NEURA is building gyms to train robots for the real world
NEURA is building gyms to train robots for the real world

NEURA Robotics is opening ‘gyms’ where robots train under real-world conditions, starting with two German universities. Its bet is that the thing holding humanoids back is not intelligence, but a shortage of real experience. The German robotics firm NE…

Substack adds AI detection to fight ‘Claudefishing’
Substack adds AI detection to fight ‘Claudefishing’

Substack has a name for the moment you realise a post you admired for its human voice actually came from a bot: Claudefishing. Now it is handing readers a button to catch it, powered by the AI detector Pangram. The newsletter platform has launched an A…

To prove the anti-AI Pope’s words were human, his camp used AI
To prove the anti-AI Pope’s words were human, his camp used AI

To defend an anti-AI Pope from claims a machine helped write his words, his camp reached for an unlikely tool: AI. An Australian firm has certified Pope Leo XIV’s writings as human-made, using a suite of the very detectors the technology has spawned. P…

Jack Dorsey’s Block takes on Slack with Buzz, a workspace for humans and AI agents
Jack Dorsey’s Block takes on Slack with Buzz, a workspace for humans and AI agents

Jack Dorsey’s Block wants to take on Slack. The twist is that the workforce it is building for is half machine. Its new app, Buzz, is an open-source workspace where humans and AI agents share the same channels, and every agent carries its own portable …

Databricks’ cofounder just raised $20M to be the Switzerland of AI compute
Databricks’ cofounder just raised $20M to be the Switzerland of AI compute

The company came out of stealth on Tuesday. The founders built it at UC Berkeley, in the same lab that produced Spark, Databricks, and Anyscale. The team includes Zongheng Yang and Databricks co-founders Ion Stoica and Scott Shenker. The star-studded c…

Natural raised $30M to build a Stripe for AI agents, before Stripe gets there
Natural raised $30M to build a Stripe for AI agents, before Stripe gets there

The next big customer for a payments company may not be a person at all. It may be an AI agent, and a startup called Natural has raised $30 million to serve it. The Series A was led by Kirsten Green at Forerunner Ventures, and closed when Natural was j…

Fig Expands Platform Across the Full SecOps Engineering Lifecycle, Making Resilience the Default
Fig Expands Platform Across the Full SecOps Engineering Lifecycle, Making Resilience the Default

Security operations environments are constantly evolving. New cloud services, data sources, automations, and detections are introduced on a regular basis, while upstream systems can change without warning. Although these updates are intended to improve…

Empirical Security raised $25M to predict which flaws hackers will actually exploit
Empirical Security raised $25M to predict which flaws hackers will actually exploit

Most security teams face the same problem. There are far more flaws than anyone can fix, and no clear way to know which ones matter. Empirical Security wants to predict the answer. The Chicago startup’s Series A was led by Brightmind Partners, chief ex…

This startup raised $15M to break Nvidia’s tightest grip on AI, its software
This startup raised $15M to break Nvidia’s tightest grip on AI, its software

The pitch is bold for a seed round. Infinity says it can strip away the one advantage that has kept Nvidia untouchable. It has just raised money to try. The company closed a $15 million seed round at a $100 million valuation on Monday, it announced. Ba…

Decart’s Lucy 2.5 unlocks new live video effects, but physical AI is the real winner
Decart’s Lucy 2.5 unlocks new live video effects, but physical AI is the real winner

Artificial intelligence startup Decart continues to stretch the boundaries of what’s possible with the release of its latest live video model, Lucy 2.5, introducing real-time streaming visual effects capabilities for the first time. The startup claims …