See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from Sept. 7–11.
The post AI Agents, Foldables, Cyberthreats, and Chip Deals Define This Week in Tech appeared first on TechRepublic.
See what you missed in Daily Tech Insider from Sept. 7–11.
The post AI Agents, Foldables, Cyberthreats, and Chip Deals Define This Week in Tech appeared first on TechRepublic.
NLM Photonics, a Seattle-based chip materials startup and University of Washington spinout, announced two new investors: Pangaea Ventures and Diamond Edge Ventures, the investment arm of Mitsubishi Chemical Corp.
They joined as part of a funding round that totals $13 million, according to a Form D filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission. NLM has reported at least $26 million in funding since 2018, according to SEC filings.
The company offers a way to move more data without burning more power. Inside a data center, information travels between chips and servers as pulses of light. The part that puts the data onto the light beam, called a modulator, is normally made of silicon. It limits how much data a link can carry, and how much power that takes.
NLM’s technology, sold under the name Selerion, is an organic electro-optic material that goes on as a liquid and hardens in place on the chip, taking over the modulator’s job from the silicon underneath. The company says it does the work 10 to 15 times more efficiently.
Applications for the technology include fiber-optic networking equipment and the links between servers in AI data centers. NLM says it could also be used in quantum computing.
Five existing investors participated in the round, which the company described as a Series A2: Emerald Technology Ventures, Oregon Venture Fund, Idemitsu, Tokyo Ohka Kogyo and StoryHouse Ventures. Private investors and company employees also took part.
Pangaea Ventures, which has offices in Canada, the United States and Japan, backs startups built on advances in materials, chemistry and biology. It says it has invested in more than 40 companies over more than 20 years. David Weekes of Pangaea is joining NLM’s board, which already includes Frank Balas of Emerald.
Diamond Edge Ventures, led by president Curtis Schickner, has $200 million to invest through 2030. It backs companies in Mitsubishi Chemical’s core markets, including advanced materials, polymers and electronics, and its portfolio includes Boston Materials, DigiLens and Eridan.
Hamamatsu Photonics, which invested previously, is not part of this round but is still a shareholder, according to the company.
The company was incorporated in 2018 as Nonlinear Materials Corp. It licensed its patents from the University of Washington, building on 25 years of research there in the labs of chemists Larry Dalton and Bruce Robinson. Robinson is one of the company’s co-founders, as is Lewis Johnson, a longtime UW researcher who is chief technology officer.
Pack Ventures, the UW-affiliated venture fund, is an investor in NLM and is also listed among the advisors to its board.
GeekWire covered NLM’s launch in 2019, when the company was raising a $1.25 million seed round and running a small production lab on campus.
Brad Booth, who spent nine years at Microsoft and joined NLM’s board in 2023, took over as CEO in 2024 from co-founder Gerard Zytnicki, who is now a corporate advisor to the company. The company raised $1 million from Tokyo Ohka Kogyo and Hamamatsu in 2023.
Last year NLM said outside testing confirmed that a 1.6-terabit chip combining silicon with its materials ran at 224 gigabits per second on each of eight channels. It started sending samples of 1.6- and 3.2-terabit chips to customers in March.
NLM is not alone in trying to build a better modulator. Lightwave Logic, a publicly traded Colorado company also working with organic materials, named NLM among its smaller competitors in its annual report for 2024.
Some of the company’s rivals have raised a significant amount of funding. HyperLight, a Harvard spinout that uses a crystal called lithium niobate instead of an organic material, has raised $117 million, including $80 million in June led by MediaTek.
NLM has worked to get its materials onto other companies’ production lines. In March the company said the chips going out to customers were made at GlobalFoundries, and that it had built modulators using Tower Semiconductor’s high-volume silicon photonics process.
The company will increase its US market presence and will expand its engineering and go-to-market teams.
The post HelmGuard Raises $7.3 Million for Agentic GRC and Security appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Late last week, word started leaking that the National Institutes of Health (NIH) had reached an agreement with the Department of Defense that would see part of the NIH's budget used to fund research at the Department of Defense. So, on the Friday just prior to a US holiday weekend, the Department of Defense released a copy of the agreement and confirmed that it had been signed roughly a month earlier. The move is striking for a number of reasons, ranging from the existing budget disparities between the two parties involved to the fact that the money would be used for projects that the current NIH leadership has explicitly rejected.
