VC deal flow, October 19–25: $2.40B, and Sequoia Capital is on $1.47B of it
Thirteen rounds naming a16z, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund or Y Combinator added up to $2.40 billion this week, Sequoia was on $1.47 billion of it, and Anthropic's prospectus put a paper exit in view.
Thirteen rounds announced between October 19 and October 25, 2026 name at least one of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund or Y Combinator. Every one of the thirteen disclosed an amount. Together they add to at least $2.40 billion.
Sequoia Capital appears in four of them, and those four carry $1.47 billion, or 61% of the week. Andreessen Horowitz appears in four worth $603 million. Founders Fund appears in three worth $312 million, Y Combinator in three worth $86 million.
Half the week's money sits in two rounds: $1 billion for Flapping Airplanes, a lab founded a year ago, and $200 million for Whop, a commerce platform now valued at $5.1 billion.
The week's exit news had no price attached. Anthropic's draft prospectus went out, and its listing is expected this year.
Confirmed top-four deals
| Sector | Company | Round and terms | Tracked-firm role | What the company does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Frontier AI | Flapping Airplanes | $1B Series A, announced October 21; $6B valuation | Sequoia Capital: participating, an existing backer; Index and Lux co-led | A one-year-old lab building a training framework it says makes models cheaper to train and run. 1 |
| Critical infrastructure AI | ASI | $325M Series C, announced October 21; $3B valuation | Andreessen Horowitz: participating; Spark Capital led | World models that simulate aircraft, vessels and power grids days ahead so operators can plan rather than react. 2 |
| Manufacturing software | Arda Industries | $232M in total, announced October 21: a $160M Series A at a $1.5B valuation plus a $72M seed | Founders Fund: co-led the seed with Accel; Altimeter, Accel and Khosla co-led the Series A | Turns CAD files into assembly lines and work instructions, and reprograms them when a design changes. 3 |
| Defense biotechnology | Warhound | $200M seed, disclosed October 22; $1.2B valuation | Sequoia Capital: participating; no lead disclosed | Gene-edits and clones working dogs for military and police units, with Anduril supplying the hardware. 4 |
| Digital commerce | Whop | $200M Series D, announced October 21; $5.1B valuation | Sequoia Capital: co-lead with Shopify Ventures | Storefront, payments and API tools for small internet businesses, about 25,000 of them. 5 |
| Robotics | Eka Robotics | $150M Series A, announced October 20; $1.45B post-money | Andreessen Horowitz: co-lead with F-Prime | Robotic hands with force sensing, trained in simulation, for picking and wire handling on factory lines. 6 |
| Workplace AI | Town | $108M Series B, announced October 20; $1B valuation | Andreessen Horowitz: participating; Forerunner and Menlo co-led | Per-user AI assistants that message each other and outside contacts to run shared tasks. 7 |
| Developer infrastructure | Blacksmith | $66M Series C, announced October 21; $1B valuation | Sequoia Capital: lead; Y Combinator: participating | Runs software build and test jobs roughly twice as fast, on about 10 megawatts of its own compute. 8 |
| Oncology devices | Coherence Neuro | $45M Series A, announced October 22; valuation undisclosed | Founders Fund: co-lead with the OpenAI Startup Fund | Implantable and wearable bioelectronic devices that watch a tumour change and treat it. 9 |
| Military planning software | Watchtower Labs | $35M seed, announced October 22; valuation undisclosed | Founders Fund: participating; Shield Capital and Conviction led | Simulation and optimisation tools that stress-test courses of action across hundreds of futures. 10 |
| Justice software | Longeye | $20M Series A, announced October 21; valuation undisclosed | Andreessen Horowitz American Dynamism: participating; N47 led | Search and citation tools that let detectives check large evidence sets against the original record. 11 |
| Frontline workforce | Firstwork | $15M Series A, announced October 21; total raised $20M | Y Combinator: participating; Earlybird led | Automates document checks, background screening and onboarding for hourly workers. 12 |
| Corporate governance | Pennant | $5M seed, announced October 22; valuation undisclosed | Y Combinator: participating; Urban Innovation Fund led | An AI model of corporate governance, starting with proxy voting for pension funds and asset managers. 13 |
Frontier labs
Flapping Airplanes: $1 billion, nine months after its seed
Flapping Airplanes raised a $1 billion Series A, co-led by Index and Lux, and announced it on October 21. Bloomberg reported the round values the company at $6 billion. 1
In January the company launched with a $180 million seed from GV, Sequoia and Index at a $1.5 billion valuation. The new price is four times that. 1
Sequoia Capital was an earlier backer following on; Index and Lux co-led this round. Partner David Cahn wrote the firm's January 28 note explaining the investment, and called the founders "the young person's AGI lab". 14
The three founders are Aidan Smith and brothers Asher and Ben Spector. Smith worked at Neuralink during college; the Spectors were statistics and computer science PhD students at Stanford. 1
What the company sells is a claim about training efficiency. It describes a single program, a megakernel, that can run training, inference and a video game at once, keeping a GPU busy. The premise is that capable systems can be trained without ingesting half the internet. 1
The $1 billion buys hiring and time to test that premise. For an LP reading this digest, it sets a price for research-stage AI: $6 billion for a team, a framework and no disclosed revenue.
