Finance, VC & PE

Education is the most powerful investment countries can make, yet it is being systematically underfunded. Our projections show that global aid to education will decline by up to 30% between 2023 and ...

Class Disrupted is an education podcast featuring author Michael Horn and Futre’s Diane Tavenner in conversation with educators, school leaders, students and other members of school communities as they investigate the challenges facing the education system in the aftermath of the pandemic — and where we should go from here. Find every episode by bookmarking […]

Self-interested agents, left unconstrained, tend toward defection in repeated social dilemmas, causing cooperative gains from trade to collapse. This paper investigates what formal mechanisms, layered on top of unrestricted communication, are sufficient for a society of such agents to maintain market stability, and how resilient those mechanisms are to adversarial attack. We instantiate the research question as a multi-agent marketplace simulation where 18 LLM agents (DeepSeek-V3) with complemen

Ollama Inc., the largest artificial intelligence platform connecting developers to open models, today announced it has raised $65 million in a new funding round led by Theory Ventures. Benchmark, 8VC, Y Combinator, Pace Capital, 49 Palms, GTMFund, and other investors and angels also participated in the Series B round. Today’s funding brings the company’s total […] The post Open-source AI developer tool Ollama raises $65M to grow its platform appeared first on SiliconANGLE .

Investing in Europe’s digital future: Study projects long-term economic impact of the European Competitiveness Fund Anonymous (not verified) Thu, 07/09/2026 - 17:11 A new study by the Joint Research Centre (JRC) and Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology (DG Connect) estimates that every euro invested through the Digital Leadership window of the proposed European Competitiveness Fund (ECF) could generate between €1.84 and €2.21 of EU Gross Domestic Product (GDP)

Authorities increasingly rely on social media to advance sustainability transitions, infrastructure investment, and service reform. Yet how citizens respond to these digital communications remains poorly understood. Existing approaches rely on aggregate engagement metrics (e.g., likes), providing limited insight into discourse structure and quality. We developed a data-driven, multidimensional framework to analyse how social media communication shapes the content of discourse, focusing on sustai

LLM-based ASR adapted to regulated domains such as banking is bottlenecked by privacy: real speech is costly and legally constrained to collect, making synthetic text-to-speech (TTS) an attractive substitute. Yet synthetic speech stays acoustically mismatched with real recordings, and work on this gap has stayed within supervised fine-tuning (SFT). We instead turn to reinforcement learning, and show that Group Relative Policy Optimization (GRPO) extracts far more from the same synthetic speech t

Financial crime prevention platform Tangos AI has closed a $20 million seed financing round led by Red Dot Capital Partners, with participation from Leaders Fund, Clarim Ventures, VentureIsrael, Signal Fire, Clutch Capital and Selah Ventures and a strategic investment by Bright Data.

National UK law firm Stone King has appointed Jas Bassi as its inaugural IT director, marking a significant milestone in the firm’s continued investment in technology, digital transformation and information […] The post Exclusive: Stone King appoints Jas Bassi as IT director appeared first on Legal IT Insider .

Chinese AI labs are increasingly pursuing proprietary chips, mirroring a global trend towards software-hardware integration, but industry insiders and analysts warn that the strategy carries risk due to the massive upfront investments required. “The core motivation for choosing in-house chips lies in pursuing [greater] hardware-software synergy and lowering long-term operating costs,” said Arisa Liu, chief director and research fellow at Taiwan Industry Economics Services. Paul Triolo, a partner

Chinese memory giant ChangXin Memory Technologies (CXMT) kicked off the final stage of its Shanghai listing, setting a subscription date for a share offering that is expected to raise at least 29.5 billion yuan (US$4.3 billion) and would rank as the second-largest on the tech-focused Star Market. China’s leading DRAM maker, based in Hefei in the central province of Anhui, will hold its initial price consultation on Monday and open subscriptions on July 16. The initial public offering (IPO) will.

U.S. venture capital deal value hit $412.7 billion in the first half of 2026, nearly 30% more than investors put to work in all of last year — and a small cluster of giant artificial intelligence rounds accounted for almost the entire jump. That’s according to the second-quarter PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report released Wednesday night. Artificial […] The post PitchBook: US venture funding hits $412.7B in first half as AI deals dominate appeared first on SiliconANGLE .

