ZeroHour

Search: “General Catalyst”

106 stories

Can Skills Learned in Games Transfer to Real-World Work?

Good Start Labs trains models in strategy games like 1830 and Diplomacy, showing terminal-agent training transfers to financial research benchmarks.

Good Start Labs, spun out of Every with $3.6M from General Catalyst and Inovia, trains AI models in verifiable strategy games. A 30B model trained as a multi-turn terminal agent in 1830: The Game of Railroads and Robber Barons improved Finance-Agent benchmark performance, while single-turn QA training did not transfer. The founders also co-authored COS-PLAY, a paper on co-evolving LLM decision and skill-bank agents for long-horizon tasks.

Latent Space · 8h agoAI research

Cognition hits $48B valuation, signaling investors believe AI coding is far from a winner-take-all market

Cognition, maker of Devin, raised $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation led by a16z, Accel, and Founders Fund, with revenue at $900M annualized.

Cognition raised $2 billion at a $48 billion valuation, four months after a $26 billion round, led by Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Avenir. Its annualized run-rate revenue grew from $492 million to $900 million since May, with projected $4-5 billion by end of 2026, while compute costs could push 2026 burn to $800 million. The startup, founded by Scott Wu, counts Mercedes-Benz, NASA, Goldman Sachs, and Citi as customers and is training its own model to cut reliance on OpenAI and Anthropic.

TechCrunch · AI · 7d agoAI industry

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 · 7d agoAI industry1

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.