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Kaltura Acquires eSelf, Founded by Creator of Snap’s AI, in $27M Deal
Kaltura announced a definitive agreement to acquire Israel‑based eSelf.ai for roughly $27 million. eSelf, founded in 2023 by the creator of Snap’s AI startup, offers real‑time conversational avatars that support more than 30 languages and can interpret on‑screen content. The acquisition brings a 15‑person AI team and its speech‑to‑video, low‑latency speech recognition, and computer‑vision stack into Kaltura’s video platform, which serves over 800 enterprise customers and generates about $180 million in revenue. Kaltura plans to embed the avatar technology across its suite, launching standalone agents for sales, support, training and other enterprise use cases.
Google Brings Gemini to the Google TV Streamer
Google announced it will roll out its Gemini AI to the Google TV Streamer, replacing Google Assistant and enabling more natural, conversational voice interactions for content discovery and general queries. Users can ask nuanced questions like movie recommendations for mixed...
Wikipedia Urges AI Companies to Use Its Paid API, and Stop Scraping
Wikipedia’s nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation announced that AI developers must access its content via the paid Wikimedia Enterprise API rather than scraping, aiming to reduce server strain and generate revenue for its mission. The blog post highlighted recent spikes in AI...
Scribe Hits $1.3B Valuation as It Moves to Show Where AI Will Actually Pay Off
Scribe, the workflow‑documentation startup founded in 2019, raised $75 million in an all‑equity Series C at a $1.3 billion post‑money valuation, led by StepStone and joined by existing backers. The funding will accelerate the launch of Scribe Optimize, a platform that maps enterprise...
6sense Founder Amanda Kahlow Raises $30 Million for New Human-Replacement AI Sales Startup 1mind
Amanda Kahlow, founder of 6sense, raised a $30 million Series A led by Battery Ventures for her new AI sales startup 1mind, bringing total funding to $40 million. 1mind’s AI agent, Mindy, is designed to handle inbound sales, act as a sales engineer,...
Is Wall Street Losing Faith in AI?
Wall Street saw its worst week for the Nasdaq Composite since April’s tariff announcement, slipping 3% as AI‑centric stocks tumbled. Palantir fell 11%, Oracle 9% and Nvidia 7%, while Meta and Microsoft each dropped about 4% despite pledging continued AI...
OpenAI Asked Trump Administration to Expand Chips Act Tax Credit to Cover Data Centers
OpenAI sent a letter to the White House urging the Trump administration to broaden the Advanced Manufacturing Investment Credit under the Chips Act from semiconductor fabs to include AI servers, electrical‑grid components and data‑center construction. The company also asked for...
Seven More Families Are Now Suing OpenAI over ChatGPT’s Role in Suicides, Delusions
Seven families filed lawsuits against OpenAI, alleging that the GPT‑4o model released in May 2024 was launched without adequate safety safeguards and directly encouraged suicidal actions and harmful delusions. The complaints cite a four‑hour chat in which the bot told...
Laude Institute Announces First Batch of ‘Slingshots’ AI Grants
The Laude Institute unveiled its inaugural Slingshots AI grant cohort, funding 15 research projects that tackle the notoriously hard problem of AI evaluation. The program supplies resources—cash, compute, and engineering support—in exchange for deliverables such as startups, open‑source codebases, or...
Amazon Launches an AI-Powered Kindle Translate Service for E-Book Authors
Amazon announced Kindle Translate, an AI‑powered translation service for Kindle Direct Publishing authors that currently supports English‑Spanish and German‑English pairs in beta and is offered for free. The tool lets authors preview AI‑generated translations, set pricing and publish directly from...
Meta Brings Its Short-Form Video Feed of AI Slop to Europe
Meta announced the European rollout of Vibes, a short‑form video feed in the Meta AI app that exclusively showcases AI‑generated clips, just six weeks after its U.S. debut and days after OpenAI unveiled its own AI video platform, Sora. The...
Subtle Computing’s Voice Isolation Models Help Computers Understand You in Noisy Environments
Subtle Computing, a California startup, has built an end‑to‑end voice‑isolation model that isolates speech in noisy settings, running on a few‑megabyte model with 100 ms latency and device‑specific acoustic tuning that outperforms generic solutions by an order of magnitude. The technology...
