AI Startups

Poolside released Laguna S 2.1, a 118-billion-parameter open-weight coding model that matches or exceeds larger rivals on agentic coding benchmarks and runs on a single Nvidia DGX Spark desktop system. The San Francisco …

Jack Dorsey, co-founder of Twitter and Block, announced Buzz, a new open-source group chat platform for teams and AI agents, on Tuesday. Built by Block, Buzz aims to challenge Slack and GitHub by merging workflows, inclu…

Analysts at Bank of America and UBS advise investors to stick with AI hardware stocks despite a volatile July that briefly pushed chip stocks into a bear market. BofA says new open-source models like China's Kimi K3, lau…

Fei-Fei Li announced on July 21st, 2026, that robotics simulation startup SceniX is joining World Labs, an organization focused on accelerating spatial-intelligence research. SceniX, founded by Yunzhu Li, Changxi Zheng, …

Xaira Therapeutics has developed X-Cell, an AI model for drug discovery that predicts gene expression changes by training on information-rich causal data from its X-Atlas dataset, overcoming the scaling limitations of mo…

Gritt, an AI-powered robotics system, is building infrastructure on-site with top 10 U.S. EPCs today, claiming a 4X efficiency gain with no added labor. The company says 41% of the U.S. construction workforce will retire…

Gritt has raised $32 million in combined pre-seed and Series A funding for AI-powered robotic systems that attach to existing construction equipment to install solar panels up to four times faster than manual crews. The …

Skyfall AI emerged from stealth and is acquiring early-stage SaaS startups with monthly recurring revenue under $20,000, offering up to $1 million per acquisition and deploying its AI as CEO to operationalize the busines…

China's Moonshot AI announced its Kimi-K3 open-weight model, which outperformed Anthropic's Fable 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol on the Frontend Code Arena benchmark, intensifying the global AI arms race. The Kimi-K3 API cos…

Adam Jacob, co-founder of Chef, has raised $6.25 million for Swamp, a startup building deterministic AI-agent automation for operational workflows. The SEC filing by Elder Swamp Club Inc. shows $6,249,998 sold toward a $…

Short interest in US stocks has hit a record high, with S3 Partners reporting that short interest across all S&P 500 stocks is about 3.7% of free float, the highest since the firm began tracking in 2010. The surge reflec…

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon expressed skepticism about the AI spending boom, saying the huge investments may not pay off as investors expect, but he praised SpaceX's plan for space data centers as potentially viable. …

Cursor doubled usage limits for its own models on all paid plans on July 16, 2026, but excluded third-party models like Claude and GPT, as announced by Lee Robinson on X. The move comes as Moonshot AI launched the open-w…

Gritt launched out of stealth on July 21 with $32.4 million in total funding, including a $26 million Series A led by Obvious Ventures, to retrofit construction equipment like skid steers and forklifts with robotic arms …

OpenAI launched ChatGPT Work, a productivity layer powered by GPT-5.6 that automates multi-step tasks across apps like Slack, Google Drive, and Microsoft Teams, targeting over 5 million business users at roughly $25 per …

OpenAI launched a ChatGPT for small business program offering virtual training, in-person AI academies, guides, and access to new agents and partners, while also announcing that ChatGPT Work and Codex have reached 10 mil…

Open-weight AI models from Chinese labs are proving to be a terrible business, unlike open-source software, according to financial disclosures and analyst reports. Zhipu, the lab behind GLM 5.2, lost nearly $500 million …

Augustus, an AI-native federally chartered clearing bank for stablecoin-era payments, raised $180 million at a $1 billion valuation led by Tiger Global. The startup aims to replace legacy correspondent banking with alway…

SkyPilot emerged from stealth on July 21 with a $20 million seed round led by Lux Capital, backed by personal checks from Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, Google chief scientist Jeff Dean, Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue, and o…

SkyPilot, a control plane that unifies fragmented AI compute into a single pool, emerged from stealth today. The open-source platform, which began as a PhD project at Berkeley, now manages over 10,000 GPUs across hundred…