Physical AI training data does not exist at the scale the robotics industry needs, and a startup called Encord is building a business around producing it. Inside a warehouse in San Leandro, California, a worker named Andrew Ceja plays Jenga while wearing a headset that films what he sees and measures his brain waves. It is an unlikely assembly line for one of technology’s most urgent supply-chain problems. Brain Waves, Muscle Signals, and the Search for Better Robot Data The brain wave headset was built by Zander Labs, a German neuroscience startup with offices in Berlin, Munich, Cottbus, and Delft.…
Author: Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi
Funke Adeyemi spent a decade in corporate banking and fintech before moving to business journalism. She started in trade finance at a major UK bank, moved to a payments company scaling into African markets, and spent her last role leading partnerships at a cross-border remittance platform. She writes about business strategy, fintech, digital banking, and the corporate news that moves markets. She is interested in how companies actually make money rather than how they describe making money in investor presentations. Funke lives in South London. She reads earnings calls the way other people listen to podcasts, and finds them about as reliable.
Lift House London founders are building something that would look odd by Silicon Valley standards: a six-storey co-living space in East London where Sunday journaling replaces Demo Day countdowns, and volleyball on Tuesdays is a fixture rather than a treat. The house, officially called the London Island Founder House, launched in March. Rowan Aldean, 26, who sold a previous company last year and now runs an applied AI startup, lives there with his wife Zahraa, 22, a forthcoming pharmaceutical research PhD candidate. Four other founders round out the current cohort, ranging from a brain-coaching entrepreneur to a tech strategist who…
Monday.com AI layoffs entered the industry’s lengthening ledger this week when the Tel Aviv-based work management software company disclosed it would cut just over 600 employees, roughly 20% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring tied to what it calls an ‘AI-driven growth strategy.’ The announcement, filed with the SEC, described a ‘leaner, more focused operating model’ and a reworked approach to product, marketing, and go-to-market operations. Co-founder Eran Zinman told employees in a LinkedIn memo that the move ‘was not made to reduce costs or replace people with AI,’ framing it instead as an adaptation to an AI-first…
A Kalshi Netflix cease-and-desist letter, sent on Friday, has put the prediction market platform on a collision course with one of the world’s largest streaming services, just days before a documentary about the industry is set to air. The target is a trailer for Instadocs: The Prediction Games, a fast-turnaround Netflix documentary scheduled for release on Sunday 27 July. The film features interviews with both Polymarket chief executive Shayne Coplan and Kalshi chief executive Tarek Mansour. A Screenshot, a Las Vegas Party, and a Court Order The trailer centres on a gathering in Las Vegas where traders who claim to…
A single downed power line exposed a deepening vulnerability in AI data center grid stability on 22 July, when more than 3.1 gigawatts of data centre load vanished from the PJM Interconnection in roughly 30 seconds, sending voltage surging from Northern Virginia to Chicago and causing lights to flicker across several states. The line had tripped in the Ashburn area, the heart of the world’s densest concentration of data centres. The grid would normally recover in seconds. This time, according to ElectronEconomics, it took more than 10 minutes to stabilise. The cause was not a utility switching off the facilities:…
The OpenAI Codex Micro keypad is a sturdy, frosted-keyed macro pad that costs $230, pairs with ChatGPT and its agentic coding tool Codex, and arrives at precisely the moment OpenAI’s hardware ambitions are attracting the most uncomfortable kind of attention. OpenAI built the device in partnership with Work Louder, a Montréal-based specialist in programmable mechanical macro pads. OpenAI describes it as a limited-run collaboration, and the product shipped with a Codex Icon Keyset containing 32 extra keycaps. The internal product identifier is kbd-1.0-codex-micro. The layout is straightforward enough: six frosted agent keys across the top, each assignable to a specific…
On 23 July 2026, Cognition announced that it had acquired The Interaction Company of California, the startup behind Poke, in a deal the two parties valued in the ‘low nine figures.’ The strategic logic is straightforward: Cognition acquires Poke not simply to expand its product range, but to transplant a personality into its enterprise coding agent Devin. Cognition Acquires Poke for Personality, Not Just Code Poke, which launched in March 2026, is an AI assistant users access through their messaging platform of choice: iMessage, SMS, Telegram, or, in certain markets, WhatsApp. It covers tasks across travel, health, finance, scheduling, and…
A Rivian IEEPA tariff refund lawsuit, filed on Thursday in the U.S. Court of International Trade, makes plain what the Supreme Court ruling alone did not settle: winning a constitutional argument does not automatically put money back in a company’s pocket. Rivian LLC and Rivian Automotive LLC, the two co-plaintiffs named in the nine-page complaint, are suing the U.S. government, U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP), and CBP commissioner Rodney Scott. Their lawyers, drawn from Chicago-based trade specialists Page Fura, P.C., want the court to declare the tariffs contrary to law, order a full refund with interest, and recover court…
AI guardrails designed to keep frontier models out of criminal hands are increasingly frustrating the cybersecurity researchers whose job is to break things first, and the pressure is now redirecting some of them toward unregulated foreign alternatives. The tension sharpened dramatically this summer when the U.S. Commerce Department issued an export-control directive targeting two of Anthropic’s newest models. Cloud Security Alliance documented that Anthropic launched Claude Fable 5 and Claude Mythos 5 on 9 June 2026, describing them at launch as the most capable models in the company’s history. Three days later, the restrictions arrived. According to Digital Applied, the…
Iranian hackers targeting ICS devices across America’s critical infrastructure have widened their list of victims beyond Rockwell Automation, with a CISA advisory updated on 22 July 2026 now naming Siemens and Schneider Electric hardware as active targets alongside the controllers first flagged in April. The advisory, originally published on 7 April 2026 and carrying the reference AA26-097A, is co-authored by eight agencies: CISA, the FBI, the NSA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Department of Energy, the Cyber National Mission Force, and, in a first for a cyber advisory of this type, the Department of the Treasury. Treasury’s inclusion reflects the…
