Breakout Ventures closes $114m Fund III to back AI-powered science startups
Breakout Ventures closes $114m Fund III to back AI-powered science startups

The San Francisco firm has closed its third fund at $114 million, its largest to date, betting that AI and biology are now inseparable, and that the founders who understand both will build the companies that matter most. Lindy Fishburne started Breakou…

Yann LeCun just raised $1bn to prove the AI industry has got it wrong
Yann LeCun just raised $1bn to prove the AI industry has got it wrong

The Turing Award winner left Meta four months ago convinced that large language models are a dead end. Today he announced $1.03 billion in seed funding, Europe’s largest ever, to build something different. In November 2025, Yann LeCun walked into Mark …

Mantle8 secures €2.06M EU grant to scale natural hydrogen tech
Mantle8 secures €2.06M EU grant to scale natural hydrogen tech

A €2.06 million EU grant gives the Grenoble deep-tech startup non-dilutive runway to industrialise a four-component technology platform, and moves it one step closer to its first commercial drilling campaign. Fourteen months after closing a €3.4 millio…

BMW Group brings humanoid robots to Germany
BMW Group brings humanoid robots to Germany

The automaker has launched a pilot at its Leipzig plant using Hexagon Robotics’ AEON humanoid. The move follows a successful 11-month run in the US with Figure AI’s robots, and arrives just as the production chief who championed the programme prepares …

Escape raises $18M to replace pen-testers with AI agents
Escape raises $18M to replace pen-testers with AI agents

The timing is not coincidental. In October 2025, Escape published research that scanned more than 5,600 publicly deployed applications built with vibe coding platforms, tools like Lovable, Base44, and Bolt.new that let non-developers build and ship app…

The open-source AI red-teaming tool used by Fortune 500 companies is now part of OpenAI
The open-source AI red-teaming tool used by Fortune 500 companies is now part of OpenAI

The acquisition of Promptfoo, which counts more than 125,000 developers and 30-plus Fortune 500 companies among its users, is OpenAI’s most direct move yet into AI application security. Its technology will go into Frontier, the company’s enterprise age…

Italy’s Mirai Robotics raises $4.2M to build autonomous vessels for the ‘blue economy
Italy’s Mirai Robotics raises $4.2M to build autonomous vessels for the ‘blue economy

A Puglia-based startup founded by the man behind aircraft maker Blackshape has closed a pre-seed round to build software-defined ships and maritime AI. The ocean, it argues, is the last major physical environment not yet governed by software. Mirai Rob…

Nscale raises $2bn Series C at $14.6bn valuation
Nscale raises $2bn Series C at $14.6bn valuation

The UK hyperscaler has now raised over $4.5bn across equity rounds in less than six months, and says it is the largest Series C ever closed in Europe. That claim deserves scrutiny. When Josh Payne founded Nscale, the company was barely a year old, and …

Nscale raises $2bn Series C at $14.6bn valuation
Nscale raises $2bn Series C at $14.6bn valuation

The UK hyperscaler has now raised over $4.5bn across equity rounds in less than six months, and says it is the largest Series C ever closed in Europe. That claim deserves scrutiny. When Josh Payne founded Nscale, the company was barely a year old, and …

Nscale raises $2bn Series C at $14.6bn valuation
Nscale raises $2bn Series C at $14.6bn valuation

The UK hyperscaler has now raised over $4.5bn across equity rounds in less than six months, and says it is the largest Series C ever closed in Europe. That claim deserves scrutiny. When Josh Payne founded Nscale, the company was barely a year old, and …