Society & jobs

AITechnology stocks fell after the Financial Times reported that OpenAI told investors its annualized revenue is approaching $50 billion, well below the $68 billion widely reported two months earlier. An anonymous source said the earlier figure included gross revenue from partners while the new one is net revenue. The Nasdaq fell 1.25%, with Oracle down 5.5%, Intel down 5.3%, and Nvidia down 2.9%. OpenAI's most recent valuation is $852 billion, and it now plans a 2027 IPO rather than 2026.

Why it matters: The article explains how a gross-versus-net revenue distinction behind the reported figures moved AI stocks, linking OpenAI's valuation to its IPO plans.

AIAutomation Anywhere agreed to acquire Boost.ai, a conversational voice AI company, from Nordic Capital, the company announced Wednesday. Boost.ai supports more than 36 languages, serves hundreds of customers in regulated industries such as financial services, telecommunications and insurance, and maintains more than 650 deployments and about 600 live AI agents. The deal extends Automation Anywhere's autonomous enterprise platform into customer experience, following its acquisition of Aisera in late 2025.

AIAndreessen Horowitz (a16z) says it led General Medicine's $120M Series B round. General Medicine aims to combine patient history, clinical guidance, transparent pricing, and access to care in one experience, with a catalog of over 2,900 products and services. The company also plans to offer the same infrastructure to health systems, payors, and pharmacies.

AIVariety reports that AI Studio Authors First is backed by $10 million and pledges to help writers faithfully adapt their books. The post links to the full Variety article, which contains further details.

AIa16z says it is leading doxxnet's Series A, backing a private network that lets people and their AI agents browse privately, transfer files directly, and communicate peer to peer. doxxnet runs its own global backbone, IP space, naming system and certificate authority, and users can start without an email address or phone number. The company is led by Barrett Lyon, whom a16z credits with helping pioneer DDoS defense through Prolexic.

AIa16z says it is leading Armadin's Series B, backing a team led by Kevin Mandia, Travis Lanham, Evan Peña, and David Slater. Armadin's platform uses an agentic attacker swarm to run continuous offensive testing across external assets, cloud, identity, internal networks, and applications, producing validated kill chains and proactive remediation. The first product is Armadin Red.

AIMeta's Muse personal agent has become a mass-market consumer product, with Shopify announcing a deal to let Muse check out across its shops and Amazon blocking Muse from shopping on its platform. Startup Instinct, valued at $2.5 billion in its latest round, is reportedly seeking new funding at $10 billion. Shares of Expedia, banks, brokerages and subscription media fell on fears that agents could bypass them.

AIAir Street Capital has led a $40 million Series A round in Jack & Jill, with Madrona joining and existing investors Creandum and Entrepreneurs First investing again. The company runs Jack, an AI agent that talks with job seekers about career moves and searches millions of job postings, and Jill, a recruiting agent that introduces candidates to hiring managers. Jack & Jill has arranged 25,000 interviews and plans 5,000 more each month, according to the article.