Thrive Holdings, a firm that acquires traditional businesses and integrates AI into their operations, has raised $2 billion in new funding at a $12 billion valuation, with backing from investors including SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital. Part of the funding will support the launch of a new vertical focused on regulatory services for…

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Insider Brief Alloy Robotics raised $8 million at an $80 million valuation to expand its AI-agent platform for diagnosing robot failures and improving fleet reliability. Square Peg led the round, with participation from Blackbird, Airtree, Skip Capital and executives and engineers from OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla, Waymo, Halter and Carbon Robotics. Alloy said its platform supports…

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Insider Brief Obsidian Security, a platform securing non-human identities and AI agents across third-party applications, announced $85 million in Series D financing led by Crescent Cove Advisors, with participation from existing investors including Greylock Partners and Menlo Ventures. The round follows accelerating growth, with more than 100 customers now spending over $100K annually and over…

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Superblocks, a vibe-coding startup, has signed a multiyear joint marketing agreement with Amazon Web Services that will allow its tool to be embedded directly within the private clouds of AWS enterprise customers. Under the arrangement, applications built through Superblocks will use Amazon Aurora databases and integrate with Amazon Bedrock, keeping business data within a company’s…

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Read Online | Sign Up | Advertise Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}, and welcome to 5,731 new readers. Calling Grok a frontier model might have sounded ridiculous a year ago, but SpaceXAI’s latest model is paving a trajectory that likely doesn’t have rivals laughing anymore. Grok 4.6 comes in hot with strong…

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Okta says identity-scoped Model Context Protocol (MCP) tool lists can reduce AI agent token costs. Each model call made by an AI agent can include schemas, names, descriptions and parameters for every tool exposed by a MCP server. Okta calls the resulting prompt overhead the “tool tax”: tokens consumed as a model considers tools, including…

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Brad Lightcap, one of OpenAI’s longest-serving executives, announced he is leaving the company to pursue a new venture. Lightcap, who joined OpenAI in 2018, served as chief financial officer for four years before becoming chief operating officer in 2022, a role he held until transitioning earlier this year to lead special projects. Before OpenAI, he…

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Google CEO Sundar Pichai announced that the Gemini app has surpassed 1 billion monthly active users, marking it as one of the company’s fastest-growing products and the 14th Google product to reach that milestone. The growth places Gemini alongside OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which reached 1 billion monthly active users in June. Google has increasingly integrated Gemini…

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A competitor no longer needs a press release to change the ground under a business. A model upgrade, a quiet price cut, or a single well-placed mention in a ChatGPT answer can shift customer decisions before anyone on the other side even notices. That speed is why competitive intelligence has become one of the more…

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June, an AI enterprise platform founded by former Salesforce executive Efrat Rapoport and co-founders Ohad Hen, Barak Goldstein, and Idan Tsitiat, emerged from stealth with $20 million in pre-seed funding led by Marc Benioff’s Time Ventures, with additional backing from Michael Dell, Aaron Levie, and George Kurtz. The company declined to disclose its valuation. The…

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