Eka Robotics has completed a $150 million Series A funding round led by a16z and F-Prime, at a post-money valuation of $1.45 billion. The company was founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja. Its vision-force-action model, paired with force-sensing grippers, can grasp about 1,500 objects weighing under 1 kg per hour, with a success rate exceeding 95%; the gripper costs less than $1,000 and is rated for 5 million cycles. The team uses a physics simulator to build reinforcement learning environments, and says it can generate thousands of hours of robot experience within minutes. It is currently running pilots with industrial customers for pick-and-place and cable manipulation.
Eka Robotics has completed a $150 million Series A funding round led by a16z and F-Prime, at a post-money valuation of $1.45 billion. The company was founded by MIT professor Pulkit Agrawal and former Google DeepMind researcher Tuomas Haarnoja. Its vision-force-action model, paired with force-sensing grippers, can grasp about 1,500 objects weighing under 1 kg per hour, with a success rate exceeding 95%; the gripper costs less than $1,000 and is rated for 5 million cycles. The team uses a physics
AI startup Vectorial has closed a $3 million seed round co-led by Smilegate and SenseAI Ventures to launch its consumer research platform that simulates human behavior. The platform is based on the behavioral model SAPIENS, whose training data covers more than 2.5 million real consumers; it predicts consumer behavior 30% more accurately than general-purpose models and achieves about 86% accuracy compared with real user research. Customers including GoodRx, Boat, Everkind and Concrete Software run an average of 600 simulations per month, and the company will use the new funding to build SAPIENS 2.0.
AI startup Vectorial has closed a $3 million seed round co-led by Smilegate and SenseAI Ventures to launch its consumer research platform that simulates human behavior. The platform is based on the behavioral model SAPIENS, whose training data covers more than 2.5 million real consumers; it predicts consumer behavior 30% more accurately than general-purpose models and achieves about 86% accuracy compared with real user research. Customers including GoodRx, Boat, Everkind and Concrete Software ru
SmartBear has added two capabilities, Sources and Workflows, to its BearQ agentic quality assurance system: Sources pulls requirements and bug reports from Jira and, combined with existing tests in Reflect and Zephyr, identifies coverage gaps to reduce duplicate testing; Workflows supports chaining tasks under a single trigger, for example automatically creating a test environment and running regression tests once a build enters CI/CD. SmartBear said that in a September 30 survey of 1,436 respondents in the US and UK, 23% cited trust as the top barrier to adopting autonomous testing.
SmartBear has added two capabilities, Sources and Workflows, to its BearQ agentic quality assurance system: Sources pulls requirements and bug reports from Jira and, combined with existing tests in Reflect and Zephyr, identifies coverage gaps to reduce duplicate testing; Workflows supports chaining tasks under a single trigger, for example automatically creating a test environment and running regression tests once a build enters CI/CD. SmartBear said that in a September 30 survey of 1,436 respon
Enterprise engineering and consulting firm AuxoAI announced it has closed a $20.7 million Series A funding round led by NTT Venture Capital to accelerate growth and expand its enterprise AI consulting model. Its core platform, Damia, is a toolkit for "forward-deployed engineers" that turns enterprise data into applications and encodes business process knowledge into AI agents capable of long-term collaboration. The company has worked with Global 2000 enterprises for more than three years and has partnerships with platforms including Google, AWS, Snowflake, Databricks and Microsoft.
Enterprise engineering and consulting firm AuxoAI announced it has closed a $20.7 million Series A funding round led by NTT Venture Capital to accelerate growth and expand its enterprise AI consulting model. Its core platform, Damia, is a toolkit for "forward-deployed engineers" that turns enterprise data into applications and encodes business process knowledge into AI agents capable of long-term collaboration. The company has worked with Global 2000 enterprises for more than three years and has
AI startup Firefly Technology has raised a $20 million Series A round led by Definition Capital, with participation from BoxGroup and Susa Ventures. The funds will be used to bring AI into the physical world and improve workplace safety. Its Ember Safety Management platform can integrate existing equipment such as cameras, sensors and radios, and comes with hardware including wearable emergency buttons, AI beacons and network gateways. The platform has been deployed across three campuses of Front Range Community College, the largest community college in Colorado.
