Fundraising

AIQuoc Le co-founded Discovery Loop with Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Oriol Vinyals to automate machine learning, engineering, and science. The main post, from Chip Huyen, praises the effort and predicts auto science will be big.

AIJeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals and Quoc Le are founding Discovery Loop, a Public Benefit Corporation focused on automating machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discovery. The founders say they have worked together for 14 to 30 years and helped build widely used products, infrastructure and AI models. Andrew Ng's own text is a congratulatory message, and the company's mission statement appears in the attached image.

AIJeff Dean says his new venture is first focusing on finding office space and hiring a founding team over the next few weeks. The company plans to build infrastructure, AI models, and systems to automate large-scale experimentation for ML research and engineering, using itself as the first customer. The post also announces open hiring at discoveryloop.com.

AIQuoc Le, Jeff Dean, Sanjay Ghemawat, and Oriol Vinyals announced they are co-founding Discovery Loop, a Public Benefit Corporation. The company aims to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discovery and progress.

Why it matters: The announcement names the co-founders and a public benefit structure, showing how this new company frames automating machine learning, science, and engineering.

AIAmazon Research Awards named 34 recipients of its Build on Trainium program, a $110M credit initiative supporting AI research at 30 universities on AWS Trainium. The post frames the program as support for academic AI research on Amazon's custom Trainium chips.

AISimile, which aims to simulate all eight billion people on earth accurately, announced a $200M Series B at a $2B valuation led by Greenoaks. Index Ventures, Hanabi, A*, Bain Capital Ventures, CVS Health Ventures, and Definition also participated.

AIThe 2026 Global Developers Pioneer Conference (GDPS) and International Embodied Intelligence Skills Competition has opened global calls for scenario challenges, teams, and experts ahead of its October 23–25 event at Shanghai Zhangjiang Science Hall.

AIAndrew Ng is launching LearnVector, an AI-based learning company starting with a $100M investment from Coursera and planned collaboration with Coursera and Udemy. The company aims to replace one-size-fits-all instruction with a custom learning guide for each person, adapting to how each learner studies. Ng argues that unguarded chatbots can harm learning, so LearnVector will rely on Coursera's trusted library of authoritative materials.

AILTM has partnered with Cognition to deploy Devin, the AI software engineer, through BlueVerse RightLogic, a managed, outcome-based service that clears customers' vulnerability backlogs. RightLogic is designed to clear 80 percent of an enterprise's CVE backlog, up from the 60 percent previously delivered, and will focus first on banking, financial services, and insurance. The service is the first of five joint offerings the companies plan to bring to market.

AIGoogle's AI Futures Fund and KDDI are launching the AI Startup Support Program to back AI-native Japanese startups with joint equity investment. Selected startups will get early access to Gemini, Nano Banana, and Lyria, plus Google Cloud credits, sovereign Gemini and GPU credits provisioned in Japan via KDDI's Osaka-Sakai Data Center, and hands-on technical support.

AICyera is joining with Oasis Security, which builds agentic access management for non-human identities such as API keys, service accounts, OAuth tokens, and agent credentials. The combination pairs Cyera's knowledge of where sensitive data lives with Oasis's visibility into which identities and agents can reach it. Sequoia Capital, which backed both companies since their Series A rounds, says the pairing covers the full path an AI agent takes through an enterprise.

AIAMD CEO Lisa Su thanked Korean minister @msitminister for attending AMD's Advancing AI event and said the two sides expanded their partnership. She said the goal is to bring together technology, talent, and deep technical collaboration to advance an open and innovative AI ecosystem in Korea.

AISafe Superintelligence (SSI) announced a long-term strategic partnership with NVIDIA, which is making a substantial investment in the company. The investment is expected to let SSI increase its compute tenfold within the next 12 months.

AIJensen Huang says defenders need a frontier AI ecosystem combining the best open and closed models, citing how an open-weight frontier model helped contain the Hugging Face intrusion when closed AI blocked essential forensics. Nvidia has created the Open Secure AI Alliance to develop new techniques and tools for safeguarding software and agents by sharing models, tooling, and research in the open.

AIMidjourney is acquiring Co-Star, and Co-Star CEO Banu Guler is joining as Midjourney's Chief Design Officer. She will build a cross-functional design, product, and frontend team for Midjourney's efforts, while the Co-Star app continues under her full control.

AITri Dao congratulated the Etched team, calling it strong in both hardware design and kernels. The quoted Etched post says the company raised $300M in Series C funding at a $10.3B valuation to accelerate production of its inference clusters. It also opened an 80,000-sqft, 10-MW facility for production and prototyping.

