10 Cool Companies That Raised Funding In October 2026
AI technology development and security continue to drive much of the venture capital flowing to IT startups. In October, companies raising investor funding included AI security heavyweights Upwind Security and Armadin, as well as early-stage startups such as Avante, Firefly and Asymptote Labs.
Follow The Money
Startups developing technology around all aspects of artificial intelligence, including AI development, infrastructure and security, continued to attract the lion’s share of venture capital investment in October.
AI and cloud security remain a popular place for VC firms to invest their money with more established companies like Upwind Security and Armadin reporting significant funding rounds, along with early-stage startups such as Rein Security, Firefly and Asymptote Labs.
AI infrastructure provider Modal Labs topped this month’s roundup with an impressive $750 million Series D funding round. Companies such as Pigment and Avante that are developing business applications with native AI capabilities reported successful funding rounds in October, as did data analytics platform company Hex and software development/continuous integration platform provider Blacksmith.
Here’s a look at 10 companies that raised funding in October 2026.
Modal Labs
Headquarters: New York
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Erik Bernhardsson
Funding: The company raised $750 million in Series D funding at a $15.75 billion post-money valuation. Accel led the round, joined by Kleiner Perkins and participation from all existing investors including Menlo Ventures, General Catalyst, Redpoint, Lux Capital, Amplify Partners and Bain Capital Ventures.
What company does: Modal Labs, which recently crossed a $1 billion annualized run rate threshold, develops a platform-as-a-service compute cloud designed specifically for machine learning and AI workloads. It allows developers to run compute-heavy Python code in the cloud with just a few lines of code.
CEO quote: “When we started Modal five years ago, I couldn’t have imagined most of the applications running on it today. It’s just as difficult to imagine the software people will be creating two years from now, but what I do know is that it’s going to require an entirely new set of building blocks. We want a lot of it to run on Modal.”
Upwind Security
Headquarters: San Francisco
Top Executive: CEO Amiram Shachar
Funding: The company announced a $400 million Series C funding round led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from Greylock Partners, Cyberstarts, Craft, Salesforce Ventures, Alta Park, Picture Capital, Swish Ventures, Cerca Partners, TCV, Penny Jar and Leaders Fund—all existing investors—and new investor Canapi Ventures. The round, coming nine months after a $250 million Series B funding round, brings the company’s total funding to more than $800 million and put the company’s valuation at $3.8 billion.
What company does: Upwind develops a comprehensive runtime cloud security platform, including a specialized sensor that provides visibility into workloads, configurations and applications in real time.
CEO quote: “The funding round makes Upwind one of the most capitalized companies in the world that’s focused on solving the cloud and AI security problem. This additional capital will fuel our product and engineering growth in building the platform that will secure cloud [and] AI infrastructure for the world in the AI era.”
Armadin
Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.
Top Executive: Founder and CEO Kevin Mandia
Funding: The $255.5 million Series B funding round brought the company’s total funding to $445 million and its valuation to more than $2.5 billion. The round was co-led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) and Accel, with participation from new investors Bain Capital Ventures (BCV) and Redpoint, and existing investors 8VC, Ballistic Ventures, Google Ventures, In-Q-Tel, Kleiner Perkins and Menlo Ventures.
What company does: Armadin, which emerged from stealth in March, develops an AI-native offensive cybersecurity platform to autonomously identify and eliminate an organization’s exploitable risks.
CEO quote: “Offense is uniquely advantaged right now. AI lets an attacker find and chain weaknesses faster than any human team can respond. The only way to build a defense that keeps pace is to train it against the best offense available, every day. That is what we built. With a16z and Accel co-leading and the support of every investor in this round, we are going to put that offense to work for the enterprises and government agencies defending the world's most critical systems.”
Pigment
Headquarters: Paris, France
Top Executive: Co-Founders and Co-CEOs Eleonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli
Funding: The Series E funding round raised $250 million and put the startup’s valuation at $2.3 billion. The round was led by Scaleup Europe Fund (managed by EQT) with participation from WIL (World Innovation Lab); existing investors including Greenoaks, ICONIQ, IVP and Meritech; and a planned investment from Nvidia.
What company does: Pigment develops an AI business planning and performance management platform that the company says combines dynamic modeling with autonomous AI agents and an intuitive user interface for making intelligent decisions across finance, sales, supply chain and other business functions.
CEO quote: “Enterprise planning will change more in the next few years than it has in the last thirty. Legacy tools are being left behind, and the world’s most advanced AI companies now run their planning on Pigment. With the backing of our investors, we are moving fast to make autonomous planning a reality for every enterprise. With AI agents running planning workflows end to end and turning decisions into action, companies can respond to change as fast as it happens.”
Hex Technologies
Headquarters: San Francisco
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Barry McCardel
Funding: The $100 million Series D funding round, which put the company’s valuation at $1.2 billion, was led by Peak XV with participation from Amplify, Avra, a16z, Next Legacy, Redpoint, Sequoia and Zero Prime.
