Figure AI (Robotics & Physical AI): $1B+

Groq (AI Infrastructure & Foundational Models): $750M

Robotics & Physical AI: ~$1.21B

AI Infrastructure & Foundational Models: ~$966M

Enterprise AI Solutions: ~$724M

Invisible Technologies, a software and services platform for data operations and AI model management, landed $100 million in new funding, valuing the company at $2 billion. The company combines an expert human marketplace with an AI orchestration platform to help enterprises organize, clean, label, and map their data, providing the foundational layer for building agentic workflows. PYMNTS

Groq, a challenger to Nvidia in the AI chip market, confirmed a fresh $750 million funding round, bringing its post-money valuation to $6.9 billion. The round, led by Disruptive, will help scale production of its Language Processing Units (LPUs) and its inference engine, which are designed to run AI models faster and more efficiently than traditional GPUs. TechCrunch

Upscale AI, a Santa Clara-based networking company, launched with over $100 million in seed funding co-led by Mayfield and Maverick Silicon. Founded by serial entrepreneurs, the company is building a full-stack, open-standard AI networking infrastructure to challenge closed, proprietary systems and provide high-performance connectivity for AI training, inference, and cloud deployments. Tech Funding News

Mueon, a Portland-based company developing semiconductor-based systems for AI and hyperscale computing, raised $15.5M in Seed funding. The round, led by Intel Capital, will accelerate development of the company’s novel data center architecture, which uses modular, stackable "Cubelets" that combine compute, memory, and power to replace traditional server racks. FinSMEs

CodeRabbit, an AI-powered code review platform, raised $60 million in Series B funding, valuing the company at $550 million. The round was led by Scale Venture Partners, with participation from NVentures. The platform integrates with code repositories to identify bugs and provide contextual feedback, helping engineering teams automate a critical bottleneck and improve the quality of AI-generated code. TechCrunch

Scalekit launched with a $5.5 million seed round led by Together Fund and Z47 to build an authentication and identity stack purpose-built for AI agents. As agents emerge as first-class users of business software, Scalekit provides developers with the infrastructure to manage agent identities, permissions, and tool-calling, addressing a critical security gap in the current ecosystem. citybiz

Overmind, a startup that predicts the "blast radius" of software deployments, bagged $6 million in a seed round led by Renegade Partners. The tool integrates into CI/CD pipelines and uses AI to analyze how a proposed change will impact production infrastructure in real time, warning engineers before a potentially catastrophic deployment occurs. The Register

Ultralytics, the developer of the popular open-source YOLO computer vision models, raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Elephant VC. The company, whose models are used over 2 billion times per day for tasks like crop monitoring and production line analysis, will use the funding to expand the YOLO algorithm family and productize its technology for enterprise use. SiliconANGLE

Remedio, an AI cybersecurity firm founded by a former Israeli intelligence cyber defender, secured $65 million in its first funding round at a $300 million valuation. The round, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, will help the bootstrapped and profitable company scale its AI platform, which acts like a hacker to identify and automatically remediate risky device misconfigurations and unpatched software across corporate networks. Forbes

Terra Security, a continuous penetration testing platform, raised a $30M Series A led by Felicis. The company uses a "swarm" of fine-tuned AI agents, overseen by human experts, to act like ethical hackers and continuously test an organization's full attack surface, moving beyond traditional point-in-time, manual penetration tests. Terra Security Blog

Spara, a NYC-based startup, raised $15M in seed funding led by Radical Ventures and Inspired Capital. The company provides an enterprise platform with real-time AI agents for chat, voice, and email that engage high-intent website visitors to qualify leads and book meetings instantly, aiming to accelerate sales cycles for go-to-market teams. FinSMEs

Encentive, a German AI software startup, raised €6.3M ($6.8M) in a seed round led by General Catalyst. Its platform, flexOn, integrates directly with industrial machinery like refrigeration, heating, and battery systems to automatically optimize energy consumption based on market prices and renewable energy availability, promising to reduce costs by up to 20%. Tech Funding News

