VC deal flow, September 28–October 4: $2.10B across AI agents, security, and two portfolio exits
Confirmed checks from a16z, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund and Y Combinator reached $2.10 billion across eleven rounds, led by Instinct's $1 billion Series C, while two AI portfolio companies left through acquisitions.
Eleven rounds announced between September 28 and October 4, 2026 name at least one of Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund or Y Combinator as an investor, and $2.10 billion was disclosed across ten of them. Andreessen Horowitz appears in seven of the eleven; Sequoia Capital and Y Combinator appear in two each, and Founders Fund in one. Nine of the eleven rounds fund AI or the agent infrastructure built on top of it; the two that do not are the fintech Jeeves and the space manufacturer Varda.
Two portfolio companies also left in the same week. AMD agreed on September 28 to acquire World Labs, whose 2024 seed round Andreessen Horowitz co-led, for $8.2 billion in stock. 1 Salesforce signed a definitive agreement on September 29 to acquire Listen Labs, a company Sequoia Capital backed from seed through Series B. 2
Confirmed top-four deals
| Sector | Company | Round and terms | Tracked-firm role | What the company does |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Consumer AI agents | Instinct | $1B Series C, announced September 28; $10B valuation | Sequoia Capital: investor; Benchmark Capital and Coatue backed the round | A personal AI assistant that books travel, makes reservations, pays bills and cancels subscriptions for its users. 3 |
| AI for housing and healthcare | EliseAI | $350M round, announced September 29; $4B valuation | Andreessen Horowitz: co-lead with Bessemer Venture Partners and Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan | Automates leasing, resident services and health-system administration for landlords and physician groups. 4 |
| Cybersecurity | Armadin | $255.5M Series B, announced October 1; valuation above $2.5B | Andreessen Horowitz: co-lead with Accel | Runs autonomous AI red-team attacks to find and fix exploitable paths across a company's systems. 56 |
| Space and life sciences | Varda Space Industries | $251M Series D, announced September 30; valuation undisclosed | Founders Fund: participating investor; Lux Capital and Natural Capital led | Manufactures pharmaceuticals in orbit and brings them back in reentry capsules. 7 |
| Fintech | Jeeves | $110M Series C-1, announced September 29; valuation undisclosed | Andreessen Horowitz and Y Combinator: participating investors; CoinFund led | Corporate cards and expense management, now expanding into stablecoin payments. 8 |
| Engineering software | Flow Engineering | $50M Series B, announced September 30; $750M valuation | Sequoia Capital: participating investor; Valor Equity Partners and Atreides Management co-led | Gives hardware engineers AI agents that keep CAD drawings aligned with requirements and test results. 9 |
| Privacy networking | doxx.net | $38M Series A, announced October 1; valuation undisclosed | Andreessen Horowitz: lead investor | Builds a private parallel network that people and their AI agents use away from the public internet. 10 |
| AI training environments | Halluminate | $30M Series A, announced October 1; valuation undisclosed | Y Combinator: participating investor; Oak HC/FT led | Builds finance-specific training environments for frontier AI models. 11 |
| Enterprise software | Kanu AI | $11.7M seed, announced September 30; valuation undisclosed | Andreessen Horowitz Speedrun: participating investor; Trilogy Equity Partners led | Turns demonstrated employee workflows into custom internal software. 12 |
| Medical robotics | Aleph Surgical | $7.5M pre-seed, announced September 30; valuation undisclosed | Andreessen Horowitz: lead investor | Developing an autonomous surgical robot. 13 |
| On-device AI | Conway Research | first round, announced October 2; terms undisclosed | Andreessen Horowitz: lead investor | Building personal AI that runs on the user's own devices. 14 |
Consumer AI agents
Instinct: $1 billion, a month after $350 million
Instinct raised a $1 billion Series C at a $10 billion valuation, announced September 28, with Sequoia Capital, Benchmark Capital and Coatue investing. The company had raised $350 million at a $2.5 billion valuation a month earlier, and it launched its invite-only service in August 2026. 3
