Fundraising

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.

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.

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 has led a $40 million Series A round in Jack & Jill, with Madrona joining and existing investors Creandum and Entrepreneurs First investing again. The company runs Jack, an AI agent that talks with job seekers about career moves and searches millions of job postings, and Jill, a recruiting agent that introduces candidates to hiring managers. Jack & Jill has arranged 25,000 interviews and plans 5,000 more each month, according to the article.

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 has signed a formal agreement with Nihon Kotsu and GO to start operating autonomous taxis in Tokyo in 2027. The post links to a Waymo blog post with further details about the Tokyo launch.

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.

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.

AILegal AI company Harvey says it raised $550M at a $15.5B valuation, led by Diffusion and Lightspeed. It reports more than $400M in ARR and 3,000 customers, including 80% of the top 100 law firms, and plans to invest the funds in people, compute, and inference and model training.

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.

AIElad Gil reacted to Cognition's announcement that it raised over $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation, led by a16z, Accel, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Avenir. Cognition says its run-rate revenue has grown from $492 million in May to almost $900 million.

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.

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.

AIMistral has raised €3B to scale its training and inference compute and build future model generations. The company is also expanding its Science team across offices in Paris, Palo Alto, San Francisco, London, Zurich, and Warsaw, and is recruiting.

AIMistral AI announced it has raised €3 billion to scale its training and inference compute. The founder says the goal is to make open and sovereign AI the technology frontier, and links to Mistral's announcement on sovereign open-weight AI.

Why it matters: The source gives the funding size and stated purpose, which helps readers gauge how Mistral plans to expand its training and inference capacity.

AIMistral AI announced a funding round led by Samsung and co-led by EQT's Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG, with continued backing from ASML, Nvidia, and BNP Paribas CIB. The company said the capital will support its infrastructure, product capabilities, and deployment at scale, and let it expand frontier research and model development.

AISuno announced a global strategic partnership with Believe and its self-release platform TuneCore to give independent artists new ways to create, distribute and earn from music. Tracks made with Suno's new industry partner model will become eligible for distribution through Believe and TuneCore, and the companies plan new product experiences that let artists collaborate with fans and get paid. Suno said its audio watermarking, fingerprinting and download limits will also apply to music distributed through Believe and TuneCore.

AINVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang says NVIDIA compute is fungible, durable and highly rentable, making it a productive, revenue-generating asset. Background from @OrnnExchange notes that H100 rental prices rose 22 percent month over month to $3.28 an hour, even though the chip is three years old.

AIGoogle DeepMind selected 16 organizations for its inaugural Accelerator: AI for the Planet (APAC) cohort to scale AI-powered environmental solutions. Participants span biodiversity monitoring, sustainable agriculture, and climate and carbon projects across countries including New Zealand, Singapore, Indonesia, India, and Japan. Over three months, they will receive access to Google's AI stack, including frontier models, plus mentorship from company experts.

AICoatue is in talks to form a joint venture with chip startup MatX to finance purchases of memory and logic dies as well as manufacturing capacity at chip makers. The JV is being discussed with funding in the billions of dollars.

AIAnthropic is hiring for billing, fraud detection, and other financial infrastructure to build in-house, according to job postings. The move raises questions about what it could mean for payments provider Stripe, and it helps explain Stripe's recent OpenRouter deal.

AIGeorgi Gerganov reports that Hugging Face has been acquired by NVIDIA and says the llama.cpp/ggml project will keep its founding principles. He states that NVIDIA engineers have contributed to the codebase for more than a year, and that all backends will continue to be developed through community participation and remain hardware-agnostic.

Why it matters: The post shows how an acquisition may affect an independent open-source project's governance, hardware neutrality, and relationship with its corporate supporter.

AIMira Murati's Thinking Machines is in talks to raise more than $1 billion at a valuation above $40 billion, below the $50 billion-plus price it was pursuing last fall. The startup is generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue, which the author calls an impressive multiple.