ElevenLabs, an AI voice startup, has doubled its valuation to $22 billion through a $300 million employee tender offer co-led by Wellington and T. Rowe Price. The funding round values the company at twice its previous valuation as it expands its text-to-speech and voice synthesis capabilities. Source
Flow Engineering, which applies AI agents to hardware design, has raised funding at a $750 million valuation from Valor, Atreides, and Sequoia. The startup also secured Roelof Botha, Sequoia's former managing partner, as an angel investor and board member, underscoring investor confidence in AI's applicability to semiconductor and chip design workflows. Source
The Federal Trade Commission is investigating OpenAI and Anthropic over potential consumer harms, examining whether the AI labs have broken federal laws prohibiting unfair and deceptive practices. The agency's action reflects growing regulatory scrutiny of frontier AI companies as their systems reach consumers and enterprises. Source
Google has announced Gemini 4 Argon, its next frontier AI model, which delivers "frontier performance in complex workflows across real-world software engineering, enterprise knowledge work like legal and finance, and cybersecurity defense," according to Koray Kavukcuoglu, Google's chief AI architect and senior vice president of Google DeepMind. Access is being restricted initially to trusted cyber defenders before wider release. Source
Reddit is ending support for RSS feeds and terminating public API access to tighten control over its user-generated content as the platform battles unauthorized AI bot scraping. The move restricts access to Reddit's trove of data, which has become a valuable training resource for AI developers. Source