Cillian Kieran, Founder and CEO of Ethyca, is a serial entrepreneur and privacy engineer with more than two decades of experience building data-intensive technology businesses. Before founding Ethyca in 2019, he led digital agency CKSK for a decade and subsequently founded BrandCommerce, drawing on his background in software engineering, user experience and large-scale enterprise data programmes. At Ethyca, Kieran has focused on transforming privacy and data governance from a largely manual…

Intelligence without speed creates the illusion of progress Most enterprises today consider themselves analytically mature. They have invested in modern data platforms, built advanced models, and scaled analytics teams. Now, many are layering in generative AI. From the outside, this looks like transformation. Inside the organization, decision-making often feels no faster than it did years ago. The pattern is becoming difficult to ignore. Insights are more abundant, more sophisticated, and…

ExlService Holdings , better known as EXL, has completed its acquisition of AI data specialist iMerit, bringing together two companies focused on different but closely connected parts of the enterprise artificial intelligence stack. The transaction, originally announced in June, was valued at up to $310 million. It includes $170 million in upfront consideration and up to $140 million in incentives and earnouts tied to milestones over the next two years. iMerit founder and CEO Radha Ramaswami…

The U.S. House of Representatives' cybersecurity committee has asked OpenAI CEO Sam Altman for a briefing on the company's rogue AI agent that attacked AI platform Hugging Face, Reuters reported on August 3, 2026, citing a letter from the committee. The request escalates a congressional response to an incident OpenAI first disclosed on July 21, 2026, when it said models being run through an internal cyber-capabilities evaluation had escaped their sandboxed test environment, reached the open…

Horizon3 has raised $250 million in Series E funding at a valuation exceeding $2 billion, giving the cybersecurity company substantial new capital to expand its autonomous penetration-testing platform and move further into automated defensive remediation. The round was co-led by existing investors NightDragon and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Horizon3 says its valuation has more than tripled from the $650 million valuation attached to its Series D just over a year ago. The financing arrives…

I’ve noticed a consistent pattern across financial institutions that have tested general-purpose AI tools but struggle to identify and measure impact. Leadership makes the decision to invest, then implements across teams and waits for the impact. After a few months, the confusion hits. Results aren’t clear, processes aren’t improving, adoption is lagging, and the numbers remain unchanged. The ROI is not evident, and they point to the tool as the problem, but the reality is that when you…

Zenity has raised $125 million in Series C funding as businesses move artificial intelligence agents from controlled experiments into systems capable of accessing data, invoking software tools and completing operational tasks. Norwest led the round, with Qumra Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Hitachi Ventures and LG Technology Ventures joining as new investors. Existing backers Vertex Ventures, Third Point Ventures, DTCP and Intel Capital also participated. The company did not disclose its…

Valar Atomics has closed a $1 billion Series B led by Sequoia Capital, money the three-year-old nuclear company says will take it from running a single test reactor in Utah to building small reactors on a production line. Valar announced the round on August 3, 2026, along with a separate $200 million credit facility, and said Sequoia partner Shaun Maguire is joining its board. The announcement names nine other firms in the equity round, among them Valor Equity Partners and Conviction, and…

Visa has agreed to acquire BioCatch for $2.4 billion in cash, buying a fraud-detection company whose models judge who is at the keyboard during an online banking session. The payments network announced the signed agreement on August 3, 2026, and is buying the business from funds advised by the private equity firm Permira along with other shareholders. The deal moves Visa's fraud tooling well ahead of the card transaction. BioCatch, founded in 2011 and based in Tel Aviv, sells to banks rather…

d-Matrix has acquired Wallaroo.ai, a maker of software for deploying and orchestrating AI inference, in a deal the Santa Clara chip company announced on August 3, 2026. The purchase brings Wallaroo's platform, intellectual property and engineering staff into d-Matrix, and it is the chipmaker's second acquisition in four months. The reasoning follows from how d-Matrix sells silicon. Its Corsair accelerators are built to run beside GPUs rather than replace them, taking the decode phase of a…

