All posts tagged: In Brief

Anthropic’s annualized revenue surges to B

Anthropic’s annualized revenue surges to $65B

Anthropic’s revenue continues to not only grow at an historic pace but also to accelerate. The model maker’s annualized revenue run rate — a projection of a full year’s revenue based on a recent, shorter period —surpassed $65 billion at the end of July, Bloomberg reported on Monday, up from $47 billion in May and just $9 billion at the end of last year. Anthropic didn’t immediately respond to our request for comment. The company’s investors expect it to continue to grow at approximately the same rate for the remainder of the year, finishing 2026 between $100 billion and $120 billion, the Financial Times reported. Meanwhile, rival OpenAI has doubled its revenue to $40 billion, up from $20 billion at the end of 2025, Bloomberg reported last week. The two companies may calculate their revenue metrics differently, but Anthropic’s growth rate has captivated investors far more than OpenAI’s has. Both companies have filed confidential IPO paperwork. Anthropic is expected to hit the public markets ahead of OpenAI — possibly as soon as this fall. Anthropic …

Bot-detection startup Spur nabs 0M from Insight

Bot-detection startup Spur nabs $200M from Insight

Spur Intelligence, a cybersecurity startup based in Lake Mary, Florida, has raised a $200 million round led by Insight Partners. Spur, founded by two former Defense Department engineers in 2017 — five years before ChatGPT’s public launch — was prescient. The startup’s tech helps enterprises distinguish legitimate human users from increasingly well-hidden bot traffic to help identify fake users and threats. “As sophisticated criminal VPNs, residential proxy networks, and anonymization infrastructure proliferate, organizations are increasingly operating with a critical blind spot: they can see the activity, but not the infrastructure behind it,” Insight’s Thomas Krane said in a written statement. Detecting malicious traffic has, of course, been a hill corporate security teams have been climbing for eons. But nothing compares to the onslaught facing them today. As of mid-2026, bots are now more active on the internet than humans, Cloudflare reported last month. “Thought it would be end of 2027, then early 2027, but agentic traffic growing so fast that bots have now passed human traffic online for the first time in the Internet’s history,” …

Superhuman acquires AI detection startup GPTZero

Superhuman acquires AI detection startup GPTZero

GPTZero, the three-year-old AI detection startup that Princeton grad Edward Tian first built as a senior thesis project, has been acquired by Superhuman, the companies announced on Tuesday. Terms of the deal were not disclosed, though Tian told Business Insider that GPTZero amassed more than 19 million registered users and $30 million in annual recurring revenue. In 2024, Tian told TechCrunch that it was profitable. Tian and co-founder CTO Alex Cui, who’d been friends since high school, raised a $3.5 million seed round led by Uncork Capital, followed by a $10 million Series A in June 2024 led by Footwork co-founder Nikhil Basu Trivedi, with several other notable investors including Reach Capital, Jack Altman’s Alt Capital, and Neo. All told, the company raised just $13.5 million. Superhuman — the company formed when Grammarly bought email provider Superhuman last year and rebranded under that name — already had an AI detection tool built into its platform. GPTZero’s mission has been to help humans detect and defend against AI slop. Grammarly’s tool has been designed to help …

Mistral is rumored to be raising €3B at €20B valuation

Mistral is rumored to be raising €3B at €20B valuation

French AI lab Mistral AI is in early discussions to raise about €3 billion ($3.5 billion), Bloomberg reported Friday, citing anonymous sources. The funding round would value the company at around €20 billion (about $23.15 billion), nearly double the €11.7 billion valuation it received in a Series C funding round last September. One of Europe’s leading AI startups, Mistral launched in 2023 with the stated ambition to “put frontier AI in the hands of everyone.” The company has taken a more open approach to its AI development compared to its American rivals, offering some foundational large language models with open weights, allowing anyone to customize them as they see fit. The company also offers closed models tailored for use cases such as programming, voice cloning and generation, and optical character recognition. Lately, with European countries distancing themselves from American tech, Mistral has positioned itself as a friendlier, “sovereign” and homegrown alternative. The company is setting up a data center near Paris and has partnered with France’s army, the government of Luxembourg, and several major European …

Katie Haun raises B for new venture funds

Katie Haun raises $1B for new venture funds

Former Andreessen Horowitz investor Katie Haun announced on Monday in a press release that her firm has raised $1 billion across new funds to continue its thesis of backing crypto and blockchain. The capital will be spread across startups at early and later stages, Bloomberg reported, and, within the crypto and blockchain space, it will be used to back startups focused on alternative assets (like gold and other commodities), the agentic economy, and financial services. The firm hopes to deploy the capital globally over the next two to three years. Haun left a16z in late 2021 and launched her own venture firm shortly after, in 2022. The firm handles more than $2 billion in assets under management, estimates PitchBook, and its investments include Palmer Luckey’s Erebor Bank and the crypto finance company Ellipsis Labs.  Source link

