Google is developing an AI startup incubator aimed specifically at former employees, known as “Xooglers.” Ana-Maria Stanciuc reports for The Next Web, citing Bloomberg, that the initiative would give Google an early foothold in ventures founded by people who already know the company’s tools and models. The incubator would sit alongside two existing programmes. Google …
Seattle startup Gradial has raised $65 million in Series C funding to fuel its vision of a unified AI operating system for enterprise marketing, Kerry Flynn reports for Axios. The company builds AI agents that automate workflows across the dozens of specialized tools large marketing teams already rely on, including Adobe, Salesforce, ServiceNow and Databricks. …
A New York-based startup called Flourish has raised $500 million to pursue one of AI’s most ambitious goals: building an artificial intelligence system that works like the human brain. Steven Levy reports for WIRED that Jeff Bezos led the early funding after reading a two-page pitch document, eventually contributing tens of millions of dollars and …
A new startup called Trajectory is building a platform that helps AI products improve continuously by learning from real user interactions. Maxwell Zeff reports for WIRED that the company was founded by researchers who previously worked at Google DeepMind, Apple, and OpenAI, and has raised a $15 million seed round at a $115 million valuation. …
AMI Labs, the startup founded by former Meta chief AI scientist Yann LeCun, has raised more than $1bn in its seed round, making it the largest seed funding round ever secured by a European company. Sifted reports that investors include chip giant Nvidia, Singapore’s Temasek, French firms Cathay Innovation and Daphni, German VC HV Capital, …
Netflix has acquired InterPositive, an AI tools company founded by actor and filmmaker Ben Affleck, who will now serve as a senior adviser to the streaming giant. Todd Spangler reports for Variety. The full 16-person team of engineers, researchers and creatives will join Netflix as part of the deal. Financial terms were not disclosed. InterPositive, …
Apple has acquired Q.ai, an Israeli artificial intelligence startup specializing in audio technology and facial analysis. The deal values the company at between $1.5 billion and $2 billion, making it Apple’s second-largest acquisition after the $3 billion Beats purchase in 2014. Q.ai was founded in 2022 by Aviad Maizels, Yonatan Wexler, and Avi Barliya in …
The artificial intelligence industry faces a critical shortage of high-quality data needed to train more powerful models. A new startup, Moonlake AI, aims to solve this problem by creating data from interactive 3D worlds. Rashi Shrivastava reports for Forbes. The company was cofounded by former Stanford PhD students Sharon Lee and Fan-Yun Sun. They are …
The AI startup Moonvalley has released a new video generation model named Marey, designed specifically for the film industry. The company aims to position its tool as a collaborative partner for filmmakers rather than a replacement for human creativity. A key feature is that Marey is trained exclusively on licensed data, a strategy intended to …
The $1.5 billion AI startup Builder.ai has filed for bankruptcy after revelations that it used human developers instead of artificial intelligence. Vinay Patel reports for International Business Times that the company’s supposed AI system was actually operated by 700 Indian programmers pretending to be automated bots. Builder.ai raised over $450 million from prominent investors including …