Poke, the AI assistant you text like a friend, is making its next big move. The company behind the assistant, The Interaction Company of California, has been acquired by AI coding startup Cognition in a deal valuing the startup in the “low nine figures.”
The deal will bring Poke’s interaction model and personality to Cognition’s coding assistant Devin. Meanwhile, Poke will take advantage…
As US weighs response to Chinese AI, industry urges against broad open-weight restrictions
July 27, 2026
Several AI companies, including Hugging Face, Meta, Microsoft, Mistral, and Nvidia, have signed an open letter urging policymakers not to impose broad “premature restrictions” on open-weight AI models. The letter comes as Washington debates how the U.S. should respond to…
Attie, Bluesky’s AI assistant that lets you build custom social feeds without programming, is evolving into an open-ended research tool.
The company this week said it’s added a new feature to the AI assistant, called Quests, that lets users ask it for information and…
Etched, the AI chip startup founded by three Harvard dropouts in 2022, has closed a $300 million Series C funding round at a $10.3 billion valuation, co-founder and COO Robert Wachen tells TechCrunch.
The round was led by Sequoia, with Andreessen Horowitz, SK Hynix, Jane Street, and Diffusion Capital also participating, along with other, earlier investors. Other backers of the company include…
White House science advisor Michael Kratsios said that Moonshot, the Chinese company behind Kimi K3, the largest available open-weight LLM, built its model by copying Anthropic’s Fable LLM while using chips that aren’t cleared for export to China.
“Large-scale, covert…
ServiceNow bets $40 million on Indian banking software specialist to expand its financial services push
July 24, 2026
ServiceNow, the U.S. enterprise software company known for automating workflows like IT service management and HR operations, is betting on an Indian banking software specialist to deepen its push into global financial services.
The company has invested $40 million in…
Passionfroot, a German startup building a marketplace connecting B2B creators with brands, said on Wednesday it has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Insight Partners.
Rebecca Liu-Doyle, managing director at Insight Partners, said Passionfroot is placed well at a time when creators are specializing as AI companies look for more visibility.
“Passionfroot has the perfect…
Glow emerges from stealth at $1.2B valuation to challenge endpoint security in the AI era
July 23, 2026
Glow, a cybersecurity startup founded by former Meta and Snowflake executives, emerged from stealth as a unicorn, betting that artificial intelligence is reshaping how enterprises secure employee devices.
The Palo Alto-headquartered startup on Wednesday said it raised $180…
For years, Synthesia’s pitch was to use AI to help enterprises create interactive training videos, in minutes, for a fraction of the cost normally associated with developing corporate educational materials. The startup’s newest product is making a different bet – that…
AI and the rise of the universal entertainment app
July 22, 2026
All the big entertainment apps are starting to look the same, and that’s not an accident. For a decade, platforms fought over who would dominate a single format: music, video, podcasts, audiobooks. Now, powered by AI, they’re fighting over something bigger – becoming the app you default to whenever you have time to kill, no matter what form the content takes.
There are several reasons why…
