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Point72 Ventures channels capital and strategic guidance to startups and growth-stage companies in fintech, deep tech, and enterprise technologies. It provides not only funding but access to expertise, executive and technical talent, and hands-on support to help companies move from concept toward public markets. The firm operates primarily in New York, Seattle, and San Francisco as an affiliate of Point72, a global asset manager founded by Steven A. Cohen. Unlike many funders, it pairs its investments with the backing of a large asset-management organization and a team of domain experts to provide operational help, mentorship, and talent resources. The goal is to help entrepreneurs grow successful companies and achieve a public offering or other significant exits.
Industries
Venture Capital
Enterprise Software
Fintech
AI & Machine Learning
Company Size
11-50
Company Stage
N/A
Total Funding
$10.3B
Headquarters
New York City, New York
Founded
2016
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General Intuition, the startup building a foundation model that trains generalized AI agents how to move through space and time, is in talks to raise at a $6 billion pre-money valuation from new investors including Valor Ventures, Point72 Ventures, Seven Seven Six.
/C O R R E C T I O N - Smack Technologies/. Aug 18, 2026, 08:08 ET In the news release, Smack Raises $61 Million Series B to Bring Intelligent Autonomy to the Tactical Edge, issued 18-Aug-2026 by Smack Technologies over PR Newswire, we are advised by the company that an edit was made. The complete, corrected release follows: Smack Raises $61 Million Series B to Bring Intelligent Autonomy to the Tactical Edge. Smack is scaling the domain-specific AI that allows America's warfighters to achieve Decision Dominance across the Joint Force. AUSTIN, Texas, Aug. 18, 2026 /PRNewswire/ - Smack Technologies, the first frontier AI lab for national security, today announced it has raised a $61 million Series B financing round led by Costanoa Ventures and First In, with participation from Point72 Ventures, Geodesic Capital, Nomi Capital, Felicis, Scribble Ventures, Fortitude Ventures, Bloomberg Beta, and Palumni VC. The round brings Smack's total capital raised to over $90 million as they rapidly expand their Decision Dominance platforms across the Joint Force. The new funding will enable Smack to build the proprietary hardware necessary to deploy Alpha, its tactical AI platform, directly to the edge. While Smack's Omega platform supports strategic planning at the command level, Alpha extends those decision-making capabilities to warfighters operating in comms and compute constrained environments. Unlike commercial LLMs, Smack's AI is purpose-built to reason through the physics, resource constraints, and operational complexity of warfare. Smack will also use the new funding to rapidly increase model scope across domains and warfighting functions, and to recruit top AI research and engineering talent. "The next peer-level conflict won't be won by the side with the most sensors and effectors. It will be won by the side with Decision Dominance, the side that can turn information and capabilities into action the fastest," said Andy Markoff, CEO and co-founder of Smack Technologies. "The DoW needs the entire decision-making process to become more autonomous while still making the correct decisions in an increasingly complex battlespace. Getting this right means putting humans in the process where they are ethically and strategically valuable - and removing humans from the part where they're not." But right now, the defense industry is pursuing autonomy that only targets the platform: how independently a drone can navigate, how many vehicles one operator can control, or whether a swarm can coordinate against a target. These are real engineering problems, but they don't answer the military question that decides a campaign: can a distributed force act coherently toward its objective, while comms degrade in a DDIL environment, resources are running out, and the adversary adapts in real time. Autonomy has to be solved at the level of the campaign, not the platform. This is Intelligent Autonomy: campaign-level decision-making at the speed of the fight, decentralized to the edge. Together, Smack's Omega and Alpha platforms put Intelligent Autonomy in the field. Omega supports campaign-level reasoning at the command level, while Alpha pushes that same reasoning to warfighters and autonomous systems at the tactical edge. The result is an AI reasoning layer across echelons and warfighting functions. This is how Smack delivers Decision Dominance to the Department of War, and how America and her allies will win the next peer-level conflict. "The nature of warfare doesn't change, but its velocity absolutely does. Warfighters today may have better situational awareness, but what they need is decision-making support at machine speed," said Arthur Karell, General Partner at First In. "Smack is leading the production of fight-tonight AI decision-making models, and we couldn't be prouder to support its highly experienced team of operators and researchers as they deploy these advanced models downrange." "You can't simply fine-tune a commercial large language model, call it defense tech and expect to win a peer-level fight," said Greg Sands, Founder & Managing Partner at Costanoa. "That requires both a detailed understanding of sensors and effectors and the hard-earned, tacit knowledge that lives in the heads of people who've made decisions under fire. It also requires the right model for the mission, which is more likely to be small and physics-based than large and language-based. Smack is the first team we've seen build the training environment to capture that expertise and turn it into models that work everywhere the fight happens - from the command center to the tactical edge, including in low-compute, disconnected environments where cloud-dependent systems simply can't operate." About Smack Technologies Smack Technologies is the first frontier AI lab built for national security, delivering Decision Dominance to the Joint Force. Co-founded in 2024 by MARSOC veterans, Smack is building domain-specific AI models for the singular purpose of deterring - or winning if necessary - the next peer-level conflict. The company's products, Omega and Alpha, are designed to cut across decision-making silos within the DoW, enabling campaign planning in minutes and plan updates in seconds across all time horizons for the United States, its allies, and partners. Smack is hiring world-class AI engineers and researchers and continues to build its team of leaders from all branches of the military and defense. Visit https://smacktechnologies.com/careers to join the fight. Correction: The investor list in the first paragraph was updated SOURCE Smack Technologies
By Mike Stone WASHINGTON, Aug 17 (Reuters) - Smack Technologies, a defense-technology startup building artificial intelligence decision-making tools for the military, is raising funding to speed production of its flagship product and make wearable AI h...