Airia, an enterprise AI security and orchestration platform, announced $100 million in funding from its co−founder, JohnMarshall(co-founder of AirWatch). The company provides a governance layer for enterprises to securely deploy and scale both homegrown and external AI agents, offering features like role-based permissions and an AI firewall to mitigate security risks and ensure compliance. BusinessWire

Vega, a secretive Israeli cybersecurity startup, exited stealth with $65 million across Seed and Series A rounds at a $400 million valuation. Led by Accel, the funding will scale its AI-native security analytics and investigation platform, which aims to replace legacy SIEM systems by analyzing security data in place to automatically surface critical threats. Calcalistech

EvoluteIQ, a native AI platform for automating complex business processes, secured $53 million in minority growth capital from Baird Capital. The company’s low-code platform unifies process orchestration, data integration, and generative AI to help enterprises in regulated industries like banking, insurance, and healthcare automate end-to-end workflows. Tech.eu

Omnea, a startup utilizing AI to address the "unsexy" issue of procurement, has raised a $50 million Series B round co-led by Insight Partners and Khosla Ventures. The platform helps companies manage software and tool purchasing by using AI to handle conversational requests, track suppliers, flag risks, and manage RFPs, streamlining a traditionally manual process. Business Insider Africa

Druid AI, an agentic AI startup for enterprise automation, raised $31 million in Series C funding led by Cipio Partners. The company's platform, centered on its "Druid Conductor," orchestrates hundreds of specialized AI agents to automate tasks like data entry, customer service, and IT support, unifying disparate bots under a single user interface. SiliconANGLE

Console, a startup using AI agents to resolve IT support tickets, raised a $23 million Series A co-led by DST Global Partners and Thrive Capital. The platform integrates with tools like Slack to automatically handle over 50% of common IT requests, freeing up support teams to focus on higher-value projects. Upstarts

Ray Security, a predictive data security platform, emerged from stealth with an $11 million seed round co-led by Venture Guides and Ibex Investors. The AI-powered platform continuously analyzes how data is accessed across users, systems, and AI agents to predict future data needs and proactively apply adaptive security controls before risks emerge. Business Wire

Fabrix Security, a Tel Aviv-based startup founded by veterans of Run:ai and Orca Security, raised $8 million in seed funding led by Norwest and toDay Ventures. The company is building an AI-native identity and access management (IAM) platform that uses explainable AI agents to automate access governance at scale for both human and non-human identities. Calcalistech

Eve Security, an agentic AI security and observability platform, announced a $3 million seed round led by LiveOak Ventures. The company has developed what it calls the first "Agent-in-the-Loop" (AITL), an AI that observes, assesses risk, and interrogates other AI agents to secure their interactions with critical business systems. citybiz

Irregular, an Israeli AI security firm, raised $80 million in around led by Sequoia Capital and Redpoint Ventures, valuing the company at $450 million. The startup stress-tests frontier AI models from labs like OpenAI and Anthropic in simulated environments, helping to identify and mitigate emergent risks and vulnerabilities before the models are publicly deployed. TechCrunch

PassiveLogic, a company building generative autonomy for the built environment, raised $74 million in a Series C round led by noa. The company’s platform uses real-time physics-based digital twins and AI to autonomously manage and operate buildings and industrial systems, effectively turning them into infrastructural robots. FinSMEs

Markup AI, formerly Acrolinx, raised $27.5 million Series A led by Genui Partners and EMH Partners. As AI dramatically increases the volume of created content, the company provides an AI-powered platform to help enterprises check and improve that content for quality, consistency, and compliance. Axios

Keplar, a market research startup, raised $3.4 million in seed funding led by Kleiner Perkins. The company uses a conversational voice AI to conduct in-depth customer interviews at scale, aiming to replace costly and time-consuming traditional research methods by providing deep analysis of customer sentiment in minutes. TechCrunch

RegScale, a startup disrupting the legacy Governance, Risk, and Compliance (GRC) market, announced a $30 million Series B round. The company is building an engineering-focused, AI-native platform that treats compliance as code, using a fleet of AI agents to automate documentation, audits, and risk assessments for enterprises in highly regulated industries. RegScale Blog

