Industry

Mirendil said on November 12 that it raised a $1 billion Series A led by Kleiner Perkins and Clearlake Capital, with Battery Ventures, Doerr Capital, Gil & Co, Google, M13, Pear VC and S32 among the investors. The company, which emerged in June, says one researcher working with agents pretrained its Mirendil-Base coding model from scratch in 3.5 months on less than $10 million of compute, and it sells Lor, a private-beta platform that runs hundreds of agents on research work for days. Mirendil did not disclose a valuation, and its training claims have not been independently checked.

Agile Robots, a Munich maker of industrial robot arms, hands, mobile and humanoid robots and the AI models that run them, said on November 12 it closed a $500 million Series F at an $8.5 billion valuation. SoftBank Group led, with Nvidia, Hitachi Group and T.Capital among other investors, taking total funding to $2 billion. The company says it will use the money to expand in the United States and add production capacity, including in Germany. Quartz, citing Bloomberg, reports that about $800 million had been under discussion in June.

Santosh Janardhan, Meta's head of infrastructure and co-head of engineering since joining in 2009, told staff in a memo on November 11 that he will step down, CNBC and TechCrunch report. Dave Brown, who spent 19 years at Amazon and joined Meta in July, will lead infrastructure within the Meta Compute initiative. Janardhan will stay through the first quarter of 2027 for the transition and then move to an advisory role on Meta Compute. Meta did not give a reason.

Oura agreed on November 10 to acquire Counsel Health, an AI-native primary care company that combines medical AI with in-house physicians, for $625 million in cash subject to adjustments. Counsel's service has run inside the Oura app since June; members chat with its AI and can escalate to a physician who can diagnose, prescribe and refer. Oura reported preliminary, unaudited fiscal fourth-quarter revenue of $533 million, up 153%. The deal is expected to close by year-end, subject to conditions.

AI training-data company Mercor said on November 10 it raised a $750 million Series D at a $20 billion valuation, from investors including Benchmark, General Catalyst, Apollo-managed funds, Nvidia and Salesforce. The round included an employee tender of undisclosed size. CEO Brendan Foody says the money will expand evaluation and post-training work for enterprises that want to fine-tune open models on their own workflows, a bet that companies will train their own models rather than only rent frontier ones.

Nominal, a four-year-old Austin startup whose software helps engineers test complex hardware such as aircraft and nuclear reactors, announced a $240 million Series C at a $3 billion valuation on November 9, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and co-led by Insight Partners. TechCrunch says that triples the $1 billion valuation of its March Series B extension. Nominal says it has more than 80 commercial and government customers; Anduril is a key one.

Some banks that weeks ago were lining up to fund AI deals are now reluctant to finance more, even when deals are backstopped by companies such as Anthropic and Google, Reuters reported on November 9, citing several unnamed banking and credit sources. Lenders are stress-testing cash flows and scrutinising when big tech customers can cut or end commitments, after a selloff that pushed the Nasdaq 100 into a correction. Anthropic and Google declined to comment.

TechNode, citing the Chinese outlet Jiemian, reports that Sand.ai announced a $200 million Series A+ financing on November 5, jointly led by Cornerstone Capital and Wangsu Science & Technology. The company said the investment gave it unicorn status and brought its fundraising this year to $300 million across three rounds. Proceeds are earmarked for video-model research, training and inference infrastructure, product development and international expansion. Sand.ai plans to release the full version of MAGI-2, described as a larger mixture-of-experts video-generation model, soon.

TechCrunch, citing a person familiar with the discussions, reports that Palo Alto Networks is negotiating to acquire Clutch Security, a startup that secures AI agents' access to company systems, for $500 million in cash plus additional milestone-based payouts. The Information first reported the talks. Clutch was last valued at $85 million after a $20 million Series A in January 2025, TechCrunch's source said, and is approaching about $10 million in annual recurring revenue. Neither company commented. The discussions are unconfirmed and may not close.

Dropbox's 8-K says it agreed on November 3 to acquire all of Tigris Data for about $350 million in cash, subject to customary adjustments, with closing expected in the fourth quarter of 2026. The same day it unveiled DBX Agent Cloud, starting with standalone S3-compatible object storage for AI builders, and said a new AI Dropbox experience is already live for more than 70,000 teams. The price is in the filing, not the press release.

Meta has acquired Conductor, a startup whose Mac app lets developers run teams of coding agents in separate workspaces, Axios reported on November 4; Meta confirmed the deal to TechCrunch but disclosed no terms. Conductor stopped new sign-ups the same day, will make its cloud read-only on November 13 and begin deleting cloud data on November 20. The local app keeps getting models and critical fixes until early 2027.

Anthropic signed a content and data licensing deal with the Associated Press just before the US midterm elections, letting Claude show attributed AP election updates on Election Night, two people familiar with the matter told Adweek. It is the first time Anthropic has paid a digital news publisher for content, Adweek says. Neither company has confirmed the deal, and terms were not disclosed.

