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St. Louis biotech rounds
Two St. Louis bioscience startups announced major seed funding rounds in late July, with Aurenar raising $5.7 million and Pairidex securing $4.89 million.
“Aurenarraising $5.7 million andPairidexsecuring $4.89 million”
Aurenar, a medical device company founded in 2024 by neurosurgeon Dr. Eric Leuthardt, said it will use the funding to advance a noninvasive neuromodulation platform toward a pivotal clinical trial.
Pairidex plans to put its new capital toward the commercial launch of FusionMRD, a blood-based test designed to detect extremely low levels of residual disease in patients with certain leukemias.
The St. Louis Magazine story also described how Aurenar’s financing began before the company was formed, including an R21 grant from the National Institutes of Health that helped launch an early clinical trial.
In the same account, Arch Grants’ outgoing executive director Gabe Angieri said the organization has provided just over $20 million to 291 companies since 2012, with those businesses reporting more than $1.4 billion in revenue and raising more than $920 million in follow-on capital.
AI funding and speech model
US-based AI voice startup Wispr Flow raised $280 million in Series B funding at a $2 billion valuation, with India-focused venture capital firms Peak XV Partners and Together Fund among the new investors in the round.
The VCCircle report said the round was led by existing investor Menlo Ventures and included participation from existing backers Notable Capital, NEA, Neo Ventures, 8VC and MVP Ventures.
New investors listed by VCCircle included Acrew, Activate, Forerunner, Goodwater, Peak XV, Together Fund and PLUS Capital, along with a group of athletes, artists and cultural leaders.
Alongside the fundraise, Wispr Flow launched Canto, its first proprietary speech model, and the company said it can reduce word error rates in difficult conditions from more than 30% to between 5% and 10%.
VCCircle added that Wispr Flow said its users have now generated more than 60 billion words through the platform and that the company is used by employees at almost all Fortune 500 companies and more than 10,000 enterprises.
Kalanick on VC dynamics
Travis Kalanick told David Senra’s podcast that “a super high bar for a VC is ‘do no harm,’” yet, in his experience, just 10% of the VCs out there are capable of meeting that bar.
“just 10% of the VCs out there are capable of meeting that bar”
In TechCrunch’s account, Kalanick said only “1%” by his estimate are actually “helpful,” adding, “It’s hard for them to participate because they just aren’t in that deep.”
The same TechCrunch story placed Kalanick in a new fundraising moment, saying his robotics company Atoms “just nabbed $1.7 billion,” led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Ben Horowitz joining the company’s board.
TechCrunch also reported that Kalanick advises founders to have a pitch so honed that it creates a bidding war among firms to sweeten their deals, while warning them to avoid a “victim mentality.”
Kalanick’s remarks included his view that “The problem was I ran too close to the line in too many situations,” and he said the optics were a problem even if he believed he broke no rules.