Y Combinator published its Summer 2026 Request for Startups in late April, just days before the application deadline. The document lists 15 categories of companies that YC’s partners want to fund. Eight of them require capital, hardware, or both. The list includes AI for low-pesticide agriculture, counter-swarm drone defence, inference chips for space, lunar manufacturing […]

The flight from John F. Kennedy International Airport to the East 34th Street Heliport in Midtown Manhattan took seven minutes. By car, depending on the time of day, the same journey takes between 60 and 120 minutes. On Friday, Joby Aviation landed its all-electric air taxi at the heliport as part of a demonstration hosted […]

The company that built TikTok’s recommendation algorithm, the system that predicts with unsettling accuracy what a person wants to watch next, is now using a related class of AI to predict how molecules will behave inside a human body. ByteDance’s drug discovery unit, Anew Labs, presented its first AI-designed therapy at the American Association of […]

Three days of cross-examination in Oakland produced a $130bn lawsuit’s most awkward admissions, including that xAI trains on OpenAI’s models. The judge, not the jury, will decide. Elon Musk took the stand in Oakland on Tuesday with a story he has been telling for two years. He had founded OpenAI in 2015, he said, to […]

Apple has quietly raised the desktop’s starting price to $799 after demand from developers building local AI tools cleared its shelves. Tim Cook says it could take months to catch up. For five years, the Mac mini has been the cheapest way into Apple’s desktop ecosystem. Since the M4 refresh in late 2024, that price […]

BMO has filed a provisional patent on a quantum algorithm for seismic forecasting, and is sending mobile branches to wildfire zones with AI dispatch. The bank says it is the future of risk. Banks are not, as a rule, in the earthquake business. They are in the business of pricing risk, which is adjacent. Still, […]

Oracle’s stock has fallen nearly 50 per cent since hitting a record in September and dropped 14 per cent in the six sessions through Thursday, its worst stretch in months. Of the 51 Wall Street analysts tracked by Bloomberg who follow the company, 41 have buy ratings and only one rates it a sell. The […]

After a CFIUS-induced retreat in 2024, the wafer-scale chip startup is back with an OpenAI deal in its pocket and a sharper bet against Nvidia. Eighteen months ago, Cerebras Systems looked like a cautionary tale. The Sunnyvale-based AI chip startup had filed for an initial public offering in September 2024, only to see its plans […]

The video game retailer that meme traders saved from oblivion is now eyeing one of the internet’s oldest marketplaces. GameStop Corp is preparing a bid to acquire eBay Inc, according to a Wall Street Journal report published on 1 May 2026, sending eBay shares surging more than 13% in after-hours trading. The move would be […]

Lerrel Pinto co-founded Fauna Robotics, a startup that built an approachable bipedal robot called Sprout. He left in 2025. Amazon acquired Fauna in March, along with its 50 employees and its $50,000, three-and-a-half-foot-tall dancing humanoid, to enter the consumer robotics market. Pinto then co-founded Assured Robot Intelligence with Xiaolong Wang, a former Nvidia researcher and associate […]

Keeping track of rent due dates, scheduling apartment maintenance, even figuring out how to split utilities with roommates – when it comes to renting, there are plenty of chores on your to-do list. Thankfully, these days, there’s an app for everything. I’ve rounded up a list of the top 8 apps to help busy renters […]

The Turnberry Agreement was supposed to be the floor. Signed at Donald Trump’s golf resort in Scotland last July, the deal between the United States and the European Union set a 15 per cent tariff ceiling on nearly all EU goods entering America, including cars, car parts, semiconductors, and pharmaceutical products. In exchange, the EU […]

Mark Zuckerberg’s earnings call on Wednesday was about AI. It was about the $125 billion to $145 billion Meta plans to spend on capital expenditure in 2026. It was about Llama models and recommendation engines and the advertising systems that generate $56 billion in quarterly revenue. It was not about children. No investor asked Zuckerberg […]

Nebius Group, the Dutch cloud computing company that split from Russian internet provider Yandex in 2024, has agreed to acquire Eigen AI for approximately $643 million in stock and cash. The deal, announced on 1 May, is for a 20-person startup founded by alumni of MIT’s HAN Lab. In a market where the largest AI […]

The Pentagon announced on 1 May that it has signed agreements with Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon Web Services, and Reflection AI for expanded use of advanced artificial intelligence on classified military networks. The deals bring the total number of companies with such agreements to seven, following similar arrangements with SpaceX, OpenAI, and Google, which signed its own […]

Founders Fund, the venture capital firm co-founded by Peter Thiel, closed a $6 billion growth fund on 1 May, its largest ever and its fourth dedicated late-stage vehicle. The majority of the capital, $4.5 billion, came from limited partners including sovereign wealth funds. The remaining $1.5 billion came from the firm’s own partners and employees, […]

When Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz on 27 March, following weeks of US and Israeli air strikes, Brent crude hit $126 a barrel and the World Bank warned that energy prices would surge by 24 per cent, the largest increase since the Russia-Ukraine shock of 2022. For most oil-importing nations, this was an economic […]

Either way, let's get you up to speed.

