All Stories — Page 31
Every story published on RuntimeWire, newest first.
- NYC Council puts OpenAI and rivals under oath at AI safety hearing
The October 5th hearing brings representatives of OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Meta before all 51 Council members, alongside whistleblowers including former Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon. OpenAI sent the Council a letter last Thursday recommending safeguards ahead of the hearing.
- SecondSight closes Series A to take its insurance AI beyond cyber
SecondSight named former Ryan Financial Lines CEO Jamie Bouloux president as it broadens SHAPE beyond cyber; the announcement did not disclose the round size.
- ELISA adds 390-plus stress tests and token-level code history to Linux safety work
ELISA is bringing Cregit and stress-ng into its community as it works on shared tools and evidence for safety-critical Linux systems.
- Volvo and Waabi put a supervised autonomous truck into Warp's Texas freight network
The Dallas-Houston operation carries customer freight to third-party facilities, with an observer still in the driver's seat.
- Casa brings its $199 home-care service to Austin with free donation pickups
Casa's Austin launch pairs its $199 monthly membership, which includes 1.5 handyman hours, with a free October 9th pickup drive for Austin Pets Alive! Thrift.
- RobCo crosses $1B as its CEO moves to the US to scale factory robotics
RobCo paired a reported $40M employee share sale with new investment as it prepares to launch its two-armed Alfie robot in March 2027.
- Y Combinator's cold-email advice for startup sales
Nick Abraham's October 4th X thread points founders to YC guidance on outreach, a subject tied to the lead-generation agency and software tools he has built.
- SignSplit secures a $400M strategic seed commitment at a $1B valuation
CEO Alessandro Monterosso brings lessons from clinical-data startup PatchAi to SignSplit's consented-data platform. Its $400M commitment includes capital and a multi-year package of strategic resources.
- Instinct's unsolicited shopping tips put Noah Shinn's commission model to the test
Instinct users described recommendations tied to earlier conversations; the messages were not labeled as ads, and no evidence shows they generated commissions.
- Clockwork raises $31M as LinkedIn deploys LinkPass across its AI infrastructure
Clockwork.io CEO Suresh Vasudevan says a conversation with co-founder Balaji Prabhakar drew him back to startups; Together AI is commercializing TorchPass on its GPU clusters.
- DaVinci Commerce adds a product-memory layer for AI shopping agents
The expansion, which the company says became available on October 1st, builds on founder Diaz Nesamoney's decades in enterprise data and personalized advertising.
- Namespace raises $42M to build infrastructure for AI coding agents
Scale Venture Partners led the round, about six and a half months after Namespace announced $23M in combined seed and Series A funding.
- ElevenLabs customer alleges unauthorized account use drove a $39,000 usage spike
JayJay P. says two separate company accounts showed abnormal activity, including one that typically spent $100-$200 a month.
- Waymo reportedly tests SFO terminal drop-offs under a staged airport permit
Waymo's rider instructions still direct SFO customers to the Rental Car Center or Grand Hyatt, both reached from the terminals by AirTrain.
- Safeworld raises $12M-plus to test whether robots can work safely around people
CMU safety researcher Ding Zhao, repeat founder Kyle Wong and engineer Simo Rachidi are building simulation tools for the risks robots encounter on real jobsites.
- Keyfactor adds Matt Cohen to its board as its $1B-plus investment closes
The former CyberArk CEO joins as Keyfactor closes Summit Partners' $1B-plus investment and prepares for its next phase of growth.
- Brett Adcock's $39B Figure valuation still outruns its robot deployments
A Forbes profile traces how Adcock has financed ambitious businesses before their products reached broad use. Figure's factory work and home-robot research remain early against a $39 billion valuation.
- Campfire's agent-built Rust port tests whether Ruby's readability still pays
David Heinemeier Hansson says Ruby remains his choice for hand-written code; 37signals' October benchmarks show what its Rust port gains on a test machine.
- Hark says its first 100,000 sign-ups get the paid plan free
Founder Brett Adcock says Hark will launch this week, following an August preview of its browser-using AI agent, Handoff.
- Startup Spotlight: Truli turns supplement-labeling headaches into AI compliance software
Catherine Zhou says a failed attempt to make an iron gummy exposed the regulatory work behind food and supplement claims; Truli's tools were already launching in 2025.
- RuntimeWire ranks nine AI models on news research, summaries and writing
GPT-6.1 Sol Pro leads the equal-weight index, which combines three task suites with samples ranging from 50 to 100 tasks.
- Claude Opus 5.5 Tops Mazur Constrained Story Writing Benchmark
Anthropic’s Claude Opus 5.5 scored 1.00 on the 50-task sample at $0.0242 per task. OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and GPT-6.1 Sol Pro tied for second at 0.99, with Sol Pro costing $0.0121 per task.
- Reflection prepares its first open-weight model for enterprise AI
Reflection AI CEO Misha Laskin is preparing its first open-weight model for customer-controlled AI systems, backed by compute agreements with SpaceX and Nebius and a planned South Korean data center.
- Startup Spotlight: Omnara moved from remote coding to open-source agent infrastructure
Omnara's January 28th, 2026 post treats its remote-coding app as history and describes the managed-agent platform it now offers; the exact transition date remains unknown.