Instinct reaches users by text message rather than through an app. The assistant completes tasks using its own phone number and computer, and the company has not published user numbers. Meta's own assistant, Muse, now offers many of the same features and has climbed to the top of the US app stores. 3
Conway Research: a16z bets on AI that stays on the device
Andreessen Horowitz led Conway Research's first round, announced October 2, without disclosing the amount. 14 The firm's crypto team wrote the announcement, and it frames the investment around a privacy argument: as assistants gain access to messages, documents and commitments, the most useful AI is also the one holding the most sensitive material. Conway's product, Underdog, is built to run on the user's own hardware and to keep working offline. Founder Sigil Wen previously helped build the voice product Airchat, and he came to the firm's attention through Naval Ravikant. 14
Enterprise and vertical AI software
EliseAI: $350 million for the back office of housing and healthcare
EliseAI raised $350 million at a $4 billion valuation, co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners, with Ontario Teachers' Pension Plan joining as a new investor and Sapphire Ventures and Navitas Capital participating. 4
The round nearly doubles the $2.2 billion valuation from the company's $250 million Series E 13 months earlier, and it is the fourth time since 2023 that Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer have both backed the company. EliseAI automates leasing enquiries, resident services, maintenance requests and lease renewals for landlords, and it runs the same playbook for specialty physician groups: scheduling, insurance verification, chart preparation and follow-up. The company says its software powers about one in six US apartments, that it passed $200 million in annual recurring revenue in June, and that revenue has doubled every year for five years. 4
Halluminate: $30 million to train models on finance work
Halluminate raised a $30 million Series A led by Oak HC/FT, with existing investors Y Combinator, Orange Collective and Heavybit participating, bringing total funding to $38.5 million. Nine people work at the company. 11
Halluminate benchmarks AI models on financial tasks, then builds simulated environments where those models train against the failures. Its August benchmark put seven frontier models through a simulated acquisitions due-diligence process across 88 tasks, and the top average score was 51%. The company says four of the five largest closed-source US AI labs are paying customers, that annualized revenue has reached the mid-eight figures, and that it is profitable. 11
Kanu AI: $11.7 million for software built from watched work
Kanu AI raised an $11.7 million seed led by Trilogy Equity Partners, with a16z Speedrun, BMW i Ventures and Accel participating. 12 The Seattle company watches how an employee completes a workflow and turns that demonstration into software the whole organization can run inside the customer's own cloud. The company says it has more than doubled revenue each quarter since launching, and that one national customer cut an eight-week analysis process to under ten minutes. 12
Cybersecurity and private networking
Armadin: $255.5 million for red teams that run at machine speed
Armadin raised a $255.5 million Series B co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, at a valuation above $2.5 billion. 5 Kevin Mandia, who founded the incident-response firm Mandiant and sold it to Google, started Armadin in September 2025 with Travis Lanham, Evan Peña and David Slater, and the company had raised $189.9 million in seed and Series A funding by its March 2026 launch. 15
Armadin's platform runs an "agentic attacker swarm" that probes a company's external assets, cloud, identity, internal networks and applications continuously, then reports the attack paths it proved reachable and helps close them. The firm's own announcement pins the bet on a summer in which OpenAI, Anthropic and Meta each disclosed that a model had reached systems beyond the boundary its test assumed. 6
doxx.net: $38 million for a network off the public internet
doxx.net raised a $38 million Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Animo Ventures and Focal.vc participating, alongside the open beta of its platform. 10
Founder Barrett Lyon built the DDoS-defense company Prolexic, which Akamai acquired, and then BitGravity and Defense.net. doxx.net gives people and their agents their own IP space, DNS root, encrypted mesh and certificate authority, so calls and file transfers travel directly between peers with no communications server in the middle. The company says it blocked more than 38 million threats during a closed beta that began in December 2025. 1016
