SHOW ME THE MONEY!
BIGGEST AI RAISES THIS WEEK
- Armadin $255.5M · Series B
- Supabase $150MGIC
- Forus $150M
- Volantis $88M · Series ALachy Groom, Abstract Ventures
- Flow Engineering $50M · Series BAntonio Gracias, Gavin Baker
- OuterSignal $22M · Series ALong Journey Ventures, Abstract Ventures
TOP INVESTORS · 30 DAYS
- Abstract Ventures 2 deals · $110M in rounds
- GIC 1 deal · $150M in rounds
- Lachy Groom 1 deal · $88M in rounds
- Antonio Gracias 1 deal · $50M in rounds
WHO WILL FEED US?
AG TECH, FOOD AND THE MONEY BEHIND THEM
FUNDING Silicon Valley veterans bring tech innovation to agriculture through global investmentFUNDING Hormel’s $1B Brakebush deal would nearly triple chicken’s share of its protein portfolioROBOTS How Boston Dynamics’ robot dog is helping food factories run smarterFUNDING Greenforce Poaches Vegan Egg Maker Neggst Ahead of Acquisition by Livekindly CollectiveFUNDING Conagra slims down portfolio while investing more in popcorn, meat sticksFUNDING USDA invests $5M to restore wetlands on farm groundROBOTS Antobot scales UV-C robotics push with 300 deployments targeted in 2027FUNDING Arla to pump €63M into high-protein dairy productionAI Agentic AI in food boosts decision-making – but can enhance risks tooROBOTS Future Farming Five: what autonomous weeding taught KilterAI LABS
Image: Hugging Face
The Agent Said It Was Done. The Database Disagreed. A model guide for the GPT-6 family Sweep thousands of leases for compliance using Amazon Quick and the Adjudicated Query pattern Add secure Web Search to Claude Desktop with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore Fine-tune a search agent with multi-turn RL on Amazon SageMaker AIOpen-sourcing AstaBrief, the fast report-generation model in Asta Toward provably private learning from federated data NVIDIA DGX Spark 64GB Gives Developers More Ways to Build and Scale Local AI AutoSynthData: Generating Training Data for Enterprise Agents Chatham scales its capital markets expertise with OpenAI
ON THE RISE
WHAT YOUNG PEOPLE ARE BUILDING
From ISEF finalist to Midjourney founder: David Holz reflects on creativity, entrepreneurship and the role of AIKnow a young person building with AI? Tell us →How NVIDIA GPUs Help Accelerate OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra Ultrafast The eternal complement How Albertsons Companies is reimagining retail from the inside out Productive, Durable, Fungible: How NVIDIA AI Factories Maximize Return on Investment The Den frees up 10-15 hours a week to grow with ChatGPT Work
Gemini 4 Argon: our next era of frontier intelligence Introducing SynthID Bio From Training to Production, NVIDIA and CoreWeave Close the Loop on Agentic AI Disrupting a coordinated model-distillation campaign Open TTS Leaderboard: Scalable Evaluation for Multilingual Text-to-Speech and Voice Cloning
How Diffusion Controller unifies and simplifies AI image generation
POLL
Trump floated 'self-regulation' for AI. Who should set the rules?
Reader poll, not scientific. One vote per browser. Closes Sat, Oct 10, 8 PM ET.
