🧑‍🚀 Top Deals You Can’t Miss

1️⃣ Sysco – $29.1B acquisition of Jetro Restaurant Depot, the largest food distribution M&A in U.S. history.

2️⃣ Blackstone – $6.3B life sciences fund close, the largest dedicated private fund in the sector.

3️⃣ Insilico Medicine – $2.75B AI drug discovery deal with Eli Lilly, setting a new benchmark for pharma-AI partnerships.

🧠 Dopamine Dealflow

🌳 Series B+ & Growth

• ScaleOps, a New York, USA-based autonomous cloud infrastructure platform, raised $130 million in Series C funding. Insight Partners led the round and were joined by Lightspeed Venture Partners, NFX, Glilot Capital Partners, and Picture Capital.

• Qodo, a New York, USA-based AI code review and governance platform, raised $70 million in Series B funding. Qumra Capital led the round and were joined by Maor Ventures, Phoenix Capital Partners, S Ventures, Square Peg, Susa Ventures, TLV Partners, and Vine Ventures.

• Stedi, a Denver, USA-based cloud-native healthcare clearinghouse, raised $50 million in Series C funding. Addition led the round and were joined by Stripe, Ribbit Capital, USV, First Round, BoxGroup, and Bloomberg Beta.

🚀 Series A

• Starcloud, a Seattle, USA-based orbital AI compute platform, raised $170 million in Series A funding. Benchmark and EQT Ventures led the round.

• Mars Men, an Austin, USA-based men’s wellness brand, raised $27.5 million in Series A funding. L Catterton led the round.

🌱 Seed & Early Rounds

• Sycamore, a San Francisco, USA-based enterprise AI agent operating system, raised $65 million in Seed funding. Coatue and Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round and were joined by Dell Technologies Capital, Abstract Ventures, 8VC, Fellows Fund, and E14 Fund.

• Valinor Digital, a New York, USA-based blockchain-based private credit platform, raised $25 million in Seed funding. Castle Island Ventures led the round and were joined by Susquehanna Crypto and Maven 11.

🤝 Strategic, M&A & Undisclosed

• Sysco, a United States-based food distribution giant, acquired Jetro Restaurant Depot for $29.1 billion.

• Insilico Medicine, a Hong Kong-based AI drug discovery company, entered a $2.75 billion strategic deal with Eli Lilly.

• Physical Intelligence, a San Francisco, USA-based robotics AI company, is raising $1 billion in Growth funding. Founders Fund and Lightspeed Venture Partners are expected to be among the investors.

• Mistral AI, a Paris, France-based AI company, secured $830 million in debt financing.

💸 VC Funds Raised & Raising

• Blackstone, a New York, USA-based investment firm, closed $6.3 billion for its life sciences fund.

• Empirical Ventures, a United Kingdom-based deep tech fund, secured £10 million in additional commitments.

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📚 Read of the Day

💊 Insilico Medicine and Eli Lilly Just Made the Biggest AI Drug Deal in History

A $2.75 billion bet that AI-designed drugs are ready for Big Pharma scale.

Eli Lilly has agreed to pay Insilico Medicine up to $2.75 billion to develop and commercialize drugs designed entirely by artificial intelligence. Insilico receives $115 million upfront, with the remainder tied to regulatory approvals and commercial milestones, plus royalties on future sales. The two companies have collaborated since 2023, and Insilico has already used generative AI to advance 28 drug candidates, with nearly half in clinical trials.

The Product Pitch

Insilico's Pharma.AI platform applies generative AI across three phases of drug discovery: PandaOmics identifies biological targets, Chemistry42 designs novel molecules around them, and inClinico optimizes clinical trial planning. The platform compresses a standard multi-year discovery window into months by predicting which targets are worth pursuing before a single experiment is run.

The Backstory

Insilico launched in 2015 and spent a decade proving the AI-drug thesis before the broader market caught on. Its lead compound, ISM001-055, became the first AI-designed drug to reach Phase II clinical trials. The Lilly deal marks the transition from proof-of-concept to full commercial scale, backed by one of the world's most respected pharmaceutical companies.

Why It Matters

This deal is the clearest signal yet that Big Pharma trusts AI-generated drug pipelines enough to write nine-figure checks on them. For VCs tracking biotech and AI convergence, the $2.75 billion structure, royalties and milestone payments rather than just upfront capital, mirrors the financial architecture of blockbuster drug licensing. If Lilly's AI bet succeeds at market, every major pharma company will face pressure to match it, and the startups building AI drug discovery platforms just got a massive validation event.

👉 Read The Whole Story Here

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• 🧠 Meta’s New AI Model Predicts Brain Responses to Media — Multimodal AI pushes closer to real-world brain-computer interfaces.

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