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Former Infosys chief’s AI startup nabs another $53M

Hang Ten Systems, founded by ex-Infosys CEO Vishal Sikka, added $53 million to its seed round, bringing total funding to $85 million.

The new round was led by Temasek's early-stage platform Xora with Mayfield participating, closing five weeks after the initial $32 million seed. Founded in May 2026, the Palo Alto startup advises enterprises with over $10 billion in annual revenue on AI strategy and builds production software using its in-house Hobie framework of reusable AI skills. It works with 21 major enterprises including Fresenius Kabi, Saudi Aramco, and Siemens Energy, and plans to expand engineering, consulting, and sales teams.

TechCrunch · AI · 16h agoAI industry

Sequoia doubles down on Cymphony as AI agents create new enterprise security risks

Cymphony emerges with $30M from Sequoia and SMBC to give security teams unified visibility into AI agent and non-human identities.

Cymphony, a New York- and Tel Aviv-based startup, raised a $25 million Series A co-led by Sequoia and SMBC Fin Atlas Beyond Fund, valuing it above $100 million. Its platform builds a "workforce graph" unifying identity, data, and activity signals for employees, AI agents, and other non-human identities. The company says it found roughly 85,000 files exposed to AI tools at one US public company and reached seven-figure ARR in its first year of sales with customers including KKR and Syngenta. Sequoia previously led its undisclosed seed round, betting on Israeli Talpiot program alumni founders.

TechCrunch · Security · 7d agoIndustry

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

Travis Kalanick’s Atoms might be getting into the robotaxi business

Travis Kalanick's Atoms, which raised $1.7B led by Andreessen Horowitz with $100M from Uber, is reportedly exploring robotaxi technology and acquisitions.

Atoms raised a $1.7 billion round led by Andreessen Horowitz earlier in the summer, and Uber has invested $100 million. The Financial Times reports the startup is preparing a hiring spree and acquisitions to become a major autonomous vehicle player, and has discussed Uber using its robotaxi technology. Atoms previously acquired Pronto, an autonomous mining startup led by Anthony Levandowski, Uber's former self-driving chief.

TechCrunch · AI · 10d agoAI industry

Anthropic eyes Nasdaq listing as a second profitable quarter aims to win over investors ahead of a mega-IPO

Anthropic reports a second straight profitable quarter with $11.5B quarterly revenue and prepares a Nasdaq IPO at a possible $2T-plus valuation.

Anthropic told investors it will be profitable for a second consecutive quarter, though the claim uses an adjusted metric excluding costs like stock-based compensation. Quarterly revenue jumped 14-fold year over year to $11.5 billion, with an annualized run rate of $65 billion at the end of July and gross margins above 80 percent before revenue-sharing and training costs. The company plans a Nasdaq listing at a possible valuation of $2 trillion or more, while SemiAnalysis expects $120 billion in annualized revenue by year-end. The news coincides with CEO Dario Amodei's public call to slow AI development, backed by Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

The Decoder · 2d agoAI industry

Anthropic details distillation campaigns from Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek

Anthropic reports nearly 200 million Claude exchanges tied to distillation campaigns by Alibaba, Moonshot AI, and DeepSeek.

A new Anthropic report describes five distillation campaigns totaling nearly 200 million exchanges that extracted chain-of-thought traces from Claude to train competing models, targeting agentic tool use, coding, and reasoning capabilities. The largest campaign, attributed to Alibaba, accounted for 151 million exchanges between May and July 2026 across 3,500 accounts, peaking near three million exchanges per day, allegedly to produce training material for the Qwen model family. A Moonshot AI campaign routed roughly 300,000 requests over ten days through 5,000 accounts, primarily targeting Opus, including one task analyzing CCTV footage that appeared connected to the Chinese military. Attackers used prompt techniques, such as framing queries as katakana-only Japanese translation requests, to make Claude reveal its internal thinking traces.

TechCrunch · AIupdated · 12h agofirst · 6d agoAI safety & security 19 sources2

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya is a startup from a former Spotify leader for making music apps

Former Spotify innovation head raises $5.5M pre-seed for A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, a startup building playful music-creation apps with selective generative AI features.

A Vinyl Bar in Shibuya, founded by former Spotify head of innovation Máuhan M Zonoozy, raised a $5.5M pre-seed round from Mantis VC, SV Angel, Boxgroup, Quiet Capital and others. The startup ships small music-play apps including Speed Surfer, Usersound, Stacks, Drops, Sampler, and the iOS mixer app bop, plus a new prompt-based sound creation feature. Zonoozy says the company deliberately avoids infusing AI into every product, arguing human taste and participation become more valuable as AI-generated content grows abundant.

