Fundraising

AIThe U.S. Department of Labor said it suspended Microsoft and Adobe from its Permanent Labor Certification program, citing multiple active federal investigations. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling also said no new applications will be accepted for Cognizant, Infosys, Capgemini, Tata, Wipro and HCL. Microsoft said the vast majority of its U.S. employees are Americans and that 80% of its roughly 6,000 H-1B petitions last fiscal year were to extend or change the status of existing employees.

AIArena has secured a $200M Series B, with Lightspeed doubling down on its investment. The company is also launching the Alignment Index, which measures how closely AI behavior aligns with human values in real-world settings. Arena reports annualized revenue above $100M since its Series A, with millions of people helping evaluate frontier models through real-world use.

AIArena, the crowdsourced AI model leaderboard that started as a UC Berkeley research project, raised a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures. The company said it reached $100 million in annualized run-rate revenue in June, up from $30 million when it raised its $150 million Series A in January at a $1.7 billion post-money valuation.

AIOpenAI has reportedly told investors its annualized revenue is approaching $50 billion, about $20 billion below a previously reported $70 billion figure. The Financial Times reports the earlier number came from investor attempts to compare OpenAI with Anthropic, which counts cloud partners' sales differently. OpenAI's IPO has reportedly been pushed to early 2027.

AISpaceXAI has joined the Omacom Foundation as a Founding Corporate Patron, providing $1,500,000 in Grok tokens for Omarchy's maintenance and development. The main post says the company is glad to support the Omarchy team.

AIAutomation Anywhere Inc. announced an agreement to acquire Boost.ai Inc., a conversational voice AI company, from Nordic Capital, to extend its autonomous enterprise platform into customer experience. Boost.ai supports more than 36 languages, serves hundreds of customers in regulated industries and Europe, and maintains more than 650 deployments and about 600 live AI agents. The deal follows Automation Anywhere's late 2025 acquisition of Aisera Inc.

AISpaceXAI is joining the Omacom Foundation, which oversees the Omarchy Linux distribution, as a Founding Corporate Patron and donating $1.5 million worth of Grok tokens to the project. According to David Heinemeier Hansson's blog post, the tokens will primarily accelerate development, review code, and patch bugs. The partnership follows earlier controversy over Hansson's anti-immigration posts, which have drawn criticism of Omarchy's corporate contributors, including 1Password and Cloudflare.

AIFirmus Grid Ltd., a Nvidia-backed data center company, abandoned one of Australia's biggest-ever initial public offerings after failing to attract global investors wary of frothy AI valuations. The source provides no further details on offering size or valuation.

AICursor says it is excited to support open-source software alongside SpaceXAI, and it plans to bring more projects on board soon. Background from DHH indicates SpaceXAI joined the Omacom Foundation as a Founding Corporate Patron, contributing $1,500,000 in @grok tokens for maintaining and developing Omarchy.

AILightspeed Venture Partners co-leaders Ravi Mhatre and Bejul Somaia halted partner schedules in April 2023 for a seven-hour meeting on how to respond to AI. The firm had missed early stakes in OpenAI, ElevenLabs and Hugging Face, and was poised to back Anthropic.

AIArena announced a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation, alongside a new Alignment Index that measures whether AI agents behave safely, truthfully, and within the bounds of user requests. The company has surpassed $100 million in annualized revenue, facilitated 350 million sessions and 62 million votes, and led by Felicis and PXD from the seed and Series A stages. Arena positions the index as a way to assess trustworthiness as AI systems increasingly take real actions.

AIZeta Global unveiled the Athena Inference Model (AIM), being developed with Fireworks using Nvidia Nemotron, as part of its AthenaOS enterprise intelligence announcements. The company also said it is doing early work with partners on a specialized chip through a capital-light approach.

AIArena has announced a Series B round co-led by Lightspeed and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, 01 Advisors, Dell Technologies Capital, and Endeavor Catalyst. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Felicis, a16z's AMP, QuantumLight, and The House Fund also supported the round.

AIAnthropic is committing $150 million to the Genesis Mission to deepen its support for scientific research and technological discovery. The company also plans to make Claude and its technical support available to more than 15 federal agencies.

AIHelm.ai said it signed $70 million in commercial contracts for its foundation models for physical AI over 12 months, spanning global automotive OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, and industrial automation companies. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company said it has projects bound for production in autonomous vehicles, mining, and construction, and that it is on a path to break even. CEO Vladislav Voroninski said its models are trained on unsupervised "deep teaching" and are environment-agnostic.

AIWillow Care Inc., maker of the AI dictation app Willow Voice, chose CoreWeave for its forward-deployed support rather than compute alone, according to co-founder and CTO Lawrence Liu. Liu said CoreWeave's reinforcement learning infrastructure lets Willow focus on eval alignment, while Willow fine-tunes its own speech recognition model and pairs it with a compact post-processing LLM. He said inference demand is growing faster than training as dictation use climbs.

AIAugment Code is selling select assets, including Cosmos, Auggie CLI, and the Code Context Engine, to Harness, and the product team is moving to Harness. The company says Harness's integrated platform delivers these capabilities to customers more effectively than building them independently. Harness describes itself as building the Autonomous SDLC Platform for shipping AI-written code across enterprises.

Why it matters: The announcement shows how a coding AI company is folding its products into a larger software delivery platform, a shift that shapes how enterprise teams will buy these tools.

