#Funding/M&A

AIAridge has signed a cooperation agreement with Ras Al Khaimah to set up a regulatory sandbox for advanced air mobility in the UAE, overseen by the UAE General Civil Aviation Authority. The program will test its Land Aircraft Carrier in desert conditions and plans a demonstration route between Abu Dhabi and Ras Al Khaimah. Regulatory approval for commercial passenger eVTOL flights remains pending.

AIAnthropic is partnering with Accenture on independent evaluation of frontier AI, part of its recent commitment to embed evaluators at the company. Both companies expect to invest at least $1 billion in this capacity over the next five years.

AILovable has acquired Sutro, a company that built a language, compiler, and backend platform making application behavior and rules explicit. Sutro founder Tomas Halgas and three engineers, Max Gfeller, Tony Zhan, and Hirad Arshadi, are joining Lovable, with Halgas leading its technical evangelism.

AIMiniMax has become an AI partner to Singtel's newly launched AI Pass, supporting Singapore's SkillsFuture AI Subscription initiative. Eligible learners across 200+ SWDA-supported AI courses get access to MiniMax H3, MiniMax Agent, and MiniMax Audio to build practical AI skills.

AIAnthropic is partnering with Accenture, through its specialist AI business Faculty, on independent evaluation of frontier models, including red-teaming, alignment assessments, and safeguard testing. Anthropic and Accenture each expect to invest at least $1 billion in this capacity over five years. The source says embedded evaluators would have employee-comparable access, but standards for access and reporting, and a settled funding system, do not yet exist.

Why it matters: The source ties a new evaluation arrangement to an unresolved question of who funds and sets standards for independent AI evaluators, which is useful context for governance debates.

AIQianjue Technology founder Gao Haichuan argues that robotics will not see one breakthrough that suddenly lifts the whole industry, and he judges the company by deployment results rather than research papers. Qianjue, founded in 2023, has completed a Series A+ round worth a nine-figure RMB sum, with first orders coming from restaurant, cleaning, and hotel service robots. Gao says customers care about task completion, failure rates, and price rather than whether a predictive world model is used.

AIAnthropic is partnering with Adaptyv Bio on a protein design competition in which over 5,000 designs will be experimentally validated. Anthropic is providing up to $1 million in Claude credits plus funding for experimental validation alongside Adaptyv, while Modal contributes up to $250,000 in compute and Twist Bioscience supplies DNA.

AIYi Tay congratulated Vinh Q. Tran (@vqctran) on his move from Google DeepMind and recalled years of co-inventing work together. The post praised Tran's pursuit of his biology passion, which the quoted post describes as building Polyphron to grow human tissue with frontier models and reinforcement learning.

AIChatGPT Ads for Shopify is now live, making Shopify OpenAI's first commerce partner. Merchants set their own campaigns and budgets, with products pulled directly from Shopify Catalog, and the app is free to install and tracked from the Shopify admin.

AISakana AI says it shipped Sakana Chat, Namazu, Sakana Translate, Sakana Marlin, Fugu, Fugu Cyber, and Fugu Max this year and is now deploying them to enterprises, manufacturers, financial institutions, and government agencies in Japan and internationally. The company is massively expanding its GTM team and recruiting a Product Sales & Account Executive and a Forward Deployed Engineer (GTM) for founding roles.

AICohere and Aleph Alpha have signed a definitive agreement to combine, forming a unified company that will operate globally as Cohere. The combined company will have more than 1,000 employees across Canada and Germany.

AIMistral models now power Firefox Smart Window, Mozilla's AI browsing assistant in beta. Mistral will serve users in France and North America first, with the United Kingdom and Germany expected later this year. Conversations are not saved on Mozilla's servers by default, and partners such as Mistral agree to zero data retention.

AIFei-Fei Li announced that World Labs is recruiting robot learning researchers and engineers. A follow-up post from Yunzhu Li says the team aims to define and scale next-generation world models for robot learning.

AILatent.Space's podcast episode features Richard Socher discussing Recursive, a new neolab that raised $5B to pursue open-ended, self-improving AI for AI research. The conversation covers the Eureka Machine, Socher's 10 Spaces of Intelligence, AI peer review, and the idea that this could be humanity's last invention.

AICognition and AWS have entered a multi-year Strategic Collaboration Agreement to help enterprises deploy the Devin autonomous engineer in production. Devin can be purchased through AWS Marketplace, and the companies are exploring deeper engineering integrations within customers' AWS environments. Mercedes-Benz reportedly used Devin to analyze more than 200,000 lines of COBOL, reducing an estimated eight-month modernization project to eight days.

Why it matters: The collaboration shows how an autonomous coding agent is being packaged for enterprise legacy modernization inside existing AWS environments, with concrete customer migration figures.

AIAir Street Capital led Jack & Jill's $40 million Series A, with Madrona joining and Creandum and Entrepreneurs First investing again, following a $20 million seed round less than a year earlier. Jack & Jill uses AI agents named Jack, which helps candidates plan career moves and search job postings, and Jill, which helps companies recruit from opted-in candidates. The company says it has arranged 25,000 interviews and plans 5,000 more each month.

AIKling AI took part in TIFF: The Market 2026 on September 10 through an industry panel, networking reception, and on-site showcase. The company said the event explored how AI video is becoming part of professional filmmaking, from feature-length animation to real-world production workflows. Kling AI also said it continues to join leading film festivals such as Cannes and Toronto.

