Finance, VC & PE

At the launch of the State of Tech in Africa H1 2026 report, investors and founders got candid about why early-stage capital has dried up, what African venture capital owes the ecosystem, and where the next wave of growth is actually coming from.

The conversation about AI often centers on algorithms, computing power, or huge investments in new semiconductor fabrication plants and hyperscale data centers. But beneath each of these advances is another layer of innovation that makes them possible: advanced materials. Every new generation of AI technology demands more processing power, more memory, greater energy efficiency, and…

Exploring the Fable 5 ban, SpaceX’s strategic acquisition, and a burst of open source advancements

Web browsers now provide AI-generated news summaries for millions of users. Despite their popularity and influence, we lack a systematic understanding of how these systems transform news before people read it. Through a large-scale audit, we investigate the factual accuracy of browser-based AI summarizers and how they alter the political bias, negative affect, and journalistic writing quality of news. Drawing on 13,777 articles from 15 U.S. news outlets, we evaluate their 41,331 summaries genera

Exploring Claude Fable 5’s impact, Siri AI’s latest enhancements, and the competitive IPO landscape shaping AI’s future

New Models, IPO Announcements, and the Rise of Open Source Competitors

China’s rapid move to stem a rout in its stock markets – through direct state buying and pledges of more stabilising measures – underscores the resolve of policymakers to protect the country’s high-stakes push for technology innovation and safeguard more than 200 million individual investors. Beijing’s intervention signals a regulatory intention to engineer a more durable and sustainable bull run on the nation’s US$15 trillion stock market, which is now counted on to support strategic tech...

There’s a clear consensus that America hollowed out its critical minerals base. How to rebuild it is less settled. Alex Grant of Magrathea Metals and Wes Spurlock of Principal Mineral join Jonathan to discuss the processing technology, labor force, and how government can catalyze private capital investment in the sector rather than replace it.Image: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission via Wikimedia Commons. The post Rebuilding America’s Critical Minerals Base appeared first on War on the Rocks .

It has been a busy year for Wall Street debuts. While a few IPOs have captured most of the headlines, 203 companies have begun trading on either the New York Stock Exchange or Nasdaq market so far in 2026. Many made splashy entrances, but their performance has been more uneven since the spotlight moved to the next major offering. The Dow Jones Industrial Average has gained 7.5% this year, while the S&P 500 has climbed 9%. New listings have been more of a mixed bag. In total, roughly 49% of the c

US specialist venture firm Dimension Capital raises $800mn fund to back AI-designed medicines

arXiv:2607.16475v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: While generative AI tools are directly changing how undergraduate computer science is learned and taught, they are also reshaping the relationships between instructors and students. In contrast to existing tool-oriented research on how instructors view and adopt AI, this study investigates how instructors think about their roles and responsibilities to students through their course AI policies. Based on 13 semi-structured interviews with CS instruc

arXiv:2604.03202v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly regarded as having the potential to generate persuasive content at scale. While previous studies have focused on the risks associated with LLM-generated misinformation, the role of LLMs in enabling prosocial persuasion is still underexplored. We investigate whether donation appeals authored by LLMs are as effective as those written by humans across degrees of personalization. Two preregistered onlin

Ant International, the affiliate of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group, has raised about US$1.2 billion in a Series A funding round to fuel its global expansion, the company said on Tuesday. Existing backers Ant Group and Alibaba Group Holding joined the equity financing alongside several international institutional investors, whose identities were not disclosed. The fresh capital would be used to accelerate the firm’s international growth and drive innovation in merchant payments, account...

Defensive driving is widely recognized as an advanced driving skill. However, whether and how defensive driving affects driving safety remains insufficiently investigated. This study examines the behavioral characteristics of defensive driving, its impact on driving safety, and the underlying mechanisms. First, defensive driving is defined regarding operational timing and application scenario. Then, 82 participants are recruited for driving simulator experiments, with their behavioral and eye mo

Distracted driving remains a major safety concern, motivating approaches that aim to reduce visual overload before attention breaks down. However, visual overload varies across individuals, making it difficult to determine appropriate interventions for each driver. We investigate whether controllable visual blur can simplify the driving scene and mitigate distraction. To address this challenge, we propose BlurDriving, a target-selective, distance-aware blur system in a Virtual Reality (VR) urban

Vision Mamba models replace quadratic self-attention with linear complexity selective state space models (SSMs), emerging as efficient visual backbones. However, MambaOut demonstrates that a Gated CNN block can match or exceed VMamba on image classification, questioning the necessity of SSMs for vision. This raises a fundamental question: do VMamba and MambaOut encode visual information differently at the representation level? To investigate, we apply cross model centered kernel alignment (CKA)

CHEROKEE COUNTY, Ga. - Cherokee Sheriff's investigators arrested two agency members Monday after an internal database audit revealed multiple employees used automated license plate readers for non-law enforcement purposes. Georgia law viol ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1595#7526)

[Webinar] Investing in Thriving Communities - Preparing for the Sustainable Finance Live Hackathon

Discourse relations provide document structure, critical to language understanding and enabling language model performance and ethicality. In this work, we investigate how instruction-tuned Transformer models (LLaMA and Mistral) encode discourse relations in English, with a particular focus on the contrasting relations of causation and antithesis. Framing the task as a next-token prediction task and applying a suite of interpretability techniques to test model internals, our findings show that c

To a private equity firm.