? Notable and big funding rounds

??  Ineffable Intelligence launches with record-breaking $1.1B seed round

?? Ebury financing of over £550M

?? Robotics startup Sereact raises $110M

??‍?? Noteworthy acquisitions and mergers

? Nebius buys US AI inference startup Eigen AI in $643M deal

??  Rivage raises €50M and acquires Infoclip to build a major managed services and cybersecurity group

?? ECD International is acquiring a majority stake in Munich-based influencer marketing agency SC Media House

? Interesting moves from investors

? KOMPAS VC closes €160M Fund II for industrial tech startups

? EQT secures €3.1bn for European logistics fund

?  Earlybird closes €360M Fund VIII, doubling down on deeptech and long-term ownership

?️ In other (important) news

??  SPRIND launches €125M Next Frontier AI challenge to back new AI paradigms in Europe

?  UK to develop AI hardware plan

? Europe’s AI-native founders are building faster — and younger — than ever

??  Europe urged to become first “electro-continent” with 50% electrification target by 2040

? Freepik rebrands as Magnific, unifying its AI creative stack as enterprise and “no-collar” growth accelerates

<!--td {border: 1px solid #cccccc;}br {mso-data-placement:same-cell;}--egora and Tandem Health CEOs reject Anthropic and OpenAI threat

? Recommended reads and listens

?? UK startups enter UK parliament with hope for change

?? Berlin tech’s new reality: AI-driven output, stagnant wages, and a workforce on the move

? Software: 10 companies that raised the most in 2025

?? Invest Europe: PE- and VC-backed firms grow jobs 4%, 4x faster than Europe in 2024

? European tech startups to watch 

?? ManaMind secures $1.5M to develop autonomous testing for gaming

??  Always Friday raises €1.05M to automate corporate event planning with AI agents

?? Tapaya raises €1M pre-seed to power payments on any device

?? Qendra gets €162,000 to scale quantum computing systems

?? Atech raises pre-seed to unlock a new era of Physical AI builders with the "Lovable for hardware"

European AI infrastructure company Nebius has acquired a US startup which specialises in improving the performance of leading open-source AI models, it said today.  

Amsterdam-headquartered Nebius has acquired San Francisco-based Eigen AI for approximately $643m in cash and stock.  

Nebius, which is sometimes referred to as a neocloud, builds and operates data centres, packing them with GPUs, then offers access to these data centres to AI and enterprise companies needing compute power, as well as offering them specialised software to run AI applications.  

Eigen AI’s tech helps improve the performance of leading open source AI models from the likes of Meta, OpenAI and Alibaba in inference, the process whereby a trained model is applied to real-world data to generate answers through reasoning.  

Inference is the fastest growing part of AI and is forecast to account for around two-thirds of compute demands this year.

Eigen AI's tech helps AI model performance by improving the yields from the data, also known as tokens, that AI models process, meaning the overall cost for enterprise customers will come down, Nebius said  

Nebius also highlighted that by acquiring the 20-strong Eigen AI team, it was acquiring “elite inference research talent”, saying that Eigen AI’s founding team would set up an engineering and research presence in the San Francisco Bay Area.  

Eigen AI’s co-founders Ryan Hanrui Wang and Wei-Chen Wang are alumni of MIT’s HAN Lab, led by Professor Song Han, a leading researcher in AI computing and model efficiency.  

Nebius said Eigen AI tech will help alleviate bottlenecks in running AI inference, due to issues in memory, routing and compute.  

Nebius said: “By integrating Eigen AI’s optimisation layer directly into Nebius Token Factory, Nebius removes this bottleneck across the lifecycle.”  

It said its tech is designed to deliver “higher throughput and lower cost per inference without additional engineering overheads".

It added: "As a result, Nebius Token Factory customers will benefit from faster time to production, significantly better unit economics, and the ability to adopt new models more quickly.”