Fundraising

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.

AIElevenLabs is officially launching in Singapore, opening an office to establish its Southeast Asia hub. In July it launched Singapore data residency, offering enterprises local hosting, zero-retention options, lower latency across Singapore and East Asia, and SOC 2 compliance. Customers named include Funding Societies, Atome, and Rezonate.

AIAnalysts expect Alibaba Group Holding's cloud and AI unit to report a 50 per cent revenue surge for the September quarter, up from 45 per cent growth in the prior quarter. The projected acceleration is attributed to strong returns on the company's aggressive AI investments.

AIQualcomm has denied being the net payer in its patent deal with Huawei and rejected claims that the deal relates to LogicFolding. The available statements do not establish any licensing of LogicFolding or related peripheral technologies.

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.

AIAccording to a Wall Street Journal report citing OpenRouter data, OpenAI's share of AI compute routed through the platform rose from under 25% at the start of 2026 to nearly 50% last month. The data comes largely from AI-native startups, with some legacy tech companies also included. The report comes as OpenAI reportedly shifted focus from Sora and an erotica generator toward productivity and business customers.

AIArchitect Financial Technologies has launched Liquid Inference, an LLM router that auctions each request to providers quoting the requested model, and the lowest qualifying offer wins. Buyers can set per-job cost caps, time-to-first-token limits, minimum throughput, and region or zero-data-retention rules, and the max price is locked before generation. The source states that fees, provider list, and latency data are not yet public.

AIShanghai Biren Technology shares fell more than 12% in Hong Kong on Thursday after the company filed plans to raise HK$4 billion (US$510 million) through a share placement. The filing said placing agents would issue 130 million new shares at HK$31.08 each on a best-effort basis.

AIHuawei released its first smartphone with its own LogicFolding chip, the Mate 90 series, on October 1, as China's smartphone and car markets slow. Huawei only sells several million smartphones outside China each year, and Huawei-powered vehicle deliveries fell 29% year-on-year in September.

AIHu Han, former head of Tencent Hunyuan's visual large model algorithm center, is raising tens of millions of dollars for a multimodal startup at a target valuation of several hundred million dollars, with Yuanshi Capital as financial advisor. Investors say Hu has spoken with several firms over the past month and has suggested his model could eventually be sold to large technology companies such as DeepSeek.

AIMeta is donating 1,000 Ray-Ban Meta AI glasses to four Singapore organisations serving people with disabilities, alongside a US$30,000 grant for accessibility training. The glasses help users who are blind or have low vision read text, identify objects and describe their surroundings. The grant will fund a free curriculum from the Singapore Association of the Visually Handicapped on using the glasses safely in daily life.

AIMastra launched the Mastra Agency Program, a network of certified agencies and consultancies that build Mastra agents for clients. The launch includes five partners: Deerfield Group, Blue Drop Labs, Frontleap, Handpicked, and Young Security. Every partner has been vetted by Mastra's FDE team and receives direct access to Mastra's leadership and regular roadmap updates.

AIElevenLabs is officially launching in Singapore, opening a new Southeast Asia hub that is already working with businesses including Funding Societies and Atome. The company is also hiring in Singapore, with open positions listed on its careers page.

AINathan Lambert says compute access rather than funds is a bottleneck for many academic and nonprofit AI groups. He adds that more academic and nonprofit funding is still needed, tackled one step at a time. The quoted post from Anjney Midha announces hundreds of MI355x and B300 nodes live on nationalcompute.com, subsidized for .edu and .gov users.

AIWaymo closed a $5 billion term loan, its first debt financing, with PIMCO, Blackstone, and Sixth Street as lead syndicated lenders and Goldman Sachs as sole lead bookrunner. The debt complements a $16 billion equity investment earlier this year and gives the company added financial flexibility to expand its fully autonomous ride-hailing service across the United States and internationally.

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.

AISchneider Electric will acquire industrial design and data management firm PTC Inc. for about $22.6 billion, aiming to connect product design with operations through a digital thread. Interact Analysis says the deal could narrow Schneider's portfolio gap with Siemens, but integration with AVEVA and Cognite and the 42.3% premium weighed on Schneider's shares after the announcement.

AISnorkel AI is expanding its Open Benchmarks Grants tenfold to a $30M commitment to fund more diverse, robust, and continuously updated open AI benchmarks. The program adds an Open Benchmarks Red Team to test and strengthen those benchmarks, plus a Snorkel Research Fellowship for independent researchers developing new evaluation methods. The source says OBG-funded benchmarks have appeared on model cards from every major frontier lab.