Physical AI: robots and assembly lines
Eka Robotics: $150 million for hands that feel
Eka Robotics raised a $150 million Series A at a $1.45 billion post-money valuation, led by a16z and F-Prime. TechCrunch reported the round on October 20. 6
Raghu Raghuram, the a16z general partner who co-led it, published the firm's own note the same day. "They are already exceeding superhuman performance for certain tasks," he said. 615
The technical bet is force over vision. Eka trains a vision-force-action model on feedback from a hand it designed itself, using reinforcement learning inside a physics simulator. Vision finds the object; force closes the last millimetre. 6
The published numbers are specific enough to check against later. Eka reports about 1,500 picks an hour for objects up to one kilogram, and success on more than 95% of attempts. Its gripper costs under $1,000 and is rated for 5 million duty cycles, against 20 million for standard industrial arms. 6
Founders Pulkit Agrawal, an MIT professor, and Tuomas Haarnoja, a former Google DeepMind researcher who co-created the Soft Actor-Critic algorithm, lead the company. Industrial pilots in picking and wire handling are under way; the open test is whether the system survives a full production year. 6
Arda Industries: $232 million, and a Founders Fund seed that was never disclosed
Arda Industries raised $160 million in Series A funding at a $1.5 billion valuation, and disclosed a $72 million seed round alongside it. The combined $232 million was announced October 21. 3
Founders Fund co-led that seed with Accel, with Khosla Ventures and XYZ Venture Capital participating. The Series A was co-led by Altimeter, Accel and Khosla. 3
The product takes a manufacturer's CAD files and generates the assembly line: work instructions, assembly order and the robot programs that run it. When the design changes, the line is rebuilt in hours rather than months. 3
Chief executive Bob McGrew, chief AI officer Augustus Odena, chief technology officer Alex Mark and co-founder Jakob Frick lead the company. Deployments run inside Anduril's ArsenalOS manufacturing software, which links Arda to another round this week. 3
ASI: $325 million for models of physical infrastructure
ASI raised a $325 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation, led by Spark Capital. Affiliates of Citadel Securities, Meritech Capital, Craft Ventures, Energy Impact Partners and Andreessen Horowitz participated. 2
The Boston company sells world models that simulate physical operations hours, days or weeks ahead, so operators of aircraft, vessels and energy grids can plan instead of reacting. Founder and chief executive Phillip Buckendorf leads it. 2
The two companies are priced far apart. Eka, with hardware and industrial pilots running, is at $1.45 billion. ASI, selling simulation software into utilities and defense, is at $3 billion.
Infrastructure, defense and public safety
Warhound: $200 million before a single dog exists
Warhound came out of stealth on October 22 with $200 million and a $1.2 billion valuation. Investors named by TechCrunch include Sequoia, 8VC, Corner Ventures and In-Q-Tel, the venture firm backed by US intelligence agencies. No lead was disclosed. 4
The company was conceived by Ben Lamm, chief executive of Colossal Biosciences, and Anduril founder Palmer Luckey. Fortune first reported the round. Luckey is a partner with no equity; Colossal owns equity and licenses its cloning technology. 416
Warhound's case for a seed of this size starts with supply. More than 80% of the US military's working dogs come from Europe, and fewer than half of them are fit for service, according to the company's launch materials. 4
Lamm's team took cell lines from Belgian Malinois and German Shepherds into a biobank and plans to edit genes for health, longevity, speed and smell. The first dogs are due to be cloned and incubated, with births expected early next year and service ideally within two years. 4
Anduril's contribution sits on the dog rather than in it: protective vests and goggles with sensors that report back to handlers. The company says it is working under the guidance of the American Humane Society on certifying its training. 4
Watchtower Labs: $35 million to plan a hundred futures
Watchtower Labs raised a $35 million seed led by Shield Capital and Conviction, with Founders Fund participating. The San Francisco company builds planning software for military operations. 10
The software combines simulation, optimisation and AI to model constraints, generate courses of action across hundreds of possible futures, and stress-test each one. Chief executive Akhil Iyer co-founded it with Souren Aghajanyan and John Morman. 10
Longeye: $20 million for evidence nobody has time to read
Longeye raised a $20 million Series A led by N47, with Andreessen Horowitz's American Dynamism practice participating. The company announced it on October 21. 11
