Perceptron visual AI is moving from the research lab to the warehouse, as the startup co-founded by two former Meta Fundamental AI Research scientists launches its latest model for industrial robots and reveals a broader product portfolio than its public debut suggested. Isaac 0.5 and the Industrial Automation Play The company, which was founded in November 2024, unveiled Isaac 0.5 this week: a vision model designed to help robots ‘perceive, reason and act’ in industrial settings such as warehouses and factory floors. The model is being released as an open-weight system, meaning its parameters and training materials are publicly inspectable.…
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.
The Runable Series A funding, announced on 25 August 2026, puts $21 million behind a proposition that may sound obvious once you hear it: building a website is the easy part. Finding customers is the hard part. The Bengaluru-based startup wants to be the tool that does both. The round was co-led by Nexus Venture Partners and Susquehanna Venture Capital, with existing backers Together Fund and Array VC also participating. The all-equity, primary funding valued Runable at $65 million post-money, according to co-founder and CEO Umesh Kumar. Inside the Runable Series A Funding Round Kumar and co-founder Saksham Sarda did…
The final number was bigger than the target. Ventures Platform’s Fund II has closed at $84 million, according to the firm’s own announcement, exceeding an original target of $75 million, oversubscribed and registered as a closed-ended collective investment scheme under the Guernsey Financial Services Commission. The wire figure of $83 million, which circulated at the time of the announcement, has since been superseded by the firm’s official close disclosure. Ventures Platform Fund II marks a structural expansion for the Lagos-headquartered firm, both in capital and in mandate. Where its $46 million Fund I, raised in 2022, concentrated on pre-seed and…
Ringg AI voice agents now handle 20 million call attempts a month in India, and the startup has just secured a $10 million extension to its Series A from Peak XV Partners to push into territory that feels considerably harder than a loan-collection bot. The new capital brings the total Series A to $15.5 million. The first close of $5.5 million, announced on the Ringg AI company blog, was led by Arkam Ventures, with Groww Founder Fund, Kunal Shah, Whitecap Ventures, and Capital2B also participating. Peak XV Partners, the fully independent firm that spun out of Sequoia India and Southeast…
SpaceX Starbase Louisiana is the company’s biggest infrastructure wager yet: a $100 billion spaceport on the Gulf Coast of Vermilion Parish, built on a former Exxon property roughly ten hours from its existing complex in South Texas. SpaceX says construction begins in 2027 and the first Starship launch will follow in 2029, though Louisiana Economic Development (LED) puts initial operations a year later, in 2030. The gap between those two dates is telling in itself. SpaceX has yet to complete a single Starship flight that returns both the booster and the upper stage to the launch pad, the minimum threshold…
Breaking ground on a 225,000-square-foot campus in Albuquerque, Pacific Fusion has set its Pacific Fusion net facility gain ambition in concrete: a working demonstration system that consumes no more energy than it produces, targeted for 2030.’It’s a huge step forward for commercial fusion power,’ said Carrie von Muench, co-founder and chief operating officer. ‘To our knowledge, there’s no such facility being constructed in the country.’What the Albuquerque Campus Is Actually Built to DoThe new facility, situated at Mesa del Sol, will test Pacific Fusion’s pulsed-power approach to fusion: tightly coordinated bursts of electricity create a magnetic field around a fuel…
The debasement trade returns to Wall Street with fresh urgency, driven by a confluence of soaring long-dated Treasury yields, a weakening dollar, and a Treasury Department that has quietly expanded its bond buyback programme in ways the market is only beginning to price. Gold touched three-month highs on Monday, capping a fifth consecutive weekly gain and putting August on course for its biggest monthly rise since 1999. Bitcoin added 2% on the same day, reaching its highest level since May, after surging 22% across three days last week, its largest such rally since 2023. Overnight Tuesday, the cryptocurrency briefly touched…
The Airbound drone delivery network ambitions now extend well beyond a single hospital corridor: the Bengaluru-based startup has closed a $37 million Series A and signed a formal agreement to build a three-city aerial logistics system across the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, targeting 10,000 flights a day within one year of launch. The round was led by Greenoaks, with participation from DoorDash, Lachy Groom, Lightspeed, and Humba Ventures. It follows an $8.65 million seed round announced in October 2025, which Groom led alongside Humba Ventures and Lightspeed, and which also drew investment from senior leaders at Tesla, SpaceX, and…
The GLD call spread trade that electrified the gold options market on Monday morning was not, it turns out, a new bearish position. A correction appended to the original report clarifies that the trader was selling out of an existing holding in 420-strike calls and rolling into 430-strike calls as a replacement position. The mechanics, at least, are not in dispute. Twenty minutes after the open, someone sold almost 116,000 September 18-expiry calls at the 420 strike in the SPDR Gold Shares ETF (GLD), collecting $202 million in premium. The same trader immediately bought an equal number of 430-strike calls…
The 30-year real yield has become the number that market participants cannot stop arguing about. According to FRED, the Federal Reserve’s economic data service, the 30-year inflation-indexed Treasury constant maturity yield hit 3.06% on 17 August 2026, before easing slightly to 2.95% on 20 August. The textbook says a real yield at that level should act as a brake on growth and compress equity valuations. The argument about whether it is actually doing so is now consuming the attention of anyone who manages money for a living. What the 30-Year Real Yield Is Actually Signalling The nominal side of the…
