May 8, 2026

Abridge: Payer Prior Auth As Third Revenue Surface

New Intel: Abridge is building payer products that shift prior auth and coding to the point of the clinical conversation. That is a direct threat to the denial-automation vendors selling the adversarial version of this problem to payers.

Abridge

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Clinical AI

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Series D+

May 8, 2026

Phia: Pivoting to Social Commerce Feed, Not Just Price Comparison

New Intel: Phia, the AI fashion price-comparison agent backed by Kleiner and Khosla, is quietly building a creator-driven content feed. The pitch was Honey for fashion. The execution is starting to look like Pinterest, which is a very different company to underwrite.

Phia

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Shopping AI

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Series A

May 8, 2026

Etched: Shipping a Rack, Not a Card

New Intel: Etched is building a water-cooled rack with its own RDMA fabric, collectives library, and Nsight-equivalent profiler. Their competitor is a DGX pod, which means the sales motion will look more like Supermicro than like selling cards to developers.

Etched

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AI Silicon

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Series B

May 8, 2026

Runway: API becoming a standalone revenue line

New Intel: Runway is turning its developer API into a standalone business line, with its own funnel and post-sale ownership. That gives it revenue beyond creative seats.

Runway

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Generative Video

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Series D+

May 8, 2026

Etched: Building for Multi-Tenant Cloud From Day One

New Intel: Etched is building kernel drivers with SR-IOV, VFIO, and device attestation support. Those are the features you need to sell into multi-tenant clouds, so the intended buyer is a hyperscaler or neocloud, not a research lab picking up a dev kit.

Etched

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AI Silicon

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Series B

May 8, 2026

Bedrock Robotics: Remote Supervision Behind Operator-Less Claims

New Intel: Bedrock Robotics is building serious teleoperation infrastructure including WebRTC pipelines and native command-and-control cockpits. The 2026 operator-less deployments will almost certainly be remotely supervised in practice, one human overseeing multiple machines, which is the honest and correct version of the roadmap.

Bedrock Robotics

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Construction Robotics

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Series B

May 8, 2026

Phia: Building Internal ML Platform, Not Buying One

New Intel: Phia, the AI shopping app, is building its own internal ML platform rather than buying off-the-shelf infrastructure. For a 20-person company, that is either conviction that personalization is the moat, or a classic case of premature infrastructure investment.

Phia

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Shopping AI

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Series A

May 8, 2026

Waabi: Shrinking Foundation Models To Fit On A Truck

New Intel: Waabi's biggest remaining gap before launching driverless trucks is making their AI small enough to run onboard a moving vehicle. Most AV companies hit this wall years into deployment. Which implies their models are more capable than they have publicly let on.

Waabi

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Autonomous Trucking

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Series C

May 8, 2026

SolveAI: Training engineers on Rust internally to bet on ten-year durability

New Intel: SolveAI is building in Rust and training engineers on it internally. That is an unusual choice for AI tooling, and it points to durability over demo speed.

SolveAI

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Enterprise AI

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Series A

May 8, 2026

Unify: Betting on Clay's agency network instead of building a sales team

New Intel: Unify is using agencies and consultants as a distribution channel instead of building a classic sales team. That puts it closer to Clay's partner-led growth playbook.

Unify

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GTM Automation

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Series B