New Harris Poll research on behalf of World finds that 81% of singles would be more likely to use a dating app if every profile were confirmed as a real person. As millions of singles celebrate Singles Day on November 11, the biggest question in online dating is no longer “are we compatible?” but “are […]

London-based chip designer Fractile has raised $720 million in a Series C round, betting that memory bandwidth, rather than raw computing power, is the main constraint holding back AI performance. The funding values the four-year-old company at $7 billion, according to the Financial Times, which cited people familiar with the deal. Thrive Capital, Founders Fund, […]

ElevenLabs will help businesses fine-tune AI models on data from their own customer conversations, and opened early access to ElevenAI, an app that takes meeting notes. It also launched a partner programme and marketplace, and expanded its deal with Nvidia. ElevenLabs will help businesses fine-tune AI models on data from their own customer conversations, the […]

Microsoft will switch on Anthropic’s Claude models by default for UK Copilot customers from 9 December, The Register reported. Anthropic processes that data in the US. Richard Speed wrote for The Register that UK organisations with no setting chosen by then will have Claude enabled. Administrators can still turn it off. Leaving the setting untouched […]

IBM’s next quantum chip, Nighthawk r3, is designed to run 10,000 operations on 520 qubits. IBM plans to link two of them into a 1,040-qubit system in 2027. Customers report speedups of up to 19x on the current Nighthawk chip. IBM plans to build a quantum computer with more than 1,000 qubits in 2027 by […]

German defence company Helsing has launched Clarity, a direct challenge to Palantir. The AI platform helps armed forces turn drone, satellite and sensor data into targets. Helsing says it builds the software in Europe, under European control. Clarity pulls in sensor feeds, open sources, written reports and the systems a unit already runs. It finds […]

Google Labs has launched Tabletop, an experiment that builds custom tools such as trip itineraries, dinner polls and expense splitters from a prompt. Groups share one space and edit it together in real time. It is open to US adults via a waitlist. Google has launched Tabletop, an experiment from its Google Labs team that […]

AWS has released UAEF, a free open-source tool that tests AI agents on 36 measures, from tool use to safety. It works across several agent frameworks and flags when a new prompt or model makes an agent worse. Amazon Web Services has released a free tool that tests whether changes to an AI agent made […]

StitchStudio has raised $8M led by Voyager Capital to expand its AI agents for insurance carriers and brokers. The agents handle tasks such as quote comparison and billing checks inside existing systems, and every action can be audited. StitchStudio, an Oregon startup that builds AI agents for insurers, has raised $8M in a round led […]

New York City, United States, November 10th, 2026, TechnologyWire YouGov created 1,008 “E-twins” and tested them against 693 real, government-ID verified people they were built from, asking both the same new questions Twins’ results were validated through a recontact survey of the panelists they were based on within 48 hours Twins trained on panelists’ ratings […]

Santosh Janardhan, who has run Meta’s infrastructure for years, will step down in early 2027, Bloomberg reported. Dave Brown, who joined from AWS this year, will take over as Meta spends up to $145B this year, mostly on AI. Santosh Janardhan, Meta’s head of infrastructure and co-head of engineering, will step down from running the […]

Most people know the difference between reciting a fact and truly understanding it. In sales organizations today, that gap is costing companies their most promising deals. Patti Schutte has spent the past year listening to recorded sales calls across the enterprise teams she coaches. She keeps hearing the same problem. Salespeople have more research, more […]

ZIG Finance has launched the zEMS Vault, a tokenized product that gives institutional investors access to a diversified pool of Saudi SME private credit. It is the first deliverable from its strategic partnership with Laser Digital, the digital assets subsidiary of Nomura. KAIO tokenizes the Vault, and it is issued on BNB Chain. Laser Digital […]

VC firm Northzone has launched the first cohort of its Northstars programme, bringing together 25 experienced tech operators from across Europe.

The programme aims to build a network that will work with Northzone to identify investment opportunities and support its portfolio companies.

As AI changes how startups are built and scaled, smaller teams are taking on responsibilities that previously required much larger organisations. This has increased demand for experienced operators who can manage growth, develop products and lead teams.

The 25 participants have experience across robotics, AI infrastructure, healthcare, cybersecurity and vertical software, and will form a pan-European network to work closely with one of the continent’s most successful firms on dealflow and portfolio support.

In its first year of the new programme, Northzone will bring those ambassadors into its pipeline and investment process, helping to identify deals, offering them the opportunity to co-invest with the firm in companies they individually source, as well as providing advisory and mentorship services to Northzone portfolio companies.

