Venture

Venture

A lot of agent prototypes based on stateless APIs tackle simple use cases: one prompt, one answer, maybe one tool call. Production work is different. Real workflows unfold across many steps, require context from previous actions, depend on multiple tool outputs, approvals, and system state, and need trusted guardrails in secure environments.

Plaid, a company that connects financial applications to users' bank accounts, enabling payments and data verification, has allowed employees to sell some of their shares at an $8 billion valuation. The valuation represents a 31% increase from the $6.1 billion valuation the 13-year-old company achieved in April of last year, when it raised a $575 million round led by Franklin Templeton for partly the same purpose: purchasing shares from employees.

Saudi Arabia just made its most aggressive move yet in that generational project. The kingdom announced a new $40 billion technology investment fund, developed in partnership with American venture capital heavyweight Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), aimed at positioning Saudi Arabia as a global hub for artificial intelligence, cloud infrastructure, and advanced computing.

Last quarter, SoundHound posted revenue of $42.05 million, up 68% year-over-year, and beat the non-GAAP EPS consensus by a wide margin, coming in at -$0.03 versus the -$0.09 estimate. Management followed that with a raised full-year revenue guide of $165 to $180 million.

We're on a rollercoaster of AI disruption with geopolitical risks adding to the uneasy ride. Sell-offs have rocked markets as artificial intelligence tools and services threaten to disrupt sectors. High geopolitical tensions have also been the theme so far this year, with the ongoing US military build‑up in the Middle East, while the assault on Venezuela and January's stand‑off over Greenland are still front of mind.

Einride has secured an oversubscribed $113 million PIPE (private investment in public equity) ahead of its public debut that's expected for the first half of 2026. The Swedish startup is most well-known for building both electric trucks and autonomous pods that are designed to carry freight with no room for a human driver.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. will buy $150 million in Nutanix Inc. stock as part of a new partnership that also includes joint engineering and sales efforts. The chipmaker will additionally give Nutanix up to $100 million to fund the joint initiatives, which are meant to develop and sell an infrastructure platform for powering AI applications.

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Right after Facebook went public, there was a concern about this mobile transition, and their stock went from $42 to like $18. That was fear of a technology disruption. I've never seen a disruption that had this much anxiety and go across so many companies.

I think the technology chessboard is set around where different companies have invested on the technology strategy, and now the commercial chessboard is being arranged. We took a very contrarian view on the technology side. We were the first to build end-to-end deep learning for autonomous driving, and we pioneered this approach. Now, when it comes to this phase of moving into commercialization, we're also taking a contrarian business model approach.

A senior machine learning engineer at a top European AI lab can expect to earn between €120,000 and €180,000 annually. Their counterpart at Google DeepMind's US offices, OpenAI, or Anthropic routinely commands $350,000 to $700,000 in total compensation - sometimes more when stock is factored in.

Our forward-deployed HR execs do all the work manually at first, and then they use that work to train the AI how to think in best practices. The idea, of course, is that over time, Comp's AI agents will become fully autonomous and capable of performing traditional HR functions.

MatX, a chip startup founded by two former Google hardware engineers, has raised a $500 million Series B led by Jane Street and Situational Awareness, an investment fund formed by former OpenAI researcher Leopold Aschenbrenner. The company's goal is to make its processors 10 times better at training LLMs and delivering results than Nvidia's GPUs.

Passengers will be able to book an air taxi ride through the Uber app in Dubai before the end of 2026, the company said on Wednesday. The option will use flying electric vehicles created by startup Joby Aviation. Joby's aircraft can fit up to four passengers and are flown by commercial pilots, the companies said. Joby will operate four landing locations, or "vertiports," in Dubai, connecting Dubai International Airport with a mall, a hotel on Palm Jumeirah, and the American University of Dubai.

Perplexity, which was last valued at $20 billion, said in a motion filed February 24 in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York that Dow Jones "cherry-picked" responses from Perplexity's internet search engine to support its copyright lawsuit. News Corp.'s Dow Jones and the New York Post sued the startup in 2024, alleging that it copied their content without permission or compensation to feed its search engine.

AIA tracks a concentrated index of 50 large-cap Asian equities across China, South Korea, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore. The fund captures earnings growth and valuation re-rating of Asia's largest businesses, particularly in technology and financials, without the currency hedging complexity of some regional peers. With a 0.5% expense ratio and $2.2 billion in net assets, it is a liquid, cost-accessible vehicle for the exposure.

AMLP holds a concentrated basket of midstream MLPs that earn fee-based revenue by moving oil, natural gas, and refined products through pipelines and processing facilities. These companies collect tolls on volumes transported rather than betting on commodity prices, creating relatively predictable cash flows.