Insider Brief Apptio, an IBM company, announced the public preview of IBM Apptio AI Value & ROI, a new set of capabilities giving technology and finance executives, AI governance teams and business leaders a single view of AI spending and its connection to measurable business results. The launch addresses a widening AI accountability gap, with…

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Jeff Dean, a longtime senior Google executive, is departing to launch an AI research startup called Discovery Loop, joined by fellow Google veterans Sanjay Ghemawat, Quoc Le, and Oriol Vinyals, with Dean reportedly set to serve as CEO. The public benefit corporation aims to use AI to run thousands of simultaneous experiments, automating scientific research…

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Insider Brief ThreatLocker, a global leader in Zero Trust cybersecurity, secured $190 million in Series F funding led by Elephant, with continued support from D. E. Shaw Ventures and Arthur Ventures, and a new investment from Koch Disruptive Technologies. The capital will support development of AI-related security controls, further improvements to its Zero Trust Platform,…

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Insider Brief groundcover, a bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC), eBPF and OpenTelemetry-native observability platform, announced a $100 million Series C led by One Peak, with participation from Morgan Stanley Expansion Capital and existing investors Zeev Ventures, Angular Ventures, Heavybit and Jibe, bringing total funding to $160 million. The round follows a year in which groundcover tripled annual recurring…

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Insider Brief Freehand, whose AI agents manage supply-chain spend for Fortune 500 enterprises, announced $75 million in funding co-led by Battery Ventures and NewRoad Capital Partners, with participation from Penny Pritzker’s PSP Growth, Nexus Venture Partners and others. The round follows Freehand’s emergence from stealth with deployments at Meta, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Pfizer, Dunkin’…

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Shopify reported strong second-quarter earnings, crediting growth in AI-driven search as a key contributor to its results. President Harley Finkelstein told analysts on the company’s earnings call that AI has become a complement to traditional search rather than a replacement, particularly benefiting smaller merchants who make up the bulk of Shopify’s customer base. The company…

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Read Online | Sign Up | Advertise Good morning, {{ first_name | AI enthusiasts }}, and welcome to the 5,793 new readers who joined us yesterday. Google just shook up the team behind its AI efforts, with Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis moving to the role of chairman and veteran Jeff Dean leaving to start…

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Few phrases get thrown around 2026’s AI discourse as loosely as “artificial general intelligence.” Executives use it to describe an impressive new model launch. Journalists use it as shorthand for whatever comes after ChatGPT. Researchers, by contrast, treat it as a precise and still unmet threshold, one that separates the specialized systems already reshaping business…

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Insider Brief Avatar Robotics raised $6.5 million in seed funding to expand humanoid robot deployments in warehouses and factories and advance software that reduces reliance on remote operators. AlleyCorp led the round, while Defy.vc led an earlier pre-seed financing and Headline, Henry Ford III, Refashiond and other investors also participated. The company said its robots…

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The Open Secure AI Alliance (OSAA), an industry coalition spearheaded by Nvidia that has grown to more than 120 companies in its first week, has formed a new working group called the Shared AI Findings Exchange (SAFE) to develop AI security guidelines. The group presented initial proposals for open comment this week, with the Linux…

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