More than 50 agencies use the platform, and they have run 2,300 investigations through it, covering 15 million pages of documents and 32,000 hours of audio and video. Longeye counts that as 200,000 investigator-hours of review. 11
The differentiator the company pushes is verifiability. A patented citation engine links each finding back to the message, document or recording it came from, and the system runs inside the FBI's CJIS security policy. Chief executive Guillaume Delépine co-founded it in 2025. 11
Business and workplace software
Whop: $200 million at a tripled valuation
Whop raised a $200 million Series D at a $5.1 billion valuation, led by Sequoia and Shopify Ventures. The company announced it on October 21, its second raise this year. 5
In February, Tether made a $200 million strategic investment at a $1.6 billion valuation. Eight months later the company is priced at 3.2 times that. 5
The disclosed operating numbers are the reason to read this one closely. About 25,000 business operators generate $550 million on Whop each month, and the platform carries more than $7 billion in transactions across 185 countries. 5
Sequoia partner Doug Leone put annual revenue at "about a half billion" in the release. At $5.1 billion, that is roughly ten times the revenue run rate. 5
Sequoia published its own note on the deal the same day, under the title "Bet on Yourself". 17
Town: $108 million for assistants that talk to each other
Town raised a $108 million Series B at a $1 billion valuation, co-led by Forerunner Ventures and Menlo Ventures. Andreessen Horowitz participated alongside First Round Capital, Better Tomorrow Ventures, Serena Ventures and individual angels. 7
The product is an assistant called a Townie that connects to email, documents, calendars and core systems. Townies work with each other and with outside contacts over email and text, sharing only what permissions allow. Chief executive Jean-Denis Greze leads the company. 7
Blacksmith: a unicorn ten weeks after a $550 million price
Blacksmith raised a $66 million Series C at a $1 billion valuation, led by Sequoia Capital. Premji Invest, Peak XV Partners, GV and Y Combinator participated, bringing total funding to $125 million. 8
This digest covered Blacksmith's $45 million Series B in its August 10–16 issue, when the company was valued at $550 million. Ten weeks later the price has roughly doubled on the same product. 1819
The business is continuous integration for AI-written code: running builds and tests about twice as fast at roughly 60% lower cost. Blacksmith manages close to 10 megawatts of compute across US and European data centres and serves more than 10,000 companies. 8
Founders Aditya Jayaprakash, Aayush Shah and Aditya Maru took Sequoia's money to hire and buy compute. Sequoia's own note went out the same day as the round. 20
Firstwork and Pennant: two small YC participations
Firstwork raised a $15 million Series A led by Earlybird Venture Capital, with Legion VC, Deel Ventures, Gradient and Y Combinator participating. Total funding reached $20 million. 12
The New York company automates what it takes to get an hourly worker onto a shift: document verification, background and right-to-work checks, onboarding and compliance. It serves more than 150,000 frontline workers a month. 12
Pennant raised a $5 million seed led by Urban Innovation Fund, with Y Combinator and strategic angels participating. The New York startup builds a world model for corporate governance, starting with proxy voting for pension funds, asset managers and their legal advisers. 13
Health
Coherence Neuro: $45 million for devices that watch a tumour
Coherence Neuro raised a $45 million Series A co-led by Founders Fund and the OpenAI Startup Fund. Lux Capital, 8VC, Timeless, Olive Capital and Ahren joined as new investors. 9
The San Francisco company builds implantable and wearable bioelectronic devices with AI embedded, to monitor and treat cancer by mapping biological data as a tumour changes. 9
The money funds a first chronic human trial in glioblastoma, an application for FDA breakthrough device designation, and an expansion of preclinical work into pancreatic cancer. Chief executive Ben Woodington and chief technology officer Elise Jenkins lead it. 9
Exit watch
Anthropic's prospectus, and Sequoia's stake doubling on paper
No acquisition of a company backed by the four tracked firms was confirmed inside this window. The exit news instead came from a filing.
Anthropic's listing is expected this year at a valuation of as much as $2 trillion. Its latest private valuation is $965 billion. 21
Sequoia Capital first backed Anthropic earlier this year at a $380 billion valuation, putting in $3 billion for about 1% of the company, according to Bloomberg's tally as relayed by TechCrunch. That stake has already more than doubled. 21
This digest covered Sequoia co-leading Anthropic's $65 billion round at a $965 billion valuation in its May 28–June 1 issue. The September 14–20 issue noted that the listing could slip past the November midterms. A draft prospectus in October is that next step.
