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Sakana AI has released Fugu Max, which expands the Pareto Efficiency Frontier by orchestrating its largest pool of open and specialized models to date, and Fugu Ultra v2, which pushes peak performance higher than ever before, without the indispensable reliance on the frontier models it orchestrates. The Two-Dimensional AI Frontier. The AI industry has largely focused on one metric: building increasingly capable and expensive foundation models. But real-world AI has another cr

Integral, connecting accounting, tax, and payroll in one AI-native firm, led by Lukas Zörner and Anil Can Baykal, has announced an €18m Series A, co-led by Mosaic Ventures and Reid Hoffman, with its existing investors Cherry Ventures, General Catalyst, and Puzzle Ventures joining again. It brings the total capital raised by Integral to more than €30m. Where Integral Started. Before Integral, the founders spent years building banking and payments products for businesses and sp

Periodic Labs, an AI research and deployment company creating models and autonomous labs to accelerate science, led by Liam Fedus, Dogus Cubuk, and the team, has introduced Periodic Neon, a 1T-parameter model that was post-trained to analyze experimental results and deployed to its physical labs. This is a step towards putting autonomous discovery into the hands of scientists. Building AI-Powered Materials Labs. Since launching last year, Periodic has built high-throughput la

Liquid Compute, building a regulated exchange for compute: verification, clearing, settlement, and price discovery for neoclouds, AI companies, and traders, led by Ronit Jain and Aarav Patel, emerges from stealth with a $15 million seed round co-led by Chemistry and Firstmark. They are joined by K8 Capital, Night Capital, TrueBridge, Brainchild Holdings, UFO Holdings, Y Combinator, and angel investors such as Dmitry Balyasny. Alongside the launch, the company is announcing pe

Jack & Jill, an AI agent for your career, led by Matthew Wilson and Saaras Mehan, has raised a $40M Series A, led by Air Street Capital with participation from Creandum and Madrona, to move faster toward a job market where every person and company has an agent in their corner. Jack is an AI agent for candidates, while Jill is an AI agent for employers. When the two identify a potential match, they connect the candidate and company directly, removing the traditional applicatio

Nuance Labs, building a human foundation model with emotional intelligence, led by Fangchang Ma, Edward Zhang, and Karren Yang, has raised $50 million in Series A funding led by returning investor Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation from returning investors Accel, South Park Commons, and new investors NVIDIA and Define Ventures. The company will open a research preview of its model to the public later this year. Nuance Labs is developing AI that perceives and resp

Temporal, which develops and distributes the world's leading open-source durable execution system, led by Samar Abbas and Maxim Fateev, has raised a $550M Series E at a $12.55B valuation, co-led by Lightspeed, with Wellington Management, Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives, and Tiger Global, with strong participation from T. Rowe Price and SV Angel. Returning investors include a16z, Sequoia, Index, GIC, Sapphire Ventures, and Amplify. The Challenge of Building Reliabl

Archy, the AI platform for dental practice management, led by Jonathan Rat and the team, has raised $50 million in Series C funding led by JMI Equity, along with existing investors TCV, Entrée Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, CRV, and Alven. The funding will accelerate development of AI agents that help dental teams automate work across their practices. Archy’s System of Action for Dental Practices. Archy is an AI-powered platform designed to replace fragmented dental soft

Rime, the leading enterprise voice AI platform, led by Lily Clifford, Brooke Larson, and Ares Geovanos, has announced a strategic partnership with Dialpad, the AI platform for customer experience. Under the agreement, Rime will become the primary text-to-speech (TTS) provider for Dialpad’s agentic voice AI products, delivering natural, conversational audio across business communications worldwide. As businesses deploy autonomous AI systems, demand for human-like voice synthes

Positron AI, building the future of AI acceleration, led by Mitesh Agrawal, Thomas Sohmers, and the team, announced an $875 million Series C financing at a $5 billion post-money valuation. The round was co-led by NEA, Atreides Management, Valor Equity Partners, Andra Capital, Dylan Patel's SemiAnalysis Capital, and Jim Clark, the founder of Silicon Graphics and Netscape. As part of the financing, Forest Baskett of NEA, Gavin Baker of Atreides Management, Thomas Jermoluk from

