Category Ai updates

We deployed 100 reinforcement learning (RL)-controlled cars into rush-hour highway traffic to smooth congestion and reduce fuel consumption for everyone. Our goal is to tackle “stop-and-go” waves, those frustrating slowdowns and speedups that usually have no clear cause but lead to congestion and significant energy waste. To train efficient flow-smoothing controllers, we built fast, data-driven simulations that RL agents interact with, learning to maximize energy efficiency while maintaining throughput and operating safely around human drivers.

Overall, a small proportion of well-controlled autonomous vehicles (AVs) is enough to significantly improve traffic flow and fuel efficiency for all drivers on the road. Moreover, the trained controllers are designed to be deployable on most modern vehicles, operating in a decentralized manner and relying on standard radar sensors. In our latest paper, we explore the challenges of deploying RL controllers on a large-scale, from simulation to the field, during this 100-car experiment.

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Cloudflare has announced its first-ever mass layoff, cutting approximately 1,100 employees — 20% of its workforce — as it reported record quarterly revenue of $639.8 million, a 34% year-over-year increase. Co-founder and CEO Matthew Prince and co-founder and president Michelle Zatlyn framed the cuts not as cost reduction but as a structural response to AI-driven productivity gains.

Prince said internal AI adoption surged over 600% in three months, with the entire R&D team now using AI coding tools and all deployed code reviewed by autonomous AI agents. Employees across HR, finance, and marketing run thousands of AI agent sessions daily, he added, reducing the need for support roles.

Prince said he expects Cloudflare to employ more people in 2027 than at any point in 2026, anticipating continued hiring of AI-proficient staff.

Oracle’s abrupt termination of an estimated 20,000 to 30,000 employees via email on March 31 has sparked significant employee pushback over what many regarded as inadequate severance. The company offered four weeks of base pay plus one additional week per year of service, capped at 26 weeks, but crucially did not accelerate unvested stock grants — meaning some long-tenured employees forfeited hundreds of thousands of dollars in RSUs that were months from vesting.

At least 90 affected employees signed a petition urging Oracle to match severance terms offered by Meta, Microsoft, and Cloudflare, all of which provided accelerated vesting and more generous payouts during their own AI-driven restructurings. Oracle declined to negotiate. The company also classified some hybrid workers as remote, potentially reducing their legal protections under the WARN Act.

Insider Brief

• Modicus Prime has raised an additional $4.5 million led by Frist Cressey Ventures, bringing total funding to $8 million, to expand its Trustworthy AI Compliance Software that helps pharmaceutical companies deploy audit-ready AI across regulated GxP environments globally.
• The platform integrates with existing pharmaceutical tech stacks and quality management systems, serving as a central compliance layer for global regulators including the FDA and EMA across the full AI lifecycle, targeting an industry problem that includes an estimated $50 billion in annual quality control failures.
• CEO Taylor Chartier, a former engineer and data scientist from Shire and Bayer, co-authored the ISPE GAMP AI Guide and has been instrumental in shaping industry standards, with the new capital earmarked for expanding customer support and enhancing the platform to meet growing international AI compliance needs.

PRESS RELEASE — Modicus Prime, a former resident at Johnson & Johnson Innovation — JLABS @ Texas Medical Center, has announced the completion of an additional $4.5M in funding led by Frist Cressey Ventures, bringing total funding to $8M with additional backing from Silverton Partners and Oncology Ventures. The funding comes following the multiple rollouts of the Trustworthy AI Compliance Software enabling scalable, audit-ready AI systems across global pharmaceutical companies, CROs, CMOs, CDMOs, and adjacent regulated sectors.

The Trustworthy AI Compliance Software enables pharmaceutical companies’ AI applications in regulated (GxP) environments, both internal and from AI suppliers, to be audit-ready across their organizations. It integrates with pharmaceutical tech stacks and quality management systems, acting as a central layer that enables scalable AI use across sites and geographies with varying regulatory requirements. The integration enables a single source of truth for compliance with global regulators including the FDA and EMA across the full AI lifecycle (see Figure 1). Translating between data science, IT, quality, and compliance, the software reduces operational friction and ensures every pharmaceutical stakeholder works compliantly with AI in regulated environments. The result is safer AI adoption, reduced compliance risk and protected ROI of AI investments, allowing pharma organizations to stay focused on delivering medicines to patients. Compliant AI ultimately accelerates adoption at scale and helps reduce, for example, costly quality control failures costing the industry an estimated $50 billion annually.

