Agents

AIThreatBook says it has acquired CyberStrikeAI, an open-source AI pentesting agent. It says the tool will stay open source with added guardrails, while new capability enhancements go into its commercial edition. The post also says an earlier threat intelligence report wrongly linked the developer, a security engineer at Alipay, to national agencies.

AINaive AI, founded seven months ago, has raised $400 million across three rounds at a $1.42 billion post-money valuation. The article traces how its founder Dai Jifeng and seven other researchers met through Microsoft Research Asia, SenseTime, and Shanghai AI Lab. Naive AI's first model, Naive-N0.5-Flash, is a 309B-parameter MoE model with 15.5B active parameters, released under the MIT license.

AINous Research raised $90 million in a Series B round led by Robot Ventures, with Nvidia, Samsung and Y Combinator participating, at a $1.5 billion valuation. The company says its open-source Hermes agent, released in February, has been downloaded more than 24 million times. Nous generated $36 million in annualized revenue as of mid-September and expects it to top $100 million by year's end, according to the Wall Street Journal.

AIManus, an AI agent startup, raised more than $500 million in a funding round led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, with follow-on investment from Tencent, HSG and ZhenFund. The company did not disclose its post-funding valuation, though Bloomberg reported last month it was set to double to $4 billion. The round follows Beijing's order blocking Meta's roughly $2 billion acquisition of Manus.

AINous Research, developer of the open source Hermes Agent, raised a $90 million Series B at a $1.5 billion valuation led by Robot Ventures. The capital will fund its enterprise push with Hermes for Businesses, which lets companies deploy customized AI agents for multi-step workflows while keeping data private. The article reports about $36 million in annualized revenue by mid-September 2026, citing The Wall Street Journal.

Why it matters: The source ties the funding round to a planned shift from open source developers toward paid enterprise agent deployments, which shows how the business model may change.

AIManus' parent company Butterfly Effect said it raised more than $500 million, its first funding round since Meta called off its $2 billion acquisition. Boyu Capital and IDG Capital led the round, and existing shareholders including Tencent also participated, though the valuation was not disclosed.

AIZach Yadegari, co-founder of Cal AI, has launched Persona, a personal AI agent startup that raised $10 million led by Vine Ventures. Persona is a free beta used through iMessage, and its $179 wearable band is expected to ship in December. The company says its model runs in the cloud, user data is encrypted, and purchases require user approval, though its business model relies on ads.

AIHone launches Engines, which it describes as AI that owns business outcomes rather than answering questions or completing tasks. The company says it raised a $60M seed round led by Benchmark and Index, with participation from Elad Gil and others. Hone says customers have used Engines for procurement savings, funnel optimization, credit risk management, pipeline growth, and account management.

AISafeWorld emerged from stealth this week with $12.2 million in seed funding to offer simulation software for testing AI-powered robots. Its platform runs robots through thousands of variations of rare or dangerous scenarios with reactive human motion, and teams can rerun tests with each software update. The company says it has about half a dozen customers, mostly publicly traded companies, in industrial, manufacturing, logistics, construction and some home use cases.

AIAugment Code says it has agreed to sell Cosmos, Auggie CLI, the Code Context Engine and related technology to Harness. The team behind these products is moving to Harness to keep developing them. Augment says Harness's integrated platform delivers these capabilities to customers more effectively than building them independently.

Why it matters: The post shows what Augment Code is selling and why, which matters for teams tracking consolidation among AI coding tools.

AIManus parent company Butterfly Effect has completed a new financing round of over $500 million, led by Boyu Capital and IDG Capital, and is rebuilding a team in Beijing to develop AI Agent products for the Chinese market. Its recruitment page lists 17 open positions, up from 11 before the National Day holiday, including AI Agent product manager, Agent Harness engineer, Agent evaluation engineer, and LLM algorithm engineer roles.

AITeknium, a Nous Research affiliate, posted only the word "hello" on X. The quoted post from Nous Research announces a Series B raise to advance Hermes Agent and build a mobile app, with investors including NVIDIA and Samsung Next.

