News
AI Business News
Funding, launches, tools & everything AI money — updated daily
When A Startup Sells, Its Employees’ Equity Plans Can Change Overnight
Startup acquisitions can reshape employees’ finances and careers, with individual outcomes depending on a variety of conditions. Guest author Ron Honig, co-CEO and managing partner of From-Honig...
‘Weird And Maybe Uninvestable’: How Reach Capital Spots Its Venture Winners
Crunchbase News spoke with James Kim, partner at Reach Capital, about how Reach’s education roots inform its broader strategy, what it saw in AI detection company GPTZero, and why some of its best...
OpenAI Invests in Startup That Uses Brain Implants to Detect Cancer
It’s the latest in a growing wave of bets that AI companies are making on brain data.
Claude Science tackles deadly scorpion stings by designing protein binders from scratch
Anthropic's Claude independently designed protein binders targeting deadly scorpion neurotoxins. Out of more than 318,000 designs, 211 were tested in the lab. Seventeen met the criteria, and the two...
OpenAI acquires Orchestra Bio to build AI agents that speed up drug development
OpenAI is acquiring startup Orchestra Bio and plans to merge it with its life sciences AI platform Rosalind. The goal is to build AI agents that help pharma teams coordinate drug development, from...
Europe Wants Data Centers. Its Climate Goals Are Getting in the Way
A plan to funnel the heat given off by data centers into nearby homes has run aground in Germany. Across Europe, policymakers are weighing AI ambitions against climate objectives.
AI infrastructure management software startup ASI hits $3B valuation after raising $325M in funding
An artificial intelligence startup called ASI Inc., which builds complex models of air traffic and energy grids, said today it has scored $325 million in a Series C funding, bringing its valuation to...
Google unveils TorchTPU in a push to break Nvidia’s stranglehold on AI compute
Google LLC is striving to pry open Nvidia Corp.’s grip on the artificial intelligence computing industry with the launch of a specialized version of the open-source PyTorch framework, called...
OpenAI acquires Orchestra Bio to bring AI agents into drug development
OpenAI Group PBC revealed today that it has acquired drug development software startup Orchestra Bio Inc. Orchestra builds artificial intelligence agents that help pharmaceutical teams keep...
DeepSeek open-sources DeepInfer, the inference framework behind its production services
Chinese artificial intelligence startup Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co. Ltd. today open-sourced DeepInfer, the inference framework behind its own production...
Anthropic pitches AI safety bill that may block a model if 50+ people could be killed
The proposed policy seems to offer protections against AI running amok but actually forbids federal agencies from blocking a model's release without the permission of a judge.
Inception says Mercury 3 beats GPT-6 Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 at up to 8x the speed
Diffusion language model startup Inception AI Inc. today released Mercury 3, its new flagship model. In the company’s own benchmarks, Mercury 3 beat OpenAI Group PBC’s GPT-6 Luna and Anthropic PBC’s...
Otter.ai raises $320M in funding for its AI meeting assistant
Otter.ai Inc., the developer of a popular artificial intelligence meeting assistant, today announced that it has raised $320 million in funding. The capital came entirely from General Catalyst’s...
Hugging Face CEO warns that Netflix’s OpenAI hack documentary isn’t accurate
Before you share the Netflix documentary "AI Gone Rogue," take note. Clem Delangue, Hugging Face's co-founder who is featured in the film, says it went "full doomer mode" and isn't accurate.
Dell’s AI playbook for CFOs: Budget the tokens, then chase speed
Enterprise AI is crossing from experimentation into production, and financial services firms are among the first to prove it can pay off at scale. As token consumption climbs, finance chiefs are now...
Anthropic’s cloud partnerships are getting messy
Anthropic is reportedly struggling to secure enough compute from cloud providers that increasingly view it as a competitor, even as its infrastructure spending balloons ahead of a planned November...
