Why the checkout is the most strategic product in your 2026 stack
Every product team has a roadmap. Every marketing team has a funnel. But ask most SaaS and ecommerce leaders which single component has the greatest direct impact on their revenue, and you will hear a surprising amount of hesitation. The answer, increasingly, is the one piece of infrastructure that
Perplexity has launched Perplexity Health
The AI search company launches a suite of health data connectors, linking Apple Health, wearables, and electronic health records, making it the second major AI platform to integrate with Apple Health after OpenAI. Consumer health AI has become the year’s fastest-moving product category, and on Thurs
VC Montis raises €50M to back Europe’s energy and industrial tech startups
The Warsaw-based fund, backed by the European Investment Fund and the Polish Development Fund, plans 20–25 pre-seed and seed investments in companies working on energy transition, industrial automation, and AI. The team behind Warsaw-based Montis Capital has raised €50 million at first close for a n
Microsoft’s MAI-Image-2 enters the top three AI image generators in the world
The second version of Microsoft’s in-house image model lands at #3 on Arena.ai’s leaderboard, behind only Google and OpenAI, and begins rolling out across Copilot and Bing Image Creator today. A year ago, Microsoft was generating images for Bing and Copilot almost entirely with OpenAI’s models. On T
DoorDash launches Tasks
Here is one way the AI data economy works in practice in 2026: a DoorDash courier straps on a body camera, washes at least five dishes, holds each one up to the lens for a few seconds, and earns a few dollars. That footage, mundane, specific, reproducible at scale, is exactly what AI and robotics […
Bluesky raises $100M Series B as new CEO takes charge
Ten days after founder Jay Graber stepped aside as CEO, the decentralised social platform has disclosed a $100 million Series B led by Bain Capital Crypto, a round that closed last April but was never announced. The timing tells its own story. There is a quiet irony in the fact that the person who b
AI analytics agents need guardrails, not more model size
Picture a VP of finance at a large retailer. She asks the company’s new AI analytics agent a simple question: “What was our revenue last quarter?” The answer comes back in seconds. Confident. Clean. Wrong. That exact scenario happens more frequently than many organizations would care to admit. AtSca
Austrian startup TACEO launches a network that runs sensitive computation without seeing the underlying data
The TACEO Network, already live inside World ID’s biometric verification system for more than 18 million users, lets organisations share digital infrastructure without sharing sensitive data. When Sam Altman’s World needs to verify that a new user’s iris hasn’t already been registered, it faces a pe
Your inbox is someone else’s business model. It doesn’t have to be
There is a moment, usually around the third eerily accurate ad for something you only mentioned in an email, when you start to wonder what exactly your inbox knows about you. The answer, it turns out, is everything. And the companies running the most popular free email services in the world are not
Uber and Rivian strike $1.25bn robotaxi deal
The partnership puts Rivian’s in-house chip and full autonomous stack to work as a robotaxi platform, with commercial deployments planned for San Francisco and Miami in 2028. Uber has been signing robotaxi deals at a pace that can make any single announcement feel routine. But this partnership with
Alpine Eagle is scaling counter-drone production as Europe races to close its air-defence gap
The Munich startup’s airborne Sentinel system has been tested in Ukraine and alongside US and UK forces, now it’s planning a 2,000-square-metre production facility and quadrupling its headcount. The cost asymmetry that defines modern drone warfare is by now well documented. In April 2024, Iran launc
Parallel raises €20M to deploy AI agents for hospital administrative work across Europe
Every patient discharge in a European hospital triggers a paperwork cascade. Clinical information from the stay must be converted into standardised codes, the ICD classifications and procedure codes that determine what a hospital gets paid. Someone has to navigate the legacy software, pull the right
eternal.ag raises €8M to put autonomous harvesting robots into greenhouses
The Cologne startup’s simulation-first approach trains robots in virtual greenhouses before deploying them in real ones, aiming to crack a deployment problem that has frustrated the industry for years. The market for greenhouse automation has accumulated a graveyard of credible-sounding startups. Th
Reson8 raises €5M pre-seed funding to scale Europe’s first customisable speech AI
Amsterdam-based Reson8 has raised €5M in pre-seed funding to challenge US-centric speech platforms by building a high-precision, industry-specific speech recognition platform tailored for European languages. Reson8, a hyper-customised speech AI startup that ensures real-life, accurate, industry-spec
Ringtime raises €1.8M to send AI agents after blue-collar candidates
Recruiters spend hours a day calling, leaving voicemails, and asking the same questions. Ringtime automates the whole thing, and has already found a second home in real estate. There is a well-worn frustration in blue-collar recruitment. A warehouse operative applies on Monday, hears nothing by Tues
Ofiniti raises $6.8M to push its maritime fuel software into global shipping hubs
The Oslo-based DNV spinout processed over 25,000 bunker operations in 2025 and claims roughly 40% of Singapore’s digital bunkering market. Verb Ventures leads a growth round that brings total funding to $9 million. The paperwork of global shipping is notoriously stubborn. Every fuel delivery to ever
Finnish startup Elea & Lili raises €2.5M to replace the plastic
Polyacrylate is the synthetic crystal at the heart of every modern disposable nappy, is derived from petroleum, and it does not break down. It persists for centuries, leaching microplastics into soil and groundwater as it degrades. The hygiene industry has long regarded it as an engineering necessit
Mastercard buys stablecoin firm BVNK for up to $1.8bn
For most of its fifty-year history, Mastercard has been, in essence, a message-passing network. A transaction happens; Mastercard’s rails carry the authorisation signal between issuer and acquirer in milliseconds; settlement follows on a separate, slower track. The system is extraordinarily reliable
Meta’s Manus AI agent arrives on your desktop to take on OpenClaw
Manus’s new desktop app can read, edit, and act on files and applications directly on a user’s machine. The launch puts Meta’s AI agent ambitions in direct competition with the open-source tool that has dominated the conversation this week. OpenClaw arrived on the internet last month like a weather
Rivia raises €13M to bring agentic AI to clinical trials
The Zurich-based startup, which previously raised €3M to unify fragmented trial data, has secured a larger round to build AI agents that actively manage the complex operational layer of running a clinical trial. Clinical trials are, by almost any measure, one of the most information-intensive proces