· Venture Capital Tracker · investment-strategies · 2 min read
August 9–10 VC News: Lithography Bets, APAC AI Factories, COPD & Home Robots
Gap-fill deep dives for Aug 9–10: Source Foundry’s $400M Sequoia-adjacent chip-tool bet, Firmus’s $2B AI factories, Expedition’s $115M COPD Series B, Prime Intellect’s $130M agent stack, and Noen’s ¥500M home robots.
Earlier August batches already covered Hadrian, Moove, Fireworks, Straiker, Omilia, Sapiom, and the Bessemer cyber cluster. This roundup is the Aug 9–10 gap-fill — five deals that still needed VCT-style write-ups: who uses the product, why now, and why this capital.
Snapshot table
| Company | Amount | Stage / type | Key capital | Job |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firmus | $2B | Strategic equity @ >$10.5B | Coatue, NVIDIA, Blackstone, Jane Street | APAC AI factories |
| Source Foundry | ~$400M | Private / stealth (~$5B press) | Situational Awareness + Sequoia | Lithography / fab tooling |
| Prime Intellect | $130M | Series A @ $1B | Radical Ventures (+ NVIDIA/Intel/Dell/Iconiq) | Own-your-agent training stack |
| Expedition Tx | $115M | Series B | General Atlantic (+ RA/Vivo + syndicate) | COPD DPP1 Phase 2 |
| Noen / Knowin | ¥500M | Angel++ | Matrix China + Redpoint | Foldable home robots |
Theme 1 — The machines behind the machines
Source Foundry is the purest “chip wall” bet: Sequoia-backed stealth tooling aimed at ASML’s lithography bottleneck, with ~$500M concentrated from Situational Awareness after that fund’s public unwind.
Firmus is the deployment layer: $2B to roll NVIDIA-aligned AI Factories across Australia and into APAC, with Coatue returning beside Blackstone and Jane Street.
Theme 2 — Own the agent stack (or the clinical binary)
Prime Intellect sells compute + RL + evals so enterprises stop renting their intelligence from frontier APIs — $130M at $1B with a claimed ~$100M ARR.
Expedition Therapeutics is the non-AI counterweight: $115M at first-patient-in for a China-sourced DPP1 COPD asset — NewCo biotech capital still clears when the Phase 2 plan is sharp.
Theme 3 — Embodied AI goes home
Noen Intelligence (Knowin) raised ¥500M Angel++ for GLOW models and a sub-40cm foldable dual-arm home robot targeting 2027 — Matrix China led, Redpoint participated.
Also noted (not full explainers yet)
Flagged for coverage gaps rather than thin stubs:
- Lyzr — company-reported ~$100M Series B “on track” with agent-run fundraising; no named lead / not confirmed closed — wait for primary confirmation.
- AWOMO AI — ~¥100M seed (China cognitive/world-model research); thin English primary for a full VCT page.
- Fabulate — A$4.5M APAC influencer platform raise; outside our core fund/startup JTBD.
How to use these pages
| Audience | Start here |
|---|---|
| Founders (infra) | Firmus + Source Foundry — sell MW online or fab tooling, not slides |
| Founders (agents) | Prime Intellect — ownership + RL stack vs API wrappers |
| Investors / scouts | Follow /fund/sequoia, /fund/coatue, /fund/redpoint-ventures for directory-linked angles |
| Operators / clinical | Expedition for Phase 2 COPD NewCo pattern |
Browse more funds in the directory.
Sources
Primary links live on each deep dive. Roundup anchors:
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/08/09/embattled-hedge-fund-situational-awareness-invests-400m-in-chip-startup-source-foundry/
- https://firmus.co/newsroom/firmus-announces-fully-subscribed-usdusd2-billion-strategic-equity-investment-to-accelerate-nvidia-ai-factory-expansion-across-australia-and-asia-pacific
- https://expeditiontx.com/news/expedition-therapeutics-announces-oversubscribed-115-million-series-b-financing-to-advance-next-generation-dpp1-inhibitor-for-copd/
- https://techcrunch.com/2026/07/08/prime-intellect-raises-130m-series-a-to-help-enterprises-build-their-own-ai-agents/
- https://eu.36kr.com/en/p/3933076448558212
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Editorial note: AI tools assisted with research, structure, or drafting. Venture Capital Tracker retains human editorial responsibility for factual accuracy, relevance, and source quality before publication.
