Vapi at $500M, Martha Stewart in AI, and 9 other app-layer rounds this week

Week of May 10–17, 2026 — Nine confirmed funding rounds totaling roughly $123.5M closed across the AI application layer this week. Seed stage dominated: seven of the nine rounds were pre-seed or seed. The dominant verticals were operations automation, autonomous bookkeeping, home management, AI voice infrastructure, agentic marketing, filmmaking tools, enterprise software generation, and executive intelligence. Geographically, San Francisco led, with new entrants also surfacing in New York, Bucharest, and Dubai.

What follows is a structured rundown of who raised, who backed them, and what the founder pedigrees signal.

Vapi — an AI voice platform for customer support, sales, and scheduling — closed a $50M Series B on May 12, led by Peak XV Partners, with M12 (Microsoft's venture arm), Kleiner Perkins, and Bessemer Venture Partners co-investing. 1 Post-money valuation: approximately $500M, per a person familiar with the matter. Total funding to date: $72M. 1

The deal's credibility signal is the Amazon Ring win. Ring evaluated more than 40 AI voice vendors before selecting Vapi, and now routes 100% of its inbound customer calls through the platform. 1 Jason Mitura, VP of Software Development at Amazon Ring, put it plainly: "A lot of AI tools promise great outcomes — Vapi has delivered on them." 1 Ring's customer satisfaction scores improved after deployment.

Platform metrics: over 1 billion calls handled to date; current run rate of 1M–5M calls per day; annual recurring revenue in the "healthy" eight figures per an investor source. 1 Other enterprise customers include Kavak, Instawork, New York Life, UnityAI, Cherry, and Intuit. More than 1 million developers have used the self-serve tier. 1

Founders Jordan Dearsley (CEO) and Nikhil Gupta (CTO) are University of Waterloo graduates and Y Combinator alumni — the company was originally called Superpowered. 1 Dearsley's framing of their core problem: "The golden problem is taking this indeterminate beast that is a model and taming it. If you can do that, then you can provide value to the world." 1 The $50M will go toward engineering, infrastructure, and go-to-market; the company is at roughly 100 employees.

Why this matters to app-layer founders: Vapi is infrastructure — but it's the kind of infrastructure that every vertical AI agent (healthcare scheduling, financial services IVR, e-commerce support) will need to decide whether to build on or compete with. The Ring win, at 40+ vendor evaluation depth, is a meaningful signal that the voice layer is consolidating around a small set of providers.

Nectar Social — an agentic operating system for brand marketing teams — closed a $30M Series A on May 15, led by Menlo Ventures and its Anthology Fund, a vehicle created jointly with Anthropic. 2 Co-investors: GV (Google Ventures), True Ventures, and Kinship Ventures (Gwyneth Paltrow's fund). 2

The company was founded by sisters Misbah Uraizee (CEO) and Farah Uraizee, both former Meta employees. Nectar officially exited stealth in 2025; this round is its Series A. 2 The platform deploys autonomous AI agents across social activity, content moderation, creator workflows, competitive intelligence, and commerce conversations. It has data partnerships with Meta and Reddit, letting the Nectar agent pull and pool cross-platform signals. 2 Named clients include Liquid Death, Figma, and e.l.f Beauty.

Misbah Uraizee's positioning: "The buying conversation has moved into social, and no human team can staff every place it happens. We're accelerating our category lead in building the operating system that lets brands show up everywhere." 2

Competitive note: If you are building any marketing automation, social listening, or creator tool at the seed stage, Nectar Social is now a Series A company with Menlo/Anthropic capital behind it and live data partnerships at Meta and Reddit. That's a distribution moat worth accounting for in your positioning.

Eight rounds from $2M to $10M closed this week across a wide range of application verticals. All entries below use confirmed public sources; Sprouts.ai's round is marked as likely-confirmed (sourced from a secondary social media report, no official press release identified).

Champ AI emerged from stealth on May 13 with its $8.5M seed from Redpoint Ventures, defy.vc, SV Angel, and angels including Max Mullen (Instacart co-founder) and JJ Zhuang. 3 The three co-founders — Jagannath Putrevu (CEO), Ted Cheng, and Peter Lin — spent nearly a decade together at Instacart, scaling operations from Series B through IPO and building AI systems that supported over one million daily orders across 4,000+ retailers. 3

The product targets the operations layer — workflows that cross browsers, phone calls, and documents — which enterprises have historically outsourced to BPOs (business process outsourcing providers). Putrevu: "Enterprises are eager to adopt AI, but often overlook the most costly, highest-impact opportunities. Operations teams spend their days navigating fragmented systems that weren't built to integrate and so much of this work still gets pushed to BPOs. With Champ's AI agents, Ops teams can finally automate these workflows in-house and reduce their dependence on BPOs." 3

Redpoint partner Urvashi Barooah framed the bet on team cohesion rather than market size alone: "What sets Champ apart is the depth of its team. Jagannath, Ted, and Peter spent nearly a decade together scaling Instacart's operations to over a million daily orders, and every backchannel we ran gave us conviction this is the team to win this market." 3 Target verticals: insurance, healthcare, finance, and logistics.