AISebastien Bubeck congratulated Jacob Tsimerman and welcomed him to OpenAI. The quoted post says Tsimerman, a Fields Medal winner, announced at a press conference that he is pivoting toward AI safety and will be going to OpenAI soon.

AICognition has acquired The Interaction Company of California, the maker of Poke, a personal AI agent that texts users proactively and is approved to text natively on Apple Messages. Poke has exchanged more than 100 million messages in the last three months, and Poke users can keep using the product as before. Cognition says its models and infrastructure will make Poke faster and more reliable.

AISequoia Capital is leading Etched's $300 million Series C at a $10 billion pre-money valuation, backing the startup's custom inference silicon. Etched says its first-generation chip taped out at TSMC on leading-edge nodes and that its first cluster ran a range of frontier models in 40 days, with early customers now getting access.

AIOpenAI is announcing $17 million in new commitments to support researchers participating in the U.S. Department of Energy's Genesis Mission. The commitments expand researchers' access to frontier AI and technical collaboration to accelerate American scientific discovery.

AICognition has signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Department of Energy to join the Genesis Mission, a national AI initiative launched by executive order in November 2025. Cognition will contribute its Devin autonomous AI software engineer in four areas: software and data security, modernizing legacy scientific code, expanding scientific workforce capacity, and cloud modernization. Devin Desktop and CLI are listed as FedRAMP Class D (High) Authorized, and the company has offered in-kind code security scans for national laboratory codebases.

AILisa Su says AMD Helios will help power Anthropic's Claude at gigawatt scale. The quoted AMD announcement states the partnership expands to up to 2 GW of AMD Instinct MI450 Series GPUs in AMD Helios, with AMD committing up to $5B in strategic equity investment in Anthropic.

Why it matters: The announced deal pairs gigawatt-scale AMD Helios capacity with an equity investment, so it reads as both infrastructure and financing news.

AIOpenAI is developing Project Camellia, a long-term AI infrastructure project in Effingham County, Georgia, and says it will pay all infrastructure and electric-service costs so existing ratepayers are not subsidizing it.

AIDavid Vélez, founder and Global CEO of Nubank, and Robin Vince, Chairman and CEO of BNY, are joining the boards of the OpenAI Foundation and OpenAI Group PBC. The post says they bring experience in technology, finance, and expanding economic opportunity globally.

AICognition has acquired or welcomed the TierZero team, led by Anhang and Yun, to bring their work on automations into Devin. The goal is to help engineers spend less time handling incidents and more time building, with the source offering no further product details.

AIAMD and Microsoft Azure are expanding their partnership to deploy AMD Helios with MI455X GPUs, Venice CPUs, and Pensando networking. According to AMD's linked background, Microsoft will use Helios to power frontier model AI inference for itself, its AI customers, and Azure AI services.

AIKimi has temporarily paused new subscriptions after Kimi K3 demand pushed its GPU capacity close to limits over the past 48 hours. Existing subscribers are unaffected, and compute is being prioritized for current members while new subscription spots reopen in batches. The company also plans to split membership into Kimi Membership for Kimi Web, App, and Work, and Kimi Code Membership for coding workflows.

AISable has created "Aidan," an AI employee that leads customer calls using vision, voice, video and real-time browser interaction. Frontier companies including Notion and Decagon are already using Sable to explain their products, and more than 150 companies are on its waitlist. Sequoia Capital led Sable's seed round and co-led its Series A.

AIBunkerhill Health's Carebricks platform lets health systems create and deploy AI agents across clinical and operational use cases using data hospitals already generate. Sequoia Capital backed the company at seed and is continuing to invest. At UTMB Health, Bunkerhill grew from one agent in production to more than twenty, consolidating multiple vendors' point solutions into one platform.

AICognition says its one-year-old merger with Windsurf has produced a more capable Devin, which now manages other Devins at a mid-to-senior engineering level, and new SWE-1.7 model, described as its most capable and efficient to date. The company reports growing from 44 to 350 people and revenue run rate from $73M to $500M+ since merging the brands.

AIFidji Simo has decided to leave her full-time role at OpenAI and transition to a part-time advisor position after seven years of managing a chronic illness that required medical leave three months ago. She says she had repeatedly deferred this decision in the past and now prioritizes recovery, while remaining engaged in work on AI-driven health solutions through OpenAI, Chronicle Bio AI, and CODA.