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Intuit Signs $100M+ Deal with OpenAI to Bring Its Apps to ChatGPT
Intuit said its tools, such as TurboTax, Credit Karma, QuickBooks and Mailchimp, will be accessible through ChatGPT, allowing users to ask questions and complete tasks such as estimating tax refunds, reviewing credit options, or managing business finances.
Databricks Reportedly in Talks to Raise Funding at a $130B+ Valuation
Databricks is said to be in talks to raise a new round of funding just a few months after its last fundraise, which valued the company at $100 billion.
As Consumers Ditch Google for ChatGPT, Peec AI Raises $21M to Help Brands Adapt
Peec AI, a Berlin‑based startup that monitors brand visibility in AI‑powered searches, announced a $21 million Series A led by Singular, four months after its seed round. The funding comes as the company reports over $4 million in ARR, 1,300 customers and a...
A16z-Backed Super PAC Is Targeting Alex Bores, Sponsor of New York’s AI Safety Bill — He Says Bring It On
A super PAC called Leading the Future, backed by Andreessen Horowitz, OpenAI President Greg Brockman and other tech leaders, has pledged over $100 million to oppose New York Assembly member Alex Bores, the chief sponsor of the state’s bipartisan RAISE Act that...
PowerLattice Attracts Investment From Ex-Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger for Its Power-Saving Chiplet
PowerLattice, a semiconductor startup founded by former Qualcomm, NUVIA and Intel engineers, announced a $25 million Series A round led by Playground Global and Celesta Capital, bringing total funding to $31 million. The company claims its power‑delivery chiplet can cut chip energy consumption...
Luminal Raises $5.3 Million to Build a Better GPU Code Framework
Luminal, a Y Combinator Summer 2025 startup founded by former Intel chip designer Joe Fioti and ex‑Apple and Amazon engineers, announced a $5.3 million seed round led by Felicis Ventures with angel investors Paul Graham, Guillermo Rauch and Ben Porterfield. The...
MCP AI Agent Security Startup Runlayer Launches with 8 Unicorns, $11M From Khosla’s Keith Rabois and Felicis
Runlayer, a startup focused on securing Model Context Protocol (MCP) AI agents, emerged from stealth with an $11 million seed round led by Khosla Ventures’ Keith Rabois and Felicis. Founded by serial entrepreneur Andrew Berman, the company has already signed dozens...
Bone AI Raises $12M to Challenge Asia’s Defense Giants with AI-Powered Robotics
Bone AI, a Seoul‑Palo Alto startup, closed a $12 million seed round led by Third Prime with strategic investment from Kolon Group to build an integrated AI‑powered robotics platform for defense. The company, founded by DK Lee, has already generated $3 million in revenue,...
Sakana AI Raises $135M Series B at a $2.65B Valuation to Continue Building AI Models for Japan
Tokyo‑based Sakana AI closed a ¥20 billion ($135 million) Series B round, valuing the startup at $2.65 billion post‑money. The round, led by investors including MUFG, Khosla Ventures, NEA and Lux Capital, will fund R&D on affordable generative AI models optimized for the Japanese...
Leaked Documents Shed Light Into How Much OpenAI Pays Microsoft
Leaked documents reveal how much OpenAI paid Microsoft under a revenue-share agreement. They also indicate inference costs.
Databricks Co-Founder Argues US Must Go Open Source to Beat China in AI
Databricks co‑founder Andy Konwinski warned at the Cerebral Valley AI Summit that the United States is losing its AI research edge to China, noting that PhD students are seeing twice as many compelling Chinese AI ideas as American ones. He...
OpenAI Says It’s Fixed ChatGPT’s Em Dash Problem
OpenAI announced that ChatGPT now respects user instructions to avoid em dashes, fixing a long‑standing quirk that many saw as a telltale sign of AI‑generated text. The issue, dubbed the “ChatGPT hyphen,” had appeared across academic papers, emails, social media...
ChatGPT Launches Pilot Group Chats Across Japan, New Zealand, South Korea, and Taiwan
OpenAI began piloting a group‑chat feature for ChatGPT in Japan, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan. The tool, available to Free, Plus and Team users on mobile and web, lets up to 20 participants collaborate, with GPT‑5.1 Auto handling responses, search, image...
Apple’s New App Review Guidelines Clamp Down on Apps Sharing Personal Data with ‘Third-Party AI’
Apple has updated its App Review Guidelines to require developers to disclose and obtain explicit user consent before sharing personal data with third‑party AI services. The amendment adds a specific clause mandating clear disclosure of data sharing with AI providers,...
Google’s NotebookLM Adds ‘Deep Research’ Tool, Support for More File Types
Google is adding a new "Deep Research" tool to its NotebookLM AI note‑taking platform, allowing the system to act as an autonomous researcher that creates a research plan, browses the web, and delivers a source‑grounded report that can be inserted...
Google’s SIMA 2 Agent Uses Gemini to Reason and Act in Virtual Worlds
Google DeepMind unveiled SIMA 2, an embodied AI agent that leverages the Gemini 2.5 flash‑lite model to reason, understand language, and act in virtual environments. Compared with its predecessor, SIMA 2 doubled task‑completion rates, demonstrating complex, commonsense behavior in games like No Man’s Sky and...
