All Stories — Page 81
Every story published on RuntimeWire, newest first.
- Leak: OpenAI Pushed GPT-5.6 to July as DeepMind Holds Gemini 3.5 Pro
The claims are unconfirmed, but they land as official docs show no GPT-5.6 listing and Google has already missed its June target for 3.5 Pro.
- Sequoia and Founders Fund back Stark Defence at 3.5B-euro valuation, Bloomberg says
Bloomberg reports the German loitering‑munitions maker is valued at 3.5 billion euros after new backing from Sequoia and Founders Fund.
- Daniel Lyons ships Treedocs 0.2.0 to make repo maps fail when they go stale
The Swift CLI keeps a version-controlled treedocs.yaml file in sync with a codebase, with hooks for reviews, CI, and coding agents.
- Yinka Ogunbiyi's HaloBraid raises $7M to bring robotics into the braid salon
Seven Seven Six led the seed round for a salon assistant that starts with the stylist instead of trying to replace her.
- Fika Jobs raises $4M for AI video interviews that try to get past the resume
The Stockholm company is betting that candidates should keep live video profiles that employers can browse before a role opens.
- Cadence raises $100 million to make AI chronic care pay like infrastructure
Chris Altchek's second act has a $1.2 billion valuation, but the harder test is proving Medicare savings at health-system scale.
- France orders 5,000 Harmattan AI drones as Dassault's startup bet moves into volume
Reuters reported the order less than six months after Dassault Aviation led Harmattan AI's $200 million Series B.
- Firefly Aerospace's $110M EXIM loan would put Jason Kim's moon factory inside U.S. industrial policy
The expected loan would fund Texas spacecraft production after Firefly turned Blue Ghost into a credible lunar manufacturing story.
- ByteDance Confirms Seedance 2.5 for Early July With 30-Second AI Video
ByteDance has confirmed Seedance 2.5 as the model name and is pointing to an early July launch, with longer single-shot output, expanded reference capacity, and tighter editing controls.
- Moderne brings its AI code migration pitch to OSFF London
Jonathan Schneider and Olga Kundzich are selling deterministic code change to finance, where AI-generated diffs alone are not enough.
- University of Michigan researchers release AFUN for robot affordance understanding
The University of Michigan-led model pairs affordance masks with 3D motion curves, but its public repo is still inference-only.
- RJ Scaringe's R2 test starts at the high end, not the $44,990 Rivian headline price
Rivian's first R2 customer vehicles are $57,990 Performance Launch Package SUVs, with the base rear-wheel-drive Standard trim expected in summer 2027.
- Inside Flyer, the Air Force's new AI supercomputer at Wright-Patterson
Flyer pairs AMD CPUs with Nvidia H100 and L40 GPUs for secure defense modeling, AI workloads and hypersonics research.
- Z.ai's GLM-5.2 tops open-weight models on Artificial Analysis work benchmark
The open-weight model scored 1524 Elo on GDPval-AA, putting it near proprietary frontier systems on agentic knowledge-work tasks.
- Unsloth makes Z.ai's giant GLM-5.2 model runnable on local hardware
Daniel and Michael Han's open-source AI tooling startup is turning model compression into a distribution layer for frontier-scale open models.
- NVIDIA says AI data centers can cut water use with warmer liquid cooling
The chipmaker is trying to reframe the water backlash as a cooling-architecture problem, not a hard limit on AI buildout.
- Robot.com Turns Its Delivery Robot Base Toward Workplace Humanoids
Felipe Chavez is using Kiwibot's deployment muscle to sell R-noid into restaurants, logistics sites and healthcare, with early autonomy still limited.
- Groq raises $650M for life after Ross and Nvidia
Adam Winter is taking Groq deeper into AI inference cloud after Nvidia licensed its LPU technology and hired away its founding CEO.
- Mr. Beast hires Pietra's Ronak Trivedi for Beast Industries' creator platform push
The move gives Beast Industries marketplace talent as Donaldson tries to turn creator sponsorships into a software business.
- Spiro adds $55 million from NewTrails as it pushes Africa EV network toward unicorn scale
The follow-on check lifts Spiro's June equity round to $270 million, but the valuation behind the unicorn claim remains undisclosed.
- Dino Mavrookas's Saronic leads an $18.8B robotics funding rush
Crunchbase says robotics startups have already topped 2025 funding, with maritime autonomy, humanoids and industrial robots pulling the biggest checks.
- Ocado's board is testing a founder handoff after 26 years under Tim Steiner
Sky News says Vonage CEO Niklas Heuveldop has been sounded out for Ocado's top job, but no appointment has been confirmed.
- Aadeel Akhtar's PSYONIC turns a bionic hand into robotics data infrastructure
The San Diego prosthetics company is using human Ability Hand data with NVIDIA Isaac Lab and ABB's GoFa cobot.
- Ethan Thornton is making Mach Industries' sprawl the strategy
Mach's 22-year-old founder is running six weapons programs, a rocket-motor unit and a Navy aircraft bet before any system reaches full-rate production.