Patronus AI has raised $50m to build simulated worlds where AI agents can be tested before they touch a real system. The pitch borrows from Waymo: train in a replica before you trust the road. AI agents are meant to do real work now. They book trips, write code and run financial analysis on their […]
Sail Research has raised $80m to make AI agents cheaper to run. The startup, founded by ex-Apple and ex-NVIDIA engineers, says it can serve the tokens agents burn through at up to 10 times lower cost. AI agents are hungry. Leave one running for hours and it can chew through billions of tokens on a […]
Coval has raised $28m to test AI voice agents before they reach real callers. Its founder built the same kind of safety checks for Waymo’s self-driving cars, and thinks voice needs them just as badly. An AI voice agent can sound flawless in a demo and fall apart on a real call. It trips over […]
Adobe is buying Topaz Labs, the Emmy-winning maker of AI image and video enhancement tools. The deal hands Adobe upscaling, restoration and on-device AI as creators blend captured and generated footage. Adobe has agreed to buy Topaz Labs, an AI company that sharpens, upscales and restores images and video. The two firms signed a definitive […]
Runpod has raised $100M and reached a $1bn valuation, a tenfold jump in under two years. The cloud startup rents out AI computing power, and it says it turned down buyout offers worth more than $500M. The great AI compute crunch is minting a new kind of winner. Runpod, a five-year-old startup that rents computing […]
Tissium has raised €60M to carry the world’s only FDA-cleared sutureless nerve repair system into US operating rooms. The Paris medtech wants to swap the surgeon’s needle for a dab of light-cured glue. For a severed nerve, the standard repair has barely changed in decades. A surgeon stitches the two frayed ends together under a […]
Morgan Stanley has doubled its forecast for China humanoid robot shipments again, to 50,000 this year. The bank says the machines are moving from stage demos to real factories, shops and restaurants. China’s robots are leaving the showroom and reaching the shop floor. Morgan Stanley has doubled its forecast for China humanoid robot shipments for […]
Mistral OCR 4 reads a document like a structured map, not a wall of text. It is cheap, speaks 170 languages, and can run entirely on your own servers. Europe’s AI champion is going after the enterprise back office. Mistral has a new model, and it is not a chatbot. The French company on 23 […]
xLight, a US-backed startup chaired by former Intel chief Pat Gelsinger, is raising $350m to build an xLight EUV light source that could loosen ASML’s grip on chipmaking. Days earlier, a Dutch rival took aim at Nvidia. Deep-tech chips are hot again. The hardware behind AI is pulling in venture money again. xLight, a Californian […]
China Telecom just ordered 40,000 servers worth $1.7bn. Huawei did not even bid, yet its ecosystem walked away with the bulk of the deal. That is not an accident. It is the template. A state-owned Chinese carrier has handed Huawei a major win without Huawei lifting a finger. China Telecom named the winners of a […]
