Tech Startup

The hire marks OpenAI’s latest push into India, expanding offices, partnerships and hiring. Source: techcrunch.com Read Full Story

Artificial intelligence developer-centric cloud provider Runpod Inc. announced Wednesday that it has raised $100 million in early-stage funding, pushing the valuation of the company to $1 billion. The Series A funding, led by Summit Partners, brings the company’s total funding to $122 million across multiple rounds, including a seed round in May 2024 co-led by Intel…

Venture investor Menlo Ventures 1 said Tuesday that it has raised $3 billion in new capital — the largest new raise in the firm’s 50-year history — to back AI-focused startups across enterprise, healthcare and consumer sectors. The Menlo Park, California-based firm highlighted its early investment in Anthropic, which last month overtook rival OpenAI as the…

Last night, the increasingly enterprise-focused AI startup Sakana launched Fugu, a multi-agent orchestration system that delivers frontier-level AI performance through a single, OpenAI-compatible API. Designed for developers, enterprises, and nations seeking resilience against vendor lock-in and geopolitical export controls, Fugu (Japanese for “pufferfish”), bypasses the traditional monolithic model structure by dynamically routing queries to a…

Shinkei makes a refrigerator-sized robot called Poseidon to kill fish quickly and humanely. Source: techcrunch.com Read Full Story

Every time users belatedly discover that an artificial intelligence feature has been drawing on their data in ways they did not fully grasp, the reaction is often an instinctive sense of violation – of trust, consent and privacy. Accusations and outrage have always followed potentially invasive AI integrations, with examples ranging from email content used…

Want to keep track of the largest startup funding deals in 2026 with our curated list of $100 million-plus venture deals to U.S.-based companies? Check out The Crunchbase Megadeals Board. This is a weekly feature that runs down the week’s top 10 announced funding rounds in the U.S. Check out last week’s biggest funding deal…

On Sunday, a team of nine researchers at Sina Weibo — the Chinese social media giant better known for its microblogging platform than for cutting-edge artificial intelligence — quietly posted a 14-page technical report to arXiv that sent shockwaves through the AI research community. Their claim: a language model with just 3 billion parameters can…

African payments infrastructure company Flutterwave has hit a new valuation and landed blockchain company Ripple as an investor and partner. Source: techcrunch.com Read Full Story

When people talk about artificial intelligence and language, the focus usually defaults to English, a handful of European languages and perhaps a few from Asia. African languages – thousands of them, often tonal, hyper-local and deeply contextual – rarely make the roadmap. That blind spot is exactly where Nkenne is building a business and a…