AIMistral CEO Arthur Mensch replied that his company serves such customers too, pointing to nuclear energy as a possible obstacle. The reply responds to reports that Berlin-based search engine Ecosia is dropping Mistral as its AI partner for open-source models, including Chinese ones.

AINVIDIA announced commitments valued at $1 billion over the next five years to build U.S. capacity for super intelligence research in fields including quantum computing, healthcare and energy security. The funding will support U.S. higher-education research institutions, American quantum leadership and cloud service providers serving U.S. government mission needs. NVIDIA is also a collaborator on several phase 2 Genesis Mission awards in quantum computing, fusion, accelerator design and microelectronics.

AIOpenRouter says StepFun's Step 5 Preview is now live on its platform, priced at $1.00 per million input tokens and $2.70 per million output tokens. Cache hits are 50% off at launch, bringing them to $0.05 per million, and a week of free access is rolling out across partners including opencode, Cline, Nous Research, and Kilo Code.

AIMicrosoft's Xbox unit is formalizing its film and television push by creating a new division to expand its video-game franchises into other media. The source does not provide further details on the division's leadership, budget, or first projects.

AIElevenLabs is officially launching in Singapore, opening an office to establish its Southeast Asia hub. In July it launched Singapore data residency, offering enterprises local hosting, zero-retention options, lower latency across Singapore and East Asia, and SOC 2 compliance. Customers named include Funding Societies, Atome, and Rezonate.

AIAnalysts expect Alibaba Group Holding's cloud and AI unit to report a 50 per cent revenue surge for the September quarter, up from 45 per cent growth in the prior quarter. The projected acceleration is attributed to strong returns on the company's aggressive AI investments.

AIQualcomm has denied being the net payer in its patent deal with Huawei and rejected claims that the deal relates to LogicFolding. The available statements do not establish any licensing of LogicFolding or related peripheral technologies.

AIRohit Prasad, a longtime Amazon AI executive, will lead robotics pioneer Boston Dynamics as it prepares to manufacture humanoid robots at scale. The source provides no further details on the appointment or production timeline.

AINvidia-backed data center company Firmus has pulled its initial public offering, a dramatic move that Bloomberg says reveals new cracks in the AI funding boom. The source provides no further details on the reasons, offering size, or market conditions.

AIManus parent company Butterfly Effect has completed a new financing round of over $500 million, led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, and is rebuilding a team in Beijing to develop AI Agent products for the Chinese market. Its recruitment page lists 17 open positions, up from 11 before the National Day holiday, including AI Agent product manager, Agent Harness engineer, Agent evaluation engineer, and LLM algorithm engineer roles.

AIAccording to a Wall Street Journal report citing OpenRouter data, OpenAI's share of AI compute routed through the platform rose from under 25% at the start of 2026 to nearly 50% last month. The data comes largely from AI-native startups, with some legacy tech companies also included. The report comes as OpenAI reportedly shifted focus from Sora and an erotica generator toward productivity and business customers.

AIArchitect Financial Technologies has launched Liquid Inference, an LLM router that auctions each request to providers quoting the requested model, and the lowest qualifying offer wins. Buyers can set per-job cost caps, time-to-first-token limits, minimum throughput, and region or zero-data-retention rules, and the max price is locked before generation. The source states that fees, provider list, and latency data are not yet public.

AIShanghai Biren Technology shares fell more than 12% in Hong Kong on Thursday after the company filed plans to raise HK$4 billion (US$510 million) through a share placement. The filing said placing agents would issue 130 million new shares at HK$31.08 each on a best-effort basis.

AIHuawei released its first smartphone with its own LogicFolding chip, the Mate 90 series, on October 1, as China's smartphone and car markets slow. Huawei only sells several million smartphones outside China each year, and Huawei-powered vehicle deliveries fell 29% year-on-year in September.

AIHu Han, former head of Tencent Hunyuan's visual large model algorithm center, is raising tens of millions of dollars for a multimodal startup at a target valuation of several hundred million dollars, with Yuanshi Capital as financial advisor. Investors say Hu has spoken with several firms over the past month and has suggested his model could eventually be sold to large technology companies such as DeepSeek.

AIMeta is donating 1,000 Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses to four Singapore organisations serving people with disabilities, alongside a US$30,000 grant for accessibility training. The glasses help users who are blind or have low vision read text, identify objects and describe their surroundings. The grant will fund a free curriculum from the Singapore Association of the Visually Handicapped on using the glasses safely in daily life.

AIMastra launched the Mastra Agency Program, a network of certified agencies and consultancies that build Mastra agents for clients. The launch includes five partners: Deerfield Group, Blue Drop Labs, Frontleap, Handpicked, and Young Security. Every partner has been vetted by Mastra's FDE team and receives direct access to Mastra's leadership and regular roadmap updates.

AIElevenLabs is officially launching in Singapore, opening a new Southeast Asia hub that is already working with businesses including Funding Societies and Atome. The company is also hiring in Singapore, with open positions listed on its careers page.

AINathan Lambert says compute access rather than funds is a bottleneck for many academic and nonprofit AI groups. He adds that more academic and nonprofit funding is still needed, tackled one step at a time. The quoted post from Anjney Midha announces hundreds of MI355x and B300 nodes live on nationalcompute.com, subsidized for .edu and .gov users.

AIWaymo closed a $5 billion term loan, its first debt financing, with PIMCO, Blackstone, and Sixth Street as lead syndicated lenders and Goldman Sachs as sole lead bookrunner. The debt complements a $16 billion equity investment earlier this year and gives the company added financial flexibility to expand its fully autonomous ride-hailing service across the United States and internationally.