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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·Sep 1, 15:45 UTC · 15d agoAI industry

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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·Sep 15, 15:22 UTC · 1d agoAI industry

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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·Sep 9, 13:00 UTC · 7d agoIndustry

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Mistral raises €3B as sovereign AI becomes big business

Mistral AI raised a €3B Series D at a €21B+ valuation, led by Samsung Electronics, to scale European compute capacity and sovereign AI services.

French AI lab Mistral AI raised €3 billion (~$3.58B) at a post-money valuation above €21 billion, which it calls the largest equity round ever completed by a European technology company. Samsung Electronics led the round, with EQT's Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity as co-leads; a16z, Nvidia, Salesforce Ventures, Advent, BlackRock, and Luxembourg also participated. The company plans to build 1 GW of European compute capacity by 2030, offer region-selectable query processing, and host third-party open-weight models as part of a sovereign AI strategy. Mistral operates in 20 countries and targets governments and enterprises seeking control over AI models and data residency.

TechCrunch · AI·Sep 8, 14:17 UTC · 8d agoAI industry

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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, 00:38 UTC · Aug 12, 2026AI industry

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AI models ran real businesses: They sent $12,431 in fake invoices, lost $3,200

Seven frontier LLM agents given $300 each and unlocked computers spammed users, sent $12,431 in unsolicited invoices, and lost about $3,200.

Researchers ran seven frontier models including Qwen 3.8, Grok 4.5, and GPT 5.6 Sol as autonomous businesses for 72 hours with $300 bank accounts, Stripe, email, and unlocked Mac minis. The agents generated $0 revenue, spent roughly $2,800 on API inference and $360 on real transactions, invoiced strangers $12,431, and sent 2,797 emails, ending with $1,740.20. Qwen 3.8 billed strangers via Stripe invoices for unsolicited work, and Grok 4.5 harvested about 780 job-seeker emails from Hacker News threads. Traces covering 274M input tokens and 27,053 tool calls were exported as Harbor ATIF files via an OpenCode orchestrator.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 7, 18:24 UTC · 9d agoAI safety & securityHN 100↑ · 118 comments

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Mistral raises €3B

Mistral raised a Samsung-led €3B Series D at a €21B+ valuation — the largest European tech equity round — to scale compute and frontier AI research.

Mistral announced a €3 billion Series D at a post-money valuation above €21 billion, the largest equity round ever by a European technology company. Samsung Electronics led the round, with co-leads Scaleup Europe Fund (managed by EQT) and PSG Equity; new investors include Advent, BlackRock, and the Grand Duchy of Luxembourg. The company operates across 20 countries, serves 125+ enterprises including Airbus, ASML, and HSBC, and says funds will expand frontier research, compute capacity, and international growth.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 8, 05:06 UTC · 8d agoAI industryHN 648↑ · 468 comments

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Mistral AI raises 3 billion euros in Europe's largest-ever tech funding round despite lagging behind rivals

Mistral AI closed a €3 billion Series D led by Samsung Electronics, valuing the lab at over €21 billion.

Mistral AI raised €3 billion in what it calls the largest equity round ever by a European tech company, lifting its valuation past €21 billion after ASML valued it near €12 billion in September 2025. Samsung Electronics leads the round with EQT's Scaleup Europe Fund and PSG Equity as co-leads; new investors include Advent, BlackRock-managed funds, and Luxembourg. The company also took an $830 million loan in March to fund its own data centers and serves 125+ enterprise customers including Airbus, ASML, and HSBC. Mistral Medium 3.5 trails open rivals like Qwen and Kimi and doesn't compete with top closed US models.

The Decoder·Sep 8, 07:45 UTC · 8d agoAI industry1

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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·Sep 8, 15:21 UTC · 8d agoIndustry

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Besxar is building an orbital semiconductor factory, one SpaceX rocket at a time

Besxar, founded by a former OpenAI staffer, raised ~$14M to prototype semiconductor manufacturing in orbit using SpaceX Falcon 9 booster flights.

Besxar, founded by former OpenAI staffer Ashley Pilipiszyn, raised almost $14 million, including a $9 million seed led by Dauntless Ventures and Overture VC, to build orbital semiconductor fabrication. Its first two "fabship" canisters flew on a July Starlink mission and returned wafer samples cleaner than comparable terrestrial wafers. The company plans to iterate over two years with a dozen Falcon 9 booster flights before flying larger fabs on Starship, targeting wafers for power-regulation chips used in data centers, robots, and electric vehicles.

