This is a monthly column that runs down five interesting startup funding deals every month that may have flown under the radar. Check out our November entry here.
This month, funded startups that caught our eye included a company aiming to make a better wireless monitor for heart disease, another using AI-designed antibodies for home health tests, a startup using AI to improve airplane turnaround times, and a company developing AI-designed proteins for industrial, manufacturing and defense purposes.
$29M for at-home hormone health testing
Inito, a startup that offers popular at-home fertility tests, this month raised $29 million in Series B funding to expand its platform beyond fertility monitoring for women trying to conceive, to a broader slate of at-home diagnostics.
The Palo Alto, California-based startup was founded in 2015. Since 2021, it has analyzed more than 30 million fertility hormone data points, per the company. That data will be useful as it aims to use its new funding to expand beyond fertility monitoring to a range of hormone-related health markers.
Key to that expansion is the development of AI-engineered antibodies, or synthetic proteins created by computer models that predict how antibody molecules should fold and bind to specific targets.
“We predict how proteins fold in 3D, design synthetic antibodies using AI, and test millions of variants virtually before making a single one in the lab,” Inito co-founder and CTO Varun Venkatesan told TechCrunch via email. “This produces antibodies that are far more sensitive, consistent, and stable than anything developed through traditional methods.”
Inito says that innovation will enable it to build new, accurate at-home health tests for a wider range of biomarkers. This capability is central to the startup’s plan to grow from fertility tracking into a broader at-home health diagnostics platform that could be used to track pregnancy progression, menopause, broader endocrine markers like testosterone, and other hormonal health indicators.
“The endgame is to redefine diagnostics altogether,” CEO and co-founder Aayush Rai told TechCrunch. “If you want to understand what’s happening inside your body at every life stage and health need, you shouldn’t be limited by clinic appointments, lab schedules, or rigid testing systems. You should be able to measure, track, and get insights about your body from home, with lab-grade confidence.”
Bertelsmann India Investments and Fireside Ventures led the company’s Series B funding. The startup has now raised $42.5 million total, per Crunchbase.
$26.6M for smoother airport operations
A startup that promises to make air travel less of a headache is always going to catch our attention. So it was with Assaia, a Zurich-based startup that this month raised $26.6 million in Series B funding for its AI-driven airport operations platform.
The company says its technology — already in use at New York’s JFK, London’s Heathrow, Dubai International and Toronto Pearson airports — helps to streamline the commercial aircraft turnaround process at major air travel hubs, many of which are facing increased traffic, tighter operating margins and staffing constraints.
A portion of Assaia’s new capital will be used to further develop StandManager, its AI software module that helps optimize gate and stand assignments before aircraft land, the company says.
Assaia’s Series B was led by Armira Growth, alongside existing investors. “We focus on investing in resilient business models that demonstrate a distinct technological advantage, and Assaia exemplifies that,” Christian Figge, managing partner at Armira, said in a statement. “Its AI platform is already transforming airport operations and helping the aviation industry navigate some of its most complex challenges.”
$15M for AI-designed proteins for manufacturing
Aether Bio announced $15 million in new funding this month, promising to manufacture novel new materials using AI-developed proteins and biological processes.
The Menlo Park, California-based startup says it has raised $64 million in total funding, including this latest round, which was led by Tribe Capital with participation from new and existing investors including Natural Capital, Henkel Corp., Resilience Reserve, Shrug Capital, 4DX Ventures, Unless and Radicle Impact.
Aether says it combines “purpose-built AI and high-throughput robotics to design proteins that act like molecular assemblers, tiny machines that build one atom at a time.”
These “nanoscale machines have the precision and sophistication of massive chemical factories, but at a fraction of the size, enabling Aether to make new products faster, more affordably, and more sustainably,” according to the company.
Its first product is RapidPrint, which it describes as a high-performance 3D printing polymer filament line that uses AI-optimized materials to enable dramatically faster manufacturing of aerospace, defense and industrial parts.
The company says overall, it has developed seven new classes of proteins that have the potential to be used in defense, aerospace, pharmaceutical manufacturing, carbon capture and other applications.
“One of the things we have got very good at is targeting a novel molecular species and making it very quickly,” Aether CEO and founder Pavle Jeremić told .
