Wednesday, 26 August 2026

Wrtn Technologies raised 100 billion won ($72M) in Series C funding, becoming the first Korean AI service startup to cross a 1 trillion won valuation.

Stable Diffusion maker Stability AI closed a Series B backed by Universal Music, Sony Music, Warner Music, and Electronic Arts, bringing total funding to $232M.

Autonomous trucking company Gatik closed a $200M Series D led by Qatar's sovereign fund, aiming to grow its driverless fleet past 100 trucks this year.

Emerald AI hit a $1.05B valuation on a Series A for software that lets AI data centers throttle power use during grid stress instead of just consuming flat out.

Chris Malone, who led OpenAI's data center strategy, has left the company, one of more than a dozen executive departures reported so far in 2026.

Perplexity's Portable Computer runs its agent entirely on an Nvidia DGX Spark or RTX workstation, no cloud calls and no per-task token cost.

Google's new speech-to-text model hits a 2.6% word error rate on recorded audio, cleans up filler words, and is now live in the Gemini API.

Anthropic merged Claude's memory across chat and Cowork, so context from one now carries into the other, and you can read, edit, or delete what it stored.

OpenAI added 55 school systems and 100,000 educators to its free K-12 program, now covering more than 100 organizations in 30 states.