Sifted
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1 hour ago
Swedish investment firm EQT is in talks to lead or co-lead a Series D funding round for French AI company Mistral through its €5 billion Scaleup Europe Fund. The round values Mistral between €8 billion and €16 billion according to sources familiar with the deal. EQT's involvement as a lead investor would provide significant capital to support Mistral's continued development and expansion of its AI models and services.
TechCrunch AI
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2 hours ago
Alexandre LeBrun, CEO of AMI Labs, rejects industry terminology like 'AGI' and 'superintelligence' as poorly defined and unhelpful for describing his work on world models. AMI Labs raised $1.03 billion in March at a $3.5 billion pre-money valuation but has no product yet and is scouting partnerships in South Korea for access to real-world robotics and manufacturing environments. The startup aims to build AI systems that understand physical environments and enable safer, context-aware robots for applications where LLMs alone are insufficient.
TechCrunch AI
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2 hours ago
Moonshot AI's upcoming Kimi K3 model, expected between 2 trillion and 3 trillion parameters, is projected to match or exceed Anthropic's Opus 4.8 performance according to Financial Times sources. Moonshot is raising fresh capital at a $31.5 billion valuation, up from $20 billion in May, as Chinese open-weight models increasingly close the performance gap with expensive closed-source alternatives from OpenAI and Anthropic. The release is expected in the coming days and reflects growing momentum toward open-source AI models as cost-effective alternatives to proprietary systems.
Menlo Ventures
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3 hours ago
Menlo Ventures led a $1.5 billion Series D funding round for Fireworks, a platform for deploying and optimizing specialized AI models in production. Fireworks has grown daily token volume to 43 trillion tokens (nearly tripled since late 2024) and reached $1 billion annualized revenue, serving customers like Cursor, Vercel, and Factory. The funding reflects growing demand for inference infrastructure as companies increasingly deploy custom and open-source models alongside frontier models to balance cost, speed, and performance.
Tech.eu
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5 hours ago
Resist.UA, a Ukrainian defence-tech investment fund founded in 2023, has invested in over 100 defence technology startups including AI-powered intelligence software and autonomous drones, with its first fund building a portfolio valued at over $10 million. By the end of 2025, Ukrainian defence startups had raised more than $129 million in publicly disclosed investments and grants, making defencetech the fastest-growing sector in Ukraine's technology ecosystem. The fund aims to develop founders into long-term industrial leaders who will shape Ukraine's post-war economy and attract sustained international investment.
Sifted
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6 hours ago
Munich robotics startup Microagi raised $55 million in Germany's largest seed round to develop humanoid robots trained on factory and household task data. The funding was led by Hummingbird with participation from Northzone, LocalGlobe, Village Global and Redalpine, coming 10 months after the company's founding by former Formula 1 engineers. Microagi plans to deploy humanoid robots across European manufacturing and household sectors, with the CEO predicting robots capable of performing roughly 10 routine tasks autonomously within one year.
Tech.eu
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9 hours ago
Hyperion Robotics raised $7.4 million to expand robotic microfactories that use AI and automation to manufacture infrastructure components near project sites. The company's technology produces components three times faster, reduces costs by 50 percent, and cuts carbon emissions by 70 percent compared to conventional construction methods. The funding will enable launch of Hyperion's first UK microfactory in Flixborough and support expansion across European infrastructure markets.
Anthropic News
Anthropic committed $10 million CAD to Canadian AI research institutions including Amii, Mila, Vector Institute, and several universities to fund work in AI safety, responsible applications, and domain-specific projects. The funding includes Claude API credits distributed across eight partnerships, with hundreds of Canadian startups receiving at least $5,000 USD each in credits through the Anthropic for Startups program. Canada ranks eighth globally in Claude.ai usage with per-capita adoption more than four times higher than its population would predict, indicating stronger integration of AI tools into Canadian professional work.
Tech.eu
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10 hours ago
Applied Computing, an AI company building foundation models for energy operations, raised $20 million led by KBR with participation from Databricks Ventures. The company's flagship platform Orbital combines physics-informed AI with chemical engineering and forecasting models, designed specifically for upstream, downstream and petrochemical operations. The funding will accelerate international expansion, opening a Houston office, and increase commercial deployment of Orbital across major energy customers globally.
TechCrunch AI
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13 hours ago
Applied Computing, a London-based startup, raised $20 million in Series A funding to deploy an AI model called Orbital that helps oil and gas facilities integrate sensor data, engineering documentation, and physics-based analysis. The company claims Orbital can compress investigations that previously took days or weeks into seconds, and is already generating double-digit millions in annual recurring revenue across unnamed large, publicly listed energy operators. With the funding, Applied Computing plans to expand internationally, hire AI researchers, and establish operations in Houston and the Middle East to serve more energy clients.
