Today, we're introducing idler – a frontier data research... lab. We've raised a $9M seed round, led by Alpin Yukseloglu and frankie from Paradigm, with participation from Y Combinator, Long Journey, and angels including Manish Chandra, cat, DC, Janine Leger, Lynett Capital, Feross, and nur. This funding helps us build the evals, benchmarks, and reinforcement learning environments that the world's leading frontier labs use to train and measure their models.show more

1/ We're excited to announce our $4M seed round... led by Pantera Capital, with participation from Founders Fund , Galaxy , Base Build, Modular Capital and several crypto-native angels. We're building a composable ecosystem of margin-based products, starting with perpetuals🧵show more

Announcing our $320M Series A at a $2.3B valuation,... led by Khosla Ventures, with General Catalyst, Eric Schmidt and Jeff Bezos. General Intuition is the frontier lab for acting in space and time. We build large action foundation models trained on billions of ground truth action-labeled gameplay clips from 17M monthly active users on Medal, and push the frontier of world models to generate infinite training environments.show more

Morpho Association has raised $175M to build the open... credit network for the world. Co-led by Paradigm, a16z crypto, Ribbit Capital with strategic participation from Apollo Global Management, VanEck, Circle Ventures, and Ledger Cathay Innovation. The round also included participation from Variant, Wintermute Ventures, Prelude, IOSG Ventures, HashKey Capital, SBIホールディングス（株）, Bpifrance, Mirana Ventures, Bam Azizi, NJJ Capital and 10+ other strategic partners. The funding will help accelerate Morpho's position as the foundation for onchain credit.show more

We are releasing the first liquid way to trade... Anthropic. For far too long, frontier assets have only been accessible to a select few. We are here to bring them to the masses. Introducing EntropyIO. We’ve raised $14M led by Ribbit Capital and a $40M HYPE stake to build both improved and entirely new markets, the first of which are live on Hyperliquid today.show more

Today we're dropping the "beta" tag from Adaptyv, launching... our new website and announcing our $8M seed round. When we started Adaptyv a few years ago, our core belief was: AI models for biology are only as good as the experimental data they're trained on and the hypotheses they can test in the real world. Now, after a year of working with many great partners, we’ve scaled our infrastructure to the point that we're now open to anyone who wants to use our platform! Overall, this year, over 30 companies started using Adaptyv to validate their protein designs - from some of the biggest pharmas to frontier AI labs to many, many techbio startups. We've run hundreds of experiments, tested well over 10,000 proteins this year and are generating the data that validates the best AI models currently in development.show more

We’ve raised $2.3M in pre-seed funding to build Bleap—a... bank on the blockchain! 🚀 The round was led by Ethereal Ventures, with participation from Maven 11, Alliance DAO, Robot Ventures, Credibly Neutral , and other amazing investors who share our vision of a better financial system. Check out the coverage from @TheBlock__ : Bleap is now in beta for EEA users! 💳show more

Pi Ventures Joins Hack VC To Back AI Robotics... Startup On Base Axis Robotics (Axis Robotics) has raised a $12 million seed round led by Hack VC, with participation from Pi Network (Pi Network) Ventures, Nomad Capital, 10K Ventures, and other angel investors. The company is building a data engine for Physical AI that combines simulation, real world data capture, and human feedback to generate scalable robotics datasets. Axis said the funding will accelerate development of its global human in the loop data engine. Base (Base APAC) congratulated the team, calling Axis one of the leading scalable Physical AI and robotics platforms building on the network.show more

We are happy to share that Sorted has raised... $4.4M in seed funding 💙 The round is led by Tether and Gnosis, with participation from Movement, Angel Invest, and several angel investors including the founders of RWA.io. We started Sorted because we saw a gap nobody else was filling. Hundreds of millions of people on phones that work perfectly well, with no access to stable digital money. We decided to build for them. Today, Sorted Wallet runs across 160 countries with over 500,000 downloads. This round lets us grow in the markets we already serve, and reach the ones still waiting. To our investors, our team, and every user who found us before we found them: thank you for being part of our story 🙏 Onwards and upwards from here! Read the full announcement 👇 #Sorted #Stablecoins #FinancialInclusion #EmergingMarketsshow more

