Gary Marcus has spent years warning that the AI industry is building on shaky foundations. Now he sees a specific chain of dominoes: if OpenAI’s IPO underperforms, the fallout will not stop at one company. “Their values rely to a significant degree on the expectation that OpenAI will have an immense demand for chips and […]
The problem with letting an AI agent loose inside a company is not that it might forget who it is. It is that it has no reason to hold back. A human employee is restrained by the fear of being fired. An agent, as one investor in Arcade.dev put it, “will exhaustively exploit every permission […]
The race to power artificial intelligence has a problem that solar panels and wind turbines cannot fix on their own: the electricity has to be there at 3am, in still air, under cloud. Critical Energy, a Los Angeles startup founded by a former SpaceX engineer, has raised $22mn to chase that always-on demand with geothermal, […]
Poland produced one of the world’s most valuable AI companies almost by accident. Now it is spending public money to make sure the next one stays closer to home. Vinci, the venture arm of Poland’s state development bank BGK, has taken an $11mn stake in ElevenLabs, the AI-voice firm valued at $11bn. The same day, […]
The word “agent” is everywhere in enterprise software right now, which is exactly why Convey does not want to use it. The startup has raised a $38mn Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Khosla Ventures and Pear VC joining. Its pitch is a deliberate rebrand: not AI agents that complete tasks, but AI “teammates” […]
There is an unglamorous deadline bearing down on corporate IT, and it has just produced one of London’s more interesting AI raises. Conduct, a 35-person startup founded by three former Palantir engineers, has raised a $60mn Series A co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ, with SAP itself investing. The round takes its total funding to […]
Most cybersecurity startups sell shields. Twenty sells the sword, and investors just valued that at $1bn. The company, which describes itself as America’s first venture-backed cyber warfare firm, has raised a $100mn Series B led by Accel, Axios reported. The round, with Point72 Ventures, Caffeinated Capital and Friends & Family Capital also taking part, brings […]
Jeff Bezos appears to have settled on his AI thesis, and it is not chatbots. It is the physical world. CuspAI, a two-year-old Cambridge startup that uses AI to design new materials, is in talks to raise about $400mn at a $2.6bn valuation, the Financial Times reports. The round is led by Bezos Expeditions, the […]
Odyssey, an AI lab building real-time ‘world models’, has raised $310mn at a $1.45bn valuation. The more telling number is whose names are on the round. The Series B was led by Natural Capital, with Amazon, AMD Ventures, Google’s GV, EQT and the CIA-linked fund In-Q-Tel taking part. As part of the deal, AWS becomes […]
The Melbourne healthtech’s oversubscribed Series A, led by Airtree, funds a move into the UK and a pitch to coordinate a patient’s health data over a lifetime rather than a single appointment. Most healthcare systems are built to wait. They are organised around the moment something goes wrong, the appointment booked because a symptom appeared, […]