Diffusion Language Models (DLMs) have recently achieved substantial progress in natural language generation tasks. Recent research demonstrates that adaptive token generation ordering can significantly improve performance in mathematical reasoning and code synthesis applications. In this work, we investigate the optimization of generation order for both text-to-image synthesis and multimodal understanding. We first establish that, unlike structured problems in language generation such as Sudoku

Artificial intelligence training startup Prime Intellect Inc. has raised $130 million in funding from a group of prominent investors. The consortium included Nvidia Corp.’s NVentures, Intel Capital and Dell Technologies Capital. They were joined by more than a dozen others, including Cloudflare Inc. Chief Executive Matthew Prince. Prime Intellect stated in its Tuesday funding announcement […] The post Prime Intellect raises $130M at $1B valuation for its AI training platform appeared first on Si

SpaceX is a rocket company. It also became an AI company the day its founder Elon Musk folded in xAI, inheriting a frontier model in Grok, the planet-scale Colossus training cluster, and the live data feed of the X platform (formerly Twitter). The IPO headlines fixated on the trillionaire status, the stock price, and the […]

Chip startup SambaNova Inc. today announced that it has raised $1 billion in funding at a $11 billion valuation. General Atlantic led the Series F round with contributions from more than a dozen others. Intel Capital, Vista Equity Partners and JPMorgan Chase & Co. were among the participants. The investment follows a $350 million round […] The post Inference chip startup SambaNova valued at $11B in $1B funding round appeared first on SiliconANGLE .

Alight (NYSE: ALIT), a leading benefits administration provider of health, wealth and leave solutions, today announced a collaboration with BNY (NYSE: BNY), a global financial services platforms company, to launch a retirement solution designed to offer defined contribution (DC) and defined benefit (DB) plan sponsors and participants deeper support for plan administration and investing.

Large language models increasingly \emph{understand} dialectal English, yet still \emph{produce} only standard, US-leaning English, leaving dialectal generation, the harder half of the problem, largely unaddressed. We introduce \textbf{DiaLLM}, which continually pretrains three open-weight language model families on the International Corpus of English and applies implicit and explicit post-training paradigms, each combined with three model alignment strategies, giving the first controlled compar

And then on the other side, we have a positive kind of demand and productivity shock, which is coming from the technology cycle and particularly AI-led investment. So, there's two forces that are ...

This study adopts a behavioural bottom-up approach to AI value alignment to investigate whether an implicitly conveyed user identity shifts the moral evaluations of large language models (LLMs). Through a structured, multi-turn conversational protocol across 12,000 interactions, we evaluate AI value alignment in two non-reasoning models, gpt-4.1-mini-2025-04-14 and gemini-2.5-flash-lite. Rather than instructing the models to adopt a persona or prompting them with explicit moral stances, the user

SBS, the global financial technology company that more than 1,500 financial institutions rely on to digitally transform the way they operate, is launching SBS AI Foundation, embedding enterprise AI directly into the core banking, lending, and digital banking products its clients already run.

Adversarial vulnerability in deep neural networks (DNNs) has been studied from the perspectives of decision-boundary geometry, feature robustness, input-output Jacobians, and the instability of inverse problems. Here, we focus on the spectral structure of intermediate linear transformations that propagate information through modern DNNs, an unexplored mechanism of adversarial vulnerability. Specifically, we investigate transformer-based vision-language models, whose linear layers admit interpret

Kaon AI, a generative artificial intelligence platform and research outfit formerly known as FlowGPT that provides online interactive entertainment, today announced it has raised $60 million across recent funding rounds. The San Mateo company is backed by numerous technology sector venture capital investors, including B Capital, Redpoint Ace, Goodwater Capital and DCM. Today’s announcement follows […] The post Kaon AI raises $60M to build the next generation of AI-driven interactive entertainmen

At EBAday in Copenhagen, Tapan Agarwal, Head of Payments Solutions and Krishnan Srinivasan (KS), President and Region Head, Europe and CIS Markets, Intellect Design Arena, discussed the myths and truths surrounding AI with FinextraTV. KS began by listing the many ways he has experienced AI being used effectively within banking, firmly defining it as a 'reality' rather than a myth, but notes the constraints that must be navigated within the EU act. Tapan then explains his view on the three primar

Profile (ATH: PROF), a global financial technology leader with a presence in more than 50 countries, today announced the launch of ProfileOne, an enterprise-grade agentic AI orchestration platform designed to help financial institutions move from insight to controlled execution across banking and investment management.