Valar Atomics raised $1 billion at a $6 billion valuation after signing a development deal with Nvidia in June.
This $470mn nuclear startup is racing a presidential deadline, not the AI boom. Antares has raised $470mn to build nuclear reactors the size of a shipping container for US military bases. Its reactor makes one megawatt, about a thousandth of a conventional plant. The deadline it is racing is not a market opportunity but a presidential order, and it falls in September 2028. July 27, 2026 - 1:30 pm Most of the money pouring into small nuclear reactors is chasing AI data centres. This round is chasing a date. Antares has raised $470mn, co-led by Paradigm and Caffeinated Capital, with Point72 Ventures, Shine Capital and Industrious Ventures joining. The split is $370mn of equity and $100mn of debt, Bloomberg reported. The company was founded in 2023 and has now raised more than $600mn. It wants reactors on US military installations by 2028. The deadline doing the work. Executive Order 14299 directs the Department of War to have a reactor operating at a domestic military installation by 30 September 2028. That is the clock. Antares has firm contracts, a named site and a fixed date, which is an unusual position for a nuclear company of any size. The | of EU tech The company states the reasoning plainly in its announcement. Many US bases draw power from a commercial grid under strain from rising demand, extreme weather and, as it puts it, adversary targeting. The Air Force picked Antares under its ANPI initiative for a proposed deployment at Joint Base San Antonio. Chief executive Jordan Bramble says more military projects will be announced this year. How small is small. The scale is easy to miss and it is the most interesting number here. Antares reactors produce no more than one megawatt. A conventional nuclear plant makes about one gigawatt. Even among microreactors, which usually top out around 20 megawatts, Antares sits at the very small end. A factory builds these units and ships them whole. They run for years without refuelling, and the company targets six years or more of deployed operation. That is a different product from the reactors being built for the AI boom. Valar Atomics raised $450mn to power data centres. X-energy raised $1.02bn in a Nasdaq listing. In the UK, Nuclear Turbines raised £15mn on Monday to make industrial power cheaper. Antares is selling resilience to soldiers, not cheap electricity to hyperscalers. The milestone, and how to read it. In June, Antares took its Mark-0 reactor critical at Idaho National Laboratory, meaning it sustained a fission reaction. The company calls this the first privately developed non-light-water reactor to reach criticality in the United States in more than four decades. Paradigm's Alana Palmedo went further, calling it the first private advanced reactor criticality in decades. Bloomberg frames it more narrowly. It reports Antares as the first participant in the Energy Department's reactor pilot programme to produce a self-sustaining fission reaction. That is a real first, and a smaller one than the company's wording implies. The test ran on TRISO fuel. It validated reactor physics, reactivity control and instrumentation in a full-scale core, and it produced only a small amount of energy. "On June 4th, we won the race to criticality, and now we've shifted to the race to commercialisation," Bramble said. What has not happened yet. No microreactor is in service anywhere in the United States. Bloomberg notes the technology remains unproven at commercial scale. Antares does not expect a system that generates electricity until next year, when the Mark-1 is due. Criticality and useful power are separate achievements, and the company has one of them. Bramble frames the raise as matching public money rather than replacing it, describing the $470mn as investing "one-to-one with the taxpayer" to reach commercial scale. The bottleneck nobody mentions. Fuel is the constraint that has strangled advanced nuclear for years, and Antares moved on it in May. It signed a long-term enrichment agreement with Urenco for High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium, which Urenco called the world's first multi-year contract for HALEU supply. Advanced reactors need HALEU. Western supply of it has been thin, and Russia was for years the most reliable commercial source. Locking in enrichment is arguably a harder problem than locking in capital, and it attracts a fraction of the attention. Why this one is worth watching. Britain and Europe are running the same experiment on a different footing. A Polish billionaire's £35bn plan for 14 mini reactors targets first power in 2034, six years after Antares plans to be switched on at a US airbase. The gap is not technical so much as procedural. American defence procurement has produced a hard deadline, a named customer and a signed contract, which is a faster mechanism than a competitive energy market. Whether the reactor works on time is a separate question. Antares has made a fission reaction happen in a laboratory in Idaho and has not yet made a watt of useful electricity anywhere.
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Industries
Venture Capital
Enterprise Software
Fintech
AI & Machine Learning
Company Size
11-50
Company Stage
N/A
Total Funding
$10.3B
Headquarters
New York City, New York
Founded
2016
Find jobs on Simplify and start your career today