Alpaca’s $135M Round Leads Busy Week of Fintech Funding, Acquisitions
Alpaca, a brokerage infrastructure provider, raised $135 million in funding led by Peak XV Partners, following a $150 million Series D round in January that valued the company at $1.15 billion. The new round included participation from Elefund, Opera Tech Ventures, and Unbound.
Neo exits stealth with $100M from a16z and Bessemer to build a control layer for agentic AI software
Neo raised $100 million from Andreessen Horowitz and Bessemer Venture Partners to build a real-time control layer for agentic AI software in enterprises. The startup was founded by former executives from SentinelOne, Wiz, and Palo Alto Networks.
Bitcoin Reclaims $65,000 as BTC ETF Inflows Return: Is the Worst Over?
Bitcoin rose to $65,000 as exchange-traded fund inflows resumed for a second consecutive week. The recovery represented a 3.3% gain against the $8.2 billion in previous outflows.
A big red speaker, Louis Vuitton trophy trunks and a tattoo bet – how Spain celebrated World Cup win
Spain won their second World Cup sixteen years after their first, with Ferran Torres scoring the winning goal in the 106th minute. Rodrigo Hernández, who watched Spain's 2010 victory alone on a mini-laptop as a 14-year-old, lifted the trophy after the team's recent victory.
Anduril and Archer unveiled an autonomous attack rotorcraft built on air taxi technology. First flight is planned for 2027.
An autonomous attack rotorcraft called Thunder, built using air taxi technology, is scheduled for its first flight in 2027. The Group 5 aircraft uses a series hybrid-electric powertrain and is designed to operate alongside crewed helicopters in combat.
NASA, GE Aerospace Work Enables Hybrid-Electric Flight Demonstration
A megawatt-class hybrid-electric engine developed by NASA and GE Aerospace successfully flew on a Saab 340B aircraft at the Farnborough International Air Show. The demonstration showcased a power system designed to inform development of fuel-saving aircraft engines.
A single AI agent conversation can look perfect and still be broken, leaders from LangChain, Conviva and CoreWeave said at VB Transform 2026
Enterprises are shifting away from scoring individual AI agent conversations toward comparing cohorts of users against baselines, because single conversations can appear flawless yet indicate broken products. The industry faces tension between scalable but ungrounded automated judging through LLMs or agents and human review that cannot scale.
Paramount and Warner Bros. merger blocked by temporary restraining order one day before close
A temporary restraining order paused the $110 billion Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger for 14 days one day before its scheduled close. California District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín granted the order after 12 state attorneys general sued to block the acquisition, citing Clayton Act violations.
BlackRock’s Larry Fink Says Crypto Washout Is Over: Is Bitcoin Stabilizing?
BlackRock CEO Larry Fink stated that the cryptocurrency leverage washout has ended as Bitcoin ETF flows became positive. Bitcoin ETF inflows suggest potential stabilization in the crypto market following previous volatility.
At VB Transform 2026, Zillow's engineering chief said AI ROI numbers only hold up if you measure before you build
Zillow built an AI architecture designed to maintain customer context across multiple touchpoints in real estate transactions rather than relying on isolated chatbots. The company discovered that establishing a persistent context layer proved more challenging than organizing its data infrastructure, despite initially focusing resources on data foundation and governance.
The cleanup trap: Stop asking RAG to fix bad data
Organizations mistakenly believe retrieval-augmented generation systems can fix fragmented legacy data at the retrieval layer, but production AI failures typically stem from inadequate enterprise data foundations rather than model limitations. The cleanup trap occurs when companies pipe ungoverned data into LLM orchestrators expecting the retrieval layer to patch problems through vector databases and embedding pipelines.
A Chinese AI lab just built a giant data centre with no Nvidia inside
A Chinese AI lab called Z.AI has constructed and partially begun operating a massive data centre that runs entirely on domestically manufactured chips instead of Nvidia processors. The facility represents a significant step in developing AI infrastructure independent of foreign semiconductor technology.
Safety guardrails blocked Hugging Face's defenders, not the attacker, when an AI agent breached its systems
Safety guardrails on frontier AI models blocked Hugging Face's incident response team from analyzing exploit data during a breach, while an autonomous AI agent moved undetected across the company's infrastructure for a weekend. Commercial models cannot cryptographically or organizationally distinguish between legitimate incident responders and malware authors requesting analysis.
From Hampton to Mars: How NASA Langley Helped Land on the Red Planet
Viking 1 and 2 successfully landed on Mars fifty years ago, marking the first successful Mars landings and opening a new era in planetary exploration. NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia contributed technical expertise and steady leadership that helped turn the ambitious mission into reality.
