This is a monthly column that runs down five interesting startup funding deals that may have flown under the radar. Check out our previous entry here.

From putting nuclear reactors on barges to grading how well AI models can control robots, this month’s crop of interesting startup deals takes AI and other emerging technologies well beyond the conventional software stack.

Other companies that caught our eye are applying automation to the decidedly old-school worlds of building-material procurement, commercial property maintenance and farm recordkeeping. Let’s take a closer look.

$50M to put nuclear power at sea

Nuclear power plants are famously difficult and time-consuming to build. Bluecore Energy thinks putting them on barges could offer another way.

The Long Beach, California-based startup raised what it says was an oversubscribed $50 million seed round led by Silverton Partners, just two months after emerging from stealth with $10 million in pre-seed funding. The long list of investors in the deal included Slauson & Co., Harlem Capital, Black Angel Group, HartBeat Ventures and others.

Bluecore is developing compact, water-cooled small modular reactors designed to operate aboard floating barges. Rather than spending years constructing a new power plant and the accompanying infrastructure on land, the idea is to manufacture the systems and move them to where electricity is needed.

“Our focus is simple. Create and deliver zero-emission energy as safely and quickly as possible,” CEO and founder Kofi Asante wrote in a social media post. “Over 3 billion people live within an hour of water. We want to power them all.”

Its first target is the Port of Long Beach, with other ports and power-hungry AI data centers among the potential customers. The company says it’s working with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and U.S. Coast Guard as it pursues certification.

Bluecore’s raise comes amid a broader nuclear funding boom. Nuclear fission startups alone pulled in roughly $2 billion in venture funding in 2025, per Crunchbase data, and investors have continued writing enormous checks this year. More broadly, cleantech-, EV- and sustainability-focused startups raised about $15 billion in the first half of 2026, with second-quarter funding reaching its highest quarterly level since 2024.

Related Crunchbase query: Global Cleantech Startup Funding In 2026

$31M to bring AI to the building-materials business

Ordering cement and steel might not sound like an obvious AI use case, but Saudi Arabia-based BRKZ sees a lot of room for improvement.

The Riyadh startup last week said it had secured $31 million in new capital, consisting of a $13 million Series B equity round co-led by Wa’ed Ventures, Aramco’s venture arm, and 500 Global, plus an $18 million growth-debt commitment from Stride Ventures under a previously announced facility. The company has now raised more than $83 million, per Crunchbase.

BRKZ operates a marketplace that connects construction companies with suppliers of building materials, while also handling sourcing, logistics and financing. More interestingly, it says it has amassed some 38 million structured data points that power an AI pricing engine trained on roughly 40,000 requests for quotes.

The company says 84% to 89% of its predicted prices come within 5% of the eventual transaction price. Another AI agent reads photos of cement delivery notes sent through WhatsApp, matches them to orders and verifies deliveries — with roughly three-quarters processed without human intervention.

BRKZ is riding a construction boom in Saudi Arabia even as startup investors remain selective about construction and property technology more broadly. Global proptech startups raised about $6.5 billion via roughly 640 deals in the first half 2026, Crunchbase data shows. That’s on pace to top last year’s dollar figures, even as deal count has dipped this year. Similar to other startup sectors, investors in proptech are increasingly directing capital toward companies using AI and automation to cut costs and streamline operations.

Related Crunchbase query: Global Venture Funding To Proptech Startups In 2026

$24M for robots to take care of commercial properties

Robots are already assembling cars and moving packages around warehouses. Viabot wants them to also mow lawns and sweep parking lots — and do security patrols of those properties while they’re at it.

The Santa Clara, California-based autonomous robotics startup last week said it has raised a $24 million Series A led by Walden International to scale its fleet of robots designed to handle outdoor property maintenance for commercial real estate owners and operators.

Its machines combine autonomous navigation with attachments that allow them to perform jobs like sweeping, debris removal and landscaping tasks — all while conducting “soft security” — across large campuses and commercial properties.

Rather than trying to build a general-purpose humanoid robot, Viabot is applying autonomy to repetitive jobs that property owners already pay people and contractors to perform. The startup, which operates on a “robot as a service model,” sees an opportunity to fill a labor shortage for what’s often considered “dirty, dull and dangerous” outdoor work, Kelly Coyne, founding partner at Grit Ventures, told Crunchbase News in 2021, when the company raised earlier funding.