Bret Taylor’s Sierra buys YC-backed AI startup Fragment

Bret Taylor’s Sierra buys YC-backed AI startup Fragment

Sierra, the customer service agent startup founded by Bret Taylor, announced on Thursday that it has acquired the YC-backed French startup Fragment, which helps businesses integrate AI into workflows.  This is Sierra’s third public acquisition. It previously bought Japan-based enterprise AI solutions company Opera Tech (which it acquired in late March) and voice agent company Receptive AI (which it also announced it acquired in late March). Fragment co-founders Olivier Moindrot and Guillaume Genthial will be joining the Sierra team.  In a blog post, Taylor and his co-founder, Clay Bavor, wrote that Moindrot and Genthial will bring “valuable strength” to Sierra’s “agent development efforts in France.” Terms of the deal were not announced. PitchBook estimates that Fragment raised around $2 million through its seed round. Taylor, who also serves as OpenAI’s chairman of the board, co-founded Sierra alongside Google alum Bavor after stepping down as co-CEO of Salesforce in early 2023. The startup claims Casper, Clear, and Brex as customers and has raised more than $630 million in funding to date, from investors including Sequoia and …

Wikipedia cracks down on the use of AI in article writing

Wikipedia cracks down on the use of AI in article writing

As AI makes inroads into the worlds of editorial and media, websites are scrambling to establish ground rules for its usage. This week, Wikipedia banned the use of AI-generated text by its editors — although it stopped short of banning AI outright from the site’s editorial processes. In a recent policy change, the site now states that “the use of LLMs to generate or rewrite article content is prohibited.” This new language updates and clarifies previous, vaguer language that stated that LLMs “should not be used to generate new Wikipedia articles from scratch.” AI in Wikipedia articles has become a contentious issue among the site’s sprawling, volunteer-driven community of editors. 404 Media reports that the new policy, which was put to a vote by the site’s editors, garnered majority support — 40 to 2. That said, the new policy still makes room for continued AI use in some editorial processes. “Editors are permitted to use LLMs to suggest basic copyedits to their own writing, and to incorporate some of them after human review, provided the LLM does …

AI music generator Suno hits 2M paid subscribers and 0M in annual recurring revenue

AI music generator Suno hits 2M paid subscribers and $300M in annual recurring revenue

Suno co-founder and CEO Mikey Shulman shared on LinkedIn that the AI music generator has amassed 2 million paid subscribers and $300 million in annual recurring revenue. Just three months ago, Suno announced a $250 million funding round that valued the company at $2.45 billion. At the time, Suno told The Wall Street Journal that annual revenue had hit $200 million — that would indicate that the company has had some major growth in a short time frame. Suno lets users create music using natural language prompts, making it possible for people with little experience to generate audio with little effort. This has sparked concern from musicians and record labels, who have sued Suno for copyright infringement, since its AI model was likely trained on existing recorded music. But Warner Music Group recently settled its lawsuit and instead reached a deal that allows Suno to launch models that use licensed music from its catalog. Suno has generated synthetic music that sounds real enough to top charts on Spotify and Billboard. Telisha Jones, a 31-year-old in …

Vimeo starts layoffs after acquisition by Bending Spoons

Vimeo starts layoffs after acquisition by Bending Spoons

Vimeo, the video-hosting platform, is laying off some of its global staff, according to a report from Business Insider. The move comes shortly after the company’s acquisition by the Italian tech conglomerate Bending Spoons, which purchased it in an all-cash deal last year for $1.38 billion. Bending Spoons confirmed the layoffs to BI but wouldn’t share how many people would lose their jobs. The Verge reports that the cutbacks will impact a “large portion” of the company’s total workforce, citing a LinkedIn post from Vimeo’s former VP of Global Brand and Creative, who stated that he, “along with a large portion of the company,” had been “impacted by layoffs.” TechCrunch reached out to Vimeo and Bending Spoons for more information. Vimeo, which was founded in 2004, has struggled to find its footing in a field dominated by YouTube. In recent years, the company has leaned heavily into AI. In 2023, it announced plans to launch AI-powered script-writing and video-editing tools. This past October, the company added a suite of additional AI-powered creator tools designed to connect filmmakers’ “content directly …

Snowflake, Databricks challenger ClickHouse hits B valuation

Snowflake, Databricks challenger ClickHouse hits $15B valuation

Database provider ClickHouse secured $400 million at a $15 billion valuation, Bloomberg reported, representing about a 2.5x increase from its $6.35 billion valuation last May. The round was led by Dragoneer Investment Group, the startup said, with participation from investors including Bessemer Venture Partners, GIC, Index Ventures, Khosla Ventures, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. ClickHouse, which spun out from Russian search giant Yandex in 2021, develops database software designed to process the massive datasets required by AI agents. The company competes with Snowflake and Databricks. The company also announced the acquisition of Langfuse, a startup that helps developers track and evaluate the performance of their AI agents. Langfuse competes directly with LangSmith, LangChain’s observability platform. ClickHouse database is open sourced, and it makes money by selling managed cloud services, which saw annual recurring revenue (ARR) grow by more than 250% year-over-year, it said. The company’s customers include Meta, Tesla, Capital One, Lovable, Decagon, and Polymarket. Source link