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Ollie, a subscription-based AI assistant focused on family organization and privacy, announced via CEO Bill Lennon on X that it will shut down on November 6. The SOC 2–compliant startup, which raised a $7.5M seed round led by Khosla Ventures, said customers will get instructions to export data and receive refunds.
Tolan, an AI companion app that helps users manage daily life, relationships and goals via a cartoonish avatar, has raised $30 million from investors including Union Square Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Homebrew, doubling its total funding. The company told Upstarts Media it has double‑digit millions in ARR, about 250,000 active users and 70 million conversations in the past year; PitchBook estimates its valuation above $268 million (medium confidence), though Tolan did not disclose a new figure.
Arena, a crowdsourced AI model-ranking platform that began as a UC Berkeley project, raised $200 million in a Series B at a $3.1 billion valuation. The company said it reached a $100M annualized run rate in June, added an enterprise product called AI Evaluations and launched an "alignment" leaderboard; the round was led by Lightspeed and Khosla with participation from Salesforce Ventures, a16z, Felicis and others.
British startup Worldmodeldata, advised by Yann LeCun and led by CEO Rhea Loucas, is packaging controller inputs and paired visual data from video games into curated datasets for training 'world models' and says it has licensed almost 1 million hours of such data. The company pitches itself as a broker to speed dataset access for labs, while some researchers and firms (including Nvidia) caution that game physics and lack of fine-grained real-world signals may limit usefulness for tasks requiring precise motor control.
PrismML released Bonsai 2 27B, a compressed version of Alibaba’s open-source Qwen3.8 27B reduced to about 5.9 GB (a 9–10× memory reduction) while matching roughly 98% of Qwen’s aggregate benchmark scores. The Caltech-founded startup says it uses a ternary-weights compression technique to shrink model weights, claims minimal performance loss versus originals, has previously seen millions of downloads of earlier Bonsai releases, and plans to apply the approach to much larger models; it raised a $22.25M seed and is backed by investors including Khosla Ventures and Cerberus Capital.
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