Jan 19, 2026 Weekly Roundup

Weekly Funding Roundup:
Jan 12–18, 2026

Three blockbuster rounds totaling $2.3B, led by Skild AI's $1.4B for embodied intelligence, Etched's $500M transformer chip play, and ClickHouse's $400M data platform raise.

$2.3B
Total Raised
3
Rounds
3
Unicorns

Key Themes

AI breadth expanding beyond foundation models. This week's capital flowed to specialized hardware (Etched's transformer ASICs), analytics infrastructure (ClickHouse), and embodied robotics intelligence (Skild AI). Investors are increasingly betting on the enabling layers (chips, data platforms, and physical-world AI) not just the models themselves.

Late-stage concentration persists. All three rounds exceeded $400M, reinforcing the pattern of $100M+ rounds dominating dollar volume. Capital is flowing to companies with strong traction, defensibility, and clear paths to scale or monetization.

Corporate and strategic investors highly active. Nvidia, Samsung, Salesforce Ventures, Schneider Electric, and LG all participated in Skild AI's round. Corporate participation remained near record levels as strategic players seek exposure to the AI infrastructure buildout.

The Rounds

Skild AI Series C
Jan 13
$1.4B
$14.0B valuation

The embodied AI and robotics intelligence company tripled its valuation in roughly seven months with a massive $1.4B Series C. Skild AI is building generalist foundation models for robotics and physical-world intelligence, betting that the same scaling laws powering LLMs can apply to robots navigating and manipulating the real world. SoftBank led the round with a deep syndicate of strategic and financial investors.

SoftBank (Lead) Sequoia Capital Coatue Lightspeed Felicis Nvidia Samsung Salesforce Ventures Schneider Electric LG Macquarie 1789 Capital
Etched Series B
Jan 13
$500M
$5.0B valuation

The AI chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts raised $500M at a $5B valuation to scale its transformer-specific ASIC. Etched's Sohu chip is purpose-built for transformer inference on TSMC's 4nm process, claiming 500,000+ tokens/sec on Llama 70B, positioning it as a specialized alternative to Nvidia's general-purpose GPUs for AI workloads.

Stripes (Lead) Peter Thiel Positive Sum Ribbit Capital
ClickHouse Series D
Jan 16
$400M
$15.0B valuation

The open-source columnar database company more than doubled its valuation to $15B with a $400M Series D. ClickHouse has become a go-to platform for real-time analytics and increasingly for AI workloads, competing directly with Snowflake and Databricks. The round will fund global expansion, performance improvements, and deeper AI/data lakehouse integrations.

Dragoneer (Lead) Bessemer Venture Partners GIC Index Ventures Khosla Ventures Lightspeed T. Rowe Price WCM Investment Management

Methodology

Data sourced from company announcements, press coverage, and social media posts via Grok analysis of X. All rounds include linked sources in our database. Source URLs are stored in each company's funding history. Visit individual company pages to see them.

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