Ashton Kutcher is leaving Sound Ventures, the firm he co-founded with Guy Oseary 11 years ago, to start a new venture capital firm with Morgan Beller, according to TechCrunch. The new firm will target early-stage investments in AI infrastructure, energy, and deep tech, areas where Kutcher believes the next generation of transformative companies will be […]
The buzziest corner of finance AI is not the trading desk. It is the dull middle office, where staff keep thousands of portfolios in line with spreadsheets. A London-founded startup just raised $27mn to automate exactly that. The company is MDOTM. It has closed a $27mn growth-equity round led by Expedition Growth Capital, it said. […]
A Silicon Valley startup says it has built a pharmacy with no pharmacist behind the counter. Sealed bottles go in, filled and checked prescriptions come out, in about a minute. The company, Queue, came out of stealth on Tuesday with a working machine and fresh money. It has raised a $12.6mn seed round led by […]
A Belgian cybersecurity unicorn has bought an Israeli startup with an unusual trick. Its AI agents fix an open-source flaw without breaking the app that depends on it, something most security tools cannot do. Aikido Security, based in Ghent, became Europe’s fastest cybersecurity company to reach a $1bn valuation in January. It has now acquired […]
Higgsfield AI did not exist before March 2025. Fifteen months on, the video startup is in talks to raise money at a $5bn valuation, four times its worth at the start of the year. The company is seeking $300mn to $500mn, The Information first reported. That would value it at $5bn before the new money, […]
Every year, more than $200 billion in employer-originated wages crosses international borders. The money moves through a patchwork of local banks, regional payroll vendors, and manual compliance processes. Anyone who managed international payments in 2005 would recognise the setup. The scale has changed. The plumbing has not. This is not a minor inefficiency. It is […]
Schneider Electric is buying Cognite, a Norwegian-founded industrial AI company, for $3.1bn in cash. The French group wants software that can make factories and power grids think for themselves. Schneider Electric said on June 30, 2026 that it had agreed to acquire all of Cognite in an all-cash deal worth $3.1bn. Cognite builds software that […]
Salesforce led the Series A, which 8090 announced this week. The pitch behind it is blunt. AI can already write code. The hard part is stopping enterprise software from falling apart as dozens of agents and engineers change it every week. TechCrunch first reported the round, and the company confirmed the details. The investor list […]
AI chip startup Etched has raised $800 million and revealed that its backers include trading firm Jane Street and VentureTech Alliance, a venture firm with a strategic partnership with TSMC. The company, which designs chips specifically for running AI models rather than training them, says it has signed one billion dollars in sales contracts and […]
Japan has decided it does not want to depend on Elon Musk to keep its phones connected from space. The government is set to provide up to ¥150 billion, roughly $926 million, in subsidies to a consortium led by Rakuten Group to build a homegrown low-Earth-orbit satellite communications network. A project Tokyo frames explicitly as […]
