Walmart buys Vibe.co for $1.4bn to chase Amazon in ads
Walmart buys Vibe.co for $1.4bn to chase Amazon in ads

Walmart is paying a reported $1.4bn for a connected-TV ad startup worth $410m nine months ago. The price tells you how far retailers will now go to catch Amazon in advertising. Walmart has agreed to buy Vibe.co, a connected-TV advertising platform. Two…

Luminvera bets on immersive software for robotics
Luminvera bets on immersive software for robotics

For most of Luminvera’s short life, the pitch came with an AR wearable. The company, incorporated in March 2026 and run out of Silicon Valley, started as a bet that the right device could pull an industrial engineer out of what its founder, Lu Yang, li…

AI infrastructure startup Baseten raises $1.5bn at up to $13bn valuation as Blackbird makes its biggest-ever bet
AI infrastructure startup Baseten raises $1.5bn at up to $13bn valuation as Blackbird makes its biggest-ever bet

The AI infrastructure startup raised $1.5bn in a Series F, with Australia’s Blackbird VC putting in what may be the largest single outlay yet by an Australian firm. Baseten has raised $1.5bn in a Series F round that values the AI infrastructure startup…

Immigrant-focused VC Geek Ventures returns with larger checks
Immigrant-focused VC Geek Ventures returns with larger checks

Immigrant founders have long played a significant role in U.S. technology, but access to early-stage capital often still depends on local networks, customer introductions and proximity to established investors. That gap has created room for a small num…

NeuralTrust raised $20M to police the AI agents companies can’t even count
NeuralTrust raised $20M to police the AI agents companies can’t even count

NeuralTrust, a Barcelona startup, has raised $20mn to secure the AI agents that big companies are now deploying faster than they can keep track of. The seed round, worth €17.2mn, was led by Munich’s Alstin Capital, with VentureFriends, Seaya, Kibo Vent…

Arcade raised $60M to fix the real wall blocking enterprise AI agents: what they’re allowed to do
Arcade raised $60M to fix the real wall blocking enterprise AI agents: what they’re allowed to do

The problem with letting an AI agent loose inside a company is not that it might forget who it is. It is that it has no reason to hold back. A human employee is restrained by the fear of being fired. An agent, as one investor in Arcade.dev put it, “wil…

The bottleneck in geothermal moved from the drill to the turbine. This SpaceX alum raised $22M to fix it
The bottleneck in geothermal moved from the drill to the turbine. This SpaceX alum raised $22M to fix it

The race to power artificial intelligence has a problem that solar panels and wind turbines cannot fix on their own: the electricity has to be there at 3am, in still air, under cloud. Critical Energy, a Los Angeles startup founded by a former SpaceX en…

Why CMOs need a new operating system for accountability
Why CMOs need a new operating system for accountability

Marketing leaders have never had access to more data, yet proving the business impact of advertising has become increasingly difficult. As budgets face greater scrutiny and finance teams demand clearer evidence of return on investment, many chief marke…

Henrique Schmaiske and the human work behind Meteor 3.0
Henrique Schmaiske and the human work behind Meteor 3.0

Meteor.js is one of those open-source projects developers have lived with for years. It has over 44,800 GitHub stars, more than 500,000 active installations worldwide, and still sits inside products across many countries. Behind its largest release in …

Poland bought a stake in ElevenLabs to grow its next AI champion
Poland bought a stake in ElevenLabs to grow its next AI champion

Poland produced one of the world’s most valuable AI companies almost by accident. Now it is spending public money to make sure the next one stays closer to home. Vinci, the venture arm of Poland’s state development bank BGK, has taken an $11mn stake in…