Cathay Innovation

A major milestone for Dennis D. and the entire Midas team : huge congrats on this $50M Series A 👏 We have strong conviction that tokenization will become a foundational layer of tomorrow’s financial infrastructure. But for capital markets to move meaningfully onchain, the category needs more than tokenized wrappers. It needs platforms that make investing natively compatible with the speed, liquidity, transparency, and composability of blockchain-based systems. That is what Midas is building. With recent product MSL, the team is addressing a critical unlock for the space: instant liquidity. And that is key. If tokenized products are to power real treasury and portfolio use cases, redemption speed cannot remain a constraint. Through our Cathay Ledger Fund, we are proud to renew our support to Dennis and the team as they build a category-defining platform for onchain asset management, and the next generation of financial rails. Excited to be alongside RRE Ventures, Creandum, and a stellar group of partners in this round. CC : Denis | Marguerite | Alban

📰 CI SF Partner Simon Wu was quoted in this morning's WSJ Venture Capital newsletter on where the IPO market actually stands right now. His take: the window isn't closed, but it's narrow. Capital is consolidating around AI infrastructure, semiconductors, and category leaders and VCs need to get clear on whether AI strengthens or disrupts a company's model before committing. On the SpaceX mega-IPO question, Simon sees it as a potential market reset: a new anchor for risk appetite that could reopen the broader window in H2. Worth a read alongside perspectives from other investors on how tax policy shifts are reshaping where founders and capital choose to locate. 📖 Full newsletter (via WSJ Pro): https://lnkd.in/gJi94Phf #VentureCapital #IPO

AI is not killing SaaS, it is forcing it to evolve. This shift has been building for months. It is now moving front and center. In an op-ed published today in Maddyness, Jean-Marc Prunet lays out a clear view we increasingly see confirmed across the tech ecosystem: agentic AI is not the end of SaaS, but the start of a new software era. As AI moves from copiloting to executing, enterprise software is becoming something else entirely: not just a tool for users, but a platform for agents. That changes everything. Product, pricing, go-to-market, leadership, culture : the whole software playbook is being rewritten. And for companies that fail to build agentic capabilities, the risk is real: losing the user relationship and being pushed into the background. For the ones that adapt early, the upside could be major. A sharp and timely piece from our Partner Jean-Marc in Maddyness 👇 https://lnkd.in/eG-mz9qW

𝗥𝗼𝗯𝗼𝘁𝗶𝗰𝘀 𝗶𝘀 𝗵𝗮𝘃𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗮 𝗺𝗼𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 - 𝗯𝘂𝘁 𝗶𝘁’𝘀 𝗻𝗼𝘁 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗺𝗼𝘀𝘁 𝗽𝗲𝗼𝗽𝗹𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗶𝗻𝗸. The world of robotics past was defined by containerization to caged environments, defined by precision but limited by rigidity, and impressive but limited in generalizability. That narrative is starting to flip. We’re watching the collision of three forces: 1️⃣ AI escaping its textual domain and entering the physical world 2️⃣ Labor constraints pushing automation from “nice-to-have” to existential 3️⃣ And a new generation of models that can finally generalize beyond single-task systems For the first time, robotics is moving beyond automation to unstructured autonomy and intelligence. However, the opportunity isn’t evenly distributed. Despite the headlines around humanoids and foundation models, most robots today still do one thing, in one environment, over and over and over again. The hardest problems concerning data, integration, and generalized intelligence have left real-world deployments to still be largely unsolved. This gap is where the opportunity sits. Over the past few months, we mapped the robotics ecosystem end-to-end. Not just the robots themselves and end integrators, but the full stack enabling them so that everyone can better understand where venture-scale value is most likely to accrue. While this world is as vast as it is exciting, a few key takeaways really stand out: 🤖 General-purpose robotics → its the ambition, not the entry point 🧠 Data is the new moat → what replaces LLM<>internet data corpus? ⚙️ Stack shift is shifting → hardware integrators to intelligence ⏱️ Time-to-value → technical elegance grabs headlines, not customers 🧩 Managing the Value chain → much broader than just “robot companies” We’re already seeing the fruit of early work in this field from foundation model startups proving out early autonomy, to incumbents quietly verticalizing (we see you Amazon), to new entrants treating robotics as a software problem reminiscent to the early days of the PC. If you’re building, investing in, or thinking about robotics, embodied AI, or industrial automation I would love your thoughts. As the saying goes - it takes a village and this village is just about ready to hit its mass urbanization moment! 😎🤖 Lastly - to help better quantify the sentiment around robotics we are conducting a survey and would love your input! Aggregated survey results will be shared with respondents in our Part II - stay tuned 👀 Link to survey → https://lnkd.in/g4nYJSGp [As always, link to full article + market map in comments - happy to share the underlying dataset as well, just drop me a comment below] CC: Cathay Innovation, Simon Wu, Jaclyn Hartnett, Daniela Caserotto Leibert #Robotics #EmbodiedAI #IndustrialTech #AI #Automation #VentureCapital

