Company
Menlo Ventures is a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California, investing in technology startups across sectors including AI, software, and fintech.
Elorian, a Palo Alto startup that raised a $55 million seed round, released Glimpse, a model that crops, zooms and runs code on images while it reasons. Elorian's own evaluations put it ahead of GPT-6 Astra on scientific charts and short video captions.
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Nous Research raised $90 million at a $1.5 billion valuation to sell its open-source Hermes agent to corporate IT departments. The money pays for single sign-on and audit controls, so the price depends on companies paying for features around code anyone may copy.
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Venture-backed AI companies bought 195 AI startups through Sept. 29, Crunchbase data shows, 14% more than all of 2025, while buyers rose just 2%. The same companies are buying more often, so sellers face a pool of acquirers that has barely grown.
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Salesforce agreed to pay about $2 billion for Listen Labs, roughly 67 times the AI interview startup's $30 million in annualized revenue. The price holds up only if selling those real-customer interviews through Salesforce's clouds lifts that revenue several times over.
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Armadin, the AI attack-testing startup run by Mandiant founder Kevin Mandia, raised $255.5 million at a valuation above $2.5 billion. Investors are betting that always-on AI agents will take over the budget companies now spend on periodic penetration tests.
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Salesforce agreed to buy AI interview startup Listen Labs at a reported $2 billion, about 67 times its estimated revenue. Salesforce says the data will give its agents context, without saying how Listen's simulated customer answers are checked against real ones.
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Meta has released seven new apps so far in 2026, betting that AI makes shipping easier and that its recommendation systems can scale the ones people want. What Meta now has to ration is the in-house promotion that grew Threads, and the harder call is which launches to close.
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Gimlet Labs plans 100 MW of Cerebras-powered inference capacity, pairing wafer-scale chips with GPUs for different phases of each request. For buyers, the quoted 3,000 tokens per second is a company target until measured results appear.
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A payments company is paying roughly 140 times annualised revenue for the switchboard that decides which model your code calls. The anti-lock-in pitch is now the lock-in.
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Mercury 2.5's diffusion decoder refines many token positions at once, which is why its headline throughput moves with batch size, output length and the reasoning setting Inception ships as an adjustable knob.
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The Series C funds a 28-billion-parameter model trained on more than 100 billion genes. Two of the partners who helped assemble that dataset, Nvidia and Anthropic's joint fund, are also in the round.
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The company says the money will train the next generation of its EDEN models. The published evidence so far is one January bioRxiv preprint, co-authored with Nvidia, whose venture arm also put money into the round.
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Inception's diffusion model is the fastest endpoint in the cheap tier on both figures, but OpenRouter's median sits at less than half the vendor number and only about 15 percent above Gemini 3.5 Flash-Lite's measured 382 tok/s.
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Mecka AI pays people to wear sensors while they make coffee or fix cars, and two people told TechCrunch that Sequoia is leading a round at about $500 million, three months after a $60 million round. The terms are not final.
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Salesforce is reportedly talking to Listen Labs at $2bn, four times the startup's valuation eight months ago and 67 times its $30m of annualised revenue. The seller's refusal of a signed round looks well timed.
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Crunchbase counted 29 additions to its unicorn board in August, worth about $63bn, and across the nine AI, software and semiconductor entrants with disclosed terms, every dollar of new cash set roughly eight dollars of paper.
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Listen Labs walked away from a signed $125m round at $1.5bn, which on the numbers leaves its existing holders about 45 per cent better off if the Salesforce talks close. Its smaller rival still carries the richer multiple.
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Twenty-one of those 81 carry the number while still private, so the comps a Series A gets underwritten against are marks rather than distributions, and the arithmetic that produced four is sensitive to one ownership input.
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Fast Company reports that Pangram beats rival detectors in independent testing, without naming an error rate, and Substack, NewsGuard and an exam platform are already running it on writing whose authors never opted in.
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Venture investors told Business Insider that ARR at AI startups now spans signed contracts, token usage and one strong month, which leaves the buyer to supply the definition before the number can be compared.
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