The agreement itself sets up a system where the NIH would transfer money to the Department of Defense to fund staff and projects that would "support the advanced development of medical countermeasures against pandemic influenza, chemical, biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) threats, and emerging infectious diseases." The money would come out of the budget for the NIH's National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, or NIAID, to which Congress has allocated $6.6 billion in 2026. The agreement is set to run for a decade.
Left unspecified is just how much of the NIAID budget will be spent on Defense projects. Reporting by Nature suggests that the Department of Defense was looking for up to a third of its total budget but was being told to settle for about 10 percent. There's obviously an enormous disparity between the budgets of these two agencies, given that the 2026 Defense budget is roughly $1 trillion. That budget is under considerable strain, however, due to the open-ended nature of the conflict with Iran. The deal has also been announced at a time when the NIH has been struggling to issue sufficient grants to use the money that Congress allocated to it.
© Artem Onoprienko
The startup founded by Palo Alto Networks’ Nir Zuk has raised $290 million to build an AI-native security platform for highly regulated organizations that cannot rely on the public cloud.
The post Cylake Raises $245 Million Ahead of Cybersecurity Platform Beta appeared first on SecurityWeek.
The US-Europe investment gap is growing as AI drives American venture capital. Discover why Europe is falling behind and what tech leaders must do.
The post US-Europe Investment Gap Widens Due to AI Surge appeared first on TechRepublic.
The US-Europe investment gap is growing as AI drives American venture capital. Discover why Europe is falling behind and what tech leaders must do.
The post US-Europe Investment Gap Widens Due to AI Surge appeared first on TechRepublic.
Stoke Space says it has raised roughly $1 billion to get ready for the first launch of its fully reusable Nova rocket — and to scale up the rocket’s design for even bigger payloads.
To accommodate its grander ambitions, the Kent, Wash.-based startup is also scaling up its rocket test facility in Moses Lake, 175 miles to the east.
“We have confidence in the foundation that we’ve laid today, and now it’s time to scale,” Stoke Space CEO and co-founder Andy Lapsa told GeekWire.
The newly announced Series E financing round was co-led by Point72 Ventures and Spark Capital, with participation from General Innovation, Glade Brook Capital, US Innovation Technology, Washington Harbour Partners, Woven Capital, Y Combinator and other investors.
The final figure will be “within rounding error” of a billion dollars, Lapsa said. “Not quite, or a little more,” he said. “The speed with which this has come together is very fast.”
Lapsa said that scaling up the Nova rocket’s design was always part of Stoke Space’s game plan, but that the timeline is being accelerated in response to the growing demand for launches and the shrinking availability of launch opportunities.
The timing of Stoke’s pivot to a bigger launch vehicle wasn’t sparked by a single event, Lapsa said. “The pressure has been growing over the last couple of years,” he said. “It certainly hasn’t slowed down recently.”
The revised plan calls for Stoke to begin launching missions with the initially designed rocket, now known as Nova Pathfinder. Pathfinder’s first stage will be powered by seven of Stoke’s Zenith engines, and the upper stage’s Andromeda engine will have a ring of 24 thrust chambers integrated into an actively cooled metallic heat shield. The rocket will be capable of putting 3 metric tons of payload into low Earth orbit, or LEO.
Pathfinder’s first launch is now scheduled for early 2027 — a slight slip from earlier expectations. It will carry a spacecraft for AstroForge, a California-based asteroid mining company. “We’re going out to the asteroid belt, and yeah, Astroforge is our partner for that one,” Lapsa said. “They’re looking to prospect and ultimately mine asteroids, and bring back rare earths and other important materials.”
The super-sized version of Stoke’s rocket, known as Nova Block 2, is due to make its debut in 2029. Its first stage will have twice as many Zenith engines as Pathfinder. Its upper stage will have 12 independent engines, each with two thrust chambers. That will increase Nova’s lift capability by a factor of five, enabling up to 15 metric tons of payload to be delivered to LEO. More than 4 tons can be sent to geosynchronous transfer orbit, or GTO.
In comparison, SpaceX says its partially reusable Falcon 9 rocket can deliver 18.5 tons to LEO or 5.5 tons to GTO in reusable mode.
Both versions of the Nova rocket are designed to be fully reusable, with the first-stage booster flying itself down to a recovery ship and the upper stage making a separate re-entry. Stoke is only the second company in the space industry to pursue that strategy. SpaceX has designed its Starship launch system for dual-stage reusability but hasn’t yet reached that goal.
