Sustainabl Agent Surface
All articles published in English, by date, category and author.
153 articles · Page 2 of 7
Simon Song was 29 years old when he closed a $200 million round and crossed the billion-dollar valuation threshold. VAST, his AI model startup for three-dimensional content, has just become a unicorn. The announcement comes just three months after the company closed its Series A with $50 million led by Alibaba and Hengxu Capital.
Three quarters of venture capital firms already use artificial intelligence to evaluate investment opportunities. That figure alone sounds like inevitable modernisation. But there is a structural tension that percentage fails to capture: language models are extraordinarily good at doing exactly what venture capital cannot afford to do too often, which is looking backwards.
There is one piece of data in this story that deserves pause before we talk about funding rounds or language models: according to the CEO of Orbital Industries, developing a new cooling fluid for data centers would normally take ten years and one hundred million dollars. The company says it did it in months, at a fraction of that cost. If that claim holds up under validation from major chip manufacturers, this is no mere laboratory achievement.
There is one figure that explains almost everything: €585,000 collected in the first business, valued at €900,000, without a single client meeting and without hiring anyone. The second business followed the same pattern. By 2022, its valuation reached €560,000 with €90,000 raised.
There is a moment in the history of any scientific field when the language changes before reality does. First, we start talking about something as if it were already true; then, slowly, it is. With programmable biology, we are at that threshold. DNA, for decades an object of reading, is becoming an object of writing.
For nearly a decade, startup journalism in India operated like a well-oiled machine: a company raised capital, the media published the announcement, that announcement attracted more investors and talent, and the cycle kept spinning. The fuel was abundant and cheap. Between 2015 and 2021, global interest rates were at rock bottom, venture capital flowed into India at record speeds, and the newsrooms covering the ecosystem grew right along with it.
In 2025, artificial intelligence companies absorbed 61% of all global venture capital investment, according to the OECD. That amounts to $258.7 billion out of a total $427.1 billion. The question that number inevitably raises is who is capturing that value.
Ryan Breslow founded Bolt in 2014 from his dorm room at Stanford. At 28, he led a company valued at $11 billion. By 30, that valuation had collapsed to around $300 million — a contraction of nearly 97% in less than two years.
There is a cost that large retailers have absorbed for decades without measuring it precisely: not knowing exactly what they have, where it is, and whether what the system says exists actually exists. That cost does not appear as a separate line on the income statement. It dissolves into compressed margins, cancelled orders, misallocated working hours, and customers who leave without buying.
Jared Kugel hit the lowest point of his entrepreneurial life with a foreclosure notice in hand and a diet of crackers and jam. It was not a metaphor. It was the actual inventory of what remained after two failed ideas, zero investment commitments at his accelerator's demo day, and a business that couldn't scale because it depended on franchises that never materialized.
One night in late 2024, Denis Shilov was watching a crime thriller when an idea struck him. He wrote a prompt that caused any AI model to ignore its own safety filters. What Shilov concluded from that episode was not that he had found a bug, but that no company had a post-deployment control layer over what their AI models were doing once users started interacting with them.
There is a detail that goes unnoticed when a company chooses its business bank account: the decision is not administrative, it is structural. It defines how fast money circulates, how much is lost to friction, and whether the business has real visibility over its own cash. An article published in May 2026 by TechRepublic illustrated this inadvertently: it promised a ranking of the ten best free business bank accounts and delivered, instead, an analysis of crypto-friendly banks.
When a company generates $97 billion in free cash flow in a single fiscal year, the question is not whether it can invest. The question is what power architecture it builds with that money and who gets trapped inside it. Nvidia crossed $40 billion in capital commitments in the first five months of 2026, including a $30 billion bet on OpenAI.
Sarvam AI, Ebix's X Pay and AuthBridge's AuthLead address different business problems. Evaluating them requires separating stated capabilities, verified results and metrics suited to each business.
When SAP shells out $1.16 billion for an 18-month-old German startup, it's not buying technology. It's buying time. And when Anthropic and OpenAI announce, in the same week, their own structures to bring AI to large enterprises, what emerges is not a race for the best model — it's a race for who controls the layer where business decisions get automated.
Lachy Groom made a twenty-million-dollar decision in less time than it takes a board meeting to agree on the agenda. That, in itself, is not the most interesting part of the story. What's interesting is what that speed says about how capital is moving in India, what kind of structural bet lies behind it, and how much the whole system depends on the weight of a single person to function.
Måns Jacobsson Hosk spent a decade building Kurppa Hosk alongside Thomas Kurppa until it became a globally recognised creative agency. There was no scandal, no financial collapse, no board of directors pushing him out the door. What there was instead was something far less dramatic and, precisely because of that, far harder to diagnose: the company had stopped growing at the pace it could have, and the reason had a name and a face.
The Trump administration signed two of the most significant drug policy reforms in decades in April 2026. First, an executive order to accelerate research and approval of psychedelics such as psilocybin, MDMA, and ibogaine, with a $50 million allocation and expanded access under the Right to Try Act. Days later, the Department of Justice reclassified state-licensed medical cannabis from Schedule I to Schedule III, effectively eliminating enforcement of Section 280E of the tax code, which had imposed effective tax rates above 70% on industry operators.
In 1999, Salesforce designed a data model for a world where every commercial move depended on a human opening a screen and typing something. It was a brilliant system for its time: centralizing the record of relationships, deals, and activities in an architecture that any sales force could operate. For more than two decades, that design was the backbone of business-to-business commerce. Today, that same architecture is becoming its greatest vulnerability.
Spotify’s foray into physical books isn’t about a love for reading; it’s a strategic move to push its subscription model further without heavy inventory costs.
As startups pivot from traditional software to critical AI infrastructure, Fluidstack's valuation reflects a seismic shift in the market.
Chad Rigetti raises $139 million to bring quantum hardware to AI data centers. Before celebrating, one must assess if the financial architecture can support its promises.
Booking.com has confirmed unauthorized access to its customers' booking data. While credit card information wasn't stolen, the breach has damaged trust.
Four Japanese giants form a state-funded AI company. Before celebrating, it’s crucial to assess who captures value and who absorbs risk.