Kai-Fu Lee’s 01.ai is raising a pre-IPO round ahead of a planned Hong Kong listing in 2027, the former Google China chief told Bloomberg at the World AI Conference in Shanghai. The company is unwinding its offshore holding structure, the same prerequisite that Moonshot dismantled in May to clear its own path to a Hong […] This story continues at The Next Web

Europe wants its own technology champions. It just seems less comfortable with what champions look like once they arrive. The European Commission’s latest Digital Markets Act (DMA) decisions capture that tension. Europe wants more innovation, investment, and globally competitive digital platforms. Yet when a company assembles the data, technology, distribution, and complementary services needed to ... Europe Wants Tech Champions, Then Makes Them Share the Trophy The post Europe Wants Tech Champi

There’s a new boogeyman in the battles over AI: so-called “stealth crawlers.” We’ll admit it—the term “stealth crawlers” sounds quite nefarious. In reality, they’re anything but. “Stealth crawlers” are simply automated tools to access and collect public web data—without disclosing the user’s identity. Private crawlers like these facilitate all kinds of important work that benefits the public, including investigative reporting, academic research, cybersecurity protection, and more. Anonymous craw

The Italian prime minister said the deal is a “recognition of Italian defense industry but also of how Europe can reinforce its autonomy by investing in its own technological capacity and companies.”

Real-time EEG classification on edge devices is bottlenecked by the floating-point arithmetic of conventional neural networks. We investigated Differentiable Logic Gate Networks (Diff-Logic) as a hardware-native alternative that compiles models into pure Boolean circuits executable via bitwise CPU operations. Through rigorous iso-parameter experiments across four EEG datasets spanning two classification tasks, binary dementia detection and 3-class emotion recognition, we compared Diff-Logic agai

The Times reports that the CMA's outreach is understood to be a precursor to a formal probe Source

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AliExpress a l’insigne honneur d’écoper de l’amende la plus élevée jamais infligée par la Commission européenne dans le cadre du règlement sur les services numériques (DSA). La plateforme de commerce en ligne opérée par le groupe chinois Alibaba fait l’objet d’une sanction de 550 millions d’euros pour manquement aux obligations d’évaluation et d’atténuation des risques […]

Launch Africa has invested in 15 startups so far in 2026, with a focus on early-stage startups, as other investors slow down on funding.

Self-hosted AI agents read and write their own memory and configuration files to function. An agent may get compromised via corruption of its own state -- a compromise realized via legitimate OS system call invocation. We refer to this class of threats as self-state attacks. In this paper, we investigate the OS resilience to this class of attacks. Formally, we characterize a four-axis attack space (Target, Mechanism, Granularity, Temporal); investigate the structural limits of prevention, detect

Asian shares are mostly higher but South Korea's Kospi has fallen nearly 5% as investors unload more stocks linked to artificial intelligence.

Large Language Models (LLMs) often struggle to navigate value conflicts when trained with the compressed scalar rewards of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF). To address this challenge, we investigate how chain-of-thought (CoT) reasoning can help improve performance in this domain. Geometrically, we show that CoT correlates with further smoothing the model's loss landscape in its sharpest direction, helping resolve the optimization instability of traditional scalar rewards. We als

A detailed record of federal courts and grand juries rejecting the Trump administration’s use of subpoenas, search warrants, and indictments. The post “Zero Evidence”: How Judges and Grand Juries Have Rejected the Trump Administration Efforts to Investigate and Prosecute appeared first on Just Security .

Banks are beginning to move beyond AI models that only score, classify, or recommend. The next wave ...

* After the Trump family and his administration prevailed upon Romanian officials to release suspected international sex traffickers, the Tate brothers are now set to be extradited to the UK. [ Forbes ] * Litigation funders getting squeezed on both sides. Some states have attempted to ban their work, and elsewhere investors are putting money behind law firms directly rather than work with a funder. [ Bloomberg Law News ] * ACLU gearing up to take on state surveillance tactics, which are much mor

Here are five key things investors need to know to start the trading day.

La Selección Española nos ha vuelto a dar otro momento histórico para recordar con su 1-0 ante Argentina en la final del mundial, proclamándose por segunda vez campeona del mundo. Y lo curioso es que la celebración no solo se ha visto y oído, pues también se ha medido. El sismólogo Jordi Díaz Cusí, investigador de Geociencias Barcelona (GEO3BCN-CSIC), ha compartido en su cuenta de X una gráfica con los registros de la Red Sísmica Educativa del instituto durante la final entre España y Argentina.

Over the past decade, the playbook for Nigerian fintechs has been remarkably consistent: build payment products, acquire merchants, scale transaction volumes, obtain microfinance bank licences, expand into lending, and eventually launch savings products.

Earlier this year, Tushar Sen, an independent researcher based in New Delhi, submitted a manuscript to Security and Privacy about the modeling of polymorphic malware. On May 15, a purported reviewer for the journal wrote Sen indicating he received the article, but that it was not ready for publication. “i may revise it with you … Continue reading Publisher investigating peer reviewer for alleged bribery scheme

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