Fundraising

AIShengShu Technology has released Vidu Q4 Preview, a first preview of its next flagship video generation model, supporting up to 15 reference images, up to three reference audio clips, and output up to 4K with 10-bit color depth. Clips can run up to 16 seconds, and the preview supports only image-to-video and reference-to-video generation. For Vidu's SaaS product, a two-month launch offer starts at RMB 0.09 per second, while the standard price after the offer and the full Q4 release date have not been announced.

AIUpscale AI says its SkyHammer scale-up switch ASIC will deliver an aggregate bandwidth of 115.2 Tb/sec and support up to 576 accelerators in a single networking tier. The company is partnering with Nvidia on NVLink Fusion while also developing an alternative to Nvidia's NVSwitch for AI clusters. The article notes that Upscale AI has raised $500 million in total funding and has a $2 billion valuation.

AITypeSafe AI raised $870 million at a $7.5 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Sequoia and DCVC. The company says Jev, released September 15, is used by a third of Fortune 500 companies, and it is a transformer model that outputs probabilities rather than text. TypeSafe claims Jev runs faster and uses far fewer tokens than LLMs, positioning it for automation tasks.

AITypesafe AI raised $870 million in a Series A round at a $7.5 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Sequoia Capital and existing investor DCVC. Martin Casado joins the board. The company says it will add more machine-native models and enterprise features and that a third of the Fortune 500 use its product.

AIStepFun's Step 5 Preview, a 600B-total, 27B-active MoE model with 1M context and vision, is free to try on Nous Portal for one week. Nous Research says it scored 33.89 on the Hermes Index, the same score as GPT-6 Luna.

AITypeSafe Inc., creator of the Jev AI model, says it raised $870 million at a $7.5 billion valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz with Sequoia Capital and DCVC participating. Jev outputs structured results, such as yes/no answers, list selections or scores, instead of natural language text, and the company says it runs requests in under 700 milliseconds, up to 200 times faster than some frontier LLMs. TypeSafe plans to use the funds to expand its planned System One model series and roll out unspecified enterprise features.

AIOpenAI's annualized revenue is expected to reach or exceed $70 billion by the end of the year, according to Bloomberg's Ed Ludlow. Oracle is keeping several data centers on schedule by using truck deliveries of natural gas. The episode also covers the mega AI IPO pipeline and the future of physical AI, in a conversation with Kleiner Perkins partner Ilya Fushman.

AIaccording to a post from Kilo. The model has 600B parameters, with 27B active per token, and supports a 1M-token context and vision.

AIOpenAI's annualized revenue rate stood at roughly $50 billion at the end of September, according to the Financial Times, after an earlier figure of nearly $70 billion, which Axios reports was calculated to compare more directly with Anthropic's. The gap reflects different accounting for partner sales, with Anthropic recording full customer payments and OpenAI counting only its own share for certain deals. OpenAI is negotiating at least $30 billion in new capital at a target pre-money valuation of $1.4 trillion, Bloomberg reports.

AIVerizon shares fell about 7% and T-Mobile fell 12% on Friday after SpaceX announced a deal to buy a nationwide spectrum portfolio from Grain Management to expand Starlink into mobile service. The portfolio covers up to 14 megahertz of paired spectrum in the 800 MHz band. AT&T fell about 10%, while SpaceX stock rose about 1%.

AIRohit Prasad, a longtime Amazon AI executive who helped build Alexa, will lead Boston Dynamics as the robotics company prepares to manufacture humanoid robots at scale. The source does not give further details on the appointment or production timeline.

AIa16z says it is leading an investment in TypeSafe AI, whose Jev model hands decisions to code as typed values and reached 1 trillion tokens generated three days after launch. The company says Jev costs roughly 1/100 to 1/500 of frontier models and runs 100x faster on classification tasks at comparable accuracy. TypeSafe says 25% of the Fortune 500 have integrated Jev.

AIFactory says it is acquiring Mentlio (YC S26), a startup building in-harness model routing, context compression, and AI usage measurement to optimize cost and quality. The founders, Ashank Shah and Ahmet Demirbas, will join Factory to bring this work into its autonomous software engineering platform for large enterprises.

AIArena's weekly update says Nano Banana 2.1 ranked in the top six across three Image Arena modes, with #4 in Multi-Image Edit at 1431 points. Mistral Large 4 placed #43 overall in Agent Arena, 11 spots above Mistral Medium 3.5, and Claude Haiku 5.5 (High) landed #30 in Code Arena WebDev at 1587 points, priced at $0.10/$0.50 per 1M input/output tokens. The post also introduces Arena's Alignment Index and announces a $200M Series B at a $3.1B valuation.

AITypeSafe AI, the startup behind Jev, a new AI model that went viral after launching a few weeks ago, has raised about $870 million at a $7.5 billion valuation. Andreessen Horowitz led the financing.

AIOpenAI expects to reach or exceed $70 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year, driven largely by growth in its enterprise business. The figure was reported by Bloomberg's Ed Ludlow on "Bloomberg Open Interest."

