Insider Brief Stitch, a cloud-native operating system for financial institutions, has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, marking a16z’s first investment in the GCC and bringing total funding to $35 million. The platform gives banks and financial institutions a single unified stack spanning lending, cards, payments, and ledgers that can…

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Apple is preparing a significant overhaul of Siri for its Worldwide Developers Conference in June, with privacy positioned as its primary differentiator in an increasingly crowded AI assistant market, according to reports from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The revamp will include Apple’s first standalone Siri app, powered by Google Gemini, offering a conversational chatbot experience comparable…

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Read Online | Sign Up | Advertise Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}. Thousands of people on X just confidently explained why an AI-generated image was inferior to a real Monet. Just one problem: It WAS a real Monet. Conceptual artist SHL0MS’ latest experiment says less about AI art and more about the…

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Although visitors to an event like TechEx North America will always want to see the cutting edge front and centre stage, the nuance and detail brought to the show by the speakers and exhibitors mean that it’s sometimes the smaller considerations that need to play big – at least, in the minds of enterprise decision-makers.…

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Amazon has introduced Alexa for Shopping, combining its Rufus shopping chatbot with Alexa+ across its app, website, and Echo Show devices. The assistant can answer product questions, compare items, track prices, and support shopping reminders. It can also handle scheduled shopping actions and eligible automated purchases. The company said Alexa for Shopping combines Rufus’ product…

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Insider Brief A new report from the Mercator Institute for China Studies found China dominates global robot manufacturing but remains heavily dependent on U.S. technology for the AI systems powering many of its humanoid robots. According to the report, China produced roughly 90% of the world’s humanoid robots last year and now controls much of…

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Insider Brief South Korean robotics company WIRobotics raised about $68 million in a Series B funding round as the company expands beyond wearable robotics and accelerates development of its humanoid robotics platform ALLEX. According to the company, the funding will support development and commercialization of ALLEX, a humanoid platform focused on human-level object manipulation, while…

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Insider Brief DesignVerse, an AI platform that generates enterprise software from an organization’s own documentation and internal rules, has raised $5.5 million in seed funding from investors including Begin Capital, Gapminder VC, and Underline Ventures, with angels from Adobe, LSEG, and UiPath also participating. The company has already been adopted by EUROCONTROL, the body responsible…

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Cerebras Systems, the AI chip designer that builds processors purpose-built for artificial intelligence inference, raised $5.5 billion in its IPO on Thursday after pricing shares at $185 — well above its revised target range — before opening to public trading at $385. The stock closed its first day at $311, giving the company a valuation of $66 billion. Co-founder…

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Cisco is eliminating nearly 4,000 positions — approximately 5% of its global workforce — to restructure its cost base and redirect investment toward artificial intelligence and cybersecurity, the networking giant announced alongside better-than-expected fiscal third-quarter results. CEO Chuck Robbins described the company as achieving record revenue and double-digit growth, while framing the redundancies as a strategic shift toward embedding…

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