AI Agents
Nous Research Bags $90M to Sell Its Open Hermes Agent to Big Business
Nous Research raised $90 million from Nvidia, M12, Samsung and others to take its MIT-licensed Hermes Agent into the enterprise.
Funding
AI Models
Nvidia Wants to Own America's Answer to DeepSeek, Not Just Fund It
Nvidia, already $800M deep in open-weight startup Reflection AI, is reportedly in talks to buy it or go deeper, days after Beam launched.
AI Agents
Manus Doubles to $4B With a $500M Raise and Eyes Hong Kong
The Singapore-based agent startup closes a $500M+ round co-led by Boyu and IDG, with Tencent in, and starts prepping a Hong Kong IPO.
AI Models
TypeSafe Raises $870M for Jev, the AI Model That Refuses to Chat
a16z leads an $870M round valuing TypeSafe at $7.5B, weeks after its non-text decision model Jev went viral.
AI Models
Daily Brief: $1.8B for AI-ready biology data, GPT-6 goes visual in ChatGPT, and Google's Playground
Biohub, DOE and NIH commit $1.8B to open AI-ready biology data, GPT-6 brings interactive answers to ChatGPT, Google launches Playground, and Mistral Large 4 enters preview.
AI Agents
FieldAI courts a $10B valuation on a $700M robotics raise
Robotics startup FieldAI is raising about $700 million at a $10 billion valuation, quintupling from roughly $2B last year.
AI Infrastructure
Broadcom syndicates a $60B chip-debt pile aimed at Anthropic
Broadcom's Wall Street syndicate is assembling roughly $60 billion in AI chip financing expected to benefit Anthropic and others.
AI Infrastructure
Volantis raises $88M Series A for photonic AI inference
Volantis lands $88M Series A to build A-1 photonic inference systems aiming at 20T+ parameter models and 10k tokens/sec per user.
AI Infrastructure
Daily Brief — Friday 2 October 2026
SoftBank completes its final $10B OpenAI tranche; Broadcom’s prospectus loan for Anthropic TPUs; Google’s Suncatcher orbital TPU test; TypeSafe’s decision-only Jev model.
AI Infrastructure
Efficient Computer raises $97M to shove AI chips past the power wall
While everyone else buys more GPUs, Efficient Computer just raised nearly $100M to make the watts disappear. THE GIST Efficient Computer closed more than $97 million Series B at a $650 million valuation on 29 September, taking total funding to $173 million. TQ Ventures led. Proceeds fund volume Electron E1 shipments for physical AI and a Fabric push toward datacenter parts claiming over 10x better energy use. THE TAKE Energy, not FLOPs, is the bottleneck everyone quietly adm
Funding
Feather Robotics banks $7.6M pre-seed for a $29,990 wheeled humanoid kit
Another humanoid raise — except Feather's kit costs $29,990, rolls on wheels, and already booked over a million in revenue. THE GIST Feather Robotics raised $7.6M Gradient-led pre-seed for a wheeled bimanual humanoid aimed at third-party developers. Kit: $29,990, ~10 hours battery, ~1 m reach, SDK included. Ex-Google/Tesla founders claim a two-month prototype, first customer in nine months, and >$1M revenue. THE TAKE Wheels over legs is the grown-up move for warehouses and k
AI Infrastructure
PicoJool raises $27.5M to put VCSEL lasers on AI scale-up links
Pat Gelsinger just backed another bet that copper is done for AI clusters — and PicoJool's VCSEL lasers just raised $27.5 million to prove it. THE GIST Palo Alto's PicoJool closed a $27.5M Series A led by Socratic Partners (Rick Clemmer), with Hudson River Trading in, taking total funding to $39.5M for GaAs VCSEL modules aimed at AI scale-up links (200G/lane claimed) plus US and Taiwan facility expansion. Coverage: SDxCentral. THE TAKE Optics is where GPU clusters hit the wa
AI Infrastructure
Nscale banks $3.36B convertible war chest — Nvidia puts in another $1B
Nscale just raised $3.36 billion in pre-IPO convertibles — and Nvidia is writing a fresh $1 billion cheque to keep the GPU factories humming. THE GIST London-based Nscale announced a $3.36bn convertible loan note round led by Third Point, with Nvidia, Apollo, Citadel, Hudson Bay, and Abu Dhabi Investment Council among backers — $2.36bn closed now and Nvidia's extra $1bn lands mid-November, converting at IPO. Full release: PR Newswire. THE TAKE $103bn of contracted value and
