Startups

OpenAI Partners with Thai Government to Launch Accelerator for Healthcare and Education Startups

OpenAI has partnered with Thailand's Ministry of Higher Education, Science, Research and Innovation (MHESI) to launch an eight-week accelerator program supporting ten Thai startups building AI products in healthcare, wellness, and education. The initiative, announced in Bangkok, represents OpenAI's first public-private partnership focused on startup acceleration with the Thai government. Participating organizations include Thailand's National Innovation Agency (NIA), Mahidol University, and Tec

Consumer AI Agent Startup Instinct Raises 50 Million Series B at .5 Billion Valuation

Artificial intelligence startup Instinct, incorporated under Spear Street Technology, has raised $250 million in a Series B funding round co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark. The new capital brings Instinct's total funding to $350 million and values the one-year-old startup at $2.5 billion. Consumer Autonomous Agent Architecture Instinct develops a personal AI assistant intended to autonomously manage daily digital logistics on behalf of individual users. Founded by 23-year-old researcher

OpenAI Allocates 00 Million to Second Startup Fund as Sole Investor

According to regulatory filings submitted to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), OpenAI has established a $400 million venture vehicle for its second startup fund. In a notable structural shift from its inaugural vehicle, OpenAI is serving as the sole investor, committing capital directly from its corporate balance sheet. The launch marks a significant departure from the mechanics of the original OpenAI Startup Fund, established in 2021. That initial $175 million fund was raised

AI Assistant Startup Instinct Raises 50M Series B at .5B Valuation

Spear Street Technology, the creator of the personal AI assistant Instinct, has raised $250 million in a Series B funding round that values the one-year-old startup at $2.5 billion. The investment was co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, with participation from Greenoaks and Conviction. The capital injection brings Instinct's total funding to $350 million, following a $75 million Series A led by Kleiner Perkins partner Mamoon Hamid earlier in August 2026 and initial seed financing backed by

Arga Raises 0M Seed from General Catalyst to Build Enterprise Simulation Sandboxes for AI Agents

Arga, a startup developing synthetic simulation environments for training enterprise AI agents, has raised $10 million in a seed funding round led by General Catalyst. The round included participation from Box Group, Emergence, Gradient, and SV Angel. The company builds functional digital twins of enterprise SaaS platforms—such as Salesforce, Workday, and standard email infrastructure—to create sandboxed testing grounds for reinforcement learning (RL) workflows. Addressing the Enterprise Rein

Runable Raises 1M Series A to Expand Autonomous AI Agents Into Business Growth

Bengaluru-based artificial intelligence startup Runable has raised $21 million in Series A funding to expand its autonomous agent platform from code generation into full-funnel business operations and customer acquisition. The all-equity round valued the company at $65 million post-money and was co-led by Susquehanna Venture Capital and Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from existing backers Together Fund and Array VC. Founded in 2025 by Umesh Kumar and Saksham Sarda, Runable operates

South Korea's Wrtn Raises 2.2M Series C at 22M Valuation

South Korean AI platform operator Wrtn Technologies has secured approximately 100 billion won ($72.2 million) in a Series C funding round, pushing the startup's valuation above 1 trillion won ($722 million). The new capital brings Wrtn's cumulative funding to roughly 230 billion won ($166 million) as the company expands its consumer and enterprise generative AI offerings across Asian markets. Expanding Beyond Domestic Aggregation Founded in Seoul in 2021, Wrtn built its initial user base as

Gamma Acquires AI Design Startup Lica to Establish Multimodal Research Lab

AI presentation platform Gamma has acquired design startup Lica to establish an internal research division focused on multimodal communication and automated layout models. The deal brings Lica co-founders Priyaa Kalyanaraman and Purvanshi Mehta to Gamma to head the new research laboratory. Gamma reached a $2.1 billion valuation in November 2025 following a $68 million funding round, scaling its user base to more than 100 million accounts. The platform allows users to generate presentations, doc

Keenable Exits Stealth with 6M Seed to Build Web Index for AI Agents

Keenable Exits Stealth with $26M Seed to Build Web Index for AI Agents Search infrastructure startup Keenable has emerged from stealth with $26 million in seed funding led by Accel, with participation from Conviction Partners and angel investors. The company is developing a web-scale indexing engine tailored specifically for programmatic retrieval by autonomous AI agents and language model workflows rather than human web browsers. Keenable was co-founded by Andrey Styskin, former head of searc

AI Data Startup Micro1 Reaches 00M Gross Run Rate Amid Training Demand

Four-year-old AI data and annotation startup Micro1 has reached a $500 million gross annualized run rate, expanding fivefold from $100 million eight months ago as foundation model builders scale spending on post-training datasets and reinforcement learning environments. After accounting for contractor compensation paid to specialized annotators, Micro1 retains approximately 60% to 70% of gross billings, placing its net annual run rate between $150 million and $200 million. The Shift Toward Ex

Nvidia Strikes $6B Licensing Deal with Poolside and Backs Startup at $12B Valuation

AI model developer Poolside has entered into a non-exclusive $6 billion licensing agreement with Nvidia, paired with a $1 billion direct equity investment that values the startup at $12 billion pre-money, according to an investor communication reported by Newcomer. As part of the transaction structure, Nvidia has extended job offers to 109 Poolside personnel, creating a hybrid licensing and talent transfer arrangement that mirrors recent structural deals across the frontier AI ecosystem. Deal

xpander launches a vendor-neutral control plane for the AI agent sprawl

Higgsfield AI Raises $400M at $5.4B Valuation, Quadrupling in Seven Months

AI video generation startup Higgsfield has raised $400 million in a Series B round that values the company at $5.4 billion, up from $1.3 billion in January. The round was led by DST Global with participation from Goldman Sachs, Liberty Global, Intel Capital, and others. The 4x valuation jump in seven months signals intense investor appetite for the AI video layer that could become the foundation for robotics, world models, and the next generation of content creation. What Higgsfield Does Hig

Anthropic in talks to buy Decart for $6 billion, targeting compute efficiency

Anthropic is in talks to acquire Israeli AI startup Decart for about $6 billion, according to people familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg. The deal would be Anthropic's largest known acquisition and signals a strategic push to lower the cost of running its models at scale. Decart builds software that makes GPU compute more efficient — reducing the cost of training and operating AI models by helping chips work harder. For Anthropic, which just reported preliminary Q2 revenue above $11.5 b

French startup Kog says smarter software can pull 30x faster inference out of stock GPUs

The race for faster AI inference has pushed labs toward custom silicon, but a French startup argues the cheapest speedup is already sitting in servers companies bought. Kog says it can reach roughly thirty times faster LLM inference on standard data-center GPUs using software alone. Kog demonstrated three thousand tokens per second per request on AMD MI300X and NVIDIA H200 GPUs in May, running a small two-billion-parameter model it has since open-sourced as Laneformer 2B. Chief executive Gael D

Blacksmith's valuation jumps nearly 10x in under a year as AI coding fuels software testing

A $45M Series B values the AI code-testing startup at $550M, nearly 10x its year-ago mark.

QuantHealth raises $45M to simulate clinical trials before patients enroll

QuantHealth, a Tel Aviv startup, has raised forty five million dollars in Series B funding to grow its clinical trial simulation platform. Qumra Capital led the round, and the company says total funding now stands near seventy million dollars since its 2020 founding. The pitch is simple to state and hard to achieve: test a trial in software before a single patient is recruited. QuantHealth's tools let drug developers model whether a protocol is likely to succeed, tune who gets included, and est