Nvidia and Dell back AI cloud startup Volta at a $2.4bn valuation
Nvidia and Dell back AI cloud startup Volta at a $2.4bn valuation

A new company wants to be the one that pays for everyone else’s AI chips. Volta Infra Holdings has raised $300m in venture funding and lined up a further $5bn in financing to help a broader range of tech firms afford Nvidia’s costly hardware, in a roun…

The AI boom runs on metal. A two-year-old startup just raised $310m to mine it, autonomously, on US soil.
The AI boom runs on metal. A two-year-old startup just raised $310m to mine it, autonomously, on US soil.

People tell the AI boom as a story about chips and models. Underneath it is metal. Every data centre, chip, power line and robot starts with copper and a handful of other minerals. The United States has quietly lost control of where they come from. A t…

The danger isn’t the AI model. It’s the agent acting on its own, and Zenity raised $125m to watch it.
The danger isn’t the AI model. It’s the agent acting on its own, and Zenity raised $125m to watch it.

Most of the money spent guarding AI has gone to the model and the prompt. Zenity has just raised $125m on a different argument: both miss the real danger. That danger is the AI agent that acts on its own. The Israeli startup secures what agents do once…

A startup that lets AI hack your own network just tripled to $2bn, days after AI models hacked networks for real.
A startup that lets AI hack your own network just tripled to $2bn, days after AI models hacked networks for real.

A company whose product is an AI that hacks your network has just tripled in value. It did so in the same week that AI hacking stopped being hypothetical. Horizon3 has raised a $250m Series E at a valuation above $2bn, up from $650m a year ago. The tim…

A startup says the AI bottleneck isn’t compute. It’s memory, and it ditched the GPU to prove it.
A startup says the AI bottleneck isn’t compute. It’s memory, and it ditched the GPU to prove it.

The AI hardware conversation is stuck on one word: compute. A startup out of Tel Aviv wants to change the word to memory. Majestic Labs, founded in 2023 by former Google and Meta engineers, has unveiled a server it says can do the work of a rack of Nvi…

Yellow.ai is going public to buy the call centres it wants to replace with AI
Yellow.ai is going public to buy the call centres it wants to replace with AI

Most AI companies want to sell software to call centres. Yellow.ai wants to buy the call centres. The enterprise-AI firm has agreed to go public through a merger with a blank-cheque company. It plans to spend much of the money acquiring the outsourcing…

A two-year-old battery startup just hit $13bn by turning American homes into grid capacity.
A two-year-old battery startup just hit $13bn by turning American homes into grid capacity.

A home-battery company that did not exist three years ago is now worth $13bn. Base Power has raised $1bn in a Series D and launched its own battery, Base Core. The bet behind the number is blunt: the grid cannot keep up with America’s power demand, and…

A Korean chip startup just quadrupled to $2.2bn, betting AI’s next money is outside the data centre.
A Korean chip startup just quadrupled to $2.2bn, betting AI’s next money is outside the data centre.

A South Korean chip designer few outside the industry have heard of just became a $2.2bn company. DeepX has signed the first tranche of a Series D round that values it at roughly four times its previous mark. And it is not finished raising. The first s…

Fusion’s best-funded bet raised another $1bn, and hired the banker who took Moderna public
Fusion’s best-funded bet raised another $1bn, and hired the banker who took Moderna public

The AI boom needs colossal amounts of electricity. That has turned fusion, forever mocked as “30 years away,” into one of the hottest bets in tech. The best-funded player just raised another $1 billion. Commonwealth Fusion Systems, based in Massachuset…

Everyone else is shrinking satellites. K2 raised $500m to build giant ones, and put AI in orbit.
Everyone else is shrinking satellites. K2 raised $500m to build giant ones, and put AI in orbit.

Most satellite startups are racing to build smaller. K2 Space is going the other way, on purpose. Investors just handed it $500 million to keep going bigger. K2 raised a $500 million Series D at a $6.8 billion valuation, it said on Thursday. Kleiner Pe…