Modal Labs, an AI inference infrastructure startup, is in early discussions with venture capital firms about a new financing round that could value the company at roughly $2.5 billion. If completed, the round would more than double the $1.1 billion valuation reported less than five months earlier. The company’s annualized revenue run rate is about $50 million. Co‑founder and CEO Erik Bernhardsson said the conversations are general and not an active fundraising effort. Existing backers include Lux Capital and Redpoint Ventures, while General Catalyst is reportedly considering leading the round. Leer más →

Anthropic is in the final stages of raising a $20 billion capital infusion at a valuation of $350 billion, according to Bloomberg. Investor demand has pushed the company to seek twice the amount it originally targeted. The round includes participation from a range of venture firms and strategic partners, notably Nvidia and Microsoft, which are expected to provide the bulk of the funding. Anthropic recently rolled out new AI models for legal and business research and introduced coding agents that have been praised for boosting developer productivity. The fundraising effort comes amid intense competition among frontier AI labs and rising compute costs, with rivals like OpenAI also gearing up for large capital raises and potential IPOs. Leer más →

San Francisco startup Sapiom has closed a $15 million seed round led by Accel, with participation from Okta Ventures, Gradient Ventures, Array Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Anthropic, and Coinbase Ventures. The company is building a financial layer that enables AI agents to automatically purchase and access software, APIs, data, and compute services. By handling authentication and micro‑payments behind the scenes, Sapiom aims to remove infrastructure hurdles for non‑technical creators building AI‑driven applications, focusing initially on B2B use cases. Leer más →

Resolve AI, a startup that automates system reliability engineering, announced a $125 million Series A round that values the company at $1 billion. The round was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and included existing investors Greylock Partners, Unusual Ventures, Artisanal Ventures, and A*. Co‑founders Spiros Xanthos and Mayank Agarwal, former Splunk executives, bring experience from their earlier venture Omnition, which Splunk acquired in 2019. The funding positions Resolve AI at the forefront of the emerging AI SRE category, alongside peers such as Traversal. Leer más →

Voice‑AI startup ElevenLabs announced a $500 million financing led by Sequoia Capital, pushing its valuation to $11 billion. Existing backers a16z, Iconiq and several others increased their stakes, while new investors such as Lightspeed Venture Partners, EvanticCapital and Bond joined the round. The capital will fund research, product development and international expansion into markets like India, Japan, Singapore, Brazil and Mexico. Co‑founder Mati Staniszewski highlighted plans to broaden the company’s offerings beyond voice, including video content and multi‑modal AI agents. The company closed the prior year with $330 million in annual recurring revenue. Leer más →

Several senior researchers have left OpenAI, citing limited resources and a strategic shift toward ChatGPT and other large‑language‑model products. Departures include a leader of reasoning research, a model‑policy head, and an economist, each describing challenges in pursuing broader scientific work. The exits highlight internal tensions between pure research and product‑centric goals, while investors remain confident that OpenAI’s massive user base provides a competitive edge despite the staffing changes. Leer más →

Seattle‑based Carbon Robotics introduced the Large Plant Model (LPM), an artificial‑intelligence system that can instantly recognize plant species across farms. Powered by more than 150 million photos collected from over 100 farms in 15 countries, the model allows farmers to direct the company’s LaserWeeder robots to eliminate weeds without the need for new data labeling or retraining. The update arrives via software, giving users real‑time control over what the robots target. The breakthrough builds on the company’s existing AI platform and follows years of neural‑network development by its founder, who previously worked at Uber and Meta. Leer más →

Amazon is reportedly negotiating a major investment of at least $50 billion in OpenAI, which is seeking $100 billion in new funding that could lift its valuation to $830 billion. Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is leading talks with OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, while OpenAI also explores capital from sovereign wealth funds and tech giants. The deal is expected to close by the end of the first quarter, highlighting Amazon’s deep ties to the AI sector through its AWS partnership with Anthropic and a new $11 billion data‑center campus in Indiana. Leer más →

Outtake, an AI‑driven cybersecurity startup that automates the detection and takedown of digital identity fraud, has closed a $40 million Series B round. The round was led by Iconiq’s Murali Joshi and featured angels including Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, Pershing Square CEO Bill Ackman, Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, Anduril co‑founder Trae Stephens, former OpenAI VP Bob McGrew, Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, and former AT&T CEO John Donovan. Founded in 2023 by former Palantir engineer Alex Dhillon, Outtake counts OpenAI, Pershing Square, AppLovin and federal agencies among its customers and reports rapid revenue and customer growth. Leer más →

AI data‑labeling platform Handshake has acquired data‑label‑auditing startup Cleanlab in an acqui‑hire deal. The move adds Cleanlab’s co‑founders and nine key engineers to Handshake’s research team, aiming to improve the quality of human‑generated data for top AI labs. Cleanlab, founded in 2021, had raised $30 million and built algorithms that automatically flag incorrect labels. Handshake, valued at $3.3 billion in 2022, expects the acquisition to strengthen its data‑quality offering for customers such as OpenAI. Leer más →

