Grid Dynamics entered a strategic partnership with Doosan Robotics to combine AI software with collaborative robot systems for industrial automation. The companies plan to pair Grid Dynamics’ GAIN Platform for Physical AI with Doosan’s cobots, which are used in 45 countries, to support use cases including dual-arm assembly, inspection and packaging. Grid Dynamics said the…

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Insider Brief mimic robotics unveiled a full-stack system for industrial dexterous manipulation, combining the mimic hand M1, the mimic wearable U1 and a custom software stack. The M1 is a tendon-driven robotic hand with 15 actuated degrees of freedom and 21 joints, designed to match key human-hand capabilities while using forearm-based actuators for durability and…

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Insider Brief Alta, the AI System of Actions for go-to-market teams, has raised $25 million in Series A funding led by IN Venture, with participation from Mindset Ventures, Skywell Capital, LeumiTech77, and existing investors Entrée Capital, Target Global, and Verissimo Ventures. Founded in 2023 by Stav Levi-Neumark, Tom Hoffen, and Mor Shabtai, Alta has hit…

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The bill for artificial intelligence has stopped behaving the way software bills used to behave. For years, enterprise technology costs were predictable: a per-seat license, a flat monthly fee, a number finance could plan around. That predictability is disappearing fast for AI. As major providers shift from flat-rate subscriptions to consumption-based pricing, and as agentic…

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Insider Brief AIsa, the transaction network for the AI agent economy, has raised $6.5 million in total funding to date, including a new seed round co-led by Alibaba and Tribe Capital, with participation from Draper Associates, Sumitomo Corporation, and Saison Capital. The platform provides a unified transaction layer letting AI agents discover, access, and pay…

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OpenAI has broadened its foray into physical products this week, releasing a ChatGPT-branded basketball alongside its recently launched $230 Codex Micro keyboard. The $70 rubber basketball is tied to what the product listing describes as the “Pause. Play. Prompt.” campaign, which OpenAI frames as an effort to encourage people to step away from screens. Beyond…

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Google rolled out two significant AI updates this week, expanding both its conversational search tool and its video creation platform. The company announced that AI Mode, its conversational search experience, now allows users to connect and interact with apps including Instacart, Canva, and YouTube directly within search. The update lets users complete tasks such as…

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General Compute, an AI inference cloud startup, has secured a $400 million loan from tech investment firm Upper90, in what may be the first financing deal to use inference-specific chips as collateral. The company, founded by CEO Finn Puklowski and CTO Jason Goodison, raised a $15 million seed round in May to build an inference-focused…

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Katalyze AI, a San Francisco-based life sciences AI startup, has raised $10.5 million in seed funding to build an agentic operating system for pharmaceutical manufacturing and life sciences. The round was led by Bonfire Ventures, with participation from Inovia Capital, Ripple Ventures, Alumni Ventures, Gokul Rajaram, and Farzad Soleimani. The company was founded by Reza…

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Thinking Machines Lab, the AI startup founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, released its first in-house model, Inkling, an open-weight system that developers and organizations can download and modify directly. The mixture-of-experts model contains 975 billion total parameters, drawing on roughly 41 billion for any given task, and was trained on 45 trillion tokens…

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