Tuesday, November 3, 2026

AI inference startup Fal doubles its valuation to $16B as demand surges (opens techcrunch.com)

Fal hosts image, video and audio AI models for developers; the new valuation is double its April value. Bessemer led the round, and Nvidia and T. Rowe Price also invested.

Traversal, which provides AI agents for site reliability engineering, raised $120M co-led by Kleiner Perkins, Redpoint, and Khosla at a $1B valuation (opens forbes.com)

Traversal's agents help companies such as American Express and Pepsi troubleshoot site outages.

Ted Schlein’s Ballistic Ventures seeks $490M for new funds amid AI-driven cybersecurity boom (opens techcrunch.com)

Ballistic Ventures is seeking $360 million for a new flagship fund and $130 million for a separate investment vehicle.

AI cloud startup Applied Compute raises $350M after reaching key revenue milestone (opens siliconangle.com)

Applied Compute, an AI infrastructure provider, raised at a $3.25 billion valuation after reaching a revenue milestone.

Yvonne Bajela is bringing $17M in fresh capital to Europe’s startup scene (opens techcrunch.com)

Yvonne Bajela's Evertrue Capital announced a $17M debut fund to back early-stage AI and fintech startups in Europe.

CrowdStrike to acquire cybersecurity startups Fiddler AI, Dreadnode for reported $495M (opens siliconangle.com)

CrowdStrike is buying two startups that secure AI agents, announced alongside an update to its Falcon Guardian product.

Show HN: Kairos – Open-source risk and fraud decisioning platform (opens github.com)

Finic's Kairos is an open-source alternative to real-time fraud decisioning platforms such as Sift and Sardine.

OpenHack: Always on AI Security Engineer (opens ycombinator.com)

OpenHack finds, verifies, prioritizes and fixes vulnerabilities automatically.

Anthropic releases FlashProve, an open-source prototype that cryptographically verifies an AI response came from a given model, not one that a router swapped in (opens anthropic.com)

The prototype would let anyone check that a response really came from the model it claims to be from.

twentyfour26: Building Fully Autonomous Factories in America (opens ycombinator.com)

twentyfour26 is building autonomous factories in America, starting with on-demand CNC machining.

△ Prism by Navier AI: Agents for hardware engineering (opens ycombinator.com)

Navier AI's Prism agents build CAD, run simulations and write engineering reports for hardware teams.

Google takes Dreambeans to India in bid to bring AI-generated personal stories to the masses (opens techcrunch.com)

Google's Dreambeans, an AI experiment for generated personal stories, now supports 13 Indian languages.

US tech giants' hidden AI debt swells 90% to $3.2T in 6 months (opens asia.nikkei.com)

Off-balance-sheet debt from AI-related obligations at US tech giants almost doubled in six months, to $3.2 trillion.

Scaling Git at OpenAI (opens openai.com)

Block reports Q3 revenue up 10% YoY to $6.7B, above est., Cash App gross profit up 27% to $2.07B, raises its full-year profit outlook (opens reuters.com)

It is the third straight time Block has raised its full-year guidance.

Canva says it is restructuring, which will impact 1,271 workers, or 22% of its workforce, as it merges its product, growth, and platform teams (opens theage.com.au)

The Age reports the cuts respond to slowing growth; co-founder and CEO Melanie Perkins said some people will change roles or be asked to move to central hubs.

Revolut says it cut AI coding inference costs by ~90% in less than a year by making self-hosted GLM models its default over commercial tools like Claude Code (opens theregister.com)

Revolut says it cut AI coding inference costs by ~90% in less than a year by making self-hosted GLM models its default over commercial tools like Claude Code — Revolut says that in less than a year it's managed to slash its AI coding inference costs by roughly 90 percent by making self-hosted…

China’s Largest Startup Deal Ever Lifts Global Venture Funding To $59B In October (opens news.crunchbase.com)

Crunchbase counts $59 billion of global venture funding in October, up 45% from a year earlier, largely because of DeepSeek's record $15.9 billion round.

The Financial Engineering Essential for AI in 2027 (opens tomtunguz.com)

Anthropic's S-1/A shows $5.0B of short-term burst compute at $7 to $13 per GPU-hour raised blended GPU costs 82% in two quarters, turning Q2's $974M operating profit into a $567M Q3 loss.