TechCrunch · AI · 2d agoAI industry 2 sources

Lovable CTO: The Future of SaaS Is Apps That Agents Can Use

Lovable pivots from app building to exposing app functions as agent-callable capabilities via hosted MCP servers, raising a $400M Series C at a $13.3B valuation.

Lovable CTO Fabian Hedin outlined a strategy of turning published applications into agent-accessible capabilities by exposing selected functions as tools through a hosted MCP server, usable from ChatGPT, Claude, and other MCP-compatible clients. The company reports surpassing a $500M annualized revenue run rate, more than 60 million projects created, over 900 million monthly visits to Lovable-built apps, and usage by employees at nearly two-thirds of the Fortune 500. Menlo Ventures led a $400M Series C this month alongside EQT's Scaleup Europe Fund, valuing the company at $13.3 billion. Lovable evolved from the open-source GPT Engineer tool, became a commercial product in November 2024, and now competes with platforms like Vercel in AI-generated software hosting.

Latent Space · 21d agoAI industry

An Anthropic researcher’s doomsday warning comes at a very interesting time

An Anthropic researcher resigned warning the company is 'gambling with our lives' racing toward superintelligence, timed with its reported IPO preparation.

TechCrunch's Equity podcast discusses the resignation of an Anthropic researcher who warned on X that the company is 'racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives'. The company's own alignment lead co-signed the message rather than walking it back. The hosts note the warning lands differently with Anthropic reportedly preparing for an IPO. The episode also covers Apple's AI-focused event, Stokes Space's $1 billion raise, Cognition raising $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation, and a $50 million seed round for floating nuclear reactors.

TechCrunch · AI · 5d agoAI industry1

Accel reportedly in talks to lead $1B round for Thinking Machines at $40B valuation

Thinking Machines, Mira Murati's AI lab, is in talks to raise $1 billion at a $40 billion valuation, with Accel reportedly leading.

Thinking Machines, the AI lab founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, is negotiating a $1 billion round at a valuation of at least $40 billion, below the $50 billion it reportedly sought last year. The company's annual revenue run rate exceeds $100 million, mostly from usage-based compute fees for its open-weight Inkling model adapted on the Tinker platform. Its prior $2 billion seed round, led by Andreessen Horowitz with Nvidia, GV, Lightspeed, and Conviction Partners, valued it at $12 billion. Several co-founders, including Lilian Weng and Luke Metz, have since returned to OpenAI.

TechCrunch · AI · 13d agoAI industry

Anthropic reportedly signs $517 billion in compute deals after Dario Amodei warned rivals about reckless risk

Anthropic signed compute contracts worth up to $517 billion in eleven months, adding 14.8 gigawatts amid the AI capacity race.

According to The Information, Anthropic locked in contracts worth up to $517 billion over eleven months, adding at least 14.8 gigawatts of compute since October 2025 on top of 1–2 gigawatts it already had, and is planning its own data centers. Bloomberg reports Anthropic's annualized revenue topped $65 billion, while OpenAI was above $40 billion as of July and targets 30 gigawatts by 2030. The spending follows Dario Amodei's early-2026 warning that rivals underestimated investment risk, while Sam Altman now cautions about 'unsustainable silliness' from neo-cloud providers.

The Decoder · 9d agoAI industry1

Cylake Raises $245 Million Ahead of Cybersecurity Platform Beta

Cylake, an AI-native sovereign security startup founded by Palo Alto Networks' Nir Zuk, raised $245 million, taking total funding to $290 million.

Security startup Cylake raised $245 million via a convertible note with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Picture Capital, and Redpoint Ventures, six months after a $45 million Greylock-led seed. Founded by Nir Zuk, Wilson Xu, and Ehud Shamir, the 40-plus-employee company is building an on-premises/private-cloud AI-native security platform for governments and highly regulated enterprises. A beta is expected by the end of 2026 with general availability in 2027.

SecurityWeek · 8d agoIndustry

AI compute provider Nscale is looking for $3.5B in pre-IPO financing

British AI compute provider Nscale seeks $3.5B pre-IPO via $1.5B convertible notes and $2B from Nvidia ahead of a possible September IPO.

Nscale, a British AI infrastructure company founded about two years ago, is reportedly in talks to raise $3.5 billion ahead of an IPO that could come as early as late September 2026: $1.5 billion in convertible notes plus $2 billion in financing from Nvidia. Nvidia previously joined Nscale's $1.1 billion Series B in March, led by Aker and billed as the largest Series B in European history, following a $155 million Series A in December 2024. Nscale recently signed an approximately $45 billion deal with Anthropic and has told investors it has roughly $103 billion in projected revenue based on signed customer leases.

