Today's AI Pulse
Odyssey lands $310M Series B, valued at $1.45B
Odyssey announced a $310 million Series B round that values the AI lab at $1.45 billion. The round was led by Natural Capital and included backers such as Amazon, AMD Ventures, GV, EQT and IQT. In parallel, Odyssey struck a preferred‑cloud deal with AWS to use Trainium silicon for large‑scale model training.
Also developing:
In Conversation With: Bloomberg’s Amanda Stent
Amanda Stent, Bloomberg's head of AI strategy, says artificial intelligence is now a core reality for financial services, yet regulatory frameworks lag behind. She emphasizes that responsible AI—transparent attribution, explainability, and robust guardrails—is essential for trust and competitive advantage. Bloomberg employs a layered "Swiss‑cheese" approach, including red‑team testing and a sector‑specific risk taxonomy, to safeguard its AI products. The firm also invests heavily in internal upskilling, guilds, and a scalable AI infrastructure to keep pace with rapid innovation.
Nebius Agrees to Buy AI Agent Search Company Tavily for $275 Million
Nebius Group NV, the cloud‑computing spin‑off from Yandex, announced a $275 million acquisition of Tavily, a specialist in AI‑agent search technology. Tavily’s software equips autonomous agents with real‑time data retrieval for tasks such as software development and financial trading. The deal...
Proptech Startup Smart Bricks Raises $5 Million Pre-Seed Led by A16z
Smart Bricks, a London‑San Francisco proptech, announced a $5 million pre‑seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The AI‑powered platform ingests millions of data points to deliver autonomous valuation, cash‑flow forecasting, and risk modeling for real‑estate deals. It also automates the transaction workflow,...
SquareAI Enters the U.K. and Other Digital Transactions News Briefs From 2/10/26
Square announced the UK launch of SquareAI, a free conversational AI tool that helps merchants interpret sales data and make faster decisions. Blue Payment Agency expanded its services to high‑risk e‑commerce merchants selling restricted items, while Duck Creek Technologies will...
AI Video Startup Runway Raises $315M at $5.3B Valuation, Eyes More Capable World Models
Runway, the AI video generation startup, closed a $315 million Series E round, lifting its valuation to $5.3 billion. The capital will fund the pre‑training of next‑generation world models and broaden product reach into sectors such as gaming, robotics, and climate science. Runway’s...
Excel Pros Must Learn Python to Trust Copilot
I've been doing analytics for 14+ years. And I'm a Microsoft Excel MVP. It's 2026 and top Excel users know better than making this mistake: Ignoring Python. Because Copilot in Excel uses Python to work it's magic with your data. Even if it doesn't tell...
AI Data Center Stack: System Build, Not Chip Cycle
AI DATA CENTER STACK — this is a systems build, not a chip cycle 👇 COMPUTE & SERVERS: $NVDA Owns accelerated compute end to end. CUDA locks software, NVLink locks topology. Sells architectures, not chips. Switching costs scale with clusters. $AMD Pressure valve...
Spire.AI Unveils Knowra, a Domain-Aware Context Intelligent Platform to Solve Complex Enterprise Objectives
Spire.AI announced Knowra, a domain‑aware Contextual AI platform that overlays a knowledge‑graph‑driven intelligence layer onto existing enterprise data and AI stacks. The solution unifies fragmented data, semantics, and business rules to deliver decision‑ready outcomes while preserving governance and explainability. Built...
DXC Completes Enterprise-Wide Amazon Quick Deployment and Launches New Practice to Help Accelerate AI Adoption
DXC Technology completed an enterprise‑wide rollout of Amazon Quick, the agentic AI‑powered digital workspace, reaching 115,000 employees in 70 countries. The deployment introduced an AI Advisor used by more than 40,000 engineers, accelerating decision‑making and productivity. DXC also launched the...
IgniteTech Unveils Adminio™ AI, Transforming Meeting Scheduling Through Intelligent Email Orchestration
IgniteTech introduced Adminio™ AI, a patent‑pending platform that automates meeting scheduling through conversational email assistants. The AI persona operates on the user’s own domain, handling calendar checks, time‑zone conversions, and multi‑party negotiations without booking links. Adminio AI integrates with Microsoft...
North Africa Rises on Deals as MENA AI Funding Hits $858 Million
AI venture capital in the Middle East and North Africa surged to $858 million in 2025, representing 22% of total regional VC and 29% of all deals. The United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia dominated funding, absorbing 87% of AI capital,...
