a16z

2026-10-20

STARTUPS · 1 SOURCE · TechCrunch AI

Eka raises $150M Series A at $1.45B valuation and showcases force-aware manipulation model

Eka Robotics, founded by Pulkit Agrawal and Tuomas Haarnoja, closed a $150 million Series A led by a16z and F-Prime at a $1.45 billion post-money valuation. The startup demonstrated a force-sensitive gripper plus a vision-force-action physical AI model trained with large-scale simulation and reinforcement learning that it says can pick ~1,500 objects per hour with >95% reliability and outperforms humans on certain dexterous tasks.

8.0

2026-10-13

STARTUPS · 3 SOURCES · The Verge AI · TechCrunch AI · The Decoder

Character.AI files for Chapter 11; Disney to buy assets for $20M

Character.AI has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US, listing estimated liabilities of $50–100 million, and is seeking to sell its assets. Disney is the lead bidder under a proposed deal that would pay $20 million for certain assets, hire some former Character.AI staff including ex‑CEO Karandeep Anand, and receive a nonexclusive IP license; the company says it will continue operating while the sale process proceeds and may be wound down if no suitable bid emerges.

8.0

2026-10-11

MONEY · 1 SOURCE · The Decoder

Falling AI token prices drive higher compute demand, echoing Jevons' paradox

Data from Ornn, Silicon Data, and Bloomberg (as of Aug 2026), cited by a16z, show declining AI token prices coinciding with steady or rising NVIDIA H100 rental rates. Cheaper tokens are unlocking more agentic automation and applications and expanding volume faster than per‑unit costs fall, but it's unclear how much demand is human versus agent-driven; if usage growth slows, hardware suppliers, cloud providers, and energy companies could face significant downside, a sensitivity already reflected in market moves after reports of weaker OpenAI revenue.

7.0

2026-09-22

STARTUPS · 1 SOURCE · The Verge AI

Andreessen Horowitz to launch Horowitz Andreessen Academy with major tech partners

Venture firm Andreessen Horowitz (a16z) is creating the Horowitz Andreessen Academy, a one-year, highly selective program that will not grant degrees but offers short classes from tech leaders (including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman), co-op placements at partner companies, and more than $50,000 in compute credits. The academy launches with $42 million in funding led by a16z, 10 announced partners (Anduril, Anthropic, Coinbase, Google, Meta, NVIDIA, OpenAI, Palantir, Replit, Stripe), will admit about 50 students for a free inaugural fall 2027 cohort, and requires participants to relocate to San Francisco.

6.0

2026-09-08

STARTUPS · 1 SOURCE · Mistral AI

Mistral raises €3B Series D at >€21B valuation to scale sovereign, open-weight AI stack

Mistral announced a €3 billion Series D led by Samsung Electronics, with co-leads Scaleup Europe Fund (EQT) and PSG Equity, at a post-money valuation of more than €21 billion — the largest equity raise ever by a European tech company. The funding will expand Mistral’s frontier research, compute capacity, infrastructure and commercial footprint as it positions its open-weight models, private compute and products as a "sovereign" full-stack AI offering for enterprises and governments.

9.0