Smartbird, formerly Allbirds, rebranded after pivoting to AI in April 2026 and named Nadia Carlsten (ex-AWS) as its first CEO for AI infrastructure. After a $43M shoe sale and $100M stock-market raise, Carlsten—based in Amsterdam—will earn $700K/year and about $9M in stock.
A new screen time app called Mivo Scrolling launched last month with an approach centered on self-reflection rather than strict restrictions, positioning itself as an alternative to conventional app…
Clair Health, a startup founded by Stanford graduates Jenny Duan and Abhinav Agarwal, announced in June 2026 that it has raised $11.6 million to develop a wearable device designed to track hormonal…
Odyssey’s June 2026 $310M Series B values the world-model AI startup at $1.45B, led by Natural Capital with Amazon, AMD Ventures and GV participating. AWS is set as preferred cloud as Odyssey optimizes models for Trainium chips; total funding hits $337M.
Pramaana Labs announced $27 million in seed funding on Wednesday, June 17, 2026, to build AI systems that use formal mathematical verification to reduce errors in high-stakes industries such as law,…
XDOF surfaced from stealth in June 2026 with a $70M seed round to tackle the shortage of high-quality robot training data. The San Francisco startup (founded Oct 2024, ~60 employees) works with 20 customers, and CEO Philipp Wu calls the physical-data “chicken-and-egg” problem; it plans pipelines spanning teleoperation on deployed robots, broader teleoperated data, and “egocentric” annotation.
In June 2026, DeepL acquired Mixhalo—an SF real-time audio startup—to expand into live events translation and open its first Bay Area office. Mixhalo, founded in 2016 by CEO Vik Singh and others, raised more than $39M and already used DeepL as its primary translation provider.
African payments infrastructure company Flutterwave announced on Tuesday, June 16, 2026, a Series E funding round that values the company at $3.2 billion. The round includes an equity investment from…
AI startup Probably raised $9 million in seed funding in 2026 to develop a system designed to eliminate hallucinations and factual errors from AI-generated outputs, with backing from Andreessen…
Respond.io, a Kuala Lumpur-based customer conversation management platform, announced in June 2026 that it has raised a $62.5 million Series B round led by Camber Partners, with participation from…
June 2026’s $234M round for Sarvam pairs HCLTech’s $150M lead stake with backers including Bessemer, Khosla Ventures and Peak XV, valuing the company at $1.5B. The Bengaluru startup (Vivek Raghavan, Pratyush Kumar) targets $300M for Series B and says its conversational AI handles 2M+ interactions daily.
In April 2026, Loft Orbital’s Yam‑9 ran NASA JPL’s NAVI‑Orbital (led by Juan Delfa Victoria) with DeepMind’s Gemma 3 VLM to autonomously identify targets from natural-language queries. Powered by an Nvidia Jetson Orin AGX.