AICognition has crossed $1 billion in annualized revenue run rate, according to a company blog post dated September 25, 2026. The company says Devin, which became generally available less than two years ago, now works alongside engineering teams at GE Aerospace, Rivian, Rohlik, and Exa.

AILiveKit has acquired Loophole Labs, an infrastructure company whose technology will enhance LiveKit's platform for building voice, video, and physical AI agents. The acquisition moves LiveKit closer to offering customers essentially unlimited concurrent agents, according to the company.

AIAnde, which builds AI agents for corporate entertainment, has raised $52 million in funding led by Lightspeed and Redpoint along with other investors. The round was reported in The Information's AI Agenda newsletter.

AIFactory has raised $200M at a $5B valuation from investors including Blackstone, Khosla Ventures, and Sequoia Capital, bringing its total funding to over $400 million. The company says it will use the capital to accelerate research, product, and global go-to-market efforts. Factory says hundreds of thousands of developers use its platform, with customers including Nvidia, Blackstone, and T-Mobile.

AILegal AI company Harvey says it raised $550M at a $15.5B valuation, led by Diffusion and Lightspeed. It reports more than $400M in ARR and 3,000 customers, including 80% of the top 100 law firms, and plans to invest the funds in people, compute, and inference and model training.

AICognition has raised over $2B at a $48B valuation, led by Andreessen Horowitz and Accel. The company says run-rate revenue grew from $492M to almost $900M since its May round, and Devin now offers Auto-Triage, Security Swarm, and Automations.

AIBaidu's latest AI Pulse highlights how its product portfolio, including DuMate, GenFlow, MeDo, and ERNIE Assistant, is built to take AI work from request to finished result. The post also notes that Baidu has become a dual-primary listed company and that its Apollo Go robotaxi service has expanded in Dubai and Hong Kong.

AINVIDIA and AWS are expanding their partnership across GPUs, CPUs, networking, open models and software. The announcement cites 2 million additional NVIDIA GPUs across AWS infrastructure, the NVIDIA Vera CPU coming to AWS for agentic AI, NVLink Fusion with NVHBM memory, and 100,000 GPUs for U.S. government AI factories on secure AWS infrastructure.

AIAt the 2026 Jiazi Gravity Tech Industry Investment Conference in Beijing, Jiazi Guangnian's CEO Zhang Yijia said first-half 2026 saw investment amounts rise 91.6% year on year, IPOs rise 39.2%, and M&A transaction value double. The report said AI absorbed over 70% of global venture investment, with OpenAI and Anthropic together raising $217 billion, roughly 40%.

AIDatabricks announced it crossed a $7 billion revenue run-rate, growing over 80% year over year in Q2, and raised $5 billion in its latest fundraise. Lakebase reached a $100 million-plus run-rate, and Lakehouse reached $1.5 billion-plus, growing over 100% year over year, with continued positive adjusted free cash flow. The company says it will invest the capital in Lakebase, a serverless Postgres database for AI agents; Genie, AI coworkers for business data; and Unity AI Gateway, multi-AI governance for controlling costs.

AISequoia Capital is leading a seed round for Preview, an AI-native video creation and production platform that combines a video timeline with an infinite ideation canvas in one collaborative workspace. The platform lets teams generate with any model, track characters, locations, and props, and keep complete records of how each asset was made. The article says more than 100 studios are already using Preview, from agencies to Hollywood feature filmmakers.

AIDatabricks has acquired ElectricSQL, the team behind PGlite, a WebAssembly Postgres implementation that runs in browsers and syncs asynchronously with Postgres instances. The company says the technology will strengthen its Lakebase Postgres offering for fast AI agents.

AIManus will delete data generated by certain users on or after December 29, 2025, from 8:00 a.m. on August 23 through August 24, 2026 (SGT), as it returns to independent operations and meets regulatory requirements. Affected users can back up their data until 7:59 a.m. on August 23 and restore it starting 8:00 a.m. on August 25, 2026 (SGT), with no charges during the backup period.