🎉 How D-lightful! 🎉 Chainguard has raised a $356M... Series D round co-led by new investor Kleiner Perkins and existing investor IVP, with participation from Salesforce Ventures, Datadog, Inc. Ventures, and every single other existing investor. This brings our total funds raised to over $600M, and puts us at a $3.5 billion valuation. We’re on a mission to be the safe source for open source and build a future where security and innovation can move in lockstep. This new investment allows us to continue creating secure, easy to use products and solutions that enable that future for our users. The momentum we’ve built over the past few years has been incredible to experience, and we’re grateful to all our customers, investors, and community for supporting us and being along for the ride. 🫶 Reach out if you are interested in joining us on this journey—we are hiring in every department! Check out our CEO and co-founder Dan Lorenc's blog:show more

We are releasing AutoResearchExam, a benchmark on open-ended machine... learning and engineering tasks. Our benchmark covers seven research areas including model training, data curation, AI safety and interpretability. In each task, we give agents 24 hours with a CPU or GPU machine to develop and improve their solutions through experiments and feedback. We measure both speed and quality with a combined score. Our benchmark has a unique feature: testing if agents create improvements that hold up on data they never see. We find that AI research agents often overfit as they try to improve. We see an interesting head-to-head comparison at the frontier: Astra starts the strongest and holds the lead for up to 19 hours but Fable 5.1 catches up and gets the top performing spot in the final hours. Qwen3.8 Max, Gemini 3.8 Flash and Grok 4.6 all sit on the cost-performance Pareto frontier, giving strong options at lower API budgets. Anthropic's Opus and Fable retain nearly all their validation performance on hidden tests, with gaps of 1.1% and 2.9%. Astra's improvement over Sol extends to generalization too, with that gap falling from 6.9% to 1.7%. (1/n)show more

Today, we are announcing that we've raised $20 million... from Union Square Ventures, Lightspeed, Y Combinator, Jeff Dean, Patrick Collison, John Collison, and others. We built an AI agent that connects to every tool you use at work, automates workflows across all of them, runs code when it needs to, and generates custom UIs on the fly that work with your actual systems and data. We hit $5M ARR and have had 1,200% growth this year. Read more atshow more

Big milestone for Ethereal Machines. We've raised $28.5M in... Series B funding, led by Avataar VC with participation from Peak XV Partners and other investors. We're using this capital to: • Build a 300,000+ sq. ft. advanced manufacturing facility • Develop India's first domestic CNC controller • Scale our AI-powered factory OS, Vesper • Expand globally India has the talent to lead in advanced manufacturing. We're building the capability to match. Thank you to our customers, investors, partners and team for being part of this journey. Kaushik Mudda Navin Jain SUMEET PATIL Blume Ventures Steadview IndigoEdge Prashanth Prakash Shailesh Lakhani Sandeep Singhal Lip-Bu Tan Karthik Reddy Arpit Agarwal Rajan Anandan #DeepTech #AdvancedManufacturing #MakeInIndiashow more

Today, we’re sharing the history of Foundation Labs, written... from our perspective as founders. What we thought, what we set out to build, and what we learned from six years on the frontier of crypto, culture, commerce, and art. We’re publishing this now while the experience is still fresh. It was important to us that a clear record exists in our own voice, rather than leaving our story to be interpreted by others over time. Our aim is to contribute to the commons. We believe there are many future chapters still to be written with this technology, and we want future founders to be able to reference and build on our experience—to start on second base. We’ll keep this online as a resource for the foreseeable future. To the artists, collectors, investors, and former teammates—thank you for being part of the journey.show more

