AI Startups

Mercor, the $10 billion AI talent platform, acquired Deeptune, a startup building simulation environments for AI agent training, in a deal announced July 9. The acquisition signals growing investment in AI training infra…

Forward-deployed engineers (FDEs) are emerging as a key role in the AI-driven job market, according to a Forbes analysis. The piece examines how technical expertise remains crucial as AI reshapes employment, with FDEs po…

Eightco Holdings disclosed a treasury of approximately $397 million as of July 8, 2026, including a $90 million indirect investment in OpenAI, $18 million in Beast Industries, $1 million in Mythical Games, 283,452,700 WL…

Apollo Global Management and Blackstone are set to begin trading portions of a $35 billion private credit deal financing AI chip infrastructure for Broadcom and Anthropic, with about $15 billion expected to be available …

SpaceX's AI division signed a $1.25 billion monthly compute lease with Anthropic, projected to add $15 billion in annual AI revenue ahead of SpaceX's June 2026 IPO. The deal nearly quintuples xAI's revenue from $3.2 bill…

Ollama, an open source AI developer tool, raised $65 million in Series B funding led by Theory Venture, bringing its total funding to $88 million. The company, which helps developers run open-weight AI models on their PC…

Starbucks is developing in-house AI tools to replace software from Microsoft and IBM, aiming to cut costs as part of a $2 billion savings plan. The coffee chain is building alternatives to Microsoft's inventory system an…

Hedge fund billionaire Ken Griffin, who dismissed AI as 'garbage' in January, now predicts a 'golden age of entrepreneurial activity' powered by the technology, signaling a shift in institutional capital flows toward AI-…

AI unicorn Mercor, led by 23-year-old billionaire Brendan Foody, acquired Deeptune, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup that builds simulation environments for AI agents. Foody had invested in Deeptune's Series A month…

Lyzr, an enterprise AI agent startup, used its own AI agent, Agent Sam, to help raise a $100 million Series B round at a $500 million valuation. The agent handled investor questions and drafted memos, drawing $400 millio…

Microsoft opened its Fairwater AI datacenter in Wisconsin, equipped with NVIDIA GB200 GPUs, as part of a $190 billion annual capex spree that has pressured its stock. The facility supports Azure and AI workloads, while c…

Paradigm, a leading crypto venture capital firm, raised a $1.2 billion fund to invest in AI and robotics, expanding beyond its crypto roots. The fund has already backed drone-delivery firm Zipline and space-defense start…

Meta plans to put its own AI chip into production in September and aims to roughly double computing capacity across its data centers, according to Reuters. The chip, part of Meta's MTIA line, is designed to reduce relian…

SK Hynix's Nasdaq listing was oversubscribed more than seven times, with orders reaching roughly $171.5 billion, signaling strong demand for one of the largest foreign share sales on Wall Street. The South Korean memory-…

A Chinese academic warns that China must overhaul its innovation ecosystem or risk losing technological sovereignty and national security in an existential AI race with the US. The academic advocates for open-source AI, …

Rackspace Technology announced a capital raise and updated outlook on July 9, 2026, to accelerate its enterprise AI strategy, including regulated and sovereign deployments with Palantir Foundry and AIP. The company highl…

Salesforce is promoting Anthropic's Claude Tag inside Slack, a product that competes with its own Slackbot and Agentforce, because Salesforce's equity stake in Anthropic is worth roughly $5 billion, far outweighing any p…

Solopreneurs are using AI tools like Claude to build consulting businesses generating $5,000 per month by systematizing expertise into passive income streams, serving multiple clients without hiring a team. The model shi…

AI startup Fundamental launched NEXUS, a large tabular model (LTM) designed to analyze structured data like spreadsheets, where large language models (LLMs) fail. The model, backed by $275 million in funding, is being ad…

Christina Qi, former hedge fund manager of Domeyard LP, raised $97 million in Series B funding for her market data startup Databento, which aims to rival Bloomberg by offering cheaper, usage-based financial data feeds. T…