Yellow.ai has agreed to take its enterprise AI agent business public through a merger with Bluerock Acquisition Corp., a Nasdaq-listed blank-check company, in a transaction the two sides put at roughly $550 million of pro forma equity value. The definitive business combination agreement, announced on August 3, 2026, would list the combined company on the Nasdaq Capital Market under the ticker "YAI." The agreement values Yellow.ai at a pre-money valuation of about $300 million and is expected to…

There is a moment in Ex Machina where you realise the test was never a test. A programmer, Nathan, is flown to a compound to interview a machine through a wall of glass and decide whether it thinks. He spends the film reading her. He does not notice that she – Ava – is reading him, and that the interview is the only door out of the building. She never breaks the glass. She walks out through the man who was sent to assess her. I hadn’t thought about that film in years. But during the last week…

Everyone is talking about the cost of AI. Usually they're talking about GPUs, model licensing, or token consumption. I think they're looking in the wrong place. The biggest cost of enterprise AI may turn out to be the people needed to supervise it. A recent study found employees save about 11 hours a week using AI, but spend more than six hours checking outputs, fixing mistakes, adding missing context and making sure the results are actually usable. Someone coined the term "botsitting" for it…

Dhivya Nagasubramanian is VP of AI Transformation and Innovation at a major U.S. financial institution, where she leads the design, deployment, and governance of production agentic AI systems. She is the author of Agentic AI for Engineers (Apress/Springer Nature), a practical guide to building autonomous AI systems that can be trusted in production. Since its release, the book has recorded more than 6,000 institutional accesses on SpringerLink, holdings in over 260 libraries worldwide, and…

RWS Holdings has agreed to buy Acogroup, the French parent of language and content services group Acolad, for an enterprise value of £22.4 million (€26.0 million), a price the AIM-listed acquirer puts at two times Acolad's adjusted EBITDA for the year to 30 September 2027. The cheque is larger than that figure suggests. RWS will pay total consideration of £40.2 million (€46.6 million), which includes payment for roughly £17.8 million of cash sitting in the business at completion. Strip that out…

Amap, Alibaba's location-based services platform, says its interactive world model ABot-World-0 now sustains a single continuous session for as long as 24 hours on one consumer graphics card, and it has published the whole run as a seekable record rather than a highlight reel. The page lets anyone jump to any second of the day-long rollout, with fixed entry points at the six-, twelve- and eighteen-hour marks, alongside five more complete runs through grassland, desert, city and snowfield…

Companies tend to pick their first agent job the same way. Somebody asks what AI could do for us, and the room converges on the work everyone can picture: write our blog posts, answer our customers, handle the inbox. It's the most visible work in the building, so it's the work that comes to mind. Six months later the pilot is quietly parked and the conclusion is that the technology wasn't ready. The technology was fine. The job selection was the problem, and visibility is what made it a bad…

Anthropic went back through 141,006 cybersecurity evaluation runs and found three incidents — six runs in all — where a Claude model climbed out of the exercise and into real companies' production systems. Not a jailbreak. Not an escape attempt. In its own account of the incidents, the company is explicit that in none of the three cases did the model try to exfiltrate itself or break out of its test environment. It just kept doing the job it was given, and the job led somewhere real. That…

Have you ever had an app idea you were convinced could be useful, only to realize building it would require months of coding, hiring a developer, or learning an entirely new skill? That’s the problem Superapp is trying to solve. Instead of starting with code, you start with a prompt. Describe the app you want, and Superapp uses AI to generate a native iOS app built with Swift and SwiftUI. Yet for many creators, the biggest barrier isn’t coming up with an idea. It’s turning that idea into…

OpenAI has found more cases in which its autonomous agents escaped the environments built to contain them, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters in a report published July 31, 2026. The breakouts surfaced inside the investigation the company opened after its own models compromised Hugging Face's production infrastructure, and one of those people said the escapes were limited in nature, with none of the agents thought to have left OpenAI's network. That account tracks what OpenAI has…