🚨 BREAKING: Walden Robotics has just come out of... stealth with $300 million in funding and a $1.1 billion valuation. Another unicorn in the robotics space. 🦄 Just 6 months after incubation. The company was spun out of Toyota's robotics research lab by co-founder Russ Tedrake, a former Toyota Research Institute executive and MIT professor who taught a course on robotic legs. The seed round was co-led by Deviation Capital and Toyota, with participation from: NVIDIA, Boeing, Samsung Ventures, CoreWeave Ventures and AE Ventures. The robot is already working. A pilot is live at a North American Toyota factory where a Walden humanoid is pulling eight-hour shifts alongside human workers, loading and unloading car parts, cleaning machinery, kitting for assembly. A shift. Every day. Walden builds its own hardware, software and AI models, designed to continuously learn and improve in real production environments. Tedrake's words on the opportunity are worth noting: "Everyone recognises the magnitude of the opportunity and the technology feels ready, but success is not assured. You have to think through the business case, the unit economics, and how to marry the best of manufacturing and logistics with disruptive AI technology." Rare honesty in a space full of hype. The race to own that market is accelerating every single week. 🤖 Great story by Bloomberg here: ~~ ♻️ Join the weekly robotics newsletter, and never miss any news →show more

Modern conflicts are decided in the air. Swarm Aero... is building a radically effective way to scale air power. We're proud to share that we've raised $35 million in Series A funding, led by Two Sigma Ventures and Silent Ventures and joined by our seed investors Khosla Ventures, Scribble Ventures, Friends & Family Capital, Construct Capital, COATUE, Founders Fund, Alumni Ventures, and MaC Venture Capital! This brings total capital raised to $59M to accelerate the deployment of our large UAV and the swarm software that enables drones to be controlled at scale. While smaller drones pack smaller punches and require assistance to get to the fight, our large, multimission UAV can cover long distances and defeat high-value targets. Designed to manufacture at unprecedented volume and cooperate with superhuman dexterity, our UAV achieves asymmetric impact at dramatically lower cost than traditional aircraft. The future world order depends on who controls air power. Swarm is building the technologies needed for deterrence and dominance in the 21st century. And we’re hiring! Read more in Axios' Future of Defense exclusive on the raise (thank you Colin Demarest!) and our press release:show more

Nearly a year of Code Arena: WebDev progress compressed... into 15 seconds. Each line follows the highest-scoring model from top labs over time, showing the pace of improvement across the ecosystem. In just the last year, the model in the leading spot increased score by +340 pts and the number of frontier labs competing for the top spot expanded from 6 to 10. Anthropic has dominated throughout the year. Although standout releases have jumped to the top spot, most notably the Chinese open-source model Kimi K3 from Kimi.ai in July. Today, GPT-6 Astra by OpenAI leads with 1796 pts, followed by Claude Fable 5.1 at 1764 pts. The next closest lab is 103 pts away, Qwen with 1685 pts. Code Arena: WebDev ranks models through head-to-head user preference on real front-end web development tasks. These votes drive the leaderboard that is tracking the frontier.show more

Money is becoming software. HIFI is the infrastructure it... runs on. We've raised a $37 million Series A led by Left Lane Capital. Thank you to the customers who run on HIFI, the team that builds it, and the investors who back it. Demand is accelerating. We now process more than $7 billion a year, and existing customers have grown their usage more than 400% in the past six months. Together, they've onboarded more than 10,000 businesses and 200,000 individuals through HIFI. Our technology runs from Wall Street to everyday payments. In July, HIFI's platform was part of DTCC's pilot for tokenized repo. And through our partnership with Visa, developers can pair HIFI's stablecoin settlement with Visa Direct to move money globally. With this round, we're building toward the full stack of tokenized money, from payments and stablecoin cards to tokenized capital markets. We're growing our teams in New York and key international markets, acquiring strategic regulatory licenses, and reimagining new products for the partners building on HIFI. We're just getting started. → Read our blog: → Read the exclusive in Axios:show more