Scaling agentic AI isn’t just about having the latest tools — it requires clear guidance, the right context, and a culture that champions experimentation to unlock real value. At VentureBeat’s Transform 2025, Anu Bharadwaj, president of Atlassian, shared actionable insights into how the company has empowered its employees to build thousands of custom agents that solve real, everyday challenges. To build these agents, Atlassian has fostered a culture rooted in curiosity, enthusiasm and continuous experimentation.

“You hear a lot about AI top-down mandates,” Bharadwaj said. “Top-down mandates are great for making a big splash, but really, what happens next, and to who? Agents require constant iteration and adaptation. Top-down mandates can encourage people to start using it in their daily work, but people have to use it in their context and iterate over time to realize maximum value.”

That requires a culture of experimentation — one where short- to medium-term setbacks aren’t penalized but embraced as stepping stones to future growth and high-impact use cases.

Creating a safe environment

Atlassian’s agent-building platform, Rovo Studio, serves as a playground environment for teams across the enterprise to build agents.

“As leaders, it’s important for us to create a psychologically safe environment,” Bharadwaj said. “At Atlassian, we’ve always been very open. Open company, no bullshit is one of our values. So we focus on creating that openness, and creating an environment where employees can try out different things, and if it fails, it’s okay. It’s fine because you learned something about how to use AI in your context. It’s helpful to be very explicit and open about it.”

Beyond that, you have to create a balance between experimentation with guardrails of safety and auditability. This includes safety measures like making sure employees are logged in when they’re trying tools, to making sure agents respect permissions, understand role-based access, and provide answers and actions based on what a particular user has access to.

Supporting team-agent collaboration

“When we think about agents, we think about how humans and agents work together,” Bharadwaj said. “What does teamwork look like across a team composed of a bunch of people and a bunch of agents — and how does that evolve over time? What can we do to support that? As a result, all of our teams use Rovo agents and build their own Rovo agents. Our theory is that once that kind of teamwork becomes more commonplace, the entire operating system of the company changes.”

The magic really happens when multiple people work together with multiple agents, she added. Today a lot of agents are single-player, but interaction patterns are evolving. Chat will not be the default interaction pattern, Bharadwaj says. Instead, there will be multiple interaction patterns that drive multiplayer collaboration.

“Fundamentally, what is teamwork all about?” she posed to the audience. “It’s multiplayer collaboration — multiple agents and multiple humans working together.”

Making agent experimentation accessible

Atlassian’s Rovo Studio makes agent building available and accessible to people of all skill sets, including no-code options. One construction industry customer built a set of agents to reduce their roadmap creation time by 75%, while publishing giant HarperCollins built agents that reduced manual work by 4X across their departments.  

By combining Rovo Studio with their developer platform, Forge, technical teams gain powerful control to deeply customize their AI workflows — defining context, specifying accessible knowledge sources, shaping interaction patterns and more — and create highly specialized agents. At the same time, non-technical teams also need to customize and iterate, so they’ve built experiences in Rovo Studio to allow users to leverage natural language to make their customizations.

“That’s going to be the big unlock, because fundamentally, when we talk about agentic transformation, it cannot be restricted to the code gen scenarios we see today. It has to permeate the entire team,” Bharadwaj said. “Developers spend 10% of their time coding. The remaining 90% is working with the rest of the team, figuring out customer issues and fixing issues in production. We’re creating a platform through which you can build agents for every single one of those functions, so the entire loop gets faster.”

Creating a bridge from here to the future

Unlike the previous shifts to mobile or cloud, where a set of technological or go-to-market changes occurred, AI transformation is fundamentally a change in the way we work. Bharadwaj believes the most important thing to do is to be open and to share how you are using AI to change your daily work. “As an example, I share Loom videos of new tools that I’ve tried out, things that I like, things that I didn’t like, things where I thought, oh, this could be useful if only it had the right context,” she added. “That constant mental iteration, for employees to see and try every single day, is highly important as we shift the way we work.”

Funding to North American startups surged in the first half of 2025, fueled by investor enthusiasm around artificial intelligence.

Overall, investors poured $145 billion into seed through growth-stage rounds for U.S. and Canadian companies in the first six months of the year, per Crunchbase data. That’s a 43% gain year over year, and the highest half-year total in three years.

Total investment in the second quarter, meanwhile, was down sequentially due to a drop in late-stage financing. However, we did see a rise in seed and early-stage funding, as charted below.

We also saw the pace of dealmaking slow a bit in Q2. Deal counts were down quarter over quarter at seed, early stage and late stage, as shown below.