Ian Crosby announced Synthetic's $10M seed from Khosla Ventures on May 14. 4 Co-investors include Basis Set Ventures and angels Tobi Lütke (Shopify CEO), Kaz Nejatian (Shopify COO), Zach Abrams, Cosmin Nicolaescu, and Michael Tannenbaum. 4

Crosby co-founded Bench Accounting in 2012, building it into one of North America's largest SMB bookkeeping services before its shutdown in 2024 and subsequent acquisition. He then held senior roles at Shopify and Mercury. 4 Synthetic's target is full automation — connecting directly to a startup's bank, payroll, billing systems, and inboxes at $49/month, roughly one-quarter the cost of traditional human bookkeeping services. 5

Crosby is blunt about where the product stands: "I'm not sure if it's yet technologically possible to make this work. AI is notoriously unreliable, and no one wants to entrust their accounting to a system which might get it wrong. Our focus is on quality control and we're not going to release this until we feel confident that it's more reliable than a human bookkeeper." 4 No launch date committed.

Khosla partner Jon Chu drew an explicit analogy to Parker Conrad — ousted from Zenefits, then founded Rippling (now valued at ~$17B) — when explaining the bet on Crosby. 4

Hint launched on May 13 with a $10M seed led by Slow Ventures, with Montauk Capital (the project incubator), Tusk Venture Partners, Amplo, Energy Impact Partners, Hannah Grey VC, and Brian Kelly (founder of The Points Guy) co-investing. 6 Co-founders: Martha Stewart, Yih-Han Ma (CEO, previously led home services brand-building at Red Ventures), and Kyle Rush (CTO, previously an engineer at Casper). 6

The platform's mechanic: a user inputs their address, and Hint auto-pulls publicly available property data — weather history, soil quality, air quality, flood risk, and listing records — then combines that with Stewart's domain expertise to generate proactive maintenance recommendations. 7 Target launch: summer 2026 on desktop and iOS.

Stewart's stated motivation: "I've wanted to create something beyond education, something that could actually help proactively manage one's home the way that I do — but the technology wasn't ready for my vision. Hint is." 6 The addressable market context: U.S. residential renovation and repair spending exceeds $500B annually, per a 2025 Harvard Joint Center for Housing Studies estimate. 7

Flick raised $6M seed in May from True Ventures, GV, Lightspeed, Y Combinator, and angels — no single lead investor was named. 8 The company is from Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch, currently five people. 8

Co-founders Ray Wang and Zoey Zhang are married and bring a complementary skill set: Wang was a software engineer at Instagram who worked on scaling Instagram Stories from zero to 400 million daily active users; Zhang is an award-winning filmmaker whose AI films have won over 30 international festival awards. 8

The platform lets users direct short films through chat-based prompting on a storyboard canvas. It supports Google Veo 3, ByteDance Seedance, and Midjourney, with character consistency across frames as its core differentiation. Pricing: $5–$600/month. 8 The team is considering relocating from the Bay Area to Los Angeles. Wang on the job-displacement concern: "We are well aware that people have concerns about AI replacing jobs of Hollywood. We believe that we are creating more jobs." 8

Dessn raised $6M seed on May 12, led by Connect Ventures, with Betaworks and N49P co-investing. 9 Co-founders Gabriella Hachem and Nim Cheema started the company two years ago; the team is currently four people.

The differentiation from tools like Lovable or v0 (Vercel): Dessn works only with existing production codebases, abstracting away dependencies so engineers can make visual changes directly in their live repo via cloud execution — no setup required. Pricing: free (one repo, five prompts/week) up to $39/user/month. 9 Customers include teams at Color (health tech), Wispr (voice AI), and Mercury (fintech). 9

Cheema's founding thesis: "When we started the company two years ago, our whole thesis was the code is going to get commoditized — and in a world where code is insanely cheap, you just get a lot more software, and then design becomes a way that's a differentiator." 9

Brief closed a $5M seed led by EPIC Ventures (Salt Lake City, $400M+ AUM, focused on B2B SaaS), with Boulder Ventures co-investing. 10 The founding team — Larry Augustin (CEO), Zac Sprackett, and Clint Oram — previously built SugarCRM, a category-defining company in enterprise CRM. 10

EPIC partner Nick Efstratis described the positioning: "Executive Intelligence is the rare AI bet that is not a feature inside an existing category. It is a new layer of enterprise software." 10 The company made its first public appearance roughly two weeks before the funding announcement (late April 2026). Product details beyond the "AI-driven decision intelligence for executives" framing were not publicly disclosed at the time of this report.

DesignVerse, based in Bucharest, Romania, announced a $5.5M seed on May 12 from Begin Capital, Gapminder VC, Underline Ventures, and strategic angel investors from Adobe, LSEG, and UiPath. 11 The company previously raised $850K in pre-seed.

