Lightspeed

Patronus AI raises $50M to test AI agents

Patronus AI, a San Francisco startup founded in 2023 by former Meta AI researchers Anand Kannappan and Rebecca Qian, raised $50 million in a Series B round led by Greenfield Partners. The company builds simulated "digital world models" that replicate websites and internal systems to stress-test AI agents using reinforcement learning, aiming to reveal shortcuts and failure modes that benchmarks miss. Patronus says its revenue grew 15-fold over the past year and that many frontier AI labs and startups are customers. The Series B included participation from Notable Capital, Lightspeed, Datadog, and Samsung and brings Patronus’s total funding to $70 million. Current product focuses include engineering and finance simulations; the company positions itself against in‑house evaluation teams and human-data firms that assist with reinforcement learning.

Kyber Raises $5M to Power Low-Latency Robot Control

Kyber, a Paris-based startup led by Jean-Baptiste Kempf (best known as the lead developer of VLC Media Player), has built an open-source SDK and infrastructure layer to synchronize video, audio, sensor data and control inputs for remote devices with minimal latency. The startup raised a $5 million funding round led by Lightspeed to scale its platform for use cases in robotics, drones and remote IT access. Kyber offers an open-source core plus a productized enterprise version and provides hands-on deployment via forward-deployed engineers (FDEs). The company has ~25 full-time staff, offices in Paris, San Francisco and Singapore, and reports commercial deployments across defense, telco, robotics and AI customers.

New Product Launches and Updates

Version B includes new product offerings such as 'AI Blogs New' and updates to existing products.