Daily Funding Roundup:
Apr 28, 2026
Public-market jitters, private-market conviction. Coultreon Biopharma raised $125M for oral immunology, Manifest OS hit $750M on a $60M Series A (legal-tech record), Liquid took $18M for 24/7 multi-asset trading. Meanwhile a WSJ OpenAI revenue-miss report tanked Oracle 5% and CoreWeave 7%, the World Bank flagged a 24% energy price surge, and Mag 7 prints land tomorrow afternoon.
Rounds
Belgian immunology biotech Coultreon Biopharma (formerly Onco3R Therapeutics) raised an oversubscribed $125M Series A to advance COL-5671, an oral SIK3 inhibitor targeting psoriasis and ulcerative colitis. The asset was transferred from Galapagos NV in 2025 alongside a $23M convertible loan that has now converted into the equity round. Sofinnova led with co-leads from Forbion and Novo Holdings; Galapagos, Regeneron Ventures, Balyasny, Luma Group, Samsara BioCapital, Longwood Fund, and Finchley Healthcare Ventures joined. Pitch: biologic-class efficacy in pill form for two of immunology's largest indications.
AI-native law firm Manifest OS raised $60M at a $750M post-money valuation, the largest legal-tech Series A on record. Menlo Ventures and Kleiner Perkins co-led, with First Round Capital and Quiet Capital. Founded by serial entrepreneur Dan Mishin (June Homes, NextStory Capital), Manifest replaces the billable hour with fixed-fee, AI-orchestrated legal work, starting with business immigration and expanding into other knowledge-worker practices. The thesis: if AI agents can do the structured legwork, law firms become workflow software, not labor pools.
New York 24/7 multi-asset trading platform Liquid raised $18M co-led by Neo and Left Lane Capital, with Haun Ventures, K5 Global, SV Angel, AntiFund, Sunflower Capital, and existing backers Paradigm and General Catalyst. The platform offers 500+ markets across crypto, equities, commodities, FX, prediction markets, and pre-IPO secondaries with up to 200x leverage and an integrated AI assistant. Founded by 25-year-old ex-Two Sigma quant Franklyn Wang. Total raised: $25.6M after a $7.6M Paradigm-led seed in November.
Copenhagen-based wealth management OS Performativ raised €11.96M ($14M) Series A led by Deutsche Börse Group ($9.2M, minority stake). Rabo Investments joined alongside existing backers FinTech Collective and Denmark's sovereign EIFO. The cloud-native platform consolidates portfolio management, performance and attribution, risk, compliance, multi-custodian aggregation, reporting, and trading for European private banks and family offices. The signal: legacy stack incumbents (Avaloq, FactSet) face renewed pressure from cloud-native challengers backed by infrastructure giants.
Also Noted
NYC fresh dog food brand Golden Child launched out of stealth with $37M total funding ($25M Series A plus prior seed) led by Redpoint Ventures, with Atomic and A* participating. Co-founded by Quentin Lacornerie (ex-Hims & Hers VP Product) and Jack Abraham (Hims & Hers co-founder). The Hims-and-Hers playbook applied to premium pet nutrition.
London/Belgrade-based All3 raised $25M seed led by RTP Global, with SuperSeed, Begin Capital, s16vc, and VNV Global. Building AI plus legged robots for residential construction sites, betting that humanoid and quadruped robots can absorb the labor shortage in housebuilding faster than module-based prefab can.
NYC AI sales tax compliance platform Zamp raised $17M (bringing total venture to $30M) led by Acrew Capital, with Thomson Reuters Ventures participating. Founded 2022 by Rohit Bhadange, Edward Lando, and Clete Werts to automate multi-jurisdiction sales tax compliance for SaaS and ecommerce companies.
NYC Windmill raised $12M seed led by Inspired Capital, with Primary Venture Partners, Founder Collective, and Oceans Ventures. Founders Max Shaw, Brian Distelburger, and Mark Tanner are building an AI workforce/HR context graph: a single source of truth for employee data that AI agents can act on across HRIS, payroll, and ATS systems.