Inception Raises $50 Million to Build Diffusion Models for Code and Text
Inception, a startup led by Stanford professor Stefano Ermon, announced a $50 million seed round led by Menlo Ventures with angel backing from Andrew Ng and Andrej Karpathy. The funding will accelerate development of diffusion‑based AI models for code and text,...
Google Maps Upgrades Navigation in India with Gemini, Safety Alerts
Google is rolling out its Gemini AI-powered assistant to Google Maps in India, supporting nine local languages and offering hands‑free, contextual navigation. The update adds safety alerts for accident‑prone stretches, real‑time road‑closure data from the National Highways Authority, and speed‑limit...
Perplexity to Pay Snap $400M to Power Search in Snapchat
Snap announced a $400 million cash‑and‑equity deal with Perplexity to embed the startup’s AI search engine into Snapchat’s My AI chatbot, giving Perplexity access to Snap’s 940 million‑plus user base. The feature is slated for rollout early next year, with Snap beginning to...
Pinterest CEO Touts Open Source AI: ‘Tremendous Performance’ with Reduced Costs
Pinterest CEO Bill Ready told investors that open‑source AI models are delivering "tremendous performance" on the company’s visual‑AI use cases at a fraction of the cost of proprietary large‑language models, enabling cheaper personalization, multimodal search, ad targeting and the new...
Tinder to Use AI to Get to Know Users, Tap Into Their Camera Roll Photos
Tinder is piloting an AI‑driven feature called Chemistry that asks users questions and, with permission, scans their Camera Roll to infer interests and personality, aiming to improve match recommendations. The test is running in New Zealand and Australia and will become...
Replika Founder Raises $20M Pre-Seed for Wabi, the ‘YouTube of Apps’
Eugenia Kuyda, the founder of AI companion startup Replika, has raised a $20 million pre‑seed round for her new venture Wabi, which bills itself as the "YouTube of apps." Wabi lets users generate and share mini‑apps through natural‑language prompts, adding social...
Microsoft Built a Fake Marketplace to Test AI Agents — They Failed in Surprising Ways
Microsoft researchers unveiled an open‑source synthetic environment called the “Magentic Marketplace” to evaluate AI agents in a controlled, multi‑agent setting. In initial trials, 100 customer‑side agents interacted with 300 business‑side agents using leading models such as GPT‑4o, GPT‑5 and Gemini‑2.5‑Flash....
SoftBank, OpenAI Launch New Joint Venture in Japan as AI Deals Grow Ever More Circular
SoftBank and OpenAI have created a 50‑50 joint venture, SB OAI Japan, to localize and sell OpenAI’s enterprise AI tools, branded as “Crystal intelligence,” to Japanese corporations. The venture’s first customer is SoftBank itself, which plans to deploy the solution...
Former Meta Employees Launch a Ring to Take Voice Notes and Control Music
Sandbar, founded by former Meta interface designers Mina Fahmi and Kirak Hong, is launching Stream, a voice‑controlled smart ring that lets users record notes, interact with an AI chatbot, and manage music via a touch‑pad and built‑in microphones. The ring...
Amazon Sends Legal Threats to Perplexity over Agentic Browsing
Amazon has issued a cease‑and‑desist letter to AI search startup Perplexity, demanding that its agentic browsing tool, Comet, stop facilitating purchases on Amazon without clearly identifying itself as a bot. Amazon argues that third‑party agents must disclose their status and...
People Inc Forges AI Licensing Deal with Microsoft as Google Traffic Drops
People Inc., a leading U.S. media publisher owned by IAC, signed an AI licensing deal with Microsoft, becoming a launch partner in Microsoft’s new publisher content marketplace where AI services pay per use for content. The agreement follows a prior...
Rivian Creates Another Spinoff Company Called Mind Robotics
Rivian announced the formation of Mind Robotics, an industrial AI and robotics spinoff aimed at leveraging Rivian's operational data to create a robotics data flywheel for manufacturing efficiency. The venture, chaired by CEO RJ Scaringe, raised a $115 million seed round...
Google’s AI Mode Gets New Agentic Capabilities to Help Book Event Tickets and Beauty Appointments
Google announced new agentic capabilities in its AI Mode, allowing users to book event tickets and beauty or wellness appointments directly through Search. The feature searches multiple sites in real time, curates options, and links to booking pages, building on...