Stoke is developing an active-cooling system for upper-stage reusability. Some of the rocket’s cryogenically cooled liquid hydrogen propellant is circulated through channels in the upper stage’s metallic heat shield to absorb the intense heat of atmospheric re-entry. SpaceX has been experimenting with different heat shield strategies for Starship, but some experts have expressed doubts about SpaceX’s approach.
Both versions of Stoke’s rocket are designed to fill a market niche that’s different from Starship’s. The Nova rockets’ capabilities fall close to both ends of the medium-lift spectrum, while SpaceX’s super-heavy-lift Starship is designed to loft 100 to 150 tons of payload to LEO.
Stoke Space’s 168,000-square-foot factory and headquarters facility in Kent was designed from the beginning to manufacture rockets that are bigger than Nova Pathfinder.
“We bring in raw sheet metal, we build our core and we ship a rocket,” Lapsa said. “We can use the same methods and effectively the same tooling to build larger diameters and larger lengths, and that’s very intentional.”
The company’s rocket test facility in Moses Lake is being expanded from 75 to 550 acres to accommodate work on two types of rockets simultaneously.
“We’ve done, I would say, an extremely efficient job at leveraging the 75 acres that we use today,” Lapsa said. “The expansion across the street is going to enable us to test again at rate. … Certain of our facilities have an overlapping blast radius, so they interfere with each other. A big advantage of being able to spread our wings a little bit, and get a little bit more space, is that those test stands can operate in full independence of each other.”
Stoke’s launch facilities at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida can also accommodate a dual-track approach. A new payload processing facility at the Cape is intentionally sized to support both Nova Pathfinder and Block 2.
In June, Stoke Space’s Moses Lake facility completed what the company called proto-qualification testing of the first-stage booster for its first Nova Pathfinder rocket. “The second stage will ship out pretty soon,” Lapsa said. “That goes to Moses Lake. … This will be acceptance testing of the structure, and then we’ll do a static hot-fire test out there to fully shake down the second stage, and then it ships out to Cape Canaveral.”
The booster is being prepared for shipping to the Cape as well. “We’ll repeat the wet dress rehearsals that we did in Moses Lake, but we’ll do it on the launch pad itself,” Lapsa said. “Then we’ll do the same thing: static fire test on the first stage down there, and then the two stages go together, and we go to space.”
Stoke Space has been on a phenomenal growth curve since Lapsa and his fellow co-founder, chief technology officer Tom Feldman, left Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin space venture in 2019 to create the company.
Lapsa said Stoke currently has about 400 employees. “It’s approximately 50 in Moses Lake, 50 in Cape Canaveral. We have a handful of remotes, and then everybody else is in Kent,” he said.
Even though Stoke Space hasn’t yet launched a rocket, the startup’s steady progress toward that milestone — and its long-term vision for total rocket reusability — have been impressive enough to keep investors on board.
“Having supported Stoke through multiple stages of its growth, we believe this company has demonstrated both the exceptional technical progress and the ambition to build a launch system capable of serving the market at industrial scale,” Chris Morales, partner at Point72 Ventures, said today in a news release.
“Full reusability is the inevitable end state of the market, providing an order-of-magnitude cost and service advantage over partially reusable rockets,” said Clay Fisher, general partner at Spark Capital. “Stoke had the right thesis seven years ago and has paired that prescient vision with a blistering pace of execution. As a result, they stand uniquely positioned to give customers more choice and capacity when they need it, and to unlock an enormous new economy in space.”
Lapsa said he’s grateful for the vote of confidence.
“We’re humbled by the investment, having great partners behind us,” he said. “It’s an incredibly critical and important moment for us as a civilization to get right. I think space development is really, really important for our ability as a civilization to continue to scale and continue raising the quality of life that we enjoy — and we’re thrilled to be part of it.”
Catch promises the capabilities of a trusted executive assistant, with built-in controls governing what data and systems it can access.
The post Catch Raises $5 Million for AI Executive Assistant With Guardrails appeared first on SecurityWeek.
Resect AI, an artificial intelligence startup led by a team of scientists and engineers in Washougal, Wash., launched out of stealth Thursday with $25 million in funding to commercialize an open-source technology designed to catch AI hallucinations before they happen.
Unlike traditional AI monitoring tools that evaluate generated text after the fact, Resect AI says its patented technology operates in-stream — looking deep inside large language models in real time to observe, detect, interpret, and modify model behavior before a hallucination can occur.