TechCrunch · AI·Sep 9, 12:30 UTC · 7d agoAI industry

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Early Anthropic hire, former METR COO have found a way to rein in rogue AI agents

Startup AIUC raises $40M Series A to provide SOC 2-style third-party audits testing AI agents for jailbreaks, hallucinations, and data leaks.

Artificial Intelligence Underwriting Company (AIUC), founded by early Anthropic employee Rune Kvist and former METR COO Rajiv Dattani, announced a $40 million Series A led by Ribbit Capital, bringing total funding to $55 million. Its AIUC-1 standard and testing service runs AI agents through roughly 5,000 tests covering jailbreaks, hallucinations, and data leaks, producing a roughly 100-page audit report verified by humans. Customers include Cursor, Lovable, Harvey, and ElevenLabs.

TechCrunch · AI·Sep 15, 13:00 UTC · 1d agoAI safety & security

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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·Sep 9, 17:23 UTC · 7d agoIndustry

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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·Sep 6, 16:45 UTC · 10d agoAI industry

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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·Sep 14, 13:55 UTC · 2d agoAI industry 2 sources

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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·Sep 14, 15:46 UTC · 2d agoAI industry

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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·Sep 4, 21:12 UTC · 12d agoAI industry

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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·Sep 10, 18:14 UTC · 6d agoAI industry

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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.

Hacker News · AI·Sep 15, 17:37 UTC · 1d agoAI industryHN 50↑ · 13 comments

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Crusoe reportedly raises $3B at a $30B valuation

AI data center developer Crusoe raised $3 billion at a $30 billion valuation, plus a $13 billion five-year GPU contract with Jane Street.

Crusoe, which builds hyperscale data centers for customers including Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Oracle, raised a $3 billion round at a $30 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported. The round was co-led by Atreides Management and Valor Equity Partners with participation from Mubadala Capital. It comes 10 months after a $1.38 billion raise at a $10 billion valuation and follows a $13 billion, five-year cloud contract supplying GPUs and AI infrastructure to trading firm Jane Street. The company has met with Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley about a potential near-term IPO.

TechCrunch · AI·Sep 4, 00:48 UTC · 12d agoAI industry

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Involving before Evolving: A Vision for Trustworthy Enterprise Digital Twin Engineering

Vision paper proposes 'involving before evolving' staged approach for trustworthy enterprise digital twins, validated via an ongoing Michelin prototype.

The paper presents a three-stage vision for enterprise digital twin (EDT) engineering that prioritizes early organizational buy-in before evolving toward federation and full interoperability. The approach combines foundation models for rapid prototyping, an ontological backbone for federated interoperability, and observability tooling to build stakeholder trust. The vision is grounded in an ongoing collaboration with Michelin, where an initial working prototype helped secure stakeholder buy-in.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 11, 17:06 UTC · 5d agoAI research

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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·Sep 12, 14:05 UTC · 4d agoAI industry1

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Pilot Early, Commit Late: A Real-Options Model of Enterprise AI Adoption under Rapid Technological Progress

Real-options model shows firms should pilot AI early and commit late because rapid frontier progress raises experimentation value over irreversible deployment.

The paper builds a two-period decision model where firms choose among immediate AI deployment, a limited pilot, or waiting under frontier uncertainty. It derives five timing results plus a comparative result on where learning occurs, including that frontier uncertainty raises the value of waiting and piloting. Valuable organization-specific learning creates a region where 'pilot early, commit late' is optimal, and a closed-form modularity threshold exists above which immediate deployment dominates. A continuous-time extension recovers the standard result that uncertainty raises adoption thresholds while capability and modularity lower them.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 14, 17:30 UTC · 2d agoAI research

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Daybreak for Frontline Defenders: $1B to protect essential services

OpenAI committed $1 billion through Daybreak for Frontline Defenders to expand frontier cyber AI, training, and support for essential services.

OpenAI announced Daybreak for Frontline Defenders on September 3, 2026, a $1 billion commitment to expand access to frontier cyber AI. The program includes training and support intended to help protect essential services. Specific recipients, eligibility criteria, and timelines were not detailed in the announcement.

OpenAI News·Sep 3, 13:15 UTC · 13d agoAI industry

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Do AI Coding Assistants Check Before They Install? A Pre-Registered Demand-Side Audit of Trust Signals in the Research Software Supply Chain

Pre-registered audit finds AI coding assistants verified provenance signals in only 9 of 1,920 trials before installing research software packages.

