ZeroHour

Search: “sequoia”

8 items in the last 7d

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.

Apple security advisory (AV26-930)

CCCS relays Apple's September 14, 2026 security updates fixing vulnerabilities across iOS 27, macOS Tahoe 26.7, Sequoia 15.8, Safari, and other products.

The Canadian Centre for Cyber Security (AV26-930) notes that as of September 14, 2026, Apple has addressed vulnerabilities in iOS and iPadOS prior to 27, macOS Golden Gate prior to 27, macOS Tahoe prior to 26.7, macOS Sequoia prior to 15.8, plus tvOS, watchOS, visionOS 27, Safari, and Xcode prior to 27. The bulletin provides no CVE identifiers or exploitation details. Users and administrators are encouraged to review Apple's security releases and apply the updates.

Canadian Centre for Cyber Security · 17h agoAdvisory

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

Apple Rolls Out Massive Security Update Fixing 273 Vulnerabilities Across Its Devices

Apple's coordinated rollout patches 273 unique vulnerabilities across iOS 27, macOS Golden Gate 27, watchOS and Safari, including remote code execution flaws.

Apple shipped one of its largest coordinated security updates on September 14, 2026, fixing 273 unique CVEs across iOS 27, iPadOS 27, macOS Golden Gate 27, watchOS 27, tvOS 27, visionOS 27, Safari 27 and Xcode 27. Highlights include CVE-2026-65414, a Bluetooth out-of-bounds write enabling remote code execution, and CVE-2026-84607, an AVEVideoEncoder race condition granting kernel privileges to sandboxed apps. macOS Golden Gate 27 covers the broadest set with 210 CVEs, and Apple states none of the flaws were exploited in the wild.

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.

Apple Patches 200 Vulnerabilities With New iOS 27, macOS Golden Gate 27 Releases

Apple patched a record 200+ vulnerabilities in iOS 27 and macOS Golden Gate 27, including 20 kernel flaws; none exploited in the wild.

Apple's iOS 27 and iPadOS 27 releases fix roughly 126 security flaws, 20 of them in the kernel, while macOS Golden Gate 27 addresses 210 vulnerabilities, about 100 shared with the mobile release. macOS Tahoe 26.7 patches 153 unique CVEs, including 26 kernel defects that could cause memory corruption, privilege escalation, system termination, and information leaks. Notable fixes include CVE-2026-64752, a CoreMedia memory corruption flaw allowing iPhone compromise via a malicious image, and CVE-2022-3437, a heap buffer overflow in Heimdal Samba enabling denial-of-service. Apple states none of the patched flaws are known to be exploited in the wild.

SecurityWeek · 2d agoVulnerabilityCVE-2022-3437CVE-2026-647521· 1 read

Apple Updates Everything, (Mon, Sep 14th)

Apple patched a record 261 vulnerabilities across iOS 27, macOS Golden Gate 27, watchOS 27, and other platforms, with none flagged as exploited.

Apple's annual OS update shipped iOS/iPadOS 27, macOS Golden Gate 27, tvOS 27, watchOS 27, and visionOS 27 plus bug-fix releases for the 26 and 15 branches, fixing a record 261 vulnerabilities. Notable issues include multiple kernel flaws allowing root privilege escalation (CVE-2026-43689, CVE-2026-43691, CVE-2026-43698, CVE-2026-43786), remote code execution in CUPS (CVE-2026-43692), kernel memory corruption via malicious NFS servers (CVE-2026-43686, CVE-2026-43687), and WebKit memory corruption from crafted web content (CVE-2026-43715). No vulnerabilities are labeled as actively exploited, and Apple does not assign per-CVE severities. Users report iOS 26.7 being downloaded when iOS 27 is intended, and tools like Little Snitch and BlockBlock need updates before upgrading to macOS 27.