Articles tagged with "AI-agents"
Intel spinout Articul8 raises more than half of $70M round at $500M valuation
Articul8, an enterprise AI company spun out of Intel in early 2024, has raised over half of a planned $70 million Series B funding round at a $500 million pre-money valuation. This marks a fivefold increase from its $100 million post-money Series A valuation just months earlier. Led by Spain’s Adara Ventures, the round is expected to close in Q1 2024. Articul8 has surpassed $90 million in total contract value from 29 paying customers, including major firms like Hitachi Energy, AWS, Franklin Templeton, and Intel. The company is revenue-positive, projecting annual recurring revenue of over $57 million for the year, with nearly half already recognized. Articul8 specializes in AI systems designed to operate within customers’ own IT environments, focusing on regulated industries such as energy, manufacturing, aerospace, financial services, and semiconductors where accuracy, auditability, and data control are paramount. Unlike general-purpose AI models offered by cloud providers,
energyartificial-intelligenceenterprise-AIregulated-industriessoftware-applicationsAI-agentsIntel-spinoutMicro1, a Scale AI competitor, touts crossing $100M ARR
Micro1, a three-year-old startup specializing in recruiting and managing human experts to generate training data for AI labs, has experienced rapid growth, surpassing $100 million in annual recurring revenue (ARR) from about $7 million at the start of the year. Founded by 24-year-old Ali Ansari, Micro1 serves leading AI labs including Microsoft and Fortune 100 companies focused on improving large language models through post-training and reinforcement learning. The company’s growth is fueled by increasing demand for high-quality human data, a market Ansari projects will expand from $10-15 billion today to nearly $100 billion within two years. While Micro1’s ARR growth is impressive, it remains smaller than competitors Mercor ($450 million ARR) and Surge ($1.2 billion ARR in 2024). Micro1’s success is attributed to its efficient recruitment and evaluation of domain experts, leveraging a platform that evolved from an AI recruiting tool called Zara. Beyond servicing elite AI labs, Micro1 is targeting two
robotAIrobotics-pre-traininghuman-datamachine-learningAI-agentsdata-annotationAll the biggest news from AWS’ big tech show re:Invent 2025
At AWS re:Invent 2025, Amazon Web Services emphasized AI advancements focused on enterprise customization and autonomous AI agents. CEO Matt Garman highlighted a shift from AI assistants to AI agents capable of independently performing tasks and automating workflows, unlocking significant business value. Key announcements included expanded capabilities for AWS’s AgentCore platform, such as policy-setting features to control AI agent behavior, enhanced memory and logging functions, and 13 pre-built evaluation systems to help customers assess agent performance. AWS also introduced three new “Frontier agents” designed for coding, security reviews, and DevOps tasks, with preview versions already available. AWS unveiled its new AI training chip, Trainium3, promising up to 4x performance improvements and 40% lower energy use for AI training and inference. The company teased Trainium4, which will be compatible with Nvidia chips, signaling deeper integration with Nvidia technology. Additionally, AWS expanded its Nova AI model family with new text and multimodal models, alongside Nova Forge, a
energyAI-chipscloud-computingAI-agentsNvidia-compatibilityAI-trainingAWS-re:InventGeneral Intuition lands $134M seed to teach agents spatial reasoning using video game clips
General Intuition, a new AI research startup spun out from Medal—a platform for sharing video game clips—has raised $133.7 million in seed funding led by Khosla Ventures and General Catalyst. The company leverages Medal’s extensive dataset of 2 billion annual videos from 10 million monthly users to train AI agents capable of spatial-temporal reasoning, which involves understanding how objects move through space and time. This dataset is considered superior to alternatives like Twitch or YouTube due to its first-person gameplay perspective and the presence of highly selective, edge-case clips that enhance training quality. The startup’s AI models can interpret unseen environments and predict actions based solely on visual input, mimicking human player perspectives and controller inputs, making the technology transferable to real-world applications such as robotic arms, drones, and autonomous vehicles. General Intuition aims to develop general agents that interact with their surroundings, initially focusing on gaming and search-and-rescue drones. Unlike competitors who sell world models, General Intuition’s goal
robotAI-agentsspatial-reasoningdronesautonomous-vehiclesmachine-learninggaming-AIFundamental Research Labs nabs $30M+ to build AI agents across verticals
Fundamental Research Labs, an applied AI research company formerly known as Altera, has raised $33 million in a Series A funding round led by Prosus, with participation from Stripe co-founder Patrick Collison. The company operates with a unique structure, maintaining multiple teams focused on diverse AI applications across different verticals, including gaming, prosumer apps, core research, and platform development. Founded by Dr. Robert Yang, a former MIT faculty member, the startup aims to be a “historical” company by eschewing typical startup norms and is already generating revenue by charging users for its AI agents after a seven-day trial. Among its products, Fundamental Research Labs offers a general-purpose consumer assistant and a spreadsheet-based AI agent called Shortcut, which has demonstrated impressive performance by outperforming first-year analysts from McKinsey and Goldman Sachs in head-to-head evaluations. The company has raised over $40 million to date and is focused on productivity applications as a primary value driver, with long-term ambitions to develop
