AI Startups

Samsung is in talks to invest hundreds of millions of euros in Mistral AI as part of a funding round that could value the French startup at about €20 billion, according to the Financial Times. The investment would give S…

The heads of Samsung Electronics, SK Group and Naver are working to meet Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang near Silicon Valley this week, industry sources said Wednesday, in a follow-up to Huang's four-day visit to Seoul in June. …

Fireworks AI, the inference startup founded by former Meta PyTorch lead Lin Qiao, closed a $1.5 billion Series D at a $17.5 billion valuation, up from a $4 billion valuation nine months ago, as the company hit $1 billion…

Naren Shaam, an Indian-born Harvard Business School graduate, secured $10 million in funding for Omio to launch AI-powered multimodal travel services in Japan and Southeast Asia.

Yang Zhilin, the 34-year-old founder and CEO of Moonshot AI, has gone viral on Chinese social media platform Weibo after his company's Kimi K3 model launched on Friday, with the hashtag 'Post-90s Tsinghua University geni…

Chinese AI unicorn Moonshot AI, developer of the Kimi K3 model, is closing a fundraising round at a US$30 billion valuation and plans a subsequent round as early as August, according to a source. The Beijing-based compan…

Samsung is in talks to invest up to €1bn in French AI group Mistral at a valuation of €20bn, according to the Financial Times. The South Korean tech giant's potential investment would position Mistral as a leading Europe…

Hugging Face retired its own Text Generation Inference (TGI) server in December 2025, directing users to SGLang, a tool that began as a UC Berkeley research paper in 2023 and by 2026 was running on over 400,000 GPUs, gen…

Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released its first open-weights model called Inkling on July 15, 2026, after raising roughly $2 billion in seed funding and reportedly hitting a $12 billio…

A 23-year-old founder is building an AI-native platform to help intelligence agencies and police departments analyze large volumes of data and counter homegrown terrorism, inspired by the bottleneck exposed during the Bo…

YC-backed Prescience launched on July 21st, claiming its AI-managed health benefits platform can cut employer premiums by roughly 20% while offering $0-deductible plans. Founded by brothers Aditya Jain (MD, Harvard Medic…

Moonshot AI, developer of the Kimi chatbot, plans to begin talks in August for a final pre-IPO funding round targeting a pre-money valuation of up to $50 billion, according to Bloomberg. The company, which could pursue a…

Marc Held, CEO of HOPTEK, an AI-native freight monetization platform, shared insights on successful freight tech exits, drawing from his track record with Green Screens and Turvo. Held is applying his problem-solving app…

A weekend rumor that Anthropic is acquiring robotics startup Physical Intelligence spread rapidly on X, even after Physical Intelligence CEO Karol Hausman denied it via a Slack message containing a gif. The rumor was not…

GMI Cloud, led by Alex Yeh, reported that signed customer commitments pushed contracted annual recurring revenue above $500 million as of July 21st, while live ARR grew 2.4x during the first half of 2026 from its year-en…

OpenAI posted a job listing for a support delivery lead in its ads division that referenced building a publisher-facing ad network, then deleted those references after CMO Insider inquired. The listing originally include…

Adaption launched Teams on July 21st, adding shared compute, centralized billing and member-level controls to its model-building platform. The release turns collaboration and spending controls into product features for g…

Base44, a Wix-owned startup founded by Maor Shlomo, launched a seven-day developer competition on July 21st offering $10,000 to one winner for an application built through an external IDE or AI coding agent and deployed …

American AI labs face an existential threat from low-cost Chinese competitors, according to a report in The Economist. Chinese firms are developing AI models at a fraction of the cost, potentially undercutting U.S. domin…

Curative CEO Fred Turner canceled the health insurer's $600,000-a-year Salesforce CRM contract after building an internal replacement using AI-assisted coding in about two months, according to a 20VC podcast interview an…