Daily AI Grants Roundup – July 09, 2026

Ollama raised $65M in Series B funding led by Theory Ventures. The open-source AI platform is used by 8.9 million developers worldwide.

We’ve talked before about the hot IPO summer , but with SpaceX just launched to public markets and Anthropic and (maybe) OpenAI soon to come, it can be easy to miss the sheer scale of what’s happening.. We got a good reminder of it in Wednesday’s NCVA-Pitchbook Venture…

The popular open source AI tool Ollama has raised a $65 million Series B, led by Theory Ventures, founder and CEO Jeff Morgan tells TechCrunch.. This round follows a previous $15 million Series A led by Benchmark’s Peter Fenton.. All told, the company has now raised $88…

Nandan Nilekani, co-founder of Indian IT services giant Infosys, will no longer serve as a general partner at Fundamentum Partnership , the venture capital firm he co-founded nearly a decade ago.. Nilekani (pictured above) will be stepping down from his role as Fundamentum…

Posted: Marina Temkin Lovable reportedly in talks to double its valuation to $13.2B Lovable, a Swedish vibe-coding startup, is in talks to raise $300 million at a valuation of $13.2 billion — exactly double the $6.6 billion valuation the company achieved last December, Sifted…

Loading the player… Before OpenAI’s GPT-3 ushered in the era of foundation models, companies built specialized natural language processing models from scratch, training each on large amounts of task-specific data.. Today, most organizations start with a general-purpose model…

Your gaming data could be the secret to AGI, according to this Bezos-backed startup When it comes to achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI), large language models just don’t have what it takes.. Models like ChatGPT and Claude are great at text, but they’re less…

At a time when AI backlash and data center protests are making headlines, Anthropic’s Claude is rolling out a new feature that subtly makes the case for why you should keep using it.. On Thursday, the company introduced “Reflect,” a built-in dashboard that lets you track and…

Microdramas are such a rage these days that nearly every kind of company in the attention economy space — be they dedicated microdrama apps , social media giants (TikTok and Instagram) or streaming services ( Peacock , Amazon Prime , and India’s JioHotstar ) — is building a…

Posted: Russell Brandom Google’s deepfake detector system used to debunk McConnell hoax pic Google’s SynthID system has been used to debunk a high-profile AI-generated hoax image, in a rare but significant win for the system.. Earlier this week, a picture circulated online…

SpaceXAI has released its latest model, Grok 4.5 — the first since the company went public several weeks ago.. In a blog post published Wednesday, SpaceXAI characterized its new release as a workhorse that can tackle all of the typical tasks that the AI industry has sought to…

Google Photos is getting a new “Video Remix” feature that can edit and transform videos in seconds, Google announced on Wednesday.. The feature is powered by Gemini Omni, Google’s recently released model that promises to “create anything from any input.” The launch is…