HeyStartup

Intercom, now called Fin, launches an AI agent whose only job is managing another AI agent

The company formerly known as Intercom just did something that no major customer service platform has attempted at scale: it built an AI agent whose sole job is to manage another AI agent.Fin Operator, announced Thursday at a live event in San Francisco, is a new AI-powered system designed specifically for the back-office teams that configure, monitor, and improve Fin, the company's customer-facing AI agent. Rather than replacing human support agents — which is what Fin itself does on the f

How RecursiveMAS speeds up multi-agent inference by 2.4x and reduces token usage by 75%

One of the key challenges of current multi-agent AI systems is that they communicate by generating and sharing text sequences, which introduces latency, drives up token costs, and makes it difficult to train the entire system as a cohesive unit. To overcome this challenge, researchers at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and Stanford University developed RecursiveMAS, a framework that enables agents to collaborate and transmit information through embedding space instead of text. This chang

RJ Scaringe has raised more than $12B across three startups and investors still want more

Investors can't seem to get enough of RJ Scaringe or his ideas. Storytelling and communication are one of his superpowers, according to Jiten Behl, who joined Rivian when the company had just a handful of employees.

General Catalyst posted VC rage bait and it worked, especially on a16z

Compulsive X user Marc Andreessen himself couldn't resist responding, many, many times.

A hotel check-in system left a million passports and driver’s licenses open for anyone to see

The tech company that maintains the hotel check-in system set its cloud storage to public, allowing anyone to access customers' data without a password.

Anthropic and the Gates Foundation are betting $200 million that AI can do more than make money

  Anthropic has committed $200 million over four years to a partnership with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the largest deal of its kind between an AI company and a global philanthropy. The money, a mix of grant funding, Claude usage credits, and technical support, will fund programmes in global health, life sciences, education, […]This story continues at The Next Web

Silicon Valley’s vacationland needs a new energy provider just as AI is driving prices up

Lake Tahoe, Silicon Valley's favorite vacation spot, is about to get hit with higher energy prices as AI drives demand for electricity.

Eighteen48 raises EUR175 million to back the private equity deals no one else sees

  Eighteen48 Partners, the London-based alternative asset manager co-founded by Julien Sevaux, Tarek AbuZayyad, and Edward Clive, has closed €175 million for the first tranche of its inaugural private equity fund. The fund is targeting €350 million in total and will back mid-market buyouts across Europe, sourced exclusively through independent sponsors, dealmakers who find and […]This story continues at The Next Web

Tesla reveals two Robotaxi crashes involving teleoperators

Newly unredacted crash reports reveal some of the troubles Tesla has had as it tries to scale its robotaxis.

Claude’s next enterprise battle is not models: it’s the agent control plane

New VB Pulse data shows Microsoft and OpenAI leading enterprise agent orchestration, but Anthropic’s first measurable foothold points to a larger fight over who controls the infrastructure where AI agents run.For the last two years, the enterprise AI race has mostly been framed as a model war: OpenAI’s GPT series versus Anthropic’s Claude versus Google’s Gemini, with smaller and open-source alternatives also coming in from the U.S. and China. But the next strategic fight may not be over which mo

China’s tech giants are replacing the search bar with AI agents that shop for you

  For years, buying something online in China meant typing keywords into a search bar and scrolling through an endless grid of listings. That ritual is being dismantled. On Monday, Alibaba Group integrated its Qwen artificial intelligence assistant with Taobao, its largest marketplace, giving the chatbot access to a catalogue of more than four billion products. […]This story continues at The Next Web

Revolut is offering every employee GBP1,000 to sell business banking. The real prize is a $200 billion IPO.

  Revolut’s chief executive, Nik Storonsky, has told employees across the company that business banking is now its top priority, and is offering each of them £1,000 to prove he means it. In a memo sent to staff on Friday, Storonsky asked everyone, regardless of department, to help bring in new business customers, send pitches […]This story continues at The Next Web

OpenAI launches ChatGPT for personal finance, will let you connect bank accounts

Once users connect their accounts, they will see a dashboard of their portfolio performance, spending, subscriptions, and upcoming payments.

Bolt is betting that South Africa’s next ride will be a Chinese electric car

  Bolt Technology, the Estonian ride-hailing company that has spent roughly $180 million building a dominant position in South Africa, has struck a deal with China’s Dongfeng Motor Group to roll out an electric-vehicle fleet in the country. The partnership will start in Cape Town, with Dongfeng’s Box hatchback and its more premium 007 sedan […]This story continues at The Next Web

Power prices are up 76% on America’s biggest grid, and a watchdog is pointing fingers

The price spike is a reminder of a deeper problem: The U.S. power grid was not designed for the electricity demands of an AI-driven economy, and the gap between what the grid can deliver and what the industry needs is widening.

US orders travelers on Air Force One to throw away gifts, pins, and burner phones after China trip

While the summit appeared cordial, China remains a key adversary of the United States, given its advanced intelligence and espionage capabilities.

How tokenized real-world assets are solving crypto’s counterparty dilemma

Modern derivatives and digital asset markets operate under a persistent drag of operational friction. A recent Nasdaq survey reveals that 70% of global firms experience settlement failures on a daily basis. This structural inefficiency forces institutions to maintain excess overnight collateral buffers, tying up capital that could otherwise generate returns. The inability to mobilize assets […]This story continues at The Next Web

AI gave North Korean hackers a $600 million month. DeFi is still working out how to respond.

  The two hacks came a little over two weeks apart. On 1 April, attackers drained roughly $285 million from Drift Protocol, a Solana-based derivatives exchange, after spending months posing as a quantitative trading firm to trick employees into authorising malicious transactions. On 18 April, a separate group exploited a single-verifier flaw in Kelp DAO’s […]This story continues at The Next Web

Runway started by helping filmmakers — now it wants to beat Google at AI

AI video-generation startup Runway is betting that video generation is the path to world models. And that being an AI outsider is an advantage, not a liability.

Trump leaves Beijing saying he and Xi talked AI guardrails. Nothing was signed.

Asked what kind of guardrails on the way out, the US president told reporters on Air Force One: ‘standard guardrails that we talk about all the time’. H200 deliveries to ten cleared Chinese buyers remain stalled. Donald Trump told reporters on Air Force One on Friday that he and Xi Jinping discussed AI guardrails and […]This story continues at The Next Web