Midu Daily · Wednesday, Oct 21, 2026
MIDU
Blackwall raises $100M Series C at $2.2B valuation to expand web security for AI agent traffic
Blackwall, an Estonia-founded web security company, raised $100M in a Series C led by AVP at a $2.2B valuation.
AI
Fortune Term SheetAlso 1 source reportsDaytona raises $60M Series B at $1B valuation for agent sandboxes
Daytona, a San Francisco startup building cloud sandboxes for AI agents, raised a $60 million Series B led by FirstMark at a $1 billion valuation.
SiliconANGLEInception releases Mercury 3 diffusion model, claiming up to 8x speed over GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5
Inception AI released Mercury 3, a diffusion language model it says beat GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 on eight of 12 internal benchmarks at four to eight times their speed. Inception measured 1,068 tokens per second on Nvidia GPUs versus about 240 for Haiku 5.5 and 130 for GPT-6 Luna, with a 1 million token context window. Pricing is 20 cents per million input tokens and 70 cents per million output tokens, and no outside group has published results yet.
Enterprise Software
SiliconANGLESalesforce to acquire Braze for $5.66B in cash
Salesforce agreed to acquire marketing automation provider Braze for $5.66 billion in cash.
AlleyWatch FundingDaptic raises $15M Series A led by Canvas Ventures to bring compliance into product design
Daptic raised a $15M Series A led by Canvas Ventures, bringing total funding to about $22M.
Robotics/Hardware
Tech Funding NewsAlso 1 source reportsDream Labs raises $90M seed led by B Capital and Kindred Ventures for a shared robot AI brain
Dream Labs, a San Francisco startup founded in 2026 by former NVIDIA robotics researchers.
Reliable Robotics opens Seattle-area radar hub as valuation tops $1 billion
Reliable Robotics opened a radar R&D center in Bothell, Washington, and raised $115 million.
Coherence Quantum raises €2.78M seed led by Lifeline Ventures
Finnish quantum hardware startup Coherence Quantum raised €2.78M in a seed round led by Lifeline Ventures.
Other & Roundup
Fortune Term SheetSendCutSend raises Series B at $2.1B valuation led by Spark
SendCutSend, a Reno-based company that turns customer designs into custom metal parts.
TechCrunch VentureInspired Capital closes $450M fourth fund as New York pushes back on Silicon Valley
Inspired Capital, the early-stage firm founded in 2019 by Alexa von Tobel and Penny Pritzker.