What company does: Hex develops an AI-powered data analytics and collaboration platform that consolidates isolated data tools into a unified, cloud-based workspace. The company just launched Hex 4.0, which the company described as a complete “from-scratch rewrite” of the product for the AI era.
CEO quote: “This [funding] gives us a bunch more runway to keep building this thing and take some more bold bets into the future…We believe the next chapter of data work is rooted in code, with the context and controls needed to establish trust, governance and guardrails.”
Blacksmith
Headquarters: San Francisco
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash
Funding: The $66 million Series C funding round brought the company’s total funding to $125 million and set its valuation at $1 billion. The round was led by Sequoia Capital with participation from Premji Invest and existing investors Peak XV Partners, GV and Y Combinator.
What company does: Blacksmith has developed a high-performance continuous integration cloud platform that’s designed to accelerate software development workflows, specifically for engineering teams using GitHub Actions.
CEO quote: “Writing code used to be the slow part of shipping software. It isn't anymore… Every code change still has to be built and tested before anyone merges it. That step is CI [continuous integration], and most companies are struggling to keep up with the volume of CI they need to run… Blacksmith is the CI cloud. Companies bring us their CI workloads, and we run them faster than they could anywhere else, with zero operational overhead.”
Avante
Headquarters: Seattle, Wash.
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Rohan D’Souza
Funding: The $30 million Series A funding brought the company’s total funding to $40 million. The round was led by Frist Cressey Ventures with participation from existing investor FUSE and new investors Sorenson Capital, Hearst Ventures and Morgan Stanley Next Level Fund.
What company does: Avante develops an enterprise AI platform for benefits teams. The platform’s purpose-built agents take on end-to-end benefits chores, from checking vendor contracts against claims, to preparing leadership reports, to helping employees understand and use their benefits.
CEO quote: “Benefits teams are responsible for one of the largest and most consequential investments their companies make, yet they’re still operating with outdated information, archaic spreadsheets, and technology built for another era. We’re combining purpose-built technology with real-time automation and years of benefits expertise across the AI stack, resulting in 100x leverage for the people whose decisions shape the health, financial security, and well-being of millions. Few areas of work touch people’s lives more directly, and benefits teams deserve technology built for the importance of what they do.”
Rein Security
Headquarters: New York and Tel Aviv
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Matan Bar-Efrat
Funding: The $25 million Series A funding round was co-led by Glilot Capital and Sienna Venture Capital with participation from Corner Ventures, Atlacle and RNP Capital Advisors. The round brought the company’s total financing to $35 million.
What company does: Rein Security develops an AI-native runtime security platform purpose-built for enterprise AI agents. The technology provides full visibility and protection across every enterprise agent, tracing every action to the line of code that triggered it and connecting it to its business outcome.
CEO quote: “Enterprise AI agents are becoming essential to how businesses operate, but security hasn't kept pace with the autonomy these systems now have. This funding enables us to keep building the infrastructure enterprises need to deploy AI agents with visibility, control and confidence.”
Firefly
Headquarters: New York
Top Executive: Founder and CEO James “Batt” Buckley
Funding: Firefly emerged from stealth with the $20 million Series A funding round led by Definition Capital with significant participation from BoxGroup (its third investment in Firefly) and continued backing from Susa Ventures, which led the company’s seed round.
What company does: Firefly develops a physical AI platform for safety and security that combines its purpose-built hardware, AI-powered software and existing infrastructure (such as cameras and radios) into a single intelligent system. The technology can detect incidents, automate daily operations and coordinate action in real time.
CEO quote: “We've accepted a strange contradiction in safety technology: The more important the job, the more complicated the tools seem to become. We now have the technology to build something fundamentally different. Our goal is to give the people responsible for safety extraordinary capabilities, while keeping them firmly in control. We're starting with safety because it's a problem we know deeply, but what we're building has the potential to transform how people interact with the physical world.”
Asymptote Labs
Headquarters: New York
Top Executive: Co-Founder and CEO Justin D’Souza
Funding: The oversubscribed $5.5 million seed funding round was led by Tower Research Ventures with participation from Lytical Ventures, 1984 Ventures and South Park Commons. The company will use the funding to expand engineering, product development, hiring and go-to-market activities.
What company does: The company’s technology provides runtime visibility and control infrastructure for enterprise AI agents and is capable of intercepting and blocking risky behaviors before they cause damage. At the product’s core is the company’s Beacon open-source telemetry layer for AI agents.
CEO quote: “AI agents are becoming a new operating layer inside every company, but the infrastructure to understand and control them hasn't caught up. We saw this problem firsthand when building agents at Doppel. As companies deploy thousands of agents across their infrastructure, their runtime data will become one of the most valuable assets they own. We built Beacon as open source because we believe every organization should own that data, and Asymptote enables them to act on it.”