Smack Technologies raises $61m as the Pentagon’s hurry becomes a battlefield-AI business model
Smack Technologies raises $61m as the Pentagon’s hurry becomes a battlefield-AI business model

A defence software start-up that most of Silicon Valley had never heard of a year ago is suddenly flush with cash, and the reason says a great deal about where the Pentagon is steering the technology industry. Smack Technologies, an Austin-based firm b…

Wispr raised $280mn at $2bn to argue the text box is finished
Wispr raised $280mn at $2bn to argue the text box is finished

Wispr has raised $280mn at a $2bn valuation. Menlo Ventures led the round, having led the last one too. Total funding now stands at $361mn. The company makes Wispr Flow, a dictation app that turns speech into cleaned-up text in whatever application you…

The DOJ is investigating Andreessen Horowitz over competing board seats
The DOJ is investigating Andreessen Horowitz over competing board seats

The US Justice Department is investigating Andreessen Horowitz. At issue is whether partners at the venture capital firm improperly sit on the boards of competing artificial intelligence companies. Bloomberg reported the investigation on Monday, citing…

Aachen’s amber raised €7mn to sell AI sovereignty to the Mittelstand
Aachen’s amber raised €7mn to sell AI sovereignty to the Mittelstand

Aachen-based amber has closed a €7mn Series A. Ventech co-led it with NRW.Venture, the venture arm of NRW.BANK. NRW.BANK is the development bank owned by the German state of North Rhine-Westphalia. By the standards of this year’s AI rounds, €7mn is sma…

Higgsfield raised $400mn at $5.4bn, four times its January valuation
Higgsfield raised $400mn at $5.4bn, four times its January valuation

Higgsfield has raised $400mn at a $5.4bn valuation. DST Global led the round. Goldman Sachs, Intel Capital, and Liberty Global Tech Ventures all took part, alongside Tribe Capital, Smash Capital, Fifth Wall, Valor Capital, Mirae Asset Capital, and NTT …

Terra Industries closes a $52mn seed and opens its first office outside Africa
Terra Industries closes a $52mn seed and opens its first office outside Africa

Terra Industries has added $18mn to close a $52mn seed round and will open its first office outside Africa in London, while keeping manufacturing in Ghana and Nigeria. The Nigerian company was founded in 2024 and says it is on track for more than $100m…

Groq closes $350M Series A at $3.5bn evaluation and Nvidia joins the round
Groq closes $350M Series A at $3.5bn evaluation and Nvidia joins the round

Groq, the AI-inference chip company that spent the better part of a decade pitching itself as the scrappy alternative to Nvidia, has raised fresh money at a valuation that quietly concedes how much has changed. The company announced on Monday that they…

Nvidia is not backing OpenAI’s rent. It is backing the buildings
Nvidia is not backing OpenAI’s rent. It is backing the buildings

A residual value guarantee is a promise about an object, not about a tenant. Someone builds a thing. Someone else rents it. A third party promises the thing itself will still be worth a set amount. If the renter walks, the owner relets or sells. The gu…

Nvidia puts $1.5bn into SoftBank’s SB Energy to power OpenAI’s Ohio data centre
Nvidia puts $1.5bn into SoftBank’s SB Energy to power OpenAI’s Ohio data centre

Nvidia has agreed to invest $1.5 billion in SB Energy, the US power and infrastructure developer backed by SoftBank and OpenAI, in a deal that hands the chipmaker up to 8 gigawatts of AI computing capacity at an Ohio campus being built for OpenAI. It i…

Gravis Robotics has raised a $200M Series A led by SoftBank
Gravis Robotics has raised a $200M Series A led by SoftBank

Gravis Robotics, an ETH Zurich spinout building software that lets excavators and diggers run themselves, has raised a $200m Series A led by SoftBank, a round it bills as the largest ever in construction robotics. The deal confirms reports that surface…