Firecrawl, an open-source web crawling platform used by 350,000 developers, raised $14.5 million in Series A funding to improve AI's access to web data while building a marketplace that pays content creators when their work is used to train AI systems.
DeepMind's Genie 3 preview; ElevenLabs' Eleven Music launch; Ukraine launches a sovereignty-preserving AI Factory, NVIDIA's new resources for robotics applications; Datumo raises a Series B to become a contender in the training data market; and much more.
Spanish AI startup Multiverse Computing released two ultra-small AI models called SuperFly (94M parameters) and ChickBrain (3.2B parameters) that can run offline on devices from smartphones to IoT appliances while matching or exceeding the performance of their larger parent models.
Estonian medtech startup Better Medicine raised a pre-seed €1M round to expand the EU rollout of its CE-certified AI kidney cancer detection tool and prepare for U.S. market entry. Better Medicine aims to address critical radiologist shortages with its AI-powered lesion detection solutions.
Ai2 released MolmoAct, the first open-source Action Reasoning Model that can "think" in 3D space for robotics applications, achieving state-of-the-art performance while being trained more efficiently than competing models from major tech companies.
Anthropic acquired the Humanloop team, including its three co-founders and a dozen engineers, in an acqui-hire to strengthen its enterprise AI strategy with expertise in prompt management, LLM evaluation, and AI observability tools.
Cohere raised $500 million at a $6.8 billion valuation to accelerate its security-first enterprise AI platform, adding former Meta AI research head Joelle Pineau as Chief AI Officer and former Uber acting CFO Francois Chadwick as CFO.
Continua, founded by former Google Distinguished Engineer David Petrou, raised $8 million in seed funding to develop AI agents that can naturally participate in group chats on SMS, iMessage, and Discord, helping coordinate tasks and reduce conversation chaos.
Seoul-based AI startup Datumo raised $15.5 million in Series B funding led by Salesforce Ventures to compete with Scale AI. Datumo aims to differentiate itself by providing automated AI model evaluation and safety tools for enterprises, and leveraging its unique licensed datasets.
NVIDIA unveiled a robotics development suite at SIGGRAPH 2025, featuring the Cosmos Reason model and other advanced simulation tools. Major companies are already adopting NVIDIA's technologies to accelerate the development of physical AI applications across trillion-dollar industries.
Ukraine has launched the AI Factory initiative to build domestic AI infrastructure and develop a national large language model, aiming to achieve digital sovereignty and become a top-three AI nation by 2030.
ElevenLabs' Eleven Music is an AI music generation service that has reportedly been trained on properly licensed data. However, its commercial viability remains uncertain due to its restrictive terms of service, which contradict some public claims about commercial use permissions.