Hugging Face is selling a $399 robot duck with open-source software
Hugging Face is selling a $399 robot duck with open-source software

Pollen Robotics has unveiled a bipedal robot called Microduck, at an introductory price of $399 before taxes and shipping. The Bordeaux company is owned by the AI platform Hugging Face. Its new machine has one eye and 15 motors, stands 25cm tall, and w…

I’m 19, and I’ve watched more than 200 brands quietly give up on influencers
I’m 19, and I’ve watched more than 200 brands quietly give up on influencers

I’m 19, and I’ve had an odd seat for the last couple of years of the creator economy. My company runs a marketplace that connects consumer brands with creators, and it’s grown to more than 200 brands. From that seat, I keep watching the same thing happ…

Meta launched Pocket in the US, and the app it came from shut down the same day
Meta launched Pocket in the US, and the app it came from shut down the same day

Meta has launched Pocket across the United States. The app it is based on shut down the same day. Pocket had been testing quietly in Brazil since July. It is now available to everyone in the US. Pocket lets people type a prompt and get back a small int…

Anthropic’s enterprise venture has bought its second consultancy in four months
Anthropic’s enterprise venture has bought its second consultancy in four months

Ode, the enterprise AI company Anthropic set up with Blackstone, has bought an AI consultancy called Casper Studios. Casper helps companies put Claude to work inside software their staff already use, Ode said on Thursday. The announcement gives no pric…

Astromech raised $20mn at $3.8bn to forecast how biology breaks
Astromech raised $20mn at $3.8bn to forecast how biology breaks

Astromech has raised $20mn at a $3.8 billion valuation to build AI that predicts how living systems will change. The company says its models learn from 3.8 billion years of biological history. The valuation and the training window are the same number, …

Starcloud raised $250mn to buy rockets it cannot yet book
Starcloud raised $250mn to buy rockets it cannot yet book

Starcloud has raised $250mn to put AI compute in orbit, and a large part of the money is earmarked for rockets it cannot yet book. The Series A extension values the company at $2.3bn post-money, the company said. Its total raised now stands at $450mn. …

Nvidia pays Poolside $6bn to license its model factory and hire 109 staff
Nvidia pays Poolside $6bn to license its model factory and hire 109 staff

Nvidia has agreed to pay Poolside $6bn to license the software the startup used to build AI models, and to offer jobs to 109 of its staff. It is also investing $1bn in what remains, at a $12bn pre-money valuation. The terms come from a letter Poolside …

Castelion raises $1bn at $13bn to scale hypersonic weapon production
Castelion raises $1bn at $13bn to scale hypersonic weapon production

Castelion has raised $1bn at a $13bn valuation. Three SpaceX executives founded the company in 2022 to build missiles. Its first product is Blackbeard, a hypersonic strike weapon designed for quantity rather than craft. The structure repays a close rea…

Relativity Networks raised $22mn to make AI’s fibre run at nearly light speed
Relativity Networks raised $22mn to make AI’s fibre run at nearly light speed

Relativity Networks has raised $22mn and landed a $40mn order from a large cloud provider. The company is pitching a faster kind of fibre for AI data centres. The Orlando-based company announced the funding and the commercial deal on Tuesday, in a pres…

A British AI-chip startup is raising at $6.5bn after an Anthropic deal
A British AI-chip startup is raising at $6.5bn after an Anthropic deal

Fractile, a British startup building chips for artificial intelligence, is in advanced talks to raise money at a valuation more than six times what it fetched three months ago, Bloomberg reported. The jump follows a deal to supply chips to Anthropic. T…