ComputerWorld AI·
Venture funding of AI companies in 2026 will easily smash funding records set in 2025, with some heavy deals already consummated in the first quarter, according to market researchers. Data from Crunchbase shows that $300 billion poured into 6,000 startups worldwide during the first quarter of 2026. That’s a quarterly record for venture funding in AI companies, a Crunchbase news report said. A study from S&P Global measured generative AI funding reaching over $140 billion in the first quarter of 2026, outpacing all of 2025, according to a story published on the company’s website. Amid economic concerns, inflation, and the war in Iran, there were fewer deals overall, but the funding rounds were large in scope compared to any made in 2025. X.AI, for example, kicked off 2026 with a series-E round of $20 billion. OpenAI received $122 billion in a massive funding round in March, with a valuation of $852 billion. Anthropic received $30 billion in one round of funding that valued the company a
Read full articleCrunchbase News interviews Kevin Tsang, managing director of Amex Ventures, about the firm’s investment thesis, the kinds of startups it aims to back, and how it works with founders to build and scale projects with a vision toward becoming a "global agentic concierge."
The deal, announced last November, would have seen Perplexity's AI search engine integrated directly into Snapchat.
Agencies are reevaluating technology deployments with an eye toward future savings and more flexibility, expecting more funding and business shifts in 2026.
Discover the top search and fetch APIs for AI agents in 2026. Compare tools like TinyFish, Tavily, and Firecrawl based on latency, token efficiency, and free tiers to optimize your agent's web retrieval. The post Top Search and Fetch APIs for Building AI Agents in 2026: Tools, Tradeoffs, and Free Tiers appeared first on MarkTechPost.
One scale parameter determines accuracy in rotation-based vector quantization. The post How a 2021 Quantization Algorithm Quietly Outperforms Its 2026 Successor appeared first on Towards Data Science.
Artificial intelligence unicorns are multiplying fast, and not all of them deserve the attention they get. This guide covers the most valuable private AI companies of 2026, what they actually build, who is paying for it, and what separates genuine commercial value from inflated numbers.
Large U.S. venture deals this week were led by a massive defense tech raise for space security startup True Anomaly. We also saw sizable deals for startups applying AI to fintech, marketing, customer service, health care and developer tools.
In 2025, the Bay Area expanded its dominance of U.S. seed funding — capturing a growing share of both deals and dollars — even as most startups remained geographically dispersed, an analysis of Crunchbase data shows, resulting in a more bifurcated landscape.