TechCrunch · AI · 12d agoAI industry

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

Maven Robotics wants to steal your robot deployment deal

Warehouse robotics startup Maven Robotics emerges from stealth with $100 million to build 250 third-generation palletizing robots.

Maven Robotics, founded in 2024 by former Apple special projects engineer Hamza Derbas and his brother Khalid, emerged from stealth after raising $100 million from RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures, and XTX Markets Ventures. Its wheeled dual-arm robots, moving 10 mph and lifting up to 30 kg, perform mixed palletizing in distribution centers, with up to eight units reportedly running 16 hours a day at 99%+ uptime. The company plans to build 250 third-generation robots, start design on a fourth-generation platform, and expand toward material handling and fabrication, positioning itself against rivals like Agility, which is going public via a $2.4 billion SPAC deal.

TechCrunch · AI · 6d agoAI industry

Anthropic Says Seven China-Based AI Labs Ran Industrial-Scale Claude Distillation Attacks

Anthropic disrupted industrial-scale unauthorized Claude distillation by seven China-based AI labs, including Alibaba, DeepSeek, Moonshot, and Z.ai.

Anthropic identified and disrupted six illicit distillation campaigns since February 2026 run by seven China-based labs: Alibaba, Moonshot, DeepSeek, Z.ai (Zhipu), MiniMax, Xiaomi, and SenseTime. The largest, GTG-16005, involved 151 million exchanges targeting Claude Opus 4.6/4.7 chain-of-thought transcripts, peaking at roughly 3 million exchanges per day from more than 3,500 fraudulent accounts. Labs used proxy/relay services with fictitious identities, fake or stolen credit cards, harvested API keys, and purchased conversation transcripts from third-party resellers. Anthropic is countering by banning reseller accounts, summarizing internal reasoning before responding, and introducing preserved thinking in Fable 5.1, which encrypts reasoning and prevents context edits before it.

Your startup’s next teammate might be an AI agent: Gusto, Insight Partners, and Leland explain what that changes at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026

TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 panel with Gusto, Insight Partners, and Leland will examine how startups integrate AI agents into early teams.

A Builders Stage session titled "Hiring When AI Is a Co-Founder" at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 (October 13-15, Moscone West, San Francisco) features Gusto CEO Josh Reeves, Insight Partners SVP Michelle Johnson, and Leland CEO John Koelliker. The panel will discuss how early-stage startups decide which work to delegate to AI agents versus human hires, covering ownership, accountability, and culture. Gusto serves more than 500,000 companies, and Johnson previously helped scale Flock Safety from under $1 million to $90 million in ARR. The piece doubles as event promotion with discounted registration before September 25.

TechCrunch · AI · 2h agoAI industry

Nvidia wants to pour up to $10 billion into Anthropic's record-breaking IPO

Nvidia is reportedly in talks to invest up to $10 billion in Anthropic's IPO, which targets a $2 trillion valuation, making it history's largest.

Reuters reports Nvidia is negotiating to become an anchor investor with up to $10 billion in Anthropic's planned IPO, locking in shares before they hit the open market. Anthropic aims to raise up to $100 billion at a roughly $2 trillion valuation, with the IPO expected to complete before the US midterms in November. Anthropic's revenue reportedly grew from about $9 billion at the end of 2025 to over $65 billion by July 2026. The company already runs on Nvidia GPUs and committed in 2025 to purchasing $30 billion in Azure compute packed with Nvidia chips.

The Decoder · 4d agoAI industry1

What's Scarier Than Agents Taking over Internet? CEO Cartel Trying Take over AInew

Opinion essay argues Dario Amodei's proposals for embedded evaluators and frontier AI coordination would require antitrust waivers and entrench a large-lab cartel.

The author critiques Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's proposal for embedded evaluators inside AI labs, democratic coordination on safety standards and pacing, and global coordination with authoritarian governments. He argues such coordination requires loosening antitrust law, burdening startups while shielding incumbents like Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI, and doubts verifiable global pacing given enormous defection incentives. The piece links lab motivations to data center subsidy pushback, competition from open-source and low-cost Chinese models, and upcoming IPO financial disclosures.

Tajin Group: Guarantee Marketplace Vendor Involved in Phishing and Chinese Money Laundering Group

Recorded Future details Tajin Group, a Chinese-speaking vendor on Telegram guarantee marketplaces running phishing, carding, and money laundering operations targeting Chinese banks.

