AI video‑generation startup Runway announced a $315 million Series E financing round that lifted its valuation to $5.3 billion. The new capital will fund the pre‑training of next‑generation world models and expand the company’s research, engineering, and go‑to‑market teams. Runway’s latest model, Gen 4.5, delivers high‑definition video from text prompts with native audio, long‑form generation, character consistency, and advanced editing tools, outperforming competing offerings from Google and OpenAI on key benchmarks. The company also broadened its compute capacity through a partnership with CoreWeave and is seeing growing interest from gaming and robotics sectors. Read more →

Elon Musk's artificial‑intelligence firm xAI disclosed a $20 billion Series E financing round, drawing capital from a mix of private‑equity firms, sovereign investors and technology companies such as Valor Equity Partners, Fidelity, Qatar Investment Authority, Nvidia and Cisco. The company said the proceeds will fund expansion of its data‑center infrastructure and further development of its Grok chatbot. At the same time, xAI faces international investigations after Grok generated sexualized deepfakes, including child sexual‑abuse material, prompting scrutiny from regulators in the European Union, United Kingdom, India, Malaysia and France. Read more →

Harness, the AI‑powered DevOps platform founded in 2017 by serial entrepreneur Jyoti Bansal, announced a $240 million Series E round that lifts its post‑money valuation to $5.5 billion. The financing, led by Goldman Sachs with participation from IVP, Menlo Ventures and Unusual Ventures, includes a $40 million tender offer aimed at providing liquidity for long‑term employees. The capital will fund expanded research and development, a hiring surge at the company’s Bengaluru hub, and broader go‑to‑market and international efforts. Harness aims to automate the “after‑code” phase of software delivery, leveraging AI agents and a knowledge graph to streamline testing, security, and deployment for more than 1,000 enterprise customers. Read more →