Once again, enormous rounds for generative AI companies were the main reason investment totals held high. In Q2, that included Meta’s $14.3 billion June investment in Scale AI, the second-largest round of the year after SoftBank’s record-breaking $40 billion March financing for OpenAI.

In addition to vast sums going into startups, the second quarter was also a robust period for exits. This included high-valuation IPOs from Circle and Chime, as well as multiple acquisitions for $1 billion or more.

Below, we take a closer look at investment activity by stage and review some of the larger exits.

Table of contents

Late stage and technology growth

Late stage attracts the most money, so we’ll start there.

For the second quarter, investors put $41.5 billion into later-stage and technology growth investments, which is the third-highest quarterly total in three years.

Round counts also held high, with an estimated 239 later-stage and tech growth deals in Q2. That equates to the second-highest tally of the past five quarters.

A handful of megadeals pushed the investment totals up, led by Meta’s Scale AI investment, a strategic and financial deal that includes founder Alexandr Wang joining the social media giant.

Other big deals included a $2.5 billion Series G for defense tech unicorn Anduril, a $2 billion financing for GenAI startup Safe Superintelligence, and a $900 million Series C for AI coding company Anysphere.

Also noteworthy: We did see a sequential dip after Q1. However, that was to be expected in the quarter following OpenAI’s unprecedented $40 billion financing.

Early stage

Early-stage investment also held up at historically high levels in Q2.

In total, investors put $14.3 billion into early-stage companies, roughly flat with the prior quarter. Round counts ticked up a bit, though, hitting the highest point in four quarters.

As usual, a few particularly large rounds contributed heavily to the Q2 early-stage funding totals. Standouts include a $200 million Series B for residential battery provider Base Power, a $186 million Series A for green steel producer Electra, and a $177 million Series A for drug developer Antares Therapeutics.

Seed

Across all stages, seed investment saw the biggest spike in Q2. That was entirely due to a single round — the $2 billion financing for Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup led by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati.

Including that round, seed investment for the quarter totaled $5.9 billion, the highest level in three years, as charted below.

While funding was up, seed-stage deal counts fell a bit in Q2, based on preliminary data. We expect that total to rise some over time, however, as it’s common for some seed-stage deals to be added to our dataset weeks or months after they close.

The median seed-stage financing was around $3 million last quarter, although we did see some deals that were much bigger. Besides Thinking Machines, larger ones this past quarter included a $100 million seed round for AI model tester LMArena, and a $77 million initial financing for aerospace and defense startup Amca.

AI

Given the dominant role of AI startups in attracting venture funding, we’ve also been breaking out the share of investment going to this area.

For Q2, North America’s AI-related startups pulled in $34.5 billion in total funding, showing continued heavy investor appetite for the space. While down from Q1, which had the massive OpenAI financing, it’s still an impressive sum and the third-highest quarterly total to date.

Exits

The second quarter was also a fairly happening period for startup exits, including both IPOs and M&A deals.

IPOs

On the IPO front, the highlights for Q2 were the debuts of two heavily funded fintech unicorns: stablecoin pioneer Circle and digital banking provider Chime.

Of the two, Circle made the biggest splash on public markets. The New York-based company priced IPO shares well above the projected range and saw its stock increase severalfold from there. Its recent market cap was over $50 billion.

Chime has also performed well. Shares are still trading above the IPO price, and the San Francisco company had a recent market cap of more than $11 billion.

Other venture-backed companies that made their debuts last quarter included Hinge Health, Slide Insurance and Voyager Technologies.

M&A

Acquisition activity was also pretty lively in the just-ended quarter, with multiple big-ticket deals announced.

In the AI arena, one of the buzziest was OpenAI’s purchase of Io, the device startup co-founded by famed Apple product designer Jony Ive, for a reported $6.5 billion. OpenAI also snapped up AI coding startup Windsurf for a reported $3 billion.

Other large deals included Xero’s purchase of Melio for a reported $2.5 billion, and Abbvie’s purchase of Capstan Therapeutics for up to $2.1 billion.

An upbeat quarter and a strong half

Overall, most of the metrics we looked at for this past quarter and the first half of the year point to an upbeat funding scene and a receptive environment for startup exits. It’s especially encouraging to see the IPO window opening up after a long dry spell. And with Figma expected to make its debut in coming weeks, the parade of closely watched unicorn IPOs looks far from over.

So what could go wrong to dampen this rosy picture in coming months? Certainly there’s plenty of risk factors, including a broader market pullback. For now, however, it looks like a bullish period in startup-land, particularly for those with compelling AI use cases.