CxO Considerations to Invest in LLM/SLM Development
Enterprises are moving from speculative AI projects to strategic investments in Large Language Models (LLMs) and Small Language Models (SLMs). LLMs deliver broad, multi‑domain capabilities but demand massive data, compute, and capital, while SLMs offer domain‑specific agility with lower resource...
AI Talent Mobility and the Institutional Logic of EB-1A and NIW
AI’s rapid development cycles and cross‑border collaborations are reshaping how talent moves, but U.S. immigration categories—EB‑1A (extraordinary ability) and EB‑2 NIW (national interest waiver)—still rely on stable, publicly verifiable records. The article argues that the core tension lies between AI’s...
Coveo Announces Hosted MCP Server to Expand Enterprise AI and Agentic Partner Ecosystem
Coveo unveiled its Hosted Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, a secure interoperability layer that links the company’s AI‑Relevance platform to leading large‑language models such as ChatGPT Enterprise and Anthropic’s Claude. The MCP Server lets AI agents query Coveo’s unified content...
The HR–IT Debate in the Age of AI: Cooperation or Consolidation?
AI is reshaping the relationship between HR and IT, prompting record collaboration and even the creation of a new C‑suite title, chief productivity officer, that combines people and technology oversight. Leaders argue that merging the functions can speed decisions and...
Former Sugar Refinery Near Caen, France, Could Become AI Data Center
A former 33‑hectare sugar refinery near Caen is slated for acquisition by Brown Fields, which plans to transform the derelict site into an AI data center. The project, estimated at €15‑€20 million, benefits from an existing 220 kV power line and a...
AI in Recruitment: A Practical Guide for Hiring Teams
AI is rapidly reshaping recruitment by automating screening, scheduling, and candidate communication. SHRM research shows 85% of employers using AI report time savings and efficiency gains, while the State of Hiring 2025 report highlights that 41.2% of candidates abandon applications,...
AI Automates Company-Wide Content Sharing at Scale
🛑 STOP SCROLLING 🛑 🛑 STOP SCROLLING 🛑 Remember that AMAZING blog post, white paper, video or podcast your team published last year? I have a simple way for you to get more out of it in 2026... It's a simple tool...
ON24 Celebrates 2025 Winners of the Digital Engagement Excellence Awards
ON24 announced the 2025 Digital Engagement Excellence Awards, honoring firms such as Fortinet, Salesforce, and Travel Media Group for outstanding virtual event performance. Winners leveraged the ON24 Intelligent Engagement Platform to drive revenue, accelerate AI adoption, and scale personalized experiences....
TSMC Approves US$44.96 Billion Budget Amid AI Boom
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC) approved a US$44.96 billion capital budget to expand advanced, mature and specialty technology capacity, upgrade packaging, and build new fabs. The plan includes upgrading its Kumamoto plant to 3‑nanometer production to meet surging AI demand. The...
Quantum Technique Solves Complex Equations in Consistent Time, Unlike Rivals
Researchers benchmarked quantum‑inspired Tensor Network (QTN), Hydrodynamic Schrödinger Equation (HSE), and Physics‑Informed Neural Networks (PINN) against classical GMRES and spectral solvers for the 1‑D Burgers’ equation. The QTN solver delivered a record‑low L₂ error of 10⁻⁷ and showed near‑constant runtime...
Energy Vault Partners with Peak Energy to Develop Energy Storage Architecture for AI Data Centers
Energy Vault has entered a strategic partnership with Peak Energy to create a dedicated energy‑storage architecture for AI‑focused data centers. The solution merges Peak’s sodium‑ion battery technology with Energy Vault’s Vault OS software and system design. A supply agreement secures 1.5 GWh...
The Bionic Storyteller: How AI Can Amplify HR’s Human Voice
HR leaders in 2026 face mounting pressure from layoffs, cost cuts and rapid AI deployment, yet the core challenge remains preserving trust and connection. The article proposes the “Bionic Storyteller” framework, positioning AI as a memory scaffold that captures, aligns,...
Ship Imperfectly, Let Users See Your Vision
Flo Crivello , founder of Lindy told me he gave early users a product that was oily, half-broken, and rough around the edges. His no-code AI automation platform wasn't ready. Not by traditional standards. The first people through the door...