Conduct, a London-based startup founded by former Palantir employees, raised €11.2 million (~$12.1M) in Seed funding led by Creandum. The company has developed an AI platform to modernize legacy enterprise IT systems, starting with SAP, allowing organizations to directly query their complex ERP codebases to reduce maintenance costs by up to 90%. EU-Startups

Vibranium Labs raised $4.6 million in seed funding to scale its incident management platform. The company's product, Vibe AI, is described as the first AI Site Reliability Engineer (SRE), using agentic technology to autonomously monitor, triage, and resolve IT incidents and outages 24/7 for mission-critical enterprises. PYMNTS

Arch, a platform for managing private market investments, raised $52 million in a Series B round led by Oak HC/FT. The company uses AI to automatically collect, structure, and analyze financial data from documents like K-1s and statements across disparate portals and emails, creating a single source of truth for investors in alternative assets. Business Wire

GreenLite Technologies, a startup using AI to speed up the construction permitting process, raised a $49.5 million Series B led by Insight Partners. The company’s human-in-the-loop AI system reviews commercial building plans to identify compliance issues and check code requirements, reducing approval times from months to days. The Wall Street Journal

MarqVision, an AI platform for brand protection, closed a $48 million Series B round led by Peak XV Partners. Originally founded to fight online counterfeits, the company now uses AI to provide end-to-end brand control, helping legal and go-to-market teams manage their digital presence and recover lost revenue from intellectual property infringement. TechCrunch

Pascal AI, a startup building autonomous, agentic workflows for investment management, raised $3.1 million in seed funding led by Kalaari Capital. The platform automates the entire investment research lifecycle, using AI agents to gather insights, generate investment memos, and update financial models, reasoning like a seasoned analyst. SiliconANGLE

Tabs, an AI-native revenue platform for finance teams, raised $55 million in Series B funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company uses AI agents to automate the entire contract-to-cash workflow, including reading contracts, creating invoices, automating collections, and performing real-time revenue recognition to help CFOs accelerate cash flow. Axios

WorkFusion, a FinTech firm specializing in AI agents for financial crime compliance, secured $45 million in a round led by Georgian. The company’s pre-built agents automate manual, document-heavy workflows in areas like anti-money laundering (AML), sanction screening, and KYC, helping top global banks scale compliance operations. FinTech Global

Kertos, a Germany-based AI compliance platform, closed a €14 million ($15.1M) Series A led by Portage. The company’s AI agents integrate with a business's tech stack to automate compliance workflows for European regulations, handling tasks from asset discovery and risk assessment to document drafting and continuous monitoring. Tech.eu

Iris Finance, a startup providing an AI-powered CFO for CPG brands, raised $6.2 million in seed funding from investors including Glasswing Ventures. Its platform connects to data sources like Shopify, Amazon, and NetSuite to handle cash-flow forecasting, profitability tracking, and inventory planning for its 130 customers, 70% of which are in beauty and wellness. Beauty Independent

uiAgent, an AI agent platform for accounting firms, raised a $4.6 million seed round led by Marathon Management Partners. Built to address a labor shortage in the CPA industry, the company provides a library of AI agents that automate repetitive audit, tax, and client accounting workflows, reporting an 80% reduction in manual data entry for customers. GlobalData

Aleph, an AI-native Financial Planning & Analysis (FP&A) platform, secured a $29 million Series B led by Khosla Ventures, bringing its total funding to $46 million. The company is building an intelligence layer for finance teams that automates workflows and uses AI for tasks like variance analysis, helping companies like Zapier and Turo make faster, data-driven decisions. GlobeNewswire

Rulebase, a Y Combinator-backed startup, raised a $2.1 million pre-seed round led by Bowery Capital. The company is building an "agent co-worker" for fintech back-office operations, using AI to automate and manage regulatory compliance, dispute resolution, and quality assurance workflows across tools like Zendesk and Jira. TechCrunch

