Insider Brief Schaeffler has opened a 7,500-square-meter factory in Taicang, China, where humanoid robots assemble components for other humanoids while the company tests training, simulation and production systems under industrial conditions. The facility combines component manufacturing, robot training, data collection and digital twins, with six humanoids working across five assembly stations and a training center…

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Tolan, an AI companion app designed to help people manage daily life, navigate relationships and emotions and achieve their goals, has secured a further $30 million from investors including Union Square Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Homebrew, according to Upstarts Media. The round doubles Tolan’s total funding and lifts its valuation above the previous $120 million,…

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Amazon Web Services has released TorchNeuron, a tool that lets AI startups move their applications onto Trainium, Amazon’s AI chip, in a direct challenge to the software advantage that has helped Nvidia become the default hardware for AI. TorchNeuron works with PyTorch, the free, open source toolkit used to build, train and run AI models,…

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AI meeting note-taking company Otter.ai has secured $320 million from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF), which provides non-dilutive capital to startups and earns returns based on the results of marketing spend. Otter said the funding will support enterprise growth, go-to-market strategy, international expansion and product innovation. The nearly decade-old company had raised $50 million…

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Insider Brief Atombeam, an AI technology company, has raised $18.3 million through a Regulation A+ offering on StartEngine, bringing its total funding to more than $55 million, backed by a patent estate of 678 filings, 308 of which are issued or allowed. Its commercially deployed Neurpac software compacts and encrypts machine data in one pass,…

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Microsoft has introduced new security features aimed at protecting enterprises from risks posed by AI agents, headlined by Guardian Agents, a tool that monitors the agents a company deploys. It forms part of Project Perception, which Microsoft introduced in June with red, blue and green teams of agents to attack, detect and fix vulnerabilities from…

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Anthropic and AI infrastructure provider Nscale are reportedly close to announcing another $45 billion compute deal, just over a month after the two companies agreed a deal of the same size. According to Bloomberg, which cited people familiar with the matter, the companies are on the verge of finalizing the new agreement, although talks are…

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Montreal-based Inovia Capital has secured $200 million in a first close for Inovia Capital Fund VI, its sixth venture capital fund. The firm plans to deploy the capital over three years, backing between 25 and 30 startups across North America and Europe. The fund will target sectors where AI is still early in adoption but…

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Insider Brief Eka Robotics raised $150 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz and F-Prime at a reported $1.45 billion valuation to develop robots that combine dexterous manipulation with the speed and reliability needed for real-world deployment. The company is building a vision-force-action model trained with simulation and reinforcement learning to help robots…

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Read Online | Sign Up | Advertise Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}, and welcome to our 5,481 new readers. Anthropic has spent 2026 warning that AI is moving faster than anyone is ready for. Now one of its co-founders says the moment has a name. Jack Clark just said that the singularity,…

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