Loops Smart AI, which builds agentic tools for online retailers, has raised $3.5 million in seed funding led by a16z's speedrun accelerator. NTT Docomo, Connecticut Innovations, Alumni Ventures and Monday Capital also took part.
Amazon, the second-largest corporate employer, has bet heavily on robots to scale its operations. The article asks what that means for its human workforce.
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.
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.
In a talk, Erik Peterson says AI spending is overtaking cloud bills and causing a cost crisis in software engineering. He covers tokenmaxxing and unit economics, and predicts fully autonomous AI will write, deploy and govern code by 2028.
The chief executives of Intel and Broadcom warned that access to capital could emerge as a major constraint on the AI boom.