USV raises $900M to lead more AI rounds, cuts its partnership to four
A storied early-stage shop writes its biggest check yet and shrinks the room that spends it; a state regulator calls human-vs-robot fighting unsanctioned; CoreWeave turns the agent improvement loop into a product.
Union Square Ventures has raised $900 million across two funds — including a $500 million early-stage fund, nearly double its 2024 raise — while cutting its general partnership to four investors, and the firm says it intends to lead more AI rounds. Bloomberg reported the partnership will announce the money Thursday: the early-stage fund jumps from the $275 million USV raised in 2024, and the active general partnership shrinks to four. The firm has spent its career arguing the opposite — small funds, a small partnership, conviction over committee — so doubling the check size and halving the decision-makers is a genuine strategy change, not a routine close. The read: AI rounds now demand more capital per deal, and USV would rather write bigger checks with fewer voices than watch its best companies get led by megafunds. It has already been leaning into the theme — the firm took a position in Nous Research's $90 million Series B earlier this week — but a $500 million fund exists to lead, not follow.
California's State Athletic Commission has told REK, the self-styled "humanoid robot fighting league," that it cannot hold any contest or exhibition involving a human in the state without sanction. The cease-and-desist targets the September 18 bout in San Francisco between influencer Frankie LaPenna and a $100,000 humanoid — an EngineAI machine with a Terminator-style head, piloted by a person over a virtual-reality link — which the commission called unsanctioned; the New York Times broke the story, and REK's chief executive Cix Liv posted the letter to X himself with "We made it boys." The letter's wording bars fights involving "any human," which leaves the league's next event untouched: Friday's card features two armed robots fighting each other. Either way, this is the first US regulator treating robot combat as a combat sport requiring a license rather than a tech demo — a category question every humanoid stunt from here on will have to answer.
CoreWeave is packaging the agent improvement loop as a product: Forge connects run, observe, curate, improve, evaluate in one environment, open across models, frameworks and other clouds. Unveiled around its Fully Connected event, Forge bundles Agent Lens for inspecting what agents actually did, a registry for checkpoints and agent configurations, reinforcement-learning rollouts and model distillation, with CoreWeave's ARIA research agent now generally available; the company says MasterClass and Canva are already building on it, alongside a partner network of tested, co-engineered integrations. VP of product marketing Susanne Seitinger's framing is the pitch — "go from first agent to your very best agent as quickly as possible" — and the underlying claim is that the winning cloud won't just train and serve models but compress the loop between a production run and the next better version of it.
What to watch: whether REK's robot-vs-robot event proceeds without a human-participation ruling becoming a precedent, and which AI round USV leads first with the new fund.
Is shrinking a partnership to four investors the sharpest way to bet on AI — or the riskiest? Tell us in the comments.
