AI Infrastructure

San Francisco – September 15, 2026 -- Lightfield has raised $47 million in a Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Maverick Capital, Coatue, Audacious, Alumni Ventures, Greylock, and Lightspeed Venture Partners. More than 5,000 companies have signed up for the platform since its November 2025 launch, ranging from early-stage startups to scaling firms with hundreds of CRM users.

Lightfield targets a structural flaw in legacy CRM systems built for manual data entry

Traditional CRM platforms like Salesforce and HubSpot were designed for people to type data into fields, stages, and notes rather than for AI agents to reason from. When agents are layered onto these systems, they inherit incomplete fields, stale close dates, and notes reconstructed from memory, producing work that companies cannot verify.

Newark, N.J. – September 11, 2026 -- Agilis, a digital and AI platform provider for the chemical industry, has formed an Advisory Board staffed with former senior executives from Dow, BASF, Brenntag, allnex and Boston Consulting Group to guide its enterprise scaling and international expansion.

Agilis has digitized more than one million SKUs across 50-plus countries

The company says it has run AI features in production with customers since 2024, a stage many chemical industry peers have yet to reach as they remain in pilot testing. The new board is tasked with advising on strategy, product direction, enterprise adoption, commercial execution and international growth.

Shanghai – September 10, 2026 -- China Merchants Bank has won the Cloud Native Computing Foundation's (CNCF) End User Case Study Contest after lifting average accelerator utilization from 35% to more than 60% and cutting inference cost per 1 million tokens by over 60%.

Unified control plane pools nearly 10,000 accelerator cards

The bank's AI infrastructure team built a single Kubernetes control plane combining Kueue, KEDA, Prometheus, HAMi, and Fluid, allowing training, fine-tuning, and online inference workloads to share close to 10,000 heterogeneous accelerator cards. Working with its data center and other internal teams, the bank brought 99% of its accelerator compute under this framework.

Shenzhen – September 07, 2026 -- Pudu Robotics launched the PUDU GT Series, a lineup of three commercial robotic mowers built for professional grounds and turf maintenance, with a global debut set for GaLaBau 2026 in Nuremberg, Germany, from September 15-18.

The series comprises the GT3, GT5 and GT7, each engineered for a distinct commercial use case: fragmented business properties, large-scale turf operations, and precision golf and sports-field cutting.

PUDU GT3 combines mowing and sweeping for fragmented commercial properties

The GT3 is a compact 91 cm (36-inch) unit aimed at facility management and grounds teams handling irregular layouts such as business parks, university campuses and hospitals. It merges grass cutting, clipping collection and light debris removal with paved-area sweeping via integrated disc brushes, cutting the need to switch equipment for daily maintenance.