AI startup Firefly Technology has raised a $20 million Series A round led by Definition Capital, with participation from BoxGroup and Susa Ventures. The funds will be used to bring AI into the physical world and improve workplace safety. Its Ember Safety Management platform can integrate existing equipment such as cameras, sensors and radios, and comes with hardware including wearable emergency buttons, AI beacons and network gateways. The platform has been deployed across three campuses of Fron
Scaled Cognition has released Voice, a text-to-speech model that supports more than 25 languages and voice cloning, and can be accessed via API or deployed self-hosted. It focuses on accurately reading aloud details such as account numbers and addresses. Managed API pricing is $9 per million characters, while self-hosting costs $1 per million characters (excluding infrastructure). The company says that at a scale of 5 million characters, including infrastructure, the cost is about $13 per million characters, and it claims a speech generation latency of 70 milliseconds. Voice's Smart Pronunciation capability first determines the meaning of abbreviations and numbers before generating audio—for example, reading "Pay 1/2 by 1/2" as "pay half by January second"—and it can run without relying on APT or other large language models.
Scaled Cognition has released Voice, a text-to-speech model that supports more than 25 languages and voice cloning, and can be accessed via API or deployed self-hosted. It focuses on accurately reading aloud details such as account numbers and addresses. Managed API pricing is $9 per million characters, while self-hosting costs $1 per million characters (excluding infrastructure). The company says that at a scale of 5 million characters, including infrastructure, the cost is about $13 per millio
An AI medical consultation meme has gone viral online; its content is said to allude to Baidu, and a German version of the meme has also appeared. The article notes that the earlier claim "20 million people a day see a doctor on Doubao" once trended on social media, showing that many people really are using AI assistants to consult about health issues.
Michael Levitt, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, predicted at the Second International Conference on AI Scientists (ICAIS 2026) that by 2056, young scientists aided by AI agents may accomplish in one year the work his generation did in a lifetime, and said this prediction may not even be aggressive enough—the efficiency gain could far exceed 30 times. He believes AI will erase the age gap among scientists, and stressed that the coexistence of multiple models such as DeepSeek, Kimi, Claude, and ChatGPT is the guarantee for humanity to use AI safely.
Michael Levitt, winner of the 2013 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, predicted at the Second International Conference on AI Scientists (ICAIS 2026) that by 2056, young scientists aided by AI agents may accomplish in one year the work his generation did in a lifetime, and said this prediction may not even be aggressive enough—the efficiency gain could far exceed 30 times. He believes AI will erase the age gap among scientists, and stressed that the coexistence of multiple models such as DeepSeek, Kimi, C
Ant inclusionAI has open-sourced Ming-3.0-asr-tiny on GitHub, combining the Ling-tiny-v3 language model with an audio encoder to support Chinese-English transcription, dialect recognition, and Context ASR. Dialect evaluation covers 15 test sets including Hunan, Minnan, Cantonese, and Sichuan-Chongqing; Context ASR can recognize proper nouns via hotwords in prompts or preceding dialogue. The inference stack uses Transformers 5.12.1, fla-core 0.5.2, and PyTorch 2.11.0, and provides an SGLang accelerated deployment example.
Ant inclusionAI has open-sourced Ming-3.0-asr-tiny on GitHub, combining the Ling-tiny-v3 language model with an audio encoder to support Chinese-English transcription, dialect recognition, and Context ASR. Dialect evaluation covers 15 test sets including Hunan, Minnan, Cantonese, and Sichuan-Chongqing; Context ASR can recognize proper nouns via hotwords in prompts or preceding dialogue. The inference stack uses Transformers 5.12.1, fla-core 0.5.2, and PyTorch 2.11.0, and provides an SGLang accel
