Baseten buys Blaxel, a startup that builds sandboxes for AI agents
Baseten buys Blaxel, a startup that builds sandboxes for AI agents

AI inference company Baseten has acquired Blaxel, a startup that builds secure execution environments, or sandboxes, for AI agents. Baseten co-founder and chief technology officer Amir Haghighat told Axios Pro about the deal, which the outlet reported …

Motive pulls its IPO filing after raising $1.3bn from General Catalyst
Motive pulls its IPO filing after raising $1.3bn from General Catalyst

Motive has secured more than $1.3bn in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund, the company announced on Thursday. Because of the financing, Motive has withdrawn its previously filed S-1 registration statement for an initial public…

Visa, Mastercard and Ant International team up on ID checks for AI agents
Visa, Mastercard and Ant International team up on ID checks for AI agents

Ant International, Mastercard and Visa have begun working together on a shared Know-Your-Agent framework. It covers AI agents that make purchases on behalf of users. The three companies announced the collaboration on Thursday, Singapore time. Reuters a…

BNP says AI borrowing will end the credit bull market, and it is lending to AI too
BNP says AI borrowing will end the credit bull market, and it is lending to AI too

BNP Paribas expects the years-long rally in corporate bonds to break as hyperscalers flood the market, forecasting some $400B of their bond sales next year and a record $3.7T of net fixed income supply. The ECB reached a similar conclusion in August, f…

ElevenLabs signs its first major-label deal, licensing Universal music for a fan remix platform
ElevenLabs signs its first major-label deal, licensing Universal music for a fan remix platform

Universal Music Group and ElevenLabs have signed a multi-year licensing agreement and will build a music creation platform on it that lets fans produce remixes, mashups, new interpretations and personalised vocal experiences using tracks from artists w…

Salesforce closes Fin and eyes $2bn Listen Labs, Business Insider reports
Salesforce closes Fin and eyes $2bn Listen Labs, Business Insider reports

Salesforce completed its acquisition of Fin on Thursday, bringing the customer service AI company formerly known as Intercom into its business. The same week, Business Insider’s Katie Roof and Ben Bergman reported that Salesforce has held talks to buy …

Saudi Arabia weighs merging EA with Savvy into one gaming giant
Saudi Arabia weighs merging EA with Savvy into one gaming giant

Saudi Arabia’s Public Investment Fund is weighing a merger of Electronic Arts with Savvy Games, which would put Madden NFL and Pokemon Go under one roof. Brussels cleared the EA takeover on competition and foreign subsidy grounds six weeks ago, and com…

Skild AI hit $100M in run-rate revenue selling robots a brain that learns from one video
Skild AI hit $100M in run-rate revenue selling robots a brain that learns from one video

Skild AI says it has reached $100M in recurring revenue run-rate ten months after its first commercial deployment, with hundreds of robots running at more than 60 companies. Its S1 model learns tasks from a single video without prior training data, whi…

DeepSeek launches V4.1-Flash and retires V4-Pro, its flagship model
DeepSeek launches V4.1-Flash and retires V4-Pro, its flagship model

DeepSeek released V4.1-Flash on Thursday. It is a smaller model that the company says beats its own flagship on coding and agent tasks, at a lower price. The Hangzhou lab announced it in a thread on X and published the weights on Hugging Face under the…

More Americans are warming to EVs, a new study finds
More Americans are warming to EVs, a new study finds

The HERE-SBD EV Index finds positive American perceptions of charging infrastructure rose from 28% to 47% in a year, and 60% now expect it to keep improving, even as US battery-electric market share fell to 5.37%. HERE is headquartered in Amsterdam and…