Top 5 VC Deals of the Week in AI (9/26/25)

By Christopher Robbins · Sep 25, 2025 Views: 4

Our Top 5 VC Deals of the Week in AI featured funding announcements from Upscale AI, AppZen, Colossal Biosciences, Groq and Filevine

This week we continue our series on the top 5 VC-funded deals in AI.

This week's venture capital funding announcements maintained recent momentum, with all five transactions in excess of the $100 million threshold.

The top reported deal, per FinSMEs, came from Mountainview, Calif.-based Groq, which raised a massive $750 million round in part to "expand operations and its development efforts," according to its announcement. Groq is involved in AI inference, which involves applying trained models to actual real-world work. Our second-place announcement comes from the lawtech space, where Salt Lake City-based Filevine., brought in a $400 million equity raise. The top five also included de-extinction company Colossal Biosciences, the company using AI to help resurrect species like the woolly mammoth and the thylacine, as well as companies in the finance and networking sectors.

Smaller funding raises that did not quite make our top 5 this week included announcements from the ecommerce, lending, and procurement spaces.

Below, we highlight the top five venture capital deals, ranked from the highest to the lowest funding amounts, showcasing the companies at the forefront of the AI revolution...

Top 5 Venture Capital Deals from Sept. 11-Sept. 17

1. Groq

Location: Mountain View, CA
Description: Groq specializes in ultra-fast AI inference solutions, helping enterprises deploy large language models (LLMs) and other compute-intensive AI workloads with speed and efficiency.
Funding Amount: $750M
Funding Round: New funding (undisclosed round)

2. Filevine

Location: Salt Lake City, UT
Description: A leading provider of legal operating intelligence systems, Filevine offers end-to-end case, document, and workflow management for law firms and legal teams.
Funding Amount: $400M
Funding Round: All-equity financing round

3. Colossal Biosciences

Location: Dallas, TX
Description: A pioneering de-extinction company, Colossal is known for its efforts to revive extinct species and apply advanced genomics for conservation. The company added $120M in new funding to its previous $200M Series C, bringing the total to $320M.
Funding Amount: $320M (in total Series C round)
Funding Round: Series C (updated)

4. AppZen

Location: San Jose, CA
Description: AppZen delivers an agentic AI platform for finance teams to automate spend management, audit workflows, and compliance reporting.
Funding Amount: $180M
Funding Round: Growth funding

5. Upscale AI, Inc.

Location: Palo Alto, CA
Description: A next-generation AI networking startup, Upscale AI is focused on building scalable networking solutions optimized for AI-era infrastructure and workloads.
Funding Amount: Over $100M
Funding Round: Seed funding

Make sure to check out our Top 5 VC Deals of the Week in AI right here!

Written & Researched by DWN Staff

VC Deals Synopsized by ChatGPT Research Source: FinSMEs