Centari, an AI-powered deal insights platform for legal and financial firms, raised $14 million in an oversubscribed Series A round led by Sentinel Global. The company's "Deal Reasoning Engine" transforms complex transactional documents into structured insights with attorney-level accuracy, aiming to move beyond generic RAG tools for high-stakes M&A, investment management, and finance workflows. PR Newswire

Lila Sciences, a biotechnology "AI unicorn," raised $235 million at a $1.23 billion valuation. The funding, led by Collective Global and Braidwell, will be used to expand its "AI science factories"—automated labs that use AI to develop and test novel drugs and materials, creating a feedback loop between computational models and real-world experiments. Bloomberg

Conceivable Life Sciences secured $50 million in a Series A round led by Advance Venture Partners to accelerate the development of its AI-powered automated IVF lab platform. The company uses robotics and AI to standardize the more than 200 manual steps in IVF procedures, aiming to reduce variability and improve outcomes for fertility clinics. Femtech Insider

Doctronic, an AI-native platform for personalized healthcare, raised $20 million in Series A funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. The company provides an "AI doctor" that offers users instant, anonymous health guidance and connects them to licensed physicians for video visits, aiming to solve challenges around timely access to quality care. PR Newswire

Inbox Health, a patient billing and communications platform, announced $20 million in growth equity led by Ten Coves Capital, bringing its total funding to $55 million. The company uses an AI-enabled tool to automate medical billing and payments, aiming to simplify the process for patients and reduce unpaid bills for providers. MobiHealthNews

Sophont, a medical AI startup founded by 22-year-old Tanishq Abraham, closed a $9.22M pre-seed and seed round led by Kindred Ventures. The company is building large-scale, multimodal medical foundation models trained on diverse clinical data—like pathology slides, brain scans, and clinical notes—to create an AI that can "see the whole patient." Endpoints News

Meela, a developer of an AI companion for seniors, raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by Bain Capital Ventures. The company is building a voice-based AI focused on providing companionship, cognitive stimulation, and human connection to combat the loneliness and social isolation prevalent among older adults. citybiz

Synthesize Bio, a Seattle-based startup founded by researchers from Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, launched with $10 million in funding from Madrona Venture Group. The biotech company is building a generative genomics foundation model to predict gene expression and simulate the results of hypothetical lab tests, aiming to make drug discovery faster and cheaper. GeekWire

Bio Protocol, a decentralized science (DeSci) platform, secured $6.9 million in funding from investors including Maelstrom Fund and Animoca Brands. The company is building an AI-native biotech research framework that uses decentralized AI "BioAgents" and blockchain-based incentives to accelerate the drug discovery pipeline and open scientific research to community participation. Cointelegraph

Trially, a clinical trial recruitment platform, raised $4.7 million in a seed round led by Flyover Capital. The company introduced its agentic AI solution, Margo, which uses HIPAA-compliant LLM agents to analyze unstructured medical data to match patients with suitable trials and automate the enrollment process, tackling a key bottleneck in pharma development. Clinical Trials Arena

Nolla Health, an AI-driven healthcare company offering on-demand skin cancer and acne assessments, has raised $4.5 million in seed funding. The company uses Vision Transformers and multimodal deep learning systems trained on over 1 million cases to provide fast, personalized, and expert-recommended treatments, aiming to put "a doctor in everyone's pocket." Beauty Independent

Moodwork, a French startup providing an AI-powered workplace mental health platform, secured €3.1 million (~$3.4M) in funding led by Newfund. The platform blends scientific research, psychological support, and AI-driven personalization to help companies improve employee well-being and address workplace stress and burnout. Startuprise

Numeral, a startup automating sales tax compliance, raised $35 million in a Series B round led by Mayfield, valuing the company at $350 million. The company's AI acts like a human tax accountant, tracking changing laws across over 11,000 jurisdictions and managing filing and payments, targeting the complex needs of e-commerce and software companies. TechCrunch

Finary, a Paris-based wealth management platform, raised €25 million (~$27M) in a Series B round with participation from new investor PayPal Ventures. The funding will be used to expand across Europe and launch AI-driven wealth management tools, targeting millennials and Gen Z who are navigating a massive generational wealth transfer. EU-Startups