The 25 Northstars are the first chosen operators in the ongoing programme. 

The Northstars

1. Adyen: Dhruv Ghulati, Principal Project Manager, AI/ML 
2. Black Forest Labs: Aitana Giebels van Bekestein, Marketing 
3. Coinbase: Keith Grose, Managing Director UK and Europe 
4. Comand AI: Marie Inuzuka, Co-founder and CPO 
5. DeepL: Sebastian Enderlein, CTO 
6. ElevenLabs: Pieris Christofi, Deployment & Product 
7. Fireworks: Dimi Nikolaou, Field CTO
8. Genesis: Guillaume Soulé, Head of EU Business
9. Langdock: Lina Wenner, Chief of Staff 
10. LegalFly: João Nunes, Chief of Staff 
11. Lovable: Sophia Nabil, Community and Growth
12. Thomas Gayno, Product Advisor (ex-Mistral, ex-Mirelo) 
13. MicroAGI: Zeno Hamers, Macrovector, Research and Deployments
14. Neko Health: Dr Gesa Sophia Borgeest, Head of GTM 
15. Numeric: Alex Heintze, Solutions Lead, EMEA 
16. Omnea: Patrick Penzo, Head of Marketing 
17. OpenFX: Karan Shah, Chief of Staff
18. Samsara: Praveen Murugesan, VP Engineering 
19. Sana: Olivia Elf, Head of Operations 
20. Sierra: Nick Young, Regional VP Enterprise Sales
21.  Scarlet: James Allgrove, COO 
22. Sunrise Robotics: Bronagh Crowley, GTM 
23. Tandem: Nelly Andrée Tranaas, Director of Operations
24. Qutwo: Elin Dölker, Chief of Staff
25.  XBOW: Zac Wallis, Head of Talent
    
    

    
    

Sam Endacott, Partner at Northzone, who will lead the programme alongside Elena Pantazi (Partner & Head of Platform), shared:

“Silicon Valley’s edge is density: capital and talent in one place, feeding each other. Europe has the talent but it is spread across dozens of cities and ecosystems.

The best operators in Berlin, Stockholm, Zurich, Paris and London should all be on speed dial with each other so they can share what best-in-class looks like in their respective fields.

The operators we have partnered with across Europe today are the future of tech on the Continent. We’re thrilled to build a founding community with them to continue unlocking the next generation of startups and founders who want to learn from top-tier talent who’ve helped scale Europe’s biggest platforms in AI.”

Artificial intelligence is fundamentally changing how software is built, deployed, and managed. AI coding assistants are helping developers ship software faster than ever. Meanwhile, a new generation of AI-powered Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) tools promises to help organizations respond to incidents and recover from outages in record time. But there’s a problem with this approach: […]

Anorak, a London-Chengdu entertainment tech company with the vision of “making any pursuit playable”, today announced a $5 million pre-seed round co-led by Play Ventures and Backed VC, with participation from Supercell and MTG.

Anorak is led by CEO Shaun Rutland, who co-founded Hutch – the mobile automotive games studio behind Top Drives and F1 Clash, acquired by MTG in 2020 – and Chief Creative Officer Jonathan Alpine, a founding employee at Hutch and its former Chief Creative Officer.  They are joined by co-founder Tak Fung, Chief of AI, who leads Anorak's AI lab in Chengdu, China.

The company, which began as a generative video research project, now has a 20-strong team across London and Chengdu, developing proprietary inference technology to make generative video faster, cheaper and more controllable, progressively enabling games and experiences to shift from pre-generated to generative, real-time interaction.

The company's medium is interactive generative video – generative video, made playable. Rather than simply prompting its way to new AI-bolstered versions of existing games, Anorak is building new play patterns from scratch, and the platform to go with them. It’s a platform where generated video responds to user choices and inputs in real time. The model pairs human creativity and playfulness with agentic ingenuity and visualisation to establish an entirely new entertainment medium; one that is playable, watchable, and shareable.

At Hutch, the team learned how deep a single subculture can run. Car enthusiasts didn't just play – they obsessed over details, built communities and held each game to their own standards. Anorak takes that lesson and applies it to every subculture there is: anglers, sneakerheads, padel players, birdwatchers, K-pop fans, and thousands of communities no publisher would ever greenlight a game for. 

Generative media changes the economics of serving these communities. Anorak will bring its interactive format to increasingly wider and specific interests, making entertainment viable for audiences that traditional game production economics have left underserved.

