funding
Exein raises $270 million to expand embedded security and pitch physical-AI protection News
Exein says it raised $270 million at a $1.7 billion valuation for firmware and runtime security, while its proposed physical-AI foundation model remains a roadmap item expected in 2027.
Mistral raises 3 billion euros with a European state on the cap table News
Mistral AI raised 3 billion euros at a 21 billion euro post-money valuation in a round led by Samsung Electronics, with the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg among the investors and sovereignty as the organising pitch.
Gallup is testing AI agents that answer surveys for real people News
Gallup has built AI agents from in-depth interviews with about 1,000 of its panel members and is independently validating whether their simulated answers can stand in for human ones, while its partner Simile raised over $200 million at a $2 billion valuation.
Alibaba is raising 80 billion Hong Kong dollars purely for AI News
Alibaba proposed placing newly issued shares with non-U.S. investors for HK$80 billion, saying it will put 100 percent of the net proceeds into its full-stack AI capabilities including AI infrastructure.
Etched raised 700 million dollars and shipped its first rack to Jane Street News
Etched announced on August 18 that it shipped its first inference rack to Jane Street and raised 700 million dollars at a 21 billion dollar valuation, betting that frontier inference belongs on hardware co-designed for it rather than on general-purpose accelerators.
NVIDIA lines up six financiers to mobilize 500 billion dollars News
NVIDIA announced agreements with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs, and KKR to build independent financing platforms intended to mobilize more than 500 billion dollars of third-party capital for AI compute infrastructure.
NVIDIA invests in Safe Superintelligence, promising an order-of-magnitude compute jump News
NVIDIA and Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence announced a long-term strategic partnership including an NVIDIA equity investment, which SSI says will expand its available compute by an order of magnitude.
DeepSeek paused its funding round after a leaked meeting transcript went viral News
Bloomberg reports DeepSeek told prospective backers it would not sign expected agreements for now, a suspension its sources attribute in part to viral posts about a leaked investor-meeting transcript attributed to founder Liang Wenfeng.
AI app-builder Emergent raises $130M, hits $1.5B valuation News
Emergent, an AI platform that turns plain-language prompts into working websites, apps, and business dashboards for non-technical founders, raised a $130 million Series C at a $1.5 billion valuation, signaling that AI software-creation tools are moving past developers and into the hands of small business owners.
DeepSeek is designing its own AI chip -- and raising outside money for the first time News
Chinese AI startup DeepSeek is developing its own chip aimed at running trained models rather than training them, and is simultaneously raising its first-ever outside capital -- about $7 billion at a $52-59 billion valuation.
Together AI raises $800M as open-source AI inference crosses $1B News
Together AI raised an $800 million round on July 1 at an $8.3 billion valuation, more than doubling in about 16 months, as its annual bookings crossed $1.15 billion and open-source model usage tripled in a year.