AIShanghai-based Twoo is building an AI that participates in conversations between two users, sharing context, remembering experiences, and helping them plan activities together rather than serving one person. Founder Cobe Chen says the product's monetization includes in-app "shells" that unlock outfits for its octopus AI character, plus premium memberships for professional uses such as collaborative writing and teaching. The company is preparing overseas expansion into North America, Japan, and South Korea.

AIWaymo, Nihon Kotsu and GO have signed an agreement to prepare a commercial launch of a fully autonomous ride-hailing service in Tokyo in 2027. The post links to a Waymo blog post with more details on the partnership.

AIRobotaxis are coming to Tokyo in 2027 🇯🇵✨ Waymo, @Nihonkotsu_Taxi, and @go_goesnext have signed a formal contract toward launching autonomous taxis in Tokyo. Learn more:

AIFactory has raised $200M at a $5B valuation from investors including Blackstone, Khosla Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, bringing its total funding to over $400 million. The company says it will use the capital to accelerate research, product, and global go-to-market efforts. Factory says hundreds of thousands of developers use its platform, with customers including Nvidia, Blackstone, and T-Mobile.

AIWaymo is partnering with Allianz Partners to build insurance, claims, and safety research infrastructure for its planned autonomous ride-hailing expansion in Europe, starting with London and Munich. The collaboration will provide tailored fleet insurance, liability protection, and digital claims handling, plus joint crash analysis and safety modeling research. Waymo cites a 16x reduction in serious injury crashes compared to human drivers in cities where it operates.

AIMira Murati said Thinking Machines is building machine intelligence to expand human will and judgment, and welcomed Neil Chowdhury to help make that future safe. Chowdhury, who joined Thinking Machines to work on safety and alignment, said he wants safety systems that let control over AI be shared widely rather than concentrated in a few hands.

AIJohn Schulman publicly welcomed Neil Chowdhury, who joined Thinking Machines to work on safety and alignment. Chowdhury's background post says he wants to build safety systems that let control over powerful AI be shared widely rather than concentrated in a few hands.

AIWaymo, Nihon Kotsu and GO have agreed to prepare a commercial, fully autonomous ride-hailing service in Tokyo, targeting first public rides in 2027. The service will be available through the GO and Waymo apps, starting with an initial fleet and expanding to around 100 vehicles across key Tokyo neighborhoods. The launch depends on regulatory approval from national and local authorities and completion of ongoing validation.

AIOracle co-CEO Mike Sicilia argued on the Q1 FY 2027 earnings call that AI accelerates rather than replaces packaged applications, and promised an "agentic AI accelerator" in October to compress SaaS deployments from years to months. Oracle's SaaS revenue grew 10 percent, while software license revenue fell 3 percent to $5.5 billion and cloud revenue rose 60 percent to $11.6 billion. The company also said GPUs coming up for renewal were renewed or resold at a 20 percent premium and that it turned on 850 MW of new datacenter capacity in the quarter.

AIThe CEO of AI assistant Instinct told investors he is looking to raise $1 billion in new funding. That could imply a $10 billion valuation, four times its valuation from last month.

AICognition has welcomed Jonathan Kelley and the Dioxus team, whose framework Cognition used extensively to build and improve Devin's performance. Cognition plans to continue supporting Dioxus, Blitz, Taffy, and Subsecond while increasing investment in Dioxus-Native and Blitz. The Dioxus team will also work on Devin's virtual machine, computer use skills, and testing capabilities.

AIBill Peebles, OpenAI's former head of Sora, is teaming up with Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and investor Sujay Jaswa to create a new startup. The company will develop AI models for Hollywood, according to a report from The Information.

AIGimlet Labs raised funds in three tranches priced at $2.5 billion, $3 billion, and a "significantly higher" valuation, despite $3 billion being the headline price. The post, citing The Information, presents the structure as evidence of an AI funding frenzy.

AIStarting today, Nashville riders can be matched with a fully autonomous Waymo vehicle through the Lyft app, in addition to hailing on the Waymo app. Lyft says availability will grow in the coming weeks.

AIFactory is now available on the Claude Marketplace, letting enterprise customers apply their committed Anthropic spend toward its autonomous software development platform. The platform automates the software development lifecycle, covering planning, implementation, testing, and security within one system, with enterprise deployment options that keep execution close to customers' code and infrastructure.

AIMark Chen says no human or agent reviewed user data for the Navier-Stokes effort. He adds that OpenAI and other LLM companies do use user feedback and de-identified data to improve ChatGPT and Codex.

AINoam Brown says a plot shows the model OpenAI used is a major advance beyond today's LLMs, and that no one relied on Levent's or Tristan's prompts. He was responding to questions about how Navier-Stokes might be achieved and the attention given to those prompts. Background from Sebastien Bubeck describes coordination over Euler and Navier-Stokes results, including a disputed suggestion about Levent's authorship.

AICognition has raised over $2B at a $48B valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. The company says run-rate revenue grew from $492M to almost $900M since its May round, and Devin now offers Auto-Triage, Security Swarm, and Automations.

AIMistral announced a €3 billion Series D round at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion, led by Samsung Electronics with co-leads Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity. The company says the funding will expand frontier research, compute capacity, infrastructure, and international growth, and that it now operates in 20 countries with 125+ enterprise customers including Airbus, ASML, and HSBC.

Why it matters: The round shows how a company frames sovereign, open-weight AI as a full stack spanning models, infrastructure, compute, and products, which is useful context for European enterprise AI strategy.