robotAI-agentsautomationproductivity-appsdigital-humansmachine-learningrobotics-developmentFundamental Research Labs nabs $30M to build AI agents across verticals
Fundamental Research Labs, an applied AI research company formerly known as Altera, has secured $30 million in Series A funding led by Prosus, with participation from Stripe CEO Patrick Collison. The company operates with an unconventional structure, maintaining multiple teams focused on diverse AI applications across verticals, including gaming, prosumer apps, core research, and platform development. Founded by Dr. Robert Yang, a former MIT faculty member, the startup aims to be a “historical” company rather than follow a typical startup model. It is already generating revenue by charging users for its AI agents after a seven-day trial period. Among its products is Shortcut, a spreadsheet-based AI agent described as a “superhuman excel agent” that outperforms first-year analysts from top firms like McKinsey and Goldman Sachs in accuracy and speed. The company’s offerings also include a general-purpose consumer assistant and other AI tools like Fairies. Prosus investment partner Sandeep Bakshi highlighted the team’s mission-driven
robotartificial-intelligenceAI-agentsautomationproductivity-appsdigital-humansAI-research11 startups from YC Demo Day that investors are talking about
At Y Combinator’s Spring 2025 Demo Day, the majority of startups showcased were focused on AI, either developing AI agents or tools to support AI development. A notable trend was the emergence of startups creating specialized AI assistants modeled as “Cursor for X,” targeting specific professional domains such as knowledge workers (Den) and lawyers (Vessence). Besides AI, robotics also featured as a resurging area of interest. Among the startups attracting significant investor attention were Anvil, which offers SEO optimization tailored for AI-driven content discovery platforms; Atum Works, innovating 3D-stacked chips to overcome transistor scaling limits with potential to rival NVIDIA; and Auctor, which automates enterprise software implementation and has already drawn interest from major vendors like SAP and AWS. Other highlighted startups include Cactus, providing an AI copilot to help solopreneurs manage calls and payments; Den, considered one of the hottest companies for its AI agents designed to replace tools like Slack and Notion for enterprise
robotAI-startupsrobotics-revival3D-chipssemiconductor-materialsenterprise-automationAI-agentsMeta’s V-JEPA 2 model teaches AI to understand its surroundings
Meta has introduced V-JEPA 2, a new AI "world model" designed to help artificial intelligence agents better understand and predict their surroundings. This model enables AI to make common-sense inferences about physical interactions in the environment, similar to how young children or animals learn through experience. For example, V-JEPA 2 can anticipate the next likely action in a scenario where a robot holding a plate and spatula approaches a stove with cooked eggs, predicting the robot will use the spatula to move the eggs onto the plate. Meta claims that V-JEPA 2 operates 30 times faster than comparable models like Nvidia’s, marking a significant advancement in AI efficiency. The company envisions that such world models will revolutionize robotics by enabling AI agents to assist with real-world physical tasks and chores without requiring massive amounts of robotic training data. This development points toward a future where AI can interact more intuitively and effectively with the physical world, enhancing automation and robotics capabilities.
robotartificial-intelligenceAI-modelroboticsmachine-learningautomationAI-agentsSam Altman thinks AI will have ‘novel insights’ next year
In a recent essay, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman outlined his vision for AI’s transformative impact over the next 15 years, emphasizing the company’s proximity to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI) while tempering expectations about its imminent arrival. A key highlight from Altman’s essay is his prediction that by 2026, AI systems will likely begin generating “novel insights,” marking a shift toward AI models capable of producing new and interesting ideas about the world. This aligns with OpenAI’s recent focus on developing AI that can assist scientific discovery, a goal shared by competitors like Google, Anthropic, and startups such as FutureHouse, all aiming to automate hypothesis generation and accelerate breakthroughs in fields like drug discovery and material science. Despite this optimism, the scientific community remains cautious about AI’s ability to create genuinely original insights, a challenge that involves instilling AI with creativity and a sense of what is scientifically interesting. Experts like Hugging Face’s Thomas Wolf and former OpenAI researcher Kenneth Stanley highlight the difficulty of this task, noting that current AI models struggle to generate novel hypotheses. Stanley’s new startup, Lila Sciences, is dedicated to overcoming this hurdle by building AI-powered laboratories focused on hypothesis generation. While it remains uncertain whether OpenAI will succeed in this endeavor, Altman’s essay offers a glimpse into the company’s strategic direction, signaling a potential next phase in AI development centered on creativity and scientific innovation.
AIartificial-intelligencescientific-discoverymaterial-scienceenergy-innovationAI-agentsnovel-insights