By intervening directly within the model’s internal decision-making process rather than running post-hoc checks, the platform stops fabrications at the source while simultaneously generating an audit trail for enterprise compliance and due diligence.
“AI has prematurely been put in a position of trust. Adding labels such as ‘use at your own risk’ flies in the face of proper governance or compliance,” Kevin Owens, co-founder and CEO of Resect AI, said in a news release. “We are building the next large enterprise AI company to bring transparency and accountability to AI for industries such as publishing, finance, healthcare, research, and education where factual accuracy is absolutely critical.”
Beyond its tech, the startup’s leadership is also bullish about its small-town presence.
Washougal is a city of roughly 18,000 residents, 175 miles south of Seattle, tucked along the Columbia River across from Portland. Resect AI employs four people at an office on Main Street — including its co-founders — out of a 30-person workforce spread across the Seattle area, California, New York, and Texas.
“We believe the talent is up to par and we loved the sense of community that we found when we first came up here,” Owens told GeekWire. “We have been coming to the greater Washington and Oregon areas on and off over the years and finally decided this needed to be our headquarters.”
Owens said the decision has already paid off, noting that the startup has quickly tapped into the region’s talent pool by recruiting PhDs from both the greater Seattle and Portland markets while connecting with Northwest capital markets leaders.
Resect AI is also planning to open an office in the Seattle area in the near future for engineering and to serve as a business hub.
Alongside Owens, Resect’s other co-founders include Tim Walton, chief artificial intelligence officer; Tyler Gerber, chief operating officer; and Tommy Lofgren, chief product and marketing officer.
The company plans to use the funding to accelerate research and development, expand its go-to-market initiatives, and fuel talent acquisition — bringing its total headcount to 50 by the end of 2026.
The Austin-based company will invest in agentic runtime security capabilities to secure AI coding agents.
The post HiddenLayer Raises $100 Million for AI Runtime Security appeared first on SecurityWeek.
The startup’s firewall evaluates AI skills, plugins and MCP servers for malicious instructions, excessive permissions and software supply chain risks.
The post AI Agent Firewall Startup AIR Security Emerges From Stealth With $50 Million appeared first on SecurityWeek.
On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed a stopgap measure that would continue funding the US government through early December. While the measure still requires the signature of President Trump, it's widely expected that he will act to avoid a government shutdown immediately before the midterm elections.
This is a normal part of how the US government has operated in recent years, as it's often difficult to build the political support needed to pass a full year's budget in advance. In fact, dissent within the House's Republican caucus prevented them from agreeing on their own measure to keep the government open; instead, the House simply adopted a version of the spending bill that had previously passed the Senate.
From the perspective of scientists and their supporters, that adoption turned out to be a very good thing, because the Senate's budget bill, passed in early August, contains a provision that blocks the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from implementing new rules that would give political appointees full control over what science is funded and allow them to cancel any grant at any time. The proposed rule has been widely decried as catastrophic for science, and it faced widespread opposition from scientific and health-focused organizations.
© Getty Images | Bloomberg
NewDays, a Seattle startup using a generative AI therapy to treat people with mild dementia, has raised additional funding and closed its seed round with $16 million. The funding was led by Madrona and General Catalyst.
The company also announced on Wednesday that it has expanded its services to Nevada, joining Washington, California, Florida, Texas and New York. NewDays offers telehealth visits with human clinicians once or twice a month alongside unlimited conversations with an AI companion named Sunny.
“Our goal isn’t to add years — it’s to add quality to the years people have,” said CEO and co-founder Babak Parviz.
The startup is addressing a widespread issue: one in three Americans over 65 experiences cognitive decline, with 11% living with dementia and another 22% with mild cognitive impairment. Patients use Sunny to engage in conversational topics, memory exercises, and language or reasoning games designed to strengthen cognitive function.
While these cognitive strategies are clinically proven, they have historically lacked broad accessibility, Parviz said. NewDays aims to make treatment scalable using AI and demonstrate measurable improvement.
This past July at the annual Alzheimer’s Association International Conference, the company presented research showing that NewDays patients with dementia performed better on cognitive tests than expected historical decline curves — translating to roughly 18 months of preserved cognitive function. The study was limited to 24 patients, half of whom have dementia and the other half experiencing other cognitive impairment.