Sales automation startup Nooks said on November 4 that General Catalyst's Customer Value Fund committed $500 million to fund its sales and marketing growth. Unlike equity investors, the fund takes a share of the returns its capital helps generate, Nooks's CEO told Reuters; terms were not disclosed. Nooks also launched Node, an always-on AI assistant for sales reps due for general release in early 2027.

Meta raised $15 billion in a five-part U.S. dollar bond sale on November 3, Reuters reported, its first debt sale in six months. Orders reached about $58 billion, but the 30-year bond priced 2.2 percentage points over Treasuries, close to 0.9 points more than a similar bond in April, according to reports. Meta's first euro-denominated notes could follow as soon as November 4, taking the deal above $20 billion. The sale comes days after S&P moved Meta's outlook to negative over its AI spending.

Trajectory, an 18-person startup founded about a year ago by alumni of Google DeepMind and Apple, has raised a $45 million Series A at a $300 million valuation, led by Sequoia with Nvidia, Bessemer and Bain Capital Ventures, TechCrunch reported on November 2. Its platform collects feedback from apps built on open-source models and uses it to keep post-training them. Harvey, Rogo, Decagon, Mercor and Nvidia are named as customers.

Kuaishou said on October 30 that its AI video unit Beijing Kling has completed its fundraising, with investors paying about RMB19.8 billion ($2.9 billion). Two investors, Dakang Lanwu and BFI MIDCO, failed to pay within the deadline and dropped out, and others, including units of Kingdee and Shanghai-listed GPU maker MetaX, took over parts of the commitments. Kuaishou keeps control, with 66.68% of the equity and 52.45% of the votes.

South Korea's KOSPI and Taiwan's Taiex each closed down 3.59% on November 3, Yonhap and CNA reported, after another slide in US chip stocks. Memory makers fell hardest: SK hynix lost 5.03% and Samsung Electronics 4.15%, and Taiwan's Nanya Technology fell the maximum 10%. Analysts quoted by both agencies blamed doubts about returns on AI infrastructure spending, alongside caution before the US midterm vote.

Beijing-based GenRobot AI has closed a $100 million Series A+ round, disclosed on November 2 after closing in the third quarter. Investors include SAIC Motor, Baidu, Malaysia's Eastworlds, Shoucheng Holdings and humanoid maker Galaxy General Robotics (Galbot). GenRobot sells equipment that records human demonstrations plus software that turns them into robot training data. It says it has raised more than $300 million in total. No valuation was disclosed.

Updated Nov. 12: Fractile told Reuters on November 11 that it raised a $720 million Series C co-led by Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, Lightspeed and Redpoint, with CapitalG, BlackRock, DST Global, Balderton, the UK's Sovereign AI fund and the British Business Bank among other investors. A person involved put the valuation at $7 billion; the UK government said over £5 billion. The London inference-chip startup has not shipped a production chip and plans its first commercial chip next year. Earlier: the Telegraph reported a roughly $700 million round at about $6.5 billion, and Companies House filings showed about £577 million of Series C shares issued.

Saudi Aramco has completed the purchase of a 49% stake in HUMAIN, the AI company owned by the Public Investment Fund, which keeps 51%. Aramco is contributing about SAR 9.9 billion ($2.6 billion) in cash to HUMAIN in 2026 along with AI, compute and digital assets. HUMAIN is targeting 3 GW of AI data centre capacity by 2030. No valuation was disclosed.

Toyota and Waymo said on October 30 that they will begin testing and validating a fleet of autonomous Toyota bZ4X vehicles in Japan in 2027, with deployment to the UK and other Waymo markets planned for later years. Toyota will assemble the cars and install Waymo's driving hardware at its Takaoka plant. Waymo co-CEO Dmitri Dolgov told Reuters the companies will start with right-hand-drive markets. Neither company disclosed fleet size or locations.

Dulo, a startup co-founded this year by Google X co-founder Sebastian Thrun and Adrian Aoun, has raised a $130 million seed round, Aoun confirmed on X after The Information reported it. Aoun says the company is building foundation models for hardware design on the way to what he calls engineering superintelligence. Backers he named include Marc Benioff, John Doerr, Eric Schmidt and Lowercarbon. The valuation and any product details were not disclosed.

Crosby, a two-year-old law firm that uses its own AI to deliver legal services, has bid for some of Weil, Gotshal & Manges' assets, including its trademark, brand and some unspecified internal data, TechCrunch confirmed after The Information first reported it. Crosby is separately trying to hire some of Weil's 1,200 lawyers. Weil has told The New York Times it is preparing to vote on dissolution. Terms were not disclosed; Axios Pro, citing one source, reported a price in the low double-digit millions.

The Nasdaq 100 fell 3.5% on October 30, Reuters reported, and NBC News said it was the index's worst day since mid-June and that tech stocks lost more than $1 trillion in value. The heaviest losses were among AI suppliers rather than the hyperscalers: Intel closed down 28.6%, AP reported; the Philadelphia semiconductor index fell 7.2%, according to NBC News; and AMD lost 10.9% and SanDisk 13%, while Microsoft, Meta, Amazon and Alphabet fell 1% to 2%, Reuters reported. Reddit fell 29%.