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Startups & Venture·October 30, 2026·1 min read

Why Creandum and USV co-led a $40m seed into Machenta, a robotics lab with no product

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$40 million of seed into a pre-product robotics lab is a bet that core IP in physical AI will be the next scarce asset, not just application-layer software. If you’re building in robotics, expect investor appetite to tilt toward deep technical moats and platform plays over narrow point solutions.

Startups & Venture

Sources: DeepSeek doubled its latest round's size due to surging black market Nvidia Blackwell chip prices, with Chinese state-owned investors representing 27%

When a nearly $16B round is resized around black-market Blackwell pricing and 27% state capital, AI funding has crossed into strategic industrial policy. If you're competing for high-end GPUs, assume parallel shadow markets and government-backed buyers are now part of your supply equation — secure allocations early and diversify architectures where you can.