Latest Tech Arcade stories, page 5: bite-size news on AI, startups, funding, chips, robotics and biotech, every story sourced.
The former Apple and PrimeSense engineers behind Face ID and the Kinect raised a $165M Series C at a $1.6B valuation to fix robots' biggest blind spot: perception.
Nvidia is paying $12.93 billion for Hugging Face, the home of open-source AI and 18 million developers. It's the chipmaker's largest acquisition ever, and it just bought the town square where every AI builder meets.
VAST, the company behind text-to-3D platform Tripo, raised ~$446M across Series B and B+ — pushing AI 3D generation into foundation-model territory.
Spanish startup iPronics raised a $125M Series B, with Nvidia participating, to swap copper for light and rewire AI data centers in sub-milliseconds.
Miami's Felix closed a $200M Series C led by a16z and General Catalyst at a ~$1.4B valuation, moving $8B in remittances for 6M+ users through a WhatsApp chat.
The Pentagon opened GenAI.mil to 3 million personnel with ChatGPT Mil and Grok for Government at IL5 clearance. Anthropic's Claude is the one vendor left out.
Starcloud closed a $250M Series A extension at a $2.3B valuation to run Nvidia GPUs in orbit. One H100 is already up there; the FCC filing asks for 88,000 satellites.
Socure raised $156M at a $5.2B valuation and bought agentic-AI startup Fravity to fight machine-speed fraud with AI agents of its own.
The FDA cleared Revolution Medicines' daraxonrasib, the first broad RAS-targeted pill for metastatic pancreatic cancer, doubling median survival to 13.2 months at a $477,000-a-year list price.
Hugging Face's Microduck is a $399 open-source biped that walks, falls, and self-recovers, retrainable with reinforcement learning, while the cheapest humanoid still starts at $13,500.
The FDA cleared GENGLYCOS, Ultragenyx's first gene therapy: a one-time $2.7 million infusion targeting the root cause of glycogen storage disease type Ia.
Andreessen Horowitz just closed a $1.1B 'Machine Age' fund for chips, power, cooling and robots. The VC that said software eats the world is now betting on the hardware underneath it.
AusperBio raised $120M to push AHB-137, an antisense drug that cleared hepatitis B in 68% of a small trial, toward the first functional cure for a disease 240 million people live with.
Google's custom-chip deal could hand Marvell up to $120 billion in revenue. So why did the stock drop 7% on record earnings? The payoff doesn't land until fiscal 2029.
Gatik raised a $200M Series D led by Qatar Investment Authority and Koch to scale its driverless middle-mile trucks — with $600M in freight already contracted.
Instinct's personal AI agent hit a $2.5B valuation on a $250M Series B, up 50x in four months — as security experts flag its perpetual grip on your inbox.
Emerald AI raised $150M at a $1.05B valuation to make AI data centers throttle their own power when the grid is stressed — and says the trick could free 100+ GW on the existing U.S. grid.
Amazon is shutting down Mechanical Turk on Sept 30 after 21 years, ending the 500,000-worker 'artificial artificial intelligence' platform that helped train the AI now replacing it.
Starcloud raised $250M at a $2.3B valuation — with Nvidia joining — to run AI data centers in orbit. Free sunlight, vacuum cooling, and an 88,000-satellite dream.
Moderna and Merck's personalized mRNA cancer vaccine cleared Phase 3 in 1,137 melanoma patients — and Moderna's stock more than doubled before the full numbers were even released.
Castelion, founded by ex-SpaceX engineers in 2022, raised a $1B Series C at a $13B valuation to mass-produce its Blackbeard hypersonic missile.
XPeng's robotics unit raised over $900 million at a $6.3 billion valuation in its first external round — before the IRON humanoid has shipped a single unit.
AMD is buying Toronto startup Taalas, which etches AI model weights directly into silicon. Its first test chip ran Llama 3.1 8B at 16,960 tokens/sec — about 48x a GPU.
Unitree's Shanghai debut popped 629% intraday, valuing the humanoid robot maker near $66 billion - on 2025 net profit of about $41 million.
