Fundraising

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.

AIGeekPark reports that Krinwave, a Shenzhen company, has completed a new 400 million yuan round with XVC and Sequoia China as new investors. The company says its low-frequency ultrasound captures brain structures through the skull, which conventional high-frequency devices cannot, and it aims to supply hardware and its kOS software platform to brain-computer interface and NeuroAI groups.

AIEvan Cheng, CEO of Mysten Labs, presented the Sui Agent Pass at Sui Basecamp in Singapore as a way to bound AI agent authority over money. Users would define allowed actions, assets, recipients, and permission duration, with the system itself enforcing those limits so that losses stop at a predefined cap even if an agent is compromised. The article argues that the real challenge is making such limits impossible to bypass when failures occur.

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.

AIThreatBook has acquired CyberStrikeAI, an open-source AI pentesting agent, after reports that attackers had used it in real intrusions. The company says it added guardrails to limit misuse but will put new capability enhancements into its commercial edition, and it argues defenders should control such tools. It also corrects an earlier threat intelligence report that linked the developer, a security engineer at Alipay, to government agencies, calling that attribution a false positive.

AIGoogle Cloud unveiled Gemini Agent at its Gemini at Work 2026 event, a general-purpose work agent for enterprise customers that works across Gemini Enterprise and Workspace. Currently the agent supports Gemini and Claude models, with an API planned so developers can integrate it into third-party applications.

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.

AIMicbot says a procurement dispute with a Zhejiang customer over four wheeled-quadruped robots has been settled through negotiation, after reports of late P2 deliveries, a balance fault in a Curiosity S01 and a disagreement over secondary-development rights. The buyer, which ordered two P2 units for 580,000 yuan and later two S01 units at 160,000 yuan each, had refused research-only terms for software access. Micbot's October 6 statement said it supports customer secondary development but requires clear authorization and protection of core technology.

AINaive AI, a Tsinghua-linked company founded seven months ago, has raised $400 million across three rounds at a post-money valuation of $1.42 billion. The company's founder is Dai Jifeng, an associate professor in Tsinghua's Department of Electronic Engineering, and its team has not given interviews or published a product introduction.

AIZhang Lei, then a recent PhD graduate working mainly on image retrieval, beat a team led by face recognition expert Li Ziqing in a 2002 Microsoft Research Asia contest to build a face detection system. He cut the false-positive rate from roughly 50% to 1%, and the algorithm was integrated into Windows. Several members of his team later became prominent figures in China's technology industry.

AIBASAL Intelligence, founded by Tsinghua AIR's first PhD graduate Li Jianxiong, has secured lead funding from Five Source Capital, with Ivy Capital, Linear Capital and WestSummit Capital participating. The company says it is betting on an action-native In-Context embodied foundation model that lets robots learn on site from a few human demonstrations and trial attempts within minutes, without retraining after a scene change.

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.

AIChina's Xiongan New Area is accelerating efforts to attract technology firms, officials and sources said, aiming to nurture local industries alongside state institutions relocated from Beijing. Officials are targeting companies that could reach valuations of 10 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion) and list on markets including Hong Kong within a few years.

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.

AICaterpillar and CoreWeave are working to cut the time needed to train construction machines from months to hours, according to Caterpillar's Brandon Hootman. Caterpillar's ecosystem holds about 18 petabytes of federated machine, dealer and customer data, and a single machine can generate terabytes of LiDAR, camera and control data in a day. The partners use AI models, working with Nvidia, to annotate incoming field data so it can feed simulation and training within the same workday.

AIAnthropic released Claude Haiku 5.5, a small model priced at about a quarter of Haiku 4.5's running cost. Anthropic also halved Sonnet 5.5 cache read prices from 20 cents to 10 cents per million tokens.

AINous Research, developer of the open-source Hermes AI agent, raised $90 million in a Series B round led by Robot Ventures, with Nvidia and Samsung participating. The company is now valued at $1.5 billion and says Hermes has been downloaded more than 24 million times. The source also reports $36 million in annualized revenue as of mid-September and expects it to exceed $100 million by year's end.

AIUS venture capital deal value reached a record $515.8 billion in the first nine months of 2026, driven largely by giant AI rounds for OpenAI and Anthropic, according to the PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor. Exit activity has not kept pace, with third-quarter exit value heavily dependent on SpaceX's $60 billion all-stock purchase of Anysphere, and IPOs remaining sparse.

AIGallatin AI raised $50 million in a Series A round led by contributors including 8VC and Silent Ventures, following a $15 million seed raise in 2024. The El Segundo, California company's Navigator platform helps the U.S. military manage supply chains, with the U.S. Army and U.S. Air Force listed as customers. Gallatin says it will use the funds to enhance Navigator's AI capabilities and hire more engineers.

AIA Financial Times report said OpenAI told prospective investors its annualized revenue was approaching $50 billion, about $20 billion below the $68 billion figure widely reported two months earlier. The gap is attributed to gross versus net revenue treatment, and the Nasdaq fell 1.25% as Oracle, Intel, Nvidia and CoreWeave declined. The report comes as OpenAI, valued at $852 billion, and Anthropic prepare for IPOs.

Why it matters: The article ties a revenue revision to market reaction and IPO valuations, showing how investor confidence in AI revenue figures can move tech stocks.

