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Models techcrunch.com

No product? No problem. This Disrupt 2026 session shows how to get pre-seed funding with conviction, storytelling

It’s not just you: AI startups are taking in a huge amount of seed funding, and in the process making things harder for anyone looking for funding even at a pre-seed stage. We’ve covered the trend in detail, and at this year’s TechCrunch Disrupt event, we want to help pre-seed founders now being held to seed-stage […]

Startups theaiinsider.tech

AIsa Secures $6.5M, Co-Led by Alibaba and Tribe Capital, to Build the Transaction Network for AI Agents

Insider Brief PRESS RELEASE — AIsa, the transaction network for the AI agent economy, has announced it has raised US$6.5 million in total funding to date, including a new seed round, co-led by Alibaba and Tribe Capital, with participation from Draper Associates, Sumitomo Corporation, Saison Capital and other investors.

Quick takes

Frontier labs are expanding free education channels, from Anthropic's Claude for Teachers for US K-12 educators to Google's Gemini-powered ATL Saathi for Indian robotics labs and statewide library AI training.
Models
Product roadmaps are shifting from chat toward long-running agents that act across apps and files, as ChatGPT Work and enterprise voice and coding deployments move agentic workflows into production.
Models
Open embedding models are being framed as agent infrastructure, with NVIDIA's Nemotron 3 Embed aimed at enterprise RAG, code search, agent memory, and agentic retrieval efficiency.
Models
Software economics are recalibrating as GitHub argues that AI has lowered the cost of writing code while the cost of owning, reviewing, and sustaining those changes has not.
Startups
Capital is rotating toward cheaper inference and specialized agents, from Fireworks' $17.5B valuation to a $400 million chip-backed loan and Applied Computing's $20M plant-wide oil-and-gas model.
Chips
Frontier labs are packaging education distribution as a primary go-to-market lane, from free Claude for US K-12 teachers to Gemini tools for Indian robotics educators.
Models
OpenAI is shifting ChatGPT from chat into multi-hour agentic work across apps and files, with enterprise operators already applying ChatGPT and Codex to regulated payments workflows.
Models
NVIDIA is positioning open embedding models for enterprise RAG and agent memory, pairing Nemotron 3 Embed with NeMo Automodel fine-tuning paths into Hugging Face Diffusers.
Models

Market Pulse

AI Pulse
44/100
bearish

AI-linked equities are under pressure, with Meta Platforms -2.79%, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing -2.77%, NVIDIA -2.21% driving the tracked basket lower.

META -2.79%
Meta Platforms labs
TSM -2.77%
Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing chips
NVDA -2.21%
NVIDIA chips
GOOGL -2.17%
Alphabet. labs

Recurring Movers

META 12 hits · -2.69%
TSM 12 hits · -2.82%
GOOGL 12 hits · -3.04%
NVDA 11 hits · -2.21%