DeepSeek has agreed to lead the first funding round for Winverse AI, which builds AI for robots, according to Bloomberg. The seed round is worth tens of millions of dollars and would value Winverse at about $400 million, with Meituan's Long-Z also committed.
Some software vendors are positioning all or part of their offering as free of AI, to varying degrees and for different reasons.
The chief executives of Intel and Broadcom warned that access to capital could emerge as a major constraint on the AI boom.
Ambient-intelligence startup Mistlabs has released its Ambi AI system on Apple devices after a beta, backed by $26 million in new funding. Ambi is designed to act without being asked, rather than simply complete tasks on request.
Spotify says AI-assisted development more than doubled the number of code changes merged each month. The surge led it to rework testing, observability, rollback capacity, prioritisation and automated maintenance to protect quality and reliability.
A former Plaud executive has raised $26 million for an AI app that listens in the background. It reflects the industry bet that assistants need constant context about users to be useful.