about 30 years of diagnostics experience from BD, Illumina, and Hologic.
Company and Leadership
ClearNote Health started in 2016 as Bluestar Genomics, spun out of Stephen Quake's Stanford lab, and rebranded in late 2022. Quake and Chief Scientific Officer Dr. Samuel Levy co-founded it.
Problem and Opportunity
Pancreatic and ovarian cancers are deadly partly because they're hard to catch early and lack routine screening. A blood test that flags them before symptoms appear could change outcomes.
Product and Technology
ClearNote uses a 5-hydroxymethylcytosine epigenomic platform paired with machine learning. The signal differs between cancerous and healthy cells and reads from a standard blood draw. Its Avantect pancreatic test combines epigenomics, genomics, genotyping, and glycan biomarkers, reporting 82.6% sensitivity and 97.5% specificity in high-risk patients. A reported CMS code adds a reimbursement tailwind.
Use of Proceeds and Vision
The capital supports commercial expansion of the Avantect portfolio, ongoing clinical studies, and the Virtuoso platform for drug R&D. The new leadership hires point to a push on commercialization.
Market Context
ClearNote operates in the liquid-biopsy market against GRAIL, Exact Sciences, Guardant Health, and Freenome. Rather than chasing broad multi-cancer screening, it focuses on high-risk patients and hard-to-detect cancers, and its epigenomic signal sets it apart from mutation-based rivals.
5. Pace Raises $46M For AI Insurance Operations
Deal Overview
- Stage: Series B
- Sector: Fintech, insurance AI
- Geography: United States, New York City
- Round size: $46 million
- Operating regions: US and Europe
Investor Profile
Thrive Capital and Sequoia Capital co-led, with Emergence Capital and Pruven Capital. Sequoia had already put in about $10 million earlier in the year, so this is a fast follow-on from conviction backers.
Company and Leadership
Pace was founded in 2024 by CEO Jamie Cuffe. It serves the insurance value chain, including carriers, brokers, and the outsourcers that handle much of their back office.
Problem and Opportunity
Insurance back-office work, like submission intake, policy servicing, and claims, stays labor-heavy and often gets outsourced. Pace anchors its opportunity in the roughly $9 trillion global protection gap.
Product and Technology
Pace builds an agentic workforce. Its AI agents navigate internal systems, read documents, and even make phone calls to run insurance tasks end to end, inside a governance layer built for regulated work. Since launching in 2025, the agents have handled more than 250,000 workflows. With Ryze Claim Solutions it cut claim cycle times by 30%, and named partners include Prudential, WTW, Newfront, and Convex US.
Use of Proceeds and Vision
The round funds an expansion of agent capabilities, with a near-term goal of handling tens of millions of tasks across the US, Europe, and new markets within the year. Pace frames itself as an operations partner, not a point tool.
Market Context
Pace competes with insurance-focused AI startups, horizontal agent vendors, incumbent outsourcers, and insurtech automation players. Its edge is insurance-specific orchestration plus proven deployments with named carriers.
6. Signos Raises $20M For AI Glucose Monitoring
Deal Overview
- Stage: Series B+
- Sector: Healthtech, metabolic health
- Geography: United States, Silicon Valley
- Round size: $20 million
- Total funding: roughly $57 million
Investor Profile
GV, Dexcom, and Blue Cross Blue Shield of Alabama backed the round. Dexcom's role runs deep: it's an investor, the hardware supplier, and now a distribution channel. The insurer's check signals payer interest in cheaper metabolic tools.
Company and Leadership
Signos was founded in 2018 and is led by CEO Sharam Fouladgar-Mercer, with co-founders Bill Tancer, William Dixon, and Pierre Wehbe. The company says it has grown roughly tenfold over six months.
Problem and Opportunity
Many people regain weight after stopping GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic. Signos argues that pairing glucose data with coaching builds the lasting habits the drugs alone don't teach.
Product and Technology
Signos pairs a continuous glucose monitor with an app and AI coaching that shows how food, movement, sleep, and stress move a person's glucose and weight. It holds the first and only FDA clearance for a CGM system aimed at weight management, granted in 2025, with no prescription needed. It now runs on Dexcom's over-the-counter Stelo sensor and sells on Stelo.com, priced at roughly $129 to $449 a month. A 20,000-person study feeds its personalization engine.
Use of Proceeds and Vision
The money accelerates growth, deepens the Dexcom partnership, and pushes into employer-sponsored benefits, where self-insured employers want cheaper ways to manage rising GLP-1 spend. Funds also support the AI platform.
Market Context
More than 115 million US adults have prediabetes, most unaware. Signos rides the GLP-1 wave and growing payer pressure, competing with non-cleared apps like Levels and Nutrisense, while Dexcom and Abbott supply the sensors that make the category possible.
Lessons For Founders
- Speed is rewarded right now. Corgi and OpenRouter both raised again within a year and roughly doubled their valuations. Strong metrics let you reset terms fast.
- Regulated industries are where applied AI is winning checks. Pace, Corgi, ClearNote, and Signos all sell into insurance or healthcare, where compliance and proprietary data build a moat.
- Real usage beats narrative. OpenRouter's 25 trillion weekly tokens and Pace's 250,000 handled workflows gave investors hard proof, not projections.
- Strategic investors signal positioning. Dexcom for Signos and CapitalG for OpenRouter bring distribution and credibility a generic fund can't.
- Profitability changes the conversation. Corgi raised to expand, not survive, which let it dictate terms even in a fast-moving market.
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