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MiniMax raised $2B in funding; CEO commits to no salary until AGI and dedicates shares to open-source community.
MiniMax closed a $2B funding round; CEO IO pledges no salary until AGI, commits 4% equity to employees and 1% to open-source community.
Ollama announced a $65M Series B funding round, with 9 million developers and 85% of the Fortune 500 already using their local LLM platform.
Paris-based AI voice startup Gradium raises $100M in seed funding from Nvidia and others to scale its ultra-low latency voice AI models and open a Bay Area office.
Ollama, an open-source AI developer tool for running models locally, raises $65M in Series B funding led by Theory Ventures, reaching nearly 9M monthly users and serving 85% of Fortune 500 companies.
Lovable, a Swedish vibe-coding startup, is in talks to raise $300 million at a $13.2 billion valuation, doubling its December valuation, with Menlo Ventures expected to lead the round.
General Intuition, a startup building a foundation model for robotics trained on video game data, argues robotics will follow NLP's pattern with general-purpose models, and has raised $320M at a $2.3B valuation to pursue this vision.
Prime Intellect has raised $130 million in Series A funding at a $1 billion valuation to provide enterprises with a full-stack platform for building their own AI agents, offering compute access, reinforcement learning tools, and evaluation capabilities as a marketplace.
An analysis of the challenges in funding open-source software, evaluating approaches like donations, open-core models, and grants, with a focus on sustaining projects like Inko without compromise.
Bezos-backed startup General Intuition believes gaming data can train world models for physical AI, bridging the gap between LLMs and AGI. The company closed a $320 million round with notable investors.
SambaNova Systems raised $1 billion at an $11 billion valuation in a Series F round led by General Atlantic, just five months after its $350 million Series E and SN50 chip launch, reflecting strong demand for enterprise AI inference infrastructure.
Even Realities Technology, a Chinese smart-glasses maker founded by an Apple veteran, raised $150 million from Tencent and Meituan to become a unicorn, competing with Meta in the AI wearable market. The company's G2 glasses prioritize user privacy by not including cameras, focusing on heads-up display features.
Google Play is distributing $1 million USD to support 10 indie studios in Sub-Saharan Africa through the Indie Games Fund, offering $50K–$200K grants plus mentorship.
Nearly 90 startups achieved unicorn status in the first half of 2026, driven primarily by AI companies. Venture capital funding reached $456 billion by May, with OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and Waymo leading mega-deals.
In Q2 2026, AI captured over 70% of venture capital, with H1 2026 reaching $510 billion, surpassing the total for all of 2025.
Groq founder reveals that West Coast VCs rejected funding due to herd behavior, ultimately securing funds from East Coast VCs.
Quantum Systems, a Munich drone startup, raised $1.2B at an $8B valuation. Its Vector drone, proven in Ukraine, uses AI navigation without GPS and has open software, appealing to European governments.
SiliconFlow has submitted a listing application to the Hong Kong Stock Exchange. By 2025 Token throughput, it is China's largest independent Token supplier, with investors including Alibaba, Meituan, etc.
An essay expanding on the metaphor of open source as critical infrastructure by examining how real-world bridges are inspected and maintained, drawing parallels to the need for systematic, government-backed support for open source projects.
Venice AI, a privacy-first platform offering uncensored access to over 200 AI models, raised a $65M Series A at a $1B valuation. The company is already profitable with $70M ARR and over 3 million active users.