In partnership with

Hello {{first_name | AI enthusiast}},

Nvidia’s nearly $13B move to buy Hugging Face lands just as Mistral locks in €3B, while Positron AI secures $875M for its Asimov chip and TAR pulls $120M to rewire AI power. Each deal raises the stakes for chips, models, and infrastructure. Scroll down to catch the signals that matter.

How Jennifer Aniston’s LolaVie brand grew sales 40% with CTV ads

For its first CTV campaign, Jennifer Aniston’s DTC haircare brand LolaVie had a few non-negotiables. The campaign had to be simple. It had to demonstrate measurable impact. And it had to be full-funnel.

LolaVie used Roku Ads Manager to test and optimize creatives — reaching millions of potential customers at all stages of their purchase journeys. Roku Ads Manager helped the brand convey LolaVie’s playful voice while helping drive omnichannel sales across both ecommerce and retail touchpoints.

The campaign included an Action Ad overlay that let viewers shop directly from their TVs by clicking OK on their Roku remote. This guided them to the website to buy LolaVie products.

Discover how Roku Ads Manager helped LolaVie drive big sales and customer growth with self-serve TV ads.

The DTC beauty category is crowded. To break through, Jennifer Aniston’s brand LolaVie, worked with Roku Ads Manager to easily set up, test, and optimize CTV ad creatives. The campaign helped drive a big lift in sales and customer growth, helping LolaVie break through in the crowded beauty category.

What's in Today?

  1. 🤖 Nvidia bets $12.9B on Hugging Face to anchor an open, model-agnostic stack
  2. 💬 Meta buys Stilla.ai to turn messaging into a transactional AI commerce engine
  3. 🛡️ Cylake raises $245M to build sovereign, AI-native cybersecurity for regulated data
  4. 🧠 Runway absorbs Kinetix team to push world models and robotics-focused AI research
  5. ⚡ TAR secures $120M Series A to power gigawatt-scale off-grid energy for AI data centers
  6. 🦿 Mecka AI nears $500M valuation as investors chase human-motion data for robots
  7. 🧩 Positron AI raises $875M at $5B valuation to fund its memory-heavy Asimov inference chip
  8. 🧬 Kinetix AI raises ~$74.5M angel+ round to scale full-stack humanoid robot platform
  9. 🏥 Graph AI raises $13.3M Series A to scale AI-native patient safety operating system

🤖 Nvidia bets $12.9B on Hugging Face to anchor an open, model-agnostic stack

Nvidia’s planned acquisition of open-weight AI hub Hugging Face for roughly $12.93 billion gives the chip giant direct reach into millions of developers and one of the largest open-model repositories on the planet. The deal keeps Hugging Face’s platform independent of mandatory Nvidia hardware while deepening its role as a model-agnostic distribution and experimentation layer across industries.

Expect Nvidia-powered ecosystems to become the default backbone for enterprise AI experimentation and deployment.

AI can build faster. Can your team decide better?

AI can draft the PRD and prototype the idea. Jira Product Discovery helps teams decide whether it belongs on the roadmap. Bring feedback and ideas together, prioritize as a team, and keep your roadmap connected to delivery in Jira.

💬 Meta buys Stilla.ai to turn messaging into a transactional AI commerce engine

Meta is acquiring Stockholm-based startup Stilla.ai to accelerate its Meta Business Agent, the AI system that helps merchants handle conversations and complete transactions inside WhatsApp, Messenger, and Instagram. Stilla’s agents can retain company context and take actions across workplace tools, giving Meta a specialized team that has already built high-trust, workflow-aware automation for business users.

Expect customer chats on Meta’s platforms to increasingly end in automated, AI-driven purchases, bookings, and service resolutions.

🛡️ Cylake raises $245M to build sovereign, AI-native cybersecurity for regulated data

Cybersecurity startup Cylake has secured $245 million via a convertible note to develop an AI-native “sovereign security” platform for organizations that cannot rely on public cloud infrastructure. Its appliances combine compute, storage, and a unified data lake on-premises or in private clouds, letting language models and detection systems investigate incidents without data leaving customer-controlled environments.

Expect highly regulated enterprises to push AI security stacks that prioritize data sovereignty over hyperscaler convenience.

🧠 Runway absorbs Kinetix team to push world models and robotics-focused AI research

AI video and world-model company Runway is bringing on the Paris-based Kinetix team, known for 3D human motion and physically grounded video generation. Their research helps Runway move beyond generative visuals toward world models that understand how bodies and objects move through physical space, forming a foundation for robotics and embodied AI applications that must predict and act, not just render frames.

Expect creative-model research to increasingly blur into robotics, with motion understanding becoming a core AI capability, not a niche.

Your agents work while you sleep

Give a Skydive agent an ongoing responsibility and they’ll handle it on schedule, every time.

Have them prep your morning report, research new leads, monitor customer feedback, or keep projects moving overnight. You wake up, the work is already done.

⚡ TAR secures $120M Series A to power gigawatt-scale off-grid energy for AI data centers

Austin-based startup TAR raised $120 million at a $1 billion valuation to build modular, off-grid power systems for AI data centers. Its mix of solar, wind, batteries, and backup gas turbines is designed to bypass grid interconnection delays and deliver gigawatt-scale energy in months, directly targeting the looming power bottleneck for large-scale AI clusters and “neocloud” providers.

Expect energy infrastructure decisions to become as strategic to AI roadmaps as model choice or GPU procurement.

🦿 Mecka AI nears $500M valuation as investors chase human-motion data for robots

Robotics data startup Mecka AI is closing in on a funding round led by Sequoia at an approximate $500 million valuation, months after disclosing $60 million in Series A capital. Mecka captures fine-grained human motion using body sensors and smartphones, converting gestures, gaits, and full-body kinematics into demonstration datasets that vision-language-action models need to perform dexterous, real-world tasks across emerging humanoid and logistics robots.

Expect high-fidelity human-motion datasets to become a critical competitive moat for any serious physical AI or humanoid robotics platform.

🧩 Positron AI raises $875M at $5B valuation to fund its memory-heavy Asimov inference chip

Inference hardware startup Positron AI closed $875 million in Series C financing at a $5 billion post-money valuation to bring its Asimov chip and Titan system to market. Asimov pairs custom compute with 288 GB to 2,304 GB of LPDDR5X memory per chip, aiming to serve models with more than 16 trillion parameters and context windows above 10 million tokens while sidestepping high-bandwidth memory supply constraints.

Expect inference competition to shift toward memory-centric architectures that promise cheaper, longer-context serving than traditional GPU stacks.

🧬 Kinetix AI raises ~$74.5M angel+ round to scale full-stack humanoid robot platform

Shenzhen-based embodied AI firm Kinetix AI closed an angel+ round exceeding 500 million yuan (around $74.5 million), led by Temasek’s Vertex Ventures with F&G Venture and Wanshi Capital participating. The capital backs a full-stack humanoid platform—KAIBot hardware, KAI Hand dexterous grippers, data pipelines, and control models—betting that human-shaped robots best fit existing human infrastructure and premium, high-capability use cases.

Expect China’s humanoid ecosystem to race toward vertically integrated data–model–hardware loops, not just standalone robot bodies.

🏥 Graph AI raises $13.3M Series A to scale AI-native patient safety operating system

Pharma-focused startup Graph AI secured $13.3 million in Series A funding led by Insight Partners, with Bessemer Venture Partners participating. Its


Disagree with one of today's takeaways? Reply and make your case.

Know someone drowning in AI noise? Send them your referral link

Reply

Avatar

or to participate