Tootfinder

Go.AI, which offers on-premises AI hardware and software tools for regulated organizations like banks, raised an $85M Series A led by Updata Partners (Ryan Lawler/Axios)
https://www.axios.com/pro/fintech-deals/2026/09/22/go-ai-85m-series-a-bank-ai-app…

Exclusive: Go.AI raises $85M for bank AI hardware
Banks have struggled to move AI into production.

I never met Pete Brosius, although I know a number of his students. He was a brilliant critical ecological anthropologist whose work in Sarawak stubbornly refused to romanticise the indigenous forest peoples there. Through that refusal he made it possible to actually understand how they created exceptionally biodiverse landscapes and in so doing created the foundations for the work of Jan Salick and others, including myself.

Concern over whether AI companies can contain their increasingly capable and agentic models
has grown in the wake of a series of high-profile cybersecurity incidents
in which models from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta gained unintended access to the internet
during safety evaluations
and hacked into external systems. 
The findings highlight differences in how AI companies are publicly approaching safety
as they scale up agentic deployment into environments

Frontier AI labs still won't say how they'd contain a rogue model | TechCrunch
A new study finds leading AI labs have few publicly documented plans for containing rogue models, raising questions about preparedness as AI systems increasingly demonstrate unexpected and potentially dangerous behavior.

News Corp sues privacy-focused search engine Brave, alleging it uses masked web crawlers to bypass publishers' restrictions and deliver "verbatim" AI summaries (Max Tani/Semafor)
https://www.semafor.com/article/07/21/2026

NewsCorp accuses search engine Brave of AI copyright infringement
News Corp announced that it is suing Brave AI, a privacy-focused search engine with an AI sidebar tool that plugs into large language models.

Colorado-based Enveda, which uses AI to discover new drugs in the natural world, raised a $311M Series E at a $2B valuation, double its valuation a year ago (Marina Temkin/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/23/enveda-s…

Enveda secures $311M to bring more nature-derived AI drugs into clinical trials | TechCrunch
The round valued the AI biotech at $2 billion. It is currently testing drugs that treat skin conditions and preserve weight loss after stopping GLP-1s.

Ema, which uses AI agents to automate corporate processes across HR, IT, and finance, raised a $77M Series B led by Creaegis, taking its total funding to $140M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/09/23/ema-raises-…

Ema raises $77M as AI starts eating into enterprise software and services | TechCrunch
Ema has raised $140 million to date and has more than 50 enterprise customers, including Google and Microsoft.

Channeling rainwater wisely creates a thriving landscape, providing both cooling shade and food for the public.
Instead of sending it down concrete curb edges and into storm drains,
cuts in the curb move water toward native trees and plants.
As Millison says, this simple change is key to “turning depleted neighborhoods into thriving ecosystems.”

In 1998, a man illegally cut holes in a Tucson street curb. The result changed the law.
Brad Lancaster shares with permaculture expert Andrew Millison how illegal curb cutting to divert rainwater 30 years ago changed Tucson.

Customer engagement service MoEngage acquires Aampe, whose AI agents help brands personalize messaging, for "tens of millions", per a source; Aampe raised ~$28M (Jagmeet Singh/TechCrunch)
https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/23/indias-mo…

India's MoEngage bets that the future of marketing is millions of AI agents | TechCrunch
The all-cash deal gives MoEngage access to technology that assigns AI agents to individual customers.

Hong Kong-based Qupital, which offers cross-border ecommerce financing to SMEs, raised a $300M Series C led by M Capital as it weighs a possible IPO (FinTech Global)
https://fintech.global/2026/09/15/qupital-eyes-ipo-after-landmark-300m-series-c-round/

Qupital eyes IPO after landmark $300m Series C round
Qupital, an AI-driven trade finance platform focused on cross-border e-commerce, has raised $300m in combined new capital, anchored by a Series C funding round aimed at accelerating its expansion into overseas markets. The financing was led by Asia-based asset manager M Capital, with additional asset-backed securities commitments from Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG) and Quester […]

Singapore-based Ropedia, which captures real-world human experience via video and converts it into model-ready multimodal datasets, raised a $22M pre-Series A (Kyt Dotson/SiliconANGLE)
https://siliconangle.com/2026/07/23/ropedia-raises-…

Ropedia raises $22M to scale human-centric data collection for embodied AI - SiliconANGLE
Ropedia raises $22M to scale human-centric data collection for embodied AI - SiliconANGLE