Startup investors are pouring money into those sorts of real-world AI applications. Global venture funding to physical AI companies — including robotics, autonomous vehicles, aerospace, drones, industrial automation and sensors — reached $47.4 billion across 521 deals in the first half of 2026, Crunchbase data shows. That’s nearly 4x the $12 billion invested in the second half of 2025 and almost 80% above the year-ago period.

Related Crunchbase query: Global Physical AI Venture Funding In 2026

$10M to give AI robots an independent report card

As frontier AI models move from controlling software to controlling robots and machines in the real world, Robocurve wants the public to have an independent way to understand what they can actually do.

The 3-month-old San Francisco startup announced last week that it raised a $10 million seed round led by Initialized Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, Notable Capital, Halcyon Futures, Decasonic and others.

Robocurve says it wants to act as an independent third-party auditor for physical AI, testing how well frontier models can control real robots and publicly reporting the results. The company says its own research has already found that general-purpose large language models can outperform specialized robotics vision-language-action models on some simple tasks.

Importantly, Robocurve isn’t positioning itself as a conventional robotics benchmarking startup. It is incorporated as a Public Benefit Corporation with a legal duty to independently evaluate the robotics capabilities of frontier AI systems and report those findings to the public.

The company says AI labs don’t dictate its research agenda, evaluation methodology or published results, and it plans to work with governments, policymakers and civil society as robot capabilities advance.

Academia is a big part of that model, too. Rather than developing every benchmark itself, Robocurve funds academic teams and supplies them with robot hardware to create open-source benchmarks. More than 200 institutions — including researchers from 19 of the world’s top 20 universities, according to the company — have signed up for its benchmarking program. Robocurve is offering a combined $500,000 in funding plus free robotic arms to participating academic groups.

Its funding is timely given the massive influx of capital pouring into robotics and physical AI. Within the broader physical AI sector, robotics startups alone raised more than $21 billion globally in the first half of 2026, Crunchbase data shows, already eclipsing the nearly $16 billion raised in all of 2025 and even the $15.3 billion invested during the venture market’s 2021 peak.

As ever more powerful models move from screens into machines capable of manipulating the physical world, figuring out what those models can — and can’t — safely do becomes a more consequential problem.

Related Crunchbase query: Global Robotics Venture Funding In 2026

$5M to let farmers talk instead of type

A lot of agricultural software has one basic problem: Farmers don’t spend their days sitting at desks.

With that in mind, Tellia this month raised a $5 million pre-seed round led by Revent for a voice-first AI platform designed specifically for farmers, agronomists and other agricultural workers.

Instead of asking someone working in a vineyard or almond orchard to stop and fill out a form or type notes into a computer, Tellia enables them to leave a voice note, send a WhatsApp message, or even submit a photo to log records, generate reports and set reminders. It says its AI then turns that unstructured information into records associated with the correct field, crop and crew.

For example, for a livestock farmer that might mean a voice prompt like: “Tellia, the vet just checked Herd 3. All clear, next health check due in 6 weeks, log that.”

Or a vineyard manager might ask: “Tellia, based on this year’s Brix and pH logs, what’s the projected alcohol level for the Cabernet lot?” and receive an instant answer based on previously collected data.

San Francisco- and Paris-based Tellia was founded last year and says its technology is already deployed across 1 million acres, including at Campos Brothers Farms and Duckhorn wineries in the U.S., as well as agricultural organizations in Europe.

Grey Silo Ventures, Jeriko and Fund F also participated in its latest funding.

Its raise comes amid a much tougher environment for agtech startups overall. Venture investment in agriculture and farming remains in a correction from its 2021 peak, when startups in the space raised $10.5 billion across more than 1,400 deals, Crunchbase data shows. That makes companies applying increasingly cheap and accessible AI to specific, everyday farming problems an interesting corner to watch. Voice AI, in particular, has emerged as one of the hot spots in artificial intelligence funding in recent years.

Related Crunchbase query:  Global Agriculture And Farming Funding In 2026

Related reading:

• Sector Snapshot: Robotics Startups On Fire As Venture Funding Surges To Record Numbers In 2026
• VCs Pour Billions Into Physical AI As The Next Wave Of AI Investing Takes Shape
• Sector Snapshot: Agtech Startups Face A Drier Funding Climate
• Why Big Investors Are All Ears For Voice AI Startups

Illustration: Dom Guzman