Listen to today’s podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/silk-logic-small-business-daily/id1841930957
Small Business Daily Podcast 01/29/2026
Today’s podcast episode was created from the following stories: a funding-filled news day at the intersection of AI, automation, infrastructure, and the evolving internet. Here’s what matters and why it could shape your strategy next.
Factify gets $73M in seed funding to replace antiquated PDF files with intelligent documents
Factify raised $73 million to replace static PDFs with “document-as-infrastructure” files that carry identity, access rules, version history, and built-in intelligence. Early adopters in legal and HR are using these self-governing, audit-logged documents to streamline approvals, signatures, and compliance directly within the file. For enterprises moving to AI-driven workflows, this promises a single source of truth that both humans and machines can trust.
Waabi raises up to $1 billion and partners with Uber to deploy 25,000 robotaxis as the race to dominate self-driving heats up
Waabi secured up to $1 billion and struck a deal with Uber to roll out at least 25,000 robotaxis, expanding beyond its autonomous trucking work. The company’s end-to-end “AV 2.0” approach aims to accelerate deployment timelines, positioning Waabi against Waymo, Tesla, and other rivals. The tie-up underscores Uber’s strategy to seed multiple robotaxi partners and rapidly scale autonomous ride-hailing.
Ex-Palantir engineer raises $40 million for cyber startup Outtake, with backing from Microsoft CEO Nadella
Outtake raised $40 million to scale its autonomous AI agents that detect and remediate threats like phishing in near real time. With customers including OpenAI and Pershing Square, the startup reports 6x ARR growth and scans of 20 million potential attacks last year. The pitch: “always-on security” that builds a trust layer for the internet, shifting cyber defense from reactive to proactive.
Limy built a platform that helps brands optimize for the era of AI agents. See the pitch deck that helped it raise $10 million.
Limy raised $10 million to help brands understand and influence how AI agents discover, evaluate, and recommend products. By plugging into a brand’s CDN, Limy detects agent visits, traces prompts back to conversions, and surfaces the topics worth advertising against. As “business-to-agents” emerges, the company positions itself as the control layer for attribution, analytics, and agentic ads.
Adaptive6 scores $28M in early funding to find and fix cloud cost inefficiencies
Adaptive6 raised $28 million to treat cloud waste like a security vulnerability—detecting issues, tracing them to code, and enabling one-click fixes via CI/CD. Supporting AWS, Azure, GCP, Snowflake, and Databricks, the platform claims 15%–35% savings by bringing FinOps directly into engineering workflows. For enterprises battling sprawl, it’s a shift from cost oversight to cost remediation at scale.
Platform Engineering brings multicloud support to its formae infrastructure-as-code platform
Formae now supports GCP, Oracle Cloud, Azure, and OVHcloud, aiming to unify multicloud infrastructure management without brittle state files. A new SDK, “Platform for Infrastructure Builders,” helps teams create safe, custom plugins rapidly—potentially with AI agents assisting. The goal is to modernize IaC for distributed environments and accelerate automation beyond single-cloud toolchains.
Crypto payments startup Mesh raises $75M at $1B valuation
Mesh secured $75 million at a $1 billion valuation to simplify crypto checkouts across 100+ digital assets with instant processing. The platform streamlines wallet connections, supports EU MiCA compliance workflows, and even enables agentic commerce via Google’s AP2 protocol. Expect faster international expansion as Mesh pushes into Latin America, Europe, and Asia.
Insurtech startup Fulcrum raises $25 million in seed, series A funding
Fulcrum raised $25 million to deploy AI agents that handle coverage and claim analysis, proposal generation, policy checking, and certificate issuance for brokerages. With adoption among nearly half of the top 50 U.S. brokerages, the platform reduces reliance on offshore BPOs while improving accuracy and speed. It’s a blueprint for modernizing the brokerage back office with deeply integrated AI workflows.
Redwood Materials lands Google as a new investor
Google joined Redwood Materials’ upsized $425 million Series E, valuing the company at over $6 billion as it expands into grid-scale energy storage. Redwood’s “second-life” EV batteries aim to stabilize power for AI-hungry data centers and a straining grid, while it continues U.S.-based recycling and critical minerals processing. The bet: energy storage is now essential infrastructure for the AI economy.
Amazon plans to cut ~16,000 roles across the company as part of an ongoing effort to reduce organizational layers and bureaucracy, after cuts in October 2025
Amazon will eliminate about 16,000 roles to streamline decision-making and reduce management layers, following a 14,000-role reduction in October 2025. The company says the move is necessary to maintain efficiency and focus, with severance and transition support for impacted employees. It’s another sign that tech giants continue to prioritize operational discipline amid shifting market realities.
