Gritt solar construction robots emerged from stealth this week with a $26 million Series A round, betting that AI-controlled machinery can solve one of the clean-energy transition’s least glamorous bottlenecks: finding enough hands to actually install the panels. The San Francisco-based startup, according to FinSMEs, was founded by two Carnegie Mellon-trained roboticists, CEO Puneet Puri and CTO Vishal Dugar. The Series A was led by Obvious Ventures, with Union Square Ventures and Active Impact Investment also participating. The round brings Gritt’s cumulative fundraising to either $34 million, as the company has stated, or $32.4 million, as Robotics & Automation News…
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 Anthropic copyright settlement worth $1.5 billion has cleared its final legal hurdle, with Judge Araceli Martinez-Olguin of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California signing off on Monday, formally closing a lawsuit that exposed one of the AI industry’s least flattering habits: training on books lifted from piracy sites. The case, formally captioned Bartz v. Anthropic, was originally filed in 2024 by authors Andrea Bartz, Charles Graeber, and Kirk Wallace Johnson, who accused Anthropic of using unauthorised copies of their books while developing its Claude AI models. Judge William Alsup granted preliminary approval in September 2025…
A federal judge has temporarily halted the Paramount-Warner Bros merger, handing an early victory to a coalition of twelve state attorneys general who argue the $110 billion deal would choke competition in film, television, and basic cable. The ruling came after California Attorney General Rob Bonta and his counterparts filed suit in federal court, despite the US Department of Justice having already cleared the transaction following an exhaustive eight-month review. Twelve States, One Federal Judge The lawsuit, case 4:26-cv-7116, was filed in the Northern District of California and names California, Arizona, Colorado, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Nevada, New Jersey, New Mexico,…
The Netflix InterPositive acquisition carried a price tag of approximately $587 million in cash, the streaming company confirmed in its most recent Form 10-Q filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). The figure puts a firm number on a deal that Netflix had announced in March without disclosing financial terms. InterPositive was co-founded by actor and director Ben Affleck, who launched the company in 2022 and kept it in stealth mode until the acquisition. According to Variety, its 16-person team comprised engineers, researchers and creatives working on AI tools aimed squarely at the editing suite rather than content generation…
The Uber Delivery Hero deal carries a headline figure of $14.8 billion and the ambition to double Uber’s delivery footprint overnight. But the more revealing story of the past week was playing out in a Washington, D.C. hearing room, where Uber and Waymo were squaring off over the rules that will govern the next era of autonomous vehicles. The two threads are connected. Uber is simultaneously trying to cement its position in food delivery and trying to limit how freely its robotaxi rivals can operate. Both are competitive moves, just fought on different terrain. Inside the Uber Delivery Hero Deal…
The Nolan AI Trojan horse analogy arrived with a laugh. Asked by French YouTuber Hugo Travers whether artificial intelligence might be a gift that conceals something darker, Christopher Nolan, director of the newly released The Odyssey, agreed, and then sharpened the metaphor. ‘I think AI is a Trojan horse that everybody knows the Greeks are inside,’ he said. ‘It’s a transparent horse, it’s made of glass.’ The remark landed as more than a clever soundbite. Nolan is president of the Directors Guild of America, which secured explicit AI protections in its 2023 three-year collective bargaining agreement with the Alliance of…
The Waymo San Francisco pause lasted roughly one hour on Saturday morning, a precautionary shutdown triggered by a SFGate-reported power outage that cut electricity to northwest neighbourhoods including the Presidio, Golden Gate Park, and the Richmond District at about 9:52 a.m. The Alphabet-owned robotaxi company told riders that service was ‘temporarily paused’ and that ‘freeway routes are unavailable.’ A spokesperson later confirmed the full picture: the company ‘decided to pause service for approx. one hour to assess the scale of the power outage affecting a large portion of San Francisco and coordinate with local officials.’ A Larger Outage Than First…
The US EV market retreat is broader, and moving faster, than any single discontinued model can capture. Honda’s confirmation that the Prologue is going out of production is the most recent entry on a list that now spans Japanese, Korean, Swedish, and German automakers, all pulling back from American showrooms for overlapping but distinct reasons: federal tax credit expiry, Chinese-linked technology bans, import tariffs, and a platform strategy that has simply moved on. Honda Prologue: From Promising Numbers to Free Fall The Prologue had genuine commercial momentum before the bottom fell out. Honda sold roughly 33,000 units in 2024 and…
EV fast charging reliability has quietly undergone one of the more credible turnarounds in consumer technology, and a 600-mile round trip to Montreal this summer put that improvement to the test. The result was near-flawless: three charging stops, roughly 20 minutes each, zero queues, and a single app hiccup at a station just outside the city. Three years ago, the same driver made a shorter trip, about 350 miles to Maine and back, in the same Audi e-tron. That experience required three calls to customer service, two broken stalls, and a charging session that refused to end properly before a…
Neil Rimer’s AI redistribution warning landed in Athens, not Sand Hill Road. Sitting at a tech festival in the Greek capital in late May, the co-founder of Index Ventures told a reporter he has ‘a strong sense that there will be some sort of a redistribution’ of the wealth piling up around artificial intelligence. ‘It’ll either be voluntary or it’ll be involuntary, but it’ll happen, and I hope it’s voluntary,’ he said, adding that tech leaders ‘can play a leading role in seeing that through.’From most mouths in venture capital, that would be unremarkable. From Rimer, whose firm has raised…
