M12 - Microsoft's Venture Fund

Perspectives from the M12 investment team on AI, cloud infrastructure, security, deep tech and what it takes to build an enterprise company.

Growth round fundraising strategies and the metrics that matter, with WorkBoard CEO Deidre Paknad and B Capital's Rashmi Gopinath.

A founder's role in recruiting. Talent lessons from M12's Marty Collins, drawing on strategy and learning experience at Microsoft HR.

News and announcements from M12, Microsoft’s venture fund: new investments, portfolio milestones, funding rounds and founder features.

PsiQuantum's Series D marks major technology milestones. Why M12's conviction in fault-tolerant quantum computing remains steadfast.

Welcoming Evisort to the M12 portfolio. Founded by Harvard Law and MIT alumni, applying AI to enterprise contract management.

M12 is Microsoft’s venture fund. Its team has experience in investing, entrepreneurship, research, and go-to-market.

M12 is Microsoft’s venture capital fund. It invests in early-stage technology companies disrupting the enterprise.

Inception AI Inc. introduces **Mercury 3**, a diffusion-based language model that outperforms OpenAI’s **GPT-6 Luna** and Anthropic’s **Claude Haiku 5.5** in speed, achieving up to **8x faster token generation** (1,068 tokens/sec vs. ~240 for Haiku 5.5). The model excels in coding tasks like **SWE-Bench Atlas** (51.1 vs. 33.3 for GPT-6) but trails in long-context tests. Early adopters—such as **Octen AI** (real-time search) and **RevisionDojo** (tutoring)—report sub-second response times, addressing latency-sensitive use cases. Pricing starts at **$0.20M input/$0.70M output tokens**, with API compatibility via OpenRouter, Baseten, and Vercel. Founded in 2024, Inception raised **$50M** (led by Menlo Ventures) and was reportedly in **acquisition talks with Microsoft** (valuation >$1B).

Oct 2026SiliconANGLENews article

Reach Security raises over **$50 million** in Series B funding led by Top Tier Capital Partners to expand its AI-driven cybersecurity platform, **Reach Everywhere**. The company’s technology automates security control adjustments in real time, helping enterprises prioritize only actionable vulnerabilities while integrating with existing tools like ServiceNow and Jira. Customers, including Autodesk and Insurity, report **160+ hours saved weekly** and a **156% ROI** from streamlined exposure management. Reach’s deterministic AI validates controls continuously, addressing AI-fueled attack speeds—where adversaries now operate in as little as **27 seconds**—by ensuring defenses adapt without manual intervention.

Oct 2026FinTech GlobalNews article

Prime Intellect acquires Moondream, a Seattle-founded startup that makes small, open-source image-understanding models. Its co-founders Jay Allen and Vik Korrapati join Prime Intellect to lead inference work and expand its efforts in vision and computer-using AI agents. Moondream’s Photon inference engine compiles each model into a GPU megakernel to reduce idle time between tasks. Prime Intellect keeps the Moondream name for efficient models and offers its latest model, Moondream 3.1, through its inference service.

Oct 2026GeekWireNews article

Mecka AI raises a $60 million Series B led by Sequoia, with participation from Nvidia, Microsoft’s venture fund M12, and others. Founded in 2024, the startup pays people to record everyday tasks, such as making coffee or fixing cars, using body sensors and smartphones to produce data for training robots. The company aims to provide robotics with human-generated training data, similar to data-labeling firms serving large language models.

Oct 2026TechCrunchNews article