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 December entry here.
A host of interesting, under-the-radar recently funded startups caught our attention in the past month, including one that’s developing nuclear-waste generated electricity on the moon, another that aims to use AI to extract business intelligence from enterprise contracts, and a shoebox-picking warehouse robot. Let’s take a closer look.
$55M to turn contracts into business intelligence
AI-driven contract intelligence platform Ivo said last month that it raised $55 million in a Series B round led by existing investor Blackbird, with participation from Costanoa Ventures, Uncork Capital, Fika Ventures, GD1 and Icehouse Ventures.
The funding for the San Francisco-based company comes amid record-breaking funding for legal tech startups, particularly those that apply AI-driven automation to the notoriously paperwork-heavy profession. All told, venture funding to legal tech startups in 2025 nearly doubled year over year to more than $4 billion, per Crunchbase data.
Ivo itself has now raised $77.2 million from investors, per Crunchbase. Its latest funding comes as in-house legal teams face mounting pressure from rising contract volumes and growing compliance demands.
Even as contracts increasingly serve as the backbone of revenue, vendor relationships and risk management, much of the data inside those agreements remains locked in PDFs and legacy systems, which are difficult to search or analyze without manual review.
Ivo’s platform automates contract review and transforms agreements into structured, searchable data. Its review product uses lawyer-built playbooks to standardize positions and flag deviations, with customers reporting time savings of up to 75% compared to manual review, per the company. Its intelligence layer also reportedly allows teams to surface obligations, renewal terms and risk exposure across entire contract libraries in seconds.
Since its previous funding round, Ivo says it has grown annual recurring revenue by 500%, increased its total customer count by 134%, and expanded adoption within the Fortune 500 by 250%. Its customers include Uber, Shopify, Atlassian, Reddit and Canva.
“Our goal has always been to make interacting with contracts fast, accurate, and enjoyable,” CEO and co-founder Min-Kyu Jung said in a statement. “Every key relationship in a business is defined by an agreement, yet most organizations struggle to extract the insights inside them. Our focus is to give in-house teams a trustworthy solution that helps them work faster and gives them visibility into their contracts that was previously impossible.”
Related Crunchbase query: Legal And Legal Tech Startup Funding, 2025
$10M for warehouse robots, including one that picks shoeboxes
Amid record robotics investment, we perhaps shouldn’t be too surprised to see some very specialized bots get funding.
One is from Nomagic, a Polish warehouse robotics company that last month raised a $10 million Series B extension led by Cogito Capital Partners. Along with its new funding, the Warsaw-based company unveiled its Shoebox Picker robot, designed to “reliably pick two-piece, unsealed shoeboxes.” That might sound like a niche task, but the company said shoeboxes account for up to 20% of SKUs in U.S. fashion e-commerce, yet have long resisted automation.
The Shoebox Picker can pick up to 450 units per hour when it’s only handling shoeboxes, and up to 600 units per hour for mixed bins, per the company. It can handle more than 98% of the shoeboxes on the market, according to Nomagic.
Nomagic’s vision is “to bring physical AI into the heart of warehouse and logistics operations, where intelligent, autonomous systems can finally bridge the gap between digital optimization and real‑world execution,” CEO and co-founder Kacper Nowicki said in the funding announcement.
The company was founded in 2017 and has raised $84.6 million to date, per Crunchbase.
Venture funding to robotics-related startups overall totaled nearly $14 billion last year, per Crunchbase data. That’s a 70% increase over 2024 and eclipses even the peak funding year of 2021.
Related Crunchbase query: Robotics Startup Funding
$5M to replace synthetic dyes with plant-based alternatives
Sparxell, a startup developing plant-based color technology, raised $5 million in a pre-Series A round led by Swen Capital Partners’ Blue Ocean 2 fund, with participation from Alpha Star Capital Management and Cambridge Enterprise Ventures.
The Cambridge, U.K.-based startup is tackling one of the fashion and chemical industries’ dirtiest secrets: synthetic dyes. An estimated 17% to 20% of industrial water pollution stems from textile dyeing and fabric finishing treatments.
Sparxell’s funding seems timely, as regulators globally are tightening scrutiny of chemical substances. The European Union has moved forward with restrictions on intentionally added microplastics, and policymakers are weighing broader bans on PFAS “forever chemicals.” In the U.S., the FDA has also been reassessing certain synthetic color additives in food and consumer products.
Spun out of the University of Cambridge, Sparxell aims to replace petroleum-based pigments and heavy metals with wood pulp-derived coloring. The company says that arranging cellulose crystals to reflect specific wavelengths of light produces 100% plant-based pigments, glitters and inks designed as direct replacements for conventional dyes.
