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:…

‘It’s literally the gulag’: inside the revolt at Meta’s AI unit, where elite engineers were drafted to label data
‘It’s literally the gulag’: inside the revolt at Meta’s AI unit, where elite engineers were drafted to label data

It takes a particular kind of dysfunction for an employee to hijack a company-wide livestream and demand the hosts pass a message to a senior executive: that he is, in not so many words, garbage. That happened inside Meta this month. According to a rec…

Accenture had its worst stock day ever on fears AI is eating consulting. Hours earlier, it spent $4.18bn trying to escape that.
Accenture had its worst stock day ever on fears AI is eating consulting. Hours earlier, it spent $4.18bn trying to escape that.

Accenture had the worst day in its history on the stock market on Thursday, and the reason cuts to the heart of the AI era: investors increasingly fear that AI will hollow out the consulting business itself. Shares fell as much as 20 per cent, the comp…

The ‘godfather of AI’ called xAI a failure and warned of a bubble. He’s also selling the alternative.
The ‘godfather of AI’ called xAI a failure and warned of a bubble. He’s also selling the alternative.

Yann LeCun has never been quiet about his doubts, and his latest target is one of the most valuable companies on earth. Elon Musk’s xAI is “kind of a failure” that will not be able to compete on the frontier with OpenAI and Anthropic, LeCun, the founde…

Baseten is raising $1.5bn at up to $13bn, betting AI’s profits lie in cheap inference
Baseten is raising $1.5bn at up to $13bn, betting AI’s profits lie in cheap inference

Baseten is finalising a $1.5bn funding round that values the company at up to $13bn. The structure is almost as notable as the size. The round is dual-tiered, with some investors buying in at an $11bn valuation and others at $13bn, according to the com…

NASA picked Eric Schmidt’s Relativity Space to fly to Mars. It has never reached orbit.
NASA picked Eric Schmidt’s Relativity Space to fly to Mars. It has never reached orbit.

NASA is partnering with Relativity Space, the rocket company run by former Google chief Eric Schmidt, to fly a science mission to Mars. Announced on June 17, the mission is called Aeolus, the first flight in Relativity’s new Interplanetary Sciences Pro…

Midjourney says its new full-body scanner beats an MRI. It has never built hardware before.
Midjourney says its new full-body scanner beats an MRI. It has never built hardware before.

Midjourney, the company best known for turning text prompts into images, has announced something it has never made before: hardware. And not a phone case or a pair of glasses, but a full-body medical scanner. At an event in San Francisco on June 17, fo…

Sequoia’s Roelof Botha joins the SpaceX board, days after the record IPO
Sequoia’s Roelof Botha joins the SpaceX board, days after the record IPO

SpaceX has named its first new board member since going public, and the word doing the heavy lifting in the announcement is “independent.” In a filing on June 17, the company said its board had elected Roelof Botha, the former Sequoia Capital steward, …

Trump says Apple will build chips with Intel in the US
Trump says Apple will build chips with Intel in the US

The news that Apple had agreed to make its chips in the United States did not come from Apple. It came, on Thursday, from a post by President Donald Trump on Truth Social, announcing that the company had agreed to work with Intel to design and manufact…