XPENG said on Monday that its robotics business has raised more than $900M in what the company described as its first funding round, a substantial sum for a unit that has yet to sell a single robot commercially. The timing is deliberate, since the Chin…
GoWish has raised fresh funding at a valuation of more than $200mn, according to Bloomberg, which reported the round on Monday. The company is one of the more unusual businesses to come out of Copenhagen’s startup scene, not least because it did not st…
SoftBank plans a record 1 trillion yen retail bond sale, about $6.3bn, the largest by any issuer in Japan, to fund investment commitments to OpenAI. Analysts say banks were reluctant to take the risk, leaving the deal dependent on retail investors. Sof…
Alibaba is placing HK$80bn, about $10.2bn, of new shares in Hong Kong and says all net proceeds will go to AI infrastructure and capabilities. It comes days after the company reported a 75% fall in quarterly net profit driven by that same spending. Ali…
Outer Biosciences has come out of stealth after four years, keeping surgically discarded human skin alive for up to a month and feeding the results into an AI model that predicts useful compounds. It has raised about $23mn and employs 19 people. A comp…
Letara, a Hokkaido University spinout, has raised about ¥2.6bn, roughly $16mn, for hybrid rocket engines that use plastic as fuel and are not legally classified as explosives. Germany’s HyImpulse raised €45mn for the same approach last October. A Japan…
Letara, a Hokkaido University spinout, has raised about ¥2.6bn, roughly $16mn, for hybrid rocket engines that use plastic as fuel and are not legally classified as explosives. Germany’s HyImpulse raised €45mn for the same approach last October. A Japan…
Anthropic could raise around $100bn in a listing as early as October, exceeding SpaceX’s record, with backers modelling a valuation of at least $2tn. The Financial Times reports that senior executives have not set a valuation target even privately. Ant…
Aptera has partnered with Shanghai’s Launch Design on a manufacturing programme worth up to $44mn, covering tooling, testing and pilot production. Aptera pays two-thirds of the costs, while its latest filing reports $10.1mn in cash and substantial doub…
Astromech has raised $20mn at a $3.8 billion valuation to build AI that predicts how living systems will change. The company says its models learn from 3.8 billion years of biological history. The valuation and the training window are the same number, …