Insider Brief Mach9, the AI CAD software company for civil engineering, has raised a $34 million Series A co-led by First Round Capital and Bessemer Venture Partners, with participation from Prudence and Quiet Capital, bringing total funding to $49 million as the U.S. faces a growing need to rebuild aging infrastructure. The San Francisco company…

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OpenAI is reportedly close to securing up to $30 billion in private funding at a $1.25 trillion pre-money valuation, in a round led by Coatue and UAE investors, according to sources cited by CNBC. The financing could be paired with a deal to secure additional computing capacity from the UAE. OpenAI declined to comment. The…

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Walmart has introduced an Agent Gateway and a set of new features to support customers who shop using AI agents, taking a different approach from rival Amazon, which recently began blocking agents from making purchases. Several travel and booking sites have also locked agents out entirely. President and CEO John Furner, speaking at the Masters…

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Blacksmith, a platform that helps companies build and test software more efficiently, including code generated by AI, has secured a $66 million Series C round led by Sequoia, valuing the company at $1 billion. The company focuses on continuous integration, the process of building, testing, merging and validating code changes. Co-founder and CEO Aditya Jayaprakash…

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Nirva, a startup building an ambient AI wearable, has secured a $25 million pre-Series A round, bringing its total funding to $33 million after an earlier $8 million from investors including Lightspeed and South Park Commons. The company was founded in 2025 by former Meta Reality Labs employees Wei Lyu and Jason Chen, alongside Hanying…

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Blackstone is placing itself at the heart of the AI boom, backing everything from data center loans to frontier models, firm veteran Jas Khaira said at TechCrunch Disrupt. Khaira leads Blackstone N1, the firm’s San Francisco-based AI hub established this year. Khaira said AI requires far more capital than earlier tech cycles, giving Blackstone, with…

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Spotify reached 788 million monthly active users and nearly €5 billion (about $5.6 billion) in third-quarter revenue, but its earnings call focused on how AI agents could reshape music listening. Co-CEO Gustav Söderström told investors that Spotify is one of the few categories positioned to thrive in the agentic era. He explained that agents excel…

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Nebius Group, the Amsterdam-headquartered AI cloud company listed on Nasdaq, has entered into a $3.5 billion senior secured facility provided by Citi to support the global expansion of its AI infrastructure. Proceeds will fund data center development and GPU procurement, along with general corporate purposes. The facility has a 364-day maturity and initially carries interest…

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Microsoft’s AI diagnostic system, MAI-DxO, correctly diagnosed complex medical cases more than twice as often as generalist physicians in a simulation, according to a study published in Science. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, described the result as a step toward medical superintelligence. DxO coordinates multiple AI agents that function like a panel of doctors, questioning patients,…

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Read Online | Sign Up | Advertise Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}, and welcome to our 6,202 new readers. AI agents have been pitched as the ultimate time-saver, handling digital chores so you don’t have to. Now those same capabilities are causing headaches for America’s banking ecosystem. Some of the top banks…

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