The number of fusion startups that have raised more than $100 million has reached 17, according to a TechCrunch tally published Thursday, with total private investment in the sector now exceeding $13 billion. Two of the most recent rounds, Helion Energy’s $465 million raise and Focused Energy’s $240 million Series A, both closed in June […]

Most of the AI industry is betting that bigger models mean smarter machines. A new startup is betting the opposite. Aether AI, based in San Diego, has raised a $20mn seed round to chase a different idea entirely. Its founder thinks the next leap will not come from scale. It will come from teaching machines […]

AI’s next bottleneck is not the chips. It is the wiring between them. As clusters grow to hundreds of thousands of GPUs, the copper links that shuttle data between them are running out of road. So the industry is racing to move that traffic onto light instead. HyperLight, a startup spun out of Harvard, has […]

Liberty Bank, a 201-year-old mutual bank headquartered in Middletown, Connecticut, announced the launch of an AI Center of Excellence alongside a strategic partnership with Flare AI. The centre will serve as the hub for AI strategy, governance, and execution across the bank’s personal, commercial, and digital operations. The partnership is structured around outcomes rather than […]

Spotify on Wednesday launched Reserved by Spotify, turning the concert ticketing concept it unveiled last month into a live product. The feature automatically holds up to two concert tickets for Premium subscribers based on their listening habits, making Spotify the first audio streaming platform to offer dedicated pre-sale ticket access. The first artist to participate is indie-pop […]