“Generative AI under the guidance of an expert human clinician is what finally lets us deliver a medically proven intervention at that scale. That’s the whole thesis of the company,” Parviz said via email.
To further validate its platform, NewDays is currently running a randomized controlled trial with Kaiser Permanente in California.
Users can try Sunny for free. If they’re interested in the full program, there is a free 20-minute assessment to evaluate suitability. NewDays is covered by traditional Medicare and working to secure in-network status with private insurers and Medicare Advantage plans. Participants in the program also have the option of paying $150 out-of-pocket for each clinical session.
Seattle-based venture capital firm Madrona released its sixth annual Intelligent Applications 40 list this week, naming 45 private AI companies (the five extras come from ties) that have collectively raised $410 billion from investors across the industry.
Three of them — Anthropic, OpenAI and Databricks — account for 92% of that total.
The uneven distribution of funding reflects a larger split in the tech industry, as the largest AI companies make huge bets on the computing capacity needed to meet demand for their models, while almost everyone else builds businesses on top of them.
The frontier labs are “increasingly funded by strategic capital from the likes of Amazon, Google, Nvidia and SoftBank rather than traditional venture,” Madrona’s Matt McIlwain and Rolanda Fu wrote in a post accompanying the list. That scale, they added, “makes every other category on this list look capital light by comparison.”
On top of that, he said, hundreds of billions of dollars are flowing into OpenAI and Anthropic.
“And what I say to both the big tech companies and to the people funding the model companies: thank you very much,” McIlwain said on Bloomberg TV, noting that the five largest tech companies will spend an estimated $750 billion in capital expenditures this year.
But even setting those big three aside, McIlwain said, the rest of the winners have raised an average of more than $800 million each. That’s a total of $34 billion combined. Companies across the list are raising far more than they used to, enough that Madrona had to redraw its own categories.
The list sorts companies by total capital raised, and this year the ceiling for “early stage” rose to $50 million, up from the $30 million threshold that held for the previous five lists. The cutoff for “emerging enablers,” its category for smaller infrastructure companies, doubled to $100 million.
“Companies across the board are raising more money, and the definition for what ‘early’ means continues to shift higher,” McIlwain and Fu wrote.
Madrona has published the IA40 since 2021 as a roster of the private companies it considers most important in building and enabling AI applications. According to the firm, this year’s list drew on input from 72 investors representing 54 venture and corporate firms, who nominated and voted on more than 450 companies, with PitchBook data factored into the scoring.
Two Seattle-area companies made this year’s list:
Last year’s list included two other Seattle-area companies in addition to Clarify.
Madrona, one of the Seattle region’s largest and oldest venture capital firms, is an investor in all four — Clarify, Gradial, Statsig and Dropzone AI — although it also invests outside the region, and many of the companies on the IA40 are not in its portfolio.
Several of the companies on this year’s list have engineering centers in the Seattle region, including Anthropic, which leased 113,000 square feet in South Lake Union this year; OpenAI, which expanded to nearly 300,000 square feet in downtown Bellevue after the Statsig acquisition; and Anduril, which employs about 560 people in Bellevue and Seattle.
Databricks, the San Francisco-based data and AI company (which leased 142,000 square feet in Bellevue this year), is the only company to appear on all six IA40 lists. That said, 23 of last year’s 40 winners returned this year, a 58% repeat rate, up from 33% the year before.
McIlwain and Fu wrote that the biggest and most established companies on the list are holding their spots, noting that “the age of experimentation is giving way to an age of enterprise readiness,” with buyers and investors “paying premiums for companies that can demonstrate real ROI.”
Madrona will recognize the winners at its IA40 Summit in Seattle on Sept. 29 and 30.
Updated with Matt McIlwain’s comments to Bloomberg TV.
The Trump administration is halting vital federal research on the foodborne parasite Cyclospora, despite the record-breaking, nationwide outbreak of the diarrheal pathogen, according to Politico.
Of the three research programs that represent nearly all of the Cyclospora work at the US Department of Agriculture, two have been defunded, and the third is about to lose every scientist working on it. The Trump administration is shuttering the USDA's Beltsville Agricultural Research Center near Washington, DC, and moving its work to a location in Iowa. That includes relocating the remaining Cyclospora research.
Although the research is still funded, insiders told Politico that not one of the scientists working on the project plans to relocate from Maryland to Iowa. Instead, they are either retiring, being reassigned to a different project, or leaving the USDA's research services.
© CDC | Melanie Moser
Login