AICorma is training a foundation model for defensive cybersecurity agents, trained with large-scale reinforcement learning on simulated enterprise networks. In red/blue team tests, a defender failed to find a planted backdoor 78% of the time, even when it was an identical copy of the model that planted it. Corma says its agentic Security Workforce is deployed at Fortune 500 companies and large enterprises, and that the firm's seed round is led by Sequoia Capital.

AILTM has partnered with Cognition to deploy Devin, the AI software engineer, through BlueVerse RightLogic, a managed, outcome-based service that clears customers' vulnerability backlogs. RightLogic is designed to clear 80 percent of an enterprise's CVE backlog, up from the 60 percent previously delivered, and will focus first on banking, financial services, and insurance. The service is the first of five joint offerings the companies plan to bring to market.

AICyera is joining with Oasis Security, which builds agentic access management for non-human identities such as API keys, service accounts, OAuth tokens, and agent credentials. The combination pairs Cyera's knowledge of where sensitive data lives with Oasis's visibility into which identities and agents can reach it. Sequoia Capital, which backed both companies since their Series A rounds, says the pairing covers the full path an AI agent takes through an enterprise.

AICognition has acquired The Interaction Company of California, the maker of Poke, a personal AI agent that texts users proactively and is approved to text natively on Apple Messages. Poke has exchanged more than 100 million messages in the last three months, and Poke users can keep using the product as before. Cognition says its models and infrastructure will make Poke faster and more reliable.

AICognition has signed a memorandum of understanding with the U.S. Department of Energy to join the Genesis Mission, a national AI initiative launched by executive order in November 2025. Cognition will contribute its Devin autonomous AI software engineer in four areas: software and data security, modernizing legacy scientific code, expanding scientific workforce capacity, and cloud modernization. Devin Desktop and CLI are listed as FedRAMP Class D (High) Authorized, and the company has offered in-kind code security scans for national laboratory codebases.

AICognition has acquired or welcomed the TierZero team, led by Anhang and Yun, to bring their work on automations into Devin. The goal is to help engineers spend less time handling incidents and more time building, with the source offering no further product details.

AISable has created "Aidan," an AI employee that leads customer calls using vision, voice, video and real-time browser interaction. Frontier companies including Notion and Decagon are already using Sable to explain their products, and more than 150 companies are on its waitlist. Sequoia Capital led Sable's seed round and co-led its Series A.

AIBunkerhill Health's Carebricks platform lets health systems create and deploy AI agents across clinical and operational use cases using data hospitals already generate. Sequoia Capital backed the company at seed and is continuing to invest. At UTMB Health, Bunkerhill grew from one agent in production to more than twenty, consolidating multiple vendors' point solutions into one platform.

AICognition says its one-year-old merger with Windsurf has produced a more capable Devin, which now manages other Devins at a mid-to-senior engineering level, and new SWE-1.7 model, described as its most capable and efficient to date. The company reports growing from 44 to 350 people and revenue run rate from $73M to $500M+ since merging the brands.

AISpaceX has exercised its option to acquire Cursor in an all-stock transaction, aiming to build highly useful AI models. The quoted announcement says SpaceXAI has spent several months jointly training a model with Cursor, to be released soon in Cursor and Grok Build.

AISpaceX has exercised its option to acquire Cursor in an all-stock transaction, with the stated goal of building the world's most useful AI models. Over the past few months, SpaceXAI has been jointly training a model with Cursor, which will be released in Cursor and Grok Build soon.

Why it matters: The deal combines Cursor's coding tools with SpaceX's AI team, and a jointly trained model is due to ship in Cursor and Grok Build.

AICognition introduced the AI Productivity Guarantee, under which it will issue credits up to $10M if Devin delivers less engineering value than enterprise customers pay for. The company uses an AI estimator to measure hours of productive output, validated against engineers' own estimates of how long the same work would have taken by hand. Value is converted to dollars at a standard global rate and compared against each customer's consumption near the end of the annual contract.

Why it matters: The post explains how Cognition estimates Devin's output in hours and backs the estimate with a $10M credit commitment, a concrete model for measuring AI vendor value.