The post Have a 401(k)? Help ProPublica Investigate What’s Really Happening to Your Money. appeared first on ProPublica .

Meniga has launched Fini, an advanced, standards-compliant MCP server that enables banks to bring agentic AI into their digital channels using Meniga's financial intelligence.

In 2011, Marc Andreessen, a key figure in California’s venture capital scene, coined the phrase: “Software is eating the world.” The phrase describes the spread of software into everyday life and the displacement of physical business models. This process continues in an unexpectedly literal sense: AI companies purchase used books, scan them, and dispose of them to gather input for their models. The reason for this seemingly cumbersome method is the expectation that it will fall under the fair us

Jan 21 (Reuters) - Eightfold AI, a venture capital-backed artificial intelligence hiring platform used by Microsoft, PayPal and many other Fortune 500 companies, is being sued in California for allegedly compiling reports used to screen job ... (https://incidentdatabase.ai/cite/1575#7495)

In the era of digital revolution many contemporary events that changed the world were shaped through the internet. Nowadays, the emergence of internet of things (IoT), combining physical objects with virtual networks is expected to have even more influence. This new 'decentralised' structure in the world raises questions such as power, governance and the notion of democracy online. The aim of this paper is to investigate these notions. We have taken the examples of Bitcoin and Wikipedia and exam

With fewer than five years left to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), a new UN report says sustained investment and international cooperation have improved billions of lives, but warns ...

AI-mediated communication is increasingly being utilized to help facilitate interactions; however, in privacy sensitive domains, an AI mediator has the additional challenge of considering how to preserve privacy. In these contexts, a mediator may redact or withhold information, raising questions about how users perceive these interventions and whether explanations of system behavior can improve trust. In this work, we investigate how explanations of redaction operations can affect user trust in

Deliberation plays a crucial role in collaboration; when humans work together, they naturally engage in communication to align information and reach an agreement. In this paper, we investigate deliberative large language model (LLM) agents under partially observable joint decision-making tasks. We formalize deliberative collaboration as a cooperative joint decision problem with partial and asymmetric observations, and introduce a scalable benchmark that instantiates this problem across multiple

Robbyant, the embodied artificial intelligence arm of Chinese fintech giant Ant Group, launched a new vision model that it claims can help robots overcome a long-standing challenge: accurately perceiving glass, mirrors and transparent objects. The unit of Hangzhou-based Ant Group on Tuesday unveiled its next-generation spatial perception model, LingBot-Depth 2.0, alongside a new foundational visual model called LingBot-Vision, as AI labs race to equip machines with the “brains” required to...

With the rapid progress of AI capabilities and the move to agentic systems, organizations are expanding their use cases as the technology continues to grow. That constant evolution also introduces risk, leaving IT leaders to wonder which investments will prove valuable even six months into the future. Returning to the foundational elements of AI architecture—the…

Africa's displacement zones may be the continent's least contested fintech...

BRUSSELS — The EU’s biggest lenders should set out how they will tackle risks from cutting-edge artificial intelligence models by the end of October, the bloc’s top banking supervisor said today. Chair of the supervisory board of the European Central Bank, Claudia Buch, told lenders to put in place action plans outlining how they will […]

Hong Kong’s stock market could face sell-off pressure amid a torrent of new share supply in coming days as the six-month lock-up period ends for hot artificial intelligence and semiconductor picks including Zhipu AI and MiniMax. Meanwhile analysts warned of rising fears of a drain on liquidity as many of the same companies were eyeing large secondary share placements. The market was facing dual selling pressure, said Stevan Tam, associate director at Fulbright Financial. “These stocks have...

China’s semiconductor equipment industry is heading into the first-half earnings season under intense scrutiny, as a broad stock rally turns one of the tech sector’s least visible niches into a crowded investor trade. The rally has swept across makers of etching, thin-film deposition, cleaning and testing machines, among others, reflecting bets that China’s next round of chip spending will benefit a wider group of domestic suppliers. Shares of Naura Technology Group have soared more than 70 per.

Tool-augmented large language models extend their capabilities beyond parametric knowledge through external tools, but tend to invoke them unnecessarily. We investigate whether tool-use decisions have any stable internal representation that can be extracted and manipulated, a question that is non-trivial given that tools exist entirely in context at inference time and have no direct encoding in model weights. We show that steering vectors extracted from heading-anchors positions exert bidirectio