Artificial Intelligence

Palo Alto, Calif. – September 25, 2026 -- Prime Minute emerged from stealth with $15 million in pre-seed funding led by Eclipse, with participation from 8VC, to build what it calls the first global resilience prime for natural disaster response.

Wildfires cost the US an estimated $424 billion annually, driving urgency for faster response

The company's initial product targets rapid initial attack against wildfires, addressing gaps in detection, coordination, and suppression that determine whether a fire is contained early or escalates into a major disaster. The system combines real-time intelligence, AI-assisted mission analysis, and precision aerial suppression capabilities designed to operate during high winds, nighttime incidents, degraded visual environments, and when ground crews cannot reach a scene.

Knoxville, Tenn. – September 24, 2026 -- ResultStack has completed a national benchmark evaluating hundreds of convenience-store brands to rank the 100 strongest digital ecosystems in the industry, with results to be shared privately at NACS 2026 in Las Vegas.

Benchmark evaluates connectivity, not just app features

The Top 100 C-Store Digital Ranking assesses mobile, loyalty, payments, ordering, personalization, rewards, partnerships and connectivity as an integrated system rather than isolated tools. ResultStack, whose team combines more than 50 years of operator-side convenience retail experience, built the framework to measure how effectively these capabilities work together across the customer journey.

Los Angeles – September 24, 2026 -- Brahma AI has raised $150 million through a preferred share issuance, anchored by a $100 million investment from Multiples Alternate Asset Management, with an additional $100 million in investor interest still pending allocation.

Funding will fuel R&D and a new Silicon Valley presence

The capital will accelerate research and development, expand Brahma AI's global go-to-market operations, and establish a significant presence in Silicon Valley. Cantor Fitzgerald & Co. served as sole placement agent on the financing.

Anchor customers span entertainment, sports and healthcare

Brahma AI operates across four verticals: media & entertainment, sports, healthcare and advertising. Global anchor customers include Warner Bros, the NBA and Mayo Clinic, while strategic distribution partners include Google, Hakuhodo and DNEG.

Shanghai – September 23, 2026 -- PATEO (02889.HK) has signed a strategic Memorandum of Understanding with Arm to jointly develop physical AI applications for the automotive sector, targeting next-generation perception- and interaction-driven computing workloads for vehicles.

PATEO's AI revenue jumps 588.6% year-on-year in first half of 2026

The company reported approximately RMB 209 million in AI-related revenue for H1 2026, a 588.6% increase from the prior-year period, as its physical AI initiatives move from proof-of-concept to scaled deployment.

Las Vegas – September 23, 2026 -- The Kroger Co. (NYSE: KR) outlined its artificial intelligence strategy at GroceryShop 2026, disclosing a phased approach that moves from assisted to fully autonomous AI use across customer and operational functions.

Kroger structures AI deployment into three governed stages

Yael Cosset, Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer, said the company's AI roadmap progresses through assisted, augmented and autonomous stages, with the level of automation determined by risk, repeatability and the need for human judgment. "The goal is not autonomy everywhere," Cosset said, adding that governance remains central regardless of which stage a given use case occupies.

Pittsburgh – September 22, 2026 -- Viam will debut BoxBot, a robot arm that opens taped cardboard boxes, at IROS 2026 in Pittsburgh, running September 27 through October 3. The system was trained on just 125 teleoperated demonstrations collected in roughly five hours over four days, using a fine-tuned open-source vision-language-action model with no custom architecture required.

BoxBot combines visual servoing with a fine-tuned SmolVLA model on one data path

The robot uses image-based visual servoing to guide a cutting tip along tape seams typically 1 to 2mm wide, since no two sealed boxes present identical geometry. A fine-tuned SmolVLA model then handles the contact-rich task of peeling open and adjusting four box flaps. Both systems run as native services on the same machine, with the VLA policy inferring locally on an NVIDIA Jetson Orin Nano through Viam's ML model service.

Santa Clara, Calif. – September 22, 2026 -- Palo Alto Networks has launched Unit 42 Continuous Frontier AI Defense, a new agentic offensive security service built on Anthropic's Claude Mythos 5 and OpenAI's GPT-5.6-Cyber models, aimed at helping enterprises find and fix exposures before attackers exploit them at machine speed.

The service responds to a shift in attacker capability: threat actors using AI have compressed breach cycles by nearly 97% in some cases, cutting the time from vulnerability discovery to exploitation from weeks to hours, according to Palo Alto Networks.

Boston – September 21, 2026 -- Cellular Intelligence, a Boston-based AI company building a universal foundation model of cell signaling, has appointed Turing Award laureate Yann LeCun, Moderna co-founder Robert "Bob" Langer, BioInnovation Institute CEO Jens Nielsen and Helmholtz Munich computational health director Fabian Theis to its Scientific Advisory Board. Langer also joins the company's Board of Directors as an observer.

Paris – September 21, 2026 -- A newly published book, "Dialogue Between a Thinker and AI," has become the test object for a comparative experiment feeding identical text to five major artificial intelligence systems: OpenAI/Astra, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Google Gemini and xAI/Grok. The French and English print editions are now available, but the project's core output is a public meta-reading exercise designed to expose how differently large language models interpret the same source material.

Five AI systems receive an identical corpus for independent analysis

Seoul – September 20, 2026 -- NAVER D2SF, the in-house corporate venture arm of NAVER, has joined a $10 million Series A2 bridge round for Silicon Valley-based precision medicine company ImpriMed, backing its push toward U.S. regulatory clearance and Asian market expansion.

ImpriMed targets FDA clearance and CLIA certification by Q1 2027 for its blood cancer platform

The company is preparing to commercialize diagnostic products for blood cancers and blood infection in the United States, having already established business partnerships with major U.S. hospitals. ImpriMed's xCellSense platform keeps patient-derived cancer cells viable outside the body for extended periods, allowing evaluation of drug sensitivity alongside genomic, immunophenotypic and clinical data. The company's AI models are trained on more than 3.5 million data points combining real-world data with functional cell analysis.