Wispr raises $280M at $2B valuation as it looks beyond dictation
The funds will allow Wispr to increase its footprint as it ventures into new areas, such as meetings, with its newly released note-taker tool. Source: techcrunch.com Read Full Story
Startups
Funding rounds, acquisitions, new ventures and the bold founders building at the frontier of AI and crypto. Follow the money shaping tomorrow’s technology landscape.
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Semiconductor Giants Are Busy Backing Startups This Year
Anyone with a stock portfolio has invariably noticed that semiconductor companies are on a tear this year. Massive AI spending has helped push earnings and valuations for industry leaders to record levels. In turn, semiconductor giants are investing record sums in startups. So far this year, the sector’s most valuable companies have participated in rounds…
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Cutting RAG inference costs 6x starts with deciding what never reaches the LLM
Most teams building retrieval augmented generation (RAG) systems for high stakes classification make the same architectural bet: Route every ambiguous case straight to the language model and trust the retrieved context to sort it out. This works fine in a demo. It falls apart the moment the system has to survive an audit, a regulator,…
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SpaceX officially closes its Cursor acquisition
AI coding startup Cursor is now officially a part of SpaceX. Source: techcrunch.com Read Full Story
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Chipmaking equipment supplier Lam Research to spend $3B+ on new labs
Lam Research Corp., a major supplier of chipmaker equipment, plans to spend more than $3 billion over the next five years to enhance its engineering capabilities. The company detailed the initiative on Thursday. Nasdaq-listed Lam sells machines that chipmakers use to produce memory chips, advanced packaging and other products. It also has a presence in…
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How A Teenage Carpenter Became The Founder Of AI Construction Startup Trunk Tools
Editor’s note: The following is the second profile in a series of articles about startup founders from non-technical backgrounds who have launched successful venture-backed companies. Read the previous interview with MagicSchool AI founder Adeel Khan here. Before founding Trunk Tools, an AI startup for the construction industry, Sarah Buchner spent more than a decade working…
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Four of five enterprises that secured AI agent identities still can’t contain one that goes rogue
Visa’s president of technology, Rajat Taneja, walked the VB Transform 2026 audience through aiming Anthropic’s Mythos at Visa’s own payment network. The model stitched minor weaknesses into working exploit chains, and Visa open-sourced the harness that governed the hunt. That’s what it looks like when an enterprise has the engineering depth to act on what…
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Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni reportedly knew Phia was ‘cookie stuffing’ for months
Phia, the shopping startup co-founded by Phoebe Gates and Sophia Kianni, is once again under fire for its alleged business practices. Source: techcrunch.com Read Full Story
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Nvidia taps Wall Street for a half-trillion dollars to fuel global AI infrastructure buildout
Some of Wall Street’s biggest financial firms are partnering with Nvidia Corp. to pour a half-trillion dollars of funding into the artificial intelligence industry’s massive infrastructure buildout. Nvidia said today it has struck deals with Apollo Global Management Inc., BlackRock Inc., Blackstone Inc., Brookfield Corp., The Goldman Sachs The Goldman Sachs Group and KKR &…
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Four AI agents coordinating in real time outperformed Claude Opus 4.8 on enterprise coding tasks
As enterprise codebases grow, AI agents tasked with analyzing them are buckling under the weight of long-horizon tasks that require multiple interactions and tool calls. Dividing the work among a team of agents seems like the obvious fix, but it introduces a fatal flaw: most multi-agent systems are not designed for agents to coordinate among…
