Kevin Mandia, who founded the cybersecurity startup Mandiant in 2004 and sold it to Google for $5. 4 billion in 2022, has launched a new AI-native cybersecurity startup with what the company claims is a record-breaking funding round. The new outfit, called Armadin, has raised $189. 9 million in combined …

Prediction market Kalshi is making it easier for its users to have conversations on Meta’s social network Threads. Kalshi now offers a share option that will automatically embed the relevant prediction market chart into a Threads post. Whether people want to discuss who’s going to win Best Picture or which …

The Berlin-based startup Periwinkle is offering a new avenue for those wanting to leave centralized social media operated by Big Tech companies. Instead of joining a decentralized, open social networking app like Mastodon or Bluesky, Periwinkle allows anyone to set up a social media account on their own domain, under …

Bluesky CEO Jay Graber is stepping down from the top leadership position and transitioning to a new role as chief innovation officer, the company announced Monday. Graber, who has helped grow the X and Threads competitor to 43 million users and furthered the development of its underlying AT Protocol, will …

AMI Labs, the new venture cofounded by Turing Prize winner Yann LeCun after he left Meta, has raised $1. 5 billion pre-money valuation. AMI is working on world models, or AI that learns from reality, not just from language. This category has fewer players than generative AI, but maybe not …

City Detect, a company that uses vision AI to help local governments monitor the health of buildings and neighborhoods, announced on Friday a $13 million Series A round led by Prudence Venture Capital. The startup launched in 2021, and Gavin Baum-Blake, the remaining co-founder, serves as CEO. He said the …

The Pentagon has officially designated Anthropic a supply-chain risk after the two failed to agree on how much control the military should have over its AI models, including its use in autonomous weapons and mass domestic surveillance. As Anthropic’s $200 million contract fell apart, the DoD turned to OpenAI instead, …

Retail investors are famously locked out of the startup world. Robinhood is attempting to change that by allowing the general public to invest in a portfolio of what it calls “some of the most exciting private companies operating today. ” To do this, the company that pioneered the commission-free brokerage …

AI video-generation startup Luma on Thursday launched Luma Agents, designed to handle end-to-end creative work across text, image, video, and audio. Luma Agents are powered by the startup’s Unified Intelligence family of models, with architecture trained on a single multimodal reasoning system. Luma Agents are being pitched as a new …

Nominal on Thursday announced a fresh $80 million Series B extension round at a $1 billion valuation, led by Founders Fund. This followed the company’s $75 million Series B round led by Sequoia in September. The company offers software that helps hardware engineers test their designs and began as a …