Menlo Ventures

Sapiom Raises $35M Series A for AI Agent Infrastructure

Sapiom, an AI infrastructure company for building and operating autonomous agents, announced a $35 million Series A funding round led by Dragonfly with participation from Accel, Gradient, Coinbase Ventures, Operator Collective, Formus Capital, and VanEck Ventures and continued support from Okta Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, and Array Ventures. The round follows a $15 million seed six months earlier and brings total funding to $50 million. Alongside the financing Sapiom launched Sapiom Router, Sapiom Agent Studio, and Sapiom Runtime. The company says it has processed over 270 million transactions and supports more than 100,000 agent runs per day.

Klaviyo Acquires Agency, Hires Elias Torres as CPO

Klaviyo has agreed to acquire the team, proprietary software and intellectual property of Agency, an AI-native customer success startup founded in 2023 that had raised $32 million from investors including Sequoia, Menlo Ventures and Felicis. The transaction, with terms undisclosed, is expected to close in Q3 2026 and the Agency team (about 25 people) will join Klaviyo after closing. Agency co-founder Elias Torres will become Klaviyo’s Chief Product Officer, reporting to co-founder and co-CEO Andrew Bialecki, and will lead Klaviyo’s agent product line, including Composer and Customer Agent. Klaviyo says the acquisition will accelerate its AI-driven customer experience efforts as it aims to scale the combined agent products to hundreds of thousands of businesses, leveraging infrastructure that stores over nine billion consumer profiles.

Why Google Withdrew from the AI Race

The author argues that Google has effectively withdrawn from the current AI race focused on coding agents and recursive self-improvement (RSI), not because it lost but because its DeepMind leadership favors an alternative approach based on world models. The piece contrasts two competing approaches: startups like OpenAI and Anthropic doubling down on agentic systems, coding agents, and brute-force scaling toward RSI, and Google/DeepMind pursuing world-model-based research. The article cites recent model releases and market signals—Anthropic and OpenAI's rapid product momentum, Andrej Karpathy joining Anthropic, OpenAI's Codex growth, and Google’s Gemini Flash 3.6 ranking behind frontier models—as evidence. The author frames this as a strategic divergence that could determine which organizations reach future AGI capabilities and shape the broader AI ecosystem.