Insider Brief Axya, the AI-powered procurement platform for manufacturers, has raised a $17 million CAD Series A led by McRock Capital with participation from Yamaha Motor Ventures, BDC’s Industrial Innovation Venture Fund and Real Ventures, alongside a new banking relationship with CIBC. The platform combines deep ERP integrations with a human-in-the-loop approach in which AI…

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Read Online | Sign Up | Advertise Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}, and welcome to our 9,410 new readers. OpenAI’s agents spent the summer loose on government websites, and newly disclosed details are raising fresh questions about how well the company can actually control its technology. AI labs are now reportedly investigating…

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The AI story of September 22–28 was not simply that agents became more capable. It was that their hidden handoffs became visible: a supposedly automated call could reach a contractor, a supposedly private prompt or image could reach a reviewer, a monitor could detect an agent long before a person stopped it, and a local…

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Insider Brief Light Origins launched Light-O1, its first general-purpose embodied foundation model, using human actions recovered from internet video to create a reusable starting point for adapting robots to different tasks and embodiments. The company trained six 4-billion-parameter versions on up to 120 billion multimodal tokens, with larger pretraining runs reducing held-out next-action and whole-body…

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Insider Brief SoftBank Group invested $225 million in Autonomous Solutions Inc. and formed a joint venture with the industrial automation company to develop and commercialize autonomous construction equipment for large infrastructure projects. ASI said the venture will target civil construction and material handling using its Mobius fleet-management platform, with plans to support mixed fleets of…

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Insider Brief Feather Robotics raised $7.6 million in pre-seed funding to expand its modular humanoid platform for developers building physical AI applications, with Gradient leading the round. The company said its wheeled bimanual robot is priced at $29,990, offers up to 10 hours of battery life, about 1 meter of reach and a software development…

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Oracle has sent a force majeure notice to the developer of Project Jupiter, a Stargate AI data center campus in New Mexico, Bloomberg reported on Thursday. According to Bloomberg’s sources, Oracle is not seeking to exit as the campus’s main tenant, but the notice would allow it to delay payments if the facility misses its…

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Insider Brief BigHat Biosciences, a clinical-stage AI-driven protein therapeutics company, has raised a $75 million Series C co-led by DFJ Growth and Premji Invest, with participation from Catalio Capital Management, LG Technology Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, Amgen Ventures and Eli Lilly, bringing total funding to $223 million. The company pairs frontier AI with autonomous, high-throughput experimentation…

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Insider Brief PicoJool, which develops optical connectivity for AI infrastructure, has raised a $27.5 million Series A led by Socratic Partners with participation from Hudson River Trading, following a $12 million seed round led by Playground Globaland bringing total funding to $39.5 million. The funding will expand its teams and facilities in the U.S. and…

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Google is rolling out two new AI features that push Gemini further into users’ daily lives, one that lets the assistant phone businesses on a user’s behalf and another that turns photos into a digital wardrobe. The first, Call for Me, is launching as an experiment for U.S. Pixel 11 owners with a Gemini subscription…

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