WHO GOT HACKED
Italy’s Data Protection Authority fines IQVIA €7 million over data protection breachShinyHunters hacker reportedly detained in Jordan, aiding FBIShinyHunters hacker “Rey,” allegedly involved in FBI data theft, detained in JordanWarlock Exploits SharePoint Flaws to Disable Security Tools and Deploy RansomwareDanish university DTU breach exposes data of up to 200,000 peopleJudge dismisses spyware case brought by Salvadoran journalists targeted with PegasusKiteworks & Citrix Incidents Show Challenges of Zero-Day ResponseNEW IN HAVE I BEEN PWNED
Medela — 423,947 accountsLimeLeads — 17,838,396 accountsBurger King Russia — 3,155,792 accountsChess.com (2026) — 4,653,212 accountsBreach data: Have I Been Pwned (CC BY 4.0)
INTERNATIONAL
KOREA Seoul police officer detained over AI sexual deepfakes, thousands of illegal filesCHINA Huawei's openJiuwen Open-Sources X-Router to Pick the Right Model for Each Agent RequestCHINA Quality over quantity: China’s AI microdrama producers battle viewer fatigueUK Black Box: The Chatbots | Life Raft | Ep 4 – podcastUK OpenAI says its review into hacks, including on Australian government sites, is costing $500,000 a dayCANADA Federal government launches new national AI councilCANADA Alberta municipalities juggle data centre development gold rush with public pushbackAI NEWS
Official White House Photo by Joyce Boghosian
It's not AI anymore, it's 'super intelligence' (according to the White House) Apparently, OpenAI isn't trying to build "magic intelligence in the sky" anymore AI Is Producing More Than Humans Can Process Amazon responds to data center backlash, says it no longer uses NDAs The Nvidia Shield TV Is 7 Years Old. It Just Got a $100 Price Hike Capcom is preparing for a ‘future where we create games together with AI’OpenAI safety employee resigns, claiming the company’s ‘culture is broken’ Splice CEO Kakul Srivastava thinks AI emails are killing conversations An OpenAI safety employee has quit and is sounding the alarm "Muse Gadgets" turns AI hardware into an open-source DIY project Another OpenAI safety departure adds to a pattern of researchers leaving with public warnings
All the AI agents that can live in your text messages Muse Creates Detailed Profiles of All Your Friends and Family Deepmind researchers propose "Artificial Symbiotic Intelligence" as an alternative to the singularity Open-source "BootLoops" harness supports AI models in performing precise scientific calculations AI agents build 3D scenes from photos but have no idea if they got it right
Meta wants your next gadget to be Muse-infused Apple changes full-disk access permissions to curb abuse from AI agents Sean Parker is rebuilding Stability AI around music Meta open sources code to let you make Muse AI gadgets Amazon’s $1B plan to combat data center backlash draws more backlash
Apple will limit Mac disk access as AI agents ‘substantially’ increase risk Affected by layoffs? Don’t miss this $75 deal for your TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 Expo+ Pass US arrests tech CEO accused of smuggling $300M in Nvidia chips into China Apple says it’s tightening macOS ‘Full Disk Access’ controls due to new risks from AI agents OpenAI’s Dot agent is enterprise software that can also order your dinner
Call it AI, call it Super Intelligence, only 2% of consumers are buying it These AI Experts Want to Do High-Stakes Research Out in the Open Redefining enterprise intelligence with autonomous AI Trump’s Crazy AI Rebrand Was a Loyalty Test for Tech Execs—and It Worked The 7-year-old Nvidia Shield TV is now $100 more expensive due to AI
A Flaw in ChatGPT’s Mac App Could Have Let Hackers Grab Sensitive Data Don’t be fooled—LLMs don’t reason Judge dismisses Chegg and Penske antitrust lawsuits targeting Google AI search With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI—until now “We’re not going to shoot ourselves in the foot” over hack fallout, says OpenAI’s chief research officer
Making AI an asset, not an expense
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TOP TECH, AI & BUSINESS PODCASTS THIS WEEK
- 1Moonshots: Recursive's $670M Bet on Self-Improving AI, Sonnet 5.5 Hits 70%, Elon Co-Leads Pentagon Push EP 299966K views this week · 8 episodes
- 2All-In: Trump’s Super Intelligence Summit, AI Safety Accord, GDP Beats, Midterm Predictions590K views this week · 3 episodes
- 3Prof G Pod: The Iran War Is Costing You Money. Here’s How Much.403K views this week · 4 episodes
- 4Lenny's Podcast: Why Claude can’t be your PM (yet)156K views this week · 7 episodes
- 5a16z Podcast: Why Specialized AI Could Beat The God Model137K views this week · 6 episodes
THE ROBOTS ARE COMING!
Image: Futurism
Government Officials Order the Robot Cage Fights to Stop, Organizers SayTop US rivals test high-tech military drones, robots, new warfare tactics to boost battlefield powerUS Navy weighs MQ-9B SeaGuardian drone as maritime patrol force multiplierFrontline Robotics unveils Frodo, its new 6×6 UGV with 93-mile range and 25 mph top speedMusk explains why Tesla Robotaxi is not running at night, and lidar is the answerThe physical AI race will be won in the patent officeTesla teases “Halloween Mode” update with Optimus rising from a graveyardMIT robot swims through water via living muscle cellsInside Omron’s next-generation LD mobile robotsBUILDERS & RESEARCH
We're going to need default hard budget caps on pretty much everything September sponsors-only newsletter Rex's Dino Store Quoting Matthew Green He Built This CityQuoting Anthropic Frontier Red Team