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Search: “sequoia”

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Mecka AI nears $500M valuation in Sequoia-led deal amid rush for robot training data

Mecka AI, which collects human motion data for robot training, is nearing a Sequoia-led round at about a $500 million valuation.

Mecka AI is nearing a new funding round led by Sequoia Capital at a valuation of roughly $500 million, three months after raising $60 million led by Framework Ventures with participation from Menlo Ventures, SV Angel, and Kindred Ventures. Founded in 2024 by Josh Gao, Mogen Cheng, Jason Chong, and Duy Nguyen, the startup pays people to record everyday tasks using body sensors and smartphones to produce egocentric training data for humanoid robots. The company projected a $100 million annual run rate by the end of 2026 and competes with firms like Scale AI, Mercor, Surge, Micro1, and XDOF in the physical-world data market.

TechCrunch · AI · 5d agoAI industry1

macOS 27 Golden Gate – Review

Ars Technica reviews macOS 27 Golden Gate, highlighting an unavoidable Apple Intelligence upgrade, new AFM 3 Core models, and dropped Intel Mac support.

macOS 27 Golden Gate delivers the first significant Apple Intelligence upgrade two years after launch, and the toggle to disable the AI features or delete downloaded models is gone. Apple Intelligence runs on a new AFM 3 Core model built in collaboration with Google, while the more capable AFM 3 Core Advanced requires an M3 chip and at least 12GB of RAM. The release drops all Intel Mac support, requiring Apple Silicon, with Sequoia security updates expected to end in fall 2027 and Tahoe's in 2028.

Hacker News · AI · 17h agoAI industry 2 sourcesHN 45↑ · 28 comments

AEO startup Profound hits unicorn valuation, raises $180M Series D 7 months after last round

AEO startup Profound raised a $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation led by Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins.

Profound, which builds marketing software to help brands appear in AI search results, raised a $180 million Series D at a $1.8 billion valuation, seven months after its $96 million Series C. Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins led the round, with Lightspeed Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, and South Park Commons participating. The company reports 3x revenue growth in six months and over 1,000 enterprise customers including Comcast, The Estée Lauder Companies, and Walmart. It operates in the generative engine optimization (GEO) and answer engine optimization (AEO) space.

TechCrunch · AI · 1d agoAI industry

AIR raises $50M to help companies vet the skills and add-ons AI agents use

AI security startup AIR exits stealth with $50M across two seed rounds to continuously vet skills, plugins, and MCP servers used by enterprise AI agents.

AIR, founded by Unit 8200 veterans Yair Saban and Niv Hoffman, raised $10 million led by Sequoia and $40 million led by Greenoaks to secure the emerging AI agent software supply chain. Its platform discovers agents in enterprise environments, intercepts their actions, and continuously vets skills, add-ons, and MCP servers against a maintained whitelist, filtering out about 27% of found add-ons. The company claims over 20 customers, roughly a quarter large enterprises, with strong demand in financial services and pharma, and competes with Noma Security, Zenity, Astrix Security, and Operant AI.

TechCrunch · Security · 15d agoAI industry

harshatheg/Qwen-2.5-1B-RLCD — new model trending #30 on Hugging Face

A community MLX inference engine evaluates constrained JSON schema fields in parallel on Apple Silicon, reporting 5.6-7.0x latency speedups with guaranteed schema validity.

The repository harshatheg/Qwen-2.5-1B-RLCD appeared at #30 on Hugging Face trending, but its content describes Parallel Constrained Decoding, an MLX-based inference engine for structured extraction and classification on Apple Silicon Macs. Benchmarked with mlx-community/Qwen2.5-1.5B-Instruct-4bit on an M4 Max, it reports 5.6x-7.0x latency reductions (e.g., 1,900 ms to 270 ms for a 28-field support triage task) with 100% syntactic validity and calibrated field-level probabilities. The engine prefills a single KV-cache, broadcasts it across all schema fields, and slices logits to valid candidate tokens for enum fields with up to 255 choices.

Hugging Face trending models · 1d agoAI tools & infra

AI research startup Listen Labs scrubbed a $1.5B funding round for Salesforce talks

Listen Labs abandoned a signed $125M Series C term sheet at a $1.5B valuation amid acquisition talks with Salesforce at roughly $2 billion.

Listen Labs, a three-year-old voice AI market research startup with about $30 million in annualized revenue, signed a term sheet for a $125 million Series C led by Menlo Ventures at a $1.5 billion valuation but walked away before closing. The financing likely collapsed due to acquisition talks with Salesforce at around $2 billion, though no deal is finalized. Competitor Simile recently closed a $200 million Series B at a $2 billion valuation, resetting benchmarks for the sector. Listen Labs' customers include Microsoft, Canva, Anthropic, and Sweetgreen.

TechCrunch · AI · 7d agoAI industry