The aim is to hand those tools to real-world communities, so they can make playable content for themselves – shaped by their own in-jokes, rituals and taste, not a boardroom's guess at what a mass market wants. When anyone can make anything, Anorak believes taste becomes the scarce asset, and the communities that hold it should not only steer what is created, but become the creators.

Anorak is releasing new playable experiments on its blog every week, with plans to launch a creator platform that will enable anyone to realise their ideas.

It won't be a traditional chatbot that turns a prompt into a game. Anorak believes creation should be as much fun as playing – it's about having fun making fun.

According to Shaun Rutland, CEO and co-founder, Anorak:

"Every time making got cheaper – in music, film and games – value moved to whoever had the taste to filter the flood. Generative is the biggest of those shifts yet, because almost anyone can now create. 
Anorak is about giving every community that power: real people making playable things for the people they actually care about."

According to Harri Manninen, Founding Partner, Play Ventures, Anorak is at the forefront of building a new form of interactive entertainment, turning generative video into experiences people can play, watch and share. 

“What makes the vision especially compelling is the opportunity not only to build for passionate communities, but to empower those communities to create entertainment around their own interests. 

Shaun, Jonathan and Tak combine a proven track record in entertainment with deep AI expertise, exactly the kind of team we want to back at the beginning of a new technology cycle.”

Alex Brunicki, Founding Partner, Backed VC, contends that most AI entertainment companies are using new tools to make old formats faster. 

“Anorak is asking a far more interesting question: what does entertainment look like when content is made by and for a community, especially if we shift away from the skeuomorphism that other companies are still approaching the space with?

Furthermore, the technical breakthroughs the team have made in the past 12 months make us extremely excited for what comes next with Anorak."

The funding will expand the London and Chengdu teams, bring the first playable formats to release, and establish the creator platform in early 2027.

Every company needs to attack its own systems with AI hacking tools within about 90 days, or hackers will get in first. That is the warning from Alex Stamos, chief security officer at Cognition. He told Nilay Patel on The Verge’s Decoder podcast that open-weight AI models now give low-skilled attackers much of the skill […]

AJ Agrawal has a habit of making bold calls about where business is headed. His predictions have been published in Forbes, CNN, Inc. Magazine, Fortune, Fast Company and Entrepreneur.com. He has also built and sold companies of his own, so he writes from the operator’s seat. His newest prediction is a contrarian one. Most enterprises […]

US big-hitting VCs Lightspeed and Alphabet's CapitalG have backed UK chip startup Fractile in a £500m-plus funding round, which values the startup at over £5bn, the UK government said today in a press release.

The UK Nvidia challenger, based in Bristol and London, designs chips for AI inference, the process of running an AI model.

Founded in 2022 by Oxford PhD Walter Goodwin, Fractile’s architecture keeps data directly on the chip, unlike standard chips that must constantly shuttle data between the processor and separate memory modules. It says this method can run LLMs up to a hundred times faster than existing hardware while lowering operational costs by 90 per cent. Fractile's specialised chips are set to be ready for data centre deployment next year.

The lead invesetors in the Series C round, some of which has previously been reported, are Thrive Capital, Peter Thiel's Founders Fund, Lightspeed, and Redpoint. The UK’s Sovereign AI fund, the British Business Bank, Shopify, Balderton, Dragoneer and Blackrock also featured in the round, which Fractile said amounted to around £540m.

It follows its $220m Series B, which it announced in May this year, led by Accel, Factorial Funds, and Founders Fund. The Series B funding round valued Fractile at around £820m.

The investment comes as the UK looks to become a leader in parts of the AI stack and build up its sovereign capabilities in critical technologies, reducing dependence on fragile overseas supply chains.

AI minister Kanishka Narayan said: “For too long, Britain has produced some of the world’s best scientific ideas, only to see too much of the technology, industry and wealth they create built elsewhere. We are determined to change that. If AI is going to serve the British people, strengthen our public services and create good jobs across the country, Britain needs to build more of the technology that powers it.

“Fractile represents the very best of British ambition, bringing together world-class chip design, engineering and AI expertise to develop faster, cheaper and more energy-efficient hardware.”

Marketers now have to sell to two audiences, and one of them is not human, Gamma’s Kristin Fracchia told TNW. AI is more and more an intermediary in the buying process, she said. “For all of human history, marketers have marketed to other humans, which means appealing to human psychology. Now you have a second […]

Torus, a Salt Lake City maker of energy storage systems, has raised $500m and launched Foundry, prefabricated units that bring AI computing to existing business and factory sites using grid power they already have. Magnetar led the round, the company said in a statement on Wednesday. ICONIQ, Origin Ventures, Ridgeline Partners, and Trinity Capital also […]