#Funding/M&A

AIOpenAI has agreed to use capacity at the PORTS-Pike Technology Data Center in Pike County, Ohio, alongside SB Energy, NVIDIA, and the U.S. Department of Energy. SB Energy will pay the full cost of grid upgrades and transmission lines, and the project uses closed-loop, air-cooled systems expected to use significantly less water than the historical Portsmouth gaseous diffusion plant.

AICursor's acquisition by SpaceX has officially closed, and Cursor will join the SpaceXAI team. The stated goal is to help make Grok the world's most useful AI and to improve Grok Build, Grok Bot, Grok API, Cursor, and more.

Why it matters: The acquisition closing ties Cursor's coding tools to Grok's product line, which changes how the two products may be developed and sold together.

AICursor has been acquired by SpaceX, completing a process that began in April when the two companies announced a partnership to accelerate model training. The post says the deal gives Cursor access to what it calls the largest GPU fleet in the world, which it expects to yield more capable models at lower cost. It cites Grok 4.6, released Wednesday, as an early look at what the companies can build together.

Why it matters: The post confirms a completed acquisition and links it to GPU access and cheaper model serving, which explains why the deal matters for coding tools.

AIMETR has raised commitments of around $71 million over the last six months to fund projects on autonomous capabilities, recursive self-improvement, monitoring systems, risk assessments, and AI incidents. The organization says it has not accepted funding from frontier AI companies or donations made at their direction, though those companies provide significant free tokens for its evaluations, research, and engineering.

AIDatabricks announced it crossed a $7 billion revenue run-rate, growing over 80% year over year in Q2, and raised $5 billion in its latest fundraise. Lakebase reached a $100 million-plus run-rate, and Lakehouse reached $1.5 billion-plus, growing over 100% year over year, with continued positive adjusted free cash flow. The company says it will invest the capital in Lakebase, a serverless Postgres database for AI agents; Genie, AI coworkers for business data; and Unity AI Gateway, multi-AI governance for controlling costs.

AISuno announced a landmark global partnership with BMG, one of the largest music companies, tied to the upcoming launch of its first music model developed with the music industry. The partnership aims to create new music experiences and economic opportunities for artists and songwriters who opt in, including independent artists through Suno's In Session and Spark programs.

AISequoia Capital is leading a seed round for Preview, an AI-native video creation and production platform that combines a video timeline with an infinite ideation canvas in one collaborative workspace. The platform lets teams generate with any model, track characters, locations, and props, and keep complete records of how each asset was made. The article says more than 100 studios are already using Preview, from agencies to Hollywood feature filmmakers.

AIChina's venture market rebounded in Q1 2026, with financings up 52% year on year to 2,865 deals and disclosed totals of 256 billion yuan, according to IT桔子 data. AI funding exceeded 110 billion yuan, up 185.4%, and Hong Kong IPOs raised HK$109.9 billion, up 488.81%, with information technology accounting for 22 listings.

AIDatabricks has acquired ElectricSQL, the team behind PGlite, a WebAssembly Postgres implementation that runs in browsers and syncs asynchronously with Postgres instances. The company says the technology will strengthen its Lakebase Postgres offering for fast AI agents.

AIThe Gemini app has reached 1 billion monthly users, making it Google's fastest growing product ever and its 14th product to hit the 1 billion user mark. Demis Hassabis congratulated Josh Woodward and the Gemini team on the milestone.

AIa life update: i started a new company called Pragmatik (p7k) Labs (语用科技) in shanghai, focusing on the research of next-generation agents across digital and physical worlds. thanks to Gaorong Ventures and HSG (红杉中国 & 高榕创投) for co-leading this round, and to Tencent (腾讯) and Shanghai Engine Fund (上海未来产业基金) for the support. @pragmatik_labs ·

AIDatabricks has acquired ElectricSQL, the team behind PGlite, a WebAssembly implementation of Postgres that runs in the browser and syncs asynchronously with Postgres instances. Databricks says this suits fast AI agents and plans to use the capabilities to strengthen its Lakebase Postgres offering.

AIManus will delete data generated by certain users on or after December 29, 2025, from 8:00 a.m. on August 23 through August 24, 2026 (SGT), as it returns to independent operations and meets regulatory requirements. Affected users can back up their data until 7:59 a.m. on August 23 and restore it starting 8:00 a.m. on August 25, 2026 (SGT), with no charges during the backup period.

AINovo Nordisk has chosen AWS as its preferred cloud provider and strategic AI partner to accelerate drug discovery. The collaboration will combine Novo Nordisk's scientific expertise with AWS AI tools, including Amazon Bio Discovery and Bedrock AgentCore, and establish a co-innovation hub in London. The partnership already spans AWS, Amazon Pharmacy, and One Medical.

AICorma is training a foundation model for defensive cybersecurity agents, trained with large-scale reinforcement learning on simulated enterprise networks. In red/blue team tests, a defender failed to find a planted backdoor 78% of the time, even when it was an identical copy of the model that planted it. Corma says its agentic Security Workforce is deployed at Fortune 500 companies and large enterprises, and that the firm's seed round is led by Sequoia Capital.

AIAMD has agreed to acquire Taalas, an AI inference company, according to AMD CEO Lisa Su's post on X. Su described the Taalas team as phenomenal and working at the cutting edge of AI inference. The post gives no deal terms or closing timeline.

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.

AIGoogle's Jeff Dean says tomorrow will be his last day at the company after 27 years, which he describes as growing from 25 people to over 190,000. He notes Google now has thirteen products used by more than a billion people and says he is starting DiscoLoopAI with longtime colleagues Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le.

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.

AIJeff Dean says his team selected Radical Ventures and Khosla Ventures to lead the initial funding round for their new company. Participating investors include Lightspeed, Kleiner Perkins, Doerr Capital, and Alphabet, with the seed round expected to close over the next few weeks.

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.

AIJeff Dean, with Sanjay Ghemawat, Oriol Vinyals, and Quoc Le, has founded Discovery Loop, a Public Benefit Corporation. The company aims to automate machine learning, science, and engineering to accelerate discoveries and progress.

AIGemini co-lead Oriol Vinyals is leaving Google DeepMind after years working on seq2seq, distillation, AlphaStar, and Gemini. He is building Discovery Loop (@DiscoLoopAI) alongside Jeff Dean, Quoc Le, and Sanjay Ghemawat.

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.

AIMicrosoft says fiscal year 2026 was a record year, driven by strong demand across the Microsoft Cloud. The post links to three highlights from its FY26 results.

AIMicrosoft reported FY26 Q4 earnings with $90 billion in revenue, and Azure and other cloud services revenue grew 43% on strong demand across the platform. Microsoft 365 Copilot reached more than 30 million paid seats, and Satya Nadella said Azure revenue surpassed $100 billion for the first time this year.

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.

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.