Most satellite startups are racing to build smaller. K2 Space is going the other way, on purpose. Investors just handed it $500 million to keep going bigger. K2 raised a $500 million Series D at a $6.8 billion valuation, it said on Thursday. Kleiner Pe…
The AI boom made GPUs famous. The dull chips that wire thousands of those GPUs together are quietly becoming just as valuable. Xsight Labs, an Israeli chipmaker, has raised more than $300 million at a $2.8 billion valuation, it said on Thursday. Fideli…
The US wanted to keep Chinese robots out. Beijing’s answer: do this, and we will hit back where it hurts. China has threatened “resolute” retaliation after Washington moved to bar imports of Chinese-made humanoid robots. Its commerce ministry called th…
A London startup building the training grounds for Europe’s autonomous weapons has come out of stealth with $30mn. It is one of the region’s largest defence-tech seed rounds this year. Agon is not building the weapons themselves. It is building the inf…
Google DeepMind wants one AI brain to run every robot, and it just taught that brain to use its whole body. It has released Gemini Robotics 2, a family of models that can control a humanoid from its feet to its fingertips. The system can also coordinat…
A startup wants companies to stop asking real people what they think, and ask fake ones instead. Simile has raised $200m at a $2bn valuation to build “agentic twins,” AI stand-ins for real consumers that firms can survey by the million. Greenoaks led t…
Nscale, the London AI-cloud company that owns its own power and data centres, is buying its way up the stack. It has agreed to acquire Anyscale, the startup behind the widely used Ray software. Bloomberg reported the deal at about $1.65bn. Nscale annou…
The stablecoin industry has long relied on a familiar trust model: accounting firms periodically review reserve balances and publish attestations weeks after the underlying data was collected. For an asset class that moves around the clock, that approa…
The race to build an AI “foundation model of the cell” has a fuel problem. The biological data needed to train one is scarce, messy and inconsistent. Relation Therapeutics thinks the answer is to manufacture that data itself, and GSK is paying up to $1…
Six days ago, IBM agreed to buy a quantum-computing lab that builds a kind of qubit IBM does not. This week, the lab showed the world why. HRL Laboratories published a result in Nature on Wednesday: a silicon quantum processor that, in effect, runs its…