Every VC CX deal you need to know: August 21

Every week, CX Network publishes the top funding news from the CX and customer service start-up space with a focus on the firms CX and service leaders need to know. 

This week, there's news from Queen One, Xpander, Palona AI, Temporal Technologies, Ours Privacy, Rundoo and HeyBreeze.

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Queen One Raises $25m from more than six investors 

Queen One has raised US$25 million to scale its commercial organization, accelerate investments across its AI infrastructure for commerce and launch its new advertising business.

The business, which developed the retail industry's first fully AI-governed commerce CRM, raised the new funds from Mercury Fund, Full In, Connecticut Innovations, CP Overture, Charge Ventures, Inspired Capital, and existing investors.

The capital boost brings total funding to more than $37.5 million in external venture investment and performance-based incentives.

Queen One was founded by ex-Wunderkind executives Ryan Urban and Maricor Resente, who generated more than $35 billion of attributed revenue for clients. 
The platform is the AI infrastructure for commerce, delivering a new generation of commerce technology it says achieves "undeniable performance" while reducing technology costs by up to 75 percent.

Xpander raises $7.5m in Seed round as it unveils agentic FDE

Xpander, a San Francisco-based startup that helps organizations build, run, secure, and govern AI agents across products, workflows, and internal data, raised a $7.5 million in a Seed round led by Pico Venture Partners with Emerge Ventures, Samsung Next, and SeedIL also participating. 

Xpander bridges the gap many organizations encounter when trying to scale AI pilots. It helps organizations overcome the infrastructure, security, and governance challenges that have historically limited enterprise AI adoption.

But its big draw is Omni, an agentic forward deployed engineer, which achieved a 90.9 percent score on the GAIA benchmark.

Whether creating an AI teammate for every employee, enabling every team to build its own agents, or ensuring every process is with AI built in, Omni simplifies the most complex user tasks into simple and autonomous, while also supporting collaborative multi-agent workflows to meet business objectives.

Founded by David Twizer, Ran Sheinberg, and Moriel Pahima, Xpander says is products allow enterprises "to harness the true power of AI by freely adopting, building, running, and managing AI agents without needing to adjust infrastructures or compromise security, compliance, and regulatory requirements".

Palona AI unveils multimodal AI operating layer following $20m Series A

Palona AI closed a $20 million Series A on August 18, led by Ardenwood Ventures with Fusion Fund, Defy and others, following a $10M seed in early 2025.

Palona describes itself as the AI operating layer for physical businesses, with its deployments demonstrating measurable revenue impact and proprietary advances in physical AI. Its product suite includes revenue expansion, revenue intelligence and operations excellence. It captures and converts demand across calls, catering, private events and large-order inquiries; identifies intent, value and urgency; and turns operational signals into manager-ready workflows.

Restaurants are the first proof market, but the platform can extend to any physical business where customers and frontline teams interact.

"Physical businesses need AI that can understand what is happening and act in real time," said Maria Zhang, founder and CEO. "Palona turns demand, operational context and live signals into actions that drive revenue, quality and execution."

Temporal Technologies in talks to raise $500m, doubling its value 

Temporal Technologies, whose solutions are used by OpenAI, Nordstrom, and Block, is negotiating a new round of financing that would value the company at $12 billion – possibly more. Temporal Technologies aims to raise $500 million, having closed its $5 billion Series D round just six months ago. 

Temporal's solution is an open-source tool that prevents the silent failures AI agents are susceptible to.

Whereas UiPath provides workflow solutions and Vercel offers general infrastructure services, Temporal's USP is agent reliability.

The company was founded in 2019 and already revenue has grown by more than 380 percent year-on-year, with annual recurring revenue surpassing $100 million as of February 2026. That same month, the company doubled in value from $2.5 billion to $5 billion following a $300 million Series D round led by Andreessen Horowitz and involving Lightspeed Venture Partners and Sapphire Ventures.