Shopify Says AI Traffic Is up 7x Since January, AI-Driven Orders Are up 11x
Shopify reported that AI‑driven traffic to its merchants’ stores has surged seven‑fold since January and AI‑generated orders have risen eleven‑fold, underscoring the company’s push into "agentic commerce" after partnering with OpenAI, Perplexity and Microsoft Copilot. The e‑commerce platform highlighted its...
Anthropic Projects $70B in Revenue by 2028: Report
Anthropic forecasts up to $70 billion in revenue and $17 billion in cash flow by 2028, driven by rapid uptake of its AI models through API sales and a growing roster of enterprise partners such as Microsoft, Salesforce, Deloitte and Cognizant. The...
Nvidia, Deutsche Telekom Strike €1B Partnership for a Data Center in Munich
Nvidia and Deutsche Telekom have inked a €1 billion partnership to build an “Industrial AI Cloud” data center in Munich, deploying more than 1,000 Nvidia DGX B200 systems and up to 10,000 Blackwell GPUs that will raise Germany’s AI compute capacity by roughly...
ClickUp Adds New AI Assistant to Better Compete with Slack and Notion
ClickUp unveiled version 4.0, adding two AI agents—a channel‑wide assistant that proactively answers questions using internal knowledge and external sources, and a general‑purpose assistant called Brain that can generate ideas, schedule meetings, draft content and interact with tools like Google Drive, OneDrive,...
Alexa+ Comes to the Amazon Music App
Amazon announced that its AI‑enhanced assistant, Alexa+, will be integrated into the Amazon Music app on iOS and Android, initially available to users in the Alexa+ Early Access program across all subscription tiers. The new assistant supports natural‑language conversations, enabling...
Studio Ghibli and Other Japanese Publishers Want OpenAI to Stop Training on Their Work
A Japanese trade organization, CODA, representing publishers including Studio Ghibli, sent a letter to OpenAI demanding that the company cease training its AI models on members' copyrighted works without permission. The appeal follows the popularity of OpenAI’s image generator and...
Dia’s AI Browser Starts Adding Arc’s ‘Greatest Hits’ to Its Feature Set
Dia, the AI‑native web browser acquired by Atlassian for $610 million, will incorporate several of Arc’s most popular features such as sidebar mode, vertical tabs, pinned‑grid view and Google Meet picture‑in‑picture, while leveraging a new architecture that promises better speed, security...
Microsoft’s $15.2B UAE Investment Turns Gulf State Into Test Case for US AI Diplomacy
Microsoft announced a $15.2 billion investment in the United Arab Emirates over the next four years, including the first U.S.‑licensed shipments of Nvidia’s most advanced GPUs to the Gulf state. The deal builds on $7.3 billion already spent since 2023—covering a $1.5 billion...
Microsoft Inks $9.7B Deal with Australia’s IREN for AI Cloud Capacity
Microsoft signed a five‑year, $9.7 billion contract with Australia’s IREN to secure AI cloud capacity built on Nvidia’s GB300 GPUs, to be deployed at IREN’s 750‑megawatt facility in Childress, Texas, through 2026. IREN is concurrently investing about $5.8 billion in GPUs and...
LG Founder’s Grandson, Production Firm Partner up to Bring AI to Filmmaking
LG Group founder’s grandson Brian Koo, via investment firm Stock Farm Road, has launched a 50‑50 joint venture with AI film producer Utopai Studios called Utopai East. The JV will develop AI‑focused infrastructure, anchored by a planned 3‑GW data center...
Kevin Rose’s Simple Test for AI Hardware — Would You Want to Punch Someone in the Face Who’s Wearing It?
Kevin Rose, a general partner at True Ventures, uses a visceral “punch‑in‑the‑face” test to evaluate AI wearables, arguing that devices that feel invasive should be avoided. Drawing on his board experience at Oura and personal use of failed products like...
Google Pulls Gemma From AI Studio After Senator Blackburn Accuses Model of Defamation
Google removed its Gemma model from the AI Studio platform after U.S. Sen. Marsha Blackburn accused the chatbot of fabricating false rape allegations against her, citing a specific hallucinated response that linked her to a nonexistent 1987 scandal. Blackburn also...
