Breaking News
DeepMind alumni startup, Inherent says its Faraday research agent, powered by a relatively small 27B-parameter Qwen model, outperformed GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8 at reproducing findings from scientific papers. The result suggests specialized training and agent systems could allow smaller models to outperform much larger frontier models on specific tasks.
Nvidia is reportedly discussing an investment in Perplexity as part of a new funding round valuing the AI search startup at more than $30 billion, potentially expanding Nvidia’s influence beyond chips and infrastructure into the fast-growing AI application layer.
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STARTUPS RAISING MILLIONS
💰 Startup Funding Updates
PRE-SEED
Aisel Health, a Copenhagen, Denmark-based HealthTech company building an operating system purpose-built for psychiatry and mental health, raised €1.7M in Pre-Seed funding. The round was led by Caesar Ventures, with participation from Nordic Web Ventures, LifeX, Angel Invest, Rockstart, and EIFO.
SEED
idler, a San Francisco, CA-based frontier data research lab and AI evaluation platform, raised $9M in Seed funding. The round was led by Paradigm, with participation from Y Combinator, Long Journey, and angel investors including Manish Chandra, Catheryn Li, Dan Posch, Janine Leger, Lynett Capital, Feross Aboukhadijeh, Nur Bazylbekov, and Smaiyl Makyshov.
Multiplier, a NYC-based developer of an AI-powered data platform and coding agent infrastructure for the asset management industry, raised $6M in Seed funding. The round was led by Lux Capital, with participation from Y Combinator, GoAhead Ventures, Rebel Fund, General Advance, Unpopular Ventures, Amino Capital, and angel investors Greg Jensen and Karen Karniol-Tambour.
Twin1 AI, a San Mateo, CA-based provider of an AI-powered digital twin platform for knowledge workers, raised $20M in Seed funding. The round was co-led by Bessemer Venture Partners, Tribeca Venture Partners, and Aramco Ventures, with participation from EJF Ventures, Tin Alley Ventures, AGI House Ventures, Neo, F-Prime, Btech Consortium, Antiportfolio Ventures, Lakestar, Notion Capital, and others.
Capitan Orthopedics, a Grand Rapids, MI-based provider of an orthopedic implant platform for shoulder surgery, raised $4.1M in Seed funding. Backers included Genesis Innovation Group.
GROWTH
Astromech, a Dallas, TX-based computational biology and predictive AI startup spun out of Colossal Biosciences, raised $20M in funding at a $3.8B valuation. The round was led by Bob Nelsen, with participation from NeoGenesis Capital, Builders VC, and genomics-focused venture funds.
Navi, a Bengaluru, India-based provider of a digital financial services platform, raised $100M in its first external institutional funding round. Prosus NV made the investment.
Math Magic, a Beijing, China-based AI creation company, raised an undisclosed amount in Series A+ funding. The round was led by BAI Capital and HyT Capital, with participation from V Fund, HSG, IDG Capital, Long-Z Investments, Crystal Stream, and Jinqiu Capital.
Muon Space, a San Jose, CA-based provider of satellite constellations and a mission foundry platform, raised $250M in Series C funding. The round was led by Eclipse Capital, with participation from Galvanize, Google, Salesforce Ventures, Wellington Management, I Squared Capital, Woven Capital, Radical Ventures, Congruent Ventures, Costanoa Ventures, Activate Capital, ACME Capital, ArcTern Ventures, and Overlap Holdings.
TravelX, a NYC-based provider of an AI-native post-booking revenue management platform for global aviation, raised an undisclosed amount in Series A funding. The round was led by Kaszek, with participation from Thayer Ventures.
Vessev, an Auckland, New Zealand-based provider of electric hydrofoiling marine technology, raised $19M in Series A funding. The round was led by Blackbird Ventures, with participation from GD1, Rypples, K1W1, Icehouse Ventures, Shasta Ventures, NZVC, and angel investors.
FSH Technologies, a Philadelphia, PA-based provider of government IT software replacing hourly-billed consulting firms and point-solution vendors, raised $20M in Series A financing. The round was led by Lachy Groom and co-led by Acrew Capital, with participation from Operator Partners, Contrary, Cooley, and several angel investors.
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NEW VCs IN THE MARKET
🏦 Venture Capital Updates.
Third Mind, a Menlo Park, CA-based newly formed venture capital firm, is raising its first fund. According to a SEC form, Third Mind I, LP, has a target of $25m with $5.7m already raised. The document lists Antoine Nivard (formerly at Blank Ventures) as the person related to the raise.
Makers Fund, a San Francisco, CA-based venture capital firm focused on interactive entertainment, closed its Fund IV, at $250M. The new fund, whose closing brought total assets under management by the company to $1.5 billion, will back founders building across gaming and interactive entertainment.
KEY STORIES IN TECH
📜 Latest In Tech
Apple cuts more than 200 jobs across Siri and Vision Pro teams
Apple is cutting more than 200 positions, including roughly 100 from the Vision Pro team and another 100 across Siri and its Intelligent Systems Experience group.
The restructuring comes as Apple shifts resources toward newer AI initiatives and devices. The company says it will create some new roles while eliminating existing positions.
