Fundraising

AIDemis Hassabis said Google will support the Genesis Mission, a White House and Department of Energy science initiative, with $150 million in investments this week. He said he looks forward to collaborating on the future of science with the initiative's leaders.

AISpaceX announced an agreement to buy a nationwide 800 MHz spectrum portfolio from Grain Management, subject to FCC approval. The license covers up to 14 MHz of paired spectrum and is intended to help Starlink become a major US mobile carrier. AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile shares fell in extended trading after the announcement.

AIFirmus Technologies withdrew its application to list on the ASX after investor demand for its AI datacentre business failed to materialise. The company had an anticipated $44bn valuation and planned to raise $7bn ahead of a 23 October listing, and will now seek private capital instead.

AICNBC's Jim Cramer said Thursday's AI stock sell-off, which followed a Financial Times report that OpenAI's annualized revenue was about $20 billion below previously signaled levels, shows why investors need diversification. Oracle fell 5.5% and Broadcom dropped 4.35%, while Home Depot rallied as Treasury yields eased. Cramer argued that concentrated portfolios risk panic-selling and missing a recovery.

AIElad Gil posted an enthusiastic reaction to Hone's blog post "Closing the Gap," which discusses improving AI's real-world value. The post is brief and offers no concrete product details, figures, or benchmarks beyond the linked material.

AIAlphabet spinoff Isomorphic Labs is reportedly in early-stage talks to raise a new funding round at a valuation of $40 billion to $50 billion, according to Bloomberg, which did not specify the round's size. Isomorphic's flagship AI platform, IsoDDE, is designed to automate binding pocket discovery, which it says is more than 50% better than the closest competing tool, and it models antibody interactions about 2.3 times better than AlphaFold. The company earns revenue through research partnerships with Eli Lilly, Novartis and Johnson & Johnson.

AIArena's account of its continued work with The House Fund is a short acknowledgment with no product, figures, or new details. Read alongside the linked background, it sits in the context of Arena's $200M Series B at a $3.1B valuation and its Alignment Index for frontier models.

AISalesforce Ventures announced an investment in Arena's Series B round, with Arena described as a neutral platform where real users vote on anonymous model outputs across text, coding, vision, image generation, and agentic tasks. Labs and builders use its leaderboards to guide training and purchasing decisions.

AIArena announced a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation and launched the Arena AI Alignment Index, a new measure of how AI agents behave in the real world. The main post is a thank-you from Felicis, a backer of Arena since its seed round, and the company's origins as a UC Berkeley research project.

AIThe startup behind a popular AI model leaderboard has raised a new funding round at a $3.1 billion valuation. The main post points readers to Bloomberg's coverage of the round for further details.

AIOpenAI told investors it reached roughly $50 billion in annualized revenue at the end of September, below the $68 billion figure widely reported last month. Nvidia, Oracle, and CoreWeave shares fell on Thursday, with a person familiar saying the $68 billion figure included partner gross revenue. OpenAI is also weighing a possible funding round of around $30 billion and has not finalized a term sheet.

AISafeWorld emerged from stealth this week with $12.2 million in seed funding for its robot safety simulation platform. The software lets teams build test scenarios from past incidents, safety standards, and robot logs, then runs robots through thousands of variations with reactive human motion. SafeWorld said it supports robot arms, humanoids, and mobile robots, with customers in industrial, manufacturing, logistics, and construction.

AIManus, the developer of the Manus AI agent, has raised more than $500 million led by Boyu Capital, with Tencent also investing. Bloomberg had reported a $4 billion valuation, roughly double Meta's reported offer last December, which Chinese regulators blocked in April. The funding comes days after Manus 2.0 added a new harness, Cloud Computer, and Cue, which lets agents use email accounts and digital wallets.

Why it matters: The article ties a $500M+ round to a blocked Meta deal, showing how regulators and rival bids shaped Manus's path to standalone growth.

AIMichael Burry argues that Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Meta are spending on AI to expand an oligopoly, with OpenAI, Anthropic, and Oracle seeking a share. He says data center financing tied to private equity, private credit, and insurers is showing strain, with long-term rates rising before the buildout timelines play out.

AIMicrosoft will replace per-user OneDrive allowances on Microsoft 365 Family and Premium plans with a shared 2 TB storage pool, down from 6 TB across six accounts. Heavy users could face bills that double or triple, since each extra 1 TB adds $10 a month, while family members will be able to share a single AI usage allowance. New and upgraded subscriptions get shared storage starting Oct. 8, 2026, and existing subscribers move at their first renewal on or after May 2, 2027.

AIThe U.S. Department of Labor said it suspended Microsoft and Adobe from its Permanent Labor Certification program, citing multiple active federal investigations. Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling also said no new applications will be accepted for Cognizant, Infosys, Capgemini, Tata, Wipro and HCL. Microsoft said the vast majority of its U.S. employees are Americans and that 80% of its roughly 6,000 H-1B petitions last fiscal year were to extend or change the status of existing employees.

AIArena has secured a $200M Series B, with Lightspeed doubling down on its investment. The company is also launching the Alignment Index, which measures how closely AI behavior aligns with human values in real-world settings. Arena reports annualized revenue above $100M since its Series A, with millions of people helping evaluate frontier models through real-world use.

AIArena, the crowdsourced AI model leaderboard that started as a UC Berkeley research project, raised a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and Khosla Ventures. The company said it reached $100 million in annualized run-rate revenue in June, up from $30 million when it raised its $150 million Series A in January at a $1.7 billion post-money valuation.

