Funding & Deals - SiliconNoon (Page 6)

The Arena

Brahma AI raises $150 million at a $2 billion valuation

Saturday's inbox is thin, so this one is a two-story brief: an enterprise AI round that headlines as an Indian start-up but is really a VFX group repositioning itself, and a robotics demo worth watching for what it proves about hands, not pianos. Brahma AI, the enterprise content arm majority-owned by the visual effects group behind Dune, is raising $150 million at a $2 billion post-money valuation — but the money is not in the bank yet.

The Guardrails

26 attorneys general demand federal AI safety rules from Congress

State attorneys general are done waiting for Congress to act on its own — and Microsoft has quietly retired the label it invented to sell AI laptops. Three stories for you this afternoon. 26 attorneys general from 24 states have written to Congressional leaders demanding federal AI safety rules. The letter, sent Wednesday to Speaker Mike Johnson, Senate Majority Leader John Thune, and Democratic leaders Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer, asks for four concrete things: independent safety…

The Frontier

Ex-Tesla Dojo chip startup DensityAI is in talks at a $10B valuation

A chip company founded about a year ago, with no shipped product and no named customer, is reportedly being priced like a late-stage one. The number is the headline; the memory architecture underneath it is the story. DensityAI, the accelerator startup founded by the leaders of Tesla's Dojo supercomputer program, is in advanced talks to raise several hundred million dollars at a $10 billion valuation, according to The Information.

The Frontier

Xiaomi's HySparse2 cuts million-token prefill compute fivefold

Xiaomi's model team previewed its next flagship with an architecture paper, and the numbers are about the bill the agent era runs up. Anthropic, meanwhile, wants its founders to keep control of the company after it lists. Xiaomi published HySparse2, the sparse-attention architecture its next flagship MiMo-V3 will use — claiming the design cuts prefill computation 5.02× at a million tokens versus the hybrid sliding-window attention in today's MiMo-V2 family.

The Arena

Akamai is handing Anthropic 5% of itself to lock in cloud orders

Akamai is giving Anthropic a warrant for up to 5% of its own stock — roughly 7.7 million shares at an exercise price of $111.33 — in exchange for a pledge to spend $11.6 billion on Akamai Cloud over seven years. A supplier paying a customer in equity to guarantee purchase volume is not a normal contract.

The Arena

OpenEvidence raised $250M at $15B — below the $20B it floated in July

The "ChatGPT for doctors" raised another nine-figure round. The number isn't the story — the way it surfaced is. OpenEvidence, the AI search engine for physicians, has raised $250 million at a $15 billion valuation — up from $12 billion in January, but below the $20 billion the company was reported to be weighing in July.

The Frontier

Ukraine's robots cleared 30 km of mines in two nights

The ground-robot war in Ukraine stopped being a pilot program this month — the units are now planning infantry advances around machines. Meanwhile, a US startup is trying to sell that same hardware to ordinary developers. Ukraine's Third Army Corps says its ground robots cleared antipersonnel mines from more than 18 miles of routes in two nights ahead of advancing infantry — work the corps says would have taken two sapper companies about a week — and that remote-controlled systems now handle…

The Frontier

UkisAI's Swift trims Qwen 3.8's thinking by 63% — and a rival's eval agrees

UkisAI released a family of fine-tunes that cuts the tokens Qwen 3.8 burns on second-guessing itself — 63.4 percent fewer thinking tokens on Swift Flash Next and 58.5 percent on Swift 1.5 27B, with the vendor reporting accuracy within a fraction of a point of the base model. That is the flattering half. Almost all of these numbers are self-reported, and local-model claims usually die on contact with someone else's harness.

The Frontier

AI's price crash is 13x a year — only 3x of it is better algorithms

Two studies put a number on the same thing: buying a fixed amount of AI capability is collapsing in price — and almost none of the collapse is the labs getting smarter. Epoch AI's "The Plunging Price of Thought" finds that reaching a fixed score on AI benchmarks has fallen about 47 percent per quarter since 2023 — roughly 13 times a year — and says no previous transformative technology declined that fast, running 4x faster than DNA sequencing, 6x than compute, 18x than lithium batteries and…

The Arena

Lovable's run rate passes $600M as vibe coding goes enterprise

Lovable's revenue line is now an enterprise story, a White House memo turns AI safety into a loyalty test, and a startup bets $20 million that agents belong in the group chat. Lovable says its annual run rate has passed $600 million, up from roughly $500 million in June, and the growth is coming from companies rather than hobbyists. Co-founder Fabian Hedin gave the figure on stage at the HumanX summit in Amsterdam this week, saying two-thirds of Fortune 500 companies now use the platform.

The Arena

Oracle cites force majeure on Project Jupiter as 2028 slips

Oracle has spent the week telling investors its AI backlog is real. On Thursday it told the developer of its largest New Mexico campus that it may stop paying for it. Oracle shares fell 4% after Bloomberg reported the company sent a force majeure notice to Blue Owl Capital, the developer behind Project Jupiter, aiming to delay payments on the 2.45-gigawatt campus if it does not come online as expected in 2028.

The Arena

Island raises $400M at $6.4B as rogue AI agents drive security spend

Island's funding round is the first hard number that prices the agent-security panic — and it landed the same morning Australia said an OpenAI agent had breached its health portal. Island raised $400 million in a Series F led by Evolution Equity Partners at a $6.4 billion valuation, more than 30% above the $4.8 billion it carried in a 2025 round.

See all