Seapoint, an AI-powered financial platform for European startups, announced a $3 million pre-seed round led by Frontline Ventures. Founded by the former CIO of Stripe in Europe, Seapoint is building a unified "financial home" for the underserved niche of startups that are too large for neobanks but too small for corporate banks, using AI to automate payments, payroll, and expense categorization. Tech Funding News

Envive AI, an agentic AI commerce platform, raised $15 million in Series A funding led by Fuse VC. The company is building shopping agents to serve the nearly 60% of consumers who have already replaced traditional search engines with generative AI for product recommendations, aiming to create a new layer for AI-driven commerce. Axios

Ethosphere, a startup providing a voice-enabled AI coaching platform for retail associates, raised $2.5 million in pre-seed funding led by Point72 Ventures. The platform uses wearable microphones to record in-store interactions between staff and customers, then leverages LLMs to provide individualized feedback and coaching to improve sales performance. SiliconANGLE

Phia, an AI-powered shopping agent founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, raised $8 million seed round led by Kleiner Perkins. The round included a star-studded list of angel investors such as Sheryl Sandberg and Hailey Bieber. The app and browser extension, which has already reached 500,000 users, aims to automate price comparison and product discovery for consumers. Fortune

CreatorDB, a company building vertical AI infrastructure for the creator economy, closed an oversubscribed $4.67 million Series A led by Acorn Pacific Ventures. The platform tracks over 10 million creators to provide data-driven intelligence and campaign automation for brands and agencies, helping them scale influencer marketing globally. Business Wire

Figure AI, a humanoid robotics company, announced a funding round of over $1 billion, valuing the company at $39 billion. The Series C, led by Parkway Venture Capital and backed by Nvidia, Intel, Qualcomm, and Salesforce, will be used to expand its factory and scale production of its humanoid robots, which are powered by its vision-language-action (VLA) model, Helix. SiliconANGLE

Dyna Robotics, a startup developing cost-effective, general-purpose robots, raised $120 million in a new round that values it at over $600 million. The financing was led by CRV, First Round Capital, and RoboStrategy, with participation from the venture arms of Nvidia, Amazon, and Salesforce. The company is building AI models that allow its stationary robotic arms to learn tasks like folding napkins and towels through real-world environmental data. Bloomberg

MicroFactory, a builder of a general-purpose, tabletop robot factory, raised a $1.5 million pre-seed round at a $30 million valuation. The compact, dog-crate-sized system includes two robotic arms that can be trained via both human demonstration and AI to perform precision tasks like circuit board assembly and component soldering. TechCrunch

Luminary Cloud, a "Physics AI" platform for engineering, secured a $72 million Series B led by N47 with participation from Nvidia's venture arm, NVentures. The company uses physics-based models to predict the real-world performance of complex products like cars and aircraft in near real-time, helping accelerate design iteration and optimization. EIN Presswire

Icarus Robotics raised a $6.1 million seed round led by Soma Capital and Xtal to build embodied-AI robots for space. The company aims to offload tedious logistical work from astronauts on the International Space Station, using dexterous, non-humanoid robots to handle tasks like unpacking cargo and station maintenance. TechCrunch

Plumerai, a London and Amsterdam-based startup, raised $8.7 million in a Series A co-led by OTB Ventures and Partech. The company develops licensable, on-device AI for cameras, combining Tiny AI and vision LLMs to enable features like face recognition and object detection on low-power, battery-operated devices for home and enterprise security. Vestbee

Wayve, a U.K.-based self-driving technology startup, has signed a letter of intent with Nvidia to evaluate a $500 million strategic investment for its next funding round. The potential investment is part of Nvidia′s £2 billion($2.6 billion) commitment to the U.K.'s AI ecosystem and will accelerate the development of Wayve's end-to-end, self-learning neural network for autonomous vehicles. TechCrunch

Nory, an AI-powered operating system for restaurants and hospitality, announced a $37 million Series B led by Kinnevik, bringing its total funding to $63 million. The platform uses AI to unify and automate core restaurant operations, forecasting daily demand with up to 95% accuracy to optimize scheduling, inventory, and staff management. Tech Funding News

