U.S. venture capital deal value hit $412.7 billion in the first half of 2026, nearly 30% more than investors put to work in all of last year — and a small cluster of giant artificial intelligence rounds accounted for almost the entire jump. That’s according to the second-quarter PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor report released Wednesday night. Artificial ...

Federal contracting software startup Arkenstone Defense Inc. formally launched today with $35 million in new funding to take on the compliance, security and workforce setup that keeps many commercial technology companies out of the federal market. The company sells a managed platform that handles the back-office work a startup must complete before it can win ...

Artificial intelligence optimization startup Refiant Inc. today launched Protea, a suite of long-context AI models led by a 10 million-token context window that the company says ranks among the largest ever made publicly available. Context windows determine how much information a model can hold in working memory at once. Most leading models handle no more ...

Supply chain artificial intelligence startup DeepFabric today announced the general availability of an AI agent platform built for supply chain execution, and a roster of enterprise customers is already running it in production. The company’s platform drops specialized agents into a business’ operational workflows to recover margin, cut operating costs and speed up customer response. ...

Entire Inc., the developer-platform startup founded by former GitHub Chief Executive Thomas Dohmke, today launched a preview of a distributed Git network built to let artificial intelligence coding agents clone and push code without running into the rate limits of centralized hosting. The preview is open by waitlist, with active regions in the U.S., European ...

Amazon.com Inc. is back in the bond market, this time to raise at least $25 billion for its artificial intelligence buildout, according to Bloomberg. The offering is split into eight parts, senior unsecured notes with maturities running anywhere from three years to 40. Most carry a fixed interest rate, though some float. Amazon has tagged ...

Researchers at artificial intelligence security company Noma Security Inc. today disclosed a critical prompt injection vulnerability in GitHub Inc.’s new Agentic Workflows feature that allowed an unauthenticated attacker to siphon data from private code repositories by posting a single crafted issue in a public one. Named GitLost, the vulnerability was found by Noma Labs, the ...

Cybersecurity validation startup Picus Security Inc. today launched the Picus Autonomous Exposure Validation Platform, a system that merges breach and attack simulation, autonomous penetration testing and exposure validation into a single automated loop. The platform is aimed at a question security teams struggle to answer when a critical vulnerability drops: Can this actually be exploited against ...

Autonomous security company Assail Inc. today launched Sidewinder, a rebuilt version of its Ares offensive security platform that runs on a new 31 billion-parameter model designed to audit its own findings and repair its own mistakes without human intervention. Sidewinder is a full second-generation redesign of Ares, which Assail introduced in January, with a new ...

CyberProof Inc., a co-managed security services company owned by UST Global Inc., today launched an agentic artificial intelligence service that it says can autonomously handle up to two-thirds of security investigations while leaving human analysts in control of critical decisions. The service, called CyberProof Agentic MXDR, is a form of managed extended detection and response ...