AIFormer BitMEX CEO Arthur Hayes says humanity is wasting multi-trillion dollars on AI data centers that will eventually be overbuilt, causing a crash and a bailout that he expects will benefit bitcoin and other crypto. He expects infrastructure providers to seek payment for committed compute around late 2027 or 2028. Hayes is backing Flop, an AI-agent payments project expected to launch in the first quarter of 2027 that aims to create a spot market for computing power.

AISingapore's Temasek says an unwinding of the artificial intelligence trade poses the biggest risk to markets, though it does not see that as imminent. Rohit Sipahimalani, Temasek's chief investment officer, said AI has kept U.S. stocks near record highs despite rising Treasury yields, while roughly half the Russell 3000 stocks sit at least 20% below their June highs. Temasek remains bullish on AI long term, aiming to raise its publicly traded AI exposure from about half to 70% to 75%.

AIIMF Managing Director Kristalina Georgieva said AI investment is becoming a key driver of countries' relative economic fortunes, but the boom is also inflationary and could widen inequality. She warned that AI could add up to half a percentage point to annual world growth if done right, while high interest rates, soaring energy costs and record public debt strain governments. She urged policymakers to stop delaying painful choices on debt and consider a prudently hawkish monetary stance.

AIApollo Capital Management and several banks are in talks to help SpaceX finance a $40 billion purchase of Nvidia GPUs, according to a person familiar with the discussions. The deal would rely mainly on investment-grade debt, with GPUs likely serving as collateral. SpaceX raised $25 billion in bonds in mid-June, weeks after its IPO.

AIPresident Donald Trump will award medals to tech executives including Elon Musk, Michael Dell and Satya Nadella at a science summit on Thursday, CNBC confirmed. Musk, Sergey Brin, Jensen Huang and Lisa Su will receive the National Medal of Science, while Dell and Nadella will receive the National Medal of Technology and Innovation, according to the White House. Each recipient has contributed financially to Trump or Republican campaigns and causes.

AICNBC's Jim Cramer said rising borrowing costs are dividing the stock market, with AI businesses largely insulated while rate-sensitive sectors face pressure. He cited data center builders, semiconductor firms, power providers and cybersecurity companies as far less constrained, since lenders remain eager to finance AI growth. Wednesday's $39 billion 10-year Treasury auction drew strong demand, though the 10-year yield briefly hit 5.365%, its highest since April 2002.

AIResearch firm New Constructs values Anthropic at $150 billion and calls its planned Nasdaq IPO, targeting a $2 trillion market cap, the most ridiculous offering of 2026. It cites reported 2025 revenue of $4.6 billion and a net loss of $42 billion from a leaked prospectus, and argues open-source competition makes Anthropic's business unviable. Anthropic did not respond to a request for comment.

AISamsung Electronics projected third-quarter preliminary operating profit of 107.40 trillion won ($80.2 billion), topping 100 trillion won for the first time as AI demand fuels its chips business. The forecast is up 782% from a year earlier, on revenue of about 195 trillion won, up nearly 127%. Samsung shares fell 0.7% Thursday morning, and full third-quarter earnings are expected later this month.

AIPlaintiffs filed a proposed nationwide class action in federal court in Chicago alleging McDonald's AI pricing tool violates antitrust laws by coordinating prices across independent franchises. McDonald's denies that AI sets menu prices, saying franchisees decide and the tools only provide optional information. The complaint also cites a Reuters report that some franchise owners were pressured to use the tools and log deviations from their recommendations.

AITaiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co reported September revenue of NT$511.86 billion ($16.03 billion), up 54.6% from a year earlier but down 0.6% from August. The company's third-quarter revenue was about NT$1.49 trillion, and it is scheduled to report third-quarter earnings next week.

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.

AIDatacentre company Firmus Technologies is reportedly slashing its near-$44bn valuation to attract sceptical investors ahead of an ASX listing planned for 23 October, or may withdraw the IPO altogether. Its valuation rose from $1.85bn to $15bn in about eight weeks and then to almost $44bn days before the report, while the company has only two small operational sites. About 97% of its contracted revenue sits on facilities that are not yet built, according to Minotaur Capital co-founder Armina Rosenberg.

AINasdaq CEO Adena Friedman said tokenizing assets such as Treasurys, equities and money market funds, along with the flow of money, could free up tens of billions of dollars in capital tied up as collateral across the global financial system. She said moving markets to 24/7 trading would require real-time risk and collateral management, with Nasdaq launching AI agents within its risk platform that initially provide recommendations. Friedman added that not every asset is liquid enough to support round-the-clock trading.

AIBiohub, the nonprofit backed by Mark Zuckerberg and Priscilla Chan, is coordinating a $1.8 billion effort covering data, lab equipment, and compute. Meta, Google DeepMind, and Isomorphic Labs are contributing a combined $300 million, and the US Department of Energy is investing over $500 million over five years. Commercial funders get one year of exclusive access to data they paid for, while government-funded data will be public without that restriction, and a first dataset is expected in about a year.

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.

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, the teen co-founder of calorie tracking app Cal AI, has launched Persona, a personal AI assistant startup that has raised $10 million led by Vine Ventures. Persona will offer a $179 wearable band that activates via button or wrist flick, with the model running in the cloud rather than on the device. The band is expected in December, and Persona is currently a free beta available through iMessage.