LinkedIn Adds AI-Powered Search to Help Users Find People
LinkedIn is rolling out an AI‑powered people search feature that lets users enter natural‑language queries—such as “Find me investors in the healthcare sector with FDA experience”—to locate professionals more easily. The tool, initially available to premium U.S. members, expands on...
Teen Founders Raise $6M to Reinvent Pesticides Using AI — and Convince Paul Graham to Join In
Bindwell, a startup founded by 18‑year‑old Tyler Rose and 19‑year‑old Navvye Anand, raised a $6 million seed round co‑led by General Catalyst and A Capital, with a personal check from Y Combinator co‑founder Paul Graham. The company pivots from selling AI tools to...
Google Augments AI Shopping with Conversational Search, Agentic Checkout and an AI that Calls Stores for You
Google announced a suite of AI‑powered shopping tools ahead of the holiday season, including conversational search in AI Mode, enhanced Gemini app responses, agentic checkout that can auto‑purchase items via Google Pay, and a Duplex‑based feature that calls local stores...
Coding Assistant Cursor Raises $2.3bn Five Months After Its Previous Round
AI coding assistant Cursor raised $2.3 billion in a new funding round, pushing its valuation to $29.3 billion—more than double the $9.9 billion valuation from its June Series C. The round was co‑led by Accel and new investor Coatue, with strategic investors Nvidia and...
Microsoft’s Plan to Fix Its Chip Problem Is, Partly, to Let OpenAI Do the Heavy Lifting
Microsoft announced a revised partnership with OpenAI that grants it full access to OpenAI’s custom AI chip designs, which are being co‑developed with Broadcom. The deal also secures Microsoft’s rights to use OpenAI’s models through 2032 while excluding OpenAI’s consumer‑hardware...
Milestone Raises $10M to Make Sure AI Rhymes with ROI
Milestone, an Israeli startup, raised a $10 million seed round led by Heavybit and Hanaco Ventures to build a platform that links generative AI tool usage with engineering metrics such as code quality and delivery speed. The solution creates a "genAI...
Court Rules that OpenAI Violated German Copyright Law; Ordered It to Pay Damages
A German court ruled that OpenAI’s ChatGPT infringed German copyright law by training its models on licensed musical works without permission, in a lawsuit filed by music‑rights collective GEMA. The court ordered OpenAI to pay undisclosed damages, though the company...
Anthropic Announces $50 Billion Data Center Plan
Anthropic announced a $50 billion data‑center partnership with U.K. neocloud provider Fluidstack, targeting custom facilities in Texas and New York that will come online in 2026 to power its Claude AI models. The investment aligns with the company’s internal forecast of...
Fei-Fei Li’s World Labs Speeds up the World Model Race with Marble, Its First Commercial Product
World Labs, the AI startup founded by Fei‑Fei Li, has launched Marble, its first commercial world‑model product, offering freemium and paid tiers that turn text, images, video or panoramas into editable, downloadable 3D environments. Unlike competitors that generate worlds on the...
SoftBank’s Nvidia Sale Rattles Market, Raises Questions
SoftBank sold its entire $5.8 billion Nvidia holding—32.1 million shares at $181.58 each, about 14% below the chipmaker’s all‑time high—to free up capital for a planned $30 billion commitment to OpenAI and participation in a $1 trillion AI manufacturing hub in Arizona. The transaction...
Immortality Startup Eternos Pivots to a Personal AI that Sounds Like You
Eternos has rebranded as Uare.ai and secured $10.3 million in seed funding led by Mayfield and Boldstart Ventures, shifting its focus from a legacy‑voice service to a personal‑AI platform that creates digital replicas of individuals. The company’s Human Life Model trains...
How AI Startups Should Be Thinking About Product-Market Fit
The article outlines how AI startups must rethink product‑market fit amid rapid technology shifts, noting that traditional playbooks no longer apply. Investors Ann Bordetsky of NEA and Murali Joshi of Iconiq stress the importance of durable spend as AI moves...
Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun Reportedly Plans to Leave to Build His Own Startup
Meta’s chief AI scientist Yann LeCun is reportedly preparing to leave the company in the coming months to launch a startup focused on world‑model AI, according to the Financial Times. LeCun, a NYU professor and Turing Award winner, is already...
A Former Physician Has Launched Robyn, an Empathetic AI Companion
Former Harvard resident physician Jenny Shao has launched Robyn, an iOS‑based AI companion designed to provide empathetic, emotionally intelligent support without serving as a therapist or friend‑replacement. The app uses a memory‑inspired model to track users' goals, emotional fingerprints, attachment...
Lovable Says It’s Nearing 8 Million Users as the Year-Old AI Coding Startup Eyes More Corporate Employees
Lovable, the Stockholm‑based AI coding platform founded a year ago, is approaching 8 million users, up from 2.3 million in July, and reports 100,000 new products built daily. The company, which raised $228 million—including a $200 million Series round that valued it at $1.8 billion—hit...
A Better Way of Thinking About the AI Bubble
Russell Brandom argues that the AI "bubble" is less about a sudden crash and more about a massive, mismatched bet between fast‑moving AI software and the slow‑to‑build data‑center supply chain. He notes that billions of dollars are already pledged—Oracle’s $18 billion...
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...
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...