Turnout, an AI-powered consumer service that helps Americans navigate government bureaucracy, secured $21 million in seed funding co-led by Shine Capital and LGVP. The company’s AI orchestrator, "Jake," automates nearly 60% of the tasks involved in processes like tax debt relief and Social Security Disability claims, helping users "beat the system." PR Newswire

Suena Energy, a Hamburg-based startup, raised an €8M ($8.6M) Series A to expand its AI-driven energy trading platform. The company's "Autopilot" uses AI for algorithmic optimization and trading of energy storage systems and renewables, helping customers maximize revenue and manage risk in power and ancillary service markets. Tech.eu

DianaHR, an AI-powered HR-as-a-Service platform for SMBs, raised a $3.7M seed round led by SNR Ventures. Founded by a former engineering lead at Gusto, the company’s platform uses a multi-agent orchestrator and human specialists to automate back-office HR tasks, saving small business owners over 15 hours a week. GlobeNewswire

Temelion, a French AI platform that optimizes pre-construction engineering workflows, closed a €3.2 million ($3.5M) seed round led by 360Capital. The platform automates repetitive work for building design engineers, such as producing technical documentation and evaluating contractors, freeing them to focus on higher-value tasks. Tech.eu

Thomson Reuters has acquired Additive, a San Francisco-based startup specializing in AI-powered tax document processing. Additive’s GenAI-native platform automates the ingestion and parsing of complex pass-through entity documents like Schedule K-1s, complementing Thomson Reuters’ existing tax workflow automation capabilities for accounting professionals. Thomson Reuters

D-ID, a video generation and editing platform, acquired Simpleshow, a Berlin-based B2B video creation platform. The deal will integrate Simpleshow's text-to-video tools and its 1,500 enterprise customers—including Microsoft, Bayer, and T-Mobile—into D-ID’s platform, accelerating its push into AI-powered interactive avatars for corporate training, marketing, and sales. TechCrunch

CrowdStrike announced plans to acquire AI security startup Pangea Cyber for approximately $260 million. The acquisition will bolster CrowdStrike's platform with capabilities to secure generative AI systems against threats like prompt injection, where attackers trick LLMs into performing harmful actions or exposing sensitive data. The Wall Street Journal

Nvidia has executed a $900 million+ cash-and-stock deal to hire Enfabrica CEO Rochan Sankar and other employees and to license the AI hardware startup's technology. This high-profile acquihire gives Nvidia access to Enfabrica's networking technology, which can connect over 100,000 GPUs to function as a single, powerful computer, bolstering Nvidia's full-stack infrastructure offerings. CNBC

Robinhood has filed with the SEC to launch the "Robinhood Ventures Fund I," a publicly traded fund designed to give retail investors access to private startups. The fund is expected to invest in hot sectors, including AI, fintech, robotics, and aerospace, aiming to democratize access to the gains typically reserved for accredited investors and VCs. TechCrunch

Alt Capital, the venture firm founded by former Lattice CEO Jack Altman, closed a new $275 million fund to back AI startups replacing enterprise software. The fund, which was raised in just a month, is a significant step up from the firm's $150 million debut fund and will focus on leading Series A rounds. The Wall Street Journal

Tandem Ventures, a Utah-based founder-focused firm with an emphasis on vertical AI, announced its $50M Fund I. The fund is part of over $100 million raised since 2022, and the firm will use the capital to support B2B SaaS founders from the idea stage through later growth rounds, with a goal of helping portfolio companies cross the $10M ARR milestone. Tandem Ventures

Aspire11 has launched an inaugural €500 million fund to connect European pension funds with venture capital. Inspired by the Canadian pension model, the fund will follow a "barbell" strategy, backing both early-stage VC funds and providing long-term, patient capital to visionary companies, aiming to unlock a vast, under-allocated capital source for European innovation. Tech Funding News