Modelence, a California‑based startup that offers an all‑in‑one framework for building AI‑enhanced applications, announced a $3 million seed investment led by Y Combinator. The funding will support the company’s effort to simplify the complex web of services—authentication, databases, hosting, and LLM observability—that developers must stitch together when using generative AI tools. Modelence’s toolkit, built on TypeScript, aims to reduce friction by handling core infrastructure tasks and providing a low‑code app builder, positioning the firm to capture a growing market of developers seeking smoother, more reliable AI‑driven development pipelines. Leer más →

Anthropic announced it is raising twice the amount originally planned, increasing its target from $10 billion to $20 billion. The expanded round aims to bring the company’s valuation to $350 billion and includes investors such as Sequoia Capital, Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund, and Coatue. The move follows a prior $13 billion raise that set a $183 billion valuation and follows reports that the firm is preparing for an initial public offering later this year. Leer más →

CVector, an AI startup that builds a brain‑like software layer for heavy industry, announced a $5 million seed round led by Powerhouse Ventures. The funding will accelerate the rollout of its platform, which translates small operational actions into measurable cost savings for clients such as utilities, manufacturers, and chemical producers. With a growing roster of customers and a team of about a dozen engineers, CVector aims to embed AI‑driven economics into the core of industrial decision‑making. Leer más →

Ricursive Intelligence, an artificial‑intelligence chip design startup founded by former Google researchers, announced a $300 million Series A funding round that values the company at $4 billion. Backed by Lightspeed and a roster of other venture firms, the round brings the startup’s total capital raised to $335 million. Ricursive’s technology uses reinforcement learning to autonomously create and refine silicon substrate layers, a process the founders say could accelerate AI chip development toward artificial general intelligence. Leer más →

A five‑level scale has been proposed to gauge how aggressively AI labs are pursuing revenue, measuring ambition rather than current earnings. The framework places established giants like OpenAI at the top and assigns emerging labs to levels based on product roadmaps, funding, and leadership statements. Case studies include Humans&, which is developing workplace tools and sits at Level 3; TML, whose leadership turnover raises questions about its position between Level 2 and 4; World Labs, which has shipped a commercial world‑model and appears near Level 4; and Safe Superintelligence, a research‑first venture that remains at Level 1 despite massive funding. Leer más →

Legal AI startup Harvey has purchased Hexus, a two‑year‑old firm that builds AI‑driven product demo, video, and guide tools. Hexus founder Sakshi Pratap says her San Francisco team has already joined Harvey, while engineers in India will transition after a new Bangalore office opens. The deal aligns with Harvey’s aggressive expansion, as the company recently confirmed an $8 billion valuation after raising $160 million, bringing total funding to $760 million. Harvey now serves more than 1,000 clients in 60 countries, including most of the top U.S. law firms, and aims to accelerate its suite for in‑house legal departments. Leer más →

LiveKit, a developer of real‑time AI voice and video infrastructure, announced a $100 million funding round that values the company at $1 billion. The round was led by Index Ventures with participation from existing backers such as Altimeter Capital Management, Hanabi Capital and Redpoint Ventures. LiveKit powers OpenAI’s ChatGPT voice mode and counts customers like xAI, Salesforce, Tesla, 911 emergency service operators and mental‑health providers. Founded in 2021 by Russ d’Sa and David Zhao as an open‑source project, the startup pivoted to a managed cloud offering to meet enterprise demand amid the voice‑AI boom. Leer más →

The creators of the open‑source inference engine vLLM have launched a venture‑backed startup called Inferact, raising $150 million in seed funding at an $800 million valuation. The round was co‑led by Andreessen Horowitz and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Inferact aims to bring the high‑performance vLLM technology, originally incubated at the UC Berkeley lab of Databricks co‑founder Ion Stoica, to enterprise customers. Early adopters include Amazon’s cloud services and a major shopping app, signaling strong market interest as AI inference moves to the forefront of commercial deployment. Leer más →

Aliisa Rosenthal, OpenAI’s first sales leader, has moved into venture capital as a general partner at Acrew Capital. Drawing on her experience scaling OpenAI’s enterprise sales organization, she aims to help AI startups build durable competitive advantages. Rosenthal highlights the importance of specialized context layers, affordable model alternatives, and application‑level innovation as key moat factors. She will tap her network of former OpenAI employees and enterprise buyers to identify and support promising companies. Leer más →

AI startup Humans& announced a $480 million seed financing at a $4.48 billion valuation. Backers include Nvidia, Jeff Bezos, SV Angel, GV and Emerson Collective. The company’s founders – former researchers from Anthropic, Google, xAI and a Stanford professor – aim to create AI that acts as collaborative “instant‑messaging”‑style software, emphasizing long‑horizon reinforcement learning, memory and multi‑agent interaction. Humans& plans to rethink model training at scale and user interaction to make AI a connective tissue for organizations and communities. Leer más →