FCV founding partner Senator Bill Frist, MD states, “At the end of the day, every advancement in this industry must serve the patient. By simplifying and strengthening AI compliance, Modicus Prime enables pharmaceutical leaders to stay focused on accelerating innovation and delivering life-saving therapies to those who need them most.”

Modicus Prime’s leadership is helping drive the industry’s AI movement through authoring guidelines, keynotes, webinars, and talks informing regulators. Taylor Chartier, Modicus Prime’s CEO, co-authored the ISPE GAMP AI Guide and BioPhorum AI Implementation publication in 2025. She also spearheaded ISPE’s GxP AI Webinar Series with fellow industry experts, which was an industry-first webinar series on implementing AI/ML solutions in GxP environments. Chartier continues to contribute to educational initiatives to upskill the pharmaceutical workforce in partnership with quality-focused organizations, including Pathway for Patient Health.

A former engineer and data scientist from Shire and Bayer Pharmaceuticals, Chartier states, “Pharmaceutical companies are investing heavily in AI, but without the infrastructure to deploy it compliantly and measure ROI, that investment is at risk. Adjacent healthcare sectors, including payers and providers, express the same need for compliance infrastructure. This is the gap our Trustworthy AI Compliance Software addresses, enabling scalable AI adoption across regulated environments.”

Oncology Ventures’ Ben Freeberg states, “The next wave of cancer breakthroughs are coming, and every manufacturer has to survive a regulatory audit to ensure those drugs get to patients who need them. Modicus Prime is the compliance layer that makes this happen.”

Modicus Prime is using this new capital to further service their international pharmaceutical customers with additional customer support, including the continued enhancement of its platform to better support customer deployments and growing AI compliance needs.

About Modicus Prime
Modicus Prime’s AI Compliance platform bridges data science, IT, and quality, enabling regulated organizations to deploy and scale trustworthy AI. By providing a single source of truth for regulators, the platform ensures AI applications remain compliant across their full lifecycle, from development through evolving GxP use. A resident at Johnson & Johnson Innovation — JLABS @ South San Francisco, Modicus Prime is venture-backed and partners with leading pharmaceutical organizations to enable AI audit readiness at scale. The platform integrates with existing tech stacks and quality management systems, supporting biologics, cell and gene therapies, and vaccine manufacturing across global regulatory environments.

About Frist Cressey Partners
Founded by former U.S. Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist, MD and Bryan Cressey, Frist Cressey Ventures (FCV) is a healthcare venture capital firm with $846M AUM focused on accelerating the growth of high potential healthcare companies through a differentiated healthcare network, hands-on leadership support, and healthcare policy expertise. Our mission is simple: to transform healthcare to improve lives. Our strategic partners, including The Cigna Group, MedStar Health and OhioHealth, provide healthcare to more than 50% of the U.S. population. We invest in early-stage startups that build technology or tech-enabled services to advance quality of care, system integration, patient outcomes, affordability, and access. To learn more about Frist Cressey Ventures, visit our website at www.fcventures.com.

About Oncology Ventures
Oncology Ventures is a specialized, Austin-based venture capital firm founded in 2022 by cancer survivor Ben Freeberg. The Fund invests in commercially-validated start-ups transforming the future of cancer care. Oncology Ventures is partnered with leading oncology institutions, including Texas Oncology, Fred Hutch Cancer Center, City of Hope, Moffitt and others.

Contact:
Taylor Chartier
taylor@modicusprime.com

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AI Library, an outcome-based software delivery startup founded in 2023 by Arani Chaudhuri, has raised $560,000 in pre-seed funding at a $7.5 million valuation cap to accelerate its AI agent-driven approach to enterprise software deployment.

The company’s platform automates the software delivery lifecycle using AI agents with human oversight, targeting enterprise functions including finance, operations, sales, and support. Early deployments include Tally, Times Group, and Burger Singh.

Alongside the fundraise, AI Library has launched its MCP infrastructure layer, a unified server designed to give coding agents structured access to tools, data, and workflows without fragmented integrations. The company said MCP reduces redundant processing and improves reliability for enterprise AI deployments. Funding will support product development, market expansion, and further research and development.