What to expect during monday.com’s Elevate event: Join theCUBE Oct. 29
Enterprise work management is entering a new phase as artificial intelligence agents move beyond assisting employees to executing business processes. Platforms once designed to organize projects and...
SpaceX’s AI business is beating expectations
SpaceX hit profitability in the third quarter, with net income of $4.4 billion. AI was the engine.
OpenAI acquires startup Orchestra Bio to beef up its biotech business
OpenAI says it's adding Orchestra's team and technology to work on Rosalind, its AI model for life sciences research, and to its related Rosalind Workbench tool, a harness that aims to help...
Dell sees company knowledge, not AI models, as its competitive edge
As AI agents take on more work that people used to do, enterprises need an AI operating model to match. That means changing how people, processes and work are organized, not just which tools get...
Elevenlabs releases two new speech-to-speech models designed for real-time AI conversations
Elevenlabs' new Eleven Realtime speech-to-speech models combine speed and accuracy. The v1 Max variant scores 98.8 percent on the Big Bench Audio benchmark with a 0.57-second response time....
Deepseek open-sources the inference engine that powers its fastest and cheapest AI model
Deepseek is open-sourcing DeepInfer, the inference framework behind its fast V4.1-Flash model. The vLLM-based system cuts compute costs and energy use when running AI models. The release adds more...
Dell’s security chief warns AI is lowering the barriers to sophisticated cyberattacks
Financial transformation powered by artificial intelligence now runs as two races at once. Banks and other financial institutions are racing to turn data into action with AI, while their security...
Google has joined Amazon in attacking Nvidia’s stronghold with AI app developers
Google has joined Amazon in releasing a developer tool that makes it easy for PyTorch users to move their apps off Nvidia GPUs.
ChatGPT now lets you lock your chats
The company says the feature is designed for situations where users might be discussing something personal or planning a surprise and want to keep those conversations private when handing their...
French Government Calls Emergency Meetings With Platforms Over Protests
TikTok and other sites were told to curb protest footage and AI-altered images, while online retailers like Vinted and eBay reportedly signed an agreement stop looted goods from flooding resale sites.
Mistral AI launches Voxtral 3, a full voice agent stack that listens, thinks, and talks in real time
Mistral AI launched Voxtral 3, a new family of language models built for real-time voice agents. The system combines speech-to-text, text-to-speech, and a voice agent SDK, supports more than 50...
Meta’s Muse hits 10M US downloads in 40 days, a milestone reached by only 11 other apps
New data also shows Muse is retaining users at higher rates than its AI rivals.
Sam Altman reportedly pitched three endgames for AI safety, one involving a single firm melting everyone else's GPUs
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman laid out three paths to safe AI in an internal presentation: an international watchdog modeled after the IAEA, a merger of the major labs into one entity, or a single company so...
OpenAI says GPT-6 is much better with legacy programming languages such as COBOL and Fortran
OpenAI improved its latest models for low-resource programming languages like COBOL, Fortran, and Visual Basic. On the new MultiLangBench, GPT-6 Astra hits an 87.4 percent test pass rate across 20...
Ex-Nvidia-turned-VC Amulya Vishwanath: ‘Physical AI is in its LEGO era’
It’s the moment everyone is waiting for — the ChatGPT moment for robotics, Amulya Vishwanath explained to TechCrunch’s Equity.
Plants can speak using electricity, so this startup built an AI model to decipher their language
Electric Plant has built an AI-powered translator to help humans listen to what plants are saying with the subtle electricity coursing through their stems.
An AI Agent Joined a Listserv of Top Internet Researchers. The Reply-All Chaos Is Still Unfolding
Hysteria over the agent's appearance in a 7,500-person group reveals that internet experts have outdated notions of privacy.
Figma co-founder Dylan Field thinks MCP is not a perfect protocol
Figma said it plans to support as many standards as possible without exposing all of its data.