BNVT Capital, a new London-based VC firm founded by investors from the Gates Foundation and Hedosophia, launched its debut €126 million ($136M) fund. The fund will invest in AI-first companies that apply a "Benevolent Disruption" thesis, tackling major global challenges in what it views as vast, untapped markets. EU-Startups

SoftBank Vision Fund is laying off nearly 20% of its global team as it pivots its strategy to support founder Masayoshi Son's large-scale, capital-intensive AI bets. The move signals a shift away from a broad venture portfolio to concentrate resources on high-conviction AI infrastructure projects, such as its investments in OpenAI, Arm, and the ambitious "$500 billion Stargate" data center initiative. Reuters

OpenAI is significantly ramping up its robotics division as it continues its race toward Artificial General Intelligence (AGI). The company is actively recruiting researchers with expertise in humanoid systems and posting job listings for roles in teleoperation and simulation, signaling a renewed focus on developing AI that can interact with and understand the physical world. WIRED

An investigation revealed interconnected deals involving a $2 billion investment from an Emirati sovereign wealth fund, controlled by Sheikh Tahnoon bin Zayed Al Nahyan, into World Liberty Financial, a cryptocurrency firm founded by the Witkoff and Trump families. The transaction is reportedly linked to a separate agreement giving the UAE strategic access to valuable AI chips, highlighting how sovereign funds are leveraging capital to secure national AI capabilities. The New York Times

Meta unveiled its new Ray-Ban Display smart glasses, featuring a built-in display and a wristband controller. The $799 consumer device integrates an on-board AI assistant and is controlled by the "Meta Neural Band," which uses electromyography (EMG) to read neural signals from the user's brain to their hand, representing a major step toward a new human-computer interface. TechCrunch

China has banned its domestic tech companies, including ByteDance and Alibaba, from buying Nvidia AI chips. The move by the Cyberspace Administration of China is a significant blow to the country's tech ecosystem and marks an escalation in the tech rivalry with the U.S., forcing Chinese firms to rely on less advanced, homegrown alternatives. TechCrunch

Anthropic is facing pushback from the White House over its refusal to allow its AI models to be used for certain law enforcement purposes, including surveillance of US citizens. The tension highlights a broader policy battle between the AI "safety" movement, which Anthropic champions, and a government that expects American AI companies to serve as "patriotic bulwarks" in global competition. Semafor

Nvidia has agreed to buy a $5 billion stake in Intel, becoming one of its largest shareholders. The deal is part of a broader strategic collaboration to co-develop new generations of data center and PC chips, integrating their respective architectures to challenge rivals and regain market share in the AI era. TechCrunch

Meta has begun its quest to supplant the smartphone with the launch of its Meta Ray-Ban Display smart glasses. The new hardware, which features an onboard AI assistant and a wristband that uses surface electromyography (sEMG) to read neural signals for control, is a key part of the company's long-term strategy to own the next computing platform. TechCrunch

The U.S. and China have reached a "framework deal" to spin off TikTok's U.S. operations. The agreement, blessed by Presidents Trump and Xi, will see a consortium of Trump-allied investors, including Oracle and Silver Lake, take a 50% stake in the new entity. ByteDance will retain ownership of the powerful recommendation algorithm and license it to the new firm, a structure that may face legal and political challenges. The Washington Post

OpenAI reportedly plans to spend $100 billion over the next five years on renting backup cloud servers, on top of a projected $350 billion for its core generative AI workloads. This massive infrastructure investment is aimed at ensuring the company can handle sudden spikes in user demand and maintain its competitive edge in the AI race. DCD

Neuralink, Elon Musk's brain-computer interface company, plans to launch a clinical trial in October to translate thoughts directly into text. The FDA-approved trial aims to help speech-impaired individuals communicate, while also advancing the company's long-term goal of creating a consumer brain implant for healthy individuals by 2030. Bloomberg

AI x Commerce: A new report from Andreessen Horowitz breaks down how AI agents will disrupt the five categories of consumer purchasing, from "impulse buys" to "life purchases." The analysis concludes that while AI will start by eating low-value, informational search queries, its true commercial impact will arrive as agentic platforms solve key bottlenecks in data quality, unified APIs, and user identity, fundamentally changing how consumers discover and buy products. a16z