Specialist healthcare CDP closes oversubscribed Series A at $15m

On August 19, Ours Privacy announced a multiple-times-oversubscribed $15 million in Series A funding led by Lightbank and Health Velocity Capital with additional participation from existing investors including Rock Health, Lakehouse, TMV, Switch Ventures, Starfire Ventures, GreyMatter and others.

The HIPAA-compliant customer data platform (CDP) was built by healthcare marketers for healthcare marketers.

As a growth marketing and data infrastructure platform it has been engineered for healthcare's compliance requirements, promoting the principle that protecting privacy doesn't just reduce risk, but makes healthcare marketers more effective.

Its USP has emerged from increasingly stringent data protection and AI regulations.

Prior to 2022,  healthcare marketers were using e-commerce and consumer technology for their growth and data infrastructure. However, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) clarified that disclosing protected health information to tracking vendors without a signed Business Associate Agreement can violate HIPAA and risk multi-million-dollar penalties. 

Regulators have ramped up enforcement, and nearly half of US states have passed their own privacy laws layering on additional requirements and necessitating dedicated platforms that can comply with regulatory obligations. 

Founders Jessica Holton, Adam Putterman, and Tyler Zey launched the platform in 2024.

"The future of healthcare marketing is privacy-first," said Putterman, who also serves as chief revenue officer. "Putting privacy first makes marketing not only safer, but better."

Rundoo raises $30m to help small businesses compete with Target and Walmart 

Rundoo's Series B funding round raised $30 million as it continues to roll out technology it says can help independent supply stores compete with the likes of Walmart and Target. 

Its suite of intelligent AI tools includes an AI agent assistant called Dooey which unifies a point-of-sale system, a customer relationship management (CRM) platform, e-commerce technology, a general ledger, loyalty program technology and more.

Because these tools are all linked together through Dooey, they can help business owners to grow sales while reducing costs and expanding profit margins. Dooey can also make recommendations, such as which products the store should promote to increase sales at specific moments, for example holiday periods or seasonal products. 

Confirmed on August 19, the round was led by Battery Ventures and saw the involvement of existing backers such as Bessemer Venture Partners and CRV.
"Our clients supply the materials that allow our communities to build and care for the world around us, and our technology helps them do that better and more efficiently," said co-founder and chief executive, Nick Hershey.

"Our platform gives independent store owners the same operational power that much larger corporations use to grow revenue and expand," Hershey added.

Rundoo isn't a point solution. It also partners with some of the largest distributors and manufacturers in North America allowing independent supply stores to also directly connect to suppliers. 

Rundoo will use the funds from its Series B raise to expand the engineering team, add new features to the platform, and grow its go-to-market team in Chicago with a view to expanding the customer base.

HeyBreeze raises $2.5m Seed to expand Arabic voice AI globally 

HeyBreeze, the enterprise voice AI company that focuses on the operational layer of automated voice communications, has raised $2.5 million in an oversubscribed Seed round led by Lunara Partners, with Jabbar Group and DASH Ventures.

The news broke as the platform passed one million calls a month amid demand for Arabic voice infrastructure. The company says Arabic is "now getting the voice infrastructure it deserves, while also creating a platform built to run anywhere".

The company is officially headquartered in the US but has offices in Dubai, UAE, and Amman, Jordan.

As such, the MENA region is its commercial starting point, supported by rising demand for Arabic-language voice automation and the GCC-based sovereign-cloud and data-residency mandates.

The platform is already running across the MENA, Europe, US and LATAM regions. 

HeyBreeze describes its solution as "voice AI that runs the operation, not just the call". The solution doesn't just talk but can understand context, take action, and move work forward.

Users can build agent behavior, branching workflows and conversation logic in a visual environment to handle thousands of concurrent conversations with low latency and high reliability. HeyBreeze allows users to manage missed calls, callbacks, follow-ups, integrations, and internal workflows from one operational layer.

Quick links 

• Every VC CX deal you need to know: August 14
• Where the AI vendor market is going, and what it means for CXOs
• Prompting 101: How to talk to AI

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