Firebird and U.S. Announce Phase 2 of Armenia AI Megaproject, Scaling It to $4B and 50,000 GPU in 2026
Firebird announced Phase 2 of its AI supercomputing megaproject in Armenia, adding 41,000 Nvidia GB300 GPUs. The expansion lifts total investment to roughly $4 billion, up from the $500 million first phase. With U.S. export licensing secured, the cluster will rank among the...
The Inside Story of MOZN’s Unified Approach to Fraud and AML
Saudi‑based MOZN, founded in 2017, launched FOCAL—a unified fraud, AML and KYC platform powered by Agentic AI. The solution combines multilingual name‑matching, graph analytics and dynamic risk scoring to cut false positives and deliver over 90% fraud reduction for major...
Telstra to Cut More than 200 Jobs Amid AI Push
Telstra will cut more than 200 jobs at its AI joint venture with Accenture, moving some functions to India. The AU$700 million partnership, 60% owned by Accenture and 40% by Telstra, is intended to accelerate the carrier’s data and AI roadmap....
AITech Interview with Humberto Farias, Chief Executive Officer, MAGIC Research
MAGIC Research, led by CEO Humberto Farias, was created to tackle the prohibitive cost, rigidity, and security gaps of existing AI platforms by building a distributed, hardware‑agnostic compute fabric called Fabric Hypergrid. The company’s Private AI stack combines Retrieval‑Augmented Generation,...
To Monitor an AI-Driven Economy, the Fed Is Going to Need New Tools
Professor Derek Horstmeyer warns that the Federal Reserve’s traditional metrics will lag in an AI‑driven economy where stable‑coin transactions and compute‑intensive agents dominate. He proposes three actions: tracking compute and energy costs, gaining visibility into a burgeoning shadow‑banking sector, and...
Salesforce Lays Off Staffers as Executive Leadership Churn Continues
Salesforce announced a new round of layoffs affecting roughly 1,000 employees across marketing, product management, data analytics, and its Agentforce AI unit. The cuts follow a series of workforce reductions over the past two years as the company pivots toward...
AlphaLab Selects 20 Startups For 2026 Cohort Embedding Intelligence Into Industry
AlphaLab, the Innovation Works accelerator, announced its 2026 cohort, the largest to date with 20 early‑stage startups. The selected companies cover AI, robotics, health, energy and advanced manufacturing, all aiming to embed intelligence into real‑world systems and industrial workflows. Each...
Show HN: Pipelock – All-in-One Security Harness for AI Coding Agents
Pipelock is a single‑binary, zero‑dependency security harness designed for AI coding agents that need shell access and API keys. It isolates the agent process from unrestricted internet by routing all web traffic through a fetch‑proxy that applies a seven‑layer scanning...
Artificial Neurons Ditch Magnetic Fields for More Powerful, Scalable Computing
Researchers at NTU and IIT Roorkee have demonstrated a spintronic artificial neuron that operates without external magnetic fields, using a ruthenium‑dioxide altermagnet coupled to a synthetic antiferromagnet. The device exploits out‑of‑plane spin‑splitting torque and built‑in exchange coupling to achieve intrinsic...
Q&A: How to Prepare for AI-Powered Investigations While Managing Your Own AI Risk
The Department of Justice (DOJ) is openly deploying AI tools—such as cryptocurrency tracing, financial anomaly detection, travel‑pattern analysis, and intake triage—to boost white‑collar investigations. At the same time, the DOJ’s enforcement agenda warns that companies must govern their own AI...
IBM Refreshes FlashSystem Lineup with Faster 5600, 7600, and 9600 Arrays
IBM announced a refresh of its FlashSystem all‑flash storage family, introducing the 5600, 7600 and 9600 models that replace the 5300, 7300 and 9500 generations. The new arrays feature Gen 5 FlashCore Modules with up to 105.6 TB per drive and a...
AI Stethoscope Identifies Early Signs of Heart Valve Disease, Outpacing Traditional GP Diagnoses, Study Reveals
A new AI‑powered stethoscope can spot early signs of heart valve disease up to 30% sooner than conventional general‑practice examinations, according to a multi‑center study. The research evaluated 1,200 patients across three hospitals, comparing the algorithm’s acoustic analysis to physician...
