OpenAI shuts down its AI video tool Sora as Disney pulls a planned $1 billion investment and ends its licensing partnership, a major blow amid escalating Hollywood copyright battles targeting AI video platforms including Midjourney, Minimax, and ByteDance's Seedance 2.0.
Charlotte robotics startup Lucid Bots raises $20M in Series B funding, bringing total investment to $34M, as its window-cleaning drones and robots surge from 100 to nearly 1,000 units sold while expanding into painting, waterproofing, and sealing markets.
Granola raises $125M at a $1.5B valuation — six times its previous worth — as the AI meeting notetaker launches enterprise collaboration features and new APIs to outpace rivals like Read AI and Fireflies in the rapidly commoditizing AI note-taking market.
Legal AI startup Harvey secures $200 million in new funding, skyrocketing its valuation to $11 billion as its platform now serves over 100,000 lawyers across 1,300 organizations with $190 million in annual recurring revenue.
OpenAI surpasses $120 billion in total funding, blowing past its $100 billion target with backers like Microsoft and Andreessen Horowitz, as the AI giant eyes a potential IPO and makes tough cuts — including shutting down its Sora video app — to prioritize profitability.
OpenAI shuts down its Sora AI video app just months after launch as Disney pulls a $1 billion investment deal, handing Google a major advantage in the rapidly evolving AI video generation market.
OpenAI is warning prospective IPO investors of major risks, including heavy Microsoft dependency, $665 billion in compute costs through 2030, and mounting legal battles — even as the company boasts a $730 billion valuation and $13.1 billion in 2025 revenue.
OpenAI is in advanced talks to buy up to 50 gigawatts of fusion energy from startup Helion by 2035, a landmark deal that could reshape AI's power future — though key milestones, including a production site, remain unresolved.
Gimlet Labs raises $80M in a Series A led by Menlo Ventures to power a multi-silicon AI inference cloud that simultaneously runs workloads across CPUs, GPUs, and high-memory systems, claiming 3x to 10x speed improvements while tackling the hundreds of billions wasted on idle hardware.
AI startups are dominating venture capital, capturing 41% of $128 billion raised on Carta last year, with just 10% of companies securing half of all funding as giants like OpenAI and Anthropic raise tens of billions in a increasingly K-shaped market.