Monday, October 26, 2026

Autonomous excavator startup Bedrock Robotics picks up $600M in funding (opens siliconangle.com)

CapitalG and Emergence Capital led the Series C, with Nvidia and Bessemer joining; Bedrock says it is now valued at nearly $1 billion.

Colare raises $2.5M to help firms vet engineering candidates with advanced simulations (opens siliconangle.com)

Engineering talent vetting startup Colare Inc. says its simulated candidate testing platform is ready for prime time today after closing on a $2.5 million pre-seed funding round backed by Afore Capital, Garage Capital and Acadian Ventures.

Sources: DoorDash is in advanced talks to acquire Instacart, and the deal could be finalized as soon as this week and could value Instacart at ~$17B (opens wsj.com)

Sources: DoorDash is in advanced talks to acquire Instacart, and the deal could be finalized as soon as this week and could value Instacart at ~$17B — Deal could be completed as soon as this week, people familiar with the matter say — DoorDash is in advanced talks to acquire food …

Bending Spoons completes its $1.355bn Miro acquisition (opens thenextweb.com)

Bending Spoons now owns Miro, the online whiteboard used by more than 250,000 organisations. The Milan group closed the all-cash Miro deal on Monday, it said in a statement on Business Wire. Bending Spoons agreed to buy Miro in September at an enterprise value of $1.355bn.

Hopper – Fast, open-source inference for real-time agents (opens ycombinator.com)

Hopper trains open-weight models on production traces, then serves and improves them against live traffic.

Show HN: Hob - Open-source, on device alternative to Claude Cowork and ChatGPT (opens github.com)

Hob is a free, MIT-licensed desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux that works on your files like the Claude and ChatGPT apps, with the model running locally.

Rystic: Test your AI agents with local copies of Slack, Stripe, and Google Drive 🧪 (opens ycombinator.com)

Test your agent in a simulated world before unleashing it on the real one.

EveryApp - Make every app open source (opens ycombinator.com)

Every tool your business runs on, built by your agent, owned by you

Former GitHub CEO launches rival platform built for AI coding agents (opens geekwire.com)

Entire's Trails feature replaces the pull request, using AI agents to score each code change.

AnyAlpha: The agentic trading platform (opens ycombinator.com)

AnyAlpha turns your trading idea into an agent that trades it for you, 24/7.

Microsoft offers mass buyouts for roughly a quarter of its workforce (opens seattletimes.com)

GeekWire reports the offer goes to about 60,000 employees in the US, Canada, the UK and India, with no age or tenure requirement and a package equal to standard severance.

China's Star 50 index of AI and chip leaders is down by 40% in under four months, losing ~$480B in market value (opens reuters.com)

China's Star 50 index of AI and chip leaders is down by 40% in under four months, losing ~$480B in market value; chipmaker CXMT is down ~25% in the past month — While global tech stocks teeter, in China they have already crashed as lofty valuations collapse under worries about AI demand and curbs…

Cross-request KV cache exposure in the GLM-5.3 Workers AI model (155 responses) (opens blog.cloudflare.com)

Sources: Hong Kong-based stablecoin payments startup RedotPay plans a US IPO filing by year-end and is in talks for a pre-IPO round at a $4B to $5B valuation (opens bloomberg.com)

Sources: Hong Kong-based stablecoin payments startup RedotPay plans a US IPO filing by year-end and is in talks for a pre-IPO round at a $4B to $5B valuation — Crypto firm Redotpay is considering filing confidentially for a US initial public offering by year-end, according to people familiar …

Broadcom arranges a $63B deal with BofA, Blackstone, Citi, and Morgan Stanley to finance the purchase of chips for Anthropic via a new special purpose vehicle (opens bloomberg.com)

Broadcom arranges a $63B deal with BofA, Blackstone, Citi, and Morgan Stanley to finance the purchase of chips for Anthropic via a new special purpose vehicle — Chipmaker Broadcom Inc. has arranged a $63 billion deal with Bank of America Corp., Blackstone Inc., Citigroup Inc. and Morgan Stanley …

How OpenAI turned its coding tools into dots, an always-on personal assistant (opens techcrunch.com)

Alexander Embiricos, the OpenAI executive responsible for dots, never wants to have a meeting with someone else's AI agent.

Anthropic's S-1 shows a governance structure that suits a fun quirky little mission-driven worker cooperative that needs to raise billions as a public company (opens bloomberg.com)

Anthropic's S-1 shows a governance structure that suits a fun quirky little mission-driven worker cooperative that needs to raise billions as a public company — Also share classes and fake polls. — Happy Anthropic S-1 day — Here's the draft prospectus for Anthropic PBC's initial public offering.

California Startups Have Raised More So Far In 2026 Than The Entire US Ever Has In A Single Year (opens news.crunchbase.com)

California companies have scooped up more than three-fourths of all U.S. startup funding this year. That, per Crunchbase data, is an apparent record share. And keep in mind: This year still has a couple months left.

Anthropic S-1 Analysis: How 7 Key Metrics Stack Up (opens tomtunguz.com)

Tunguz reads the S-1 as $4.6B of revenue growing 11.9-fold, a derived 40% gross margin, $974M of operating profit in Q2 and $637B of compute commitments.

Let Chaos Reign, and Then Rein In Chaos (opens a16z.news)

Replit and the Agent Habitat

Why Reddit built its own AI prototyping tool | Blair Metcalf (opens lennysnewsletter.com)

Watch now (30 mins) | 🎙️ Reddit’s principal UX engineer shows how a custom Figma MCP and Cursor pipeline takes any designer from blank slate to shareable, production-shaped prototype in minutes—no Git required

AI delivers ‘zero financial payoff’ to most companies, Apollo economist says (opens techcrunch.com)

"Despite massive investments and widespread hype around artificial intelligence, the technology has delivered zero financial payoff to corporate America outside of tech."