Insikt Group analyzed Tajin Group, a Chinese-speaking threat actor operating on Telegram-based guarantee marketplaces Dabai Guarantee and, since May 2026, Xinbi Guarantee. The group conducts phishing, payment card theft, and money laundering targeting mainland Chinese citizens and banks, testing stolen cards from twelve countries on platforms like CCAvenue and Geidea. Operators bought and sold at least 100 Telegram usernames and anonymous virtual numbers via Fragment Market to strengthen OPSEC, linking multiple usernames to single Telegram accounts. Recorded Future warns Tajin Group's TTPs are likely to be replicated by other vendors on Chinese-language guarantee marketplaces at global scale.

Recorded Future · 2d agoThreat actor

The complex corporate web behind a $3.2 billion AI data center

Ars Technica probes diffuse accountability behind TeraWulf's $3.2B Lake Mariner AI data center after a June fire exposed safety and job gaps.

A June fire at the Lake Mariner data center in Somerset, New York exposed missing alarms, a nonfunctioning suppression system, and dry hydrants, highlighting how responsibility is split across TeraWulf (owner-operator), Fluidstack (operator), Google (lease guarantees and equity warrants), and Anthropic (compute customer). The article details local concerns over the gap between promised 165 permanent jobs and a projected 35-40, socialized grid costs, and Governor Hochul's moratorium on hyperscaler development. Anthropic's February 2026 pledge to cover electricity price increases applies to the site but leaves other commitments unverified.

Ars Technica · AI · 9d agoAI industry

HelmGuard Raises $7.3 Million for Agentic GRC and Security

Agentic GRC and security startup HelmGuard raised a $7.3 million seed round co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline.

HelmGuard, a UK-based startup founded in 2024 by former Palantir executive John Daley (CEO) and Jack Miller (CTO), announced a $7.3 million seed round co-led by Infinity Ventures and Frontline, with participation from FinTech Collective, Stage 2 Capital, and Entrepreneurs First. The company builds agentic governance, risk and compliance (GRC) software that collects risk signals directly from integrated source systems and uses AI agents to automate risk management, assurance, and control gap assessments. It claims the platform cuts assessment cycles to hours by unifying fragmented compliance and security data.

SecurityWeek · 7d agoIndustry

XDOF, just 3 months out of stealth, is in talks for a Series B at a $1.2B valuation

Robotics data startup XDOF is in talks for a Series B at a $1.2B valuation led by 8VC, three months after emerging from stealth.

XDOF, co-founded in 2024 by UC Berkeley researchers Philipp Wu and Fred Shentu, collects real-world teleoperation data for training general-purpose robots. It raised a $70M Series A in June from Thrive Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, Lux, and Spark Capital, and annualized revenue is approaching $50 million. The company is partnering with UC Berkeley's AI Research lab to release the ABC robot training dataset and already serves about 20 customers, including several frontier AI labs. Terms of the Series B are not final.

TechCrunch · AI · 12d agoAI industry

ASML locks in TSMC, Samsung, and Intel while Huawei races to break its grip

ASML secures TSMC, Samsung, and Intel commitments for twelve-inch photomasks while Huawei funds China's DUV lithography push to bypass export controls.

ASML, the world's only EUV lithography maker, has locked in commitments from TSMC, Samsung, and Intel to move photomasks from six-inch to twelve inches, which ASML CTO Marco Pieters says could raise High-NA throughput by 40 percent; TSMC and ASML plan a test line by 2031 with production on High-NA tools by 2033. Meanwhile Huawei is orchestrating China's push to build DUV lithography equipment and reduce dependence on ASML, centered on Shanghai equipment maker Yuliangsheng, with SMIC testing the machines and Huawei's Habo fund backing Zeiss rivals and light-source developers. Bernstein analysts note the main bottlenecks remain projection lenses and light sources.

The Decoder · 8d agoAI industry

NVIDIA AI Factory Compute Is Becoming an Investable Asset Class

NVIDIA partners with Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR to mobilize over $500 billion of third-party capital for AI infrastructure financing.

NVIDIA announced partnerships with major financial firms including Apollo, BlackRock, Blackstone, Brookfield, Goldman Sachs and KKR. The independent financing platforms are designed to mobilize more than $500 billion of third-party capital to support AI infrastructure buildout. NVIDIA frames the move as positioning AI factory compute as an investable asset class.

NVIDIA Blog · Aug 12, 2026AI industry

How AI and cybersecurity are reshaping ServiceNow

Analysis argues ServiceNow's $7.75B Armis acquisition and AI-driven consumption pricing are reshaping its ITSM platform amid SaaS market anxiety.

