Alexander “Sasha” Rakhlin PhD ’06, the Distinguished Professor in Data, Systems, and Society at the MIT Institute for Data, Systems, and Society (IDSS); and a professor of brain and cognitive sciences at MIT, has been named the next director of the MIT Statistics and Data Science Center (SDSC). Rakhlin succeeds Ankur Moitra, the Norbert Wiener Professor of…
Zenity has raised $125 million in Series C funding as businesses move artificial intelligence agents from controlled experiments into systems capable of accessing data, invoking software tools and completing operational tasks. Norwest led the round, with Qumra Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Hitachi Ventures and LG Technology Ventures joining as new investors. Existing backers Vertex…
I’ve noticed a consistent pattern across financial institutions that have tested general-purpose AI tools but struggle to identify and measure impact. Leadership makes the decision to invest, then implements across teams and waits for the impact. After a few months, the confusion hits. Results aren’t clear, processes aren’t improving, adoption is lagging, and the numbers…
Horizon3 has raised $250 million in Series E funding at a valuation exceeding $2 billion, giving the cybersecurity company substantial new capital to expand its autonomous penetration-testing platform and move further into automated defensive remediation. The round was co-led by existing investors NightDragon and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Horizon3 says its valuation has more than…
Valar Atomics has closed a $1 billion Series B led by Sequoia Capital, money the three-year-old nuclear company says will take it from running a single test reactor in Utah to building small reactors on a production line. Valar announced the round on August 3, 2026, along with a separate $200 million credit facility, and…
d-Matrix has acquired Wallaroo.ai, a maker of software for deploying and orchestrating AI inference, in a deal the Santa Clara chip company announced on August 3, 2026. The purchase brings Wallaroo’s platform, intellectual property and engineering staff into d-Matrix, and it is the chipmaker’s second acquisition in four months. The reasoning follows from how d-Matrix…
Visa has agreed to acquire BioCatch for $2.4 billion in cash, buying a fraud-detection company whose models judge who is at the keyboard during an online banking session. The payments network announced the signed agreement on August 3, 2026, and is buying the business from funds advised by the private equity firm Permira along with…
Yellow.ai has agreed to take its enterprise AI agent business public through a merger with Bluerock Acquisition Corp., a Nasdaq-listed blank-check company, in a transaction the two sides put at roughly $550 million of pro forma equity value. The definitive business combination agreement, announced on August 3, 2026, would list the combined company on the…
Everyone is talking about the cost of AI. Usually they’re talking about GPUs, model licensing, or token consumption. I think they’re looking in the wrong place. The biggest cost of enterprise AI may turn out to be the people needed to supervise it. A recent study found employees save about 11 hours a week using…
There is a moment in Ex Machina where you realise the test was never a test. A programmer, Nathan, is flown to a compound to interview a machine through a wall of glass and decide whether it thinks. He spends the film reading her. He does not notice that she – Ava – is reading…