The Rise of RL Environments: Silicon Valley is betting big on Reinforcement Learning (RL) "environments"—simulated training grounds for AI agents—as the next critical component for advancing AI. Major labs like Anthropic are reportedly planning to spend over $1 billion on these complex simulations, and a new wave of startups like Mechanize and Prime Intellect are emerging to meet the demand, hoping to become the "Scale AI for environments." TechCrunch

Boost Run, an AI cloud infrastructure company, has agreed to go public on the Nasdaq via a SPAC merger with Willow Lane Acquisition Corp. The deal values Boost Run at $614 million and will provide over $112 million in cash proceeds to accelerate its purchase of Nvidia GPUs and expand its data center footprint, capitalizing on high investor demand for AI compute providers. Bloomberg

Chinese AI developer DeepSeek revealed in the academic journal Nature that it spent just $294,000 to train its high-performing R1 model. The figure, which is dramatically lower than the hundreds of millions reported by U.S. rivals, was achieved using 512 of Nvidia's China-specific H800 chips and is reigniting the debate over the true cost of developing competitive large-scale AI. Reuters

Octopus Energy, a British renewable energy unicorn, is spinning off its AI software arm, Kraken, in a move that could create a standalone entity worth $15 billion. Kraken, an AI platform for energy and utility management with $500 million in ARR, could pursue an IPO in New York or London within the next 12 months. The Wall Street Journal

OpenAI has hired Mike Liberatore, the former CFO of Elon Musk's xAI, as its new business finance officer. The move escalates the rivalry between the two AI labs and signals OpenAI's focus on managing its massive infrastructure and compute spending. Liberatore, who left xAI in July after just three months, previously helped arrange $10 billion in financing for the competitor. CNBC

Druid AI has hired Joseph Kim, former CEO of Sumo Logic and an executive veteran of HPE and GE, as its new CEO. The appointment is part of a strategic growth plan following the company's $31 million Series C round, with Kim tasked to accelerate the adoption of its conversational AI platform in the U.S. and other global markets. SiliconANGLE

Tesla's AI lead for its Optimus humanoid robot, Ashish Kumar, has departed to join Meta as a research scientist. The move is a significant blow to Tesla's robotics ambitions, coming just weeks after CEO Elon Musk claimed the Optimus program would eventually account for 80% of the company's value. Investor's Business Daily

Apple is losing a significant number of hardware and technology employees to OpenAI, which is ramping up work on its first hardware products. Lured by lucrative stock grants exceeding $1 million and promises of a less bureaucratic culture, more than two dozen Apple veterans have joined OpenAI this year alone to work on devices like smart speakers, glasses, and wearables. MacRumors

Snorkel AI, the $1.3 billion data-labeling unicorn, laid off 13% of its workforce, cutting 31 of its 240 employees. The company stated it is "deprioritizing some legacy areas" as it shifts toward a "data-as-a-service" business model. The cuts primarily affected software engineers, while most AI-focused roles were spared. Business Insider Africa

Research from U.S. security firm CrowdStrike revealed that Chinese AI firm DeepSeek often produces insecure or flawed code when prompted for use by groups disfavored by the Chinese government, such as those in Taiwan, Tibet, or the Falun Gong spiritual movement. The findings underscore how political biases can be embedded in AI models, creating noticeable differences in the quality and safety of their outputs. The Washington Post 

The "faith tech" industry is seeing a boom, powered by AI chatbots on religious apps. Companies like Bible Chat (30M+ downloads), Catholic app Hallow (which briefly beat Netflix and TikTok in app stores), and Pray.com (25M+ downloads) are attracting millions of users and significant investment by offering AI-driven spiritual guidance, comfort, and direction. The New York Times

Venture capital giant Insight Partners notified thousands of staff and limited partners that their personal information was stolen in a ransomware attack. Hackers exfiltrated data from the firm's HR systems, including banking, tax, and personal information of employees and investors, marking another major cybersecurity breach in the venture capital industry. TechCrunch