AISubscribers to Claude's Max plan can claim monthly API credits: $100 for the $100 tier and $200 for the $200 tier. The credits work for any Claude model and can be used in the user's own apps and other agents. The author argues that bundling monthly API credits alongside a broad model lineup will make it hard for other model companies to compete.

AIAccording to The Information, Meta and Microsoft are reducing employee use of Anthropic's Claude while moving toward their own coding tools. Microsoft's expected internal Anthropic spending above $1 billion a year has fallen by more than a third, and its monthly AI spending limits per employee were reportedly cut from $100,000 to about $10,000 in most cases. Meta's Claude Code users reportedly fell from about 60,000 to 30,000, though it still reportedly spent over $105 million on Claude Code over 28 days.

AIPreference Model is open-sourcing Karotte, the framework it uses to build reinforcement learning environments that resist reward hacking, including defenses like killing stray processes before grading and rejecting grader-crashing files. The framework has been hardened through more than a million evaluation runs and controlled red-teaming. The company focuses on machine learning engineering tasks for leading labs, and a16z says it is partnering with Preference Model and its founders, Jennifer Zhou and Ning Cao.

AIAnthropic is halving the price of cache reads on Claude Sonnet 5.5 to $0.10 per million tokens. The company says this makes Sonnet 5.5 roughly 20% cheaper to run on most long-running work.

AIReflection AI and Mistral each unveiled new open-source models this week, aiming to beat other Western open models, though they trail top Chinese and closed systems on prominent benchmarks. Reflection CEO Misha Laskin says the target is regulated industries and governments that cannot or will not use Chinese models. The outcome depends on whether businesses and agencies accept less advanced models for some tasks in exchange for lower cost and more control.

AITeradyne Robotics and Elite Robots reached a mutual agreement ending a legal dispute over robots and software, announced Oct. 1 without disclosing settlement terms. The case followed a preliminary injunction issued by the Regional Court of Hamburg against Elite Robots Deutschland over allegedly infringing Universal Robots software, which was not a final finding of infringement. Elite Robots did not admit liability.

AIIsomorphic Labs has joined the Virtual Biology Initiative (VBI) as a founding member, helping build an open resource for global researchers to accelerate understanding and treatment of disease. Demis Hassabis, owner of the account and Google/Gemini-affiliated, called applying AI to medicine and human health the most important thing AI can be used for and welcomed the partnership with CZI and VBI.

AIThe Department of Defense's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office runs the Tradewinds program, which grants "post-competitive" status to AI vendors based on videos of five minutes or less. That status can let government buyers use other transaction agreements and sometimes make awards in less than a week. OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google are listed as participants, though none commented.

AIElon Musk says SpaceX will use the best back-end model for each task, including Claude Opus 5.5, Midjourney, Suno, and other leading APIs. The main post is only an eye emoji, so its own content adds nothing beyond the quoted note about Grok's routing.

AIParamount Skydance completed its roughly $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery on October 6, with the combined company renamed Skydance. Reports also say Moonshot AI finished a final private round at about a $50 billion valuation and is preparing a Hong Kong IPO for the first quarter of next year, while Microsoft and Meta reportedly asked employees to use Claude less.

AIOpenAI cut Luna prices by more than 80% to win share, while frontier models' share of tokens slipped from 53% in August into the mid-40s as buyers shifted to cheaper tiers. The author argues that in this commoditizing market, value accrues to platforms that control distribution and aggregate usage rather than to labs with marginal benchmark leads.

AIBoston Dynamics has named Rohit Prasad, formerly senior vice president and head scientist for Alexa and artificial general intelligence at Amazon, as its new CEO, effective tomorrow. He succeeds interim CEO Amanda McMaster, the company's CFO, who took over after Robert Playter stepped down in February. Boston Dynamics said Prasad's appointment accelerates its physical AI strategy, combining robotics with advanced AI to commercialize intelligent machines at scale.

AISigil Wen has built an on-device AI assistant that promises to be free, fully private, and capable for everyday tasks. The post says the startup is backed by prominent Silicon Valley investors, but does not name them or give product details.

AIArthur Mensch posted that Mistral is building AGI from a train station. The quoted post adds that ML4 was trained on 3,800 NVIDIA Grace Blackwell GPUs in Mistral's European datacenters, including its Bruyères-le-Châtel cluster funded by its Series B. Mistral says Series C and D clusters are coming soon to support longer training and faster iteration.