News & Signals
OpenAI revenue/user miss roils chip stocks ahead of Mag 7 earnings
WSJ reported that OpenAI fell short of internal revenue and user targets ahead of its planned IPO. OpenAI publicly denied the report. The market did not wait: Nasdaq closed -0.90% to 24,663.80, S&P -0.49%, Oracle -4 to -5%, CoreWeave -7%, Broadcom -4%, AMD -3%. Reported tension between CFO Sarah Friar and Sam Altman over the miss leaked through Fortune. The setup heading into Wednesday afternoon: every Mag 7 capex dollar is now implicitly being asked to justify itself, and the market just got a single-day preview of what 'AI capex doesn't pull through to revenue' looks like.
World Bank: 24% energy price surge in 2026, Hormuz throughput crashed to 3.8 mb/d
World Bank's Apr 28 commodity outlook flagged a 24% jump in 2026 energy prices, citing Iran war and Strait of Hormuz disruption that has already cut Hormuz throughput from ~20 mb/d to ~3.8 mb/d. Brent is climbing toward $126. EM inflation projected at 5.1% for the year. The framing on X: this is not a tail risk anymore, this is the base case, and every consumer software multiple needs to be re-marked.
$18.8B into AI labs founded since January 2025
CNBC tally pegged total VC investment in AI startups founded since the start of 2025 at $18.8B, with most of it concentrated in a handful of compute-hungry research labs. David Silver's Ineffable Intelligence ($1.1B seed) and Tim Rocktäschel's Recursive Superintelligence (~$1B at $4.5B) are the emblematic recent examples. The talent flow is structural: Meta, Google, and OpenAI senior staff continue to depart for new labs, and capital is pre-positioned to catch them.
China's Manus veto goes operational, founders reportedly barred from leaving
Follow-up reporting on China's NDRC unwinding of Meta's $2B Manus acquisition: Manus's three founder Zhangs (Hong, Ji, Tao) were reportedly barred from leaving the country while the wind-down is administered. Manus had relocated HQ from China to Singapore in mid-2025 and Tencent, ZhenFund, and Hongshan had been paid out. The move sets a clear precedent that even rebranded, foreign-incorporated AI companies remain inside China's regulatory perimeter if their core team and IP originated there.
VC Mood on X
The mood split cleanly down the public/private line. Public-market AI bulls got their first real wobble of the spring as the WSJ's OpenAI revenue-miss story hit just before the Mag 7 earnings gauntlet. Oracle dropped 5%, CoreWeave 7%, and the chip complex bled with them. The narrative all afternoon: "what if all that capex isn't pulling through to revenue?" Veteran analysts pushed back hard, calling it a one-day overreaction, and OpenAI itself denied the report. But Wednesday and Thursday Mag 7 prints suddenly mattered ten times more.
Private-market AI investors did not flinch. The $60M Manifest OS round at $750M (legal-tech record), the $125M Coultreon Series A (immunology, oral SIK3), and the parade of seeds, Windmill, Dex, Liquid, All3, all closed without visible hesitation. Anthropic chatter was loud all day, with multiple reports of secondary-market demand running well above OpenAI's. The frame: applied AI is shipping revenue, foundation labs are the speculative bet, and the wedge between them just got wider.
Underneath all of it, oil at $120+, Hormuz still choked at 3.8 mb/d, the World Bank pricing in a 24% energy surge, and Beijing willing to undo a closed $2B M&A deal to send a message. VCs stayed in deploy-through-the-noise mode, but every founder pitching infra-heavy plays felt the OpenAI tape on their back. The kind of Tuesday that makes Wednesday's earnings call notes worth re-reading three times.
Rounds and signals sourced from SEC filings, press releases, and verified news reports. All amounts in USD unless noted. Reporting reflects information available at time of publication.