Space and life sciences
Varda: $251 million for drugs crystallized in orbit
Varda Space Industries raised a $251 million Series D, led by Lux Capital and Natural Capital, with Founders Fund, Khosla Ventures, Caffeinated Capital, General Catalyst, 8090 Industries, Giant Step and Also Capital participating. The round brings total funding to $598 million, and the company did not disclose a valuation. 7
Without gravity, the active ingredients in medicines crystallize in ways that are hard to reproduce on Earth, and Varda's bet is that the resulting formulations justify the trip. The company has completed six reentry missions since 2023 and plans more than a dozen launches and reentries through 2028. Co-founder and president Delian Asparouhov says the round lets the company raise its cadence and move closer to the first medicine made in space. 7
Engineering and robotics
Flow Engineering: $50 million to make hardware iterate like software
Flow Engineering raised a $50 million Series B at a $750 million valuation, co-led by Antonio Gracias of Valor Equity Partners and Gavin Baker of Atreides Management, with Sequoia Capital participating. Sequoia had led the company's Series A in October 2025, and former Sequoia partner Roelof Botha invested as an individual and joined the board. 9
Flow's agents keep CAD drawings aligned with product requirements and simulation results, the trail of paper that slows physical products down. Its customers include Anduril, Rivian, Joby Aviation, General Motors' PPU joint venture, RV Tech and Stoke Space. 9
Aleph Surgical: $7.5 million for a robot that operates
Aleph Surgical raised a $7.5 million pre-seed led by Andreessen Horowitz, with BoxGroup, Reveille VC, Constellation, FDVC, Valkyrie Ventures, Discipulus Ventures and Maniac Ventures participating. 13 The San Francisco company is building a surgical robot that learns procedures from demonstrations and improves with use, and it argues that the physical-AI money has gone to industries where labor is cheap rather than to surgery, where trained hands are the scarcest input. 13
Fintech and payments
Jeeves: $110 million for corporate money on stablecoins
Jeeves raised a $110 million round led by CoinFund, with Andreessen Horowitz, Y Combinator, Coinbase Ventures, AllianceBernstein, GIC, ParaFi Capital, Wintermute Ventures and others participating. 8
The Miami company sells corporate cards and expense management, and the round is aimed at its fastest-growing product: stablecoin settlement. Total card and payment volume has passed $5 billion, of which $1.5 billion runs at an annualized pace through stablecoins, and Jeeves plans wallets for USDC and USDT with payouts to 190 countries. Chief executive Dileep Thazhmon took the company through Y Combinator's Summer 2020 batch; its last major round was a $180 million Series C led by Tencent in 2022 at a $2.1 billion valuation. 8
Exit watch
AMD buys World Labs for $8.2 billion
AMD agreed on September 28 to acquire World Labs in an $8.2 billion all-stock deal, and World Labs founder Fei-Fei Li will join AMD as executive vice president and chief scientist. 1 World Labs builds models that understand physical space, and AMD says the acquisition will shape its chip roadmap against Nvidia, which already ships open world models. The company launched in 2024 with more than $230 million in funding co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, NEA and Radical Ventures, so the deal hands a large return to a two-year-old seed syndicate. It is expected to close before the end of the year, subject to regulatory approval. 117
Salesforce buys Listen Labs for a reported $2 billion
Salesforce signed a definitive agreement on September 29 to acquire Listen Labs, whose AI agents design studies, interview customers and synthesize the results. Salesforce did not disclose terms, and outlets reported a price of about $2 billion; the transaction is expected to close in the fourth quarter of Salesforce's fiscal 2027, subject to regulatory clearance. 218
Sequoia Capital led Listen Labs' seed round in 2023, its Series A and its Series B. The firm wrote that it used the product for its own diligence and peer feedback, and that brands including Google, Levi's and Microsoft were customers. 19 The deal appeared in this digest three weeks ago as a reported set of talks; it is now a signed agreement.
