Rejected by 180 investors, Bland just raised $50M to prove voice AI is the future
Rejected by 180 investors, Bland just raised $50M to prove voice AI is the future

Isaiah Granet spent three weeks at Y Combinator getting turned down by 180 investors. Their reason was always the same: phone calls would not exist in a year. He has now raised more than $100mn to prove them wrong. His startup, Bland, has closed a $50m…

The AI bubble didn’t pop. It sent the bill
The AI bubble didn’t pop. It sent the bill

Until last week, about 200 organisations could use a preview of Anthropic’s most capable model, Mythos. They got in through a programme called Glasswing, after the system flagged thousands of software vulnerabilities. Then, on the evening of 12 June, t…

General Intuition is raising $300 million to train AI agents on the video game data OpenAI tried to buy
General Intuition is raising $300 million to train AI agents on the video game data OpenAI tried to buy

General Intuition, a New York-based AI lab that trains agents to reason about space and time using billions of video game clips, is in talks to raise approximately $300 million at a valuation of just over $2 billion, according to TechCrunch. The round …

SpaceX adds Sequoia’s Roelof Botha to its board, days after record $75 billion IPO
SpaceX adds Sequoia’s Roelof Botha to its board, days after record $75 billion IPO

SpaceX has appointed Roelof Botha, the former steward of Sequoia Capital, to its board of directors. The appointment, disclosed in an 8-K filing on 17 June, comes less than a week after the company’s record-breaking $75 billion IPO. Botha will serve as…

Nvidia-backed Verse raises $54M to help AI data centres skip the power queue
Nvidia-backed Verse raises $54M to help AI data centres skip the power queue

For years, the scarce resource in AI was chips. Now it is power. Verse Enterprises wants to unblock that bottleneck. The San Francisco startup has raised an oversubscribed $54mn Series B. Bessemer Venture Partners led the round. GV, Nvidia and Norrsken…

Architect Labs raises $24M to let any company design its own AI chip
Architect Labs raises $24M to let any company design its own AI chip

Designing a chip is hard. It takes years, hundreds of millions of dollars, and a tiny pool of experts. Most of them sit inside a few large companies. Architect Labs wants to change that with AI. The Palo Alto startup left stealth on Thursday with a $24…

Gradial raises $65M to be the ‘AI glue’ for enterprise marketing
Gradial raises $65M to be the ‘AI glue’ for enterprise marketing

Every software company is racing to bolt an AI agent onto its own product. Gradial is betting the real money is in the gaps between them. The Seattle startup has raised $65mn in Series C funding to build what it calls an operating system for marketing:…

California expected a tax bonanza from AI IPOs. Modern compensation structures may blunt the windfall.
California expected a tax bonanza from AI IPOs. Modern compensation structures may blunt the windfall.

SpaceX is now valued at $2.5 trillion. OpenAI and Anthropic are expected to go public later this year at valuations approaching $1 trillion each. California, where all three companies are based or have significant operations, should be looking at the l…

While Helsing and Anduril chase billion-dollar valuations, Comand AI raised €32M for the layer above them
While Helsing and Anduril chase billion-dollar valuations, Comand AI raised €32M for the layer above them

The defence-tech land grab has a new front, and it sits above the drones and sensors that get the headlines. Comand AI, a Paris startup building AI software for military command, has raised a €32mn Series A led by Blossom Capital, with a strategic inve…

85% of NATO’s defence-tech funding goes to the US. AVP and Earlybird raised €500M to change that.
85% of NATO’s defence-tech funding goes to the US. AVP and Earlybird raised €500M to change that.

Europe is pledging hundreds of billions to defence. Almost none of the venture money funding the technology behind it is European. Since 2019, the US has captured around 85 per cent of all NATO defence-tech venture funding, according to the founders of…