It’s Thursday, June 18, 2026, and the clearest signal from today’s funding tape is not that venture investors are spending widely. It is that they are concentrating capital around a narrow set of problems that look hard to commoditize: sovereign […]

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The AI race has reached a point where success is measured in gigawatts. Meta has signed new agreements with AI infrastructure startup Crusoe that will give the company access to roughly 1.6 gigawatts of computing capacity across two data centers […]

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Meta’s $2 billion acquisition of AI startup Manus may be heading for an unusual reversal. The early investors who backed Manus before its sale to Meta are now exploring a plan to buy the company back at the same $2 […]

The post Manus original investors seek to buy back AI startup from Meta for $2 billion as revenue nears $500 million first appeared on Tech Startups.

Since its launch three years ago, Elon Musk has pitched xAI as a challenger to OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google in the race to build the most advanced artificial intelligence systems. One of the field’s most influential researchers is not convinced. […]

The post ‘xAI Is a Failure’: AI Godfather Warns of Trouble for Musk’s AI Startup and a Bigger AI Bubble first appeared on Tech Startups.

It’s Wednesday, June 17, 2026, and venture capital is increasingly shifting away from consumer-facing AI applications toward the infrastructure layers that power them. Today’s funding activity was concentrated in AI deployment infrastructure, regulated financial systems, cybersecurity, enterprise automation, and biotech […]

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CuspAI, a UK startup using artificial intelligence to discover new materials, is reportedly raising $400 million in funding at a $2.6 billion valuation, according to the Financial Times. The round includes participation from Jeff Bezos’ family office, Bezos Expeditions, and […]

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The 753-billion-parameter model outperformed GPT-5.5 on several software engineering benchmarks, offers a 1-million-token context window, and is available under an unrestricted MIT license. Since ChatGPT’s launch in November 2022, the AI industry’s most capable models have largely come from a […]

The post Z.ai’s open-source GLM-5.2 beats GPT-5.5 on coding benchmarks at one-sixth the cost first appeared on Tech Startups.

What happens when a struggling shoe company decides it wants to become an AI infrastructure business? Investors are about to find out. Just two months after abandoning its footwear identity in favor of artificial intelligence, Allbirds announced Wednesday that it […]

The post Allbirds rebrands as Smartbird, names Nvidia-linked AI executive as CEO after AI pivot first appeared on Tech Startups.

Text is no longer the dominant language of the internet. Memes, GIFs, stickers, and short video clips have become a primary way people communicate online, especially among younger users. AI is pouring fuel on that trend, turning millions of consumers […]

The post KLIPY raises $3.8 million, joins Google’s AI Futures Fund to build the AI-powered expression layer first appeared on Tech Startups.

Odyssey, a startup building what researchers call “world models,” announced Wednesday that it has raised $310 million in Series B funding at a $1.45 billion valuation. The round was led by Natural Capital and included participation from Amazon, AMD Ventures, […]

The post Odyssey raises $310 million at $1.45 billion valuation to build AI that simulates the real world first appeared on Tech Startups.

It’s Tuesday, June 16, 2026, and venture capital investors are sending a clear message: the race to build the infrastructure behind the AI economy is far from over. Capital did not fan out evenly today. It clustered around three ideas: […]

The post Venture Capital & Startup Funding Roundup, June 16, 2026 first appeared on Tech Startups.