The reported Nvidia Hugging Face acquisition has moved beyond rumour and into the realm of near-certainty, with The Information citing a source familiar with the matter to report an agreed price of $12.9 billion. Business Insider, which broke news of the takeover interest at the weekend, added a note of caution: talks valuing the company at more than $13 billion had not yet produced a signed agreement and could still fall apart. Neither Nvidia nor Hugging Face responded to requests for comment, though Nvidia’s silence carries its own weight: the company has a history of moving quickly to correct reports…
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 Instinct AI assistant has closed a $250 million Series B round that brings its total funding to $350 million and its valuation to $2.5 billion, an ascent that has unfolded over months and left the startup’s privacy practices under scrutiny as fast as its funding. The round was co-led by Index Ventures and Benchmark, with Kleiner Perkins joining alongside earlier backers Conviction Partners and Greenoaks, according to Yahoo Finance. The speed of the raise is striking by any measure: TechFundingNews reports the company’s valuation climbed from $50 million to $2.5 billion within a matter of months. Behind the funding…
Las Vegas Sands shares are trading at a forward earnings multiple of 14 times, barely above a 10-year low, while one-month implied volatility sits at roughly 28% against a five-year average of around 39%. For options trader Mike Khouw of Tidal Financial Group, that combination of a cheap stock and cheap options is the setup worth watching. The thesis starts with the valuation. LVS trades on a 14x forward multiple, near the bottom of its own historical range and just above the 10-year floor of 13x. That multiple, Khouw argues, reflects only the existing Macau and Singapore businesses, with no…
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.…
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…
