June 13, 2025

Powering next-gen services with AI in regulated industries 

Businesses in highly-regulated industries like financial services, insurance, pharmaceuticals, and health care are increasingly turning to AI-powered tools to streamline complex and sensitive tasks. Conversational AI-driven interfaces are helping hospitals to track the location and delivery of a patient’s time-sensitive cancer drugs. Generative AI chatbots are helping insurance customers answer questions and solve problems. And agentic…

Former DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg co-leads $15.5M Series A for AI video ad platform

June 2, 2025
DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg’s venture fund WndrCo co-led a $15.5 million Series A round for Creatify, an AI video ad platform. Creatify’s AdMax platform uses AI to quickly generate dozens of video advertisements, which are geared toward social media marketing — AdMax analyzes high-performing social video campaigns on apps like TikTok and Instagram to shape […]

Microsoft Bing gets a free Sora-powered AI video generator

June 2, 2025
Microsoft Bing announced today that it is introducing the Bing Video Creator to its app, which uses OpenAI’s Sora model to let users generate videos from text prompts. OpenAI, which has a longstanding partnership with Microsoft, has locked down access to Sora‘s video generation for paying customers only. Its integration in Microsoft Bing represents the […]

Snowflake to acquire database startup Crunchy Data

June 2, 2025
The surge in data company acquisitions continued Monday with Snowflake’s purchase of Crunchy Data. Cloud data platform Snowflake announced its intent to acquire Crunchy Data, a Postgres database partner, late this afternoon. A source familiar with the matter estimated the deal to be worth around $250 million. The terms weren’t disclosed. Snowflake declined to comment […]

Chatbot platform Character.AI unveils video generation, social feeds

June 2, 2025
A platform for chatting and roleplaying with AI-generated characters, Character.AI announced on Monday that it is rolling out a slate of multimedia features. These features include AvatarFX, Character.AI’s video-generation model, plus Scenes and Streams, which allow users to use these AI tools to create videos using their characters and then share them on a new […]

Elon Musk’s Neuralink closes a $650M Series E

June 2, 2025
Elon Musk’s brain computer interface startup Neuralink closed a $650 million funding round, the company announced in a blog post on Monday. The Series E fundraise included investors such as ARK Invest, Founders Fund, Sequoia Capital, and Thrive Capital, among others. Neuralink last raised a $280 million Series D funding round in 2023, with an […]