Gatik raises $200M as physical AI, agent infrastructure and AI power startups draw fresh capital

Moki

3 min read·2026/08/26

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Startup funding in the latest cycle is concentrating around practical AI infrastructure: autonomous freight, robotics foundation models, agent search and voice workflows, creative AI platforms, and software that helps data centers work with strained power grids.

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Gatik moves autonomous freight from pilots to scale

Gatik raised $200 million in its largest funding round to date after signing a multiyear commercial agreement with PepsiCo. The round was led by Qatar Investment Authority and Koch Disruptive Technologies, with Millennium Management, ARK Invest and Intact Private Capital also participating. The company says it has about $600 million in contracted revenue, operates fully driverless trucks across several markets, and will use the capital to add trucks, customers, cities and staff.

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Physical AI valuations keep rising around robotics foundation models

Investor appetite for robotics shifted beyond hardware into general-purpose robot intelligence. TechCrunch reported that Generalist raised nearly $200 million in an 8VC-led extension, lifting its valuation to about $3 billion and bringing its Series B total to roughly $600 million. The company says its Gen 1.5 model can teach robots new tasks from short video demonstrations. In a related signal, General Intuition is reportedly in talks to raise at a $6 billion pre-money valuation only weeks after a $320 million round, using gameplay data and action labels to train spatial AI models for real-world robotics.

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Agent infrastructure moves from chat interfaces to live workflows

Keenable emerged from stealth with a $26 million seed round led by Accel to build web-scale search infrastructure for AI agents. The startup says it has indexed more than 100 billion documents and already serves several AI labs and inference providers for training and runtime retrieval. In India, Ringg raised $10 million from Peak XV as it pushes enterprise voice AI into appointment booking, abandoned-cart recovery, KYC checks and browser-based support, processing about 20 million call attempts per month. Together, the deals show that agent startups are being funded where they can retrieve fresh information and complete measurable work.

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Strategic backers shape creative and consumer AI platforms

Stability AI raised a $76 million Series B, bringing total funding under CEO Prem Akkaraju to $232 million. The notable part is the investor base: Universal Music Group, Sony Music Group, Warner Music Group, Electronic Arts, AMD Ventures and Pacific Alliance Ventures joined the round, reinforcing Stability's pivot toward licensed creative tools for music, gaming and entertainment workflows. In South Korea, WRTN Technologies raised about 100 billion won, or $72.23 million, at a valuation above 1 trillion won, driven by overseas monetization from AI entertainment services such as OOC.

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AI's power constraint becomes a startup category

Emerald AI raised a $150 million Series A at a $1.05 billion valuation, co-led by Energize Capital and DCVC, to turn AI data centers into grid-responsive flexible loads. Its software dynamically shifts AI workloads and onsite energy resources when the power grid is stressed, and the company says the approach could unlock more than 100 gigawatts of capacity on the existing U.S. grid. With partners including NVIDIA, Oracle, EPRI and National Grid in demonstrations, the round shows that investors now treat power availability as a core AI infrastructure bottleneck, not just a utility issue.

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