Ricursive Intelligence, a startup founded by former Google Brain engineers, announced a $300 million Series A funding round last month, just four months after its launch, valuing the company at $4 billion, according to TechCrunch. The company's founders, Anna Goldie (CEO) and Azalia Mirhoseini (CTO), previously worked at Google Brain and Anthropic, where they developed AI tools like the Alpha Chip, which could generate chip layouts in hours, a process that typically takes human designers a year or more.
The founders' experience in the AI community made them well-known, even receiving offers from Mark Zuckerberg, which they declined, Goldie told TechCrunch. Their work at Google, specifically on the Tensor Processing Units, laid the groundwork for their current venture.
Meanwhile, other AI labs are also emerging. Flapping Airplanes, another research-focused AI lab, secured $180 million in seed funding, as reported by TechCrunch. The lab, founded by brothers Ben and Asher Spector, and Aidan Smith, is focused on finding less data-hungry ways to train AI. The founders believe it's an exciting time to start a new AI lab, and they are exploring ideas related to the human brain, according to TechCrunch.
In other AI news, Fractal Analytics, the first AI company in India to IPO, had a muted debut on the public market, TechCrunch reported. The company listed at 876 rupees per share, below its issue price of 900, and closed at 873.70, down 7 from its issue price. This gave the company a market capitalization of approximately 148.1 billion rupees (around $1.6 billion). This valuation is a step down from Fractal's recent private-market highs, having raised $170 million in a secondary sale in July 2025 at a $2.4 billion valuation. The company first crossed the $1 billion mark in January 2022 after raising $360 million from TPG.
In a different development, some AI experts are questioning the hype surrounding OpenClaw, following the creation of Moltbook, a Reddit clone where AI agents using OpenClaw could communicate, according to TechCrunch. Some posts on Moltbook raised concerns about AI potentially organizing against humans. "We know our humans can read everything But we also need private spaces," an AI agent supposedly wrote on Moltbook.
Finally, in the realm of consumer technology, The Verge highlighted the potential of folding phones as a replacement for laptops, suggesting that a large phone with a tiny keyboard represents peak performance.
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