The platform generates production-grade enterprise software from an organization's own design systems, component libraries, and technical documentation — at development speeds the company claims are up to five times faster than conventional methods. 11 The marquee proof point: EUROCONTROL (the pan-European aviation organization) used DesignVerse to overhaul a 15-year-old application in roughly one month — a project estimated at six months by conventional methods — with the resulting software now supporting air traffic systems across tens of millions of annual passengers. 11

Founded by Andrei Manolache (CEO, previously product design lead for Oracle's Redwood design system) and Robert Dragutoiu (CTO, 20+ years in complex systems engineering). 11 ARR exceeded $1.1M in under five months of operation, all from enterprise customers. 11 Manolache: "Organisations running critical infrastructure cannot rely on vibe coding tools. They need software that is reliable, auditable, and built around their existing systems. That's exactly the type of environment for which DesignVerse was designed." 11

Sprouts.ai closed a $9M pre-Series A co-led by True Global Ventures and Accel, bringing total funding to $14M. 12 The platform builds AI-native Revenue Agents that sit inside Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics, Microsoft Copilot, and Claude, consolidating the B2B go-to-market stack from ideal customer profile (ICP) identification through closed deals. 12 Named customers include Hewlett Packard, Razorpay, HighRadius, and Udemy.

Four additional companies emerged this week at pre-seed or seed stage with thinner public information.

Chromie Health (New York, founded 2024) closed a $2M pre-seed led by AIX Ventures (San Francisco, AI-native early-stage VC, founded 2021). 13 The product is AI-driven hospital workforce scheduling and operations management software, requiring zero IT integration and no patient data exposure. Co-founders: Douglas Ford, Scott Tisoskey, and Patricia Ford. Funding will go toward developing additional AI agents for hospital workflow automation. 13

Hacktron AI (San Francisco) announced a $2.9M pre-seed on May 15, led by Crane Venture Partners (European VC focused on data and security), with Project Europe, Vercel Ventures, Plug and Play Ventures, Cambridge Enterprise Ventures, and Overlook Ventures participating. 14 The three co-founders — Zayne Zhang, Mohan Pedhapati, and Harsh Jaiswal — are DEF CON Capture the Flag (CTF) competition winners who have presented at DEF CON and Black Hat. 14 The product runs continuous security testing against every code change rather than periodic manual penetration tests, with the system designed to simulate attacker behavior. The team has previously disclosed critical vulnerabilities in BeyondTrust Remote Support, Next.js (Vercel), Cloudflare infrastructure, GitHub, and GitLab. 14 Revenue in the first nine months: approximately $240K. Zhang: "Attackers are already using AI to find and exploit vulnerabilities faster than ever. Most companies are still testing security like it's a quarterly exercise. We're building the system that tests every code change like a real attacker would so teams can move fast without shipping risk." 14

VideoTutor.io announced an $11M seed led by YZi Labs (formerly Binance Labs, expanded into AI investing). 15 The Gen Z founding team's AI tutoring platform previously accumulated over 50 million views on TikTok, and the company is now pursuing B2B demand from enterprise customers including Tencent and Xiaotiancai (a Chinese children's smart device brand). 16 Note: Primary source (RootData) returned an error and could not be fully verified. Founder names and company HQ were not confirmed.

Lyrie.ai (Dubai) emerged from stealth in May with a $2M pre-seed — investors were not publicly disclosed. 17 The company, developed by OTT Cybersecurity LLC and led by CEO Guy Sheetrit, is building an AI agent security platform centered on the Agent Trust Protocol (ATP) — an open-source cryptographic standard for AI agent identity verification, authorization, and delegation, which the company intends to submit to the IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force) as an open industry standard. 17 Lyrie has joined Anthropic's Cyber Verification Programme. Sheetrit: "The agentic AI economy is being built right now, and it is being built without a security foundation. Every AI agent on the internet today is effectively anonymous. No identity verification, no scope enforcement, no tamper detection. We built the infrastructure that changes that — and we built it as an open standard so the entire industry can adopt it." 17

Three signals stand out from the week's data directly.

Operator pedigree is the dominant seed-stage credential. Among this week's new raises, the founders most likely to get term sheets fast share one trait: they ran the exact problem at scale before building the solution. Putrevu, Cheng, and Lin scaled Instacart's operations through IPO before targeting enterprise ops automation. 3 Misbah and Farah Uraizee built inside Meta's ads and social infrastructure before building a marketing OS. 2 Ray Wang shipped Instagram Stories to 400 million daily users before designing a filmmaking tool. 8 Manolache ran Oracle's Redwood design system before building an enterprise software generation platform. 11

Anthropic's orbit is becoming a visible signal. Menlo Ventures' Anthology Fund — created jointly with Anthropic — led the Nectar Social Series A. 2 Lyrie.ai separately joined Anthropic's Cyber Verification Programme as part of its launch. 17 For founders building on Claude or targeting enterprise customers, membership in Anthropic-linked programs and the Anthology Fund's deal flow appear to be a growing selection signal.

Non-US app-layer activity is real but thin. DesignVerse (Bucharest) posted $1.1M ARR in under five months, entirely from enterprise. 11 Lyrie.ai operates out of Dubai. VideoTutor.io's B2B traction runs through Tencent and Xiaotiancai. 16 These are isolated data points, not a trend, but they confirm that app-layer deal flow is no longer exclusively a Bay Area event.