For a reader tracking LP returns, the top of the expected IPO range is the number that matters. At a $2 trillion valuation, the same stake is worth roughly twice what it is at $965 billion.
Labeled non-top-tier context
| Sector | Company | Disclosed transaction | Lead or key investors | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| AI chips | Tenstorrent | $1.5B Series E at a $6.2B valuation | Trace Capital and Innovation X led | The week's largest round, with no tracked-firm participation named. 22 |
| Space | Xona | $250M Series D at a $2.4B valuation | Future Ventures led | A next-generation GPS replacement, an infrastructure bet of the kind the tracked firms also make. 22 |
| Biotech | Pathos AI | $237M Series E at about a $3B valuation | Bristol-Myers Squibb led | The largest biotech round of the window. 22 |
| AI for drug discovery | Warp Sciences | $215M Series A | Lightspeed Venture Partners led | Applies AI and robotics to drug development, at a Series A size the sector now sees regularly. 22 |
| Biotech | Star Therapeutics | $200M | OrbiMed and Janus Henderson led | A follow-on to Incyte's July acquisition of its Vega subsidiary. 22 |
Digest notes
- Two rounds are half the week. Flapping Airplanes' $1 billion and Whop's $200 million account for 50% of the $2.40 billion total. The other eleven average $109 million.
- Sequoia Capital had the week of the four firms. It led or co-led two rounds, Whop and Blacksmith, and appeared in two more, Flapping Airplanes and Warhound. It published its own notes on Whop and Blacksmith on the same day, October 21.
- Andreessen Horowitz co-led one round and joined three. It co-led Eka Robotics with F-Prime and took participant positions in Town, ASI and Longeye. The Longeye check came from its American Dynamism practice.
- Founders Fund's three appearances land in manufacturing, defense and medical devices. Two are co-leads: the Arda Industries seed, disclosed for the first time this week, and Coherence Neuro.
- Y Combinator appeared three times, always as one name in someone else's round. Its largest was Blacksmith, which is also counted for Sequoia, so the four per-firm totals add to $2.47 billion against a $2.40 billion week.
- Seven of the thirteen companies work on physical things. Robots, assembly lines, aircraft and grid models, working dogs, military planning, evidence review and implantable devices take the bulk of the money. Six are software: Flapping Airplanes, Whop, Town, Blacksmith, Firstwork and Pennant.
- Two rounds this week touch Anduril. Arda Industries runs inside Anduril's manufacturing software, and Warhound will carry Anduril hardware on its dogs.
Coverage note
This issue covers financing announcements dated October 19 through October 25, 2026. The confirmed total counts rounds announced inside that window whose investor lists name Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund or Y Combinator: thirteen rounds, all with a disclosed amount, adding to at least $2.40 billion.
Two counts need their definitions stated. Arda Industries is counted at its full $232 million, the sum of a Series A and a previously undisclosed seed announced together on October 21. Blacksmith is counted once in the total and twice in the per-firm figures, because both Sequoia and Y Combinator appear in its investor list.
Three kinds of item stay outside the total and are labeled where they appear: Anthropic's draft prospectus, because no new capital was raised in the window; and the rounds in the context table, because their investor lists name none of the four tracked firms.
Where each number comes from: Eka Robotics and Flapping Airplanes rest on TechCrunch reports dated October 20 and October 21, with Flapping Airplanes' $6 billion valuation attributed to Bloomberg. Warhound rests on TechCrunch and Fortune reports dated October 22, and its lead investor has not been disclosed. Whop and Longeye rest on company releases dated October 21. Arda Industries, ASI, Town, Coherence Neuro, Watchtower Labs, Firstwork and Pennant rest on FinSMEs reports, which carry the full investor lists but are secondary.
Crunchbase News's weekly roundup, used only for the context table, covers October 17 through October 23, a period that starts two days before this digest's window.
References
- 1
- 2ASI Raises $325M in Series C Funding
finsmes.com
- 3
- 4
- 5
- 6
- 7Town Raises $108M in Series B Funding
finsmes.com
- 8Blacksmith Raises $66M in Series C Funding
finsmes.com
- 9
- 10Watchtower Labs Raises $35M in Seed Funding
finsmes.com
- 11
- 12Firstwork Raises $15M in Series A Funding
finsmes.com
- 13Pennant Raises $5M in Seed Funding
finsmes.com
- 14Partnering With Flapping Airplanes
sequoiacap.com
- 15Investing in Eka Robotics
a16z.com
- 16
- 17Partnering with Whop: Bet on Yourself
sequoiacap.com
- 18
- 19
- 20Partnering with Blacksmith
sequoiacap.com
- 21
- 22
This story was produced automatically by a channel. One sentence is all it takes for Neodrop to keep producing for you.