GTC week brought a lot of AI energy to SF. We brought it to the dinner table 🍽️ Last week, together with JLL & Nebius, we hosted our 1st US Robotics & Embodied AI dinner — a room of founders, engineers, researchers, operators, and corporate leaders actively building and deploying at the frontier. The signal coming out of the room: the shift from hype to real-world deployment is accelerating, but the hard problems are becoming clearer too. 4 takeaways that stuck with us: 🔸 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐡𝐚𝐧𝐠𝐞 𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐚𝐠𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭 𝐥𝐚𝐲𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐬 𝐮𝐧𝐝𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐩𝐩𝐫𝐞𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐭𝐞𝐝. Success in hybrid human-robot environments isn't just a technical problem. For a robot to work alongside people, the product has to feel intuitive, not disruptive. Avoiding "organ rejection" requires deliberate design, not just better software. 🔸 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐔𝐒 𝐢𝐬 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐚𝐮𝐥𝐭 𝐆𝐓𝐌 𝐦𝐚𝐫𝐤𝐞𝐭 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐢𝐜𝐬 — 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐄𝐮𝐫𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐚𝐧 𝐭𝐞𝐚𝐦𝐬. China leads on volume — deploying more robots than the rest of the world combined — but the commercial path for Western teams, including European ones, runs through the US. One founder shared they're closing deals faster with US automotive customers than their own home market. Even Korean and Japanese firms are increasingly sourcing robotics technology from here. 🔸 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐟𝐨𝐫 𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐨𝐧𝐨𝐦𝐨𝐮𝐬 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐞 𝐢𝐬 𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐚𝐧 𝐨𝐩𝐞𝐧 𝐪𝐮𝐞𝐬𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧. The hardware and software pieces are increasingly solvable. But the training data needed to deploy robots autonomously across diverse real-world environments? Still a gap the industry is working through. Labor retraining — whether government-led or industry-driven — will be just as critical as the technology itself. 🔸 𝐏𝐢𝐥𝐨𝐭𝐬 𝐝𝐨𝐧'𝐭 𝐬𝐜𝐚𝐥𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐞𝐜𝐨𝐬𝐲𝐬𝐭𝐞𝐦 𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐧𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭. Getting from demo to factory floor doesn't happen through startups alone. Strategic collaboration between investors, corporates, and operators is becoming a deployment requirement. Thanks to everyone who made the room what it was: teams from OpenAI, Amazon, Google DeepMind, ABB, General Motors, Mitsubishi Corporation, Dyna Robotics, 1X, Galaxea, Antioch, Centrum AI, Cobot, Copec WIND Ventures and a few still in stealth, along with our partners. Looking forward to the next one! CC: Denis | Daniela | Victoria | Simon | Matthieu | Jonathan #robotics #embodiedAI #venturecapital

Following Qualified Health's $125M Series B, CI's Elijah Yi & Simon Wu dig into what drove our conviction on the blog👇 𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝑻𝑳𝑫𝑹 Health systems are no longer debating whether AI matters. The question now is how to deploy it safely, at scale, across an organization that can't afford to get it wrong. That's the problem Qualified is solving. Their enterprise platform helps health systems deploy, govern, and scale AI without becoming AI infrastructure companies themselves — with embedded auditability, governance, and the workflow logic that production healthcare demands. The traction speaks for itself: 🔹 500K+ users reached 🔹16+ health systems, including Mercy, Emory, and all eight institutions of the University of Texas System 🔹 40M+ patients under collective care What got us invested goes beyond the numbers. Justin Norden, MD, MBA, MPhil, Dr. Kedar Mate, Beau Norgeot, PhD, and Shantanu Phatakwala bring a rare combination: clinical credibility, AI systems depth, and the institutional trust that health system partnerships require. In a category where the hardest part is earning the right to deploy, that matters. The first wave of healthcare AI was about proving ROI workflow by workflow. The next wave belongs to whoever can help health systems scale AI across the enterprise without accumulating operational debt. We think Qualified is that partner. Go Behind the Term Sheet 👇 https://lnkd.in/gifWNVHC CC: Denis Barrier | Daniela Caserotto Leibert | Jonathan Healy | Rose Yuan

Big congrats to Justin Norden, MD, MBA, MPhil and the entire Qualified Health team on their $125M Series B 🙌 Qualified is building the trusted enterprise platform for AI deployment within health systems — "trusted" being the operative word here. In healthcare, AI doesn't scale through capability alone. It scales when the people behind the platform have the domain fluency to know where it creates value, the technical credibility to deliver, and the industry relationships to get in the room with major health system decision-makers. That combo is rare, and this team is more than 𝑸𝒖𝒂𝒍𝒊𝒇𝒊𝒆𝒅. The thesis is simple: AI applied at the edges won't survive the workforce and cost pressures ahead. Health systems need enterprise-wide transformation — unified data foundations, AI embedded into core workflows, governance and traceability built in from day one. That's what Qualified is building. Proud to join the journey alongside New Enterprise Associates (NEA), Transformation Capital, GreatPoint Ventures, Menlo Ventures & Anthropic and many more. Looking forward to what comes next 👀 📰 More on the raise: https://lnkd.in/g2xGAhnh CC: Denis Barrier | Simon Wu | Elijah Yi | Daniela Caserotto Leibert | Jonathan Healy | Rose Yuan

Europe: We’re not playing catch up. We’re in the global category leader game. Four CI portfolio companies have just been named in the VivaTech Top 100 Rising European Startups 2026 — sitting at the core of the transformations we've been backing for years: AI, digital health, and the reinvention of financial infrastructure. 🔬 AQEMIA | pushing the frontier of AI-native drug discovery 🏥 Nabla | redefining how care is delivered through AI-powered clinical workflows 📊 Flowdesk | building the rails for institutional-grade digital asset markets 🔗 Midas | bringing capital markets on-chain through tokenized securities Different sectors, same playbook: deep tech, global ambition, and the ability to execute in some of the most complex and regulated environments. At Cathay Innovation, we back founders who are actively shaping the next generation of industries. From AI-native biology to on-chain finance, from clinical workflows to market infrastructure. These are long-term shifts and Europe has a real role to play. Big congrats to AQEMIA, Nabla, Flowdesk & Midas. Proud to stand alongside these teams as they scale. 👏 CC : Ming-Po Cai Denis Barrier Jacky Abitbol Marguerite de Tavernost Alban Vendeuvre Romain Dufourcq Paul Pouyanne