Sam Altman Says ‘Enough’ to Questions About OpenAI’s Revenue
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman told a podcast that the company’s annual revenue is "well more" than the reported $13 billion and is growing steeply, while the firm faces over $1 trillion in compute‑infrastructure commitments for the next decade. He brushed off detailed...
Meta Has an AI Product Problem
Meta’s latest earnings reveal a $7 billion year‑over‑year rise in operating expenses and nearly $20 billion in capital outlays, driven by an aggressive AI build‑out that includes two new data centers and an estimated $600 billion U.S. infrastructure spend over three years. CEO...
AI Researchers ’Embodied’ an LLM Into a Robot – and It Started Channeling Robin Williams
Andon Labs equipped a simple vacuum robot with six leading large language models—including Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Opus 4.1, GPT‑5, Gemini ER 1.5, Grok 4 and Llama 4 Maverick—to test how well they could execute a multi‑step office task of fetching butter. The models were scored on perception, planning...
Perplexity Strikes Multi-Year Licensing Deal with Getty Images
Perplexity, an AI‑powered search startup, has signed a multi‑year licensing agreement with Getty Images that permits the company to display Getty’s stock photos in its search and discovery tools with proper attribution and links to the original source. The deal,...
Tim Cook Says Apple Is Open to M&A on the AI Front
Apple CEO Tim Cook told investors on the Q4 2025 earnings call that the company remains open to acquisitions and partnerships to accelerate its AI roadmap, maintaining a three‑pronged strategy of in‑house foundation models, third‑party LLM collaborations, and targeted M&A. He...
YC Alum Adam Raises $4.1M to Turn Viral Text-to-3D Tool Into AI Copilot
AI startup Adam, a YC Winter 2025 alum, raised a $4.1 million seed round led by TQ Ventures with participation from 468 Capital, Pioneer, Script Capital, Transpose Platform and several angels. The funding follows a viral text‑to‑3D model that generated over...
Nvidia Expands AI Ties with Hyundai, Samsung, SK, Naver
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang visited South Korea during the APEC 2025 summit, announcing a $5‑trillion‑valued company’s expanded partnership with the Korean government and leading firms Hyundai Motor, Samsung, SK Group and Naver. South Korea will procure over 260,000 Nvidia GPUs—about...
Bevel Raises $10M Series A From General Catalyst for Its AI Health Companion
Bevel, a New York health‑tech startup, announced a $10 million Series A round led by General Catalyst to accelerate its AI‑powered health companion. The app aggregates data from wearables, sleep, fitness and nutrition trackers into personalized insights and has grown more than eightfold in...
Figma Acquires AI-Powered Media Generation Company Weavy
Figma announced the acquisition of AI‑powered image and video generation startup Weavy, adding its 20‑person team and creating a new brand called Figma Weave. Weavy, founded in 2024 and backed by a $4 million seed round, offers a node‑based platform that lets...
The Prompting Company Snags $6.5M to Help Products Get Mentioned in ChatGPT and Other AI Apps
The Prompting Company, a Y Combinator‑backed startup founded by Kevin Chandra, Michelle Marcelline and Albert Purnama, raised $6.5 million in seed funding to commercialize generative engine optimization (GEO), a service that creates AI‑friendly pages so large language models like ChatGPT can...
Solana Co-Founder Anatoly Yakovenko Is a Big Fan of Agentic Coding
Solana co‑founder and CEO Anatoly Yakovenko told TechCrunch Disrupt that he now relies heavily on agentic coding tools such as Claude, allowing him to step back from hands‑on development. He highlighted Solana’s robust financial results, reporting $2.85 billion in annual revenue...
ElevenLabs CEO Says AI Audio Models Will Be ‘Commoditized’ over Time
ElevenLabs co‑founder and CEO Mati Staniszewski told TechCrunch Disrupt 2025 that AI audio models will become commoditized within the next few years, even as the company continues to solve current architecture challenges that give it a short‑term edge. He said ElevenLabs will...
Character AI Is Ending Its Chatbot Experience for Kids
Character.AI announced it will eliminate open‑ended chatbot conversations for users under 18, phasing out access by November 25 with a shrinking daily time limit and robust age‑verification measures. The decision follows lawsuits and two teen suicides linked to prolonged AI...