The Next Web

Meteor.js is one of those open-source projects developers have lived with for years. It has over 44,800 GitHub stars, more than 500,000 active installations worldwide, and still sits inside products across many countries. Behind its largest release in over ten years, Meteor 3.0, is Henrique […]

Poland produced one of the world’s most valuable AI companies almost by accident. Now it is spending public money to make sure the next one stays closer to home. Vinci, the venture arm of Poland’s state development bank BGK, has taken an $11mn stake in ElevenLabs, the AI-voice firm valued at […]

The word “agent” is everywhere in enterprise software right now, which is exactly why Convey does not want to use it. The startup has raised a $38mn Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz, with Khosla Ventures and Pear VC joining. Its pitch is a deliberate rebrand: not AI agents that complete […]

There is an unglamorous deadline bearing down on corporate IT, and it has just produced one of London’s more interesting AI raises. Conduct, a 35-person startup founded by three former Palantir engineers, has raised a $60mn Series A co-led by Index Ventures and ICONIQ, with SAP itself investing. […]

Google has finally made a new smart speaker, its first in roughly six years. The more interesting thing it has made is a reason to pay it every month. The Google Home Speaker costs $99.99, opens for preorder today and ships on June 25. It is the first audio device built around Gemini for Home, […]

The US government has just become a shareholder in an AI startup, in exchange for a bet that artificial intelligence can break China’s hold on the materials inside every chip factory. The Department of Commerce has awarded SandboxAQ $500mn under the CHIPS Act to develop new chemicals and metals […]

When an AI agent does something on your behalf today, it usually has to become you. It logs in as you, with your access to everything. Estonia wants to end that. The country plans to issue personal identification numbers to AI assistants, the first nation to do so, prime minister Kristen Michal […]

The Pentagon says Grok helped strike 2,000 targets in 96 hours, and that the polluting power plant behind it is a matter of paramount national security. The two claims belong in the same sentence, and that is the problem. The admission did not come in a press release or a Pentagon briefing, it came […]

Neuralink has dominated the brain-chip story for two years. It now has a serious challenger with a patient of its own. Paradromics, an Austin neurotech firm, has implanted its Connexus brain-computer interface in the first participant of its FDA-approved clinical study, the company said. The […]

Most cybersecurity startups sell shields. Twenty sells the sword, and investors just valued that at $1bn. The company, which describes itself as America’s first venture-backed cyber warfare firm, has raised a $100mn Series B led by Accel, Axios reported. The round, with Point72 Ventures, […]