Tribe Capital Chairman Arjun Sethi said his firm invested because it was excited about the real-world applications for Aether’s technology. “We’ve seen many AI companies focus on discovery, but no one has taken the leap from designing proteins to delivering physical, market-ready products until Aether,” he said in a funding announcement. “Aether is proving that its approach isn’t just innovative in theory; it’s faster, more cost-effective, and higher-performing than traditional methods, setting the standard for what AI-driven chemistry can achieve in the real world.”
$14M for a wireless heart monitor
Heart disease is the leading cause of death in the U.S., claiming nearly a million American lives in 2023, per the CDC. But despite the disease’s prevalence, accessible technology to monitor for heart issues is not as common as you may think.
Wearlinq, a San Francisco-based startup that offers a wireless heart monitor that it says offers hospital-grade monitoring at home, this month announced a $14 million Series A. The company says its product offers patients and cardiologists hospital-level heart data from anywhere.
“At home, most devices track heart rate rather than the electrical rhythm,” the company said in a press release. “Heart rate alone can’t catch many arrhythmias or the subtle changes that signal rising risk. In hospitals, wired telemetry is bulky and brief, and single-lead patches often miss intermittent events. The result is a system where patients take devices off, doctors order repeat tests, and heart disease continues to claim millions more lives.”
The company says its device is used in 75 cardiology units and by thousands of patients a month, and that it’s FDA 510(k) cleared.
Wearlinq said it will use the new funding to “dramatically scale” and expand its reach into hundreds of additional clinics. Its funding was led by AIX Ventures.
A long list of other investors participated: Berkeley Catalyst Fund, Angel School, Amino Capital, XB Ventures, Alumni Ventures, SpringTide Ventures, Solasta, Smartlink Partners, NYX Ventures, Maliam, Lightscape Partners, LDV Partners, Device of Tomorrow Capital and Celtic House Asia Partners. Alongside the equity round, the company also raised $5 million in venture debt.
$6M to analyze commercial real estate portfolios in minutes
Commercial real estate doesn’t immediately strike us as an area ripe for innovation, which helps to explain why investment into proptech startups overall has plummeted in recent years.
But given the trillions of dollars held in commercial real estate portfolios, a platform that promises to drastically streamline real estate investments and financial modeling does seem like a savvy bet.
To that end, Built AI, a London-based startup used by commercial real estate investors for financial modeling and analysis, this month announced $6 million in seed funding to expand into the massive U.S. commercial real estate market. The company says its platform has already been used to analyze $70 billion worth of investment opportunities in the U.K. and Europe. It’s now hoping to get a foothold in the estimated $22 trillion U.S. commercial real estate market.
Its seed round was led by Work-Bench, with participation from Lerer Hippeau, Timber Grove Ventures, Emerald Pine Capital and “several angel investors and property sector veterans.”
Built AI says its platform uses machine learning to extract and analyze building data to help clients manage their portfolios and underwrite new investment opportunities. The platform can analyze single properties or entire portfolios, and looks at variables such as lease terms, valuation, tenant profiles and local market data. It reduces analysis time by 90%, from hours or days to minutes, according to the company.
The company was founded in 2020 by Natan Lempert, who previously held roles at Goldman Sachs, Citi and Benson Elliott Capital Management, and Firoz Noordeen, previously director at NatWest Venture. It has raised $8.5 million to date, per Crunchbase.
“Real estate is the world’s largest asset class and yet the tools used to appraise deals have barely evolved in the last 40 years. Billions of dollars worth of investment deals are still screened every year using outdated, error-prone processes leading to over $185 billion in annual losses because of incorrect valuation metrics or missed opportunities,” Lempert, the company’s CEO, said in a statement. “Generative AI is becoming increasingly embedded in financial decisions, to translate data at scale and automate underwriting,” he said.
The company’s client list includes real estate giants CBRE, Howard Hughes Corp. and Knight Frank Investment Management.
“The future of software requires three essential attributes: domain expertise, AI skills, and ingenuity. These founders have all three and seek to fundamentally reimagine the real estate investment process,” Jonathan Lehr, co-founder and general partner of Work-Bench, said in a statement.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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