AI Infrastructure
Anthropic locks $11.6bn Akamai compute deal — and a 5% equity warrant
Anthropic just bought seven years of Akamai CPUs for $11.6bn — and walked away holding a warrant for five percent of the company. THE GIST Akamai announced after Thursday's close that Anthropic signed an $11.6bn, seven-year infrastructure deal that can expand by another $9bn to roughly $20bn. Akamai issued a warrant for 7.7 million shares (~5% as-converted) at $111.33, building on a prior $1.8bn pact; Akamai plans ~$5.5bn capex to serve it. Details: The Next Web. THE TAKE Th
Funding
SoftBank sells $10B junk bonds to keep feeding OpenAI
SoftBank is hawking a record Asia junk-bond pile so Masayoshi Son can keep writing OpenAI cheques — at yields that would make a distressed-debt desk blush. THE GIST SoftBank opened books Wednesday on a $10 billion dollar bond deal ($1B 3.5y, $4.5B 5.5y, $4.5B 7.5y) to help fund OpenAI commitments, with price talk up to ~9.875%. Bloomberg also flagged a ~€1B euro sleeve, pushing the package past $11B. Settlement targeted for 29 September. THE TAKE This is not "patient capital
AI Agents
Heidi Health banks $340M so AI agents can do real clinical work
Heidi Health just raised $340 million to stop being a fancy note-taker and start acting like a supervised clinical teammate. THE GIST Melbourne-based Heidi closed $100M Series C led by Blackbird plus $240M from General Catalyst — $340M total — to scale its AI Care Partner across health systems, per SiliconANGLE. CEO Thomas Kelly wants agents completing real clinical work under oversight, as AMA data shows 81% of US physicians used augmented AI in 2026. THE TAKE Ambient scrib
AI Infrastructure
Cornelis Networks banks $205M to wire up AI clusters
While everyone argues about GPUs, an Intel spinout just raised $205 million to sell the plumbing that keeps those GPUs talking. THE GIST Cornelis Networks closed a $205 million Series C led by IAG Capital Partners, the largest reported Greater Philadelphia VC raise of 2026 so far. The Chesterbrook firm — spun out of Intel in 2020 — builds high-speed AI data-centre networking and lists Dell, Lenovo, Supermicro, and HPE as customers; valuation undisclosed. A Qualcomm partnership wa
Enterprise AI
SoftBank borrows another $11B so OpenAI can keep spending
SoftBank just priced an $11 billion bond sale so it can wire OpenAI another $10 billion — debt stacked on debt for one equity cheque. THE GIST On Monday 21 September 2026 SoftBank Group opened roughly $11 billion in senior notes ($10B USD plus €1B), earmarked for its third OpenAI follow-on tranche due around 1 October and to retire a $10B bridge. It lands days after an $11.87B syndicated loan and a separate $10B margin loan against SoftBank's OpenAI shares. THE TAKE This is
China AI
D-Robotics banks $400M for robot brains as Washington bans Chinese humanoids
Chinese robot-chip maker D-Robotics closed a $400 million Series C for on-robot inference silicon in the same week Washington's ban on Chinese humanoid imports is still biting. THE GIST D-Robotics — spun from Horizon Robotics — raised $400M led by Mirae Asset on 17 Sep 2026 for its Sunrise chips (5–560 INT8 TOPS), including the dual Brain/Cerebellum S600 at 560 TOPS. Total disclosed funding hits ~$770M; shipments exceed 8M units, with S600 adopted by 20+ embodied AI vendors inclu
AI Agents
TypeSafe’s $40M bet: ditch the chatty LLM for a 100ms decision engine called Jev
Another OpenAI alum just raised a fat seed — then told chatbots they’re the wrong tool for production software. THE GIST TypeSafe AI emerged from stealth with $40 million led by DCVC; co-founder Diogo Almeida (ex-OpenAI, RLHF co-inventor) is shipping Jev, a machine-native model aimed at software decisions, not conversation. Per The AI Insider, Jev targets sub-100ms latency with parallel outputs and calibrated confidence, waitlisted for early access. THE TAKE Finally, someone