Listen Labs, a voice-AI market research startup, walks away from a signed $125 million Series C term sheet at a $1.5 billion valuation. The financing collapse appears linked to Salesforce’s talks to acquire the company for around $2 billion, though the discussions remain unfinalized. Listen Labs’ AI creates survey questions, interviews customers by audio or video, and turns conversations into reports; the startup has about $30 million in annualized revenue and customers including Microsoft, Canva, Anthropic, and Sweetgreen.
AIR Security launches with $50 million to build an inline firewall that screens instructions, tools and data entering AI agents’ context. Its platform discovers agents across endpoints, cloud accounts and SaaS applications, continuously rechecks their dependencies, blocks untrusted tools and injected instructions at runtime, and offers a marketplace of cleared add-ons. More than 20 companies use the platform, with demand strongest among financial services and pharmaceutical firms.
The Israeli startup emerged from stealth with research showing thousands of AI add-ons rely on untrusted sources, as companies give autonomous agents access to more data, tools and systems.