The startup says its process can cut water use by up to 90% compared to traditional dyeing methods and eliminate microplastics and toxic runoff. Unlike synthetic dyes, Sparxell’s cellulose-based pigments are also biodegradable, per the company.
“Our technology isn’t just an alternative — it is here to stay because it delivers superior performance due to its nature-inspired features. This funding takes us from proof of concept to production and commercial launches,” CEO and founder Benjamin Droguet said in a statement. “We’re at an inflexion point. Brands are under pressure to eliminate synthetic toxins from their supply chains.”
Founded in 2022, Sparxell has now raised $10.2 million, per Crunchbase. The new funding will help it scale from pilot projects to tonne-scale manufacturing by 2026, per the company.
Apparel-related venture funding totaled about $1.5 billion globally last year and in 2024, per Crunchbase data, down significantly from the peak year of 2021 when it totaled $9.2 billion.
Related Crunchbase query: Venture Funding To Fashion-Related Startups
$2.6M for AI-driven M&A deal-sourcing
Singapore-based GrowthPal, an M&A sourcing platform for corporations and high-growth startups, recently raised $2.6 million in a funding round led by Ideaspring Capital, with participation from angel investors.
The startup is targeting one of the most relationship-driven corners of corporate strategy: deal origination. While acquisitions have become a key growth lever for companies of all sizes, sourcing targets, especially in the mid-market and sub-$70 million range, remains slow, opaque and heavily dependent on banker networks and in-market listings.
GrowthPal says its AI-driven platform acts as an “M&A copilot” that translates a buyer’s strategic objective — say, entering a new geography or acquiring a specific capability — into a structured acquisition thesis. AI agents then scan a database of more than 4 million technology companies, analyzing signals including hiring trends, funding history, web activity and public filings to surface high-fit, often off-market targets.
“M&A sourcing is where most time and effort is wasted, especially for smaller and mid-market deals,” Maneesh Bhandari, co-founder and CEO of GrowthPal, said in a statement. “Teams spend weeks researching, filtering, and chasing opportunities that never go anywhere. We built GrowthPal to help buyers focus only on high-intent, high-fit targets and move from mandate to meaningful conversations far faster.”
GrowthPal, which has raised $4 million total, per Crunchbase, says it has already supported 42 completed transactions and facilitated more than 210 letter-of-intent-stage conversations across North America, Europe, Asia and Latin America. Its clients reportedly span large enterprises, PE-backed firms and growth-stage startups across SaaS, fintech, IT services and other sectors.
In one case, the company says, a single client closed seven acquisitions in 18 months using the platform.
Its funding seems prescient: There were more than 2,300 M&A deals globally involving venture-backed startups last year, per Crunchbase data, up only slightly from the year prior, but insiders who spoke with Crunchbase News said they expect strategic acquisitions for talent and technology to surge this year.
Related Crunchbase query: Global Venture-backed M&A in 2025
$411K to generate energy on the moon
Talk about a moonshot.
Deep Space Energy, a Latvia-based startup, this month said it has raised €350,000, or about $411,000, in pre-seed funding to generate electricity on the moon.
The company said the funding was led by Outlast Fund and angel investor Linas Sargautis. Along with the equity round, Deep Space says it secured another €580,000 (about $682,000) in public contracts and grants by the European Space Agency, NATO’s Defense Innovation Accelerator and the Latvian government.
The company aims to develop a novel generator based on radioisotopes — materials derived from nuclear waste that generate energy through natural decay — to power moon surface exploration and for military satellite reconnaissance.
“Our technology, which has already been validated in the laboratory, has several applications across the defence and space sectors,” Deep Space CEO and founder Mihails Ščepanskis said in a statement. “First, we’re developing an auxiliary energy source to enhance the resilience of strategic satellites. It provides the redundancy of satellite power systems by supplying backup power that does not depend on solar energy, making it crucial for high-value military reconnaissance assets.”
Ščepanskis noted in the statement that while Deep Space’s technology wouldn’t be used for weaponry, the Russia-Ukraine war was a motivating factor for its development. That became even clearer last year, when Ukraine lost its beachhead in Russia’s Kursk Oblast as the U.S. temporarily ceased the sharing of satellite intelligence.
“As Europe is trying to become more independent, it is imperative to produce satellites with advanced capabilities on our own,” Ščepanskis said. “Our technology provides an auxiliary energy source for satellites, which makes them more resilient to non-kinetic attacks and malfunctions.”
Venture funding to space- and defense-related technologies, which often overlap, soared last year. Global funding to space tech totaled $14.2 billion in 2025 — more than double the annual totals in 2023 and 2024 — per Crunchbase data. Funding recipients included a mix of defense tech, satellite and rocket developers, and startups finding innovative use cases for geospatial data.
Related Crunchbase queries: Space Tech Startup Funding and Global Defense Tech Funding
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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