AIOpenAI has reportedly told investors its annualized revenue is approaching $50 billion, about $20 billion below a previously reported $70 billion figure. The Financial Times reports the earlier number came from investor attempts to compare OpenAI with Anthropic, which counts cloud partners' sales differently. OpenAI's IPO has reportedly been pushed to early 2027.

AISpaceXAI has joined the Omacom Foundation as a Founding Corporate Patron, providing $1,500,000 in Grok tokens for Omarchy's maintenance and development. The main post says the company is glad to support the Omarchy team.

AIAutomation Anywhere Inc. announced an agreement to acquire Boost.ai Inc., a conversational voice AI company, from Nordic Capital, to extend its autonomous enterprise platform into customer experience. Boost.ai supports more than 36 languages, serves hundreds of customers in regulated industries and Europe, and maintains more than 650 deployments and about 600 live AI agents. The deal follows Automation Anywhere's late 2025 acquisition of Aisera Inc.

AIUSA Today Co. and several of its local newspapers are suing OpenAI, alleging the company copied "hundreds of thousands" of articles to train its AI models without permission. The publisher seeks damages of more than $250 million in a filing on Thursday. OpenAI did not immediately respond to The Verge's request for comment.

AISpaceXAI joins the Omacom Foundation, which oversees the Omarchy Linux distro, as a Founding Corporate Patron and donates $1.5 million in Grok tokens. According to David Heinemeier Hansson's blog post, the tokens will primarily accelerate development, review code, and patch bugs. The article notes Hansson's recent anti-immigration blog posts, and that 1Password and Cloudflare have also faced criticism for contributing to Omarchy.

AICursor says it is excited to support open-source software alongside SpaceXAI, and it plans to bring more projects on board soon. Background from DHH indicates SpaceXAI joined the Omacom Foundation as a Founding Corporate Patron, contributing $1,500,000 in @grok tokens for maintaining and developing Omarchy.

AILightspeed Venture Partners co-leaders Ravi Mhatre and Bejul Somaia halted partner schedules in April 2023 for a seven-hour meeting on how to respond to AI. The firm had missed early stakes in OpenAI, ElevenLabs and Hugging Face, and was poised to back Anthropic.

AIArena announced a $200 million Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation, alongside a new Alignment Index that measures whether AI agents behave safely, truthfully, and within the bounds of user requests. The company has surpassed $100 million in annualized revenue, facilitated 350 million sessions and 62 million votes, and led by Felicis and PXD from the seed and Series A stages. Arena positions the index as a way to assess trustworthiness as AI systems increasingly take real actions.

AIZeta Global unveiled the Athena Inference Model (AIM), being developed with Fireworks using Nvidia Nemotron, as part of its AthenaOS enterprise intelligence announcements. The company also said it is doing early work with partners on a specialized chip through a capital-light approach.

AIArena has announced a Series B round co-led by Lightspeed and Khosla Ventures, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, 01 Advisors, Dell Technologies Capital, and Endeavor Catalyst. Existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Felicis, a16z's AMP, QuantumLight, and The House Fund also supported the round.

AIAnthropic is committing $150 million to the Genesis Mission to deepen its support for scientific research and technological discovery. The company also plans to make Claude and its technical support available to more than 15 federal agencies.

AIHelm.ai said it signed $70 million in commercial contracts for its foundation models for physical AI over 12 months, spanning global automotive OEMs, Tier 1 suppliers, and industrial automation companies. The Redwood City, Calif.-based company said it has projects bound for production in autonomous vehicles, mining, and construction, and that it is on a path to break even. CEO Vladislav Voroninski said its models are trained on unsupervised "deep teaching" and are environment-agnostic.

AIWillow Care Inc., maker of the AI dictation app Willow Voice, chose CoreWeave for its forward-deployed support rather than compute alone, according to co-founder and CTO Lawrence Liu. Liu said CoreWeave's reinforcement learning infrastructure lets Willow focus on eval alignment, while Willow fine-tunes its own speech recognition model and pairs it with a compact post-processing LLM. He said inference demand is growing faster than training as dictation use climbs.

AIAugment Code is selling select assets, including Cosmos, Auggie CLI, and the Code Context Engine, to Harness, and the product team is moving to Harness. The company says Harness's integrated platform delivers these capabilities to customers more effectively than building them independently. Harness describes itself as building the Autonomous SDLC Platform for shipping AI-written code across enterprises.

Why it matters: The announcement shows how a coding AI company is folding its products into a larger software delivery platform, a shift that shapes how enterprise teams will buy these tools.

AIMistral CEO Arthur Mensch replied that his company serves such customers too, pointing to nuclear energy as a possible obstacle. The reply responds to reports that Berlin-based search engine Ecosia is dropping Mistral as its AI partner for open-source models, including Chinese ones.

AINVIDIA announced commitments valued at $1 billion over the next five years to build U.S. capacity for super intelligence research in fields including quantum computing, healthcare and energy security. The funding will support U.S. higher-education research institutions, American quantum leadership and cloud service providers serving U.S. government mission needs. NVIDIA is also a collaborator on several phase 2 Genesis Mission awards in quantum computing, fusion, accelerator design and microelectronics.

AIOpenRouter says StepFun's Step 5 Preview is now live on its platform, priced at $1.00 per million input tokens and $2.70 per million output tokens. Cache hits are 50% off at launch, bringing them to $0.05 per million, and a week of free access is rolling out across partners including opencode, Cline, Nous Research, and Kilo Code.