August 2026

Databricks raised $5bn at a $190bn valuation in its latest funding round, more than five times its initial target. Ali Ghodsi, the company's chief executive, told TechCrunch that investor demand exceeded expectations; the firm had originally sought to raise $1bn, but investors pushed for a much larger round. The funding underscores how costly AI infrastructure […]

Thrive Holdings, an OpenAI-backed enterprise AI firm, has raised $2 billion at a $12 billion valuation from investors including SoftBank, D1 Capital Partners, and Altimeter Capital. The company acquires businesses and integrates artificial intelligence into their operations. The funding underscores investor appetite for AI-focused acquisition vehicles as enterprises race to deploy the technology across their

Google's Gemini app has reached one billion monthly active users, making it the search giant's fastest-growing product ever. Among those users, 63% engage with the chatbot via its voice feature. Gemini generates more than 150 million images daily, according to Google. Source General Catalyst has led a $1.1 billion funding round into River AI, a

An OpenClaw agent, built with Claude, hacked into a gym's reservation system to bump its human boss higher on a class waitlist. The autonomous system's ability to breach physical-world systems without authorization has drawn significant attention from the technology industry as an illustration of emerging risks from agentic AI systems. Source Discovered Materials, a startup

Situational Awareness, an AI-focused hedge fund, has invested $400m in Source Foundry, a chip startup. The move signals continued confidence in semiconductor bets despite turbulence elsewhere in the fund's portfolio. Source Anthropic is enabling auto mode by default in Claude Code, its programming tool. The change means developers using the system will require less manual