Featured image: Credit: AI Library

Paris-based AI real estate startup Davis has raised €4.6 million in a pre-seed round led by Heartcore Capital and Balderton Capital, with participation from Yellow, Evantic, and Entrepreneurs First, alongside angels from the founding teams of Hugging Face, Black Forest Labs, and Supabase.

Founded in 2025 by CEO Mehdi Rais and Amine Chraibi, Davis combines proprietary AI with human expert review to compress early-stage architectural and feasibility work from months to days. Alongside the funding, the company is launching Gaudi-1, its first model for generating architect-grade floor plans and volumetrics under real-world regulatory constraints. Unlike conventional diffusion models, Gaudi-1 operates in discrete architectural space, producing structured compositions of rooms, walls, and layouts.

Davis delivers outputs as a service rather than software, adapting to local regulations across geographies and asset classes.

Featured image: Credit: Davis

Swiss startup Moonlight AI has closed a $3.3 million seed round co-led by Lotus One Investment, VP Venture Partners, and MEDIN Fund, with participation from N&V Capital and QAI Ventures, to advance AI-powered image analysis for clinical oncology diagnostics.

Founded by CEO Christian Ruiz, CTO Nicole Romano, and CMO Stefan Habringer, the company uses computer vision to detect genomic biomarkers directly from routine blood and cytology slide imaging, bypassing the high cost and slow turnaround of conventional genomic sequencing. The technology targets hematologists and pathologists treating blood cancers including MDS, chronic lymphocytic leukemia, and non-small cell lung cancer.

Funding will support expansion of a proprietary dataset linking whole slide imaging with genomic data, built through an international clinical consortium, alongside team growth and regulatory approval processes.

Featured image: Credit: Moonlight AI

Insider Brief

• Tessera Labs has raised $60 million in an oversubscribed round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Foundation Capital and others participating, to accelerate its AI-native platform for enterprise ERP transformation, with a16z partner Seema Amble joining the board.
• The company’s vendor-agnostic, multi-agent platform is pre-trained on thousands of organizational landscapes and compresses transformation timelines from years to weeks while cutting costs by more than half, with early customers including a top-five global biopharmaceutical company and a Fortune 500 document technology firm.
• The raise targets a systems integrator market valued at $500 billion in 2024 and projected to reach $800 billion by 2033, with Tessera positioning itself as a category-defining solution to one of enterprise technology’s most persistent challenges: the slow and costly modernization of mission-critical ERP systems.

PRESS RELEASE — Tessera Labs announced $60 million in oversubscribed funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) to accelerate its mission of bringing AI-native automation to enterprise transformation. Foundation Capital, Myriad Venture Partners, and Osage University Partners also participated. The announcement arrives as the global SAP community convenes in Orlando for its flagship annual event, underscoring the urgency of modernization at scale. The capital will accelerate platform development, scale go-to-market operations, and expand the company’s team of AI researchers and domain experts.

The funding follows landmark customer wins that underscore Tessera’s emergence as the platform of choice for enterprise AI transformation. Among them: a global top-five biopharmaceutical company undergoing an enterprise-wide, multi-year ERP transformation, and a Fortune 500 leader in document technology and business services modernizing its enterprise systems. They join a growing roster of Fortune 500 customers across manufacturing, technology, retail, consumer goods, and utilities, reflecting the breadth of industries now turning to Tessera Labs for mission-critical transformation at enterprise scale.

“Enterprise transformation has never been more urgent, and the technology to accelerate it has never been more powerful,” said Kabir Nagrecha, Co-founder and CEO of Tessera Labs. “Tessera Labs exists to close that gap, delivering in weeks what traditionally takes years, with the governance and reliability that mission-critical programs demand.”

Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) led the round, with Partner Seema Amble joining Tessera Labs’s board of directors. A firm whose portfolio includes Databricks and Harvey, a16z has consistently backed companies that fundamentally reshape how businesses operate, and sees Tessera Labs as addressing one of the largest and most persistent problems in technology: the transformation bottleneck.

“ERP systems are the backbone of every major company, but modernizing them has been prohibitively slow and expensive,” said Seema Amble, Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “Tessera’s platform represents a genuine category shift, not just making transformation faster, but making it predictable, governed, and continuous. That changes the economics for CIOs and unlocks transformation at a scale we haven’t seen before.”

