StepFun's Step 5 Preview scores 44 to GPT-5.6 Sol's 47 on the intelligence index at roughly one-seventh the output price, with full open weights due October 15.
Anthropic says Claude now leads 26% of its AI R&D work, up from under 1% in February, with roughly 30,000 agents running in parallel.
Dave Duffield built PeopleSoft and Workday. His third act, Ridgeline, just raised $250M at a $1.425B valuation to replace the six-to-nine legacy systems running the back office of asset managers with one AI-native platform.
CADDi's $114M Series D values the Tokyo-and-Chicago manufacturing-AI startup at $1.2 billion — a bet that factories' lost drawings are worth a fortune.
ByteDance spun its in-house AI-for-science team into Anew Labs, which raised $290M at a $1.5B valuation with the TikTok owner keeping 56% — four drug programs, none yet in human trials.
Profound raised a $180M Series D at a $1.8B valuation to get brands named inside ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity answers — the AI-era rewrite of SEO.
AIUC raised a $40M Series A led by Ribbit Capital to certify and insure AI agents, running ~5,000 adversarial tests per audit. The barrier to enterprise AI isn't intelligence, it's liability.
Cognition's valuation leapt from $26B to $48B in four months on a $2B Series E, yet its revenue multiple stayed pinned near 53x. Here's what that flat number reveals about the AI-coding boom.
Nvidia is paying $12.93 billion for Hugging Face, the 'GitHub of AI' — its largest acquisition ever, at roughly 86 times revenue. Inside the biggest check in the company's history.
Tencent-backed Enflame raised $911 million, then opened 188% higher on its Shanghai debut — closing near $25.5 billion despite holding just 1.7% of China's AI chip market.
Reno chip startup Positron just raised $875 million at a $5 billion valuation on a bet against high-bandwidth memory the priciest, scarcest part of an AI chip.
Harvey raised $550M at roughly a $15.5B valuation, double its March price, on $400M in revenue. Inside the 39x-multiple bet that AI eats the billable hour.
