College social app Fizz has expanded its ongoing lawsuit against rival Sidechat, alleging in a July 2026 filing that venture capitalist Jerry Lu of Maveron met with Fizz under the pretense of a…
Ollama raised a $65M Series B led by Theory Ventures on July 9, 2026, taking total funding to $88M, with 8.9M monthly developers and 85% Fortune 500 presence. Launched in 2023, it runs open-weight AI models locally in minutes.
SpaceXAI launched Grok 4.5 on July 8, 2026, its first big post-IPO model, pitching “Opus-class” performance. Elon Musk says it’s comparable to Opus 4.7, but faster and more token-efficient; pricing is $2/M input and $6/M output vs Opus 4.7’s $5/$25.
Vermilion Cliffs Ventures announced Wednesday the close of a $25 million Fund II, continuing its focus on technical founders building in AI infrastructure, security, and developer tools.
The firm…
A group of AI startups reported in mid-2026 that their revenue is not just growing but accelerating — reaching successive milestones in progressively shorter timeframes. The companies span a range of…
WeWard’s “Walking Mode” (launched July 8, 2026) lets users lock chosen apps like TikTok or Instagram until they hit a customizable daily step goal—3,000 is one example. Backed by Venus Williams, it has 30M users in 29 countries (4M US) and says it boosts walking time by nearly 25%.
Paris AI startup ZML launched ZML/LLMD in July 2026, a free inference server for open-source LLMs that runs on Nvidia, AMD, Google TPU, Apple Metal, and Intel Arc to reduce vendor lock-in. It’s not open source, following a 2024 ML inference framework updated in March, and ZML will only consider paid tiers after analyzing usage.
Figma’s July 2026 acquisition of Bud (formerly Orchids) goes beyond expansion into app prototyping: both platforms will shut down July 18, 2026, and users must migrate. It also follows BBC reporting earlier this year on Orchids-made apps’ cyberattack exposure.
Bidbus raised $15M in a July 2026 Series A to expand its real-time used-car auction where dealers get only a few hours to submit competing bids, with offers averaging $2,000–$3,000 more than Carvana even after Bidbus’s cut. Led by Ibex Investors with Mucker Capital, FJ Labs and others, the Los Angeles startup previously operated only in California and Texas.
On July 7, 2026, Norm raised a $120M Series C led by Khosla Ventures, valuing the nearly three-year-old AI law firm at $1.2B. Norm Law uses human-supervised AI agents for enterprise work and charges by outcomes, not hourly. Other investors include Bain and Fenwick LLP.
Station F’s F/ai is set to add a second cohort in September 2026 after the first batch raised $34M pre-seed. Launched in Jan 2026, it targets €1M (~$1.14M) revenue in six months to speed EU commercialization, Roxanne Varza said.
AI image-generation startup Midjourney is pushing to compel Disney, Universal, and Warner Bros. to disclose details of their internal AI usage as part of ongoing copyright litigation, according to a…