The global systems integrator (SI) sector was valued at $500 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $800 billion by 2033, according to Verified Market Reports, reflecting the enormous scale of enterprise transformation underway. Yet the pace and cost of these programs remain a persistent challenge: projects still require significant time and investment to complete. Tessera Labs addresses this directly by embedding intelligence into the transformation process, dramatically compressing timelines and reducing cost without sacrificing reliability.

Tessera’s platform is pre-trained on thousands of organizational landscapes and hundreds of years of transformation expertise. It captures business requirements in natural language, orchestrates secure change across critical systems (ERP, HCM, CRM, procurement, and beyond) and ensures business continuity throughout. The platform harmonizes fragmented systems and data while maintaining institutional-grade governance and traceability. Unlike point solutions or vendor-specific tools, it is vendor-agnostic and evolves continuously with new data and workflows.

Early adopters report transformation timelines compressed from years to weeks, costs reduced by more than half, and outcomes delivered right the first time, without the disruption typical of large-scale ERP projects.

“We’re hiring people who’ve built AI systems at scale and people who’ve led transformations at the world’s largest organizations,” Nagrecha added. “It’s a rare combination, and it’s what makes Tessera Labs work.”

The founding team includes AI researchers with experience at Meta, Netflix, and Apple, alongside platform experts from SAP MaxAttention and core product development teams, giving Tessera Labs the credibility with risk-averse organizations managing billions in revenue through mission-critical systems.

About Tessera Labs

Tessera Labs is a vendor-agnostic, multi-agent AI platform that transforms how enterprises modernize complex ERP systems and data. Pre-trained on thousands of organizational landscapes and hundreds of years of transformation expertise, Tessera compresses timelines from years to weeks, reduces costs by more than half, and delivers outcomes right the first time through secure, governed execution. The company was co-founded by Kabir Nagrecha (Chief Executive Officer) and Ming Chang (Chief Operating Officer), and is headquartered in Silicon Valley. For more information, visit www.tesseralabs.ai.

About Andreessen Horowitz

Andreessen Horowitz (aka a16z) is a venture capital firm that backs bold entrepreneurs building the future through technology. The firm is stage agnostic: They invest in seed to venture to growth-stage technology companies, across bio + healthcare, consumer and enterprise apps, crypto, fintech, infrastructure, and companies building toward American dynamism. a16z has over $90B under management across multiple funds. For more information, visit www.a16z.com.

Contacts

Media Contact:
John Ordoña
john@tesseralabs.ai

SOURCE

Featured image: Credit: Tessera Labs

Perplexity has opened its Personal Computer feature to all Mac users through a new desktop app, bringing local AI agent capabilities beyond its previous Max subscriber waitlist. The tool extends Perplexity’s cloud-based Computer product onto users’ own devices, giving AI agents access to local files, native Mac applications, over 400 connectors, and the web to handle complex multi-step personal workflows.

Positioned as a more secure alternative to local AI agents like OpenClaw, which drew criticism for elevated system permissions, Personal Computer runs within a secure environment on Perplexity’s servers. It can be accessed remotely via iPhone and, when paired with Perplexity’s Comet browser, operates web-based tools without additional connectors.

The feature requires a Pro or Max subscription. Perplexity’s existing Mac app will be deprecated in coming weeks.

Beijing-based Moonshot AI has raised approximately $2 billion at a $20 billion valuation, led by Meituan’s venture arm Long-Z Investments, with participation from Tsinghua Capital, China Mobile, and CPE Yuanfeng. The round brings total fundraising over the past six months to $3.9 billion, with the company’s valuation having risen from $4.3 billion at end-2025 to its current level.

Founded in 2023 by Yang Zhilin, a former Meta AI and Google Brain researcher, Moonshot quickly became one of China’s most prominent AI labs. Its open-weight Kimi models compete directly with ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude, with Kimi K2.6 currently ranking as the second most-used large language model on distribution platform OpenRouter. Annual recurring revenue topped $200 million in April.

The raise reflects surging investor appetite for Chinese open-weight AI, as rivals DeepSeek pursues a $45 billion valuation and Zhipu AI trades publicly in Hong Kong at roughly $56 billion.