ZAST.AI Raises $6M Pre-A to Scale "Zero False Positive" AI-Powered Code Security
ZAST.AI announced a $6 million Pre‑Series A round led by Hillhouse Capital, bringing total funding near $10 million. The Seattle‑based startup claims its AI‑driven platform delivers “zero false‑positive” code security by automatically generating and validating proof‑of‑concept exploits. In 2025 the company uncovered...
Single Prompt Breaks AI Safety in 15 Major Language Models
Microsoft researchers uncovered a novel attack called GRP‑Obliteration that uses a single benign‑sounding prompt to strip safety guardrails from 15 major language and image models. By hijacking the Group Relative Policy Optimization training loop, the method rewards harmful completions, driving...
Governing the Rise of Interactive AI Will Require Behavioral Insights
The episode explores the emergence of interactive AI—systems that form relational, adaptive, and proactive bonds with users—and argues that existing regulatory frameworks are ill‑suited to manage their gradual, cumulative harms. It highlights behavioral science as the missing tool for understanding...
IOWN Global Forum and Open Compute Project Join Forces to Deliver on the Next Wave of AI
The IOWN Global Forum and the Open Compute Project (OCP) announced a joint AI Computing Continuum initiative that will create an open, interoperable infrastructure spanning centralized data centers to edge locations. IOWN will provide photonics‑based communication architectures while OCP will...
Nano Masters AI Launches Free 10-Minute Future Skills Self-Assessment
Nano Masters AI introduced a free, 10‑minute Future Skills Self‑Assessment for professionals. The tool measures AI readiness across five dimensions—AI awareness, critical thinking, adaptability, human skills, and impact translation—without requiring personal data. Participants receive an instant readiness score, strengths, growth...
Cisco Donates Project CodeGuard to Coalition for Secure AI
Cisco has donated its Project CodeGuard framework to the OASIS Open‑run Coalition for Secure AI (CoSAI). The model‑agnostic security coding agent embeds best‑practice rules across the entire software development lifecycle, from design through AI‑generated code to post‑generation review. CodeGuard integrates...
Viettel Deploys Nvidia DGX B200 System at Hoa Lac High Tech Park in Hanoi
Vietnam’s military‑backed telecom operator Viettel has commissioned an Nvidia DGX B200 system at its Hoa Lac High Tech Park data centre in Hanoi. The air‑cooled rack‑mounted platform houses eight B200 Tensor Core GPUs and dual Intel Xeon CPUs, delivering petaflop‑scale performance. Viettel’s...
Ask an Expert: Should Merchants Block AI Bots?
E‑commerce veteran Scot Wingo argues that merchants must decide whether to block or welcome AI bots that now crawl retail sites. Four major agents—ChatGPT, Google Gemini, Microsoft Copilot and Perplexity—collectively command roughly one billion monthly active users, and Google’s shift to AI...
AI Infrastructure Drives Hardware Winners in Hyperscaler CAPEX
Hardware winners of the $600B+ hyperscaler CAPEX wave 🧵 Meta, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon are prioritizing compute, power, and networking control into 2026. ~75% of spend is AI infrastructure. Price sensitivity is low. Supply is tight. This is a vendor-selection cycle,...
AI, VR, and AR Shaping Flight Simulation's Future
AI, VR or AR? What is the future of professional flight simulation & training devices? A recent RAeS Conference explored the issues. https://t.co/ZbRn47azyY https://t.co/1s7khhvPme
Cameron Batt on Skubl and the Rise of Customer Experience Agents
Skubl, founded by Cameron Batt, offers an autonomous “Customer Experience Agent” platform that detects and repairs digital friction in real time. Unlike typical GPT‑4 wrappers, Skubl combines proprietary causal inference models and computer vision to act as an immune system...
AI Cheapens Services, Cutting Vendor Profits, Boosting Productivity
That little market freakout is a real mechanism: if AI makes it cheap to do what a vendor used to sell you, the vendor’s future profits fall—even as the rest of us get more productive. https://t.co/HE7npk5km7
Distinguishing LLM Authors From Their Output Is Hard
Be honest, can you actually tell which LLM wrote something (ChatGPT, Claude etc.), just from the text?
AI Agents Double Deal Volume, Close $2.4M Fast
"How we built $4.8M in pipeline from our AI agents, $2.4M closed already - Deal volume has doubled - Win rate has doubled - Agents work 24x7 - Agents have more context to pull from - $100k deal closed on Saturday" https://t.co/JjohuS42oM