Musk ally’s Valor to lead $500m Uforce round at $5bn, Bloomberg reports
Musk ally’s Valor to lead $500m Uforce round at $5bn, Bloomberg reports

Uforce, the London-based drone company built from Ukrainian battlefield manufacturers, is in talks to raise about $500m at a valuation of around $5bn, Bloomberg reported on Monday. Valor Equity Partners, the firm run by SpaceX board member Antonio Grac…

Cato raises €6m to sell AI into Italy’s €309.7bn tender market
Cato raises €6m to sell AI into Italy’s €309.7bn tender market

The investment case for Cato is unusual. Most software sells on the promise of making a hard thing easy. Cato’s backers are betting that a hard thing stays hard. The Milan startup has raised €6m in seed funding to sell AI to companies bidding for Itali…

Why manufacturers under workforce pressure should look closely at the tool drawer
Why manufacturers under workforce pressure should look closely at the tool drawer

For a manufacturer short on skilled people, time can disappear in routine places. A worker searches a drawer, walks back for a forgotten part, or discovers too late that an item is missing. PwC reported that U.S. manufacturing averaged about 420,000 jo…

Vara wins world’s first CE mark for AI that clears mammograms alone
Vara wins world’s first CE mark for AI that clears mammograms alone

A Berlin company has won the world’s first regulatory clearance for AI that closes a breast screening case. No radiologist looks at it. Vara, which trades as MX Healthcare GmbH, announced the certification on Wednesday in a statement issued through Bus…

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. …