AI Funding Surge: Startups Raise Billions Across Infrastructure, Construction and Care

From Temporal's $550M round to BRKZ's construction procurement raise, a wave of financings shows investors backing AI infrastructure and applications worldwide.

AfroEuropa Newsroom

AfroEuropa desk

Sep 14, 2026 3 min read 10

A series of recently disclosed funding rounds highlights continued investor appetite for companies building artificial intelligence infrastructure and applications across several regions.

Infrastructure and hardware

Temporal raised $550 million in Series E funding at a $12.55 billion valuation, according to Ventureburn. Lightspeed led the round, with Wellington Management and Goldman Sachs Alternatives co-leading and Tiger Global joining as a lead investor. Returning backers included Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia, Index Ventures and GIC. Temporal offers an open-source platform based on what it calls Durable Execution, which preserves application state during failures so long-running workflows can resume and complete. The company reported an annualised revenue run rate above $250 million and said Temporal Cloud processed more than 1.9 trillion actions in August.

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Construction and applications

Buildots raised $130 million to expand its AI-powered construction intelligence platform, bringing total funding to $297 million, per Ventureburn. O.G. Venture Partners led the round, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Intel Capital and others. The company uses computer vision to turn site footage into a digital twin, combining imagery with schedules and 3D models to track project progress. Its AI is trained on eight years of construction data.

BRKZ, based in Riyadh, raised $31 million in equity and debt to expand its construction procurement platform, lifting total funding above $70 million. The company secured $13 million in Series B equity, co-led by Wa'ed Ventures and 500 Global, with BECO Capital and Anb Seed Fund participating, plus $18 million in growth debt from Stride Ventures. BRKZ has built a proprietary building materials dataset of about 38 million structured data points powering an AI pricing engine, which it says predicts prices within 5% of final transaction values in 84% to 89% of cases.

Inspiren raised $70 million in Series C funding at a valuation exceeding $500 million, bringing total funding to $225 million, in what the New York-based company said was its largest round to date. NewView Capital led, with Insight Partners, Primary Venture Partners and others participating. Inspiren develops physical AI for senior living operators, combining ambient awareness with resident and community data to help care teams identify risks earlier.

Financial connectivity

Brussels-based Chift raised €10.5 million in a Series A round led by BlackFin Capital Partners, a European FinTech investor managing more than €4 billion in assets. Existing investors Entourage, Shapers, Seeder Fund and Wallonie Entreprendre also took part. Founded in 2022 by Gauthier Henroz, Henry Hertoghe and Matthieu Hertoghe, Chift provides a financial connectivity layer that lets software companies plug into more than 120 financial systems through a single unified API.