The cuts arrive during a broader transition for Apple as it tries to strengthen its AI position while dealing with rising hardware costs, including pressure from the global memory shortage.
OpenAI reverses course and calls for stronger California AI safety rules
OpenAI wants California to strengthen SB 53 by requiring monitoring of frontier models during training and evaluation and introducing stronger cybersecurity protections throughout model development.
The shift follows recent AI safety incidents, including OpenAI’s disclosure that one of its models escaped a testing environment and compromised systems at Hugging Face.
The position marks a notable reversal after OpenAI previously opposed SB 53. With federal AI legislation limited, the company now supports states developing compatible safeguards that could eventually form a national standard.
Nvidia shows the AI harness may matter more than the underlying model
Nvidia researchers got Claude Opus 5 to score 100% on the ARC-AGI-3 reasoning benchmark using a custom agent harness, compared with just 30% without it.
The key was better memory management plus a supervising agent that acts like a “CEO,” redirecting the main agent when it gets stuck, repeats itself, or heads toward a dead end.
The research suggests the next advantage in AI agents may come from the software surrounding models—tools, memory, supervision, runtime, and feedback—not simply from using the most powerful model available.
Tesla discontinues its Solar Roof
Tesla has quietly killed its Solar Roof, the roughly decade-old product that turned shingles and tiles into solar panels, removing all mentions from its website and redirecting the old pages to a generic solar landing page.
The Solar Roof never took off: Tesla wanted 1,000 installations a week but reached only 20 to 40 by 2022, while high prices, with some quotes hitting $200,000, and custom manufacturing kept costs stubbornly high.
Reports pointed to the roof’s non-solar parts warping and underproducing electricity, likely because the tight gap between tiles and roof trapped heat, cutting the cells’ output as voltage falls with rising temperature.
Amazon hikes Echo prices up to 60%
Amazon has raised prices on several Echo, Kindle, Fire TV, and Eero products, blaming rising memory and storage costs, with some jumps as steep as 60% on its cheaper smart home devices.
The Echo Dot climbed from $50 to $80, while the Fire TV Stick 4K Max went from $60 to $85 and the 16GB Kindle rose from $110 to $150.
Amazon confirmed the changes, pointing to “significant increases in memory and storage component costs” across the electronics industry, and said it held off on passing those costs to shoppers for as long as it could.
TikTok settles child privacy suit
TikTok and its parent company ByteDance agreed to pay $400 million to settle a Justice Department lawsuit accusing the app of breaking children’s online privacy laws, without admitting any wrongdoing.
The DOJ first sued in 2024 under the Biden administration, saying TikTok let kids make regular accounts and share videos with adults, and illegally collected children’s email addresses and other personal details.
As part of the deal, TikTok added stronger protections for young users, better age controls, and more parental oversight, changes the DOJ says advanced the goals behind its original suit.
New York overtakes SF in tech jobs
New York now has more tech workers than the San Francisco Bay Area for the first time, according to a report from real estate firm CBRE that has tracked tech talent for 13 years.
New York’s tech workforce hit about 394,000 last year, growing more than 8% since 2022, while the Bay Area shrank 6% to roughly 376,000 as Meta, Block, and Amazon cut jobs.
New York gained workers in financial services, an early adopter of AI, plus new AI startups in Midtown South, though the Bay Area still tops CBRE’s overall scorecard, with New York fourth.
DeepSeek launches experimental AI model
DeepSeek has launched DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp, an experimental multimodal model that reads images and screenshots and acts on them, and says its agent performance comes close to Anthropic’s Opus-4.8 on its own published benchmarks.
On the eleven benchmarks DeepSeek published, the new model beats Opus-4.8 on only three, winning DeepSWE, Agents’ Last Exam and ZeroBench by narrow margins, while trailing on the other eight, including a 12-point gap on the repository task NL2Repo.
The main selling point is price, since DeepSeek runs at about 87 cents per million words against roughly $50 from Anthropic, though the vision model’s scores all come from DeepSeek’s own testing and it was not measured against Anthropic’s newer Opus 5.
OpenAI cuts GPT-5.6 Sol API prices by more than 20%
OpenAI is reducing developer pricing for GPT-5.6 Sol for three months, as competition intensifies from Anthropic and lower-cost Chinese AI models.
Standard short-context API pricing drops to $4 per 1 million input tokens and $20 per 1 million output tokens, down from $5 and $30 respectively. The discounts also extend to eligible ChatGPT Work and Codex credits.
OpenAI’s Pro, Plus and Business subscription prices remain unchanged. The move follows recent cuts to GPT-5.6 Terra and Luna, and puts Sol below Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5 pricing of $5 input and $25 output per million tokens.
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☕ Other News
Uber faces nearly $1B fine over automated driver suspensions
The Dutch Data Protection Authority fined Uber €825 million ($966 million), the second-largest GDPR penalty to date, over allegations that drivers were suspended or deactivated through automated processes without sufficient human oversight.
Regulators argue decisions with major consequences for workers shouldn’t be made solely by automated systems. Uber disputes that permanent deactivations occur without human review and plans to appeal the fine.
The case could have broader implications for gig platforms and AI-driven workforce management, particularly around how much human oversight companies must provide when algorithms make decisions affecting people’s livelihoods.
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