Methodology

The data contained in this report comes directly from Crunchbase, and is based on reported data. Provisional data reported is as of July 3, 2025.

Note that data lags are most pronounced at the earliest stages of venture activity, with seed funding amounts increasing significantly after the end of a quarter/year.

Please note that all funding values are given in U.S. dollars unless otherwise noted.

Crunchbase converts foreign currencies to U.S. dollars at the prevailing spot rate from the date funding rounds, acquisitions, IPOs and other financial events are reported. Even if those events were added to Crunchbase long after the event was announced, foreign currency transactions are converted at the historic spot price.

Glossary of funding terms

Seed and angel consists of seed, pre-seed and angel rounds. Crunchbase also includes venture rounds of unknown series, equity crowdfunding and convertible notes at $3 million (USD or as-converted USD equivalent) or less.

Early-stage consists of Series A and Series B rounds, as well as other round types. Crunchbase includes venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $3 million, and those less than or equal to $15 million.

Late-stage consists of Series C, Series D, Series E and later-lettered venture rounds following the “Series [Letter]” naming convention. Also included are venture rounds of unknown series, corporate venture and other rounds above $15 million. Corporate rounds are only included if a company has raised an equity funding at seed through a venture series funding round.

Technology growth is a private-equity round raised by a company that has previously raised a “venture” round. (So basically, any round from the previously defined stages.)

ServiceUp, a platform that automates and manages the vehicle repair process, has raised $55 million in a Series B round of funding led by PeakSpan Capital, the company told Crunchbase News.

The financing brings ServiceUp’s total raised since its 2021 inception to nearly $70 million. The company declined to reveal its valuation, noting only that it was “a significant step up” from its $14.5 million Series A in 2022. Tiger Global Management led that round.

Existing backers Hearst Ventures, Trestle Partners, Capital Midwest Fund and Litquidity Ventures also participated in ServiceUp’s latest raise.

Brett Carlson and Brett Dashe founded the Los Gatos, California-based startup “because vehicle repair was stuck in the past.” They operated under the premise that managing the repair process is “one of the most painful parts of running a fleet or processing claims.”

“It was slow, manual and full of frustrating back and forth,” Carlson told Crunchbase News in an email interview. “For fleets and insurance carriers, that meant lost time, lost money and operational headaches.”

ServiceUp aims to offer a centralized platform so fleets and insurance carriers can manage the repair process in one place, including repair approvals, vendor management, live repair tracking, billing and data insights.

For customers who want to fully offload the repair process, the company offers ServiceUp 360, its managed service where it handles everything — including vehicle pickup and delivery — on behalf of its customers.

ServiceUp is just one of nearly 240 automotive-related startups that have raised about $3.5 billion in venture funding globally in 2025 so far, per Crunchbase data. Birmingham, Alabama-based Fleetio, a web-based fleet management system, raised the largest of the bunch — a $450 million Series D financing at a $1.55 billion valuation.

In 2024, ServiceUp experienced 180% year-over-year revenue growth, according to Carlson. While the company is not yet profitable, he projects that it will be by 2026.

Today, ServiceUp has more than 50 customers across the fleet and insurance industries, including Zipcar, Voyager Global Mobility, Clearcover and Kyte.

The company makes money in two ways: For customers using its software, ServiceUp charges a SaaS fee; for those opting for managed ServiceUp 360, it charges a service fee “to cover coordination, logistics, and quality control, “ Carlson said.

It claims to have reduced repair cycle times for its customers to date by more than 30%.

Carlson believes ServiceUp’s main differentiator is that it is solely focused on managing the full repair process for fleets, specifically mechanical and collision repairs.

“In the insurance space, large carriers often have direct repair program (DRP) networks, while smaller carriers are typically left without a scalable solution,” Carlson told Crunchbase News. “ServiceUp fills that gap by providing a purpose-built platform that manages the entire repair lifecycle with transparency, automation, and speed.”

ServiceUp plans to use its new capital to add more automation and artificial intelligence to the platform and expand into Canada and other states in the U.S. by next year. Presently, the company has 63 employees.

Jack Freeman, partner at PeakSpan Capital, believes that ServiceUp “is not just building another solution for corporate fleets.”

“They have a differentiated vision and are re-imagining how automotive collision repair should look and feel,” he told Crunchbase News via email. “They … craft solutions that make a substantial difference through enhancing visibility, decreasing downtime, and driving cost savings. ServiceUp helps corporate fleets level up.”

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Illustration: Dom Guzman