Skan AI raises $63m to watch how office staff actually work, then build agents that copy them
Skan AI raises $63m to watch how office staff actually work, then build agents that copy them

Skan AI announced $63m in funding on Wednesday, co-led by Cathay Innovation and Dell Technologies Capital. What the money is buying is not a model. It is a record of how people at large companies actually do their jobs. Skan builds that record by watch…

The man who built Qwen has a new lab, and the Shanghai government is an investor
The man who built Qwen has a new lab, and the Shanghai government is an investor

The researcher who led Alibaba’s Qwen models has started his own company. Junyang Lin announced Pragmatik Labs on X on Tuesday evening, five months after walking out of Alibaba. The lab is based in Shanghai and works on what Lin calls next-generation a…

‘It’s still day zero’: Lovable is worth $13.3bn, and the EU just became a shareholder
‘It’s still day zero’: Lovable is worth $13.3bn, and the EU just became a shareholder

Lovable is worth $13.3bn and its revenue is tripling. The interesting name on the cheque is the European Union. Lovable has raised $400m at a $13.3bn valuation. The Stockholm company lets people build software by describing it in ordinary language, and…

Joby is buying a stealth-technology firm for $500m, and rebuilding its defence arm around it
Joby is buying a stealth-technology firm for $500m, and rebuilding its defence arm around it

Joby Aviation has agreed to buy Resonant Sciences, a Dayton, Ohio radar and low-observability specialist, for about $500m, in the largest acquisition the electric air taxi company has made and the clearest signal yet of where it expects its near-term r…

Nvidia stopped funding the AI boom alone, Saudi banks cannot fund theirs, and 500 US towns have banned the buildings
Nvidia stopped funding the AI boom alone, Saudi banks cannot fund theirs, and 500 US towns have banned the buildings

  Nvidia said on Monday it would partner with six of the largest names in private capital to finance AI infrastructure through vehicles worth more than $500 billion. Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR are all in. The compa…

An activist investor says the market has decided Lionsgate is an AI casualty. It wants the studio to prove otherwise or sell.
An activist investor says the market has decided Lionsgate is an AI casualty. It wants the studio to prove otherwise or sell.

Activist investor Anson Funds is pressing Lionsgate to redefine itself for the AI era or put itself up for sale, according to a July letter to the board reviewed by Semafor. The argument turns on how the market reads a film library. “The rise of genera…

River AI raised $1.1bn to let companies train and keep their own models
River AI raised $1.1bn to let companies train and keep their own models

River AI has raised $1.1bn, roughly four months after the company was incorporated. General Catalyst and AMP PBC led the round, with strategic investment from NVIDIA and AMD Ventures, and further money from Y Combinator and Temasek. The Palo Alto compa…

Nick Blair seeks $200m for pre-launch defence-tech startup Pyra
Nick Blair seeks $200m for pre-launch defence-tech startup Pyra

Nick Blair, a son of former UK prime minister Tony Blair, is trying to raise around $200m for a defence-tech startup that has not yet launched, reported by the Financial Times and described as ongoing and unconfirmed.  The company, London-based Pyra, i…

HSBC Asset Management invests in Model ML’s ‘agentic operating system’ for banks
HSBC Asset Management invests in Model ML’s ‘agentic operating system’ for banks

HSBC Asset Management has taken a stake in Model ML, a London startup building what it calls an agentic operating system for financial services, and the deal says as much about where the industry now thinks the value in enterprise AI is settling as it …

Germany’s Uniper pivots to data centres with a €5bn plan to power the AI boom
Germany’s Uniper pivots to data centres with a €5bn plan to power the AI boom

Uniper, the German energy giant that Berlin rescued from collapse three years ago, is betting its next chapter on the server racks now reshaping Europe’s power market. The utility plans to invest around €5bn ($5.7bn) by 2030 in a strategy that pivots h…