Motive, building AI that makes your operations safer and more efficient, led by Shoaib Makani and the team, secured more than $1.3 billion in growth financing from General Catalyst’s Customer Value Fund (CVF). Pranav Singhvi, Managing Director at General Catalyst, joins Motive’s Board of Directors. The funding will support further development of the AI platform, expansion of go-to-market teams, and growth across the world’s largest and most complex organizations. “Motive is b

Tavus, the human computing company, led by Hassaan Raza and Quinn Favret, has announced Phoenix-4.5, a new state-of-the-art in real-time human rendering. Phoenix-4.5: More Natural Human Rendering. Realism in digital humans goes beyond facial appearance. Natural movement, head motion, posture, shoulders, and reactions while listening is what make an interaction feel present. Over three years, Phoenix has evolved from 3D conversational avatars to real-time facial and emotional

Maven Robotics, an intelligent industrial robotics company, led by Hamza Derbas and Khalid Derbas, has announced its launch with $100 million in Series A funding from RoboStrategy, LocalGlobe, Vine Ventures, and XTX Ventures, among others. Maven designs, builds, and deploys intelligent robotics for logistics and manufacturing. Founded in 2024, the company has created the world's first general-purpose robotics system for industrial work. The Industrial Robotics Opportunity. US

Arlequin AI, an AI native platform for critical decision-making and action, led by Hugo Micheron and Antoine Jardin, raised €28 million in Series A funding to accelerate the development of a new AI architecture based on topological neural networks (TNN*) and expand the international deployment of its technology. The round is backed exclusively by European investors and co-led by redalpine and OTB Ventures, alongside Bpifrance’s Defence Innovation Fund. Existing investors Vsqu

Cylake, the complete, AI-native cybersecurity platform that provides full visibility, sets fine-grained policy, and stops attacks in fully air-gapped sovereign environments, led by Nir Zuk, Udi Shamir, Wilson Xu, and the team, has closed $245 million through a convertible note, with participation from Lightspeed Venture Partners, Picture Capital, and Redpoint Ventures. This latest funding brings Cylake’s total raised to $290 million, following a $45 million seed round in Marc

Lightfield, the AI-native CRM, led by Keith Peiris, Pete Nichols, Henri Liriani, Jack Reed, and the team, has announced a $47M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. Since launching last November, Lightfield has signed up more than 5,000 companies and become the system of record for fast-growing businesses, with teams migrating entire Salesforce implementations to the platform. The funding will support further growth and expand the range of tasks Lightfield’s AI agent can perfo

Forus, accelerating medicine for the people, led by Sahir Jaggi and the team, has raised $150 million in Series C financing at a $3 billion valuation, led by Bain Capital Ventures, with every existing institutional investor reinvesting, including Thrive Capital, General Catalyst, Accel, Redpoint, BoxGroup, Pear VC, Avra, Human Capital, Neo, Vast Ventures, and SV Angel. Forus has now raised more than $300 million in total funding to build the AI network for medicine. Medicine

Antioch, the simulation platform for robotics and autonomy, led by Harry Mellsop, Alex Langshur, Michael Calvey, and Collin Schlager, has raised $32 million to bring software speed to physical AI development. Together with the $8.5 million seed round announced earlier this year, this brings the total funding raised to $40.5 million. Greylock General Partner Saam Motamedi joins the company's board. “Software-speed innovation in the physical world will be the foundation of the

Cognition, developer of the first autonomous software engineer, led by Scott Wu, Steven Hao, and Walden Yan, has raised over $2B at a $48B valuation. The round was led by new investors Andreessen Horowitz and Accel, alongside existing investors Founders Fund, General Catalyst, and Avenir. Other investors in the round include Benchmark, Bessemer, Kleiner Perkins, Greylock, Lightspeed, Altimeter, Bond Capital, Meritech, Atreides, Valor, T. Rowe Price, Lux, 8VC, D1, 137 Ventures

OpenAI says an internal AI system has produced a solution to the Navier–Stokes existence and smoothness problem, one of the Millennium Prize Problems. The proof argues that the three-dimensional Navier–Stokes equations can develop a singularity in finite time and includes both a written proof and a formalization in Lean. The problem, unresolved for roughly 90 years, asks whether smooth three-dimensional fluid motion can remain smooth indefinitely. OpenAI says the proof was pr