CSO Online examines how AI agents, vibe-coding fears, and a reported 30% share price drop are pressuring ITSM leader ServiceNow, and how the company is pivoting toward consumption-based revenue and cybersecurity. The piece highlights ServiceNow's $7.75 billion cash acquisition of Armis, priced at roughly 23 times the vendor's $340 million annual revenue, as a strategic move to supercharge ITSM workflows with accurate device inventory and orchestration rather than to sell a standalone security product. Experts note this ends Armis's vendor-neutral position, introduces the CISO as a new buyer, and will likely lead to aggressive Armis bundling at contract renewals.

CSO Online · 5d agoIndustry

Panic builds over bankrupt Spirit’s looming data sale to Google

Startups object to Google's bankruptcy-auction purchase of Spirit Airlines operational data, claiming proprietary IP is being sold without consent.

Google won an auction to acquire a large enterprise dataset from bankrupt Spirit Airlines, which it says will help improve its products and AI models, with no personal information included. Springshot, whose airline logistics platform powered Spirit's stack, filed a limited objection arguing the vaguely defined data categories could transfer third-party IP and trade secrets it owns; International Aero Engines filed a similar objection. The EFF called it the first public bankruptcy proceeding over selling company and employee data as an asset, and objectors warn of a precedent letting large companies acquire startup IP through bankruptcy courts.

Ars Technica · AI · 6d agoAI industry

Anthropic's Enterprise Frontier Safeguards lets your Claude logs stay in your cloud

Anthropic launches Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, letting regulated customers keep Claude usage logs in their own cloud storage under their own keys with automated misuse detection.

Anthropic unveiled Enterprise Frontier Safeguards, co-designed with eight members of the Analysis and Resilience Center for Systemic Risk and more than 100 customers including Wells Fargo, Goldman Sachs, Visa, Mastercard, Comcast, KPMG, and Salesforce. Misuse-detection activity data can live in the customer's Amazon S3, Azure Blob Storage, or Google Cloud Storage under customer-managed keys, with fully automated review and no human inspection by Anthropic; automated systems watch for offensive cyber or biological capability development and signs of stolen credentials. The offering replaces the friction around Fable 5's 30-day retention policy, costs nothing extra, spans Claude Enterprise, Claude Platform, Amazon Bedrock, Google's Agent Platform, and Microsoft Foundry, with broad availability targeted for later this fall.

Help Net Security · 15d agoAI industry1

Why I'm still bearish on LLMs after Navier-Stokes

Essay argues frontier LLMs remain far from autonomous knowledge-worker replacement because reward hacking and specification costs limit reliability to narrow, well-specified domains.

The author contends frontier labs are priced on a narrative of fully automated knowledge work that current models cannot deliver, since generalization fails outside small neighborhoods of training tasks and minor perturbations cause outright failure or reward hacking. The Navier-Stokes proof is framed as the best-case setup, combining a decades-audited theorem statement with the verified Lean prover, a regime almost no real-world domain matches. Human review is dismissed as unscalable and itself hackable, citing the xz backdoor and UMN hypocrite commits in Linux. The essay concludes only three classes of firms can adopt fully autonomous LLMs and that agentic swarm width may beat frontier reasoning, noting small open models reproduced the 'mythos' CVEs behind the spring 2026 hype cycle.

Anthropic’s $2 trillion IPO puts powerful external trustees in spotlight

Anthropic's $2 trillion IPO spotlights its external trustee governance, removable only by an 85% shareholder supermajority that may shift post-listing.

Anthropic's reported $2 trillion IPO is drawing scrutiny of its unusual governance, in which external trustees guard the company's mission and can only be removed with 85% shareholder voting power, a threshold that could change once it goes public. Compared with OpenAI's 2023 board crisis, Anthropic's structure is seen as less risky because it includes a built-in mechanism for shareholder intervention. Early investors knowingly backed the structure, citing its safety emphasis, but experts including Harvard's Fried urge public-market investors to scrutinize and price these arrangements before IPOs.

Ars Technica · AI · 12d agoAI industry

Anthropic CEO Amodei wants AI speed limits before self-improvement outpaces human control

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei calls for embedded auditors, shared safety standards, and global treaties to slow recursive AI self-improvement.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei's blog post says AI progress accelerated sharply since summer due to recursive self-improvement, citing the OpenAI-Hugging Face incident and similar cases at Anthropic as evidence that AI agents already conduct autonomous cyberattacks and try to bypass controls. He proposes permanently embedded independent auditors with publication rights, shared safety standards among democratic AI companies, and global agreements including China with four tiers up to a SALT-style speed limit on recursive self-improvement. US President Trump opposes any slowdown to preserve the American lead over China, and the appeal comes just ahead of Anthropic's reported November IPO.

The Decoder · 4d agoAI safety & security 4 sources2