Our First View of the Surface of Mars
Viking 1 successfully landed on Mars on July 20, 1976, at 5:12 a.m. PDT and transmitted its first image back to NASA controllers forty minutes after touchdown. The lander had survived descent through Mars's thin atmosphere and began transmitting visual data to monitors at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
Kevin Keegan 1951-2026
Kevin Keegan, an English football pioneer, died in 2026 after demonstrating that English players could succeed in European competition. He was celebrated for his humility, warmth, and deep passion for the game and its supporters throughout his career.
AMD’s Helios puts 72 GPUs and 31 terabytes of HBM4 in one rack. It is AMD’s answer to Nvidia’s NVL72.
A single rack contains 72 AMD Instinct MI455X GPUs with 31 terabytes of HBM4 memory and 2.9 exaflops of FP4 inference compute. The system uses 18 compute trays, each holding four MI455X accelerators on the new CDNA 5 architecture.
Inference startup Infinity raises $15M from Touring Capital, OpenAI and Anthropic researchers
Infinity, an AI infrastructure startup, raised $15 million at a $100 million valuation from investors including Touring Capital and researchers from OpenAI and Anthropic. The funding will support the company's inference optimization work for large language models.
Google’s AI cited Facebook 19.5 million times, new research finds
Google's AI cited Facebook posts 19.5 million times when generating answers to user queries. BrightEdge research shows social platforms have become primary sources for Google's AI responses, with users often never visiting the original platforms where the information originated.
Google is building a chip with Gemini baked into the silicon
Google is developing a chip called Frozen v2 that has Gemini's model architecture built directly into the hardware rather than loading the model onto a general-purpose chip. The approach differs from typical AI chips by embedding the model's blueprint into the silicon itself.
Watch Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley discuss the future of surveillance at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026
Flock Safety's CEO Garrett Langley will discuss the balance between privacy and public safety at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. The company operates surveillance technology at the center of ongoing debates about where regulatory and ethical boundaries should exist.
Some dinosaurs could rise like giants until they grew too big
Two elephant-sized South American sauropods possessed robust femurs that could handle enormous forces while standing on hind legs, especially when young. Digital tests demonstrated these dinosaurs' femurs managed stress better than those of larger species, potentially enabling them to reach treetops or display to potential mates.
China AI Sensation Moonshot’s Gamble on Big Models Pays Off
Moonshot's large language model achieved significant traction at China's tech summit, drawing larger crowds than established tech giants Alibaba and Tencent. The startup demonstrated its AI capabilities by attracting major attention at the event despite being relatively new to the market.
The Download: AI hiring biases, and weather data sabotage
AI systems are more likely than humans to develop biases during hiring decisions. Résumés may be screened by artificial intelligence before human reviewers evaluate them.
Banks are making a bigger play for the SMB back office
Banks are expanding their back office infrastructure to help small businesses manage ACH payments, international wires, and cross-border payments within unified platforms instead of switching between separate tools. This consolidation reduces workflow fragmentation and simplifies reconciliation for small business financial operations.
Bristol Myers Squibb Building Life Science Industry’s Most Advanced AI Factory on NVIDIA Vera Rubin
Bristol Myers Squibb is deploying a second NVIDIA DGX SuperPOD to expand its AI computing capacity for drug discovery and development work. The company already operates one of the largest AI clusters in life sciences and is doubling its computational infrastructure investment.
Alzheimer’s breakthrough: Scientists restore two hours of sleep without clearing brain plaques
Removing most brain immune cells called microglia restored over two hours of daily sleep in mice with Alzheimer's plaques, despite leaving the plaques intact. The overactive microglia had triggered inflammation that prevented deep, restorative sleep in affected mice.
US public health agencies to test OpenAI and Anthropic AI models
Ten state, local, tribal, or territorial jurisdictions will test generative AI models from OpenAI and Anthropic through a new program called PULSE. The initiative involves the Coalition for Health AI and Accenture to support public health departments in evaluating these AI tools.
Kimi K3 open-weight model: China’s biggest AI is a bet on memory, not compute
Moonshot AI released Kimi K3, an open-weight model with 2.8 trillion parameters, making it the largest open-weight model released to date. The model launched on July 16 and represents what the industry classifies as the 3T tier bracket.
AI is more likely than humans to form biases when hiring
Large language models develop biases when screening job applications, picking up prejudices from training data and creating additional ones independently. A study found AI systems show greater hiring discrimination than humans across multiple demographic categories in résumé evaluation.