AIShenzhen-based Insta360 opened its first U.S. flagship store in New York City's Times Square in September, marketing its pocket-sized cameras to content creators, travelers, and sports enthusiasts. Co-founder Max Richter said the U.S. accounts for 30% to 40% of the company's revenue, while the FCC has blocked DJI from selling new drones and cameras in the country. Insta360 also launched drone brand Antigravity, whose A1 drone received FCC approval just before a new foreign drone rule took effect.

AIRevolut CEO Nik Storonsky says the fintech aims to crack the US market and compete with JPMorgan and American Express. He says Revolut plans a full digital banking offer, from credit cards to loans, and will test AI agents that can shop and transact for users.

AIOpenAI reportedly assured investors it expects to reach a $70 billion annualized revenue target this year, an apparent effort to ease concerns that it is missing earlier projections. The figures matter because they are seen as a gauge of underlying demand for cutting-edge AI models and a justification for huge spending on tech infrastructure. Some analysts, however, say the annualized revenue metric itself is flawed.

AIBending Spoons CEO Luca Ferrari said falling software company valuations create buying opportunities as the firm aims to benefit from AI disrupting the industry. The source does not provide further details on specific deals, figures, or timelines.

AIFirmus abandoned its attempt at one of Australia's biggest-ever initial public offerings after failing to attract global investors wary of frothy AI valuations. The Nvidia-backed data center company's withdrawal reflects growing investor skepticism toward AI-related companies.

AIOpenAI told investors it expects $50bn in revenue this year, about $20bn less than the $70bn it had signalled last month. The gap stems partly from comparing with Anthropic, which counts revenue sold through cloud partners such as AWS and Google Cloud, while OpenAI does not. The news weighed on US tech stocks, and OpenAI is in early talks to raise $30bn at a valuation of about $1.4tn.

AIOpenAI expects to reach or exceed $70 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026, according to people familiar with the matter. The company's annualized revenue was roughly $50 billion at the end of September, those people said.

AIDayOne Data Centers Ltd., a Singapore-based company, has held preliminary talks with banks for weeks about a potential $500 million bond offering, according to people familiar with the matter. The discussions are taking place even as the company plans to list in the US.

AIFirmus Grid Ltd. is exploring a private funding round to raise as much as $3 billion after its planned initial public offering collapsed. The data center operator is seeking alternative financing options following the failed IPO.

AITom Watson, now a senior vice-president at Palantir, warned UK ministers against letting "mob rule" dictate public procurement, saying they could get "in a lot of trouble" if they do. The former Labour deputy leader's comments come as Prime Minister Andy Burnham faces pressure to drop Palantir from government contracts, including a £330m NHS software deal.

AIAustralian cloud-computing firm Firmus Grid scrapped its IPO, which had sought a $30 billion valuation. The company had only two operational data centers at the time.

AISoftBank Group Corp. is seeking to raise as much as $100 billion from Gulf investors to expand its AI investments, the Financial Times reported, citing people familiar with the matter. The report did not specify the timing or terms of the proposed fundraising.

AIXPENG has named its robotaxi business XPENG YOYO and launched a ride-hailing mini program that lets invited members of the public test the service. The company says its first production robotaxi, based on the flagship GX model, rolled off the line in May 2026, and it has completed more than 2,000 internal test rides in Guangzhou. XPENG says YOYO uses four in-house Turing AI chips delivering 3,000 TOPS, a second-generation VLA model, and a vision-based approach without high-definition maps or LiDAR.

AIOpenAI's most senior Asia-Pacific public policy executive is leaving after six months in the role, according to a person familiar with the matter. The departure comes as the ChatGPT maker faces regulatory scrutiny in the region.

AIOpenAI expects to reach or exceed $70 billion in annualized revenue by the end of 2026, according to people familiar with the matter. The growth is driven largely by its enterprise business.

AISnyk moved its internal support agent, Snyk Assist, into the core Snyk product in September 2026, giving every paying customer access. Built on LangChain and LangGraph with observability in LangSmith, the agent answers questions in plain language and can open support cases or log feature requests. It runs as a single agent behind Slack, web and API surfaces, with tools attached per user permissions.

AIAustralian AI data center operator Firmus, backed by Nvidia, has withdrawn its planned initial public offering, citing market volatility and conditions. Its board concluded the proposed terms did not adequately reflect the company's business strength and long-term growth outlook. Firmus said it will now pursue private market capital and consider other public and private options.

AIElon Musk announced on X on October 7 that Grok Bot will select the most suitable backend model for each specific task, explicitly naming Claude Opus 5.5. The source text is truncated, so the full list of other models and any further details are not available.

AIMeta, Walmart, Stripe and Sierra Technologies are partnering on a Personal Agent Protocol that would define how AI agents interact with businesses online. Sierra co-founder Bret Taylor said it will handle authentication and give companies visibility into personal agents' activity, and it is open for anyone to implement. The effort responds to concerns from six major banks, which urged the industry last month to set standards around transparency, safety, privacy, choice and interoperability.