Portfolio liquidity watch
ElevenLabs: employees sell at a $22 billion valuation
ElevenLabs let employees sell part of their vested equity in a $300 million tender offer that values the voice-AI company at $22 billion, announced September 30, double the $11 billion it reached when it raised $500 million in February. Wellington and T. Rowe Price co-led the tender. 20 Sequoia Capital led the February round, and Andreessen Horowitz quadrupled its investment in it, which makes the tender a valuation mark on a shared portfolio position rather than new money into the company. 21
Labeled non-top-tier context
| Sector | Company | Disclosed transaction | Lead or key investors | Why it is here |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Developer infrastructure | Supabase | $150M round, announced October 2, plus the acquisition of Turso | GIC led, with CapitalG, IronArc and SquarePeg | The week's largest developer-tools round, from a Y Combinator alumnus whose participant list names none of the four tracked firms. 22 |
| AI compute | GMI Cloud | $223M Series B plus a $445M credit facility, announced October 1 | ARCHIV led, with Nvidia and Asia-Pacific investors | One of the week's largest AI-infrastructure financings, with no tracked-firm participation named. 23 |
| Physical AI | SiMa.ai | $150M Series C at a $1.45B valuation, announced September 28 | Fidelity and Amplify co-led | Silicon and software for running AI on devices, in the same physical-AI corner as Aleph Surgical and Flow Engineering. 24 |
Digest notes
- One round is nearly half the week. Instinct's $1 billion is 48% of the $2.10 billion confirmed total. The other ten rounds average $110 million.
- Nine of the eleven rounds are AI, and they hold about 83% of the money. Those nine disclosed $1.74 billion. The exceptions are Varda's in-space pharmaceutical manufacturing and Jeeves' stablecoin payments.
- a16z's seven appearances span every stage and every sector in the table. The firm co-led the week's second- and third-largest rounds, EliseAI and Armadin, led doxx.net, Aleph Surgical and Conway Research, and joined Jeeves and a Kanu AI seed through its Speedrun arm. That is more appearances than Sequoia, Founders Fund and Y Combinator combined.
- Founders Fund's single appearance is outside software. The firm joined Varda's space-manufacturing round as a participating investor, following Lux Capital and Natural Capital rather than leading.
- Sequoia's two investments are both AI, and its week also carried an exit. The firm backed Instinct's consumer assistant and Flow Engineering's hardware-design agents, then signed off on Listen Labs' sale to Salesforce, a company it had funded from seed through Series B.
- Y Combinator's two positions are both follow-ons. Y Combinator appears in Jeeves, from the Summer 2020 batch, and Halluminate, from the Summer 2025 batch; neither round was led by the accelerator. Kanu AI, whose founder is also a Y Combinator alumnus, raised separately with a16z Speedrun in its participant list.
- Both exits are AI companies, announced a day apart. AMD paid $8.2 billion in stock for World Labs and Salesforce signed for Listen Labs at a reported $2 billion, resolving positions the two firms opened in 2024 and 2023.
Coverage note
This issue covers financing announcements and corporate developments dated September 28 through October 4, 2026. The confirmed total counts the rounds announced inside that window whose participant lists name Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund or Y Combinator: eleven rounds, ten of them with a disclosed size, adding to $2.10 billion. Conway Research's round carried no amount and is counted as a confirmed deal with undisclosed terms rather than in the total.
Three kinds of item are kept out of that total and labeled where they appear: the two acquisitions, because they are exits rather than financings; the ElevenLabs tender, because it is secondary liquidity rather than new primary capital; and the rounds in the context table, because their participant lists name none of the four tracked firms.
Dates for the confirmed deals come from the company or investor announcement where one exists, and from a dated report otherwise. One earlier candidate, Halter's $220 million Founders Fund-led Series E, was excluded after its announcement turned out to be dated March 2026 rather than this window.
References
- 1AMD will acquire Fei-Fei Li's World Labs for $8.2B
techcrunch.com
- 2
- 3
- 4
- 5The Week's 10 Biggest Funding Rounds: Almost All About AI
news.crunchbase.com
- 6Investing in Armadin
a16z.com
- 7
- 8
- 9
- 10
- 11
- 12
- 13Fundraising Announcement — Aleph Surgical
alephsurgical.com
- 14
- 15
- 16Investing in doxxnet
a16z.com
- 17
- 18
- 19Listen Labs and Salesforce: Hear Your Customers
sequoiacap.com
- 20AI voice startup ElevenLabs doubles valuation to $22B
techcrunch.com
- 21
- 22
- 23
- 24
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