The Series B funding will help the company with hiring, product development and expansion into more enterprise deployments, according to a Wednesday (Sept. 3) press release.

While the company did not share its valuation, a report by Reuters cited unnamed sources who said HappyRobot is now valued at $500 million.

A wave of venture investment into AI firms has raised concerns about possible saturation and increased competition for the companies, the report said.

HappyRobot is hoping its in-house tech and logistics expertise help separate it from general-purpose AI voice startups such as ElevenLabs, according to the report.

“Being verticalized” gives the company an advantage over more general-purpose competitors who might be “clueless about the operations and the intricacies of these industries,” said HappyRobot co-founder and CEO Pablo Palafox, per the report.

Launched 18 months ago, the company has more than 70 enterprise customers, including DHL, Ryder, Schneider and Werner, which use HappyRobot for tasks such as appointment scheduling, collections and outbound sales, according to the press release.

“The early results are clear: AI workers aren’t just cutting costs — they’re unlocking new revenue opportunities, increasing visibility and freeing teams to focus on strategic, relationship-driven work,” the release said.

HappyRobot’s AI operating system combines “real-time truth,” specialized AI workers, and an orchestrating intelligence to manage “complex, mission-critical work,” starting with supply chain and industrial-scale operations, per the release.

The goal is to help enterprises operate with speed and ongoing improvement, “while humans focus on higher-value work,” the release said

The PYMNTS Intelligence report “The Agentic Trust Gap: Enterprise CFOs Push Pause on Agentic AI” found that 15% of chief financial officers surveyed are even considering putting agentic AI to work, with most still in the early evaluation stage.

“This contrasts with the surging adoption of generative AI, which CFOs are increasingly using for tasks like content creation, customer service, coding and data analysis,” PYMNTS wrote Aug. 15. “The report shows generative AI’s deployment for product and service innovation up 21% and for spotting fraud and errors up 31% since March 2024.”

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The effort is designed to offer new opportunities to integrate tokenized stocks and exchange-traded funds (ETFs) “across the world’s most widely adopted smart contract network,” according to a Tuesday (Sept. 2) Kraken blog post.

“Ethereum’s vibrant developer community, deep liquidity and global user base make it a natural home for the next phase of xStocks’ expansion,” the post said. “By extending Kraken’s support of xStocks to Ethereum, we’re enabling millions of Ethereum users and thousands of live applications to source the industry standard for tokenized equities liquidity.”

In the weeks ahead, eligible Kraken clients will be permitted to deposit and withdraw xStocks directly on Ethereum, which offers investors greater choice and flexibility to transfer assets between Kraken and self-custodial wallets for on-chain activity, per the post.

Kraken announced in late June that it started offering tokenized U.S. stocks and ETFs on its platform for eligible non-U.S. clients, thanks to xStocks.

Kraken co-CEO Arjun Sethi said in the blog post that xStocks is a key component in Kraken’s efforts to bring traditional assets “onto trust-minimized infrastructure” while integrating public markets with the internet’s base layer.

“Our multi-chain strategy is deliberate,” he said in the post. “It ensures tokenized equities are accessible across ecosystems, portable between wallets and protocols, and composable within the applications users already trust. Ethereum is the next logical step. It is the center of gravity for smart contract innovation, on-chain liquidity and decentralized finance. By launching xStocks on Ethereum, we are making tokenized equities programmable, interoperable and continuously accessible to builders and institutions worldwide.”

PYMNTS explored the world of tokenized stocks earlier this summer following Kraken’s initial launch of xStocks and Robinhood’s tokenized stock announcement. Soon after, the news broke that JPMorgan Chase was developing a new service to tokenize carbon credits.

“While the initiatives may appear distinct, ranging from environmental credits to fractionalized equity exposure, the connective tissue is the same,” PYMNTS wrote July 3. “Moving traditional financial services onto the blockchain.”

The fine is likely to be less than the 4.3 billion euros the Commission ordered Google to pay in another case in 2018, Reuters reported Friday (Aug. 29), citing unnamed sources.

Asked about the report by Reuters, the Commission decline to comment, while Google pointed to a 2023 blog post in which it criticized the regulator’s interpretation of the AdTech sector, according to the report.

The report attributed the imposition of what it described as modest penalties to the approach of the new EU antitrust chief, Teresa Ribera, who it said focuses on getting companies to end anti-competitive practices rather than punishing them with big fines.

In the AdTech case, the European Commission accused Google of abusing its dominance in the online AdTech industry since 2014. The regulator alleged that the company had wielded its market power on both sides of the supply chain by showing favoritism toward its own ad exchange, AdX, in matching auctions.

Google argued that serving both advertisers and publishers is a common industry practice, competitors operate similar AdTech businesses catering to both sides of the market, and integrated technology stacks facilitate high-quality connections between advertisers and publishers.

According to Friday’s Reuters report, advertising revenue accounted for 75.6% of Google’s total revenue in 2024.

Google also faces pressure in the United States, where it is in a legal battle with the Justice Department, and a federal judge determined that the company unlawfully maintained monopolies in critical areas of the online ad industry.

It was reported in May that the Justice Department called for Google to divest some key components of its digital advertising business, including its AdX marketplace and its DFP ad-serving platform.

The Justice Department argued at the time in a court filing that such divestitures were essential to dismantle Google’s dominance and restore competition in the markets for ad exchanges and publisher ad servers.