Robert Downey Jr. has joined SPECS, Snap’s augmented reality glasses business, as its honorary chief customer experience officer, Snap announced. His job is to show people what the see-through glasses can do. SPECS runs as Specs Inc., a wholly owned Sn…
Reliable Robotics has raised $115 million, taking its valuation past $1 billion, the company announced on Tuesday. The Mountain View, California, startup builds systems that let existing aircraft taxi, take off, fly and land on their own. The money ext…
Sierra, the AI customer service startup led by Bret Taylor, has partnered with Stripe so its agents can take card payments during phone calls. Customers type their card number on the keypad and the data goes straight to Stripe. Healthcare billing firm …
Joel Kaplan, Meta’s chief global affairs officer, will leave the company in 2027 after more than 15 years, Bloomberg reported. He will stay through the US midterm elections. No successor was named, but president Dina Powell McCormick and chief legal of…
Otter.ai has raised $320 million in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund. The AI meeting notetaker announced the deal on Tuesday. It will use the money for enterprise growth, its go-to-market strategy, international expansion an…
Waymo plans to grow its fleet from about 4,000 robotaxis today to 8,000 by the end of 2026 and 20,000 by the end of 2027, Semafor reported. The push follows a $5B loan this month. Much of the new fleet will be Ojai vans built on Chinese Zeekr cars. Way…
Homebase, which makes scheduling and payroll software for hourly teams, has launched Homebase Assistant. The AI tool finds and contacts staff to cover missed shifts, builds schedules, screens job candidates and flags timecard errors before payroll. It …
New York startup Asymptote Labs has raised a $5.5M seed round led by Tower Research Ventures. It makes Beacon, a free open-source tool that records what AI agents do, and sells a paid platform that can block risky agent actions. The money will go on en…
Inception, the Redwood City AI lab, released Mercury 3 on Monday. It is the newest version of what the company calls a diffusion LLM, a design that differs from the systems behind most chatbots. Most language models are autoregressive. They write one t…
Amazon plans to hire more than 300,000 US workers for the holiday season, up 20% from last year, with seasonal staff paid an average of $20 an hour. It is adding health cover for seasonal workers who stay into January. Overall US seasonal retail hiring…