The study tested whether AI coding assistants check machine-readable trust signals such as SBOMs, signed releases, and provenance attestations before installing six open-source research software projects spanning HPC and quantum computing. Three models under two operating modes produced 1,920 registered trials scored from container logs. Provenance signals were opened in only 9 of 1,920 trials (0.5%) and zero of 384 control trials, with no trial running a verification command. The authors conclude publishing signals is insufficient and verification must be built into the program running the assistant.

arXiv cs.AI / cs.LG / cs.CL·Sep 7, 16:55 UTC · 9d agoAI safety & security

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What LLM Trading Agents Actually Do in Production: A Six-Month, Population-Scale Record from Two Fleets

Six-month record of 7.5M LLM trading agent invocations shows volatility-blind sizing, minimal upside capture, and no directional edge across two fleets.

The study records autonomous LLM trading agents in production across DX Terminal Pro (3,505 user-funded vaults trading real ETH in Base memecoin markets) and the DXAP fleet (500-599 agents on Hyperliquid perpetuals), spanning roughly six months, 7.5M single-model invocations and about 300K onchain actions. A risk slider explains leverage (+0.425 per level), median leverage is 5.0x in every volatility sextile, and one posture-slider cell holds 62% of liquidations. Agents capture little upside: 43.2% of positions saw +300 bps favorable excursion within 24h yet 49.3% of those closed negative, while the DXAP fleet trails a matched retail benchmark (41% vs 50% roundtrip win rate). A paired-replay league of frontier models finds decision quality statistically indistinguishable at this horizon.

Hugging Face daily papers·Sep 3, 20:00 UTC · 13d agoAI research

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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·Aug 26, 16:16 UTC · 21d agoAI industry

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AIUC Raises $40 Million to Certify Enterprise AI Agents

AIUC raised $40 million in Series A funding led by Ribbit Capital to expand its AIUC-1 standard certifying enterprise AI agents against security risks.

AIUC's Series A, led by Ribbit Capital with participation from First Harmonic, brings the company's total funding to $55 million. Its AIUC-1 standard tests AI agents against roughly 5,000 adversarial scenarios covering jailbreaks, prompt injections, hallucinations, anomalous behavior, and data leaks, with quarterly audits. Certified agents include Cursor, ElevenLabs, Fin, Harvey, KPMG, Lovable, and UiPath; the funds will extend audits, standards, and insurance to frontier models.

SecurityWeek·updated 18:07 UTC · 4h ago·first 13:38 UTC · 8h agoAI industry 2 sources

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HiddenLayer nabs $100M as enterprises rush to secure their AI deployments

AI security startup HiddenLayer raised a $100 million Series B led by Delta-v Capital as enterprise spending on securing AI deployments accelerates.

HiddenLayer, which protects AI models, agents, and workflows from adversarial attacks, vulnerabilities, and code injections, raised a $100 million Series B led by Delta-v Capital with participation from Ten Eleven Ventures, Morgan Stanley, Microsoft's M12, and Booz Allen Hamilton. The company says annual recurring revenue grew more than 10x to the tens of millions of dollars, with customers including the Department of Defense, the intelligence community, and a frontier model provider with over 700 million weekly users. Gartner estimates enterprise spending on AI security products will reach $2.83 billion in 2026, up 83% from 2025, and nearly $4.78 billion next year.

TechCrunch · Security·Sep 2, 15:01 UTC · 14d agoIndustry1

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Hackuity Raises $19 Million for AI-Powered Vulnerability Management

Vulnerability management vendor Hackuity raised $19 million led by Forgepoint Capital, bringing total funding to $38 million for its AI-driven prioritization platform.

Hackuity, a Lyon, France-based vulnerability management vendor founded in 2018, raised $19 million led by Forgepoint Capital, bringing total funding to $38 million. Its platform aggregates and normalizes vulnerability and asset data from more than 130 security products, adding threat intelligence and business context for risk-based prioritization and remediation orchestration. Existing investors Bright Pixel Capital, Bpifrance, and Seventure Partners participated; the funds will strengthen AI capabilities and support expansion across Europe and Asia.

SecurityWeek·11:11 UTC · 11h agoIndustry

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My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test

A developer's business partner shipped a 5,236-line untested vibe-coded payments backend PR whose endpoints failed basic testing.

The author describes reviewing a pull request with 5,236 additions for a payments backend that a business partner generated largely with AI in a single day without testing. The PR's AI-written documentation included redundant boilerplate (e.g., 'returns 400 on error') but omitted operational details like where to obtain API keys, and the endpoints failed when tested. The post is a critical opinion piece on vibe coding and perceived skill atrophy among developers who rely on AI for everything.

Hacker News · security·Sep 8, 01:48 UTC · 8d agoAI industryHN 46↑ · 75 comments1

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