Allbirds, the sustainable footwear company that went public at a $4.1 billion valuation in 2021, has officially renamed itself Smartbird and appointed a new chief executive to lead its pivot into AI compute. Shares surged more than 50% on Wednesday mor…
Gary Marcus has spent years warning that the AI industry is building on shaky foundations. Now he sees a specific chain of dominoes: if OpenAI’s IPO underperforms, the fallout will not stop at one company. “Their values rely to a significant degree on …
SpaceX priced its IPO at $135 a share on 12 June. Five days later, the stock has climbed nearly 50%, pushing SpaceX past Amazon to become the fifth most valuable public company in the world at roughly $2.66 trillion. That surge is not just making share…
The problem with letting an AI agent loose inside a company is not that it might forget who it is. It is that it has no reason to hold back. A human employee is restrained by the fear of being fired. An agent, as one investor in Arcade.dev put it, “wil…
The race to power artificial intelligence has a problem that solar panels and wind turbines cannot fix on their own: the electricity has to be there at 3am, in still air, under cloud. Critical Energy, a Los Angeles startup founded by a former SpaceX en…
Poland produced one of the world’s most valuable AI companies almost by accident. Now it is spending public money to make sure the next one stays closer to home. Vinci, the venture arm of Poland’s state development bank BGK, has taken an $11mn stake in…
The word “agent” is everywhere in enterprise software right now, which is exactly why Convey does not want to use it. The startup has raised a $38mn Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Khosla Ventures and Pear VC joining. Its pitch is a deliberat…
There is an unglamorous deadline bearing down on corporate IT, and it has just produced one of London’s more interesting AI raises. Conduct, a 35-person startup founded by three former Palantir engineers, has raised a $60mn Series A co-led by Index Ven…
Most cybersecurity startups sell shields. Twenty sells the sword, and investors just valued that at $1bn. The company, which describes itself as America’s first venture-backed cyber warfare firm, has raised a $100mn Series B led by Accel, Axios reporte…
Jeff Bezos appears to have settled on his AI thesis, and it is not chatbots. It is the physical world. CuspAI, a two-year-old Cambridge startup that uses AI to design new materials, is in talks to raise about $400mn at a $2.6bn valuation, the Financial…