Octopus Ventures is a European venture capital firm that backs growing businesses.
Fusion Fund led the seed round, which will fund a new San Francisco office and team expansion.
"Arena has significantly streamlined our RL development workflow, making training and deploying agents a breeze. The platform’s hyperparameter tuning capabilities have dramatically accelerated our experimentation and improved the performance of our models."
The financing values the former Octopus Energy subsidiary at $8.7bn and marks its official separation as a standalone technology provider.
"Kraken is in a class of its own, in terms of technology, capability, and scale. As an independent company with world-class backers and outstanding leadership, it will be free to grow even faster and is set to be a true UK-founded success story."
The pre-seed round was led by Outward VC and will support team expansion and international growth.
"Strategic procurement is one of the last frontiers for true automation because so much of it remains powered by intuition. Throughout my previous roles, I saw just how much instinct drives results, but also how much time is wasted and how much value is being left on the table because instinct alone can only go so far. Our goal at Monq isn’t to replace that judgment but to amplify it. By empowering procurement teams with strong, actionable, data-driven and intelligent insights, we’re giving enterprises the speed, clarity and confidence to negotiate at an entirely new scale while unlocking billions in hidden deal flow, value and efficiency before that value is lost to the company."
Octopus Ventures led the investment round, which values the health tech firm at £30m.
The London-based startup secured the capital to push its optical brain tracking technology toward hospitals and intensive care units.