US orders federal agencies to remove China’s DeepSeek AI from their systems
The U.S. has ordered federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek products and third-party services built using its technology, citing national security concerns.
Scaled Cognition targets customer service with low-cost voice model
Scaled Cognition Inc., an artificial intelligence lab building models for enterprise customer service agents, is introducing a text-to-speech model today that it says provides more accurate...
AI startup Firefly secures $20M to make the physical world a safer place
The digital world has already become much smarter thanks to the rise of artificial intelligence, and now a startup called Firefly Technology Inc. wants to do the same for the physical world,...
Thought Industries’ Lens checks product knowledge for conflicts before customers see it
Customer learning software company Thought Industries Inc. today launched Lens, an artificial intelligence product that checks a business’ product knowledge for conflicts before it reaches customers....
AuxoAI raises over $20M to bring AI expertise to the enterprise and redesign how work gets done
AuxoAI Inc., an enterprise engineering and consulting company that helps large businesses build and deploy artificial intelligence systems, today announced it has raised $20.7 million in a Series A...
Eka is worth $1.45B thanks to a physical AI model that has experts raving
Eka Robotics may be the first robotic arm that is actually good at picking up a wide range of objects, and it is so smooth and human-like, it is wowing the industry.
Army Cyber Command's ECHOTRIBBLE would turn AI agents into self-spreading cyberweapons
The Army Cyber Command is developing AI agents that move through other networks like a computer worm and "neutralize" targets, according to internal documents. The program, codenamed ECHOTRIBBLE, is...
Cloudflare's Clairic pulls data from documents faster and cheaper than LLMs
Cloudflare has released an AI model it says pulls data from documents faster and more cheaply than large language models. The article Cloudflare's Clairic pulls data from documents faster and cheaper...
IBM-backed llm-d framework adds controls for running AI models in-house
IBM Corp. and several other contributors to the open-source llm-d project are releasing version 1.0 of their distributed artificial intelligence inference framework, adding operational controls...
AI startup Vectorial lands $3M in funding to simulate human behavior for consumer research
Consumer research is a slow and cumbersome challenge that few companies do well, but if Vectorial AI Inc. is successful, they’ll never have to worry about doing it again. The startup today said it...
US bans Deepseek technology across federal civilian agencies
The US Department of Homeland Security has banned federal civilian agencies from using AI technology from Chinese lab Deepseek. The article US bans Deepseek technology across federal civilian...
How To Build A Billion-Dollar Company Without Venture Capital
Founders can build billion-dollar businesses without venture capital by prioritizing customer revenue, pricing for quality, hiring exceptional talent and automating processes to scale efficiently,...
Fintech Funding Fell 21% In Q3 As Deals Grew Scarcer
All told, fintech startups raised $10.6 billion globally in the third quarter of 2026, down 28.4% from $14.9 billion in Q2 2026 and 21.4% from $13.5 billion in Q3 2025.
Yelp can now call on your behalf to check wait times at a restaurant
Yelp is embedding numerous new AI features into its app that can do everything from call to check on restaurant wait times to create personalized recommendations that remember your preferences.
Otter AI raises $320M from General Catalyst’s growth fund for its meeting tool
Otter.ai said that it will use these funds for enterprise growth, go-to-market strategy, international expansion, and product innovation.
Mamdani says feds have abdicated on AI, urges New Yorkers to push back
Mayor Zohran Mamdani said Monday night that New Yorkers must resist the narrative that an AI takeover is inevitable and demand regulations that protect the public and put power back in their hands.
Hot Right Now
When A Startup Sells, Its Employees’ Equity Plans Can Change Overnight
‘Weird And Maybe Uninvestable’: How Reach Capital Spots Its Venture Winners
OpenAI Invests in Startup That Uses Brain Implants to Detect Cancer
Claude Science tackles deadly scorpion stings by designing protein binders from scratch
OpenAI acquires Orchestra Bio to build AI agents that speed up drug development